The stunning victory by Donald Trump in the 2024 election, an assault on America’s rule of law, leaves me with a particularly pointed sense of loss, a loss punctuated not by the margin of Electoral votes, a systemic result, but by the inescapable impact of the popular-vote margin in Trump’s favor.  This majority, whatever the varied reasons that drove it, seems not only to mark a loss of traditional national values, but also casts a darkness upon the significance of America’s history, what has been sacrificed for it, from the lives lost fighting an autocrat king’s army in the brutal winter of the founding, Revolutionary War, to the streets of civil conflict to expand human rights, through the modern wars, from WWII to Afghanistan, no matter that Vietnam and Iraq were politically misguided.

On the day after the election, the image of a recently departed loved one, representing the Greatest Generation, appeared from my PC screensaver on my monitor.  Her late husband fought in WWII, and both were devout patriots, her favorite holiday being our July 4th Independence Day.  My father was also a veteran of WWII, serving in the Army Air Corp under Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific, and I am an Air Force veteran of the Vietnam era.  These and hundreds of thousands more of the Greatest Generation’s patriots suffered and died to defeat the Nazi fascism which was based in the nationalist authoritarianism that Trump has so often represented, and that the Republican party of this decade has enabled.

When I saw her image on that screen, and then glanced across the room at a picture of my father, the loss of this election to Trump, to the Republican cult, to Project 2025, suddenly pierced me with an acute pain — a gasp for breath — because in that moment I realized that these dearly missed loved ones have now been driven all the farther from me because they seem now to be a little less a part of the country, the value of their part in our history and their hopes for our future has been diminished, not by Trump, who has too little worth for such affect, and this time, not by an unrepresentative Electoral College, but instead by the voices of those millions of Americans who voted for Trump, knowing what he is and what he represents, having heard the things he has vowed to do, which are an antitheses to the intrinsic American values written into the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and which our forefathers so valiantly defended.  In later generations, inadequate or no education in civics and history certainly played a part in this loss — no recognition of the founding, structure, or dangers of dictatorial systems, or in the value of democracy with its rule of law and its checks and balances.

The profound sense of loss and despair I write of also speaks for those passed, upon whose shoulders we now so despairingly stand.

Malcolm L. Kantzler ★ November 6, 2024

The real issue at the heart of Republican-initiated laws restricting voting, abortion, trans-gender affirming medical and psychological care, and the Republican-packed Supreme Court’s “Chevron” ruling, which, regarding everything from environment to chemistry to medicine, shifts ultimate, federal rule-making authority from the skilled, expert staffs of executive departments, overseen by Congress, to partisan-biased judicial rulings, is not the reduction of individual rights and freedoms, dangerous and undemocratic though that is; the issue of greatest consequence is that the undeniable advancement of civilization, achieved through centuries of disciplined, scientific investigation and technical/engineering innovation, spanning generations with ever-improving safety, quality, and length of life, is being discarded in favor of the unenlightened, “MAGA,” Christian Nationalist dictates of philistine, politically motivated politicians and judges.

The objective method and purpose of the “Trumper” Christian Nationalism—of any rhetoric from it—is to threaten and use violence to take control of government, and in so doing, create violence in the attempted transition, which inevitably turns against itself (or against any power-seeking religious sect) by increasing measure as it succeeds.  This is because religious dominance over government by any sect brings restrictions on freedom and is a magnet for violent opposition by all others, a fact the founders recognized and the primary reason for their insistence on the complete separation of church and state in the American democratic republic they created:  to prevent sectarian violence and preserve religious and democratic freedoms for all.

These minority, Republican priorities are propelling the long history of civilization’s hard-won betterment and advancement into calamitous reverse.

Malcolm L. Kantzler ★ July 27, 2024

Despite the unanimous Supreme Court decision, on March 4, 2024, to not act on the 14th Amendment’s requirement that Donald Trump, as an insurrectionist, be excluded from the ballot for any federal office, it is a wrong-headed and defiant decision that ignores the glaring contridiction which is the last sentence of the 14th Amendment’s Section 3:  “But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

The 14th Amendment, Section 3, therefore, in its last sentence, self-describes the prohibition against seeking or holding office as an imposed “disability,” independent of any other action or requirement by any other body or authority, and if it was not intended that insurrectionists be blocked, there would be NO need for a measure to be provided to remove the block:  the two-thirds vote of both Houses.  The 14th Amendment is, in effect, saying, “If you don’t want a particular insurrectionst blocked from seeking office, the only avenue open to you is to persuade Congress to vote the exception.”  And it is important to note that the intent of the 14th Amendment, Section 3’s framers, to bar insurrectionists from seeking and holding office, was so strong that it requires not a majority of the Senate, or of the Senate and the House, and not a two-thirds vote of just the Senate or the House, but a two-thirds vote of BOTH Houses is necessary—a very difficult bar!

If SCOTUS hopes to have us believe that Article 14, Section 5’s provision that, “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this Article,” means that the provisions are optional without such legislation, it will be another lie.  That phrase is repeated for many articles, and the only “optional” element is for Congress to pass such legislation if it desires.  The Constitution often will not assign authority in particular articles, relying on enumerated powers specified elsewhere within, or allowing the three branches and the states the flexibility to make that determination as need arises.  But whether Congress does or does not legislate the enforcement, the intent and requirement of the 14th Amendment’s article to enforce remains, as it does with all other articles ensconced with that provision, and it is left for Congress to legislate, or for states’ election authorities to enforce, or for the Supreme Court to rule on the method.  And the ruling most faithful to the intent of the Constitution would have been for the Court to rule that all federal election authorities must omit Trump from their ballots.  But by whichever authority, in the end, if the Constitution is to be upheld, the intent of the 14th Amendment MUST be realized, must be followed, and must be the Supreme Law of the Land, which is what the Constitution and its Amendments are and have always been intended to be.

With this ruling, by not acting itself to enforce, by barring the states’ constitutionally mandated election authorities, and by designating as the sole recourse a do-nothing, corrupt Congress with the Republican party being a cult of insurrectionists itself, SCOTUS has put America’s democracy in greater peril and has trashed the Constitution just as surely as Mitch McConnell did when he barred President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, from the required Senate-confirmation process.  The rule of law, a fundamental element of the guarantee of freedom and equality Americans have strived to perfect and have enjoyed, at tremendous cost through the generations, is dead.

Malcolm L. Kantzler ★ March 4, 2024

Many are saying that the record turn-out of the 2020 election highlights the division in America but also indicates that democracy is alive and well.  Yes, the division is clearly defined by the voting demographics, but neither the size of the electorate nor the Biden victory are indicators that democracy is alive and well; far from it, because all of the faults which allowed for the growth of that division and the rise of someone like Trump to the presidency remain as strong as ever:  the dark channels of election money which fuel the power of special interests; gerrymandering of voting districts by mostly Republican legislatures; the Electoral College; the lack of laws to enforce so many of the “norms” which were taken for granted and broken by Trump:  providing tax returns, emoluments, nepotism, a lack of lawful qualification standards for nomination/appointment or confirmation to high office (political appointments of Rick Perry, Betsy DeVos et al.), laws protecting and ensuring the independence from the presidency of the Justice Department and other enforcement agencies and their leaderships—the Trump-fix list is long; congressional rules which short-circuit democracy, like that which gives the Senate majority leader complete control over what bills will be allowed to go through the Senate’s law-making process—more power than the president, and with no override provision; the low number of representatives apportioned to the House, and again, the list of democracy fixes is long.

President-elect Biden, in his speeches prior to and after being declared the winner, emphasized that he will be a president for “We the People,” for all Americans, those who voted for him as well as those who did not.  “We the People,” the opening words of the Constitution, is a phrase at the heart of the meaning of “popular sovereignty” in America’s governing ethic, where the power and authority to govern is derived from the people, and government is accountable to the people, which is why congressional oversight committees can issue subpoenas and assign IGs, and why administration officials cannot ignore the subpoenas and fire the IGs, as Trump has done, with Republican sanction, because they are methods of enforcing that accountability to the people.  Popular sovereignty is an anathema to Trump and all authoritarians, whether they call themselves monarchs, dictators, or presidents.

Biden also said that the diverse political sides which define the extreme divide in the country must come together, that the other side are not enemies, that they are Americans and we must at least begin to respect and listen to one another.  In this there must be disagreement.  Are they really not the enemy?  While some are just ignorant and unthinking, many, enough to matter, are in government positions of power and are deliberate in their hatreds and democratic abuses.  Biden himself has implied this in his criticisms of Trump, there are not “fine people on both sides,” and because the Republican party which enabled, even encouraged the atrocities of Trump and his conspirators, and in its own right has quashed popular sovereignty for years, is deserving of neither respect nor participation in democratic government, and it must be removed entirely, never to return again to exercise power over our society.

But recognizing the enemy is about more than merely the harsh rhetoric.  Republicans who have been, in reality, sacrificing America’s democracy and hundreds of thousands of lives in the pandemic are the enemy, in every sense of the word, with nothing to say worth listening to.  The only way the confrontation ends is when those who are the enemy of America’s ideals, of its democracy and way of life, and of truth itself, upon which democratic process depends, are purged from the nation’s political life.  That means there can only be the respect for, cooperation with, listening to, and participation by the Republican party Biden calls for when “Trumpism” has been rejected entirely, in all of its forms, as well as ending the repeated, selfish, willful trashing of constitutional process—the supreme law of the land—by Mitch McConnell, his closest allies, and his lock-step Senate following, as when McConnell refused to allow the constitutionally mandated Supreme Court confirmation process for President Obama’s nominee in 2016, and as when Republicans across the land seek to limit and restrict voting rights.

Two weeks after Biden won the election with significant majorities in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, and after the election has been called to be non-reversible, Trump and Republicans continue to oppose the will of the people with conjured-up, baseless legal challenges and multiply debunked conspiracy theories.  Trump, with Republican-party support, still refuses to concede or allow the transition process to begin, and the GSA, which authorizes transition funding and coordination between the Biden transition team and federal agencies, led by a Trump-appointed loyalist, also is refusing to act.  With the COVID-19 pandemic raging, with hospital ICUs filling in nearly every state, and with a climbing death toll of 2,000 per day, every day that the Biden administration is blocked from enacting its pandemic strategies, including to begin the coordination and procurement of distribution assets for the two, recently announced, likely vaccines, is another 2,000 or more lives lost, more blood on the hands of Trump and Republicans who stand by him and his outrageous, ongoing, uncaring dereliction of duty to protect the American people.  These are the faces of the enemy.

This coming together Biden envisions will only happen when the Republican party casts aside its determination to reach its ends regardless of the means, even when those means are the continued climb of COVID’s death toll and destruction of the system that gave them the choice to betray it; only when the Republican party can again be populated by the likes of those who left it, like the McCains, and those who denounced it, like the former Republican-party conservatives of all stripes who joined The Lincoln Project and other efforts to end the rule of Trump and the Republican party which, having no resemblance whatsoever with the party of Lincoln or Eisenhower, has come to be labeled as “Trump’s party,” and which threatens to so remain and, in the years ahead, to be a force of opposition, aspiring to find its way back to the contorted control of the power of the presidency.

It is against these “Republicans,” the Trumps, Pences, McConnells, Grahams, Nunezes, Sessionses, Cruzes, McCarthys, Hatches, Jordanses, Rubios, and many others, elected and appointed, like A.G. Barr, who, in Trump’s support, acted or spoke, so hypocritically after defaming him in the 2016 campaign, out of newborn loyalty to him, and/or the party, and/or their obsession to exercise power or remain in office, not faith and service to their oaths to the Constitution or obligation to the nation or their constituencies; and also those “good men” who did and said nothing, all who would bury America’s Constitution, its democratic heritage and legacy to prioritize self- and party-interest.  It is in the fight to vanquish those “Republicans” that we must, as Joe said, “never give up, never give in.”  It is they who must either change or go away.  In the eyes of the “better angels” of America’s government and of its people, there is no place for them.

Malcolm L. Kantzler ★ November 18, 2020

“Back to ‘normal?’”

That is the last thing to which we should aspire.  Pre-COVID’s “normal” is at the root of why the U.S. virus death toll is so much higher than any other nation, higher than it should ever have been, and so discriminating in the economic and racial demographics which are most afflicted.  And what the SARS-CoV-2 virus has uncovered that’s seriously wrong with that “normal” goes far beyond those appalling, but still sharply growing infection and mortality statistics.

Ignoring inevitability.

Anyone who claims of the pandemic, “nobody ever expected a thing like this,” as Trump repeats in defense of his incompetent non-response, is either ignorant or lying, neither option being acceptable in a U.S. president.  But in Trump’s case, where the record proves he many times ignored stark warnings he was given, including high priority intelligence briefings beginning prior to last November, after he had already made cuts to pandemic planning, his lie is made bald-faced, and is compounded by his dismantling the White House National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, established by President Obama to confront a “not if, but when” pandemic, and his baseless, shift-the-blame lies that Obama left the nation with no plan or resources.  His response when questioned about removing the Biodefense Directorate, “I didn’t know anything about that” was the same answer he always gives when dodging responsibility or there is no answer other than his culpability.  Of course he knew, and if he didn’t, then the number of times “he didn’t know” would be only an admission of a dysfunctional administration management.

The story’s no different now, as communities begin recklessly to open up, few meeting guideline prerequisites for reduction of cases, presenting it as though it is an event to celebrate, with upbeat local reporting and forge-ahead ads and slogans, “We can do this together,” as though the virus is subject to the spell of wishful thinking or stubborn determination, as though the additional lives that are assured to be sacrificed are of little or no consequence, or worth the early visits to a favorite restaurant.  It is deeply disrespectful of those critical workers in health, transportation and goods distribution who take deadly risks every day, to impose upon them the greater burden which will result.  And as the toll grows to surpass expanded modeling forecasts of 120,000 deaths by August, with Trump’s irresponsible encouragement, based in lies and conspiracy theories, too many Americans are impatient to increase the risks to themselves and others after only a scant two months of protective withdrawal—two months of inconvenience for them, filled with the finality of burials, many without services, and sorrow for so many others, all being set up to continue and to increase.

It is a grave mistake to relegate the priority or urgency of this pandemic to Trump’s low level, or the same, low level that most citizens take the workings (abuses) of their government, placing it below the trivialities of sports and entertainment.  Trump, with Republican party endorsement, has been regularly stripping the government of its apparatus for accountability, oversight and truth.  Unfounded political dismissals have traditionally been carried out on Fridays in the belief that the news cycle will be less responsive and a public entering a weekend less attentive.  Trump has made three Friday removals of bipartisan inspectors generals in the last month, IGs who worked for Republican and Democratic administrations and who were appointed by Republicans.  One was in the State Department, investigating illegal arms sales to the Saudi dictatorship.  All were doing their jobs, which is intolerable to a revolving-door administration of lies and incompetence, where loyalty and obedience to Trump overshadows oaths to Constitution and country.

The CDC has been politicized to soften the guidelines it originally prepared for reopening, after those guidelines were initially shelved because Trump (or, more correctly, the promoting aide who actually read them) viewed them as too repressive on the economic recovery he places above lives, announcing that no matter what the virus does, there will be no more shutdowns.  The doctors leading the White House pandemic task force and other national health institutions have clearly warned that it is a mistake to open up too quickly and that there will be a resurgence and a greater toll of deaths.  Don’t say again that “no one knew,” or “no one warned.”  And still, zero leadership from Trump to do the known measures that must be done to provide a safer basis for reopening, rushing to return instead, at any cost, to the sorry state of “normal” that made this nightmare as deadly as it is and as more deeply horrific it will certainly become—inevitably.  Instead, he spends his time creating and promoting fake conspiracies of Obama crimes, labeling science fact as liberal exaggeration designed to bring down the economy and his presidency, lies about mail-in ballots being an illegal mechanism of democratic process, threatening states with withdrawals of funding… and plays golf.

The blood of tens of thousands of victims on Trump’s hands as a consequence of his ongoing criminal negligence will not be washed away in his sea of lies, deflections and false blaming, except in the eyes of those Republicans who are any combination of selfishly self-serving, ignorant, blind, brainwashed or obtuse.

Inequality.

In the “normal” before the pandemic, politics reigned above the common good, above the Constitution and the law, and now, in the most dangerous of times it places economic expediency above life—above tens of thousands of lives, or more.

Do we return to the “normal” of Mitch McConnell, in open, self-proclaimed defiance of the Constitution, refusing Obama’s Supreme Court nominee the required confirmation process, and unconstitutional Senate rules that make him as powerful as a dictator in the process of lawmaking, blocking House bills from even being heard in committees, let alone voted upon, which also is a ground-fault short-circuit of democracy, for which all senators, of all parties are to blame, who, with their silence have allowed this killing, power-by-rule to reside in one person, unchallenged, as “normal.”

Trump and the Republican party which enables him are an affront to the civilized transaction of social, economic, civic and humanitarian interaction.  Can we accept as “normal” the Republican party enabling of an incompetent, law-and-norm-breaking president, who is now building a tragic death toll of Americans, only to ensure his first and only priority:  that the “reality” show scripted in his mind goes on?

Appointments — garbage in, garbage out.

The pandemic lays bare the “normal” problem of allowing no-experience political appointments to be made to high offices of grave responsibility.  Republican senators have failed to uphold their oaths by making a sham of the confirmation process.  Is it not about time to erect some structure of boundaries around the appointment process, one in which law dictates that appointments must meet criteria of experience and education which indicates that performance will be a success for the advancement and good of the nation, as any other responsible job would require?

The concept of “American exceptionalism” is alive, but the existence of it passed when the Electoral College stabbed it to death by making Trump president, ignoring strong appeals against the move.  Another Republican, whose ignorance and “spread of democracy (corporatism) around the world” intent led to an unparalleled, until now, tragic cost in lives and treasure to America, George Bush, was also not the choice of the people who voted.  Must we return to a “normal” where an Electoral College continuously stabs America in the heart?

A book the size of War and Peace could be written to detail all that is wrong with the “normal” to which Americans, their mayors, governors, president, talking heads and advertisers express a longing to recapture.  We should hope that the mountain of death, daily going higher, will ignite a new, better normal.  The Republicans’ fixed Supreme Court is soon to make critical rulings affecting the accountability of presidents and the Founders’ intent for congressional oversight to curb presidential overreach, written in the Constitution.  If the conservative majority placed there by hook and crook rules, according to Republican and Mitch-McConnell politics, the democratic republic of the Founders will have taken another knife to its heart, and America will become transformed, somewhere between a plutocratic and authoritarian state.

We, my aged contemporaries, our few remaining matriarchs and patriarchs, and myself, will soon pass from the light of a decidedly darker world than we were given and have grown into, surrendering to the eternal, enveloping shroud that will be the impenetrable sarcophagus for the blazing light that is the loving presence in memory of our lives’ relations, all of whom we are thankful have been spared these last decades of America’s accelerating decline.

Malcolm L. Kantzler ★ May 22, 2020

It doesn’t matter if one is a far-left Democrat, a far-right Republican or a middle-of-the-road Independent, all enjoy and value, above all, the comforts of home.  The home within which all stripes of the political spectrum live is a composite of the color of paint on the walls, the floor treatments, furnishings, decorations and arrangements with which one surrounds oneself, and within which one feels secure, safe, akin to familial and coveted collections which speak to the ideals one admires and to which one affiliates as a brethren spirit—the home fire which comforts in all seasons.  These things are within the sight and touch of daily life, but out of sight lie the structural elements of a home which supports all that is cherished, load-bearing walls which bear the weight of the protecting roof, conducting it down to the foundation which is the backbone of the entire structure.

Republicans today, by their enabling of Trump and glossing over his crimes and many abuses, are looking to the sources of the things which they see and cherish within their houses, which are coveted by their party philosophy and provided by the policies they pursue and which Trump helps to provide while leaving them obscured within the shadow of accountability’s light.  But what they and those who support them fail to see is the pestilence which they have become, eating away at the load-bearing walls and foundation of the structure within which they prosper, which supports us all.

The Congress, courts, and executive branch are the load-bearing walls, the divided framework, separate but equal, within which the exercise of power to shape customs, laws and life is carried out.  The Constitution, when it is followed and respected, is the foundation which shapes and supports the three branches of America’s government, upon which this nation has survived, grown and prospered for more than two centuries, to become a super power and the envy of all in a dangerous world, until now.

America is falling behind the rest of the industrial world in every measure that matters to the quality of life of a populace, be it education, happiness, opportunity, lifespan, housing, and those which reflect on the culture and success of a nation, like healthcare, where the U.S. lags far behind the far-smaller, social democracies of Europe; crumbling infrastructure vs. bullet trains in China; space, where Russian technology has supported U.S. manned flight for nearly a decade; green tech in a warming world, where, again, China, and Germany are at the forefront of rewarding solutions.  The list goes on, and all of it, the failures, are tied to the policies of Republicans, narrowly focused on a wealthy sliver of America’s society, while the foundational structure of democratic governance which encouraged the opportunity and incentive fueling America’s growth and greatness through the 20th century has since been abused and ignored by them, at times, even defamed.

Mitch McConnell’s proclamation that the U.S. Senate “will closely coordinate with White House lawyers” in the procedural process of the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, along with his constant burying of House bills which come to the Senate for deliberation and vote, and his refusal to allow a sitting president’s nominee for the Supreme Court to be brought to the floor of the Senate for confirmation, represents the ultimate sledge hammer pounding against the constitutional process which upholds and preserves democracy and freedom in America.  What Republicans and those who support them fail to understand is that when that foundation fails, all houses will suffer and eventually fall into the darkness of loss left behind when the freedoms and protections that foundation guaranteed are weakened or gone.

Only authoritarianism, inequality and discrimination fill the void of a diminishing democracy.  No less than the freedom and liberty which has blessed Americans, and which has been so costly to preserve, and which America has been blessed to hold as a light for the world for so long, is what is at stake today, as the Constitution is in the middle of the struggle between Democrats in the House and Republicans in the Senate.  The abomination of Trump is a only a sorrowful sideshow in the aftermath of decades of abuses, a symptom of the sickness which has stricken at the heart of American governance, not the cause.  The root of the collapse of constitutional governance is not the ego, ignorance, and abuse of a failed president, but rather is the support and enabling of that travesty by a political majority in Congress prioritizing party self-interest over nation and oath, or the Court, stacked with unqualified partisans, tearing at the blindfold and equality of justice and law.  In this, Mitch McConnell has been the destroyer of worlds, long before Trump was on the scene.

But the good news is that, even as the voice and idea exchange of the media is harmfully consolidated, corrupted and defiled, the constitutional freedom of the voice of the voters still prevails every two years, despite Republican curtailments and disrupting outside intrusions.  And this coming election, on Tuesday, November 3rd, is far more than a vote for president and whether Republicans retain their abusive hold on power in the U.S. Senate.  It is a vote for the life of freedom in America, guaranteed by the rule of law, separation of powers, and checks and balances framed within the Constitution.  It is a vote of dire significance for the safety and comfort of every person, for the future of every home.

Malcolm L. Kantzler ★ December 25, 2019

On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, when asked why new gun laws are not being considered in the Senate, replied, “We do, in fact, await word from the White House about what the president is willing to sign.”

The purpose of the Senate is NOT to pass laws by the notion of what the president will sign, as McConnell has consistently held up as the standard which guides him, which is actually a tactic to deflect blame.  No one elected to Congress should sit still for the rule and policy empowering McConnell, which relegates either house as a rubber stamp for “anticipated” executive approval!  It is unconscionable, in any case, that any one member of the Senate should have the power, by rule, not by the Constitution, to determine what bills passed by the House will be permitted to be debated in committee as the first step in bringing bills to the Senate floor for debate and vote.  It is a direct short-circuit of democracy, making moot the voices and votes of both the people and their elected representatives.

McConnell uses the president as an excuse to block legislation he opposes, as well as constitutionally-mandated confirmations of presidential appointments, as was the case when McConnell trashed the Constitution by denying President Obama’s Supreme-Court nominee, Merrick Garland, a hearing, while Obama still had nearly a year left in office!  Today, it is the House’s bipartisan, gun-purchase, background-check law, legislation McConnell is highly paid by the NRA to block.

The rule permitting this constitutional, democratic abuse should be abolished or brought before the courts for injunctive relief, and elected officials should be pressed hard by voters and the media as to why such destructive and undemocratic rules and procedures are allowed to exist, bestowing that much power to a senator representing the voters of only one state and .05 percent of the Senate.  The purpose of the Senate is to create law in conjunction with the House on issues important to Americans who elect senators to office, regardless of what the president may think, because the process puts accountability upon both the members of Congress and the president to take a position on issues so important that framing them within law is being considered, and to perhaps cause passage by the weight of public demand and congressional accord overriding opposing considerations of special interest.

With this “firewall” tactic, both the majority party in Congress and the president evade issues without accountability, blaming either the other party, or the majority leader and the president pointing at each other.  And accountability has been sorely lacking in Congress for far too long, in large part, because of deeply abusive rules which place such power to block law in the hands of the majority, political-party leader of the Senate.

On this day, 18 years ago, Osama bin Laden and his terrorist organization, al Qaeda, engineered and carried out the most destructive attack, designed to destroy America’s economy and democracy, since Japan attacked Pearl Harbor at the onset of America’s entry into WWII.  The U.S. Senate and Mitch McConnell, with their one-person, gate-keeper rule, have surpassed bin Laden’s efforts to harm the nation, and that harm continues and deepens with every day it is permitted to continue.

Malcolm L. Kantzler ★ September 11, 2019

The Republican party of today has nothing in common with Eisenhower, or even Reagan, and especially not the Republican president whose picture Obama holds in his hand, whose boots Trump is unworthy to shine.

The Republican party of today is the party of oligarchs, racists, hypocrites, fascists, sexual abusers, pedophiles, religious extremists, science deniers and oath breakers.  It has proven this by its agenda, by its lies and propaganda, by those who wear those labels who it has supported and who it has failed to denounce, and by its turn away from democracy, the Constitution, its separation of powers and rule of law in favor of the rule of Trump and the self-serving purposes of its agenda, including voter suppression, rigged voting districts, promotion of the wealth and health of the few over the protection and safety of all through the elimination of regulation and inequality of taxing.

The Republican party of today invokes propaganda, deflection of blame, blatant lies and, mostly, fear to sway voters, claiming non-existent threats, proven false, like that it will protect those with preexisting conditions, and most ludicrously, that those threats are “promoted” by Democrats, the party that brought affordable health care to so many for the first time over the vicious opposition of Republicans.

While both parties have failed by looking to their own self-interests over those of their constituents and the democratic system, it is the Republican party of today which most represents the Founders’ worst fear of a degenerate two-party political system come true.

The Republican party of today is the antithesis of everything the Greatest Generation fought and died for in WWII.

The Republican party of today is more damaging to America’s heritage and values than any foreign foe, bringing to life “Father of the Constitution” Madison’s warning that the greatest threat to American freedom and democracy would come from within.

The Republican party of today must be made into the party of the past in the coming mid-term election, and the next, and the next…

The Republican party of today must die if America is to live.

It’s time to really drain the swamp!

There’s an election in 20 months and, if Democrats are voted into the White House and the majority of the House and Senate, assault weapons of war which have claimed the lives of so many children and allow no opportunity to confront a mass murderer can be outlawed, and Trump can be checked, preventing further damage to the nation.  And through legislation, some of the financial and environmental safeguards Trump and Republicans have removed can be restored, as well as telling the world that the cruel and insane Republican gun culture of a small minority does not represent America, that family separation and caging of children does not represent us, that Trump was not elected by us—that none of these stand for America.

Some of the items in this list require constitutional amendment, but all have been listed because Republican abuse has shown them to be necessary to shore-up oversights and weaknesses in our Founders’ legacy:  the democratic system defined by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  Strong Democratic control of the government will allow them to:

• Replace Republicans who put party over country by refusing to act when Trump fired the FBI director, admitting, as circumstances support, it was because of the Russia investigation, which Trump obstructed, and for which the director had just requested additional resources.

• Pass law prohibiting any president from ordering Dept. of Justice (DOJ) investigation or issuance of indictments against any DOJ agent/s investigations of executive-branch campaign or operational activities unless such order is confirmed by two-thirds majority of U.S. Senate.

• Pass law prohibiting the U.S. Senate and House from creating procedural rules which are contrary to constitutional procedure, and specifically from blocking Senate debate and vote on Article II, Section 2 confirmations of nominees to high offices, and the 60-vote rule.

• Amend the Constitution, Article II, Section 2, to specify that any president who (or is a party to any activity which) is under investigation for crimes and/or misdemeanors, shall be prohibited from naming nominees or making appointments or granting pardons or reprieves under the Article until such time as the issues in question are adjudicated and the president found free of wrong-doing; that nominations be temporarily made to critical posts by a committee consisting of the Majority and Minority leaders of the Senate and the Speaker and Minority Leader of the House and confirmed as specified within the Article (the intent being that an even number will force the nomination of a centrist candidate).

• The judicial system must be free of any presence or manner of political influence, public, private or governmental, its judges, clerks and academia professors untainted by the objectives of politically motivated organizations or programs and shielded from their influences.  The education and mentoring of law students, law-school graduates and clerks must by law be defined to only be engaged with by non-partisan organizations with purposes strictly confined to the letter and rule of law and the equal administration of justice in compliance with the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and issues related to their interpretation according to precedent, transcriptional judicial opinion and the nation’s founding documents.

• Pass legislation requiring the president to provide appropriate military transport for congressional oversight trips, on congressional schedules, into all areas where U.S. troops are deployed in conflict as participants or advisers.

• Complete a FULL investigation into Brett Kavanaugh to determine not only if he committed sexual assault, but also if he perjured himself about his past in his confirmation hearings and to remove him if the full investigation provides appropriate evidence.

• Pass law prohibiting executive branch restrictions to or prohibition of medical research or federal funding thereof.

• Reverse Trump’s cutting funds for fighting pandemics; mandate improved vaccine-production capacity, and designate an authority to lead the groundwork in coordinating national, state and international resources to contain and end outbreaks.

• Mandate congressional authorization (reinforcing constitutional requirement) for any military deployment or non-defense combat engagement, and blocking unauthorized military aggression.

• End all military assistance to Saudi Arabia, alongside Syria, the most repressive regime in the Mid East, even Iran, where there are elections, despite with restricted candidates—there is a choice of moderate vs. extreme; and reevaluate military sales to the country.

• Pass law to return funds Republicans took from Social Security trust fund, permanently, significantly increase the cap on contributions to pay for it; prohibit combining Social Security Administration with other agencies.

• Block federal possession of voter records and any executive action adversely affecting voting rights or procedures.

• Pass legislation establishing a no-first-use prohibition on the president ordering the launch of nuclear weapons.

• Replace those in Congress, insensitive to the shooting deaths of 20 1st-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary (among many attacks) and ban assault weapons, bump stocks, extended clips, sales to no-fly listed, and require universal background checks.

• Pass law requiring presidents to reveal their tax returns.

• Pass law prohibiting conflicts of interest and requiring presidents to divest holdings.

• Impose limitations on paid executive and family travel/protection between residences and other destinations.

• Replace impotent nepotism rules with laws prohibiting nepotism without minimum qualifications, experience and independent oversight.

• Impeach Trump, as evidence of crimes, treason or insanity/unstable psychology has appeared.

• Reverse Republican removal/reduction of health-care coverage and instead, improving it with single-payer.

• Repeal law prohibiting Medicare from negotiating drug prices.

• Pass laws prohibiting the blocking or omission of science data from government reports and electronic or print publications.

• Reverse Trump’s withdrawal from Paris accords and elimination/weakening of environmental protections.

• Reverse decades of Republican consolidation of media, expanding the venues of thought and discourse, reducing media political bias and control while increasing competition for lower prices and greater consumer choice.

• Reverse cuts to public education made by DeVos/Trump in favor of private and charter schools and reinstate regulations on predatory for-profit colleges; prohibit combining Education Department with other agencies.

• Restore strong net-neutrality rules, protecting internet access and consumer media choice.

• Prevent cuts in funding to the arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

• Reverse Trump’s indiscriminate, family-separating, citizen-involved deportations, pass immigration reform.

• Reverse Trump’s elimination/weakening of financial consumer-protection regulations.

• Pass law prohibiting sale of U.S. companies which have, or have ever applied for, defense contracts, and media companies, to foreign nationals or companies.

• Pass law prohibiting U.S. companies from engaging in foreign business where forced-technology transfer is required and from sale/license of technology to any foreign entity not of a country that is a member of active international defense organizations to which the U.S. belongs.

• Pass law establishing a cyber-defense commission consisting of chief technical officers of leading cyber-tech companies whose purpose is to coordinate assets and operations with Dept. of Defense efforts in cyber-warfare defensive and offensive strategies and capabilities.

• Reverse Republican tax-reform changes benefiting the wealthy/corporations and increasing inequality.

• Reverse Citizens United’s ruling bestowing voter status to corporations.

• Pass law prohibiting gerrymandering and to set non-partisan standards for drawing of state voting districts.

• Reverse DOJ actions impeding or reversing protections against vote suppression.

• Reverse DOJ actions impeding or reversing programs for police oversight.

• Reinstate participatory separation of church and state.

• Make permanent the ban against importing hunting trophies of endangered species.

• Pass law prohibiting federal military parades.

• Much more…

Votes must come for change to follow.

Elections have consequences—every vote matters.  Please resolve to vote and discuss it with your families, friends and neighbors.

Malcolm L. Kantzler ★ June 12, 2018; Revised October 27, 2018

He was portrayed as “someone who blamed others for his constant failures, who thought that he was smarter than everyone else, who craved attention…” and it wasn’t Trump.  Circuit Court Judge Tim Duket, in the Marinette County, Wisconsin courtroom, was speaking of Scott Johnson when he sentenced him to three life terms without parole for the murder of three teenagers he shot to death at an idyllic swimming hole, attempted murder for shots fired at several more people, and sexual assault.  Johnson’s story reveals additional characteristics tied to sociopathic behavior, and the judge’s words could have been directed at Trump; it shows how dangerous a person with sociopathic traits can become if they don’t have other distractions and outlets and the means and circumstances to get away with abuse of others.

It is impossible to say if Trump, removed from his wealth and the varied opportunities it has provided him to vent his abuse on wives, children, prostitutes, employees, customers, reality-show and pageant contestants, would have snapped and turned to the ultimate abuse of murder, as Johnson did.  But it is hardly out of the question because he has already been accused of brutal rape by his former wife, Ivana, and murder has already crossed Trump’s mind, when before thousands of people and cameras at an Iowa campaign rally, he actually said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot people and I wouldn’t lose voters.”  Why would such an example come to his mind if not for a severe psychopathy?

Trump’s ignorance and egomania prompted him, as a U.S. president, to compare himself, superlatively, to Abraham Lincoln, the president most revered for the unassailable moral integrity of his character, and to claim that near 3,000 hurricane deaths in Puerto Rico represent an “unsung, incredible success” by him in meeting the federal obligation to that emergency.  But Trump had demonstrated many times (and continues to) through many aspects of his personal, business, and political lives that he is a man drenched of decidedly defective character, a man who has no qualms at all about fatherhood by proxy of money, none about sexually objectifying and publicly expressing lust for his daughter, or physically and verbally assaulting women, or insulting anyone, be they women, Gold Star families, POWs, the handicapped, sexual-assault survivors or leaders in government—ours or of any nation… except Russia.  Russia, proven beyond any doubt to have attacked America’s democratic system, and is continuing to do so; yet, Trump does nothing to uphold his oath and primary responsibility as president to defend the nation and its Constitution against all threats—an impeachable offense on its own.

But Republicans in Congress instead enable him.

His Boy Scout speech brought to mind Hitler youth.  He brags about ripping off financially struggling contractors because loophole laws paid for by and serving the wealthy made it “legal,” just as other useful loopholes allow him and others of extraordinary wealth to escape taxes, Trump claiming his accountant’s smarts as his own for avoiding the obligation (met by all those who are far removed from his financial level) over stretches of years.  He has defrauded students who sacrificed, expecting to be able to advance themselves, not Trump’s ill-gotten gains, and for use of his golf facilities, he overcharged charitable, fund-raising events for children with cancer.  He twice revealed classified information:  to Russia and the less-than-friendly, China-leaning president of the Philippines, and he abused the power of his office to attempt influencing an FBI investigation, and failing, fired the director.

Trump undermines democracy by promoting fear through lies and conspiracy theories, like the “Deep State,” and he berates the judicial branch, the press and, by association, American democracy’s most important safeguards:  the Constitution’s checks and balances and First Amendment.  He exalts authoritarian despots while defiling America’s closest allies and mainstay alliances defending democracies, defending the murder of a Washington Post journalist by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia (ruling one of most dictatorial regimes in the Middle East) by deflecting blame to unknown “rogue killers,” and finally, weighing against his inflated value of and immoral priority for Saudi defense contracts—no mention of his business dealings, totaling more than $40 million.

The “great deal-maker/negotiator” again resorted to his principle tool, for diplomacy:  bullying, turning a treaty obligation, the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), into blackmail leverage against Canada and Mexico, there, insisting on payment for the wall, resulting in Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto canceling a planned White-House visit, Trump spokespersons calling it a “postponement;” for America:  promising to shut down the government if his wall isn’t funded—a costly border measure all experts say is unnecessary, its objectives better met with technologies, far more affordable.  His strong-arm threats most recently aimed at Canada, insulting our strongest ally by claiming it to be a “national-security threat” in his justification for imposing tariffs which all objective experts agree will harm America more than help.  And both internationally and at home he displays undeniable religious discrimination and racism which has resulted in respective federal-court injunctions, state legal entanglements and settlements, and most recently, international outrage, as well as demoralization of the U.S. diplomatic corps and career-officer resignations.  He curses in public like a pimp and lies like the corrupt politician and con artist he is, taking it to never-before attained levels of incredulous blatancy.

And, as he did in his own, 2016 election, Trump attempted to undermine confidence in the 2018 mid-term election results (and the process) by making, and encouraging other Republicans to make repeated, false claims of fraud.  Now, Trump has already intimated that his defeat in the 2020 election would be questionable and that it could incite violence.  Most recently, in a Breitbart News interview, published on March 13, 2019, Trump tied the House investigations into his administration (administration investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller has already seen 34 indictments, convictions and guilty pleas) to his supporters, implying that the investigations, or perhaps his loss in the 2020 election could provoke them:  “the police, military, Bikers for Trump… I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they [House Democrats, liberals or anti-Trump incidents] go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad…”  The causative factors are veiled, but the intentional, open threat of violence by a sitting U.S. president, in what could easily be interpreted as a coded message by the most extreme among his supporters, is undeniable… and deplorable.

Further, threatening democracy with totalitarianism, Trump has said he will block asylum claims, a violation of U.S. and international laws, and rather than uphold law, he has ignored court orders to end family separations, reunite families, and to process claims for student-debt relief against fraudulent, private “universities.”  And Trump has threatened use of executive order to repeal the citizenship rights in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, when only an Amendment, as prescribed in the Constitution, can alter the rights it guarantees, making it clear that he believes he is above the law (even as he stands an unindicted co-conspirator in federal campaign-finance crime).

Yet, Republicans in Congress still enable Trump, and there remains question if, when evidence of crimes is presented, they will also defy the Constitution.

The Founders created the Declaration, Constitution and the Bill of Rights to celebrate the diversity that would be encouraged and nurtured by their “experiment,” defining the dignity and respect which must be the values common to all people in a peaceful, prospering society, and which set forth the basic ideals, rights and protections guaranteeing a common individuality for all, under law and the same flag.  America’s system was established in compromise with the aspiration of striving for perfection within the framework of critical values, beyond dignity and respect:  rule of law, equality under the law, respect for differing viewpoints and dissent, and embracing truth.

Trump supporters, including evangelicals and elected Republican-party officials, have traded these values (and their own) for agenda and policy goals.  They should take a hard look, with common sense, at Trump’s many “all or nothing” arguments and lies, as he instigates separation from the law and the ideals defining our democracy, and tears at our many commonalities.  They’ll see themselves mirrored in the “liberal mob” he defines, which accounts for more than half of the U.S. population, from which he places them above and apart.  And they’ll see they’re also reflected in the immigrants who try to become part of us—we who are so fortunate to be the inheritors of this “experiment,” for which so many of our ancestors have sacrificed and died—another common heritage we all share—but who diminish that fortune when falling-in behind Trump’s discarding of the values defining civility and America, that make it a world beacon, or when these and the basic virtues of our framework of governance are subordinated by policy goals and, following the release of Special Counsel Mueller’s damning report, threatened by Trump’s outright defiance of the law and the constitutional obligations of congressional oversight and separation of powers.  No policy or agenda justifies sacrificing our essential, national soul.

Trump has consistently displayed all the traits of a narcissistic, egomaniacal, misogynistic, serial-liar authoritarian—all the makings of an irretrievable sociopath.  And everyone, including… no, especially his core supporters, as well as those who just hate Hillary and those who would not recognize the concept validity of “the lesser of two evils” and didn’t vote, all of them knew most of this about Trump before they voted for him, either via ballot or refrain.

So did Republicans in Congress, and with abominable selfishness and irretrievable hypocrisy they still enable him.

What does that say about them?  The Republicans?  The Trump voters?  About America?

It is safe to say that there are the “deplorables” Clinton itemized in her speech coining the term.  But the majority of those who made Trump head of state (NOT leader, that must be earned) did so out of sheer anger, frustration and/or desperation; so, Trump really represents all that is wrong with American government and society, all that has ravaged the middle class, transferring jobs and wealth to the third and developing worlds for the sake of greater corporate profits (corporations blaming globalism and illegal immigrants), leaving in the wake a despicable, obscene inequality of economics and opportunity for all except the wealthy and the powerful, to whom the Republican party bows allegiance, as a client, willingly seeding its agenda with depleted health-care plans, savagely reduced funds for health services, with resultant, increased sickness and death; lost meals for school kids and the elderly and in-suspense healthcare for all kids; cleaved public education, left bare of humanities and arts; and now, a reverse-Robin-Hood tax gift to the wealthy and corporations, with temporary appeasement scraps to what’s left of the middle class—all of it representing an interminable list of attacks against civilized attributes and ambitions across the national and international landscapes, while the wealthy get the fruits of that agenda:  hundreds of $billions in defense contracts and another steep tax break, with the cost of more than one $trillion added to the already crushing debt, dumped on future generations as Republicans try to sell the cruel, blatant lie of it “paying for itself” through the propaganda fantasy of trickle-down “growth,” the only real trickle-down being the metaphorical golden shower which Trump, McConnell, Ryan, Mnuchin and the rest of the GOP are spraying all over most Americans, including those not wealthy who voted for Trump!

The con was laid naked by Trump’s pathetic appointments to most of his cabinet seats, and his total disregard of either qualifications or experience with nepotistic filling of top-level advisory posts, most of whom are gone, in the highest turnover in history, a key business marker of failed management.  And then, his fancy executive orders and memo signings confirm it, while his social media and clumsily delivered teleprompter speeches and Boy Scout speech continue to spout the lies of his hijacked populist and democratic propaganda and his grandiose, fetid lies of feathered accomplishments.  The vice president’s most important job has become to inflate Trump’s ego by making lengthy, fluffed-praise introductions to the Rose Garden and White House ceremonial rooms, where President Obama and most others before him would just appear, or someone would say, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”  Now, it’s got to be a drawn-out “Hail Trump” prologue before the Orange will show to crow.

Trump also represents the “me first” and “I want it now” consumerism, so rampantly embedded in corporate advertising, which infects sociability, courtesy, generosity, all the things to which Trump is the antithesis and which he is now peddling in his con, which is sooo apparent, falling like dandruff from beneath his bulbous, red, “Make America Great Again” hat onto the broad foreboding of his shadow.  He has a carrot suspended in front of the donkey as it pulls his cart of pernicious political and civic sewage over a bridge that’s collapsed in the middle.

How could people, even desperate ones, expect that a man so deeply flawed as Trump, so obviously the liar and bearer of compassionless sociopathic traits that he is, would be capable of anything good or would be able to comprehend, let alone shoulder the weight of their hope?

Why do they and Republicans in Congress not recognize the absolute need for a president of this nation to be all the things Trump is not:  a person of morals, strength, honor, of social commitment, to be ethical, courteous, thoughtful, learned, cooperative and compassionate… a gentleman?  Or lady?

They know that if you make a casserole with spoiled meat, rotten vegetables and moldy cheese that it will taste bad and sicken all who eat it.  They know that damaged or virus software wrecks the computer.  They’ve heard the phrase, “garbage in, garbage out.”  With Trump, why on Earth would they expect lead to turn into gold?  Just because he plasters it on everything he owns?

Why enough people to prove the Electoral College is a dated artifact that must be abolished voted for Trump (but 3-million-plus fewer than voted for Hillary) is likely the question of our age, because in light of Trump’s profane character, and the embarrassingly narrow defeat (by only a slim 1.5 percent) of the equally distasteful Roy Moore in Alabama’s special election for U.S. Senate (who never would have been a candidate if not for Trump’s and the endorsing Republican party’s shattering of all standards of decency in politics) none of the answers that immediately come to mind are flattering for America or its people.

But Moore’s narrow loss, followed by Democrat Conor Lamb’s narrow, congressional special-election victory in Pennsylvania’s nearly two-decade-long, Republican-safe 18th District (which Trump carried by 20 points), gives real hope that good people are beginning to understand the very real perils of non-participation in the political process, and that the mid-term election in November may take legislative government (and constitutional watchdog obligation) back from Republicans who have enabled the hateful travesty of Trump’s agenda, and remove the stain of his reprehensible character, and the Republican party’s complicity with it, restoring America’s image, world standing and leadership to solve the serious problems which can only be confronted through truth, international cooperation and commitment, not lies, antagonism, ridicule and uninformed impulsiveness.

It’s time to really drain the swamp!

There’s an election in 15 months and, if Democrats are voted into the White House and the majority of the House and Senate, assault weapons of war which have claimed the lives of so many children and allow no opportunity to confront a mass murderer can be outlawed, and Trump can be checked, preventing further damage to the nation.  And through legislation, some of the financial and environmental safeguards Trump and Republicans have removed can be restored, as well as telling the world that the cruel and insane Republican gun culture of a small minority does not represent America, that family separation and caging of children does not represent us, that Trump was not elected by us—that none of these stand for America.

Some of the items in this list require constitutional amendment, but all have been listed because Republican abuse has shown them to be necessary to shore-up oversights and weaknesses in our Founders’ legacy:  the democratic system defined by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  Strong Democratic control of the government will allow them to:

• Replace Republicans who put party over country by refusing to act when Trump fired the FBI director, admitting, as circumstances support, it was because of the Russia investigation, which Trump obstructed, and for which the director had just requested additional resources.

• Pass law prohibiting any president from ordering Dept. of Justice (DOJ) investigation or issuance of indictments against any DOJ agent/s investigations of executive-branch campaign or operational activities unless such order is confirmed by two-thirds majority of U.S. Senate.

• Pass law prohibiting the U.S. Senate and House from creating procedural rules which are contrary to constitutional procedure, and specifically from blocking Senate debate and vote on Article II, Section 2 confirmations of nominees to high offices, and the 60-vote rule.

• Amend the Constitution, Article II, Section 2, to specify that any president who (or is a party to any activity which) is under investigation for crimes and/or misdemeanors, shall be prohibited from naming nominees or making appointments or granting pardons or reprieves under the Article until such time as the issues in question are adjudicated and the president found free of wrong-doing; that nominations be temporarily made to critical posts by a committee consisting of the Majority and Minority leaders of the Senate and the Speaker and Minority Leader of the House and confirmed as specified within the Article (the intent being that an even number will force the nomination of a centrist candidate).

• Pass legislation amending all “Emergency Powers” authorizations to define minimal requirements for declaration of an “emergency” and limiting the time such declarations shall be in effect and amount of funding which can be applied and the sources from which funds may be accessed, requiring an act of Congress to extend the time and funding of declarations beyond the limits established in the legislation.

• The judicial system must be free of any presence or manner of political influence, public, private or governmental, its judges, clerks and academia professors untainted by the objectives of politically motivated organizations or programs and shielded from their influences.  The education and mentoring of law students, law-school graduates and clerks must by law be defined to only be engaged with by non-partisan organizations with purposes strictly confined to the letter and rule of law and the equal administration of justice in compliance with the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and issues related to their interpretation according to precedent, transcriptional judicial opinion and the nation’s founding documents.

• Pass legislation requiring the president to provide appropriate military transport for congressional oversight trips, on congressional schedules, into all areas where U.S. troops are deployed in conflict as participants or advisers.

• Complete a FULL investigation into Brett Kavanaugh to determine not only if he committed sexual assault, but also if he perjured himself about his past in his confirmation hearings and to remove him if the full investigation provides appropriate evidence.

• Reverse Trump’s cutting funds for fighting pandemics; mandate improved vaccine-production capacity, and designate an authority to lead the groundwork in coordinating national, state and international resources to contain and end outbreaks.

• Mandate congressional authorization (reinforcing constitutional requirement) for any military deployment or non-defense combat engagement, and blocking unauthorized military aggression.

• End all military assistance to Saudi Arabia, alongside Syria, the most repressive regime in the Mid East, even Iran, where there are elections, despite with restricted candidates—there is a choice of moderate vs. extreme; and reevaluate military sales to the country.

• Pass law to return funds Republicans took from Social Security trust fund, permanently, significantly increase the cap on contributions to pay for it; prohibit combining Social Security Administration with other agencies.

• Block federal possession of voter records and any executive action adversely affecting voting rights or procedures.

• Pass legislation establishing a no-first-use prohibition on the president ordering the launch of nuclear weapons.

• Replace those in Congress, insensitive to the shooting deaths of 20 1st-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary (among many attacks) and ban assault weapons, bump stocks, extended clips, sales to no-fly listed, and require universal background checks.

• Pass law requiring presidents to reveal their tax returns.

• Pass law prohibiting conflicts of interest and requiring presidents to divest holdings.

• Impose limitations on paid executive and family travel/protection between residences and other destinations.

• Replace impotent nepotism rules with laws prohibiting nepotism without minimum qualifications, experience and independent oversight.

• Impeach Trump, as evidence of crimes, treason or insanity/unstable psychology has appeared.

• Reverse Republican removal/reduction of health-care coverage and instead, improving it with single-payer.

• Repeal law prohibiting Medicare from negotiating drug prices.

• Pass laws prohibiting the blocking or omission of science data from government reports and electronic or print publications.

• Reverse Trump’s withdrawal from Paris accords and elimination/weakening of environmental protections.

• Reverse decades of Republican consolidation of media, expanding the venues of thought and discourse, reducing media political bias and control while increasing competition for lower prices and greater consumer choice.

• Reverse cuts to public education made by DeVos/Trump in favor of private and charter schools and reinstate regulations on predatory for-profit colleges; prohibit combining Education Department with other agencies.

• Restore strong net-neutrality rules, protecting internet access and consumer media choice.

• Prevent cuts in funding to the arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

• Reverse Trump’s indiscriminate, family-separating, citizen-involved deportations, pass immigration reform.

• Reverse Trump’s elimination/weakening of financial consumer-protection regulations.

• Pass law prohibiting sale of U.S. companies which have, or have ever applied for, defense contracts, and media companies, to foreign nationals or companies.

• Pass law prohibiting U.S. companies from engaging in foreign business where forced-technology transfer is required and from sale/license of technology to any foreign entity not of a country that is a member of active international defense organizations to which the U.S. belongs.

• Pass law establishing a cyber-defense commission consisting of chief technical officers of leading cyber-tech companies whose purpose is to coordinate assets and operations with Dept. of Defense efforts in cyber-warfare defensive and offensive strategies and capabilities.

• Reverse Republican tax-reform changes benefiting the wealthy/corporations and increasing inequality.

• Reverse Citizens United’s ruling bestowing voter status to corporations.

• Pass law prohibiting gerrymandering and to set non-partisan standards for drawing of state voting districts.

• Reverse DOJ actions impeding or reversing protections against vote suppression.

• Reverse DOJ actions impeding or reversing programs for police oversight.

• Reinstate participatory separation of church and state.

• Make permanent the ban against importing hunting trophies of endangered species.

• Pass law prohibiting federal military parades.

• Much more…

Votes must come for change to follow.

Elections have consequences—every vote matters.  Please resolve to vote and discuss it with your families, friends and neighbors.

Malcolm L. Kantzler ★ December 15, 2017; Revised June 20, 2019

In his “apology,” Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) said, “The mistake I made was in the words I said, not in the heart I hold.  I ask for your forgiveness.”

This is just another case of, not apology, but cover-up and cover-over the “mistake” he really made:  revealing his true, extreme-infected self.  The truth is right there, in the words he first spoke and now tries to cover-up:

“It seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, it’s really rare.  If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”

You see, in that statement, Akin followed a basic tenant of debate and argument, being that, as in debate on fact, when a person holds an irrational belief, or tells an intentional lie, the very first thing they do is to try and give credence to the lie by claiming a qualified expert or professional endorsement, which, in supporting a lie, is often another lie or deception.  This is just what Akin did when he first made his comment, invoking “doctors,” claiming, “...from what I understand from doctors.”  Those words reveal the truth of his lie, because you can be positively assured that no medical doctor anywhere in the country, even among those whose licenses have been revoked, would have ever told him such an outrageous misstatement of medical and biological fact, unless maybe those “doctors” all got their degrees from the Medical School of Creationism, where man roamed the Earth with T-Rex and all of creation actually took just six days for God to accomplish, and probably, if such a place existed, the healing practice would be a chant.

So no, don’t believe the apology—it’s just as disingenuous as the lie he spoke to try and qualify his extreme doctrine.  Do forgive him if that is what moves you, not for the lie, but for being what he is.  But never make the mistake of voting for a Republican-extremist liar like him, or any extremist liar like him or his kind.

Unfortunately, Akin’s kind are the extremist, conservative Republicans who lead the Republican party, yet do not represent its platform in this age of never-say (except what your hired experts say will get you elected) politics.  As policy goes, and as far as what Romney and Ryan have done and how they have voted in the past, Akin does speak for them and for the party that can’t stand to hear the candor of its own aspirations, in terms of the insistent attempts by Republicans—whose rhetoric is less government intrusion into our lives—to insert government into the lives of women and their families when it comes to abortion and other issues.

When Republicans stop talking in contradiction to their actions, then they can distance themselves from the nut-jobs who want to use government power to rule over what should be private decisions on a family, health, and clerical issue, where government has no business telling responsible adults in those fields what they should collectively decide to do based on their own beliefs and circumstances.

Akin is but one example of Republican extremism on abortion that has been shown to be offensive, ignorant, and that clearly demonstrates you never really know what you’re getting when you elect someone, and that no one who gets elected really has the wisdom to presume they should make those kinds of decisions for other people, and that it’s dangerous to allow them to do so.  Republicans need to start doing as they say and stop trying to bring government control into the issues of people’s private lives.

“...out of wedlock.”

On Friday, Governor John Kasich signed a Republican-sponsored bill, declaring March 30 as Ohio’s Vietnam Veterans Day.  As a Vietnam-era veteran, it is difficult for me to see past the politics of the move, in light of the Governor’s role in leading the Ohio Republican party’s effort to destroy the elements of democracy for which hundreds of thousands of Vietnam vets served, and for which more than 58,000 died.

Gov. Kasich can best honor veterans by not trying to take away from any group the right to associate, which threatens the rights and freedom of all, and by not taking advantage of part of Ohio’s population by gerrymandering the states’s districts to achieve unfair political advantage for others, weakening the ties of representation for all, and he can honor veterans by not leading in Republican efforts to curb the voting rights of citizens who have the least flexibility in exercising those rights.

Veterans do not serve for parties and politics.  They serve for home town and apple pie and America, and ultimately, for each other, and when governors like Kasich and Wisconsin’s Walker try to tear down the democracy that was built by vets and other patriots, upon whose shoulders we all stand, they do a disservice to the democratic way, the American way, and to veterans of every war.

Note on CCs:  from this point on, letters are no longer being sent or copied to elected officials, since 99 percent of the time, it is a waste of time and money, with either no response being received, or canned responses which are out of context with what has been sent and which do not address the issues raised, in effect showing that letters are not read—another sign of a failed representative democracy.

Malcolm L. Kantzler ★ March 31, 2012

America can thank its lucky 50 stars that Arizona Senator John McCain was rejected by a slim popular majority in his bid for the presidency in 2008.  Not just because it kept Sarah Palin out of the heart-beat chair, but because otherwise, America would at this moment be at war in Libya, risking American lives in the same way that they were wasted in Iraq, not for national defense, but for an unproven assertion, in this case, that genocide is being carried out by Libyan dictator Gaddafi, through the use of military aircraft to bomb citizens.

McCain is a leading supporter and propagator of the military-industrial complex, the objective of that entity being to initiate and maintain military involvement throughout the world, spurring the growth of the military, the entrenchment of military activism in American life, and the sales of military hardware to “allies,” as has been done in Iraq with orders for tanks and F-16 Falcon fighter jets, and where its prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is acting like a dictator, insulated with a private army, paid for with more than 4,400 American lives and billions of homeland-needed dollars.  At least half of America’s citizens cannot remember a time when they would watch the TV news and not see a report on American troops in conflict.  For them, war has long ago become like a constant, distracting noise that the brain tunes out, but nonetheless absorbs.  This militarism contributes to the decline of America through an imposed sense of gloom and death, at home, where a nation in constant conflict can only be perceived as a nation falling deeper into failure, and in the occupied nations abroad, where the constant presence of troops inflicts a sense of oppression and external reformation of culture, instilling hated, sustaining and growing the spread of those who choose to join together to inflict harm upon America in return.  President Obama is right to ignore the likes of McCain and heed the strongly worded advice of his Defense Secretary, against any new military action, because a no-fly zone is an expensive and risky undertaking that America cannot in any way afford, and the outcomes and consequences are indeterminate.

McCain hasn’t learned the lessons of Iraq, probably because he was on the inside of the planning and deceptions, and there is no evidence of genocide in Libya.  It is to be expected that some demonstrators and rebels will claim atrocities and air strikes against them, but American lives can never again be carelessly put at risk on the basis of unsubstantiated claims.  A few pieces of shaky film contain the sound of jets and the rising smoke that resembles a bomb having gone off, but there is no proof that the sound of the video wasn’t altered to add the jet, or that the jet wasn’t just a fly-over, or that the smoke comes from bombs dropped by an aircraft, or that if there were, that they weren’t dropped on munitions or weapons armories to keep them from falling into rebel’s hands, which is not genocide.  Indiscriminate, widespread killing of unarmed civilians is just cause to impose military force to end it, but if that is the case, it would be recognized by multi-national observers, and America would be able to proceed with at least the cursory consent of international forums if not with their participation.

The kind of thinking about military activism with which McCain and the dominating fringe of the Republican party is ingrained must end.  President Obama recognizes that there can also be no impulsive reaction with military force to solve problems in international situations.  In previous Republican administrations, America’s military has sprawled to cover the world, and the president should do more to roll-back that reach, including closing of many military bases around the world, a total withdrawal from Iraq, and complete withdrawal of ground troops from Afghanistan, where the war was won more than eight years ago with the defeat and ousting of the Taliban regime and the scattering of al Qaeda to the four winds, where the core of America’s strength, democracy, is drifting as well.

Democracy is “People” generated and sustained.  If democracy is to succeed in any revolution, the people must want it so badly that they are willing to sacrifice in great numbers to obtain it, not flee to other nations or cower in their homes while the military of another nation confronts their oppressors for them.  This is why democracy is failing to take hold in Iraq and is not yet even a plausible hope in Afghanistan.  And it is also why public ignorance and apathy is the greatest factor contributing to the crumbling of democracy in America, with serious intrusions into the mechanics of popular sovereignty, political equality, and political liberty—democracy’s foundations.

America’s most important fight for democracy is in its own backyard, and the choking grip of the weeds on the once-grassy lives of its people is alarming and must begin to be met with the gravest attention and resolve.

cc (via web forms) March 6, 2011:  White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Max Baucus, House Financial Services Committee office, more...

Donald Trump wants to become one bullet in a Derringer pointed at the national head, as an expert speaking in oxymorons to create conundrums.  He said he is seriously “considering running for president” (of the United States) because, he said, “I hate what’s happening to the country... it’s being ridiculed.”

“I work all the time.”  This was the reason Donald Trump gave, in a April 16 speech, for his two divorces, and as another qualification for being president.

What it really shows, and what his continual harping on the non-issue of President Obama’s birthplace, is that he doesn’t know how to bring balance to his life and his priorities.  America doesn’t need a president who works all the time as much as it needs a president who understands the necessity for balance and strong family values, because balance and family values are the cores of structural strength that extend into business and government as qualities that weigh on success.

The Donald was thoroughly lambasted at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, and as C-SPAN cameras focused on him while jokes about him flew, he was clearly trying to kill the speaker with his stony stare, Saturday Night Live’s lead writer, Seth Meyer.  Besides being called “The Donald,” there’s something about the character of a guy who can’t laugh at himself that makes him especially unqualified to be in any kind of political power, especially when he is as laughable as Trump.

Sarah Palin is the other bullet, and with the Trump revelation, one of the greatest dangers of Palinism is clarified:  any clown with one foot in entertainment (or politics) who thinks about being president is no longer daydreaming, but actually believes it is not only possible, but that it would actually be good for the country.

It would be gratifying if the voters would set this sickly-comic thinking straight, but polls of November 2010 have indicated that Sarah Palin scored in the neighborhood of 40 percent among some groups, a long way from a majority as polls go, but a nonetheless alarming total that gives rational people palpable cause to fear the public as much as Iranian nucs or the image of Palin or Trump seated behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.  One can only think that these unthinking or faulty-thinking voters don’t realize that, these days, electing a president is on many levels a life-or-death proposition, and that, to them, Russian Roulette would not be too dangerous, even if played with a Derringer.

Loading the likes of Sarah Palin and Donald Trump as presidential candidates is like playing Russian Roulette with a Derringer.

cc (via web forms) December 13, 2010:  White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin; House Financial Services Committee office, more...

Despite the assurances of American presidents that motives of conquest and political interference and control are not behind the policies and actions taken by government, capitalism, which is supported by American government and defines much of its history, is heartless and wants to conquer the world and the minds and purses of all its viable population.

Capitalism is the doctrine of financial and resource control and exchange which demands that the avenues of profit dictate the priorities of the players, while corporatism is the structure of capitalism’s component pieces which defines and executes the operable concepts of growth and profit.  These doctrines and structures exist solely, with the least expenditure of investment in the mechanics of the system (production and administrative machinery and operators) as possible, to bring as great a profit as possible, as quickly as possible to those who are shareholders of the enterprise.

In America, all of this must operate within a democracy, which is supposed to be structured upon popular sovereignty, political equality, and political liberty, which define the ability of “people” to participate in self-determination.  Herein is set upon the nation the conflict, defined by the contrary interests of those who live within and work as component parts of the economic structure, with the power to set the laws defining the boundaries within which that structure must be constrained, and those who own and control the structure, whose purpose is to minimize constraints and operating costs to prioritize enriching themselves.

Democracy places restraints upon capitalism through laws and regulations, which in turn places the imperative upon selfish capitalism to seek control of democracy in order to preserve its operative freedom and minimize its costs, even if those costs are designed to protect capitalism’s operable components and the broader structure of its economic foundation.  The history of America, particularly since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, has been the struggle to strike a balance between the interests of these two structures, capitalism and democracy, to merge the best characteristics of both into one system that is beneficial to the nation, its people, as well as its mechanisms of prosperity.

Today, there is little balance, the rich are richer, the poor poorer, the middle class, which has been at the core of America’s prosperity during the last half of the 20th century, is shrinking like the glaciers and democracy is in a terminal moraine at the leading edge of the down-slide, crumbling apart, all three components that define it under attack and structurally weakened.  And, as the melting and caving of the glaciers is a self-precipitating process, hastening their destruction, so to is the subtle, furtive tearing-apart of democracy by the extreme capitalism favored increasingly by successive Republican administrations over the last 50 years.

Priorities of all government officials, especially Supreme Court Justices, should be nation- and Constitution-biased, not party or special interest of any leaning.  Capitalism and free enterprise must be preserved, as the most efficient and successful means by which prosperity and growth can be achieved, but not to extremes, at the expense of democracy and its three, “people-centered” foundational components.

In the Supreme Court, the branch of government designed by the Founders to be the Constitution’s guardian, most recently, the unethical actions of Justice Thomas and the ruling of the Republican-appointed majority in “Citizens United” have contributed most drastically to place democracy deeper under threat, being severely weakened by a structural eroding of its foundations of:  1) popular sovereignty, through the Citizens ruling and special-interest control of legislators through campaign contributions—the flawed/corrupted election process, making American government more and more to be of, by, and for the wealthy, not the people; 2) political equality, again through the Citizens ruling and the flawed and corrupted election process, giving weight to special interests and the voices of the “haves” over the “have-nots,” and due to the process and costs that are barriers to prospective candidates for office — in America’s political system, money-talk is heard; and 3) political liberty, where while anyone can speak, how and where they can speak, and more important, how and where they can be heard is controlled by special interests, most severely, for democracy, through conglomerated control of the Fourth Estate, limiting the range of responsible voices and sources for opinion, reporting of fact, and oversight of government officials and their activities, which removes any wonder about why Republicans want to de-fund PBS and NPR, which leads all of that which remains as journalism in America in exposing abuses.  And political liberty is curtailed through the party system of biased self-interest and control, through rules-setting in Congress and state/local legislatures, to gerrymandering, also responsible for promoting and preserving partisan gridlock.

The combined effect of the erosion of these three legs in the foundation of democracy is that America is, at best, a quasi-democracy that panders to the wealthy, encouraging the growth of the wealth divide between those who can afford boats and airplanes and those who can’t afford houses, health care, or food, diminishing the middle class, and through the corrupted election process, diverting legislators’ time from committee and legislative work to fund-raising and special-interest pandering, resulting in subverted regulatory and enforcement actions and failures of oversight that precipitate death and destruction, as has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, with mining disasters, factory fires, airline crashes, oil exploration and refining, environmental and economic disasters, lack of preparedness for natural disasters, and the growth and entrenchment of the military-industrial complex, resulting in the spreading of the American military footprint around the world, the addressing of political, intelligence, and law-enforcement problems with military-attempted-and-failed solutions, the callous imposition of American military and culture, to include offensively viewed sexual-advertising mores into the lands and cultures of other nations, through which the seeds of al Qaeda’s focus against America was born, and which, to oppose, further feeds an invalid expansion of military growth and operations, all of which has resulted in government-devised-and-sanctioned torture, kidnapping, private (unconstitutional) and uniformed army massacres, and further growth of hatred and opposition to America and its occupations, not to mention the flawed policies of supporting authoritarian regimes around the world, against the interests of local democratic priorities, which is coming to roost in the Middle East today, and which has been a source and incitement of unrest and violence throughout the world.  The evils of diluted and blocked regulation and destructive special-interest spending that are sprung from contribution-funded elections create a long, long string of deleterious effects upon democracy, the American people, the national welfare and future, of which these are only a few of the most obvious.

The attacks against “big government” and the unions—facilitators of collective, populist voice—by the conservatism of the Tea Party and the extremists of the Republican party mainstream are no more than guises for attacking constraints on capitalism’s unregulated, natively-destructive ambition, which is the real objective of government’s regulatory “evil largess,” with capitalism propagandized by the extremists into a victim that is never named, but instead masked, behind facades, as “initiative” or “self-determination” that is lost, or “uncontrolled debt” or “curtailing business expansion and jobs growth” as the woeful results.  These are the arguments of the wealthy protecting the profits, interests, and the agenda of the wealthy.  Where will be found among the informed middle-class or the poor a supporter of the already-failed, trickle-down, economic platform of the Tea Party or conservative Republicanism?  Those who do are no different than brainwashed suicide bombers, punching ballots instead of bomb buttons, taken in to bring about their own demise by a deceptive, self-interested bunch who make a beneficial milk wagon out to be a charging chariot.

The extreme and ludicrous (like Palin, Trump) must be discarded and American democracy restored through, primarily, the banning of all political contributions in place of publicly-funded campaigns, which will remove bribery from legislation and oversight, bring political-campaign operations and time-spans back to the realm of sanity, release the grip of special interests upon legislators and free them to devote their time to their constituents and their constitutional obligations, and make it possible to begin to diminish and end the evils mentioned above that have all sprung from the sprawl of the growth of special-interest control of every aspect of government endeavor, in the name of unfettered capitalist profit and plain bloodsucking of federal revenues through making careers out of working government’s apparatus, integral and ill-constructed for just that purpose.

Where corporate failure and crime at the top has meant being ousted with a bonus and golden parachute, there must instead begin to be real accountability, beyond just Madoff, for wealthy, white-collar, financial terrorists, as well as for presidents, cabinet officials, and justices who break the constitutional covenant with no consequences, beyond to reputation and historical judgement, for anyone, except the real pain which falls upon America’s democracy and people, as has been ever-more common in the last 50 years, where abuses have been the most flagrant and damaging.

The ageless concept of criminal and ethical immunity for high-level political operatives must end, because it strips away the legitimacy of and public faith in government, chipping away at its underlying democracy and its authority.  Look to the action being taken now against Egypt’s deposed president, Hosni Mubarak, whose illicit assets are being seized under direction of the Egyptian attorney general, or the prosecution of the former French president, Jacques Chirac, as exercises in accountability that should be standard practice in America, not a rare occurrence that, when pursued, is politically motivated.  How hollow is Secretary of State Clinton’s proclamation that, in Libya, Muammar Gaddafi “must be held accountable” for his crimes against his people, when here, torture and kidnapping and illegal wiretaps were made a standard-operating practice, violating constitutional limits and those of international agreements, and those responsible at the top have been held to absolutely none.  Therein is another cost of the persistent failure to enforce accountability within America’s government:  it has made Sec. Clinton’s and the president’s calls for accountability from other leaders anywhere else illegitimate and hypocritical, and it is a failure, the trail of which runs through Bush, Cheney, leading cabinet members and advisors of that administration, down through the bureaucracy to the like of those agency regulators who bedded with big oil and the banks instead of enforcing regulation of their platforms and transactions.

Those elected and appointed to the highest offices in a true democracy must have the fear of real accountability for unconstitutional and criminal or criminally-negligent acts or performance, just as those beneath them who depend upon collective bargaining do.  This will require a priority to prosecute above politicizing by the White House, conveyed down to the attorney general, and the resolve in Congress to cleanse and correct itself, and use the power of impeachment and (implied) withdrawn-confirmation that only it possesses to clean house and enforce ethics, showing a spine not tainted by party—and, in all of this, that seems to be the impossible dream.

cc (via web forms) February 28, 2011:  White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Rep. Zoe. Lofgren, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...

Corporatism is not an “American” founding ideal; neither are capitalism and free enterprise.  When you stop to think about it, as ideologies, they were far from the causes to which the Founders pledged their lives and fortunes:  Freedom, Liberty, and Democracy...  for the People, not to give competitive voice to any system or entity created by them.

The closest concept to capitalism which concerned the Founders was the right of citizens to hold and control private property, mostly their farms and, unfortunately, slaves.  The Dutch were among the greatest capitalists, before America declared its independence, and it wasn’t until just after the dawn of the Industrial Revolution that America created and began to grow corporatism, which as a system and philosophy has become entrenched as the controlling blueprint for operations in commerce, government, and the military.

If anything, the current recession has evidenced that American corporatism, in addition to leading the world in promoting production, growth, and preserving wealth for its participants, has bested all other nations in abusing its capitalist foundation, and by extension, the government and the American people.  But that record of achievement, for the few who walked away from the carnage with stuffed pockets, was the culmination of a lot of practice over a long time, since capitalism in America began to show the ugly side of its head back in Andrew Jackson’s time, when he went to war with the banks, a struggle with populist presidents that deepened through to Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, and to Roosevelt’s, in the Great Depression, before capitalist excess joined with a string of Republican presidents to eventually create the nightmarish landscape onto which President Obama stepped when he entered office in the depths of the Great Republican Recession.

A large nation with a vast range of private enterprises that impact upon public welfare and safety requires a large government to guarantee that safety and welfare, because time and time again, capitalism and corporatism have demonstrated that left to their own devices, death and destruction follow the profits.  Corrupted government, fueled by special-interest contributions to campaigns, contributes through regulation that is lax and criminally negligent, which the president’s announced plans, to streamline government, reducing its agencies, will help correct.

When Republicans who resist spending to create jobs that also keep America at the forefront of education, technology, and infrastructure try to propagandize capitalism, business, and corporatism as “American,” values that are diminished by government largess, as was expressed in Rep. Paul Ryan’s (WI) Republican reply to the president’s address, it is just code for expansion of wealth at the top through reduction of taxes and regulation on business—the discarding of democratic balance, where “free enterprise,” means free of government boundaries on behavior or accountability for consequences affecting others, where government spending means taxes cutting into a Niagara fall of funneled wealth.  The primary core of the contending party philosophies has become wealth distribution, and those are the naked, but veiled objectives of the Republican party today, regardless of the effect upon the vast majority of citizens or the national well-being, which in that narrow, selfish view is just fine by them, thank you, so long as the economy and global profits can be exploited, the rule of law that protects the “haves” is preserved, and the national vessel of the law’s existence is protected by a strong, omnipresent military.

In his Tucson memorial speech, President Obama said the process of democracy is marked by cynicism and vitriol.  How can there be anything else when Republican leaders resort to lies about policies, as when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (KY) said the problems of today are due to the policies of the president over the last two years?  History knows the truth as well as McConnell truthfully does:  that the problems of today are due to a conflict of philosophy, not policy, a conflict which has been won over more than two decades by the imposition of deregulated, trickle-down economics under conservative Republicanism, which has created the greatest economic divide between rich and poor in history, with the greatest reduction of the middle class and the greatest percentile of wealth in the hands of the fewest people, and which President Obama’s administration has only scratched the surface at undoing.

In his “State of the Union” address, the president said we are something more consequential than party, that we are a nation-family, and that what is important is “not that we sit together tonight, but that we work together tomorrow.”  But the field where ideologies at war can meet is very narrow, sparking an economic divide that is hardly familial, and working together chafes many elbows and shoulders, especially when the focus of those ideologies is not prioritized upon the national prosperity and the vision of the future strived for is blurred by the sweeping range of influences that buy and have their interests adjudicated into the government’s structure and policy-making, silencing the voices of the powerless, stifling opportunities.

The president also said he wants America’s democracy to be as good as nine-year-old shooting victim Christina Green imagined it to be.  It would have to be the imagination of an innocent child to be that good, because the reality is a cynical, vitriolic process of quasi-democracy which will never perfect the union, but rather, has been tearing it down, and with qualified reason.  Forming a more perfect union is a building process, one that has been set back by illicit, politically-derived, Supreme-Court-majority rulings, extreme partisanship, the unaccounted-for breaking of laws by high officials, the grip of greed and materialism, and most of all, the manipulation of political influence through party self-interest and campaign bribery, none of which will be affected by symbols such as “State of the Union” seating arrangements, which Sen. McConnell was quick to trivialize only hours before the president’s speech.

Until these systemic mechanisms for abuse of wealth and power are eliminated, Christina Green will at least have been spared the destruction of idealism that America’s government now fosters and holds in waiting for the coming-of-age of her peers and all of America’s children.  Republicans who place capitalistic and corporate values above all else should think seriously, and humanistically about how the cost of that failure balances against the bank accounts with which they measure their success.

cc (via web forms) January 25, 2011:  White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, House Financial Services Committee office, more...

President Obama’s lack of meaningful action to end the unnecessary conflicts, occupations, and deployments of U.S. military force throughout the world is unfortunate and would not garner the approval of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  This day of celebration of Dr. King and his vision would be an appropriate time for the president to consider what Dr. King had to say about war during the Vietnam conflict:

“A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war:  A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

More than 10,000 people died in the Afghanistan operations last year, and it has cost hundreds of billions of dollars, with another $107 billion slated for this year alone.  If Dr. King could speak to the president today, he would undoubtedly repeat his warning on the responsibility of public officials to conduct the government’s policy of war, which, though correct in object, was not in its premise of tactical “initiative,” not for Vietnam or Afghanistan:

“The great initiative in this war [Vietnam] is ours [not true then and, with Afghanistan, that is also very doubtful]; the initiative to stop it must be ours.”

If wars, unnecessary and unnecessarily extended, are to be stopped, the constant push of the military-industrial complex to create a public acceptance of military activism and sprawl must be stopped, a push which is designed to penetrate into every aspect of American life, including the prominent use of the “Commander-in-Chief” title for the president, even apart from military environment, and the object of the hundreds of thousands spent each time a flight of jet fighters is sent to overfly football games... to push the image and presence of militarism in American society.

America cannot and will not return to a concept of military use only in cases of true national defense so long as the military and its objectives are allowed to be twisted and propagandized to remain a source of profit for the defense industry and its varied interests, and so long as industry is allowed to remain in control of government through the corrupting influence of campaign contributions.

The pressure placed upon the United States by other nations, through their inadequate contributions to joint-defense objectives, contributes to the hand held by the military-industrial complex, raising the ante on the growth of their pot.  And the deck is also stacked against change back toward a priority for diplomacy through words rather than boots because, unlike in the time of Dr. King and Vietnam, the military is no longer a conscripted force.  A volunteer military minimizes public involvement, concern, and the chance that activism will play a role, as it did in Vietnam, to end unnecessary conflicts that are more damaging to the nation and its societal progress than they are to enemies, real or contrived.

Military service is a worthwhile experience which should again be required, not only for the character and skills it imparts to soldier-citizens, and the benefits provided to the nation during and after service, but because an encompassing, citizen participation mandates a greater public attention and awareness, and a commitment to change wrongheaded bureaucratic and political dictates by imposing a democratic voice to alter the mission objectives and the ways in which the military is used and abused.  It is for this reason that the military-industrial complex loves a volunteer military force and will use all of its considerable political control to preserve it.  The American people unwittingly assist in achieving that objective, because they will never support a return to conscripted service so long as they see the abuse of military force that exists today and know that they have no control to change it, even with a president as Obama, who is supposed to be better than he has been, allowing the obvious folly of profit by conflict and assisted corruption to continue to grow and further entrench itself as a seemingly constant and necessary aspect of daily American life, now and forever.

cc (via web forms) January 17, 2011:  White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin; House Financial Services Committee office, more...

Republicans who are trying to protect the wealthiest Americans from a return to higher, Clinton-era tax levels are fond of saying that it is “important to avoid tax increases for anyone in this troubled economy.”  What they do not mention is that, for those wealthiest Americans they are trying to protect, at a cost of $700 billion to the deficit, times could not be better!  They have the ability to increase their wealth and possessions at a time when costs for everything from securities, to cars, to boats, to second and third homes, to airplanes, all of which most of those wealthy already own, are at the lowest prices in memory.  It is practically impossible, even without the Bush cuts, for the wealthy not to prosper in this economy, and the only probable reason that elitist class would not like to see it continue as it is, is so that there need not be embarrassment at spending too lavishly.  Embarrassment, which was evident in the first year of the recession, has already become tiresome and too much with which to bother; yet, their indulgences do not add any significance to the nascent economic recovery.  In addition, despite that the wealthiest Americans, whose pockets the Republicans are trying to further line, can afford these things on the barrel head, mortgage and interest rates are depressed as prices are, affording them increased opportunities for low-cost wealth growth when many middle-income and all low-income Americans cannot afford to take advantage of the low rates and prices that prevail, making like a full-spectrum dollar store for the wealthy.

The fact is that, even if the Bush gift to the wealthy expires, for them, the gravy train doesn’t stop.  Those wealthy at the rising upper crust of America’s rotting pie will still be able to buy and invest and increase their fortunes with little real effect on their pampered lives.  But even so, instead of doing the right thing, for both the economy and the deficit, by agreeing to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for the wealthiest Americans, Republicans have instead allowed millions of Americans to suffer as their unemployment benefits expire because the Republicans want the rich to remain at shamelessly reduced tax levels, while at the same time fronting that reducing the deficit is their major objective, as they deny an $18 billion economic-aid boost to the economy at the cost of $700 billion added to the debt to pay the wealthy, whose rates are so embarrassingly low compared to average Americans that the most visible of their ilk, Warren Buffet, has plainly admitted as much, saying that the disparity is a travesty.

Republicans are clearly not interested in the national interest or any consideration of balance in the demographic-economic equation, holding a missile-defense treaty, deemed necessary by bipartisan leaders in American politics and government, hostage to their demand to keep the rich richer, in addition to dangling the heavily supported effort to end the socially discriminatory and unconstitutional practice of “don’t ask, don’t tell” for the military, in order to pressure keeping the cuts for the greedy rich in place.  With any legislation, the spoiled-brat Republicans have, as they have been doing all along, refused to eat their dinner unless it is dessert.

Those unenlightened who are not among the wealthy, and who voted for the abomination the Republican party has become since the days of Eisenhower, can now see that the Republican campaign promise to end the deficit will be accomplished the same way the deficit was built:  by stripping the poor and the middle class to hang furs and riches upon the wealthy and corporations, which now, in their steel and glass towers, oversee a controlling majority of the Supreme Court (the only branch of government with the power of the last word—the Founders’ great mistake), building for them a treasure of legal access and protections which are beyond all constitutional provisions or boundaries, and which, along with the unconstitutional, Senate-filibuster rule represents the greatest threat to democracy since the expanding Third Reich of Adolf Hitler and the cold-war missiles of the Stalinist Soviet Union.

Those who voted against, and especially those who did not vote to support continuing the turn-around begun by the Democratic administration and Congress—those who expected two decades of Republican trickle-down, economic disaster to be turned around and repaired in 18 months—should not complain as the nation continues to deteriorate in proportion to the growth of the wealth-divide and the deficit as their lives become more difficult; it is only what they so apathetically asked for and therefore, so richly deserve.

cc (via web forms) December 2, 2010:  White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin; House Financial Services Committee office, more...

We live among a growing spate of fools; though, tossing half of the Democratic Blue Dogs, liberalizing or “progressivizing” the caucus and providing one of the silver linings in the losses, may belie that.

But then, the dumbing-down of the nation becomes even more of an embarrassment as it takes another Quayle step backward into the greedy grasp of those Republicans who, with no guilt for the gushing glut, and who, it has so obviously been forgotten, brought down the anchor upon staying the truer course of decades past, set before they hogged the helm.  Now, with three fingers back on the tiller, it is they who so loudly demand change, so long overdue, they dare so boldly to say, with such unstained, unattached abandon, they, who once so recklessly set the nation’s course into the seething storm.

The proverb says, “The people get the government they deserve.”  The people have voted, or not, in this mid-term election, in both cases as victims who are accosted in the park by muggers with empty guns—handing over their purses and the bullets.

Now, though nearly half of those who participated and object to the new intrusion by putting on a swimsuit, we’ll all get striped-down, sobbing, to get a total tanning, eh?  Flip-flop, the front... the back... and now we shed all modesty, “sob,” as we allow ourselves to be planted naked on a hot summer’s beach, tearful, blinded with no sunglasses, no shade or cooling breeze, no sunscreen, no earplugs to block the crowded, ceaseless din of deceptive and inflamed discourse, and no fruity, spirited refreshment anywhere in sight, and no way to pay for any if there were.

As the president responds to the “shellacking,” as he put it, with the same, refined, surrendering, invitational approach and argument as before—the only reality he can truthfully address with the same apparent detachment that helped create it—we shall bake, expressing our anger and frustration in the mire of politically motivated House investigations, double-talk, and far more sharply pointed obstructionism, halting all progress, and handing the president a remaining term of little more than theater politics.  The Republican agenda remains the same:  limit President Obama to one term, though it is no longer publically stated, since the obdurate leadership finally gets that it is a priority that is widely, properly recognized as selfish and a disservice to the national interest.

“The best man for the job,” once taken as a good thing for the country, when government worked better, less at the mercy of a merciless and destructive party mechanism, with all its trappings to gather money and influence, placing itself above the system it embodies and the people who embody it.

Amidst the rubble of his unavoidable fate and his self-confessed failings, and the aimless, hovering turns of Congress, the president will at least still have control to finally act against another great destroyer of America that has seduced him in his first two years, as it has seduced every president, since Eisenhower:  the hold on government by the military-industrial complex.  If he chooses, he can claim the reins of defense over aggression by removing the troops, so hapless and ignored by both press and candidates in this mid-term election, from Iraq and Afghanistan, where the war was illegitimate in the first case and won seven years ago in the latter.  In their place, he can strengthen intelligence-based law enforcement, special ops, and international/interagency coordination.  He should also end the flow of billions of dollars to those corrupt, self-interested governments, payments viewed by many with the same disdain, or worse, as the pay-outs to AIG and Freddie/Fannie, and then act to vastly reduce the sprawling military footprint around the world, finally claiming America’s right to be at peace, where it should be as integral and financial recovery accelerates.

These things he can do without Congress, to turn back another great misdirection of entrenched, extremist-Republican rule, and he should if he wishes to serve another term.

cc (via web forms) November 3, 2010:  White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...

There is that disconcerting element of the conservative wealthy, flexing throughout America and the “civilized” West, that would see a return to Victorian times, with its immutable classes and fearsome work houses, as a revolution of great promise and, for them, deserved privilege and placement.

Among them are those who, despite the wreckage brought down upon most everyone except the wealthy in the last three years, in a roller-coaster crash of the economy that saw its descent begin from an apex many Republican years before, when there were no brakes or wheel-guards installed, they who set loose that deadly fall, and the net of TARP that would save its designers, they would have you vote to see business unleashed again to stalk at will, to have everyone else’s safety net of mandated health-care standards swept away, and Social Security privatized and/or slashed to save a perceived tax and provide another enriching resource with which to play, at the risk of devastation to those with only that as their earned support:  be that as it may; or, who would say to those, so untethered, who are so resourceless, therefore, so lazy, “be damned,” as would have been the case in this Great Recession; indeed, as it has been for many who would, otherwise, themselves be standing up within that crowd of self-assured individualists.

And, for many who, still standing, attend quaint, dangerous tea parties, the dread, dire boom is just out of sight, lurking, perhaps in the walls of an artery or a malignant growth, or an accident, or career disaster, waiting to harshly lower and also sink them deep within the muckety-muck dirt of that world to which they are now so skillfully solicited, and then painted with bold watercolor so as to seem, of it, a lasting, brethren part.

They, who with much emotion and little thought outside their own charity, aid to so enthusiastically cut away at the slandered cords of social conscience and responsibility, when done, will find that the floor beneath them has instead been let go; or, for now, at least in the case of the artery wall or other health affliction, that despite their best efforts to prevent it, they have been saved.

cc (via web forms) October 8, 2010:  White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...

Today, September 23, 2010, thanks to a Democratic priority for social conscience, important barriers have been placed against the for-profit-motivated abuses of the health-insurance companies.  These barriers were put in place despite the best efforts of Republicans in Congress to prevent it, and they are protections for all citizens who have health insurance, protections that the Republicans have vowed to repeal if they regain control of Congress after the November election.

These protections are representative of the classic struggle to balance democracy with capitalism, where Democrats seek to curb the corporate greed and excess of naked capitalism with regulations, imposed by law and enforced by government, and where Republicans oppose limitations on capitalism, calling it “big government controlling business.”  Republicans don’t like to mention how big “business” is, and they would have you forget how harmful business can be when it is left to regulate itself, a primary factor that created the recession which has devastated families throughout the nation.  Collectively, these protections against the inate proclavity for abuse within the health-insurance industry are known as the Patient’s Bill of Rights, and these are the protections all health-insured citizens have, starting today, that they did not have before, and that the Republicans want to take away:

No lifetime limits on your coverage:
If you or anyone covered in your family is struck with a catastrophic illness, your insurance company can no longer stop paying for your treatment because of an imposed cap.  Republicans want to give the insurance companies back the cap and leave you on the lurch to pay.

No more rescissions (or arbitrary cancelling of coverage) except in cases of fraud:
No longer can your insurance company refuse coverage or refuse to renew your coverage because you have become ill and now need the insurance to pay for your treatments.  Republicans want to give back the power to cancel to the insurance companies.

Coverage of most adult children up to age 26:
Your children, covered on your health plan, cannot be dropped until they are 26, requiring you to pay for separate policy coverage before then, coverage the insurance companies know many of them will never need until they are older and on their own.  Republicans want to let the insurance companies either have you pay for separate policies or, when your children reach 18, let them go uncovered.

Coverage of preventive services without cost sharing:
Preventive services will help prevent serious illnesses and save lives.  Republicans want to let the insurance companies require that you pay a major share, instead of having a portion of the premiums you pay go from the obscene profits of insurance executives to instead work for you to help keep you healthier and live longer.

Access to OB / GYNs without referrals:
Insurance companies can no longer force you to get a referral from them or an approved practitioner for you to visit a gynecologist.  Republicans want to let the insurance companies dictate the conditions under which you can make such appointments.

Restrictions to prevent insurers from placing unreasonable annual limits on your coverage:
Insurance companies can no longer tailor limits on categories of annual payouts to the dictates and priorities of profit criteria.  Republicans want to let the insurance companies dictate the limits, without restriction, they can pay for treating your illnesses.

No exclusion of coverage for children with pre-existing conditions (up to age 19):
Insurance companies are now prohibited from refusing to cover your children who need treatment for medical conditions.  Republicans want to let the insurance companies say no to your children’s treatment needs.

Access to out-of-network emergency room services:
Insurance companies can no longer limit the facilities you can go to for emergency care, requiring you to search your policy or hold on the phone to find out from the insurance company where you can go and be covered.  Republicans want to let the insurance companies dictate where you have to go to get emergency treatment.

A strengthened appeals process:
Insurance companies no longer have the built-in advantage when you oppose their coverage decisions.  Republicans want to keep the playing field tilted in favor of the insurance companies on appeals and all other circumstances.

Republicans have pledged to repeal the new health-care bill and all of these protections.  Yet they would lie and say to you that they would not take these important benefits away if asked about them.  They would answer by substituting a non-specific, big-picture lie that what they’re doing is preventing big-government intrusion into healthcare decisions, where there is none, and saving the aged from cuts in Medicare, where there are no net cuts, only gains.

Do you want to see these protections swept away and give all the power back to the insurance companies?  Then vote for a Republican this November, or fail to go out and vote for a Democrat, because that’s what it has unfortunately come down to:  Democrats serve the people, Republicans serve the insurance companies, but in both cases, only after they first serve themselves and their parties.  It is, again unfortunately, a matter of choosing the lessor of two evils, and that choice, unless you are wealthy, is clearly the Democrats.

Thanks to Republicans, and some rogue Democrats, like Sen. Max Baucus, many more important protections and services the health-care bill provides will have to wait until 2014 to go into effect.  And, thanks to them, insurance companies still have price control without competition that isn’t prioritized on profits, and the health-insurance industry is already pushing hard to put large increases into effect to preserve their Wall-Street and greed mandated, pocket-bulging profits.

Lockheed Martin’s F-16 assembly line.
Can industry ever justify soldiers’ lives for livelihoods or profits, especially on weapons sales to other nations?

The Predator drones (above) and ship-launched cruise missiles are the
current, primary offensive U.S. weapons in the N. African shadow war.

Military deployment for defense cannot be subverted for economics or cultural policing.

This December 2009 swath of violence in Karachi, Pakistan is only one occurance of the internal struggle for
power and control that has sympathizers in every level of that nuclear state’s society, including the military.

Are you reassured that this guard of the Pakistani nuclear missiles is smiling?
The nuclear weapons in these medium-range missiles are only the tip of the pyramid of risk that
widens as controls beyond the launch-site soldier’s weapon must be flawlessly extended through
the production, assembly, command-and-control, transportation, storage, and waste processes.

A great source of the hate and determination that continuously drives that dark, nuclear-initiated objective of the extremists, and which brought down the capitalist-iconic Twin Towers, is the perception that capitalism drives America’s new epoch of Mid-East-region imperialism, not democracy, a perception that was reenforced by Ambassador Crocker and Gen. Petraeus, among others.  The other offending factor, becoming more so to Americans, as well, is the widening presence of U.S. troops and infringing U.S. culture, particularly sexual objectification and commercialism, in lands where the U.S., its troops and culture, do not belong, and where the military footprint does no good, except to incite and legitimize Islamic-fronting radicals who want the fight, and to complete the business plan of U.S. “defense” industries which want sustained profits and expansion of their markets and capabilities to be realized on a slowly-simmering stage.

You, Mr. President, are carrying forward their corrupted agenda of greed.  President Eisenhower would tell you as much.

He already has.

cc (via web forms) August 16, 2010:  White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...

Critics, including MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who call the Republican party an “anti-immigration” party, or that the Republican party is “anti-Hispanic,” or seeks to “make criminals out of newborns” by amending the 14th Amendment’s citizenship stipulations, these critics are guilty of the very same, grossly exaggerated, inflaming propaganda that is characteristic of FOX and the conservative-Republican party’s leadership, their trumped-up charges having no basis whatsoever in fact.  Despite that it is difficult to pose any rational defense for the positions (more, the lack of) of the Republican party of today, and that its leadership is not gifted with the capacity to moderate their views or avoid abuses of rhetoric, the fact is that the Republican party, and many others, are only seeking to see immigration law enforced and American ideals preserved, as immigration law intends.

This, more correctly, makes the Republican party the anti-ILLEGAL-immigration party, as opposed to the Democratic party, which seems inclined to pander to the Hispanic vote.  And, no, the Republican party does not “hate” Hispanics, but the truth is that it is Hispanics, and chiefly those from Mexico, who with the help of the U.S. and their government, through a multi-state network of Mexican consul offices, are abusing the laws, resources, and courtesy of the American people.  There is no other way in which to address the problem than to name that race or nationality which is at its root, simply by the nature of geography, not any other intrinsic race or ethnic characteristic, and any allusion to any other characteristic by critics, other than political, where there are serious deficits, is simply an effort to paint legitimate fact-naming as racism for the sole purpose of casting critics in a completely, falsely deplorable light.

Pandering to the illegal-Hispanic alliance, if allowed to continue, admitting wave after wave of illegal immigrants, as will be the case if an amnesty is again granted with “reform,” allowing more millions to bypass immigration law and obtain the “unenlightened” vote, will eventually result in the loss of the Democratic party and all politics in America to the hands of those very illegal immigrants, forever casting aside America’s historical heritage, which rose from the Founding fathers to fight against the opposed evils in two World Wars, and which, in stark contrast to much of Central and South America, where illegal immigrants have their political values and experience, has stood as the world’s beacon of freedom and democratic process.  Such overthrow of the traditionally American society would mark a significant dilution of the already diminishing global cultural diversity, which, like America’s heritage, is worth preserving.

There is no legitimate reason to oppose a policy of enforcing immigration law, because to enforce is also to support preserving America’s unique customs and heritage instead of seeing them absorbed and replaced by that which predominates Central and South America.  Only those who wish to bring about exactly that result, who wish to see the United States opened up to a sea-change of heritage, custom, and political power as a consequence of an unregulated invasion of Hispanics from Mexico and other nations of Central and South America can oppose, without any legitimate basis, rejecting amnesty or enforcement of immigration law that, enforced, protects America’s identity and ideals.

Even more ludicrous is the charge that the Republican party seeks to criminalize babies of illegal immigrants.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  The intent is to remove a key magnet that draws illegal immigrants to America:  that their children, born here, are automatically granted citizenship as a mere consequence of presence within America’s borders, which was not an issue for the nation when the 14th Amendment was passed, but which has been a right that has been abused for purposes never intended or foreseen when the Amendment was passed.

There is no basis of reason for any expectation that children born of parents who are within the borders of the U.S. illegally, or even legally as visitors, should expect those children to be granted citizenship status.  The change sought would be limited to change citizenship so that only children born with at least one parent being a U.S. citizen would automatically receive citizenship status.  This would not criminalize any child, because, legally, those who make that false claim know full-well that the children are devoid of any capacity for culpable intent, criminal or otherwise, and infants born of illegal immigrants would retain the citizenship and nationality of their parent’s country of origin and would remain with their parents as they are processed through immigration enforcement, not, as are their parents, as lawbreakers, but only as their attendant children.  If any critics of this necessary change can deny that the intent of those who come to America illegally, to bear their children here, are not doing so with the intent and purpose of securing citizenship alone, in order that they can both receive free natal healthcare and later secure admission on a legal basis for themselves and their relatives, is either a liar or suffering damaged intellect to not have that awareness.

The only illegal immigrants the U.S. has any obligation to consider for a “structured” amnesty, are those who have served honorably in the U.S. military or whose immediate family are U.S. citizens, and that latter obligation is only through consideration of the citizen relatives.  It is important and necessary to close the spigot the 14th Amendment has opened, to remove the strongest lure to illegal immigrants, after jobs, and prevent further, ongoing abuse.

cc August 15, 2010:  Chris Matthews; (via web forms):  White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...

America has reduced much of foreign policy to a level that should be beneath the contempt of an intellectual president:  buy them or kill them, or both, which is now the situation in Afghanistan, never mind the cost and carnage of innocents left in the wake of such blundering pursuits.

In regard to the WikiLeaked documents, which highlight Afghanistan military-operations data and statistics, including civilian deaths, the administration has lined up the statements of Afghan and Pakistani officials to match its own, saying the leaks pose a severe danger to troops and operations, despite that the documents were vetted and redacted by responsible news organizations to remove names and specific data that could compromise troops or intelligence, and administration spokesmen also say, contradictorily, that most of the information was already known, is outdated, and the problems no longer exist.

Right.  And where’s that bridge?

First, a shrug of the verbal shoulder to deflect the leaked revelations, which reflect poorly on the government’s line on Afghanistan, as unimportant.  And now, it is very likely that with his contradictory statements of grave harm, Sec. Gates is spearheading the making of the leaks into an excuse for the failure of the counterinsurgency effort, the emphasis of which, as a policy, had already been found lacking and had begun a change to anti-terrorism priorities before the leaks.

More manipulation, less truth?

Secretary of Defense Gates cited the violated trust between governments and individuals represented by the WikiLeaks documents:

“It is amazing how much trust matters in relationships, whether it’s with individuals or governments around the world.”

What Gates does not deign to mention, and which his omission makes an example, is the trust between the U.S. government and its own people, particularly when the reasons for sending America’s sons and daughters into war are at question.  The leaked documents show a violation there, more onerous than any other, because for too long, truth, trust, and honesty have been placed last, or not at all, before the American people, behind the consideration of all others, as Gates perfectly reflects in his statement.

White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, who is the public face on administration policy, said:

“We are in this region of the world because of what happened on 9/11.  Ensuring that there is not a safe haven in Afghanistan by which attacks against this country and countries around the world can be planned. That’s why we’re there, and that’s why we’re going to continue to make progress on this relationship.”

This is an outrageously unachievable objective, first because it is invalid, because the Afghan government was removed as a response to 9/11, and al Qaeda decimated, hundreds of its front-line leaders killed, and thousands of the Afghan people of al Qaeda and the Taliban, associated and not, were killed, all in a victory responding to the 9/11 attack, achieving the goal stated if the demands issued to the Taliban by Bush were not met, all within the first two years after the invasion!  Second, the objective stated by Gibbs is ridiculous because even if it were possible to destroy all Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, which it is not, Afghanistan is not the where and all of al Qaeda bases or planning capabilities.  There is no need for a base in Afghanistan (or Pakistan) to plan attacks against the U.S.  Al Qaeda is global and electronically mobile.  The stated objective of the Press Secretary is so useless and meaningless that it can only be propaganda.

So what is the real objective that hides behind the expressed one of denial of Afghanistan as a place to plan attacks against the U.S.?  Is it the wealth of minerals in the hills and the drool of industries to control and exploit that wealth, U.S. and foreign?  Is it the corporations that profit with defense contracts, those military personnel who would not be happy if there was not some engagement somewhere, and those elected officials who, through contributions or through some vicarious, warmongering ideology are in their pockets, all of whom are otherwise collectively known as the military-industrial complex?  Is it to control the presence of India?

Or... most likely, is the administration afraid to say that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is a threat to America?  If it were, which it is, should not the army be there instead of Afghanistan, achieving an objective that is both quantifiable and most highly affecting of U.S. and Western national security?  That would be a meaningful war, one that removes all nuclear capability from an unstable country that is both threatened by and composed of extremist sympathizers.  One that would also pave the way to remove them from another nation afterward, peaceably.  If al Qaeda or any Mid-Eastern terrorist organization gets nuclear materials to deploy in a weapon against the U.S. or its allies, it will come from either Pakistan or Iran, more likely before Russia or India.  Does the Obama administration wish to avoid highlighting that because it does not wish to place such a threat and confrontation with an unstable Pakistan before the public?  The reason provided by Mr. Gibbs is so easy to substitute, and so unconvincing.

One example demonstrating how blatantly the government, and the Department of Defense, attempts to minimize the negative nature of the truth regarding “difficult” military operations, is Afghanistan commander, Gen. Petraeus’s July 2010 statement that, “some of the ground troops might see the rules of engagement as being somewhat bureaucratic.”  The fact is that the rules of engagement, which are highly restrictive upon soldiers, are levered to the prime value of the local populace in accord with the objectives of counter-insurgency operations, not the safety of U.S. soldiers, and they are considered by most soldiers to be a factor increasing the “danger and casualties” for them, not as being bureaucratic upon them, but rather, as being hazardous to them.  When a nation employs its military in operations that dictate rules and procedures detrimental to its survival, that should be a clue that the situation is not one that justifies the deployment of U.S. troops, because force of fielded armies is meant to be employed against enemies who are identifiable, and always in ways most effective to maximize reduction of the enemy and minimize losses to the troops, always.  If it can’t be done that way, there’s another way the problem has to be addressed, besides troops.  Afghanistan has another way, expressed by the Vice President (LEISO), and like Iraq, Afghanistan has now become a misuse of troops.

The United Nations records that in 2009, there were 2,412 civilians who were killed in Afghanistan—men, women, and children.  And, despite increased awareness that the death of civilians is always two-steps backward for the overall objectives, and regardless of more restrictive rules of engagement, that figure is 14-percent higher than the previous year, which speaks against a war that is reported by governments as going well, as well as “difficult” and “hard.”  If one out of three of the related reports from the secret documents disclosed by WikiLeaks in late July 2010 were discarded, there would still be ample reason to believe that the U.N. figures are vastly understated.

There have also been war crimes that go beyond the attributes of the fog of war, committed by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan.  But while America has so far avoided the branding that comes with trial in the World Court or by war-crimes commissions, that taint is on the heart of compassionate citizens and is a constant source of helpless regret and anger which has spanned the generations to today, beginning with My Lai, in Vietnam, the incredible carnage inflicted upon that massacred village, mostly women and children, and babies, to include sexual abuse, torture, and mutilation, being the first of which most Americans can directly associate.  Is this a palatable price for national security, in unjustifiable or unnecessary, or wrongly-extended wars, and in conditions of a partial commitment, overextending troops year upon year, and unconstitutionally augmenting a thinned resource with contract killers, unaccountable and already responsible for one cross-gender/age massacre, in Iraq?

Yet, the wars, mostly unnecessary and unjustified, keep on coming, prodded by a push to keep the machine well oiled, and reap the profit of it, along with a growing acceptance of “collateral damage,” which is evidenced by the coining of that dehumanizing term for what is, starkly put, a veil upon the casual murder of innocents.  From distant rooftops by machine-gunning, laughing mercenaries and soldiers, pumping rounds into unknown targets on a distant road, to the trigger on a joystick in an air-conditioned room 3,000 miles from the fallen targets, the mechanics of death have becoming more indiscriminate and robotic than the initiation of global conflicts in which the toys and theories are put to the ultimate test, in situations far removed from any ultimate threat to national security, instead, contributing to its demise.

In response to the WikiLeaks documents, the New York Times reported that:

“On Capitol Hill, a leading Senate Democrat (Sen. John Kerry, D-MA) said the documents, with their detailed account of a war faring even more poorly than two administrations had portrayed, would intensify Congressional scrutiny of Mr. Obama’s policy.  ‘Those policies are at a critical stage, and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent,’ said Senator Kerry.”

Therein, within that statement of a leading U.S. Senator, lies a big problem with the Afghanistan occupation, and all wars and occupations:  Congress does not understand that the Constitution puts the power and responsibility for war policy, not just the funding, in the body of Congress, not any president, not an intellectual, right-intended president like President Obama, and certainly not an ignorant, authoritative “Great Decider” criminal like George Bush.  Presidents are empowered to determine the methods and procedures, configurations and levels of force that will be deployed to achieve the goals and policies set by Congress, not make the policy or goals for military deployments themselves.  If a president believes there is a need for military engagement, or a change in congressionally authorized policy or goals, the Constitution requires that the executive “sell it” to Congress in order to get the authority through law, resolution, or order, never to initiate on its own.  Until Congress starts getting that right, there is going to be little hope of ever returning to a state of war as limited and last resort.

And every day it keeps on being done wrong, and wrongly—every day—more U.S. and innocent lives are savagely torn and extinguished.  To continue in this way, or delay to change it, is deadly wrong.

cc (via web forms) July 29, 2010:  White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...

The value of the Founders, the Charters they left to America, is not only in their wisdom and applied knowledge of human behavior, it is that those traits were a critical component in the equation to formulate a structure of government, tied to individual value and participation, based upon their first-person experience of the oppression and dangers of autocracy which seek to eliminate individual freedoms.  Their experience, and the gift to successive generations of Americans that they wrought from that experience, has shielded America from that danger ever since.  And, so departed is America today from the tug of those chains they cast aside, the ability to recognize the threats has diminished, and the framework of the government they handed down for the protection and growth of subsequent generations has been diminished and pushed aside, and in some cases, as with the Bush administration, arrogantly countermanded.

Americans must recognize that their own vision of freedom is far less acute than those who wrote the nation’s Charters, because today’s Americans, native Americans, or immigrants from other democracies, the vast majority never lived under the burden of restriction and compelled obedience like that which, in this generation, in Iran, killed Neda Soltan, and that, with the founding generation, created the anger and desperation born of those conditions, making it possible that the Founders and their townsmen and neighbors would choose to risk everything against formidable odds too change it, for themselves and their “posterity.”  As the memory of those desperate days has faded with every passing generation, and become farther removed from the mechanics of managing and overseeing the conduct of that government, today, the danger has returned, a danger with a different face, but no less threatening and no less capable of eroding the freedoms intended to be the guiding and primal principle of the government, through which all power should be filtered.

The path back to a strong democracy, to reasserting freedom, accountability, and responsiveness to the Will of the People, is to elevate the Constitution out of the lifeless archive of historical decoration to which it has been subjugated, and demand that its limitations and enumerated powers be returned to the life of the nation, in this generation, by being observed, no matter what it takes to do it, including Congress revolting against an activist majority in the Supreme Court, who have forgotten that their first responsibility is to that Constitution, not to the wishful and aborted interpretations and arguments offered by lawyers for industry, or their individual politics.  Given that responsibility, those rulings stand as a violation of the good behavior that justices are granted as the sole condition of their service and privilege, and that majority should be impeached and convicted, not left empowered to destroy political equality through subversive edict!

That is the recent crime of one branch.  For the Congress, it has failed to jealously guard its enumerated powers, allowing government to be transformed to more of an oligarchy than a democratic republic, placing greater distance between the people and the decisions that are made for the most critical policies in national life.  The Founders addressed the Congress in Article I because it is one representation indicating that Congress is the branch they intended to be the primary source of power in the republic, not the president.  The Senate has twisted the constitutional authority to set rules of its proceedings into an aberration by altering the criteria intended for governance, which is a simple majority, except where the Constitution specifically provides for a greater, two-thirds criteria.  The 60-vote rule is as much an abomination to popular sovereignty as the ruling of the Supreme Court in Citizens United was to political equality, which combined, is two legs of the tripod supporting democracy that have been axed.

As to the House, withdrawals from the Treasury are only to be made in accord with appropriations made by law, and an account of all expenditures must be published, which would include full details of each and every earmark.  And, earmarks are doubtful to fall as a proper appropriation by law, since lawful appropriations are named in accordance to their purpose, and all appropriations have a purpose, which is not served by the earmarks attached.  The Constitution intends that expenditures be required to go through the difficulty of discreet lawmaking and passage for a reason, which, as a consequence of “expedient spending,” most of it during the Republican years, looms dark over America’s future now.  In addition, the Constitution’s Article I, Section 8 prohibition against providing preference with revenue to the port of any state over the other can be applied beyond ports, just as surely as the Air Force, which didn’t exist at ratification, is included as an extension of the Section’s military powers.  The earmark funding the Bridge to Nowhere could be ruled unconstitutional simply on the basis of providing revenue to the road system of one state over another, if not that it was not a lawfully appropriated expenditure.  But, these transgressions almost pale when compared to the greatest failure by the House of Representatives to carry out constitutional power and responsibility since the founding of the nation:  its failure to bring articles of impeachment against Bush and Cheney.

And both houses of Congress are guilty of providing ratification and oversight with the incompetence and disregard that BP conducted drilling operations on the Deepwater Horizon, or that Minerals Management has regulated that drilling, or mine safety, or that any of the array of financial-regulatory agencies policed Wall Street and the banks, or that the FAA looked after the degradation of safety and pilot-workplace quality as major carriers clawed against hairline margins by growing a flimsily managed and regulated commuter network, or that the Consumer Protection Agency kept dangerous Chinese products from reaching citizens’ homes and children... and all of these failures, and more, compound the oversight failures of Congress, too many of its members sooo busy raising money for the next election, and figuring out how to give it back to the contributors, instead of doing the full job within their committee assignments that good service to the nation and their constituencies demand, ransacking access to office, choice, and political liberty for the People, the third leg of democracy, in the process.

Presidents, from at least Lincoln to Obama, have taken their pound of flesh from the body of the Constitution, from initiating deployment or extensions of military actions, unilateral raising of armies, engaging in foreign agreements or activities requiring treaty, violating individual liberties, to signing statements, which are a pure usurping of Article I, where Congress alone has the power to formulate and pass laws, the president designated specifically to either sign or veto, or let lay, never edit, redact, or annotate with signature.  As Congress has failed in oversight, presidents have also failed to prioritize national good over politics when making appointments, administering their agencies, and executing the laws, most blatant and harmful today in the case of illegal immigration.  And, the history has been that, to date, every president, of either party, has sought to use and protect and expand the unconstitutional powers and authority that have been gained through successive administrations through precedent, by virtue of the wrongful silence or cooperation of Congress and the Court.

The dangers today are subtle, and are primarily, at the lowest common denominator, due to the fraud and bribery and party control that are at the heart of campaign contributions.  But the danger is all around and, if let to continue, just as capable of wrecking the nation as the masted warships in the harbors and Redcoats who threatened the colonies in the years before the Constitution became the backbone of America’s laws and freedoms.  The Founders would tell us that the warnings, written in the history of their words, can still speak out to those who will see, and they are just as applicable today.  They would tell us that, in this strange, instantaneous, news-funneled, high-paced, complex world in which America is militarizing over horizons at every point of the compass, that time is running out, and that, since the Civil War, the Great Experiment is in the gravest danger it has ever known, from forces internal and, as a consequence of America’s excessive military proliferation, external.

Would they be listened to?  If they could appear on television and speak the warnings they’ve written and left behind?  Would that be a call to action, a rake to apathy?  Or, are the Founders no more than historical tokens for political catch-phrases?  Despite that human nature hasn’t changed at all, and that the selfishness of man they balanced with the Constitution hasn’t diminished, have they and their works become, today, as irrelevant to us as the dangers they faced and acted to conquer in their distant time?

America needs a leader to speak for the Founders and to act according to the limitations and priorities they wrote into the Constitution, to stand against those who say the Constitution is outdated and individual freedoms must be subordinated to larger interests and entities in a world of global threat and competitiveness, or that the government of the Constitution is too cumbersome in a quick-response era, and changing it even more so—better to quietly pidgin-hole it and unbalance the separation of powers.  Or more dangerous, those who claim constitutional protection and adherence to preserve freedom and reduce the size of government, the same ones who say spending to help the unemployed hurts the deficit, but keeping the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in place does not, whose real purpose is only economic self-interest, paraded behind a facade of promoting business.  They make the government of the Constitution, of the Founders, out to be an evil instrument, when it is really all there is that balances self-interest and greed, “capitalism,” with regulation, “democracy,” to stand between any hope of public safety and self rule on the one hand, and something more akin to the law of the jungle that those wealthy and powerful want to bring about on the other.  If America’s government is as big and bad as they claim, why would they wish to be a part of it?  And why would their constituents want them to be?  Those who appreciate the value of America’s heritage, its constitutional government, are those who can best work to serve both it and the People (not corporations) it was designed to benefit.

President Obama knows the works of the Founders as well or better than any modern president.  If he is unappreciative of it, or overcome by the entrenched system, or isolated by the walls of the office into performance compliant with the career professionals and bureaucrats who surround him and wrongly interpret or carry-out his intent, there may be no hope for the necessary change, or future for the republic that was envisioned and set into motion by Madison, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and the rest.  Their diminishment to the past can only mean the diminishment of every individual in the future, to become as lost and feeble in the eyes of their government as it is to be invisible and muted within the systemic sprawl and the numbing, monotonous mass.

Therein is the danger.

cc (via web forms) July 26, 2010:  White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...

To (via web form) President Obama:

July 22, 2010

Defending democracy and freedom is what the military is supposed to be about, by definition and by the intent of the Founders.  But constitutional war powers have been aborted by presidents for hollow reasons, beginning with Truman and the perceived, N. Korean hinge pin on the opening door to the onset of global communism, to the domino theory of Vietnam, the falsely alleged, threatened spread of WMD in Iraq, to terrorism in Afghanistan, and all along the way, the influence of the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned against, and the corporate conglomerates of energy and infrastructure development which, instead of defending America’s democratic freedom, have made the policy of successive administrations, and the job of the military, into one of promoting and spreading it, in the name of defense, spreading military bases and the U.S. presence over the globe in the process, often attempting to garner the expansion and profit of corporatism that are perceived to go with it.

The cost of promoting, rather than defending, is extraordinarily higher to the nation and the lives of its soldiers, and it is detrimental to America’s national security, quality of life, its future, and world regard, while providing no return.  Since WWII, S. Korea has reached a level of economic and industrial prosperity that, on a per-capita basis, in many ways exceeds America’s today.  And while facing a bankrupted, isolated regime to the north, it is still unable or unwilling to spend to defend itself, prospering under the umbrella of an on-going, American-military subsidy—Truman’s gift, wrapped in a shredded Constitution, endorsed by presidents ever since, that has kept on giving to S. Korea for 60 years and counting.  Had Truman not sent troops on his own initiative, it is difficult to say how a combined Korea, starting out communist, as Vietnam did after the U.S. finally withdrew, without the proximate threat of U.S. forces would have evolved.  All of Korea might not be as the North is now, or it might be, but with America really none the worse, and where would those S. Korean semi-conductor and electronic industries be?  But America would have been spared the lives of some 38,000 of its soldiers and more than $1 trillion that has been spent year over year ever since he deployed there, not to mention the wounded and more than 100,000 dead N. Koreans and Chinese.

Vietnam was more straightforward:  after 19 years, 303,000 lives tattered and 58,000 lost, and more than $500 billion spent... it was all in vein, except to the military-industrial complex.  The only benefit, hard lessons, forgotten and ignored, except by the first President Bush, in the Gulf War, who had the wisdom to take his victory and leave, as his son should have done in Afghanistan, after the Taliban and al Qaeda were routed and decimated.

Iraq, an unnecessary war of criminal inception, where Bush never intended to withdraw, after seven years, more than 4,400 dead soldiers, $700 billion and counting, is still a powder keg with a burning fuse and 50,000 U.S. troops, who by their presence tempt violence and the president, to be sucked back in to defend a so-called, democratic, Iraqi president, who is surrounded by corruption and violates the rulings of his supreme court to rig elections, as oil and other contracts go mostly away from America.

And then, Afghanistan, land of untold mineral wealth, and the buried arsenals of Stinger missiles, where helicopters are beginning to “crash” with frequency, and where after more than 1,100 U.S. soldiers dead, and $285 billion spent, and both increasing, sharply, Bush, and now President Obama, seems determined to follow the Soviet Union, and all who invaded before it, into decades of disaster, backing an unpopular president, who wants to, and should be allowed to deal with the Taliban, who heads a corrupt, absent, elitist government, where, like the X-Files, America can trust no one, from the top to the ranks, except to do whatever is necessary to keep American money and blood flowing, and where a new class of corrupted wealthy are poised to exploit the natural resources as America cooperates by bleeding that blood and money to make it all happen.

And President Obama, intelligent as he is, can count the continuing toll of spreading democracy rather than defending it, at 102,000 dead U.S. soldiers, more than a million wounded, millions of adversaries and collateral victims, and near $2.5 trillion spent—more than 20-percent of the national debt.  He campaigned that he would not be bound by the mistaken policies and politics of Washington but seems to have lost the more objective vision of an outside perspective by being immersed in it, and even given the costs, he is nonetheless strapped in and fastened to the track, like a rocket sled in the dawn of the military’s ballistic research, in a headlong race to disaster, where despite whatever domestic-program hurdles he clears, those mistaken, military policies, which are most entrenched, pervasive, and influencing, form a solid block, where presidents collide when war power is abused, causing the nation to suffer the pain of that cost, which is most acute and unredeeming.

The American experience is testament to the pain, sacrifice, and the lengthy steps and processes a people and their leaders must take, which eventually lead to freedom and democracy for a nation.  That is the example which should be deployed to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran, through diplomacy, education, and cultural exchange, saving the military for that which it is so well trained and equipped, and performs so well:  to remove regimes that directly threaten national security, not to remain in occupations to try and impose the lessons and processes of democracy, at the bequest of the military-industrial complex or the corporate interests who seek to see their government and its soldiers break new ground for their exploitation and profit.

The time has long passed to stop dancing around the Constitution’s limitations on war powers, and to stop defending democracy by trying to spread it, particularly in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where the ground for democracy hasn’t been plowed by the native populations who, otherwise, are not nearly ready to embrace it, no matter how hard and at what cost to America it is pounded into them.

cc (via web forms):  Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...

From Sen. Jim Web’s July 8, 2010 e-mail:

“Proponents of increased campaign finance regulation argue that current campaign financing gives wealthy individuals and corporations undue influence over the political process.  On the other hand, opponents of increased campaign finance regulations argue that prohibitions on contributions impede donors' First Amendment rights.  There are a number of bills pending before the U.S. Senate pertaining to campaign finance reform.  I will support legislation that is fair and encourages participation in the democratic process.”

To (via web form) Senator Jim Webb:

July 9, 2010

It is surprising that, in your non-committal response to the need for campaign-finance reform (elimination), you mention the defense against reform of incursion against free-speech rights.  Democracy is indeed endangered when U.S. Senators hold that up as a viable defense with which to consider voting, because they should know it is not a defense that has any merit.  The vote is what expresses the right of free speech, and the political liberty to stand or write and speak one’s views, not to buy the mechanics of dissemination, and free speech is not embodied in financial transactions, particularly campaign spending, because its primary purpose is to influence and promote, not facilitate the expression of mind of the individual, which requires no large sum of money and which is the object of the First Amendment, and which is what free speech protection is all about.

And it is more important to eliminate campaign contributions because of the greater weight of harm the practice imposes upon political equality, destroying it, which is highly significant because political equality, as you should know, is one of the three pillars of democracy, along with political liberty and “popular sovereignty,” which means that government power and authority is vested in and derived from The People, and that government acts according to the Will of The People, not the will of those who can pay the most to influence elections to detract from the People’s fair weight of voice.  That which threatens any of democracy’s three pillars:  individual political equality, political liberty, and popular sovereignty, must be afforded the preference of protection over human expressions that, like campaign contributing, are mere extensions of the primal rights of man:  free speech, direct expression of mind, being most coveted and at the core, embodied within the Declaration of Independence and the protections and guarantees written into the Amendments and articles of the Constitution of the United States of America, not indirect expression of a desire to influence the election, through contribution, to those who embody one’s ideas.

“WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men [not corporations, Mr. Chief Justice!] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men [not among corporations to secure the rights of corporations], deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed [not from the influence spending of the wealthy]...”

Forgive that bracketed inserts were placed within the word-for-word and style-duplicated copy of the Declaration’s Preamble, to direct attention to the aborted view and ruling of the Supreme Court, which also acted to promote acquired wealth and entities other than man and his (and her) “unalienable rights.”  Note the capitalization in the Declaration’s preamble and consider how it is an expression that places the emphasis on the innate qualities of man, not the acquired ones, and the role government is to play in the interaction.  Also note it states that the rights secured by the Constitution and its Amendments (defining the framework of government limits upon them) are unalienable, endowed by the Creator, not by the resources of a bank account and the societal power which that endows.

The three pillars, and particularly political equality, have never been intended to be subject to the influence of wealth, which is a disproportional characteristic among people that weighs against the value of the individual voice and its equality.  And political freedom has never been meant to be aborted, as a protection to open the purse, that supercedes and reduces the individual value of opening one’s mind and mouth to convey ideas, beliefs, and grievances.

There is all of that, and the plain and rampant corruption to which political contributions are seed, more than enough reason to see the practice end entirely—elimination, not regulation.

cc (via web forms):  White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...

To the members of Congress, the President, and their families and staffs, wishing them the best on this day celebrating the birth of our national identity, which was passed into their hands through the ephemeral portals of history, hoping that America shall find the path to return to the framework of the Constitution that followed, from which it has strayed, especially in terms of the Founders’ standards for military engagements and the source of that grave authority they intended for America:  to be the combined voices of Congress, not the single, kingly voice of the president, which silently-ceded authority now strangles the nation, miring it in everlasting conflicts and occupations, and staining its ideals and identity of power for just cause and shield of freedom with shadow, mercenary armies which, with no constitutional authority, real consequence or accountability, have brought murder and massacre to again be written into America’s legacy.

And hoping elections shall be rid of the influence of campaign contributions, instead funding elections solely through the treasury, where qualified candidates will receive equal resources, free of party control, reducing the insane electoral costs and duration, increasing the field, and freeing them of the influence peddlers and the time and resources wasted on fund raising, and most important, returning political equality to the framework of America’s weakened democracy.

The national identity is also challenged by the granting of citizenship and the vote to unassimilated immigrants, and that loss of identity is already harshly characterized in many ways, in many states along the Sunbelt, and many towns and cities beyond, throughout the nation.  The heritage of America, born on this day, 1776, now rests in your hands.  It is your responsibility to prioritize guarding it as you necessarily deal with the future of the tens of millions of illegal immigrants who are now changing the character of the nation, and who seek, through the sheer mass of their presence, to become a voice in shaping its future, but mostly in their interests and proclivities.  Those who break America’s laws to come here have no claim on citizenship and the vote, ever, and any means that provides for their absorption into the national life must recognize the value of guarding the right to vote by making full and comprehensive assimilation a mandatory prerequisite, and abandon the multiple-choice, flash-card tests and processes, with no oversight, that now grant citizenship to those who have no real understanding of America’s history or government, no appreciation of its culture and heritage, and in many cases cannot speak or read its language.  Granting the right to live within America’s borders does not impose any right or obligation for citizenship to follow.  The mere presence and growth of unacclimated immigrants is already a significant force affecting change and community resources, and whether given residency or not, with or without citizenship and the vote, it is a force that will continue to grow exponentially to change American neighborhoods, their cultures and heritages, and eventually the nation, forever, which is reason enough that the real solution should be that, with the exception of acclimated “dreamers” and their otherwise law-abiding parents or guardians, all who are here illegally and have not developed family ties with citizens should be found and deported, that armored I.D. mechanisms be instituted, that harsh penalties and equally aggressive, proactive enforcement against offending employers and landlords be initiated, and that the citizenship-birthing incentive driving illegal immigrants to America be eliminated.

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance;  and a people who mean to be their own
governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” — James Madison

While all immigrants are due the protections of citizenship with any amnesty that allows them to become residents, the vote that is attached to official citizenship must be made to be a privilege that is only granted through the earnest effort of immigrants to acclimate themselves to American culture, custom, language, and ideals, and the path should be no less severe than the history, civics, and government studies and passage required of a high-school graduate.  While the merits of that might be questioned because, outside of entertainment culture, the historical, government, and world-event knowledge of the population, particularly within youthful segments, has been shown in numerous studies and surveys to be frightfully appalling, unacclimated immigrants cannot be permitted to be admitted as another component that contributes to the dumbing-down of the electorate, despite how many party organizers and officials might prefer that more-pliable resource.  Otherwise, when those tens of millions have a gifted vote, Independence Day in America will have a new meaning that is far removed from the history that this holiday cherishes today.

You have been placed in a position of trust and have the obligation to move America back in these directions, and hopefully you will make it a priority to do so.

cc (via web forms):  White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...

May 1, 2010

Sen. Schumer (D-NY):

Today I received your e-mail seeking support for the Disclose Act, which you sponsor along with Sen. Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. Feingold (D-WI).

Besides just previously, I have written to you and your co-sponsors, and other officials many times about the serious harm and hindrance current election process brings to democracy, and the Disclose Act is just another bill snapping at the symptoms of the core problem:  corporate and union/NPO campaign contributions.  Just as ethics rules and laws, and earmarks rules and laws only put teeth into the pant cuff to tug on the trousers of the crook instead of biting him in the leg, the Disclose Act misses the mark on attacking the real problem.

A bite actually needs to be taken out of the heart of the election problem by banning all contributions in place of publicly funded campaigns and by removing the distribution of funding from party controls, as well as ending gerrymandering, if all the ills that stem from these electoral abuses are to be cured, restoring democracy and ending partisan gridlock, as well as making moot the Supreme Court’s ruling affecting corporate contributions in the Citizens case, which the Disclose Act addresses.  But that ruling is not the core problem, and the Disclose Act falls far short of attacking it as it diverts energy and attention from solving the real problem:  the contributions that are offered as bribes to legislators and reinforced by lobbyists to bring the buy-offs to bank.

I trust you still have access to the e-mails I have previously sent detailing the particulars of the danger the modern electoral process is to democracy and how this single mechanism is responsible for so many seemingly unrelated ills that make government ineffective, cause it to bring so much harm, and separate it from the people.  If not, please let me know and I will resend them to you.

The CNBC financial-reporting show, Squawk on the Street, conducted an unscientific poll, ending April 2010, just after the first two days of Senate-committee grilling of Goldman Sachs executives.  The result suggests that the Goldman executives should have switched chairs with the senators.

The question:  Which do you distrust more:  Congress or Wall Street?

The result:  Congress 82%; Wall Street 18% (4,172 responses)

This lopsided outcome was easy to predict because while we likely really trust Wall Street no more than we do Congress, we know Wall Street is in business to make a profit for themselves.  On the other hand, we expect Congress to be in business for us, yet find that time after time it is in business for itself, and for corporations which are in line way ahead of “us,” so whether we actually trust Congress less than Wall Street, we view its members as having less integrity (being more corruptible) than Wall Street’s executives.  This outcome will never change so long as the electoral system is funded by corporate and union contributions which are supervised and distributed by the Republican and Democratic party apparatuses.

Self-interest is a characteristic trait of most species.  It is very rare that any person would either be without self-interest or hold it strictly restrained through self-discipline.  In government, self-interest is in competition with public interest, and the means by which public interest can be elevated over self-interest is by elimination of factors and systemic procedures that appeal to self-interest.  Those factors and systemic procedures affecting elected and appointed officials are money and the electoral process that is hinged upon campaign contributions, which takes the predominant place as the means by which elected officials serve their self-interest to win re-elections—to remain players.  The task is not to replace the self-interest of public servants to remain in the game.  The task is to change the electoral process as the instrument of meeting that self-interest of preservation and replace it with something else, like achievement or plain good work.

The American system of campaign funding of elections celebrates the self-interest of greed, where chasing the money is elevated as the primary objective of self-preservation, of promotion, to be the “prime directive” of elected office—funding re-election—from day one, consuming major portions of legislators’ and their staffs’ time, time which should be spent on the duties of office, which are many and varied enough, and so diminished, as is clearly seen by the lackluster if not plain shoddy performance of Congress, where getting re-elected is infused, through the raising and transfer of money, into nearly every transaction and equation.

How can The People expect that their government will ever serve them when it is so pre-occupied and beholding to the task of keeping the money flow alive and well by serving two masters:  the providers—special interests, industry and corporate, and the conduit—the political parties and the electoral system, supported by their contributions?  So dependent and entwined are they, that the parties set up call centers and mandated time that elected representatives spend cold-calling for cash, and congressional leaders are largely promoted as a reward for the size of the money pile they have raised!  All the ethics rules and bills to control or limit financing, or to address earmarks, or healthcare reform, or banking regulation, are attacks against the symptoms of the real problem cause:  campaign finance in party control, aided by gerrymandering, which can only be fixed by eliminating all of it in favor of wholly public-financed campaigns and removal of funding control from the leadership of the parties, and fairly redrawing electoral districts, which will also eliminate partisan gridlock.

There is no way to deny that this process undermines democracy, popular sovereignty, the future of the nation and the welfare of The People.  And with the Citizens United ruling, the Supreme Court compounded the problem by the removal of transparency, limits, and the endowment of human rights upon corporations, making campaign financing no less than sanctioned corruption at the highest level.  It is power held up for sale and purchased by the wealthy and powerful, not tendered by a consenting public, in trust, or used in good faith.

There is no way to defend it, to turn a pig into a butterfly without making bacon.  The corporate-funded, party-controlled electoral system must be slaughtered if American democracy is to live.

cc (via web forms):  White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. David Obey, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...

While, for the most part, Goldman Sachs executives came across as evasive and uncooperative in Senate testimony, the sum of their testimony succeeded in raising the question of whether there really is any case at all the government should be bringing against them.  The two-day gain in Goldman’s stock price, almost unilateral for the sector on the first day of hearings, which also coincided with the debt-rating downgrades for Greece and Portugal, reflects the renewed confidence of investors that little harm will likely befall the cloistered firm as a consequence of the confrontation between its executives and the Senate committee.

At the heart of concerns for consequences on banking reform as a result of the hearings, is the threat of separating derivatives-trade units, eliminating trade in synthetics, and breaking-up of the larger institutions to eliminate “too big to fail,” though the consequential taxpayer bail-outs are being repaid with handsome interest, and may be a non-factor if the Goldman case results in a payback to AIG, the worst outcome Goldman faces.  The Senate testimony on Goldman’s derivatives trades could hardly indict their practices, as it was made clear that, as a market maker and trader, Goldman has no responsibility to hold investors’ hands or restrain its own trade actions based upon transactions with any of its clients, direct or brokered, beyond the usual risk disclosures in the small print.  They made it clear enough, though not for some senators, that their responsibility is to broker trades with responsible parties and, as with any investment, buyer beware.

Now, had an investor asked whether an Abacus trade, or any other was a good one to make, Goldman would have been obligated to advise for or against on the basis of its trade positions.  Or, had Goldman sought out buyers for the trade of its own shorts without disclosing the source, its position, they would clearly have been guilty of unethical and probably illegal practice.  But, so far, there has been no evidence made public that either of these circumstances were ever in play—not guilty.  But the particulars of the newly energized, SEC civil complaint against Goldman remain to be seen, and those charges cannot be discounted or minimized by congressional-committee hearings.

The recession and subsequent bail-outs were not the consequence of improper or illegal trade procedures by Goldman or any other institution.  Nor was the recession and bail-outs a consequence of any institution’s size.  The recession happened because of the size of the players’ greed and the reach of the reckless, negligent, irresponsible managements that prevailed, and the absence of appropriate rules and laws, combined with the intentional restraint of regulatory agencies, initiated by Republican-administration appointees to leading positions within those agencies, who turned a blind eye on enforcement of existing laws, or actively blocked/hindered enforcement, effectively leaving the regulatory apparatus gutted.

Congressional testimony of former administration regulators has also indicated that incompetence and a casual familiarity between regulators and the industries they were charged to oversee was a major contributing factor, allowing institutions to run amuck with unfounded risk and to spin a web of trade mechanisms, particularly synthetics with no underlying commodities or instruments, the sole purpose of which is to generate income for the trade firms, and as in the case of many mortgage loans and the Madoff Ponzi scheme, to facilitate outright fraud.  Teeth to rip apart avenues leading to these circumstances should be the point of banking-reform law.

Breaking apart the large institutions is an attractive alternative, but only because it is punitive to the top executives and legions of managers and traders who failed their institutions and the system while garnering wealth for themselves, courtesy of taxpayer funding.  To do so would harm the U.S. economy because without like break-ups of the U.S. financial firms’ overseas competitors, large U.S. firms would become disadvantaged and unable to compete, and a like weight of their disadvantage would be shifted as advantage to their international competitors.  Size is not the cause of failures, and any break-up, if not to be avoided, should only be done in conjunction with diplomacy and subsequent treaties that result in fair and comparable breakups of similar institutions in the rest of the world.

Capital-reserve levels should be assigned to large-cap institutions based upon individual risk profiles.

Trade in synthetic derivatives should be halted, to include speculation in commodities and instruments where price mirroring of the actual instruments and commodities is merely a gamble and not a transaction or a price-fixing mechanism for future purchase.  Gambling should be a recreational pursuit within the sole province of legal casinos.

Legitimately based derivatives should be limited to transactions across an exchange where transparency and regulation can be enforced.

Rating agencies should be split from firms that trade the instruments that are rated, and no rating agency should receive payment from firms or entities having interest in the trade of the instruments that are rated.  A fee, non-biased for type of instrument, should be charged on trades of rated instruments, and possibly also collected from all institutions, to be paid to the rating agencies as their sole revenue source.  Rating agencies accepting payments from trading firms and bond holders/providers opens the same dark doors as are open for legislators who accept corporate and union campaign contributions.

Rules affecting regulation of the economy should be executed through law, not through agency prerogative, where existence and enforcement of rules are subject to political manipulation through appointed agency leadership.

Outlaw esoteric and phantom accounting rules and practices.

Increase Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) resources, now completely inadequate, to investigate and prosecute rampant corporate crime, perhaps a special DOJ section, apart from the SEC, dedicated to banking and investment fraud.

Require institutions to structure their pay systems so that pay levels and bonuses are tied to performance, and institute regulatory requirements for corporations to allow shareholders to approve salary structures and packages of top executives and to permit employee choice in retirement-fund-investment options.

Consolidate consumer protection and make it immune from both political influence and segmented industry ties that have allowed inroads to undue agency influence by banking and investment firms and the scraping of consumer advocacy by politically appointed leadership.

Repeal laws shielding criminal corporate executives from civil suits.

Block corporations found guilty of fraud and theft while participating in government-contract processes from obtaining future government business, unless the product or service that corporation provides is vital to national security and not available from any other secure source.

These are the kinds of actions needed in reforming banking laws, not anything on the basis of institutional size.

cc (via web forms):  White House, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Charles Schumer, Sen. Jim Webb, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Richard Durbin, Sen. Russ Feingold, Sen. Arlen Specter, Rep. Steve Driehaus, Rep Henry Waxman, Rep. David Obey, Rep. Ed Markey; House Financial Services Committee office, more...