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READ this page and don't forget the ESSAYS segment on page 2. Your comments, criticisms, and other reactions are always welcome. Please email me. I will be happy to post them and respond and let that be chain-reactive. P.S.: Donations are always welcome. (Google ads on this page do not necessarily represent my own opinions. They vary throughout the day.) I've just put up a new page on my brilliant career as a classicist--it's at the bottom of this page, far right. Here's a link to it also. And remember, whatever you decide to do with your life, from king of the world to king of the road (or queen, in either case, or prince or princess, or etc., the best way to learn humanities is from humanity, just as the best way to learn science is from scientists! See now also my new feature "POEM WHEN POSSIBLE": I am consolidating my opus and will share poems when I can. The latest set is two Boston poems, one sweet, one sour, one summer, the other winter. After the world ends, I'll still be posting, assuming that Western civilization still reigned, or at least existed when the world ended. There's just too much to say, too many contradictions. Most of the time, I'll write, we passed by homeless people, trying to ignore them, even though one of them created the very basis of just about everything we know and love--a dead white man, a homeless one, ironically named Homer.
"Here is the masterpiece on every way that the scoundrel class shred and savage our right to vote."--Greg Palast
Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols: How the People Lost and Won, 2000-2008, by Election Integrity (EI) activist Marta Steele, is a history of the Election Integrity movement from 2000 to 2008, highlighting the corrupt practices of that decade, and how the people rallied to control and ultimately overcome them, at least in Election 2008. What happened thereafter will become another book.
The culprits were highly corruptible and low-quality machines and the machinery that allowed them to proliferate, defying the will of the people in favor of conservative values unconcerned with the exigent issues that drew the people to the polls. Voters turned out in record numbers in 2008. Thirty percent of those who usually sit out elections (a total of about 100 million) showed up.
For their will not to have prevailed would have represented the biggest travesty in our nation's history; and yet a week before Election Day both John McCain and Karl Rove were predicting a Republican victory.
Then Rove changed his mind on the eve of Election Day, predicting that Obama would win. But this occurred after the huge battle, at so many levels, ultimately boiled down to a deposition in Columbus, Ohio, on November 3, 2008, of a Rove IT operative. Once Judge Solomon Oliver found holes in the deposition, the people's will exploded and the people's choice went to Washington.
Perhaps the day before Election 2008 did not become the major holiday it should have because the machinery of election corruption is up and running again and the people are still fighting. But in Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols
the dramatic victory achieved was a successful revolution and in the long run may be remembered for that.
The ultimate success will not be a sigh of relief and a cheer for a brief period of time, but the permanent death of anti-American activities.
Our vote is our sacred right, nothing we need to acquire with a government-issued photo i.d. It is the bottom line of democracy. Without it, there is no democracy, which is not an abstract noun but continuous work. All this our founding fathers knew and passed down to us, a tough legacy and challenge but well worth our necessary efforts.
Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols has just been published (September 20, 2012) and is on sale here for $20 for the first time to the public. (All sales are final. All information gathered will only be used for the purchase and nothing will be kept on file or used in any other way.)
Some interviews: Live Interview by Danny Schechter, News Dissector Radio, 10/25/12 (scroll down to podcast and advance it to center)
Interview by Rob Kall, Rob Kall's Bottom-Up Radio Show, 2/1/13
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23 May 2013: Friedan Turns Fifty: Some Very Unfinished Business
Dearest Betty, Gloria, Hillary, Madeleine, and even Elizabeth Warren:
I went to a panel celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Betty's The Feminine Mystique. You know, the book that launched a zillion desperate white housewives out of suburbia (the poorer classes of women were already working at menial jobs) into the workplace because they wanted jobs. A domestic professional (housewife?!) herself, Betty had other fish to fry when she skewered women's magazines, for which she was writing at the time, and consumerism in general.
And women visited psychiatrists far more often than men back in those days, I remember reading.
It came out more recently that Friedan was in an abusive marriage when she wrote the book. Beyond that, in the 1997 edition, she turned to the masculine persuasion and realized what confined closets they inhabited: work and exhaustion and little else. This needed to change, too, despite advances already made that had obliged some higher-educated dads to pitch in and get to know their kids and so on. It frees up the joy of parenting for men, too, and they deserve it--all levels of society and not just the tippy-tops.
The panel, which filled the small auditorium to standing-room capacity, was held by DC's Center for American Progress and starred two icons, Gail Collins, the well-known New York Times op-ed columnist, and Anna Quindlen, the popular and prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction. Both have published numerous books and both had much to say about "where we are now," us girls (oops).
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 showed us how and before we knew it, record numbers of desperate housewives were happily (?) working and two-thirds of families included women wage earners.
Today, the United States is behind the rest of the world in women's involvement in both the workplace and society at large, the only developed nation that does not grant family leave. Our agenda for the twenty-first century is paid leave and other forms of improved treatment of women.
Anna Quindlen recalled the frown on her mother's face as she watched her reading The Feminine Mystique with deep absorption. Collins also looked back, to the period after World War II, when "anything was possible" for both sexes. Her mother regretted not having lived Collins's life.
Today women are living a "synthesis," said Quindlen. Collins praised the millennial generation as "ahead of us" (but under what circumstances did we live, FCOL?); this "kickass group" is asking more questions about the work-life balance and therefore "won't make the same mistakes that we did." They are the true synthesis people.
Though today's women lawyers don't face the sexism that confronted Sandra Day O'Connor when she graduated from law school and sought employment, there are still far more women associates than partners in firms.
And where do we go from here?
Said Collins, early childhood education is most relevant to upward mobility for all.
And what is today's "point of rage"? Said Quindlen, inequality sparks rage; she quoted an associate who expressed this notion as "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
Collins located the rage in the more than $1 trillion students owe for college loans, hoodwinked by the promise that they could easily pay them off after graduation, but today stuck in jobs they can't relate to, paying installments on these loans and accrued interest for life.
We also need to do something about the enemies military women face outside of active combat, their male colleagues.
*****
After that, the subject turned to women's colleges and how they empowered women far more than did coeducational settings. It is no coincidence, for example, that both Friedan and Steinem are Smith College graduates.
It was no coincidence, either, that I walked out of the room in a clump of Seven Sisters types. I hadn't dress stylishly for the occasion, so had to proclaim my Wellesley College affiliation before I got any attention--that's where our next president, maybe, went to college, not to mention Madeleine Albright.
*****
I was disappointed. During the Q&A period, I raised my hand tentatively, wanting the distinguished guests to address other issues, including the fate of whistleblowers like me who have dared to complain about sexual harassment in the workplace and have been jettisoned therefrom more than once and today no one wants to hire me. I'm too old anyway, though fit and hyperactive as someone half my age. They, too, are out of work in large numbers, though.
Computer scientist Clint Curtis got fired for reporting election-related political finagling back in the early 2000s and ended up working as a clerk for a Dollar Store (today he practices law). Bradley Manning spoke out and is being hanged for it, even as he moves into the court martial phase next week.
The best supervisor I ever had asked me if I was crazy when I complained to her that the new department head was stalking me outside of the workplace. I asked her how she would feel in a similar situation. She admitted she'd be upset, but I forgot to ask her what she'd do about it, I was so upset.
That issue in itself, a subset of whistle blowing, is moot, as is whistle blowing, which simply attempts to apply the principles we worship in church on Sunday to the other six days of the week.
Nor have I exhausted the list of issues confronting women's rights and the human rights that they entail.
Ladies, my offense rests. Get back to work.
Yours with only the deepest reverence and esteem,
Marta Steele
PS: Sorry about the low-quality photos. I could have downloaded better ones from the Internet, but the facial expressions were priceless.
(c)
19 May 2013: All This Mangling of a Once-Beloved Historical Event: Why the Tea Party?
I wanted to write an op-ed attributing the rise of the Tea Party to the "the skills-based gap [. . .] because they [the Democrats] don't want to tell the working classes that they're losing ground because they didn't study hard enough."
In other words, I wanted to say that the progressive [not in the political sense] declining emphasis on higher education was an outgrowth of the Powell Manifesto, which spawned a slew of conservative think tanks to counteract the creeping socialism brought on by the overeducated late-sixties college students trying to activate the values they were learning in school.
"The poor we will always have with us," the far right might have responded, Romney's 47 percent--you know, those people who need help because all of the wealth was being sucked into the top one percent. I keep saying that destruction of the lower classes isn't the answer, because the host will eventually die out--no secretaries or janitors. And then what will happen to those CEOs helpless without them, the ones who take invisible "business trips" on their yachts for weeks at a time, unmissed?
One day without the 99 percent cleaning up and pushing papers around will do more damage than the bursting of the real estate bubble. Or maybe a week without them anyway.
But we can't afford to take time off from work. Too few unions survive to carry us through such unpaid furloughs, which could result in lockouts because the unemployment rate is so high--much higher than Obama's toothy stats inform us.
I wanted to say that as early as 1984, twelve years after the Powell Manifesto was slipped to the right/right people, a report came out, "A Nation at Risk," decrying the deterioration of our educational systems that were graduating students unqualified to take on the responsibilities for which they were supposedly qualified. I taught some of them back then. Some were good, but others plagiarized. Others didn't want to have to put together a sentence, saying that they'd leave it to their secretaries. But my late father said that in the eighties he had to rewrite and correct letters written by his secretary on his behalf. As an immigrant who came here in his twenties, he spoke better English than the rest of his American-born family combined.
I wanted to say that because students were so burdened by debt from heavy loans they have to take out to put themselves through our institutions of higher learning, they can't even afford to take the jobs they studied toward, even if they're qualified for them. So there's a massive surge toward Wall Street jobs, and science suffers as that small segment of New York City geography sucks physicists away from the creative research that so much more concerns our future than financial greed.
I wanted to say that the decline in values is associated with the decline in the quality of our public educational system--producing the Sarah Palins and Michelle Bachmanns of this country, who don't know U.S. history from a hole in the ground. The latter announced that the American Revolution began in New Hampshire and that there was no slavery during the era that followed.
I wanted to blame the decline in the quality of public school educators on the decline in the quality of public education and that both were producing boobs like Palin and Bachmann. An informed citizenry is necessary to keep democracy alive, said founding father John Adams, who might have added that slavery was indeed in motion in his day. George Washington was far less kind to his slaves than was Thomas Jefferson, who had a long-term romance with one of his, resulting in generations of black and mulatto Jeffersons. The Washington legacy is probably similar, though his only ["illegitimate"] descendants I have met were whiter than white, blond hair scarcely darker than their fair skin.
In other words, I wanted to blame this whole mess on the Powell Manifesto, which indirectly, at least subtly anyway, downgraded the quality of education so that only the upper classes, educated privately, would be qualified to own the country, as many ignorant conservatives if not Tea Party people blatantly betrayed ignorance undetected by semiliterate audiences.
The "man on the street," interviewed impromptu, doesn't know that Columbus discovered America, let alone the damage done to the indigenous peoples upon his arrival.
All this I wanted to say until I read that the majority of the Tea Party, excluding the African Americans beginning to take on their values--move over, Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain--are white males, well educated, and affluent.
Turns out that the "tea party" movement sweeping the nation is disproportionately composed of individuals who have higher-than-average incomes. It's also disproportionately composed of men. And disproportionately composed of white people. . . . "but not necessarily older or just from the South."
According to a Bloomberg poll, "[f]orty percent are age 55 and over, compared with 32 percent of all poll respondents; just 22 percent are under the age of 35, 79 percent are white, and 61 percent are men. Many are also Christian fundamentalists, with 44 percent identifying themselves as 'born-again' compared with 33 percent of all respondents."
Keep in mind, all the above stats were taken in 2010.
Statistics are powerful but sometimes we don't do the math. What we can also glean from the above is that 60 percent of the Tea Party are under age 55; 21 percent are people of color, and 39 percent are women.
Some earlier stats collected by a University of Toronto professor (reported with caution, though, since samples were small) reveal that "there's a relationship between the amount of education one has and the strength of their religious beliefs. Getting an education tends to drive you away from the most fundamentalist religions. That's probably why there's a smaller percentage of college educated fundamentalists (27%) compared to moderates (39%) and liberals (51%)."
Then there are fundamentalists who earned bachelor degrees from "Bible colleges," which are more likely to teach creationism than are mainstream schools and universities.
According to the Bloomberg poll, again, more than 44 percent of the Tea Party are "born-agains" or other categories of fundamentalist Christian.
CNN, Bloomberg, the University of Toronto professor? Two out of three, at least, are mainstream sources. I don't know enough about statistics to modernize these stats on the basis of mathematical probabilities, nor was I able to access more up-to-date figures.
There are many more conclusions possible from the above figures. I choose to draw the conclusion I wanted to draw: that a substantial percentage, maybe as high as 50 percent of Tea Party members, are not as steeped in the Enlightenment culture that is still the theoretical basis of our democracy as are others of us, classified by the University of Toronto professor as moderates or liberals.
Add the above considerations to all of the election corruption that interfered with an accurate vote count in 2010 (the most corrupt election in U.S. history up until then) and acquire at least an idea why the Tea Party gained so many seats in Congress and are running the show even though a million more votes were gleaned by non-Tea Party candidates who somehow were not seated in offices they would have won had it not been for redistricting that clumps inner-city minorities into fewer and fewer electoral units, paving the road for more GOP victories, and the beat goes on, with the Electoral College another target.
The ruling "winner take all" will acquire a new denotation. The GOP will take all through ingenuity. Whither the informed public? Many minds will indeed be filled with misinformation.
Whither higher-level thinking? Get this: McDonald's or Exeter/Harvard, no oxymoron in this topsy-turvy, progressively (not in the political sense) less rational twenty-first century.
Prove me wrong. I will be vastly relieved.
After all, according to today's New York Times "Opinionator," Conservatives believe that the cause of the "skills-based gap" is "educational failure." Liberals agree. The gap "offers an opportunity to criticize our government-run system of public education and especially . . . [you don't want to read the rest]."
These same conservatives also support withdrawing federal funding from sources of higher education that persist in raising tuition.
Remember, the New York Times is studying conservatives without mentioning fundamentalists or Tea Party people at all. The conservatives include George F. Will and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., who might think twice when reading that "[s]ince 1979 the income gap between people with college or graduate degrees and people whose education ended in high school has grown." So there seems to be some hope, though the rest of the Times blog advocates the revival of unions as a fundamental step toward righting (in the nonpolitical sense) the economy, with which these same conservatives would likely take issue. But conservatives are coming out against "educational failure." Is it too late? According to a 2010 Gallup poll, "Conservative Republicans outnumber moderate/liberal Republicans in the general population by about a 2-to-1 margin; among Tea Party supporters, the ratio is well more than 3 to 1." The "Opinionator" seems to define conservative as moderate/liberal or at least moderate. But who knows? The definition should have been clearer.
Nonetheless, as I've written before, my faith in the post-boomer generations persists. They must channel all of their brilliance and creativity away from Wall Street to the sciences. Because science holds answers that will save the world--the environment, that is.
I conclude with a one-word question: "How?"
(c)
30 April 2013: Justice O'Connor "summons up remembrance of things past"
Well, dear ex-Justice, it took you only thirteen years to "summon up" regrets about the Supreme Court's decision to take on Bush v Gore that put Mr. Bush in office on 12/12/2000. Do recall that it was you who said you could not retire unless a Republican won the Election, and so you retired and all hell broke loose?
Are you sure you suffered no such regrets sooner?
Are you really that glad that three woman progressives now use the ladies' room in that august neoclassical building in front of which we have demonstrated so often?
Admit it, you'd prefer copartisan females in those spots.
How else has your political perspective changed?
When to the sessions of sweet, silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste
--Shakespeare, Sonnet 30
There's even more to regret than that. You guys chose the correct Constitutional amendment to address but mangled the wrong part of it. Have I said this before? Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg herself said that your interpretation, that the equal protection clause had been applicable, that that unprecedented, non-precedent-setting decision, would nullify all past U.S. elections in history. (I thought of that a year before she said that, but who would listen to me, especially back then?)
But let's take a look-see at what follows in that amendment right after the "equal protection" clause:
But when the right to vote at any election . . . is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, . . . or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. . . .
Even if we count only male citizens who were deprived of the vote in Florida--most of those [all?] on the fake felon lists were men who actually did not commit any crime--94,000 U.S. citizens in this scenario alone, per the latest figures I find were deprived of the vote, and punishment at this level was more than justifiable. So that more than felony was involved. And the "the basis of representation" clause--might it apply to the number of electors, so that Florida's total number of electors would have been reduced?
Then what might have happened?
Gosh darn, Bush won by only five electoral votes, where Florida had twenty-five electoral votes to contribute. How many might have been subtracted?
Here is yet another among the countless ways that the Constitution was violated relevant to the G.W. Bush administration, even before Governor Bush took office.
Violation of the Constitution (just a "piece of paper"?) is punishable by (fill in the blank).
Given that the revelation of the fake felons lists was published more than a week before your infamous 12/12 decision, so that the Sunshine state, in allowing a subtraction of so many votes from its poll lists, has violated the Fourteenth Amendment substantively (I mean, other states have used arbitrary lists and it became law that an SoS can arbitrarily reject voter registrations) . . . , well something else is rotten in the state of Florida. Not only so many votes uncounted, but a far more valid application of the Fourteenth Amendment did not even invade the discourse, did it?
But here's one thing that did: that the Constitution and its amendments nowhere grant the right to vote to citizens of the United States. This was used by the Conservative Five repeatedly. Former U.S. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. tried to do something about this omission in our sacred document. Various attorneys have argued that this provision is nonetheless implicit. Oh, well.
What me, criticize a Supreme Court decision?
But something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Justice O'Connor?
(Note how I begin with a Shakespeare quote and end up with one from Bob Dylan--neither of them was/is an attorney.)
(c)
13 April 2013: "The Horror, the Horror"
Obama has been offering this deal to Republican leaders for ages. . . .
they [the GOP] walked out expressing amazement
that he was open to such a thing"
--Gail Collins, New York Times, 13 April 2013
I thought I was hallucinating when it was announced that our president had put our social security earnings on the table, the "chained cpi," in his budget discussions with the GOP. Was he taking his clue from the bank account skimming in Cyprus? No, perhaps they took their clue from him, chronologically. Our president also skimmed 10 percent off of his salary, as a gesture. Perhaps those saved funds can be added back to our social security stash?
He did snicker with McCain, I believe, that neither was on welfare during their first debate, didn't he? He certainly snickered with someone who had written a book with a huge up-front and New York Times-bestseller status for weeks. Dreams from his father?
For the GOP to walk out in amazement that our president, as Collins reported, so betrayed his constituency may make history. It's as if our president walked out on them for taking social security off the table, which they just might have done. Or walked out on them for raising taxes on the rich of their own free will. Did they just walk out when the dinner was over, or abandon their entrees, Ms. Collins?
Oh, wow, will shockers never cease? And since when are our new extremists so holier than our president?
Next point: social security is an insurance policy we've paid for all of our working lives. It's not the charity the GOP treats it as. It doesn't come out of their oversized wallets. They collect it too. It's been proposed that all those billionaires refuse it. If so, the rest of us ragtag rabble would not have to worry or storm Washington en masse. And that would be a huge crowd, believe me, and not just doddering seniors.
But another suggestion by Ms. Collins is a bit off: "I'd trade a dramatic new commitment to funding quality early childhood education for a change in the way cost-of-living increases are computed for Social Security, as long as the oldest and neediest of the recipients are protected."
What's the cut-off age, Ms. Collins? The expanding cadre of centenarians--now so increased that they no longer earn a small square on front pages?
Our promising kiddies will someday get old, too. Statistics suggest they won't live as long as this burden on society we are, and education is hideously, frightfully neglected and way past "at risk," but why take money from us beautifully educated elders, banned from the workplace not only because we have this extra income but because we may be talking over the heads of our posterity, not to mention suffering from other forms of ageism?
Young people are prettier, let's face it, especially when they can write a grammatical sentence. And, let's face it again, soon maybe posterity won't know how to, or even know that they don't.
Let's lift some sanctions off of food sent to North Koreans--they're already half a head shorter, on average, than their cousins south of the barbed-wire border.
And let's lift some other sanctions from our own youth, who cannot afford higher education anymore--will our president put Pell grants onto the bargaining table next? Let's throw out some of those nukes sprawling over thousands of acres somewhere in the Midwest and plant food there, if it won't be radioactive. Let's cut the defense budget even more.
Now that we're living longer, let the government, instead of lowering our soc sec securities, start a hire-a-senior program, so that we won't be such a drain on society. Seems like, when we're forced back to work because of drained portfolios and pensions, we're more often sweeping floors than sitting in offices with windows. I'd take one without windows.
Have I digressed? Wish I were a loud-mouthed sharpie, or more assertive, so that I could do more than write. Here I am, in front of the 21-1/2-inch screen, writing "You go, guys, and I'll write it up."
Better than nothing, anyway.
Because, you see, the "chained cpi" won't stop there any more than Hitler did, once let loose by Chamberlain's appeasement.
(c)
1 April 2013: Culture Vulture's Picnic!: Thoughts on two cultural events I attended in DC last week: Beethoven's only violin concerto and Shakespeare's "Coriolanus."
Two cultural events I attended last week blew my mind: First, Arabella Steinbacher's amazing rendition of Beethoven's violin concerto, such a warhorse I was almost ashamed to go.
But I could not hold myself away and marveled at the first performance I've attended of a violin concerto with TWO cadenzas, each one magnificently rendered.
To me playing the violin in a concerto role is such an athletic fete. I also believe that the violin is the most difficult instrument. On the left side you both hold up the instrument by the neck and play the most complicated sets of notes; on the right side you must bow and holding the darned instrument up used to make my arms ache.
The most beautiful notes emerge when your physics are perfect--are they ever, Maestro Heifetz? And, adds Robert Mann, consecutively no two notes can be played the same way. Each must vary, have its own personality.
*****
Then on Sunday I went to a performance of Shakespeare's "Coriolanus."
I expected to sleep through it, but eyes were wide open the whole time, even through the lengthy first half, a two-hour "ordeal." Of course I preferred the second half, the denouement.
Eyes were wide open because of the magnificent performance of the protagonist, played by Patrick Page.
The play opens militarily enough, with the general's young son proudly imitating his dad, and there is the boast that he does better militarily than in school. The young fascist is reported to have MAMMOCKed a butterfly in a mock battle--this word for slaughter here makes its first appearance in the English language. The description is hideous in its details, ominous of the general's own mass slaughter by his supposed allies, the Volscii, at the end of the play.
Most awesome is the peace treaty Coriolanus brokers with the Volscii, long-time foes of the Romans. Now this occurs after the protagonist, whose given name, fittingly enough, is Martius, plucked right from the name of the war god Mars--the scion is also named Martius--has been exiled and finds the Volscii, allies with them, and organizes a vendetta, a takeover of Rome.
Humbled Romans visit the court of the Volscii to beg their general not to attack. But the entreaties of women ultimately soften his heart: his timid wife,his domineering stage door mama (Volumnia, played by Diane D'Aquila), and sister. So the women become instruments of peace.
Then Coriolanus brokers a peace treaty with the Volscii but, humiliated in this instance (peace is just not "Romanesque" maquismo here) as well as in the past by Romans, the leader of the Volscii comes to Rome, incites his soldiers against Martius-turned-Paxius (my name for the Peaceful One), and they pounce upon him and MAMMOCK him.
So the war vultures win out and the blessed peacemaker's corpse adorns the ground, truly motionless--how do they do that?
Finis!
Reminds me of an ancient cult film "El Topo," in which a Zorro-type womanizer ends up as a saint, Siddhartha-like. So parallels abound.
And so I had a double culture-vulture feast last week. Washington, DC, might not be the country's cultural capital, but it's good and I wish everyone such delectable performances, whatever your favorite medium happens to be.
(c)
1 April 2013: Democratic Doomsday? The Slippery Slope of GOP Election Deceit
Back to the future, 2016, our system is already trying on presidential candidates. I happened to have been in DC's Building Museum for lunch last week in time to witness the lavish white linen-covered tables set up for a something that turned out to be the notorious GOP fundraiser that netted $14.4 million for the RNCC.
Naturally, the sponsor was a Republican--Paul Ryan, I believe--I say "naturally" because, with their two-year terms, House reps are too busy fundraising to accomplish much else and I do sympathize, though not with Paul Ryan and his fellows.
And money runs the show, and what can we do about it? asked Green Party activists Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman today on PRN.fm, Progressive Radio, on Harvey's show "Solartopia."
And what can we do about the near certainty of a 5-4 conservative SCOTUS decision to overturn Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965? Instead of eliminating it, opined Fitrakis, the provision should be extended to all states of the union, not just the Old South plus some heavily urban districts in New York state and a few others, ironically enough.
More ironic it is, though, that Ohio is not among those states requiring such by Supreme preapproval by the Justice Department (DoJ), given all of the blatant skullduggery there that deprived Kerry of the majority that had elected him to the White House in 2004. Had this requirement been in place in the Buckeye State, the hugely corrupt, two-hatted Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell (two-hatted because he was also co-chair of the Committee to Re-elect Bush in 2004) would have been kept from relocating electoral precincts without informing voters where their votes would be legitimately counted.
Blackwell did not bother to update his webpage before Election Day, so that mass confusion reigned, because of course, this level of "re-precincting" singled out underprivileged neighborhoods. Seventy to ninety thousand votes were lost by this device alone, among so many others committed by the self-hating Blackwell and his cronies.
Will they bring back whites-only primaries, too? wondered Fitrakis. Wasserman said that the practice is already alive and well in Indiana.
Another huge elephant in the room was the insidious attempts in Pennsylvania to alter the winner-take-all Electoral College votes to splitting state votes between presidential candidates according to the partisan affiliation of each congressional district, a practice already active in Nebraska and Maine.
Because my previous home state's congressional districts are so gerrymandered (Bob compared the shape of one gerrymandered district in Ohio to the cartoon character Jughead with his hat on; another one in Texas is shaped like a stringbean, and so on), even though it has a Democratic majority there are more GOP districts than Democratic ones. The legislature is also dominated by smaller elephants and the governor is a conservative Republican.
Go figure. The subject quickly turned to the similar situation in Fitrakis and Wasserman's home state Ohio, another Democratic-leaning state dominated by the grasping GOP because the other party is so quick to compromise and move toward the center. That state is contemplating the same sort of exponential gerrymandering of the Electoral votes--the Buckeye State has sixteen congressional districts which, according to partisan distribution, should be divided evenly between the two reigning parties instead of the absurdity of Republican domination in twelve of the districts. The majority party's four districts are concentrated in the heavily African American urban districts of Cleveland-Toledo, Columbus, and Cincinatti.
Without the winner-take-all system, Romney would have taken Ohio in 2012, ushered into office by sparsely populated rural districts.
Count the populations so squished together even more than their living situations are? What's in a majority anymore? The blue state of Wisconsin is also considering this change from the winner-take-all system which, admittedly, focuses campaign attention heavily on the swing states, but the alternative mottles the true blue color of the majority even more. Blue states are the target, and thirty state governorships are held by Republicans. Do the arithmetic. As long as voters vote according to the partisanship of their registration, 292 Republican electoral votes are "in the bag" before the elections begin.
It's out in the open. I've read about it in the New York Times.
How could this blatant gerrymandering have been accomplished right beneath our feet, placing 232 Republicans in the House even though Democratic candidates collected more than one million more votes? (Wasserman named this miasma the "rotten boro system.")
Well, in Ohio, the supreme court is also hugely dominated by the GOP. It seems that it was bought out by the US Chamber of Commerce, which, in turn was fined $1,000 but not charged for its legal representation when it was caught in the act. How blind is justice sometimes?
And it seems that the state apportionment board, which is in charge of gerrymandering--I mean districting in the state--is hugely dominated by the court.
At this point both Fitrakis and Wasserman denied any direct loyalty to the compromising (and compromised) Democrats, both loyal Green partisans. Their goal, which they work toward so continuously and fiercely, is "justice and stability."
Toward this end, they have published five books on the electoral dynamics in Ohio and throughout this country, just since 2004.
Their sixth book, on "Corporate Money and the Theft of the Election Process," is due out soon, focused on election 2012 and specifically how President Obama's publicized victory was actually a "landslide denied." The electronic vote total contradicted exit polls, for example. In Ohio also, I thought I heard (the conversation was so rapid because of time limits on such huge content) that former CIA employees, among other undesirables, were involved in electoral data collection.
But given all of this type of pollution, seeping over our system the way that oil leaks are ruining land and landscapes throughout the country, might all of the attempted publicity, getting the word out, discourage people from voting? Wasserman said that the solution is to dump ALL electronic voting equipment, as Ireland has, for example, and to follow the majority of countries in the world by voting with paper ballots, all processes completely transparent, all counting done in public.
It is so ridiculous that private, for-profit corporations provide the systems and in many cases run the elections as well. Cyber-attacks are so rampant. What good is a system that can be compromised by a drive-by remote, one push of a button or touch of a mini-screen? Algorithms can predict results ahead of time.
So that's the start. No more DREs or scantrons (I've used the term "optical scanners" for years--this term is new to me).
Beyond that, a four-day period for voting is also needed. So many people simply can't get to the polls because of their work schedules. The origin of Tuesday as Election Day was for the convenience of workers, actually--for farmers bringing in their harvested produce for sale on market day in November. This land of yours and ours was once agrarian. Long time passing.
College students should be in charge of the voting process, said both Wasserman and Fitrakis, academics themselves.
Public financing of elections should replace the Citizens' United one-percent-take-all system.
Then there is the unfortunate possibility of SCOTUS Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg stepping down. Obama's chosen successor will be blocked by the Republicans' beloved filibustering device, as yet unchanged despite some half-hearted Democratic efforts. Something like that. The successful SCOTUS nominee will have to gain sixty-one votes in the Senate. Another hurdle to look forward to and pray about.
The subject of my new home "state," Washington, DC, next came up, which Fitrakis and Wasserman called a "black state"--at least 50 percent of the population here is black and the population exceeds that of two states, Wyoming and Vermont. Nonetheless, our license plates lament this system of "taxation without representation," that is, except when George W. Bush took these fighting words off of his presidential limousine. He did not have it repainted. Think positive.
As we all must, in the face of all of these corrupt obstacles dying this country red, this dying country. All we need, Bob and Harvey, now that we have the what, is the "how."
(c)
8 March 2013: Werner Herzog's HAPPY PEOPLE: A YEAR IN TAIGA: Details of the Good Life in a Frozen Shangri La
Would you believe that there are areas in the world seemingly untouched as of yet by global warming, and unconcerned about the prospect?
This portrait of a miniature civilization is structured around an interview of a Siberian (of Russian extraction and Russian-speaking) trapper, Gennady Soloviev, and some of his contemporaries, as well as a cameo of the village's underclass, the Ket people, an indigenous group dying out. Their last moribund dowager will take with her the hereditary technique of making doll-fetishes sacred to her people. Her house even catches fire, so that the dolls burn, but ultimately and slyly she reveals one that somehow survived. (As of 1979, 670 people spoke their language, an "isolate" remaining from a former group called Yenesie-Ostyak. In this film, the Ket comprise a pitiful clump, I believe all male, chopping wood and throwing it onto the back of a dump truck for pitifully low wages).
But these Asian-looking people are presented only in passing.
Herzog's focus is the 24/7 subsistence-dominated lifestyle of the totally isolated Russians of the central Siberian village of Bakhtia, all three hundred of them accessible by boat in the summer and helicopters year round, who find contentment in building every element in their lifestyle from scratch--animal traps, canoes, trappers' hovels that shelter them in the -50 degrees Fahrenheit, lengthy winters. Might they have learned these skills from the Ket? One of them is shown constructing a canoe for the "newcomers." Gennady tells the producers that he's been in the Siberian Taiga since 1970.
Free time is rare; true to the Russian tradition, the people celebrate [a secular brand of] Christmas on what we call Epiphany, the "last day of Christmas," January 6. The children drape themselves in glitter and move with music in a hand-built community room, the only public facility presented. There are no post offices, convenience stores, restaurants, or churches. There is no government except for a campaigner singing off a boat in the summer to solicit votes--of entertainment value to the children, whose parents have better things to do.
There are no taxes.
The trappers come home to celebrate the New Year--reunions with family are poignant--and leave after Christmas.
No dogsleds though. The one modern convenience is snowmobiles; the faithful dogs run alongside voyages as lengthy as 75 miles without stopping. I did notice some electric lighting in the hall of the Christmas celebration, which the filmmaker did not emphasize.
Winter is spent trapping--mainly small furry creatures like the ermine, found frozen and bent in half, whose value, Gennady laments in one of his few allusions to life outside of Bakhtia, has decreased due to excessive, astronomical inflation. Winter is generous to the Bakhtians, with copious supplies of fish, especially large pike, immediately accessible beneath the thick ice of the Yenisei River. Summer is the time for hoarding and preparing winter provisions, which consist mainly of fish and some wild fowl; no gardens are evident. Nor are swimsuits. The people wear some sort of outwear even under sunny skies that last 20 hours a day.
The English-speaking narrator's voice is plaintiff and condescending--nothing unusual for this film genre. These people probably recapitulate life during the Ice Age (yes, there were humans who weathered this grim era--did they know it was grim?), he says.
As we take in the joy of a subsistence-dominated lifestyle, I wonder if the producers were more interested in the indigenous, displaced Ket, victims of this microscopic imperialism. I was. The material above about the Ket is taken from a language list I edited for Oxford University Press more than a decade ago. Among these lists that comprise the 6800 languages of the world, some of them have died out since then. There would be dialects or tongues spoken by one survivor, or five, or ten, or one hundred.
But how did I get to this digression?
Because, though reviewers call this a beautiful portrait of the simple life amid scenery to die for, the Ket steal the show.
I like to believe that Herzog and colleagues portrayed them just long enough to break our hearts. Methods and primitive technologies date back centuries and sometimes, the producers note, millennia. The technologies, though mostly wooden--a metal trap I recall from the fifties is modern in this context--came from somewhere, from people used to inhabiting this land.
Welcome to the thriving purity of life in Bakhtia. Welcome to the good life. As indigenous people have immigrated north from Mexico to reclaim America, their native land, so the displacement of others hits home the hardest, another white man's burden easily, guiltlessly, and proudly displayed to the West by Russian immigrants. It's the American way?
(c)
27 February 2013: Supreme Court Rally to Protect Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act
Hundreds of demonstrators showed up early this morning in front of the U.S. Supreme Court building to participate in a rally protesting the likely Supreme Court decision to overturn Section 5 of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
Sponsored by around sixty-two civil rights organizations, including NAACP, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights under Law, SEIU, the League of Women Voters, and Rainbow Push, the all-day event began with a congressional press conference from 8:30 to 9 that included Reps. Maxine Waters and John Lewis, who were among those who attended the hearing.
(Section 5 provides for accountability to courts or the Department of Justice among states found in 1965 to be most guilty of minority voter suppression-- Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia, along with parts of Arizona, Hawaii, and Idaho. [initially; a state or smaller municipality may "bail out" by proving that the discrimination charged no longer exists--New Hampshire, among others, successfully opted out]).
The majority of participants were African Americans, along with Latinos, Asian Americans, LGBTQs, and whites. Many had traveled from as far away as the deep South, including Mississippi and Alabama, said by one speaker to be the two states that had delivered the fewest votes for Obama in 2012 [fewest, with such large black populations?].
The rally itself, hosted by Joe Madison of Sirius XM Radio, lasted from 9 well into the early afternoon; a post-argument call with NAACP LDF, ACLU, and the Lawyers' Committee; followed by a bus trip to Richmond by the Freedom Riders for Voting Rights, who had come all the way from Selma, Alabama, part of Shelby County, the now-infamous plaintiff in the case argued today, Shelby County v Holder.
A "post-argument analysis blog with legal experts and Alliance for Justice" will be held at 5:30 this afternoon at http://afijjusticewatch.blogspot.com/search/label/VRAanalysis.
After three hours of speeches (more on these below), activists, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III, who had attended the hearing, emerged with their reports: the "ladies" (Sotomayor, Ginsberg, and Kagan) fought like hell, while one of the plaintiff attorneys argued that Shelby County should not be subject to Section 5 of the VRA because other municipalities have records "just as bad or worse," Sharpton told the spirited crowd. [an already-quoted argument was that Section 5 was no longer needed because of Obama's two consecutive victories; other speakers referred to this monumental event as a stepping stone in a long process rather than achievement of the dream itself, in a climate that remains hugely discriminatory]
Sharpton continued that Sotomayor, Ginsberg, and Kagan questioned why no statewide officials in the Heart of Dixie state were black, when the argument was presented that the state had indeed elected blacks to political positions.
Justice Scalia offered his brainstorm, calling Section 5 "racial entitlement."
But even worse, continued Sharpton, he "loses his soul" when he sees Clarence ("er, Justice Thomas," he quickly added).
Sharpton offered no conclusive predictions, saying that he didn't know where the Court would go: 5-4 either way. Justice Kennedy is known to be somewhat undecided.
And if Section 5 is struck down, he continued, "we'll go back to the streets," the way we first got the VRA. Our forebears suffered and died--we won't lose that.
He reminded his audience of Election 2012: some states reduced the number of early voting days; voter ID laws proliferated; the Sunday Souls to the Polls drive to get church-going blacks to the polls after services was eliminated in several states (litigation in Ohio saved this event at the last minute).
"Join us in fighting James Crow II, Esquire," Sharpton quipped, referring to the more subtle forms of insidious racism now blocking election integrity. We'll beat you just as our forbears did. "The power of the people will not be denied!"
MLK III, who had joined Sharpton on the small platform, called this morning's hearing "a serious time in the history of our nation" [said by League of Women Voters president Elizabeth McNamara to be "the most important case to reach the Supreme Court in decades"]. We must find renewed strength in this the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, even as April will mark the forty-fifth anniversary of his father's death in Memphis.
"I lost a father but the nation gained a movement," he said.
If the right people were in Congress, we wouldn't be having this rally, King continued. Even if the Court says Section 5 will stand, we still have work [emphasis mine--MNS]. Racism invalidates the process [of democracy].
King advised the hundred standing before him to "march more, tweet more," use Facebook, and even reach out to the "business folk" on LinkedIn.
Inclusion is important! he concluded.
*****
Cruelly ironic it was that on this same day, February 27, a statue of Rosa Parks was being unveiled in the rotunda of the Capitol building.
Memorable words were spoken by so many of the huge roster of speakers, each given just a few minutes over a three-hour time span. Section 5 has transformed the United States from exclusive to inclusive, said Elizabeth McNamara. The problems exposed by the 2012 election should reinforce the need for Section 5.
Rep. Hank Thompson (D-GA) took the segregation-integration process farther back than the nineteenth century to the 1607 settlement of Jamestown; black indentured servants who worked on the ship that brought the settlers here were subsequently subjugated to slavery--becoming counted as three-fifths of a person by the time the Constitution was ratified in 1789.
SCLC president Charles Steele said that if we allow Section 5 to be eliminated from the VRA, "the world will fail." He spoke of his travels around the world; of how former USSR General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev assumed that Obama's consecutive victories indicated that racism was no longer a problem here. Said Steele, "Hell no, we've just begun."
Reinforcing words were spoken by Melanie Campbell, CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to those everywhere."
"It's everyone's issue!" echoed Kendra Brown, national chair of the National Black Law Students' Association.
Steele called Obama "the downpayment on a dream"; we still have to march; "I'm ready to go to jail!"
Repeal of Section 5 "will set us back by centuries," said New York Congresswoman Yvette D. Clarke.
La Raza president Janet Murguia reminded the audience of the august words that adorn the front of the SCOTUS building, just above the columns: EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW (reminiscent of one of the Constitutional amendments, the Fourteenth. which provides for equal protection, in the context of elections, among other venues).
Popular comedian Dick Gregory said that "we're not pimps--pimps think that they are in control!" and later added a strong suggestion for how to get back at the one percent for their racism: "We'll boycott Christmas!"
Testimonies to the effectiveness of Section 5 in curbing blatant discrimination were frequent [more enumerated after I left by a roster of lawyers who subsequently addressed the many who remained]. Last-minute precinct-site changes were overruled, for example. First-time Representative Marc Vesey (D-TX) said that Section 5 is essential to his state, where the Latino population is rapidly expanding, but where "hundreds of thousands of minorities" were kept from voting in 2012.
The Lone Star State's voter ID law, the "harshest" in the nation, was overruled by the provisions of Section 5, according to another speaker.
*****
Among the chants taken up by the crowd were "Let my people vote!" "No vote, no hope!" "Section 5 must stay alive!" "Section 5 must survive and thrive!" and "We're just as strong and can stand just as long!"
Shelby County v Holder will be decided early this summer (2013).
(c)
17 January 2013: "Forward on Climate" Rally and March
The largest citizen march against climate change, more than 35,000 people, was held in Washington, DC, this afternoon. One-hundred fifty busloads and 168 partner organizations contributed to the event, held to protest against the hottest year in U.S. history and the largest hurricane, among other natural disasters suffered in 2012 here and throughout the world--"the worst ever," according to Bill McKibben, president and founder of 350.org. Carbon standards must be specified for polluting industries by the EPA, for the sake of the future of the planet and of all of us, even the "one percent."
NRDC trustee and president of Rebuild the Dream Van Jones referred to the dire situation as "the biggest game humanity has ever played." Wind power and solar energy were specified to be energy sources above the ground, far preferable to those beneath it.
The main focus was the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, being built to convey tar sands from western Canada to New Orleans and ultimately to other ports throughout this country, at a huge environmental cost. "Tar sands are the dirtiest fuel in the history of the planet," said Van Jones, polluting the air twice as much as does conventional petrol. The refining process is far more complex and the quality of the fuel inferior.
Steel tunnels, already built by investors, are so poorly constructed that tar sands leak through cracks into the earth and aquifers, and thus to drinking water and natural water formations, with hideous consequences for residents of the affected terrain. The purpose of the tunnels is to convey the toxic substance for import once it is refined into diesel and other products here, profiting a minute percentage of the population--say the one percent, at the risk of the rest of the inhabitants of both the United States and western Canada.
President Obama can outlaw further construction and implementation of the project by executive order, since he could not get legislation passed in Congress, given the partisan divided in the House of Representatives, which is burdened by a Republican majority that often votes as an extremely right-wing bloc.
One speaker after another implored the president, echoed by chants and cheers from the huge audience, to honor the commitment he made in his State of the Union speech this year. ("For the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change.") The project was referred to as "the most fateful battle in U.S. history" and "the most important job humans have been entrusted with."
"If you don't fight for what you want, you'll regret what you end up with," warned another speaker.
A surprising participant in the event was an investor, Tom Steyer, who is also founder of the Center for the Next Generation. Steyer informed his surprised listeners that the pipeline is not a good investment, not "business as usual"; we simply can't afford forty more years of carbon energy.
"We must dare to say no and invent a cleaner, cheaper energy future," he concluded.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), representing the federal government but critical of its policies, said that his colleagues must wake up to reality and stop calling climate change a hoax. We must help the president to work toward these crucial environmental goals.
"We were made for this moment," he said. We must be able to say to our posterity, "Yes, we did!" A chant of "Yes, we can!" followed from the huge audience.
Spokeswomen for Canada's First Nation, welcome additions to the event, said that thirty-five tribes across their country are working together in opposition to the pipeline construction. When asked, one of them told me that actually they were communicating with Native Americans and also indigenous people throughout the Americas. People of the First Nation, though pressured, have refused to assimilate into mainstream Canadian society. The national government refers to these outspoken rebels as enemies of the country and extremists.
Colorado's Navahos, Hispanics, blacks, and whites were all specified as "relatives." Even the grass and trees are relatives. Disaster doesn't discriminate--we all bleed the same color. Mother Nature could destroy us with the shake of one shoulder; instead she nurtures us, but there are signs aplenty that we are destroying her.
"Is the economy more important than land and water?" they asked.
This rally is the beginning of a change. A four-month-old infant was identified as the youngest present today. "Will she be here in fifty years?" asked one speaker. And will the environment be tolerable? Will President Obama get rid of the three hundred coal mines throughout the country that are so violating its ecology? Will he choose to be on the winning side of history?
An old chant out of my early days as an activist was heard: "The whole world is watching." I've heard it time and again since then, but not recently.
Some of the world is way ahead of us. I heard one journalist tell another that Germany is 80 percent energy independent. If the whole world were watching, would it make a difference? We are accomplishing something rare: educating "developing" areas about the horrendous devastation wrought by hydrocarbon pollution by our destruction invasion of their pristine domains, be they the Peruvian Amazon; Prince William Sound, Alaska; Greenland, a new treasure trove revealed by melting glaciers, or any number of other age-old wildernesses now being ravaged.
Sixty-five percent of the American population supports the goals of Forward on Climate. Though the sponsoring organizations were referred to as "most of the progressives," it struck me as odd that Jill Stein, presidential candidate last year representing the Green Party, was not allowed to speak, though she did attend.
"Left of center, but not by much," I mused about the event as a whole. We all know what's right, especially the Green Party. Steering left, the project endorsed today, involves a sense of direction. An iconic participant in the march that followed the event, from the Washington Monument to the White House, was a paper, [presumably] life-sized replica of a piece of the Keystone XL pipeline. But a colossal rendition of the Statue of Liberty that loomed high above the heads of those carrying it was painted green.
(c)
12 February 2013: This Year's SOTU: We Must All Defend Our Freedom
President Obama's State of the Union (SOTU) address this year was lengthy and filled with Democratic priorities. TV's Politico commentators were unimpressed.
I was happy about the suggestion to raise the minimum wage, the promise to exit Afghanistan, the embrace of women's rights and gay rights, environmental concerns, alternative energy sources, preschool for all, the high school-junior college overlap, and more. But the two issues that most concerned me appeared as crescendos at the end: voting and gun control--especially voting--and they were poetically intertwined: All of those innocent victims of gun violence gone amok deserved a vote. I took this to mean a vote in Congress against gun violence. I hope that's what the president meant.
Expanding on the new thematic of long lines and chaos at the polls, which "we need to fix," Obama this evening specified voting as "our most fundamental right as citizens." As the military is here to defend us, so it is up to us to defend our right to vote. Onward, Christian soldiers! We've been marching to that tune for a while now, this must recent breed of suffragists, we who arose after election 2000 in shock and horror to protest and fix the hideous problems.
But you see, as always, as I told an interviewer not too long ago, there's often a ten-year gap between what Progressives militate for and when the liberals [viz., Democrats] catch on. Even smart ones like Barack Obama, who said this evening that he wants to make our government "smarter" rather than "bigger."
Brad Friedman has just published a caveat to the president's ringing promise to appoint a blue-ribbon, bipartisan commission to fix things. Looking back to about ten years ago, he recalls the [October 2002] birth of the Help America Vote Act, HAVA, influenced to some extent by another blue-ribbon commission composed of former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, formed by President George W. Bush, and then the Carter-Baker commission appointed September 2005, which also contained some good ideas and some bad ones, like the requirement of voter ID. Anything would do back then to these gentle reformers--a utility bill, for instance.
Friedman also recalls a House hearing held ironically less than a week after the spontaneous birth of a poor excuse for an activist organization online, the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR). The [March 21, 2005] timing was exquisite: the hearing concerned what went wrong with election 2004 in Ohio. It was led by Congressman Bob Ney (R-OH), co-sponsor, along with Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), of HAVA.
Because ACVR's Mark "Thor" Hearne was one of the chief spokesmen for the issues, naturally the conclusion was that too much voter fraud was committed and hence voter ID was needed across the country to fix this thorny situation.
Had any of hundreds of real, as opposed to ad hoc, grassroots activist groups been heard, the focus would rather have been on the long lines and the violation of human rights in places like Ohio, where the electoral votes were thus stolen and the wrong candidate kept in office.
Funny how Ney's March 21, 2005 hearing grew out of a report commissioned by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) on what went wrong in Ohio 2004. The COnyers report listed atrocities attached to every aspect of the voting process in the Buckeye State. No blue ribbons were awarded.
*****
In other words, EI activists and all others concerned, don't applaud too much or hold hands and jump around in glee too soon, warns Brad wisely. The people deserve the blue ribbon far more than the members of the commission so named. People who lost loved ones to assault weapons in the wrong hands. I will not add that another sort of anaphora--who really deserves to be shot--was not even implied in Obama's speech, though Boehner, McConnell, Cantor, and their ilk looked like personified razor blades without even trying. If I were in front of the TV simply to amuse myself, totally and otherwise cynical, I might have watched the squirming Boehner, opening and shutting his mouth, looking in turn nauseous and sullen--the latter when some word or two from the president was less revolting than most of them. I won't swear to it, but I think he stood up once or maybe twice to applaud during the speech. Once, for sure. He liked the idea of free trade with Western Europe. He liked the idea of diverting troops from Afghanistan to Mali, too.
*****
But it all sounded so good--the SOTU, that is. Even before reading the Tweet from Mr. Friedman, I didn't jump for joy, though, but rather breathed a sigh of relief and made a note to myself to expect more news on this now-somewhat-popularized issue and to watch carefully for it.
We do "need to fix that," Mr. President. Please no more HAVAs.
(c)
12 February 2013: Paper, Plastic, or Both: Must "Integrity" Mean "Consistent"?
I am all for the decision to clean up a system that has wrought havoc on the voting rights of millions--millions of minorities who vote against Republicans and have last names even a few good Republicans don't know what to do with: the exotic first names that are trending among African Americans, the poetic surnames of Latinos and then, oddly enough, the John Jones-type names that belong to so many and as a result create confusion.
And then there is corruption, the dishonest mistakes.
All of these issues create havoc at the polls, including endless lines that serve to eliminate even more voters with perfectly comprehensible names (like Marta Steele? Not!!).
Just as mechanical, and then electronic solutions were invented to combat the epidemic of ballot box stuffing in the late nineteenth century and onward, so now the inefficiency of our system of voter registration is blamed on the reams and reams of paper lists at the polls so rife with errors. Now, if this could all be computerized . . . Presto! Efficiency. Nor more long lines. Just point and click and move the line.
Alas (frequent cry of exasperation and grief in ancient Greek tragedy). Would that it were so simple. Plastic covering paper, that is.
Do we need to sit around and spend billions more before we realize that e-reg is as permeable to hacking as is e-voting?
Or is it possible that e-reg and a voting system converted from plastic to paper (hand-counted paper ballots [HCPB]) can coexist in harmonious efficiency? Must everything be consistent? All or nothing? Plastic or paper?
That's one for Socrates. The e-experts will undoubtedly squash me into the corner of two converging walls over it. They know so much more than I do about electronics (I'm thinking specifically of the latest findings of NYU's Brennan Center for Justice, supported this morning by a New York Times editorial). I'm not being facetious. Remember: the subject is e-reg. . . .
Because some EI advocates adamantly advocate for voting with HCPB, meticulously monitored at every stage by we-the-people, in droves, efficient droves so that no one's view is blocked. That's my position, until e-voting systems advance to a point where they are 100 percent uncorruptible. In my dreams and posterity's routines, it is hoped.
So, ideally, at this point in "our" thinking, e-reg is the ideal, along with HCPB used for early voting and absentee voting and voting at the polls, and we-the-people at every stage of those processes.
Consistency? Have studies shown that states that use all-of-one-kind of voting systems fare better than the patchworks that dominate our country's map? Ratings of the "consistent" states are inconsistent, as are those of the patchworks, according to a recent study by the Pew Center on the States (see my OEN article of 2/18/13).
So scratch consistency at this point in time. And scratch Internet voting (which I'd like to name I-voting, but IV may win out, if it doesn't confuse health-care providers too much). The thought of it. Experimental tries in California have bombed.
Like most of us, especially some EI people, I am looking forward to the president's SOTU this evening and hoping to hear more than passing mention of getting rid of long lines.
Then I'm wondering how in the world we'll replace our current voting practices with universal HCPB. They are used successfully, and sometimes even cleanly, in many other countries. That's the next hoop-on-fire. Success is to keep the paper intact.
(c)
####
For blogs published prior to January 4, 2012, see the *ARCHIVES* page. Also note that the link "editing" that was at the bottom of this page has now become a separate webpage, Editingunltd.com.
Published since April 1999, Words, UnLtd. is a labor of love. Editor and contributor Marta Steele has won numerous awards for her editing, writing, and scholarship. She is published at Opednews.com, Newsdissector.org/blog, Gregpalast.com, and Alternet.org, among other sites. She also communicates her thoughts often to the New York Times in its various reader forums; three of her letters to the editor have been published. Her work first appeared online on Votermarch.org in the summer of 2001, a month before 9/11. Additional reprint credits include the London Observer, Unprecedented.org, and the Princeton Peace Network in the News links.
40th anniversary, "I Have a Dream" speech, Washington 8/23/03
A Yardley Duck
--Words, UnLtd. cover page October 1999
"Is there anything so miraculous in the universe as human consciousness? The more scientists study, the less probable it seems that there is anything else out there in the vastness of space besides complete, impersonal phenomena: seething masses of light and energy, nothing that thinks."
--"Consciousness II: The Miracle Reconsidered," November 1999
"To strive, to seek, to find, but not to yield," is how Tennyson's "Ulysses" chooses to spend his last years, disappointed, after all, at attaining everything he longed for and then quickly becoming bored in his premature retirement. The stillness he strove for those twenty years (see the November 1999 issue of Words) necessitates perpetual motion, it seems. What we really strive after is by definition unattainable because of our human limitations. Perhaps all our striving somehow realizes this even as we never stop. And that is the romance, the tragedy, and the infinite grandeur of the human condition. Be careful what we pray for, indeed. Because in the end we do not and cannot really understand it in its fullest sense."
--"Further Millennium Thoughts," December 1999
"Traveling is the concentrate of life. We become so preoccupied with preserving moments, impressions, and views. Each night after the frenzied activities that preceded and never encompass enough, I take out my notebook and scribble down every detail I can and every image that occurs. I scribble for myself in the future, as writer and rememberer, devouring the present tense that is so illusive always."
--"England I: Psycho-Architecture..." March 2000
"To sketch our ideal leader would be a challenge.
What superhumanity this role requires and how few of us
can measure up. He must partake of human nature and
yet transcend it, for human nature is basically at fault
for all the issues she must face: human nature,
above all other things, which are, after all, conquerable.
The only thing we will never really master is ourselves."
--"Lest We Forget," March 2000
