American Values?

Senator Barack Obama and former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards stood on a platform today and spoke of change that went to the very roots of America.

It got me thinking of what American values really are. The current administration of GW Bush would have us believe that Americans do not want to work and so we must have the illegal immigrants which sneak into this country work for us. If we don't want to work how is it we get the money to pay for these undocumented workers to work for us?

Nobody answers that question but I have heard that we are lazy and just want to live off welfare or worker's compensation often. I heard it just recently from a man that used to own a restaurant near here. And you hear it from the owners of the resort as the reason they import temporary workers every year to run the ski lifts.

But a trip by the post office bulletin board always yields a wide number of locals that are willing to split firewood, clear trash, do odd jobs, shovel snow, put up fence. . .just about anything you want done. But the unspoken message here is "for cash." And more and more Americans are quitting their jobs and starting small businesses where "they will get back what they put into it."

So maybe the message here is not that us Yanks do not want to work but that we want to get somewhere if we work. We don't want to receive a paycheck where a third of our wage is already gone to taxes. And we are a bit upset with working for companies at 6.25 per hour for 39 hours with no paid days off or holidays or health insurance while the CEO is making millions - literally millions. And if he chooses to not work he has a golden parachute worth more than the highest prize on the lottery.

Maybe it is not that we don't want to work but that we are tired of the disparity between the haves and have nots in this country. Tired of working hard and getting nowhere. And hearing that the money being paid into Social Security will not be there to take out for very much longer. Tired of hearing that if you get wounded in Iraq you have to fight for care and disability benefits. Tired of paying through the nose for gas to go to a job where we will maybe not earn what it took to fill the tank. Tired of not being able to afford to miss a day of work let alone health care. Tired of paying $100 for a doctor's visit where he could not remember our name and only stayed in the same room for six minutes.

And just how long do you all think it will take the illegal immigrants to get just as sick and tired of it once they are legal citizens and can gripe like the rest of us. So then do we import (or allow to sneak in) more illegal immigrants? Do we continue to export jobs Americans will not do to foreign countries so they can make goods which are bad and which we will not be able to afford because there are no jobs here any more but hauling trash, or shoveling snow, or cleaning the stables?

So if we are going to change things down at the base and not just up at the top let's start with giving American's jobs they will want to work at. Let's take corporate profits and not give it all to the CEO but let some of it trickle down to the workers that made the company profitable. Let's give Americans health care and good schools and bridges that don't collapse on them.

And those pork barrel projects that McCain wants to eliminate. Some of them are bridges. And they all are not in Alaska. And to get those bridges built you need to hire workers. Here. You cannot outsource the building of a bridge to China. So let's build bridges. Rebuild the railroad system so we have other ways of travel besides airplanes and our gas guzzling SUV's. Let's build factories to manufacture solar panels and wind generators that we can all afford to install on our homes and cut energy costs. Let's pork barrel America up to her former glory. And we can afford it if we let Iraq rebuild its own country with its oil reserves.

And bring our troops back to our soil and give them all the medical care they need. And resupply all our National Guard Depots with the equipment they need to fight against fires and snowstorms and clean up after hurricanes and tornadoes. That is the American values I love.

Super Delegates?

Chicago 1968 Democratic Convention

What's that wonderful line? If you can remember the sixties you didn't do them. Well, technically I didn't in that sense. I was this terribly serious student that got involved with the political issues of the time but not the sex, drugs, and rock and roll part. I came very late to that party. So I really remember the 1968 Democratic Convention. The party of inclusion blew it and called out the cops . . . or as we referred to them in those days . . . the pigs.

The end result was long lasting. The Democratic Party ended up deeply divided. Many of us young Democrats defected to the SDS, the Communist party, and later alternatives like the Green party. We are not easy to get back in the fold. I worked for Republican Senator Charles Goodall in the 70's because he was against the war in Vietnam. To this day my party registration depends upon the demographics of where I live. I like to vote in primaries so I register with whatever party gets me the best slate of candidates. Here in northern New Mexico that is Democratic.

But I vote my conscious. Which is a phrase I am sure both the Republicans and Democrats do not like hearing. And I align behind candidates because of issues I am deeply concerned about. Since McCain's stance on illegal immigration effectively nullifies that issue in the Presidential campaign I am in the Democratic camp because of Iraq and the economy and gas company profits.

But I digress. The subject of this blog was to be Super Delegates. After the disastrous 1968 convention and the subsequent lost White House to the Republicans the Democrats, to give them some credit, decided to mend their ways. And that was basically to oust the smoked filled room way of choosing a flag carrier and give more people a voice in picking standard bearer for the party. Ergo our current, and evolving, primary system. Mind you there is nothing in the constitution regarding primaries and they do not have to be democratic, small d. In 1982 the Democrats, capital D, came up with the super delegate concept but it has been largely under the radar until this election.

Last night I tried to explain this to a slightly younger friend of mine who did do the 60's. And is still endowed with that moral outrage that led to the fighting in the streets of Chicago. He wants this whole process to be transparent and democratic, small d. What are super delegates? Personally, I think they are the vestiges of those smoke filled rooms buffed and fluffed to be presentable. Will they ignore the popular vote, elected delegates, states carried, and will of the people? Only if they want 1968 all over again.

And the Democrats have been so great thus far this election. They conducted every primary with paper ballots or machines with a paper trail. The Republicans continued to use the electronic ones with no backup. They have let all the candidates play this out long after it would have once been called up short. And those voting in the primaries have turned out in record (and thus far peaceful) numbers. But as we near the end it is all going back to that smoked filled room of the party bosses - the Super Delegates. The ball is in your court. Are you going to play fair?

From the Bottom Up

Obama won in North Carolina last night and won by a big margin. And in Indiana he came within 2% points of carrying that state. Just when some of us were counting him out.

And not just him. We were also counting any chance of real change in this country. I personally was counting out the United States because if we don't change I personally think we are done. What the last seven years has done to our economy, our respect in the world, our military, our freedoms, our democracy and most importantly the hope of the citizens of our country was frankly looking like a death blow. Too many people had tuned out of the process that once made this country great. And for me the most hopeful sign of the two primaries last night was the record number of voters that turned out to vote.

Joan Baez toward the end of the long and difficult fight against the war in Vietnam decided to step out of the public eye. Our ballad singer for peace was leaving us. And she said in one interview that she had come to believe that it was not the surfer on the crest of the wave that could change the direction the wave was taking but the molecules of water within the base of the wave. And they are doing just that in this election.

The least of us is contributing to Barack's campaign for change. And the little voters that once said they did not matter (with lots of evidence to back that up given the last two presidential election debacles) came out to cast a vote.

And the polls are saying they do not like the sound bytes that had become the way to win an election. The ratings on the various presidential debates which CNN, ABC, Facebook and others mounted was significant. The American people care about the issues, not the terms like Flip Flopper and Up or Down Vote. They are tired of a dictatorship for idiots and want to change the direction the wave is going.

We want a country where the least of us count. Hillary says she has proved she can will the big states. As a citizen of a small state I find that offensive. We are electing someone to be a president of all the states. California, New York, Ohio and Florida have stolen our voice too many times. There are fifty states and we deserve to be counted. If we cannot change this process through the primaries that are being run this year then we need a movement for a constitutional convention to change the election process.

And only the people can call for a constitutional convention. It takes petitions to get it on the ballot of as many of the states as possible. And then we have to vote for it. If our elected officials will not address issues like shortening the election process, setting some real limits on the money so someone cannot buy a presidency, and take a long hard look at the electoral college then we the people. Those little molecules of water need to take control of the direction this country is heading.

Let this be the last election where we are fighting so hard not just for a candidate we can believe in but for the very idea of democracy and one person, one vote that counts. Not to the highest bidder goes the highest office.

Ooops!

Presidential John McCain says he slipped up when he said in an economic policy speech that he was going to lessen our dependence on foreign oil when elected so "...we do not have to send our sons to war."

Many of us have been saying for some time that this war was about oil and the Bush administration has denied that ad nausea. It was about Saddam and Weapons of Mass Destruction. Saddam is dead and the WMD never existed.

The other argument about going to war was to make the Iraqis free and democratic and beyond an initial election or two that has not happened while the democracy in this country takes a major nose dive because of the war on terror and our need to water board and spy upon our own citizens.

And Iraq was going to pay for this war with its oil reserves. A little seen news story reported that they have a large stockpile now and could pay for the war to give them their freedom. Or rebuild what the insurgency has destroyed. But they don't.

But I think the largest ooops in this whole McCain sound byte is that it was not given much air time. Not the kind of air time we gave the Obama elitist statement and not nearly the air time given to Reverend Wright. Whether it is the truth (and many of us think it is) or a senior moment (another) by an aging candidate it is important that the American people hear this and any prolonged analysis of it. But the media remains largely mum.

If it is a misspeak it is probably no big deal unless you lump it together with all his other misspeaks and the fact that he gets irate when called on them. It looks like we are running for the highest office a senile old man with a bad temper. Just as if we lump together all the slips of the tongue and "remembered it wrong" of Hillary's which make her look like a person always going for the convenient lie. Or all the times GW has leaned on the podium and slurred that it is the fault of Congress that his stubborn, egotistical cowboy diplomacy isn't working.

So CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS how about some honest analysis out there and don't just sweep the next "ooops, you caught me" under the table. And make no mistake: It is a war for oil which we don't seem to be getting.

It is All Blackmail

I am particularly fond of this image in juxtaposition with the frog below. Frogs you know are vanishing at a concerning rate. And those remaining on our troubled planet are showing deformities in large percentages to the population. Some scientists are calling frogs our canaries in the mine.

And yet GW and his oil buddies want us to suspend all environmental controls on oil refineries and exploration. When he was governor of the state of Texas he made it the most polluted of the 50 and from the day he took office as president of the United States he has wanted to row back all EPA controls.

I have a friend that works in the Environmental Protection Agency and he says GW has virtually gutted the agency. The super fund that was suppose to clean up the worst of the abandoned mines that are leaking contaminated water with heavy metals into the earth was totally suspended. In my neck of the woods alone there is two or three of these major offenders to clean water that cause humped back fish and sick people. Catch and release in western streams has taken on a totally different purpose. No longer let the big wild fish breed but don't eat contaminated fish.

We gave oil companies major tax incentives for exploration and upgrading of their facilities to meet clean air and water standards. Have they used that or any of the huge profits they are currently raking in to build modern refineries that meet EPA standards? Have they searched for alternative fuels? Have they figured out ways to get the oil out of shale? (Incidentally there was a huge oil shale project in Grand Junction, Colorado which was abandoned because it was too costly. At the time they said if oil reached $50 a barrel it would be doable. Are they doing it at twice that?)

No to all those questions. They just sit and rake in the profits while their elected official (we certainly never elected him) berates congress for not passing his bills that would allow the oil companies to ruin not merely our National Parks, but our air and our water just because they do not want to spend some of that money to do it responsibly.

I lived in El Paso, Texas when I was a kid. It had refineries. They dumped sulfuric gas into the air at an enormous rate. It changed the color of the land around it which seemed to grow nothing. And ultimately my family had to move because of the illnesses it caused with my brother and myself. When mother became pregnant with my sister she put her foot down. She did not care where we moved. Just away from there.

The EPA standards developed for oil refineries and coal generation plants and factories in general is so we can continue to breathe. So we still have frogs in ponds and fish we can catch in a mountain stream and eat. And if GW truly agrees that global warming is an issue then why is he fighting to put more carbon emissions into our atmosphere or cut the number of green, growing and living things down.

The oil companies have not built a refinery in 30 years because they were waiting for someone like GW to make it unnecessary for them to care about their neighborhood and the planet earth.

Balance and Hope

The powers that be say they do not use the "R" word because it will generate a recession. And once they admit we are in a Recession than there will be the "D" word to worry us: Depression. So our avenue of escape from this financial mess is to think positive and spend, spend, spend.

I want to remain hopeful and I want to remain in some sort of financial balance. At the moment those two concepts seem to be in direct opposition to each other. I feel a bit like a frog perched on a lily pad in a turbulent pond.

A year ago April 7th I began a home improvement project of adding 336 sf to my house. It is a studio/gallery which will hopefully at some time in the near future generate income without having to travel to as many art fairs. The state is even supporting this endeavor obliquely by beginning a art studio tour loop for tourism through this part of the state. So I am rather stuck in having to continue to do some spending over and above food and gas. I am sure my local economy loves it, because I cannot afford to run to the big city every time I need to purchase tile, or grout, or lumber for the deck, paving stones for the walkway, etc. I admit to doing this all a lot slower than the original schedule, however. I guess that supports those words of "economic slow down" Bush likes to use.

I guess this is all why Obama's message of hope resonates with me so much. I don't care if it is irrational but I need hope. We all need some hope. There are too many dashers of hope out there: McCain because he thinks we ought to pick ourselves up by the bootstraps, Bush because he refuses to admit we are in the deep shit here, Hillary that wants to continue to play the same old dirty trick politics I have come to hate and darken my dream of hope.

How about we all go to a hilltop and meditate on achieving balance in our lives? And actually I do find some of what is happening economically hopeful. I am shopping local far more and finding that I enjoy that even when it costs me a bit more. If I have problems with the mix of paint or a broken tile they are far more likely to make it right for me than Lowe's. And I can feel good about helping my local economy.

I had picked this image of a frog on a lily pad this morning. It reminded me of how tricky it must be to balance on a small pad in the middle of a pond especially if their is turbulence. But it also reminded me that global economy or no it is the health of my little pond that matters. Shop local but shop I suppose is the message. And match your outgo to your income. Balance. And Hope. Let us not forget hope. It gets us through the worst of times.

It is a Recession, Stupid

Not an economic slowdown.

I find all this debate about whether the United States is in a recession a bit irritating. Mind you I am not an economist but I do watch my economy. And it has changed drastically in the last year.

I am on social security which I supplement with income from my art. A year ago the rather hot art market started to really cool down. By fall it was totally frozen and many of my art friends started suffering some serious financial problems. Several entered bankruptcy. Fairs that were once highly competitive to be accepted into were calling an asking why they had not received my application. I personally was cutting down the number of fairs I did and selecting those I did participate in based on how close they were to home. There are no fuel efficient vehicles you can load all your booth fixtures and art into. Mine is better than most with 20 miles per gallon.

A year ago I also let my spa membership go. Not a frill since I deal with several potentially handicapping issues that linger from a bad accident. I used to do twice a week religiously. I changed to a punch card and now go the 23 miles only when my friend can go too so we can cooperate on the gas. And while in town we also do all our shopping and errand running. But most of our grocery shopping is now done locally in the tiny neighboring town of Angel Fire. This means I may pay higher prices on food but do not “waste” the gas.

Oh, and gas is $3.76 a gallon here. Way over the national average. No subway, no trains, no bus. So I travel a lot less. I don’t go to Lowe’s or Home Depot for building supplies for the studio I am finishing. I bargain with the local hardware store. I don’t have things delivered but fit them into that van used for art shows. Electrical rates are up and so are the bills even though I have gone to all those energy efficient bulbs that give less light. Seldom more than one on at a time in my house at night.

I have also gotten rid of my satellite television which means I have no connection to mass media outside the Internet which I need for business. I used to have the Qwest land line package with all the bells and whistles and it ran me $69 per month. I have reduced that to the lowest and most basic package which is $18 but 2/3'rds of that is taxes and FCC fees. All long distance calls are done on the cell phone (also a business expense). See why artists get in trouble? If you hope to make an art sale there are things you must pay for like website, merchant account, supplies, fair fees, travel expenses, fax and cell, internet. But if there is nobody buying art because they are in the same fix I am it is all outgo and no income.

So I have cut basic services to a bare-bone minimum. I do not drive anywhere I do not absolutely have to go and then try to buddy up with my neighbor. I am shopping for clothing at the thrift shop. And this week I planted my garden for the first time in two years. I plan to live like a rabbit on the lettuce it provides for four months.

If a recession is where consumers do not buy things then yes we are in a recession. We have been for a months. The only other things I can pare down are those necessary small business expenses. Oh, and that economic stimulus check we are to get in May. I believe it has to go straight to the Chapter 13 trustee, so it is not stimulating me to go out and buy anything.

Next stop the poor house as my father used to say. He lived through the depression. I remember those stories. They seem all too real at the moment.