Just a Business

The other day I took my grandchild on a school field trip. Now my grandchild attends a middle school that is located in a lower middle class neighborhood. Its a good school and the children that attend the school are nice children. They have all the normal problems any school has in this day and age. This particular field trip involved the students working on a community project. In this case they had volunteered to stuff envelops for the community orchestra. I sat down at a table near where the children were doing the stuffing and started listening to their conversation.

I found it interesting, but soon the boys turned toward sports. The conversation centered around the current basketball season. They argued over who was the better player. Bryant or James. What team would make the playoffs and what was the best team in the NBA.

Soon I began to realize that these children really were arguing over only the professional teams. There wasn't one word said about the collages or any other level of sports. I turned toward them and asked what collage team they were for in the NCAA's tournament. They really had no answer for me. Then I asked them what was their favorite collage team. They couldn't really name one. Out of frustration I told them that what they were admiring was no more than a business and that the Lakers and Kobe Bryant had no thoughts of them except how much can you spend on their merchandise and clothing. That if they could make more money by moving to another city they would and that the players care less about the people who are fans. They move from city to city to make as much money they can make. Labron James just said he wants to have the first billion dollar business of any sportsman. The truth is The Lakers, the Cavileers, the Celtics, are in sports they are nothing more than businesses.

A Letter from my Congressman

live in a Gerrymandered Congressional district. This is a Republican dominated district that has close to 90% registered republicans. In many elections the democrats don’t even bother to run a candidate. Our Representative is Garry Miller. He used to be on my residential city council and found a way to run for congress when our last republican congressman was guilty of accepting illegal campaign contributions leaving this sure republican district open to a new congressman. He’ll probably keep this job no matter what anybody in his district fells or says until 2012 when the district will reapportioned under a new system that’s suppose to end gerrymandering in California. I hope it works.

I tell you this information so that you can understand my frustrations over voicing my opinion to my congressman. It true I can voice it, but he will never take me serious because he only has to satisfy of part of the constituency. I wrote him and email asking for some cooperation when it came to the budget and the recovery act. And that he actually consider the bill before voting against them and not just vote as a republican but as a representative of our district.

I received an answer that was as frustrating as any answer I had ever read. It made me wonder as to the intelligence of this district I live in when this congressman can send me a letter so insulting of my intelligence and think its acceptable. He told me he voted against the 700-dollar plus bill because of three provisions that constituted less than 2% of the whole bill. The issues he chose to tell me about were probably among the most innocuous of all the provision in the bill. He didn’t like that one billion dollars were going to be dedicated to Wellness and disease prevention. He also wanted found that $335 million to help prevent sexually transmitted diseases and sexual education wanting even though we have a higher teen pregnancy rate than India. He also objected to $50 billion on art. He complains that these spending plans wouldn’t create one job. I don’t know but I think people have to be hired to deliver all these services. Lastly he told me that he supported his party’s stimulus package but he never told me of one provision in that bill and when I researched this bill I couldn’t find it.

We have to do something to get rid of these kinds of representatives. Gerrymandering is the most anti democratic institution in our country. Please hurry 20012.

Living in the Bubble

We all live in a bubble and the recent plunge of the stock market is proof. At over 1400 the DOW was really over evaluated. It was in the same state as the housing market and the Dot.coms of the nineties. Do you remember the savings and loan bubble that burst during Reagan’s administration? They were the first to feel the pinch of a poorly thought out tax plan. We have had a tax plan that has slowly choked the middle class for the benefit of the upper class.

We also live in a bubble of misinformation and diversion. Often our politicians give us diversions so that we don’t notice how they are fixing things up for the over-class. Recently the politicians were grinding on about earmarks. To hear them talk you would think that if we got rid of these earmarks we would solve the fiscal problem that our federal government faces. Once you add up all the earmarks in the recent budget you find that it was only 1% of the total budget. So instead of figuring out were the real waste was in the budget, we spent all that time talking about the minutia of earmarks.

Our politicians do this with other responsibilities they have. They yell about welfare fraud from people who take hundreds out of our economy, but ignore the Enron’s who take Billions, but every once in a while they get caught and we can see what they’re really doing. Today AIG gave they’re top management bonuses while they were taking billions from our pockets. It was such an egregious move that there was no cover up for their greed. So, we heard about it and everybody has shown the proper amount of anger. You hear all the talking heads telling you about how terrible AIG is. Soon you can expect some trivial incident to be talked about to divert our attention, but you will not see our tax system fixed.

To Say or not to Say that is the Question

Words, words, words, that’s what this blog is about. I’ve started this blog entry many times because I find it very hard to write about the subject I present in this entry until I realized that the subject was words. Words bring a simple question to mind. Why aren’t the words of the president enough to get the congress to work together and come up with reasonable solutions to the countries economic, health, and educational problems? Why can’t the members of our congress meet and confer and produce reasonable legislation to get our country moving toward solvency again?

 

When you hear the words that are used by both the left and the right to communicate it becomes clear that the present political coterie can never solve a problem. Each group exaggerates the position of its opposing cabal and belittles them for that position. A good example of this is what Bobby Jendal is saying about a planned high-speed train that runs from Los Angeles to Los Vegas. He has said that it’s a train from Disneyland to Los Vegas. The fact that he inserted Disneyland as a starting point gave him fodder to ridicule the Recovery Bill. Ronald Reagan was particularly good at this. He made being a Liberal a dirty word when he called Mondale the “L” word. Since that time conservatives have used the word Liberal to discount anything people who take an opposing view of any issue. I could find so many more examples of this kind of talk by conservatives, but this doesn’t expunge liberals from blame. They might have even started all this nefarious language in the sixties. It was the “peace movement” that called the conservative establishment a demonic group of people. During the Bush administration I heard certain left wing broadcasters call President Bush head of a crime family. They called Cheney Darth Vader who everybody knows is the embodiment of evil.

 

As long as the fringe on both sides of the isle are allowed to be the spokes people and our political leaders defer to these people as the prime movers of their political philosophy our problems will not be solved. All of us need to tone down the rhetoric and open our ears and show respect to those whose ideas are different than our own. Not only will we have a better chance to solve these problems but also each of us might learn something to make our personal lives better.