Thaddeus Gadfly

Okay, if we are going to legalize homosexual marriages, and I think the time has come for a societal sea change of attitude on the subject, that gays should be allowed to marry, it begs the next question, which is, if we are accepting alternative lifestyles, and we do accept gay marriage, shouldn’t we allow polygamy, as well?

I’m of the opinion that to allow gay marriage and to disallow polygamy is an inconsistency.

If you do not think it is an inconsistency , please tell me your reasoning. I’d love to hear it.

Now then, on the question of recent events surrounding a particular religious enterprize which alledgedly is engaging in child abuse, the 400 or so children were removed from their parents and put into foster care, I have some comments.

I’m fearful of the “lynch mob” mentality that seems to be developing, that the government acted without sufficient evidence. Something about the whole thing stinks, if you ask me. I’m against child abuse in every form, but I’m also against destroying families just because they have chosen a different lifestyle than one I would choose, and I’m definitely against destroying families without sufficient evidence.

Are we going wind up with a wild wich hunt case like we say during the McMartin trials of the 1980s?

I remember vividly, that everytime a news report was given about the trial, the splash screen on TV we first saw was those of childrens toys being ensconsced in an inclement shadow of an adult, and the idea was clearly to suggest child abuse.

But there was a problem with the whole thing, it wasn’t true, none of it. In the years of trial that followed, the owners of the children’s day care center, they lost their business, their reputation, and it ruined their lives. All because of overzealous prosecutors who relied on scant evidence, and the testimony of children whose testimonies were manipulated, and keep in mind that children will be children, they have wild imaginations, and have no idea of the forces that are at play, that the whole thing can easily be seen as a game to them, and are not cognizant of the consequences of their testimony, and have no concept of “truth” and “integrity”, THEY ARE CHILDREN, just kids, get it? What the McMartin trials demonstrated was that the testimony of kids were manipulated by adults.

Let that scenario not happen again, let us rely on real corrobative evidence, not the kind of witch hunting we saw during the McMartin trails. But, I fear, we, as a society, never learn.

Rush Limbaugh recently spoke: “The left is the enemy of freedom and liberty in this country and they don’t need to be worked with.”

Rush said this in response to something McCain said, the message of which was essentially that if he is elected president, he does not see Democrats as the enemy and that he will work with them.

First off, I’m not voting for McCain, but I will say this about McCain, he is, by far, a better man than Rush Limbaugh. Rush, and others like him (such as Mike Savage), are hatemongers. Hatemongers live in a strange world with an “us against them” mentality, a seige mentality, and such mentalities  spring from the same well that other hate groups spring from. Rush and his ilk spends his days and nights promulgating only one idea, the left is bad, and all of our world’s ills come from leftist idealogy.

Let me ask Rush this question: Do you, Mr. Limbaugh, support anarchy?

Yes or no? If you answer “yes”, it would be safe to label you as a nutjob. If you answer “no”, if I were to use the same bizarre logic you apply to the left, you are “against freedom and democracy”.

How many Republicans voted against the minimum wage? Why? This is seen as an affront on the “liberty” of business to pay what they see fit to pay. This is but one small example in a litany of examples I could think of.

Yes, Mr. Limbaugh, sometimes, in the interest of social justice and common decency, lefties like myself support an idea which infringes on the freedom of one group, it’s called “regulation”. Republicans hate regulation. Let big Pharma gouge the public, let the oil companies gouge the public, let corporations pollute our rivers, air, and oceans and destroy natural habitats, all in the name of “freedom”, right?

Total freedom is anarchy. Total absense of freedom is slavery. The most ethical place to be is in the center, moderated freedom to correct the natural deficiencies in the system and human chararacter, and the center is where you will NEVER find a Republican, but you will OFTEN find a Democrat.

I do not hate Republicans, and my attitude towards them is the same as McCains healthy attitude towards Democrats. I only hate HATE, which is the only thing on earth worthy of that attitude.

Rush, you might think you are hot stuff because you have a national forum, but lesser men than you have a national forum, and it doesn’t mean much, it just means there are a lot of people who are like minded. Numbers don’t prove a thing, Hitler had a large following, as well (no, I did not compare you to Hitler).

Fortunately for Democracy, the people close to the center are often the key voters who determine who wins the elections. But, on the other hand, sometimes they can be hoodwinked. That being said, Democracy will never elect someone like Mike Savage, or Rush Limbaugh, both of whom appeal to the extreme right in the country. Yes, there are whackos on the left, just as there are buffoons on the right. You won’t find them in the center, and, as Jimmy Carter once spoke, “There are no road apples in the center of the road”.

I’m against the whole concept of public corporations and the stock market, in general. Shared-equity of private corporations makes sense, but the public corporation is an idea I just don’t get. If the argument is that it is a means of acquiring capital to start businesses and fund entrepeneurial projects, why can’t bonds do that? Wouldn’t that be a better idea? Think about it. Bonds means that there are no shareholders making a lot of noise about instant returns on their investments, which might cause board members to pressure company officials to enact policies which only help the short term, and not the long term. Isn’t that what was happening to US Auto industry for many years, while the Japanese got a leg on us by long term strategies? Would that have happened if these companies acquired capital via the bond markets, where they had to pay them back over a long time, and therefore, the incentive would be for long term strategies?

What do stock traders do? What service to they provide? After the initial IPO, all you have is paper being shuffled around, it’s a veritable ponzi scheme, is it not? Some might argue that the stock will only go up if a company is healthy. Fine, but stocks are over-valued (way above book value) by this bidding process, so this is why I write that it is a “veritable” ponzi scheme. I don’t know that it is technically a duck, but it sure quacks and walks like one. In my view, the only ethical value of the stock is the book value (the accounting value) and any value beyond that is a ponzi value. By accounting value I mean that the value of a given stock is determined by  the total equity divided by the number of outstanding shares. Any value above that is a ponzi value. And the ability to trade stocks makes it easy for those who have inside knowledge to take advantage of those that don’t, and I will bet that this type of thing goes on a lot more than insiders would have us realize. Say you were at a gambling table, and your opponent (corporate insiders) could see your hand, would you want to play against them? This is precisely the situation we have with the stock market.

My view is that if there are going to be stocks, make them only transferable (saleable back) to the issuer, and not tradable, and the stockholder actually gets a certificate, holds onto for a long time. No bidding or auctioning of stocks allowed. This way, the incentive is to hold onto the stocks, and the true growth of the company via its ability to deliver a quality product, rather than then over-hyping of the stock by speculators, determines the value of the stock. This, in my view, is the more moral way.

See, the current set up allows those who are in-the-know to manipulate stocks, to benefit financially in a way other than earning money by providing a service to the community, by pitting buyers and sellers in a way where they can reap cash windfalls at the expense of others. Recently, a CEO dumped 60 million worth of his shares in his company overwhich he presided as Chairman. Undoubtebly, he knew that the stocks were going to crash. This means that those who purchased those stocks, were unwittingly involved in a mass transer of wealth, from the buyer to the seller. And it was not a quid pro quo, something of value for something of value, it was like playing against an opponent in a poker game in which the opponent can see your hand. This should be illegal. McCain said, “this is got to stop”, and he was correct.

I bet that this (the current state of corporatism)  is one of the great contributors to boom and bust economics, and I don’t see how this is a good thing.

If you know something I don’t, please enlighten me.

McCain does not deserve to be president just because he has had military experience, or was a war hero. Wisdom & Judgement is a quality of greater importance than experience.

One might argue that experience garners wisdom, and it should, but not always. What is clear to me is that, in McCain, we have a man who has had direct experience with one of the collosal blunders of all time regarding US Foreign policy (outside of Iraq) and that was Vietnam. If anyone should understand and have learned from our history clearly it would be him.

But no, McCain wants us there “until we are victorious”, whatever that means.

He tells us that the surge is “working”. Or is it? Violence is down, that is evident. But simple math could have predicted that if you greatly increase our presence, violence would diminish, and, apparently it has. But one could easily assert, and I think quite correctly, that if we leave ten years from now, violence will return to previous levels, or if we leave tommorrow, violence will return to previous levels. If that is the probable outcome, why not leave sooner than later?

Therein lies the debate. The argument rises or falls on that one premise. And the premise is an assumption, i.e, the assumption that if we hang around long enough, spend a trillion bucks, go further and further into debt, Iraq will get its act together.

McCain, et al. , argue that all hell will break loose if we leave, and that if we stay long enough, Iraq will get it’s political act together. Well, they said that five years ago, they said it four years ago, they said it three years ago, and so on, and they keep telling us this, but what is becoming evident is that they, McCain, Bush, and all of the neocons, don’t have a clue.

Just as they didn’t have a clue when they got us into this grandiose and tragic quagmire in the first place.

Another point McCain raises is that we need to stay and leave when the time is right in order to protect our “honor”.

Excuse me? What honor? We zero’ed out that account with the rest of the world quite a few years. So, we are going to kill more Americans because McCain wants to cling to some vague notion of honor?

“We need to go there so they won’t come here”. He, Bush, and their ilk, say.

But, they don’t get it, they are here because we are there. We are the intruders.

If someone is intruding in your house, and you want them to leave, on what moral ground do they stand if they claim that they must stay otherwise you will “win”. What kind of bizarre and twisted logic is that?

How can anyone trust the judgement of these people?

The war is ruining our country on many levels, diverting resources that could be used at home, and it is costing lives, Americans and allies who are being needlessly killed; it is destroying the very fabric of this nation, putting it to decline. All imperialistic empires that did not cease being imperialistic vanished, and that is the path we are on, the path of “nation building”, which is euphemism for imperialism.

Obama is the only candidate who has been pure on the war. He was against it when very few politicians had the courgage to speak against it. The others candidates that did, Kucinich and Paul, they didn’t have a chance to get elected.

I don’t care what his pastor says or thinks, Obama is a great man, an eloquent man, and I will trust him and his reasons for not abandoning his pastor . After years of a President who could barely utter a compound sentence, let alone a simple sentence without uttering guffaws by the truckloads, a little eloquence would be just what the proverbial doctor ordered.

He is the right man in this juncture in history.

I predict Obama will be our next president.

But God help him, because America’s fiscal crisis seems to be getting progressively worse, and its ensuing nightmares are going to be one of the greatest challenges of this century.

A vote for McCain is a vote for a bankrupt foreign policy.

With Sean Hannity, and his ilk, we hear over and over and over again, the virtues of Bush’s tax cuts.

The Bush administration Tax Cut, with all it’s hoopla, really amounts to a policy of leaving no rich person behind, to wit:

http://www.ctj.org/html/gwb0602.htm

And the most alarming fact is stated:

By 2010, when (and if) the Bush tax reductions are fully in place, an astonishing 52 percent of the total tax cuts will go to the richest one percent—whose average 2010 income will be $1.5 million. Their tax-cut windfall in that year alone will average $85,000 each. Put another way, of the estimated $234 billion in tax cuts scheduled for the year 2010, $121 billion will go just 1.4 million taxpayers.

Also, Bush has given these rich-favorable tax cuts without a concomitant reduction in government spending, a double sin.

This widens the deficit. An ever widening deficit ultimately devalues the dollar, which causes a host of assorted economic problems, one of which is inflation (by virtue of the fact that the Fed has to lower the discount rate in order to prop up the economy. See, what happens is inflation caused the housing market to conjure up some fancy mortgage tools in order to allow people to afford to buy homes, which ultimately gave rise to the subprime fiasco we are in, today).

Here’s the killer: inflation is a tax on the poor, because the rich benefit from inflation, since they can hedge their investments and thereby preserve their wealth, whereas the poor do not have access to such methods. If all an individual has is $800 in savings, how likely is it that an individual who needs liquidity just to meet basic needs is going to buy a Krugerrand?

If a man or woman has $1000 in savings, which can purchase a value of X in goods this year, but next year that $1000 in savings can only purchase ten percent less, then, due to inflation, he or she has paid a hidden tax of ten per cent. Because of a deficit, the Government prints money to make up its cash shortfalls (this is a simplification, but ultimately, this does occur), which ultimately results in inflation.

See, the rich hedged by buying gold, or whatever upward moving financial instrument they purchased in order to preserve their wealth.

Republicans, in their litany of lies, lie again, and on this particular issue, the lie is beyond egregious.

Sean Hannity, on the Hannity & Colmes television program, no matter who is on to debate whatever, rarely fails to steer the conversation in a right versus left direction.

How often do we hear him say that to vote for a democrat is to vote for higher taxes?

But this is the lie that the right is perpetrating on the masses. Democrats only want taxes for those who can afford it. They do not want to raise taxes on those who cannot afford it, and the more responsible Democrats certainly do not want a tax cut without an accompanying reduction in spending to match it. By the way, this idea is supported by McCain, who, on that issue, is correct (insofar as his support of tying tax cuts to concomitant spending reductions. However, he doesn’t seem to mind that Bush’s tax cuts favor the rich).

And, which President was it who left his office with a budget surplus in the last fifty years? I’ll give you a hint: it was a Democrat (Bill Clinton).

During the last 60 years, Republicans were in the White House 57.2 per cent of the time.

During those years the Republicans controlled the White House, stock gains averaged 9.53% per year. During the years in which Democrats were in the White House, stock gains averaged 15.25%. Ah, so you thought or assumed that the stock market would fair better under Republican authority, did you?

Under which President in the last 60 years did the stark market yield the highest gains? I’ll give you another hint, it was not a Republican president (it was Clinton, again).

Give a million dollar tax cut to the poor, and you are going to see a lot of TV sets, etc,  the kinds of hard purchases which really causes jobs.

Give a million dollar tax cut to the rich, and what is purchased? A Van Gogh, A Picasso, which might cause a singular spurt of activity in job market for 15 minutes at a Sotheby’s auction?

Oh, that’s a straw man, you say? Not really, there is a difference between a simplification which accurately represents a larger picture, over the simplistic, which often resorts to straw man arguments which do not represent reality. The above idea presented is the the former catagory.

No, the Democrats are not without sin insofar as allowing the Fed to cause inflation, it’s true. However, I am more inclined to believe a Democrat will fight for responsible fiscal policy more than a Republican would.

The Republicans will tell you otherwise, but their deeds do not support it. They suffer from the simplistic idea that a tax cut is the panacea for the nation’s economic problems.

A tax cut without an accompanying reduction in Goverment spending is a tax on the poor. Not directly, but inevitably via inflation.

In essence, inflation is a transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the Government.

The rich are untouched.

Sorry corporate America. Let me, not you, decide what is, and what is not, a frankenfood insofar as what I’m going to put in my stomach.

Oh, sure, you got proof out the yin yang that cloned foods are no different than that which they were cloned from, right?

It passes all the tests, right?

How about the test of time? How about the idea that the difference might be so slight, that its true effect, harmful, or otherwise, might not be known for years and years to come?

A cloned cow is just as good as a cow with a twin, right?

Wrong. I’ve known twins, and though they, intitially, seemed identical, after a few weeks of familiarity I began to see physical differences. They are NOT exact copies, as, supposedly, clones are.

Until corporate America can prove to the extent which will withstand the test of many years, I will positively boycott any food maker who does not label their food, and give me, not them, the opportunity to decide what I will eat or drink.

It’s not a war. It’s a police action.

Terrorists are not soldiers, they are thugs, criminals. The oft-touted right wing premise that leaving Iraq is equal to “losing the war” is false. If it were a war, it would be true, but it is not a war.

Wars can be one or lost, but we can only put a dent in crime. This must be understood, because if it is not understood, we are being asked to remain in a country without a foreseeable time in the future we can leave, and people are dying.

Terrorism is crime, it is not soldiers trying to achieve some cause. Thwarting terrorism is police activity, not war activity. To say the “war can be won” is not the truth. Sure, it’s a nice sound bite, and dare anyone suggest that a war cannot be one. A war can be one, but only if it is a bona fide war.

Therefore, justifying remaining in Iraq on the basis that to do otherwise is to “lose the war”, is, in fact, causing people to die in vain based on a false premise. Putting an total end to crime is not possible, it isn’t possible anywhere on the earth, though limiting it is possible, of course, and this must be done.

The whole point is that (most) Republicans are not being honest, and not just Republicans, but anyone, such as Leiberman, and anyone else suggesting that what is going on in Iraq is a “war”. That war ended with the fall of Hussein. After that, it was a police action, and it continues to be police action.

The truth is, to leave just means that it is being recognized that police forces should be taking over the police actions necessary to thwart terrorism in the region, and that it is no longer the job of the US military. To equate this with “losing the war”, is hyperbole to sway your opinion in a dishonest fashion.

Thaddeus

Giuliani has warned us of a “new 9/11″ if America elects a Democrat President.

Perhaps with such a short memory Giuliani should do the right thing and get out of the race, since I recall, even as bad as my memory is, the last 9/11, the one and only 9/11 of the magnitude of 9/11, happened under a Republican president, in a city with a Republican Mayor.

This is just more scare tactics, among the litany of scare-the-hell-out-of-US-citizens tactics which has been the mainstay of the neoconservative movement for the last six years.

But, while we are being partisan using twisted logic, Democrats can play that game, too. How about this logic: let’s have a president with a name such as Barak Hussein Obama, because such a name would be more Arab friendly than a McCain, or Giuliani, i.e., if they like our new president a lot more than they like Bush, it is not unrealistic to assert that they might want to hurt us less, right?

Actually, the truth is that both ideas are silly. The truth is that, because as long as our “enemy” sees us as the intruder on their land, it won’t matter who is president.

It doesn’t matter what the Saudi Royalty, or other Arab leaders think, all that matters is what their citizens think, the majority of Arabs. And, I think it is fair to say that they see us as intruders in their land.

Republicans love to stigmatize an otherwise meritworthy idea of total withdrawal as “cut and run”. But the idea that a complete withdrawal is tantamount to a “cut and run” is based on an assumed premise. If our presence was legitimate, then “cut and run” might be a fair characterization, but is it?

What it is, is an assumption, a grandiose, arrogant, assumption, an assumption which is needlessly killing Americans, innocent Iraqis, and our Allies.

So the right wing has found a concept which they believe is bullet proof; a cute little sound-bite called “cut and run”, because, of course, how could any intelligent person worth his self-esteem advocate ‘cut and run’ as a viable policy in the middle east? It’s a slam dunk idea, right?

Not so fast.

It all depends on the point of view.

Allow me to ask the question this way:

An intruder forces himself into your home, would it be more moral if that intruder continued to intrude than if he cut and ran?

I bet that the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East view us as the intruder.

To say that cutting and running would appease the enemy might satisfy the ‘let’s-kill-the-bums” mentality of those who can only see trees, but when you look at the forest, the idea just might be based on a false premise, i.e., an assumed premise, which when scrutinized, is demonstrably false.

If we are in an territory against the wishes of the majority of its population, we are the intruder. Despite the fact that kings and leaders of a few of those regions might approve of our presence, keeping in mind that they don’t have to answer to their population, nor does a dictator, it’s the overall desire of given country’s population, which, for me, is the correct criterion on which to base this sentiment. The moral thing to do is to cease being the intruder in those regions that see us as such.

That is the first thing we should do, because until we do, we haven’t a moral leg to stand on regarding policy in those regions.

The entirety of the neocon foreign policy flows from an assumed premise, a false premise, and they want you to believe that a “new 9/11″ is more likely with a Democrat as president, as if it would really make a difference.

What we really need is a President who has the courage to get America’s butt completely out of the region, corporations, military, everything–let’s get the hell out, period.

Then let us see what their justification for hating us is, because, in my view, our presence is the ultimate source of their hatred. All this stuff about their so-called “kill the infidels” attitude never was a motivation for terrorism against us (on the scale that we are now seeing it) until after we intruded in their territory, so such rhetoric is just rhetoric born out of hate which was ultimately caused by our acts, policies, etc., in the region, and Republicans are using it to further their false argument that “no matter what we do, they will hate us anyway, so lets bomb them”, etc., and it doesn’t work.

With regard to middle east terrorism, fighting fire with fire begets more and more fire. If that isn’t obvious, open your eyes wider.

Of course, it would be foolish of me to suggest that “fighting fire with water” as a philosophical approach, is appropriate for all types of terrorism, but, here, I’m referring to the terrorism arising out the middle east.

Republicans are fond of saying, “we need to fight them there so they won’t be fighting us here”. That’s bass-ackwards; they are here because we are there.

The foreign policy regarding the middle east of fighting fire with fire is a flawed foreign policy, and what we should do is fight fire with water, i.e., water being the moral high ground; we shouldn’t be torturing prisoners or holding prisoners in secret prisons without some level of due process, invading sovereign nations as a “preemptive strike”, or meddling in the affairs of nations whose populations do not want us there.

Unfortunately, I fear that Bush has completely destroyed whatever water we had left, except, perhaps, the one last whirlpool of H₂0 he cannot destroy: the current movement for impeachment.