Censorship? #heblowsalot

I'm trying to decide whether the fuss over the Kansas teen tweeting, on her own time, that the governor sucks, and then being forced to apologize by her school, is authoritarian or, considering how the over reaction has played out, is amusing. I think I am leaning towards the former.

Was the the tweet potty mouthed? Perhaps, but I've heard worse on TV. Was it disrespectful? Perhaps as there are more mature ways to get your point across. Rude? I suppose if you consider respect for authority to be all-important. But I don't recall that the Constitution or Bill of Rights demanding respect for authority, quite the contrary actually.  Should the governor's office or school principal gotten involved to force her to apologize? NO!!!!! The First Amendment protects all citizens, including this blog, from being censored by the government and their representatives, which includes the governor's aide and the school principal. Both over reacted. Our Constitution guarantees free speech, even for 18-year-old girls who disagree with their governor. You may not like the way she said it but it was her right to say it.

On the other hand, there was a failure in that this student didn't know how to get her view across other than a short tweet. If anything, the school failed in using the tweet to demonstrate the proper way to articulate your gripes to a government official beyond saying "you suck" (I recall in 5th or 6th grade class projects where we wrote letters to various city officials). So instead of teaching the student how to write a letter explaining her position, the school gave her a lesson in censorship and constitutional violations at a time when many are beginning to question whether we have already given away too many rights our ancestors fought for. The US is not Chile or China after all. Worse, we're having a debate where those in government and media wonder if they should call for an apology because the way the complaint was phrased offended some. Brilliant.

No justice, no peace.

I think what bugs me most about the Solyndral solar panel "scandal" is that Republicans seem to be taking glee that an American company failed and that American jobs were lost, putting politics ahead of what is best for America. It's the economy stupids, which includes American jobs and attempts to let us become energy independent, or at least less reliant on other nations, so we can continue to be able to control our own destiny. The government tried to invest in an American company and failed. It's not like they squandered it on bankers' bonuses. But then the solar panel companies don't run the country.

There are those who believe that we the people are no longer owners of our own country and that those who do own the country, whoever "they" really are, spend billions of dollars every year lobbying their paid for Congress. The supporters of the pizza industry have money, so pizza gets declared a vegetable (the official reason, according to the GOP, is that the government shouldn't be telling children what to eat, no matter how bad it is to them and to our country). The supporters of the solar industry don't have the capital to buy politicians so instead they get buried by them. And yet the people don't question this, which is fine with those in power.

Those in power don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking pondering, for example, why there is such a strict crackdown on protestors, apparently coordinated by Homeland Security (you didn't think they would only go after international terrorists did you?),  and why the media seems to be in favor of this crackdown, noting every little thing that shows the movement is dying. They don't want a population that questions anything against their interests.

Income inequality is good as long as those in power get to keep the power and wealth and influence that allows them to tell politicians what to do. They are pissed that farmers, worried that an oil pipeline that could destroy the aquifer they need to for their livelihoods, had the audacity, to stop the pipeline, for now.  But those farmers shouldn't rest on their laurels.

Those in power  have shown that they will use violence against the people to protect those interests. You don't pay for a strong police force if you don't plan to use them to beat down the people after all.Watching the police crack down on the people with whatever excuse the politicians can come up with, and the media apparently taking their side, I have to wonder if we really are headed down towards fascism, gladly ignoring what is going on so we can play with our new tablet or iPhone. 

Too many in power seem to be happy that  honest hard-working people are fighting with those protesting for their rights, worried that the country is being stolen by a few. The media mocks these people as dreadlocked buffoons or spoiled rotten brats instead of those truly worried about where this country is headed. I guess it's only patriotic to protest when it is conservatives protesting against too much government, not control of the government by banks and Wall Street.

Those in power have convinced us that it is not ok to mortgage our kids' futures if it means higher taxes to pay the debts they left that funded their rise to power. It is ok to mortgage their futures, however, if it means they can't pay their college loans (student loans can't be dismissed in bankruptcy, the banks need to be paid after all). If you are one of these unemployed serfs, hoping to just work for free much less get a job that pays low wages that can't begin to pay your college debts and allow you live on your own, it is not ok to get mad about this, unless you are a conservative.

It is not in the best interest of those in power to have their college educated  slaves, stuck in dead end jobs they can't afford to leave, to be suddenly set free to become entrepreneurs and form the next Solyndral if their student loan debts are suddenly removed. Good talent that is cheap is hard to keep, unless that talent can't afford to leave due to loans and lack of health care, for example. Why aren't we concerned that the next Steve Jobs or Henry Ford will not be able to afford to build the next big thing in their garage? Whatever happened to supporting Americans who want to build a business and create jobs?

But I don't want to put the entire blame on those in charge. They can't get their message out without help. Fortunately, there are fewer and fewer independently owned media outlets, meaning that what is left can be easily influenced or bought thanks to a changing economic picture for the print media, whether it is through hired spokespersons or corporate owned newspapers.

For example, the media told us that those in power, who committed atrocities for years, needed the full force of the federal government to come to their aid within days when their gravy trains crashed under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity for the good of the nation, unless actual American jobs were saved. Yet they now ignore that tax dollars are being spent on tear gas to control the people or are being spent to create new weapons while they they barely question why politicians continue to demand that tax dollars not be spent on healthcare to heal.

This is the same media that is now not openly questioning politicians why they are practically celebrating the loss of American jobs. Why would they do that if they truly reported all that was fit to print? Could it be that they simply can't afford to offend those in power?

There is more going on here then we realize. No justice, no peace.

"But its against the law!"

Scores of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters were arrested on Wall Street this morning for breaking the law and clashing with police. I found these civil disobedience quotes on another site, which seem quite appropriate for today (not sure who actually collected these quotes).

• Dare to do things worthy of imprisonment if you mean to be of consequence. ~Juvenal
• Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one. ~Chinese Proverb
• Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it. ~Albert Einstein
• No radical change on the plane of history is possible without crime. ~Hermann Keyserling
• When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders. ~Veterans Fast for Life
• It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. ~Voltaire
  If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. ~Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, 1849
• You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it. ~Malcolm X
• Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the very same time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason. ~Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion
• Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. ~Mark Twain
• Integrity has no need of rules. ~Albert Camus
  If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable. ~Louis D. Brandeis
• Laws are only words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool. ~John J. Miller, And Hope to Die
• Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices. ~George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists
  Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
• We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." ~Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Why We Can't Wait, 1963
• We cannot, by total reliance on law, escape the duty to judge right and wrong.... There are good laws and there are occasionally bad laws, and it conforms to the highest traditions of a free society to offer resistance to bad laws, and to disobey them. ~Alexander Bickel
• It is necessary to distinguish between the virtue and the vice of obedience. ~Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays, 1911
• I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not so desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. ~Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849
• As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever. ~Clarence Darrow
• It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do. ~Edmund Burke, Second Speech on Conciliation, 1775
• I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. ~Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
• Ordinarily, a person leaving a courtroom with a conviction behind him would wear a somber face. But I left with a smile. I knew that I was a convicted criminal, but I was proud of my crime. ~Martin Luther King, Jr., March 22, 1956
• If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. ~Bishop Desmond Tutu
• It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. ~Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

There are those who believe that we the people are no longer owners of our own country and the only way to call attention to that is to break a few laws that have been set up to control the undesirables (guess those laws against the homeless had enough loopholes to apply to the middle class). Those people that those who do own the country, whoever "they" really are, spend billions of dollars every year lobbying their paid for Congress, so heavily influenced that they made pizza a vegetable, to get what they want, which is more for themselves and less for everybody else. They don't want their paid for politicians to get a whiff of public dissent or worse, to have the dissent spread and that one way to do this is to pass laws restricting the rights of the masses on the assumption that the masses will not challenge these restrictions because it is the law.

They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking pondering why there is such a strict crackdown on protestors, apparently coordinated by Homeland Security (you didn't think they would only go after international terrorists did you?),  and why the media seems to be in favor of this crackdown, that came without warning even as the start of winter was probably about to end protests in northern cities (or not, people in Maine are used to cold). They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. Investing in schools or infrastructure doesn't help their profit margins today.That is against their interests. And they have shown that they will use violence against the people to protect those interests.

Those people think they have discovered what they want and are trying to warn all of us that it is past time to wake up. They want obedient workers who are just educated enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but not so educated that they don't just passively accept the new new deal with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pensions.  Those are worried that they want the rest of our retirement money, attacking social security and medicare, so we will have to keep working.

Watching the police crack down on the people with whatever excuse the politicians can come up with. I have to wonder if  those people are correct and the increasingly violent crackdowns by law enforcement are because they are freaked that the OWS protestors will wake we the sheeple who will stop electing those who don't really care about good honest hard-working people. Are they  worried that those hard working people, sick of seeing wages stay stagnant while cost of living rises while they (usually those who control corporations, who are people too, and banks) destroy the environment while buying out our government and police forces to keep those people in line, are about to cause a problem?

Are they afraid that people will notice that tax dollars are being spent on tear gas to control while they and their politicians continue to demand that tax dollars not be spent on healthcare to heal? Are they worried that more middle class people may realize we have a growing income inequality gap that will come to fruition before they have finished dumbing down our education system?

And before someone calls me a liberal pinhead or something, let me state that I believe that the the Tea Party and the OWS movement are really both screaming the same message. Both see that the system we now have is falling apart. While they may disagree on subjects such as cutting spending on welfare and medical care they probably agree on many more areas of concern. Is it a coincidence that Tea Party supporters are saying they are nothing like the OWS protestors (I'm not talking about the Tea Party members themselves, but those who finance them). 99% of us are those people and the 1% keep hoping that we will be too busy fighting amongst ourselves to forget about them. Something about united we stand, divided we fall comes to mind.

We are the People. We the People are  in charge, not the businesses, not the politicians, but We. The. People. This should be, as the saying goes, self-evident.There is more going on here then we realize. No justice, no peace.

Medicare and the liars who want to lead us to the death panels

For 20 years I've been hearing politicians exclaiming that competition by private companies will lower health care costs and for 20 years my health care costs have risen. I have one thing to say to these politicians. Stop with the bull shitting already! The only prosperity a plan to replace Medicare with private insurance will be for the stock holders of the insurance companies while the average elderly American will undoubtedly watch their savings evaporate or, when they truly get ill, find themselves unable to obtain insurance (what company is really going to offer a policy to a 75 year old in a nursing home receiving dialysis three times a week unless they are forced to?) 

I don't expect social security and medicare to be present as is by time I need it in a quarter century, and I really don't mind having to work past 67 (if I am able), at least part time.  but I hate being outright lied to by pandering politicians who are probably in bed with the health care companies who have no problems with leaving the 99% to fight over sloppy seconds. As the last decade has shown, from the Enron rolling blackouts to the Wall Street mess, the corporatization of America and the magic invisible hand of capitalism doesn't always work well, unless you are at the very top of the heap and have an idiotic public who believes these lies, which we are. 

The chances for prosperity and freedom aren't supposed to only be for the 1%, they are supposed to be for all of us. And somewhere I like to think that means living an old age without having enough money to afford the premium cat food so I can still function somehow. Obama isn't bringing us death panels sheeple, it is the those who want to sell us a golden future of private health care that can be denied.

We can't afford no education

I just read an article in which a Columbia University professor defends today's high tuition sticker prices as false since college is much cheaper than people realize. I know part of my sticker shock is remembering what I and my parents paid for my CUNY tuition 25 years ago. I was very surprised when I entered my tuition from 1985 into an inflation calculator and saw that in 2011 dollars it was roughly the same. I don't know how public university tuition in other states compare, but there is no reason for students to be graduating from private universities with what is essentially a small mortgage that they will take years, if not decades to pay off (worse if they want to go to graduate, law or medical schools and incur more debt).

Tuition at many universities has been rising beyond the rate of inflation for a long time. However, the days of parents taking tuition out of their home equity have ended. Universities have forgotten they are in business to educate, not to create resort like dorms and pay for professors to do more research outside the classroom then time spent teaching students (research has its place, but it needs to be reasonable). While technology costs are higher now, it is time universities get back to the basics. Students aren't in college for a four year luxury vacation, they are there to work and prepare for their futures (parties on the weekends excluded of course).

There is something very wrong in that we are creating a generation that will be chained to jobs (if they can find them) and not take chances because they need to pay off their debts and can't afford to take a chance at a start-up that may not pay as much (or have health care but that is another story). One could even argue (put on your tin foiled hats if you have them), when taken to its logical conclusion, that we have enslaved our children's futures to private (even if publicly traded) financial entities, giving those entities ownership of the people and thereby ownership of a government that is by the people. Frightening thought, though if one looks at how much money is mixed into politics these days, it is not that far fetched.

We as a people are underfunding education at all levels (it seems as if many of the 101 courses are classes that were taught in high school as part of a public education a generation or two ago) and our children are paying the price. What this means for our country's financial future is anybody's guess but if talent can't rise to it's highest possible level because it can't afford to, then this country and its businesses are in a lot of trouble. Paraphrasing from President Franklin Roosevelt, the liberty of the people to pursue wealth and happiness will not be safe for the people if the cost to participate in the economy becomes stronger than the economy itself. Ownership of the people by those private powers holding the mortgage on the peoples' college degrees could, in its essence, lead to fascism.