tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50760358378838976882024-02-20T15:00:30.213-08:00Jackpine NeedlesCranky Commentary from a Countrified CurmudgeonJimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.comBlogger30125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-44547267318749798182011-05-19T06:58:00.000-07:002011-05-19T07:02:13.464-07:00You Can Trust Sunspot Johnson(My latest Letter to the Editor of the Eau Claire paper:)<br /><br />I’m glad to see that Senator Ron Johnson is proving himself trustworthy.<br /><br />The oil industry poured $89,600 into his campaign coffers, and he did exactly what they paid him to do. He voted to continue the $21 billion in subsidies that our government hands out to the oil companies every year.<br /><br />In a time of great concern over our Federal deficits, this was a truly courageous act. Not every senator could be trusted to push aside the interests of the people who elected him in order to keep faith with the ultra-rich oil companies who bought him.<br /><br />I’m sure Ron’s willingness to impose cuts to services that benefit ordinary people in order to shift even more wealth to the giant corporations will continue to be well-rewarded.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-35295327731877406352011-04-10T17:37:00.000-07:002011-04-10T17:39:50.922-07:00What Wisconsin has Taught Me This SpringThe American political scene is very much in flux. It is not Schroedinger's Cat, but Schroedinger's Litter. There are so many variables in play, so many potential ways for each of the players to jump, so many unforeseeable influences, that one cannot predict with any accuracy just what might happen. That said, I think that we are entering the End Times--of capitalism, at least. Whether they manage to take the rest of us with them through environmental destruction is the pin upon which the hinge of destiny swings. One path leads to Mordor, the other leads to the healing of the earth and our species. We must either recognize the great evil of unfettered "free markets" and take steps to curb them, or we perish. When framed in specific terms, these propositions have the sympathy of the general public. Most of them know who is destroying them, but they see few options. <br /><br />The problem is that our current mechanisms for choosing leaders are proving totally susceptible to tampering from massively moneyed interests. Much of this tampering is entirely legal. Fox News can provide free air time and favorable coverage to their pool of indoctrinated teabaggers; corporations can pour unrestricted amounts of cash into negative ads in any race; the “liberal mainstream media” sit poised to take out any “far-left” candidate--anyone who scares the Masters of the Universe. Dean’s scream. Kucinich’s UFO. Earthtone Al. <br /><br />What I learned in Wisconsin is that there is a way to circumvent the death grasp that the Right has on the collective throat of the media. <br /><br />Last November Wisconsin fell under the evil spell of psychologically sophisticated propaganda developed and financed by the usual big-money suspects on the national scene. Beguiled by this smooth propaganda, some independents and weak Democrats stayed home and others went off to the polls to “throw ‘em all out, dammit.” “Sunspot” Johnson, a moneyed plastic-factory lunatic and adherent to crackpot notions about global warming, defeated Russ Feingold, and Walker ascended to the throne.<br /> <br />Then came the events of February 2011, and a significant portion of the state suddenly awoke from the trance. And, once awake, we started taking action, unlike other places that were comparably threatened by the corporatist agenda. <br /><br />What made the difference? Well, first, we had the example of Egypt. But so did Americans in other parts of the country who were also under seige from the Masters. <br /><br />I think the difference was that we had Democrats who behaved like Democrats. Where in other places there were no solid public figures around which to organize, and in whom one could have faith, we had our heroes. And soon we had many more heroes. The cops and firemen who joined us; the farmers who paraded their tractors around the square; the whole damn world got into the act, as so poignantly memorialized by the chalkboard at Ian’s Pizza on which they recorded all the states and countries who ordered food for the protestors.<br /><br />The Fab 14 headed out of state and bought time. Now, I will tell you that some of those Dems were a little blue-doggish in my previous judgment, but when it all hit the fan, they stayed together and supported each other.<br /><br />Our Secretary of State (last of the La Follettes) refused to certify and publish the bill after the Republicans had “passed” it under questionable circumstances. This bought more time.<br /><br />The lines were clear. The Democrats did not waver, did not hedge, did not compromise with an illegal process. People by the tens and hundreds of thousands united. I just heard that more than half a million Cheeseheads participated in the Madison demonstrations at some time or another. I can believe it. Two nights ago at a Democratic fund-raiser dinner in Chippewa falls, guest speaker and Fab-14 Senator John Erpenback asked the crowd how many had been in Madison. More than half the crowd raised their hands. Chippewa falls is nearly 200 miles from Madison, by the way.<br /><br />Our politicians did not stand behind us. They stood with us. And they are going out with us to collect signatures. They are showing up all over the state with their sleeves rolled up, making personal contact with people. They appear ready to go anywhere and talk to any group. Literally thousands of signature-gatherers are going around door-to-door, talking to people and educating them. People who didn’t know how to use Facebook and Twitter are now suddenly fully plugged in to the worldwide cerebral cortex. The state is alive, awake, and about to cast off the foul disease that crept upon it.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-47779319230838648492011-01-13T05:52:00.000-08:002011-01-13T05:53:42.080-08:00A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little reality-based minds.Give up consistency, give up rationality, give up the shackles of logic, and all things become possible to you. <br /><br />You can balance the Federal budget by cutting taxes on the rich and create jobs by busting unions.<br /><br />You can deny the poor the basic necessities of life, secure in your knowledge that you are doing the work of the Lord.<br /><br />You can run an oil-based economy forever because oil is a renewable resource and there are no harmful consequences to burning it.<br /><br />You can call your opponents “enemies” and “traitors” and advocate their assassination and rest assured that you have no responsibility when someone acts on your word.<br /><br />You can take from others whatever it pleases you to take, and do to them whatever it pleases you to do, knowing that you are merely helping the Lord to carry out His will on those who deserve no better.<br /><br />You can subject your enemies to pain, torture and death, knowing full well that you have the Lord’s blessing because they are also His enemies.<br /><br />And finally, if you have any mild twinges of fear for your soul, at the end of your days you can utter certain magical phrases and all will be forgiven--if, indeed, there is actually anything to be forgiven in one who has lived such an exemplary life as yours has been.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-91610002413824338522010-12-05T12:15:00.000-08:002010-12-05T12:16:52.283-08:00The notion that tax cuts for the rich will create jobs is total nonsense.The notion that tax cuts for the rich will create jobs is total nonsense.<br /><br />First, if reducing taxes in the top brackets is such a great employment stimulus, why didn’t it work in the years since the Republicans initiated it, in the beginning days of the Bush Administration?<br /><br />Second, if prosperous business owners want to squirrel away some money where the IRS can't get it, they can always reinvest it in their businesses and claim the tax deduction. In this case, HIGHER taxes, not lower ones, would provide incentive for business growth.<br /><br />Third, jobs don't just appear because the rich have a few more millions lying around. They already do. Not just millions, but hundreds of billions that they're sitting on because the economy is too weak to invest in. <br /><br />Jobs appear when there is work to be done. There is work to be done when demand increases. Demand increases when the common people have something to spend. Common people have something to spend when they get either paychecks or unemployment checks.<br /><br />Extending unemployment benefits will therefore ultimately increase employment by increasing demand. <br /><br />Extending tax cuts for the rich will do nothing but make the rich richer while slowing down the economy and pushing up the deficit for no good reason.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-26352787056235156422010-11-24T14:12:00.000-08:002010-11-24T14:19:45.531-08:00What Price Security?And, really, is it even security?<br /><br />On September 11, 2001 the United States suffered a terrorist attack that cost about 3,000 lives.<br /><br />In that same year, 42,000 Americans died in traffic accidents. 3200 were killed in motorcycle accidents alone.<br /><br />We have now expended more than a trillion dollars and 5800 American military lives (4400 in Iraq and 1400 in Afghanistan) in the two wars we are fighting on the pretext of preventing another 9-11. This number, about twice the number lost in the WTC tragedy, does not count the perhaps one million civilian lives we have destroyed in the countries we invaded.<br /><br />On the home front, we are now twisting ourselves into knots and surrendering our freedoms at an alarming rate in order to prevent people from smuggling small amounts of explosives onto airplanes.<br /><br />However, anybody who really wants to take down an airplane can do so without smuggling anything on board in a body cavity. For example, a small, easily-smuggled ground-launched missile would do the job pretty well. If you want a sitting duck situation, shoot the missile at a plane that is just landing or taking off. 300 people might die, and that would be a great tragedy, of course, but it would also be comparable to the number of traffic fatalities in America in any random 3-day period. So, in the grand scale of things, we are putting more extreme strains on our democracy every day, and expending irreplaceable resources, on futile but highly intrusive procedures aimed at preventing relatively unlikely and relatively small-scale attacks.<br /><br />If all this TSA irradiating and gropery at the airports is totally ineffectual in preventing planes from being blown up then it must have some other purpose. Cranking up fear and rage in the public might be such a purpose. Or maybe it’s just a test of our docility. <br /><br />The worst possible terrorist attack on America might involve setting off a nuclear device in a major city. It could kill millions of people. Any coastal city would be totally vulnerable to a nuclear device in the hold of a tramp steamer from anywhere. But we aren’t at all thorough about searching bulk cargos. <br /><br />If we were really serious about preventing a truly disastrous terrorist attack, we would remove all those TSA people from the airports and put them to work searching the big ships and the cargo planes coming into the country.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-10296245084092291402010-10-04T11:28:00.000-07:002010-10-04T11:33:49.412-07:00Dammit, some days it's just hard not to imagine a huge conspiracy is controlling the course of events in the world.The US is now facing the greatest concentration of wealth at the top that we have seen since 1929, and we seem to have a Forever War going on. Even during the Clinton years, between the two Iraq wars, we continued a program of "low-intensity" warfare against Saddam. We have now shifted our focus to Afghanistan--that eternal sink of imperial ambitions--and will likely take on Pakistan next, followed by Iran. <br /><br />The New Democrats in the US seem to be imperialist Republicans minus the hoods and burning crosses. The nation is being swept by anti-intellectualism: fundamentalist religion, climate change denial, writing Thomas Jefferson out of the history books, and the like. The public schools are being reduced to serf academies where students learn the minimal literacy and numeracy skills required to make them useful for their masters, while those parts of the curriculum having to do with critical thinking, artistic expression, and general understanding of the world are being subverted by various strategems. <br /><br />A large portion of this country seems to think they live in a universe equipped with different physical laws than the one I believe myself to inhabit. Somehow, I think this is no accident. People who are willing to believe that humans coexisted with dinosaurs are also likely to accept the notion that their interests will best be served by deregulating the corporations and predatory investment banks, and that their true enemies are the trade unions, the Muslims, the socialists, and the brown-skinned unfortunates who pick their crops under brutal conditions for desperately little pay.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-21444017549728154932010-05-22T09:27:00.000-07:002010-05-22T09:30:08.352-07:00I think we will look back on the BP disaster as a tipping point.Its impact on national and world consciousness will rival and perhaps ultimately exceed that of 9-11.<br /><br />In a corporate calamity like this one, the most important thing from the corporate perspective is to first, minimize the significance of the disaster and second, to shift blame. <br /><br />The corporate overlords seem to have lost control of the message entirely on this one. <br /><br />It's hard to minimize the impending destruction of that heavily populated, economically significant, favored fantasy land of everyone's imagination that is the Gulf. And everyone seems to know who to blame. For example, Rush's meme about "eco-terrorism" crashed on takeoff. Contrast this situation with the Exxon Valdez. In that case, they were able to cover up much of the extent of the damage, at least from the view of the general public, largely because it happened in such a remote area. Nobody really much cared about Alaska. They didn't have fantasies about retiring there on a yacht. Also, Exxon was pretty much able to pin the whole rap on a drunken sea captain. No such luck in the Gulf. Everyone knows that it was deliberate corporate malfeasance, aided and abetted by deregulating politicians, that lay at the core of the tragedy. <br /><br />As for the effects of this disaster on world consciousness, this could be the blow that ends the public's "abuse cycle" with Big Oil. After this beating, we're maybe finally gonna leave that sonuvabitch for good. We really mean it this time.<br /><br />And it may be a wake-up call on the environment. The problem with "global warming" as a mobilizing cause is that it's slowly incremental (boiling the proverbial frog), erratic, and taking place in a complex, chaotic, and unpredictable system, the global climate. It's a lot easier to get the point of an oil-drenched bird than it is of a half-degree rise in mean temperature (even though the latter is part of a far more lethal process in the long run).<br /><br />In short, global warming is pretty abstract. Oil on the beaches is concrete. 9-11 was concrete. People mobilize to concrete threats far more readily than to abstract ones.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-48054834869996247172010-03-31T07:39:00.000-07:002010-03-31T07:41:42.574-07:00THE LITTLE BOY WHO CRIED WOLF (Updated)There once was a shepherd boy who had the job of tending to the sheep that belonged to a village. He was watching over the sheep as they grazed in a clearing in a forest when a great pack of wolves appeared out of the forest and began chasing the sheep and scattering them. The boy cried “Wolves, wolves!” and all the villagers ran away because they were frightened. <br /><br />"Don't cry 'wolf', shepherd boy," said the villagers after they straggled back to their village, "You frighten people with talk like that!"<br /><br />A few days later, the wolves returned and the boy cried out again, "Wolves! Wolves! The wolves are chasing the sheep!" The villagers again ran away, leaving him alone to protect the sheep as best he could.<br /><br />“We told you not to frighten us with these stories of wolves,” said the villagers. “We don’t believe you. We don’t think you ever saw any wolves.” From then on, they simply ignored the boy when he sounded the warning about wolves; they did not run away, but neither did they come to help him protect the sheep.<br /><br />The wolves grew ever bolder, seeing that they had to contend with only one small boy. One day they summoned all the wolf packs from the surrounding countryside to join them in a gigantic raid on the flock. They dragged all the sheep off into the woods to eat at their leisure. They killed the shepherd boy and took his body along with them as well.<br /><br />After a while the people of the village began to grow hungry for mutton, so they set out to bring home a sheep from the flock. When they got to the clearing in the forest, they found no sheep and no shepherd boy. “Look at this,” they told each other. “That thieving little boy has gone away and taken all our sheep with him. Now we know why he was crying ‘Wolf’ all the time. He was setting up his alibi.”<br /><br />The moral of the story: Truth is precious. Don’t tell it too often, or nobody will believe you.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-66704918498065517602010-01-13T08:14:00.000-08:002010-01-13T08:16:29.156-08:00How to Reform Government in a Single Great Leap ForwardThe Supreme Court appears poised to permit a massive relaxation of the rules on political contributions. I applaud this trend, but fear that it doesn’t go nearly far enough in cleaning up the tangle of rules and regulations governing our electoral process. Therefore, I would like to propose some simple reforms to make government more responsive and efficient. My grand scheme is predicated on the well-documented fact that political outcomes are decided by money, and upon the apparent intention of the Supreme Court to accelerate this trend. The genius of plan I am about to propose is that it turns what is often perceived as a flaw or failure of the system into a virtue. <br /><br />The first step in my plan is to permit unlimited contributions to politicians. Any politician will be allowed to take any amount of money from any source at any time. <br /><br />Second, the cumbersome electoral apparatus will be junked. Instead, all political offices will be put up for bid. Anyone who wants to be a Senator, for example, will submit a bid of so many dollars for the job, and the job will be awarded to the highest bidder. Once in office, the politician will receive no salary; instead, each will be expected to support him/herself on a fee-for-service basis, by selling individual votes on proposed legislation, charging a substantial fee to introduce proposed legislation written by corporate lawyers, etc. <br /><br />This plan is startling in its elegant simplicity and cost-effectiveness. It can be made to work at all levels of government, from the local city council to the Presidency. In a single stroke it converts the government from a financial drag on society into a center of profit. Furthermore, in the same stroke, it restores honesty to the system. No longer will politicians have to maintain a pretense of serving the interests of people without money. No longer will we be plagued with financial scandals. And no longer will the public need to be distracted from Nintendo, celebrity news, and reality television by so-called “electoral politics.”<br /><br />This general philosophical approach can be extended beyond the Executive and Legislative branches to the Judicial branch as well. The whole expensive edifice of the Court system, at all its levels, can simply be replaced by a simple system in which court decisions will be determined by a fair and honest bidding process. This can be made to work handily in both civil and criminal matters. If a poor person steals from a rich person, the rich person can pay to have the criminal convicted and punished. As a side benefit, I predict that our jail and prison systems would fall into disuse, at a great cost savings to society, as offended rich people opt to use cheaper means, such as fines, floggings and hangings, to punish those who have offended against them. As a second side benefit, I predict that the whole apparatus of appellate courts could be eliminated--if a person can’t afford to buy a verdict in a lower court, they will also no doubt be too poor to buy an appellate decision.<br /><br />The more I think about this system, the fewer flaws I can find in it.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-4648044686332031462009-12-19T11:13:00.000-08:002009-12-19T11:15:20.838-08:00McCain/Palin.Those four syllables are the only things that arise in my mind to counter my growing suspicion that I should maybe have ridden the Kucinich train all the way into the wall in 2008. I knew Dennis couldn’t win; in fact, his intransigence may have made him a poor and ineffective President. But casting a vote for him would at least have informed the world that I didn’t think anyone else in the candidate field was sufficiently progressive for me.<br /><br />So instead I gritted my teeth and worked for Barack Obama, my second-to-last choice for the nomination. I grew to like him more and more, to foolishly start projecting my hopes upon him. He promised things. Not everything I might have wanted, but enough. I believed him. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” I told myself. In a very large room full of other Democrats, I watched him win. We were ecstatic. I was on a natural high for a week. <br /><br />I had hoped for an FDR-style commitment to the people and the infrastructure of the nation. Here is our great chance to turn an impending disaster into a grand opportunity to put the nation to work building ourselves a modern infrastructure for the new millenium. High-speed rail, a new power grid charged with green energy, a fiber-optic network, universal internet, universal health care to lift that terrible burden from the poeple and revitalize our small businesses…<br /><br />Now it’s 13 months later. The American Empire is doing well under the new management.<br /><br />Maybe we have a few less troops and mercenaries in Iraq, but we’re building up and digging in for the long haul in Afghanistan. We have twice as many mercenaries of various stripes in our national defense system as we do government troops.<br /><br />The criminals of the last administration are at large, doing their part for the new gang by raging and raving against them, helping to maintain the illusion that we now have something fundamentally different.<br /><br />The banks are bailed out and doing nicely. They have successfully bought off any feeble attempts to re-regulate them. They are busily engaging in the same shady gambling schemes that brought the crisis down on our heads in the first place. Small local banks are folding, and people are losing their homes to foreclosure.<br /><br />Foreign sweatshops continue to pour their plastic trash into our big-box stores, where we line up to buy that trash and drag it home. Our labor unions continue to fail.<br /><br />Our privacy rights have evaporated virtually unnoticed. <br /><br />We have become ever more deeply embedded in our role as serfs in the service of corporate America, and, ever increasingly, the corporations have life-and-death power over us. Whether you live or die will be decided, to a degree even greater than before the Health Care Deform debacle, by how much money you have to feed into the maw of the machine. The IRS will be there to exact the punishments for those who resist. <br /><br />And who are the villains, the obstructionists, the social saboteurs in the view of <span style="font-style:italic;">la Regime Nouveau?</span> None other than lunatic-fringe moonbats like Howard Dean, Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders. And St. Dennis, of course.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-73984976539135119782009-11-22T07:39:00.000-08:002009-11-22T09:00:42.307-08:00Is $200,000 a year an "excessive" income?This question was asked by somebody on an online political forum; what follows was my reply to the inquirer:<br /><br /><br />Nobody is saying $200k is "excessive"-- depending on what you do to earn it. There are things I wouldn't do for $200k a year.<br /><br />I think what you're getting at is whether people who make a lot of money should pay more taxes. That is a complicated issue. First, recognize that people who make, say, $200k a year pay the same rate as everyone else on the first $50, 100, 150k of taxable income. If a new higher tax bracket is placed at $200k, only that portion of his total income above $200k is taxed at the higher rate. <br /><br />And recognize that people are generally only talking about income and estate taxes when they get themselves all worked up about the unfair taxation of the rich. In today's system, someone who makes $100k pays the same amount into Social Security as does that $200k guy. They both pay the same sales tax on a tube of tooth paste. They both pay the same amount of property tax per dollar of assessed valuation. And, to the extent that the rich guy's income derives from capital gains that he didn't work for, he will pay a lower rate than that $50k guy who had to actually go out and sweat for his bread. Warren Buffett summarized the situation nicely when he famously pointed out that his secretary pays a higher percentage of her income in taxes than he does.<br /><br />Third, take note of the fact that the rich guy is likely to make more use of government services than the poor guy. Not only do the courts devote 90% of their resources to settling disputes among businesses, but the fire departments and police forces are primarily concerned with protecting the property of the rich. Even the streets in the rich part of town are likely to have fewer potholes than in the working-class neighborhoods so those Bentleys and Ferraris ride smoother and retain their resale value a bit better.<br /><br />And lastly, recall that our gigantic military, on which we spend nearly as much as the rest of the world combined does on their collective armed forces, serves mostly to guarantee the free flow of oil from parts of the world that we have seriously annoyed with our political and military meddling. Money that could be much more wisely spent on building a green infrastructure at home instead goes to maintain and protect the flow of oil dollars into the coffers of America’s most profitable corporations--corporations that even now, in the midst of a worldwide recession, continue to chalk up record profits thanks to the generosity of American taxpayers. <br /><br />All in all, it's hard to see how the rich are going to be hurt much, or even manage to argue they are being treated unfairly in any sense, if they are asked to come forward with a few more cents on the dollar so that some less-fortunate people can have adequate health care.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-25290134549673443152009-11-11T18:55:00.000-08:002009-11-11T20:54:59.770-08:00Veterans days always make me feel weird.Veterans days always make me feel weird.<br /> <br />Especially when someone says "Thank you for your service." You see, I was an infantryman in Vietnam, but I did not serve willingly. I was drafted, forced into a deadly form of involuntary servitude, and whatever illusions I might originally have had about the rightness of the war were quickly torn from me when I saw what we were doing to the innocent people, the sacred soils, the beautiful waters and jungles and mountains of that tormented land.<br /><br />"No, don't thank me," I want to say. "Forgive me. Forgive me for participating in that awful event in your name. If you must thank me for something, then thank me for joining the movement to stop the war when I got home. Maybe thank me for the things I have tried to do for the castoffs of society--the mentally ill, the developmentally disabled, the emotionally damaged products of chaotic and abusive homes who have gone on to fill our jails and prisons. But don't thank me for going off to participate in the destruction of a foreign land whose residents never intended any harm to you or me."Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-7958001142398944082009-09-21T18:16:00.000-07:002009-09-21T18:17:55.936-07:00People on the left often make a fundamental error in thinking about the right.We keep thinking that the so-called conservatives are simply misguided and deluded. If we could only educate them, if we could only share our insights with them, they would then give up their destructive impulses and join with us in making a better world. We call them stupid when they fail to see things our way. <br /><br />This perspective is wrong. It's not about intelligence, It's not about knowledge. it's not about an inability to understand the issues that marks the difference between the right and left in today's America, whether you're discussing corporate power or universal health care or global warming. They are not stupid. They are doing exactly what they need to be doing in order to advance their interests as they see them.<br /><br />There are plenty of smart people in the corporations, plenty of smart people fighting to deny us a publicly financed health care system, and plenty of smart global-warming deniers. <br /><br />The issue lies not in intellect but in something more fundamental. The Ojibwe Indians I knew in my youth would have called it "good-heartedness." It is variously expressed in small and inconspicuous acts of charity, or in great ways, as when a President pushes through a national retirement plan intended to keep the elderly out of poverty. It is about love and empathy. It is about valuing other people. It is about simple decency.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-70032415032240656772009-07-28T19:54:00.000-07:002009-07-28T19:57:50.115-07:00It happened again.Someplace attained a record, unseasonable cold temperature, so my favorite wingnut sent me a link to the story with a snide comment about “Global warming, huh?” This happens every time there is an unusual snowfall or late frost or whatever. <br /><br />Now, the fact of the matter is, every one of these incidents can be seen as further evidence for the global-warming model. As the earth absorbs heat, it does so very unevenly. There are certain hotspots that warm up more quickly, and other cold spots that take on heat more slowly. The result is that there is more total heat energy in the system, and the atmosphere of the earth functions like one large and very complex heat engine that becomes wilder and more unpredictable in its actions as more energy pours into the system. <br /><br />Yes, overall, the temperature is going up (very rapidly on a geological scale, but apparently much more slowly on a human scale). But what is increasing much more rapidly than the mean temperature is the total craziness in the weather machinery. More energy, absorbed very unevenly at various points on the globe, means greater turbulent variation in high and low-pressure systems, dramatic and unpredictable shifts in ocean currents, and a general increase in events that are outside the norm. <br /><br />Put in statistical terms, the variance is increasing much more rapidly than the mean. The net result is that the wild swings in the weather are much more dramatic than are the comparatively small, but cumulatively disastrous, upward trends in temperature. We observe a set of record low temperatures in some locations that seem to cancel out the string of record high temperatures that are occurring elsewhere. But when we attend merely to the individual temperatures, we are missing the main point, which is that we are seeing unprecedented extremes in the weather, and it is these extremes--both high and low--that are the signature of global warming.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-18725571251234037942009-07-24T17:22:00.000-07:002009-07-24T17:31:41.219-07:00In Defense of Lou DobbsLou Dobbs has apparently been giving air time to the "Birthers," i.e. the loonies who question President Obama's birth certificate, believe he was born in Kenya, etc. The Southern Poverty Law Center sent a letter to CNN calling for Lou to be fired for his racist lunacy. I see the issue somewhat differently, so I wrote the following letter to CNN:<br /><br /><br />July 24, 2009<br /><br />Jonathan Klein<br />President<br />CNN/U.S.<br />1 Time Warner Center<br />New York, N.Y. 10019-6038<br /><br />Dear Mr. Klein:<br /><br />Please do not give in to the demands of the Left that Lou Dobbs be censored on the topic of Obama’s birth documentation. Doesn’t the political Right deserve fair treatment? If, as Stephen Colbert once observed, “The truth has a well-known liberal bias,” then isn’t the Right entitled to present a counterbalance of disinformation and deception? As your rival Fox News has so effectively demonstrated, there is ample room for half-truths, deceit, and outright lies in American journalism. Story fabrication in order to advance conservative causes has a long history in the American press, and there is no good reason why you should surrender this viable and even lucrative market to the likes of Hannity and O’Reilly. Put simply, if we don’t have Lou to lie to us, we will have to turn elsewhere to find the fuel to sustain our bigotry and otherwise indefensible hatred, and your viewership can only suffer if you shortsightedly deny a voice to the opinions of the batshit-crazy segment of the population.<br /><br />Sincerely,<br />(Jim)Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-32770394360809093062009-07-16T17:22:00.000-07:002009-07-16T17:26:16.078-07:00Another Take on Freedom of InformationI'm a psychologist, and have to do a fair amount of reading in order to keep up with my field--reading that requires access to professional journals. Unfortunately, it is difficult for me to get to the journals I need because I am a private practitioner with no academic affiliation. I do have access to some journals because of (expensive) memberships in professional societies, but there are many journals I cannot get to online. As a result, I end up having to submit individual article requests to libraries, write to authors for reprints, beg copies of articles off colleagues, etc.<br /><br />There are starting to appear some open-access, peer-reviewed online journals. This is a development I heartily applaud. I hope this trend becomes the norm for scientific and professional publishing in the future.<br /><br />In the meantime, however, in most cases we're stuck with the old model of journals put out by for-profit publishing houses and the consequent profit-driven limitations to access. I don't mean to denigrate the profit system per se, but the restricted nature of primary-source scientific information pisses me off, especially when I consider that my tax dollars go to support much of the research to which I am being denied access. But beyond that, I think everyone should have access to this kind of public information. Why should a poor person be blocked from knowledge easily available to the oppressor class?<br /><br />There has to be a better way to finance the journals. For example, why not add a small amount onto each research grant sufficient to pay for the dissemination of the findings of the research? Or, for those rare research projects without public or corporate financing, perhaps some scheme for government subsidization of publication. Any journal that publishes publicly financed research should be reimbursed from public funds for publishing the results of the research. Seems like a simple and nearly perfect solution to me.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-84687610774576548752009-07-05T08:30:00.000-07:002009-07-05T10:39:15.663-07:00The Curmudgeon's Guide to Health CareI must say I favor a free-market approach to health care: a system in which you can choose your own providers, and where you don't get punished for being taken to the wrong hospital by the wrong ambulance while you're unconscious. You know--a truly competitive system where the good providers get lots of patients and the poor ones get driven out of business because word gets around and nobody will go to them. A system where you and your provider decide what's needed for your care without interference from the corporate beancounters.<br /><br />Our present system anything but a free market for consumers. Your insurance company dictates what doctor you can see, what hospital you can go to, and whether or not you're going to get that expensive test or procedure. As long as you are well, you are a profit source for them. If you get sick, you become a problem. If you get too expensive to them, they're pretty good at finding ways to dump you. And, as a side-effect of our ingenious employer-based health care payment system, if you get too ill to keep your job, you will automatically end up on the discard heap.<br /><br />Very few of us can actually afford the kind of care that we might someday need--bypass surgery, say, or cancer treatment. We therefore must have a system in which relatively small payments from the many who do not need expensive interventions help to pay for the relatively few who do need expensive care. That means that the young and healthy need to pay in to the system during those periods of their lives when they aren't using much health care so that their elders can be cared for--and so that someday they too can be cared for in their time of need.<br /><br />No for-profit insurance scheme will ever provide free-market health care. By their very nature, insurance companies are structured to make profits by denying needed services. They reward the providers who cost them the least, not the ones who save or improve the quality of the most lives.<br /><br />The great paradox of the Western world is that only way to provide a free market for providers is through universal, tax-funded single-payer health care. In this system, the government serves as the collector and disburser of health care funds. You pay into the health care system--ideally through income taxes--and when you need health services, you go to the doctor of your choice, she treats you, she submits her bill to the government, and they pay. That's the way it works in much of the civilized world, and that's the way it should work here.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-1348981427973642362009-05-08T07:59:00.000-07:002009-07-05T10:41:17.292-07:00Something strange is happening in America--something no virtually no living American has seen as an adult.<br /><br />People just aren't drinking the Kool Ade any more. The cat's out of the bottle. The genie's out of the bag. There ain't no goin' back now. We have the power, we have the popular will on our side. There's a new game in town, and the politicians had better learn it.<br /><br />A new poll says 52% want to legalize pot despite a decades-long, intensive propaganda campaign to keep it illegal.<br /><br />65 or 70% support Obama and/or his supposedly liberal policies, despite a concentrated effort by the M$M media to sink him.<br /><br />Harry and Louise be damned--57% of Americans would be willing to pay higher taxes in exchange for universal health care.<br /><br />A large majority would gleefully see the rich start carrying their share of the tax burden.<br /><br />Everybody, from both parties, is Goddamn sick of seeing bailouts of the corporate criminals who caused the current economic mess with their greed.<br /><br />Hell, even the teabaggers, if they could figure out exactly what it is they're mad about, would discover that they too are just damned sick of being exploited by the corporate ruling class.<br /><br /><br />The Republicans and DINOs (who, combined, sadly constitute majorities in both houses of Congress) ignore these signs at their peril. If they manage to thwart the public will on these and a few other hot-button issues, I suspect they are going to find themselves confronting some unwelcome and unexpected turns of events in 2010.<br /><br />The fact is, the rules of the game seem to be changing. All that corporate lucre will only guarantee your re-election if the public is willing to buy your propaganda message. The poll data I mentioned above indicates to me that this is not necessarily the case any more. People are finding new sources of information, largely online, but elsewhere too. Just as the establishment forces managed to capture public radio and turn it into a corporate mouthpiece, Amy Goodman appears on a thousand little low-power FM stations across the land. Internet radio, satellite radio--new voices appear everywhere, singing songs the corporations don't want you to hear.<br /><br />Since the beginning of the Republic, with a few slips (such as in the period between 1932 and the end of the War), the rich have controlled public opinion. "America is a center-right country," they screeched.<br /><br />Well, despite the best efforts of the propagandists, the public doesn't seem to be falling for it any more. The majority is discovering itself. That is to say, we are becoming aware of the fact that we are indeed the majority. There is perhaps nothing more powerful on the political scene that a populism that has suddenly discovered its own popularity.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-28045186788149426762009-04-15T12:15:00.000-07:002009-04-15T12:35:12.287-07:00THE LIBERAL AGENDA<span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;">I've been hearing a lot lately about some Liberal Agenda</span></span> <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">that President Obama is about to inflict on </span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">us unwilling Americans any second now. Well, this kind of talk scared me as much as the next red-blooded patriot, so I did what any right-thinking person would do under these circumstances. I rushed out and bought up all the 9mm pistol ammunition I could find in the local sporting goods stores</span></span>. <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">(In case you didn't know it, 9mm is by far the most popular round for home defense.) </span></span><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Turns out all I could find was 3 very overpriced boxes because everyone else seems to have thought of doing this before me.</span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Well, maybe that was for the best, considering that I don't own any 9mm firearms.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Then I started to wonder--what exactly is this Liberal Agenda, anyway? I asked around and nobody down at the Dew Drop Inn seemed to know exactly for sure, so I started searching with the Google and whatnot, and I finally actually found a copy posted on one of those liberal socialist websites. So, without further ado (whatever that is), I present to you--</span></span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;font-family:georgia;"><span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">THE LIBERAL AGENDA</span></span><br /></div><br />All NASCAR events will immediately be outlawed.<br /><br />Alcohol will no longer be served in public places, but tavern and bar owners may apply for re-licensure to serve marijuana and effete coffee-based beverages.<br /><br />Abortions will be available on demand for everyone, and will be mandatory for any pregnant woman who is not a card-carrying Democrat.<br /><br />Gay marriage will be legalized, as will inter-species domestic partnerships.<br /><br />All military vehicles such as tanks, airplanes and ships will be painted in rainbow colors to signify inclusiveness, and will be emblazoned with pink triangles.<br /><br />Atheism will immediately be proclaimed the State religion. Anyone refusing to evolve into an atheist will be sent to a Darwinian re-education camp.<br /><br />Illegal immigrants will be given preference in federal hiring.<br /><br />Church services will be outlawed everywhere and replaced with Sunday-morning sensitivity training and yoga.<br /><br />All guns will be confiscated immediately. People who voluntarily turn in three or more firearms will be awarded free surfboards.<br /><br />All faith-based charity funding will cease immediately, and the funds will be diverted to the new Adopt-A-Terrorist programs that will be starting up in every state.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-32304802079032337782009-04-08T16:01:00.000-07:002009-04-08T16:22:04.003-07:00Life Sentences for TeensCNN is carrying a story today about kids sent to prison for life. According to their story, "at least 73 U.S. inmates -- most of them minorities -- ... were sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison for crimes committed when they were 13 or 14, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization in Alabama that defends indigent defendants and prisoners. <p> "The 73 are just a fraction of the more than 2,000 offenders serving life sentences for crimes they committed as <a href="http://topics.cnn.com/topics/juvenile_justice" class="cnnInlineTopic">minors</a> under the age of 18." </p><br />As I read these unGodly statistics, I am once more reminded that in Ameria, life imprisonment is for retail killers only. Wholesale murder isn't illegal.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Case in Point #1:</span> The Ford Pinto Memo.<br /><br />In the 1970's, Ford put out the Pinto with a defect that caused the car to explode in a ball of flame if rear-ended. They then ran a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether or not to modify the car to eliminate the defect. Here is their calculation (from Wikipedia):<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >Fatalities Associated with Crash-Induced Fuel Leakage and Fires</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >Expected Costs of producing the Pinto with fuel tank modifications:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >* Expected unit sales: 11 million vehicles (includes utility vehicles built on same chassis)</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >* Modification costs per unit: $11.00</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >* Total Cost: $121 million</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" ><= 11,000,000 vehicles x $11.00 per unit></span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >Expected Costs of producing the Pinto without fuel tank modifications:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >* Expected accident results (assuming 2100 accidents):</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >180 burn deaths</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >180 serious burn injuries</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >2100 burned out vehicles</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >* Unit costs of accident results (assuming out of court settlements):</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >$200,000 per burn death*</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >$67,000 per serious injury</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >$700 per burned out vehicle</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >* Total Costs: $49.53 million</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" ><= (180 deaths x $200k) + (180 injuries x $67k) + (2100 vehicles x $700 per vehicle)></span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >Thus, the costs for fixing the Pinto was $121 million, while settling cases where injuries occur was only $50 million. With such a difference in costs, Ford decided to manufacture and market the Pinto without fuel tank modifications.</span><br /><br />Nobody was ever held criminally responsible for this decision.<br /><br />*By the way, the $200k and $67k figures for the average value of a lost or injured adult life is drawn from the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) calculation of the estimated costs to society of automobile accidents. It is not a low-ball figure fabricated by Ford. (For example, the $200k for death was calculated by adding estimated direct costs of $163k -- such as loss of future earnings, plus $37k of indirect costs -- such as hospital and insurance costs, legal and court costs, victim pain and suffering, funeral costs, and property damage.)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:verdana;" >Case # 2:</span><br /><br />The Bush Administration prevaricated their way into an elective war using supposed intelligence information that they knew to be bogus. Total cost, at least 1 million lives, and the ruin of the cultural artifacts of an ancient civilization.<br /><br />Penalty? None.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-75929172398916443302009-03-31T09:08:00.000-07:002009-03-31T11:21:00.039-07:00Every Democratic President in my lifetime has disappointed me in some measure.And I was born during the reign of King Franklin and Queen Eleanor.<br /><br />You expect that of Presidents. They just aren't going to do everything to your satisfaction. I still have high hopes that Obama will be a far better President than any of his predecessors since FDR, but I don't expect him to do everything to suit me. And I reserve the right to squeal, tantrum and pout when he does not. There has never been a President, at least a Democratic President, who didn't need his feet kept to the fire by the very ones who voted for him.<br /><br />Yeah, I'm unhappy with the appearance of several major policy thrusts right now, particularly the apparent shuffling off of single-payer health care and the apparent giveaways of taxpayer money to the super-rich. However, I also recognize that, in the case of the health care proposal, we don't know anything about what sort of plan is shaping up, and Obama has something of a track record of feinting toward his opponents and then, if they don't cooperate to the extent he wants, veering away from them and essentially doing what he intended to do in the first place. The case of the stimulus package and the the Recalcitrant Republicans is an example; the current GM situation is maybe another. So he could end up putting out a health care plan that is much better than it now looks.<br /><br />Likewise the bailout of the American financial empire. The fact of the matter is that I am not an economist, I don't fully understand the ramifications of everything that Obama and his advisers have to be considering, and anyway there may still be a feint-toward-the-enemy move in there somewhere.<br /><br />I am glad that the Keynesians are back in force--Stiglitz, Krugman, Roubini, Galbraith--and I have the sense (following Robert Reich's analysis) that the Obamites are Keynesians at heart. But there is a vast world of difference between being an academic (or even applied) economist and being a politician who has to balance off many different factors, economic and otherwise, in arriving at a policy for a nation. The economists only have to deal with one part of reality--a part that doesn't include the political realities, or the need to sometimes make moves that appear to be 90 or even 180 degrees from the place where you want to end up.<br /><br />So I know where I want to go with health care in grand terms, and I know that ultimately I want the common people to have a greater share in the wealth they produce, and I want to have a clean, thermally stable, and healthy environment. But sometimes you just got to trust they guy you hired to do the job for you. You need to keep reminding him of the outcome you want, but you have to let him turn the knobs and levers to get you there.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-90403800804699481542009-03-28T20:21:00.000-07:002009-03-28T20:23:29.184-07:00A Call to Action. The supposed Democratic majority in the Senateis a MINO--a Majority in Name Only. There are all these Blue Dog types running loose, and neither Obama nor God seems to have a way of getting them into line. Somehow, even while they're effectively decapitated and bleeding to death out their neck, the Republican corpus seems able to keep its components in line. They can get those votes without intraparty dissent in the House, and can get within maybe 3 votes in the Senate. I don't know what their secret is, other than threatening not to support dissenters in upcoming elections, but their Congressional leaders got some kinda mojo on the rank & file.<br /><br />We don't have anything like that. It's not even a matter of herding cats. It's a matter of herding cats who think they're ocelots. It seems obvious that neither the President nor the leadership can get them with the program on the major legislation that not only defines us as a party, but that lays the groundwork for the resurrection of the nation. THIS IS NOT TOLERABLE. If the Goddam leadership can't break their lips loose from the asses of Corporate America, there is only one force left that can do it.<br /><br />Us.<br /><br />And we have to start right now. Critical votes, votes that will decide parts of our destiny for much longer than the next generation or two, are coming up. Health care. War or peace. Our energy and environmental future. We can't just sit around and hope for Primary challenges in 2010. We can't wait for public financing to eventually happen and decrease their reliance on deals with the Devil for campaign funding. We have to get their attention right now. To put it into technical terms, we have to scare the living shit out of them.<br /><br />They need to smell torches burning in the night, and see the glint of fork tines in the flickering light of the flames.<br /><br />Can we do that? Frankly, I don't know. But I do know that there is nothing more important in national politics right now.<br /><br />Here are the steps.<br />1) We identify our blue-dog targets.<br />2) We let them know precisely what we want<br />3) We convince them that if they don't do what we want, we will have their heads.<br /><br />For step 3, each BD's constituents will have a special role of communicating with them, but you don't have to be a constituent. All you have to do is let them know, preferably in writing, exactly what you want on a case by case basis. One letter or fax for each issue. Let them know that you are watching and that, while you cannot vote directly in their election, you will be sending a campaign contribution. It will go to them if they have proved themselves to you, or it will go to a more liberal Primary opponent if they have not. Then people start bombarding the papers with letters to the editor, holding rallies, calling them out wherever they show up in public, and generally making them painfully aware that they are dealing with a wave of united public activism, and the choice is theirs. They can either ride the crest to victory or be smashed beneath it.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-53646240564646147902009-03-28T13:20:00.000-07:002009-03-28T13:23:03.167-07:00The only problem with Madoff's Ponzi schemeis that it wasn't big enough.<br /><br />At $50 billion they give you a prison term. At 5 trillion they give you a bailout.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-48516866911141983182009-03-17T07:45:00.000-07:002009-03-17T07:46:53.126-07:00The Nightmare of Universal Health CareThe whole purpose of a health insurance company is to collect fees from the insured and to distribute as much as possible of those funds to the executives and owners of the insurance company. This is done by several means--for example, by increasing the cost of the insurance premiums, by denying and restricting services, and by reducing or withholding payments to providers after they deliver authorized services. Health insurance companies are among the most efficient methods in our economic system for transferring wealth from the lower classes to its rightful owners, the wealthy.<br /><br />It should be clear to anyone who thinks about it that any single-payer, universal health-care plan would totally defeat the whole purpose of health insurance. The “owners” of the system would be the public at large. The executives would either be government employees or bureaucrats operating under the government’s thumb, who would be perversely motivated to provide actual services to the insured.<br /><br />In fact, the whole enterprise would end up frittering away virtually all the money put into it on providing care for the wretched masses rather than enriching its owners. Moreover, as experience in the rest of the industrialized world shows, once any such system gets put in place, it will be virtually impossible to ever return to a normal and sane profit system, because the public will very quickly become addicted to the idea of getting health care that actually meets their tedious little needs rather than being satisfied with whatever the insurance companies decide to let them have.Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5076035837883897688.post-82524480948376337462009-02-27T16:53:00.000-08:002009-02-27T17:01:31.243-08:00Why so many homeless vets? And what should we do about them?<div class="jmessage-body">Every war has left us with a hard core of spiritually injured veterans who subsist somehow on the margins of society. With the unprecedentedly high incidence of subtle brain injuries, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and similar conditions in our new crop of veterans, combined with our failure to evaluate and treat them during the Bush years, I suspect that we may be facing a set of problems that will profoundly affect the character of our society for many years to come.<br /><br />The vast majority of vets from previous wars have managed to reintegrate themselves into society, not always quickly, and usually painfully, but nevertheless in some measure successfully. What's different about the ones who didn't make it, the ones living under the bridges or sleeping on heating grates or freezing to death in an abandoned basement somewhere, dressed in tatters, hand locked around the neck of a liter of rotgut?<br /><br />Well, most of those people are addicts or alcoholics or both. Some are psychotic as well. Most of them began their addictions when they were still in the military. The psychoses mostly showed up a little later.<br /><br />A funny thing about addictions and addicts--people say "He's an addict" and lean back as if they have not only explained something, but have given themselves an excuse not to get emotionally involved. They treat the addiction as if it were the root cause of the problem, then they assume that the addiction arises because of some moral failing in the addict, so it's really the veteran's own fault that he's sleeping under the bridge, and that relieves us of the obligation to be concerned. What a wonderful, comforting blanket of self-justification for inaction one can weave.<br /><br />The problem is, addictions don't just arise out of thin air. People start using drugs and alcohol for a reason. And, incidentally, the addictions are not primarily physiological problems. Cut off the supply to one drug, and they will simply switch to another. The meth epidemic began when people could no longer get cheap cocaine.<br /><br />Addictions are not about poor moral fiber, and they are not primarily about physiological dependence. They are about something else. They are about drugging away psychospiritual pain. People do drugs for the most part because the drugs quiet the demons in their heads. People get those demons, for the most part, as the result of experiencing severe, emotionally damaging abuse, neglect, or trauma. The dry psychiatric term for these demons is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD for short.<br /><br />There is nothing quite as effective as a war for creating psychospiritual demons. Thousands of veterans are still living with the demons they acquired in Vietnam, and we are about to be flooded with hundreds of thousands of new demon-haunted veterans from Iraq.<br /><br />Most drug and alcohol treatment programs are quite ineffective. One massive study of inpatient VA programs showed that only 20 to 25 percent of the graduates were still abstinent after one year. The reason for this is that the treatment programs work on what is often termed a "medical model." They believe that they are dealing with physiological problems, that the major issue for the user is coping with physical cravings for a substance to which his body has become habituated. But the physical habituation is only part of the problem, and in most cases is the least part of the problem. Conventional treatment does not address the real issues, which are the psychological ones.<br /><br />We have a new generation of techniques for coping with PTSD and related emotional problems brought on by exposure to extreme abuse and trauma. One such method is called EMDR (short for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). Another involves a combination of brainwave biofeedback and talk therapy. However, these methods are relatively expensive because they are conducted in series of individual treatment sessions and require extensive training on the part of the therapists.<br /><br />Thus the veteran problem is by no means an easy one. Most of these individuals will require a combination of expensive psychotherapy and substance abuse treatment. Some of them, particularly those with severe mental illnesses, will require hospitalization while treatment is provided. They will need help learning new job skills. They will need housing, food, clothing, medications, training, and jobs.<br /><br />We will only manage to cope with the problem of homeless veterans when we own up to its enormity and commit ourselves to providing the care and help that they need. Are we willing to do that? Are we willing to do that at a time when we find ourselves trembling on the verge of a new global depression? </div>Jimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01105629467720563235noreply@blogger.com0