Whether in government, business, unions, or any other human activity, we can find people who are rogues, clowns, politicians, or statespersons. And sometimes a person can be any of these at various times.
Rogues are those who are only for themselves. They may merely be selfish or they may work to destroy others. Clowns are those who have no connection to reality. Politicians are those who try to work with others to accomplish something they can’t do by themselves. Statespersons are those who have a vision for the common good and succeed in implementing some portion of that vision.
Richard Nixon was an example of someone who was all of the above as candidate and President. He was a rogue in his first campaign for the Senate when he misrepresented Helen Gahagan Douglas as a Communist. He was a rogue when he authorized the Watergate break-in. He was a clown when he said “I am not a crook.” He was a politician in that he did work on legislation that was supported by many in both parties, for example Marshall Plan funding. He was a statesman when he looked beyond his anti-Communism to visit and recognize China.
The genial Ronald Reagan was certainly not a rogue. He was a clown in that he thought the Laffer Curve showed that decreasing taxes would increase prosperity. He was a politician in that he did get legislation passed that had significant bi-partisan support. He was a statesman in that he worked with Mikhael Gorbachev on a nuclear arms treaty.
A good portion of the current Republican candidates are clowns and at least one is a rogue. They are clowns in their continued attacks on President Obama, including continuing to label him as a Muslim. They are clowns in their continued belief that giving more money to the rich will make the general public richer. Their schemes will make the whole country poorer with an even more rapidly deteriorating infrastructure and more rapidly warming climate. And they don’t seem likely to be good politicians because they seem incapable of compromise to get something done. As I looked at a picture of them in the Star Tribune of 2016-01-17, I thought that the only gray matter was their gray uniforms, I mean gray suits (“Give candidates a little time to think and a little time to speak – you know, kind of like presidents have.”, Stephen L. Carter, Bloomberg).
As for the current Democratic candidates, they may be politicians working with others, but I don’t see them as statespersons.
Rogues in business include those who ran Enron (into the ground) and those who gave misleading information to get people to sign mortgages they couldn’t afford. The Koch brothers are certainly rogues in that they buy a lot of legislation at the state and local levels that is advantageous to them and detrimental to the people.
The rogues in Oregon do not represent the people. Those “patriots” occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge are only after some Ayn Rand “freedom” to do what they please rather than the freedom to govern ourselves. The Tea Party types seem to completely ignore the General Welfare clause of the Constitution and the establishment of a Congress to provide laws. If law enforcement doesn’t bring these rogues to justice, it will be our misfortune (malheur in French).
The magical thinking of the anarchists in Oregon is of the same ilk as another set of rogue anarchists: the so-called Islamic Jihadists of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Boko Haram. These “Islamic” rogues no more represent Islam than the Bundy anarchists represent the American people. Consider that there are only about 100,000 “Jihadists” but 1.6 billion Muslims
As a measure of how non-Islamic these rogues are, consider that they may not even have copies of the Qu’ran. “Because it has nothing to do with the Quran. They didn't even have the Quran; they didn't want even to give us a Quran.” - Al Arabiya News, 2015-02-04, reporting on Didier François’ interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
If you want a better sense of Islam, see www.trueislam.com.
But “Islamic” rogues are not the only misusers of “religion”. If we are a Christian nation, why do some “Christians” call for the expulsion of Muslims? Why do some “Christians” call for bombing women and children because there are “Islamists” in an certain area. What kind of Christian nation would have nuclear weapons that would indiscriminately kill thousands of innocent citizens?
On the one hand, we had the rogue Fred Phelps whose Westboro Baptist Church would picket veterans’ funerals as a protest against gays. I couldn’t confirm this memory but I did find a long list of non-Christian behavior. On the other hand, we have the Christian statesman, Martin Luther King Jr., who eschewed hate and worked hard to spread Christian love, even against those who would hurt him.
We don’t get to choose many of our rogues, but we can choose many of our politicians and statespeople. But to do that, we have to show up at each and every election. If we stay away, we bring on the clowns, and the rogues, too. Every vote counts and your vote counts only if you cast it.
Also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, 2016-01-21 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2016/01/22/6588_rogues_clowns_politicians_and_statespersons.
Showing posts with label Eisenhower. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eisenhower. Show all posts
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Sunday, June 22, 2014
Corporations, persons, tools, and fools
Corporations are persons? Someone said that you know a corporation is a person when Texas executes one.
How did we get to this situation that corporations have “freedom of speech” and many other freedoms granted to actual living individual persons?
Corporations were originally created to give monarchs and other nobility a piece of the economic action. As the merchant class rose in the cities, the monarch couldn’t tax them because they had no land. By creating a corporation of a given business, the monarch could insist on a few shares of a corporation and rake in more in profits than he would have in taxes. Also, by giving a monopoly to a corporation, he protected it from competition.
These monopolies soon expanded far outside the monarch’s country with colonization of other parts of the world. An example is how British law forbade the American colonies from producing a long list of items or importing goods through any other organization than the British East India Company. Was the British East India Company composed of Adam Smith’s “order of men” who “were not to be trusted” with proposing legislation? The Boston Tea Party was an act of defiance against the corporate monopoly enjoyed by the British East India Company.
Is today’s Tea Party a tool of corporations who want to extract minerals without paying the full cost of such extraction? These corporations are waging legislative, administrative, and public relations campaigns to allow them to operate on corporate terms. Are these corporations composed of Adam Smith’s “order of men” who “were not to be trusted” with proposing legislation? Also as the British East India Company was a “foreign” entity, many of the extractors of today are entities from out of state or even out of the country.
Does “Open for Business” or “Business-friendly” apply to locally-owned companies or to large corporations that will move elsewhere whenever they think an area is not bending to their wishes? Does it mean that large corporations will be given subsidies, including reduced taxes, that aren’t given to locally-owned businesses? If we want truth in government, maybe we should insist that states and localities that claim to be “Business-friendly” should admit being “Corporation-friendly”.
Can you find “corporation” in the U.S. Constitution? That was deliberate. Many of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention remembered well the dominance of a corporation over Colonial affairs and did not want a repeat of that stranglehold. Many of the national politicians of the time had a vision of craftsman and farmers plying their goods in local markets.
But with advances in transportation, the economic situation changed drastically. To build canals required capital. To gather capital, groups of people had to organize to buy shares and/or borrow money. If the enterprise failed, the shareholders didn’t want to be held individually responsible for the losses of the company beyond their own financial contribution. Wouldn’t you? Thus, the limited liability corporation came to the United States.
With the coming of the railroads came ever larger corporations. The Illinois Central Railroad hired a lawyer to get special privileges for it like breaking unions, hiring foreign workers, and gaining privileges not held by people. Yep, that lawyer was the “of the people, by the people, and for the people” guy. Apparently, the Civil War opened his eyes to many things. This excerpt from one of his letters shows this rather strongly:
“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
My, how political parties morph over the generations! I think only two Republican Presidents have had similar misgivings.
Many decades later another war-time leader worried about the “military-industrial” complex. But one of his predecessors pulled a corporate branding trick on the American people. The Department of War was now to be called the Department of Defense. Now corporations weren’t in the business of selling war machines but were fulfilling “defense contracts”.
One of the political ironies is the political party the claims the federal government can’t do anything right bends over backward to lavish more money on the military-industrial complex. Do they not know that snafu and fubar are terms coined by the guys in the foxholes?
So, are corporations the tools of the people or are the people the tools of corporations? If we let the latter happen then we are the fools.
For a lot more about the abuse of and by corporations, see “Life, Inc., How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back” by Douglas Rushkoff.
Mel owns shares in a few corporations and almost always votes against their overpaid executives and boards.
How did we get to this situation that corporations have “freedom of speech” and many other freedoms granted to actual living individual persons?
Corporations were originally created to give monarchs and other nobility a piece of the economic action. As the merchant class rose in the cities, the monarch couldn’t tax them because they had no land. By creating a corporation of a given business, the monarch could insist on a few shares of a corporation and rake in more in profits than he would have in taxes. Also, by giving a monopoly to a corporation, he protected it from competition.
These monopolies soon expanded far outside the monarch’s country with colonization of other parts of the world. An example is how British law forbade the American colonies from producing a long list of items or importing goods through any other organization than the British East India Company. Was the British East India Company composed of Adam Smith’s “order of men” who “were not to be trusted” with proposing legislation? The Boston Tea Party was an act of defiance against the corporate monopoly enjoyed by the British East India Company.
Is today’s Tea Party a tool of corporations who want to extract minerals without paying the full cost of such extraction? These corporations are waging legislative, administrative, and public relations campaigns to allow them to operate on corporate terms. Are these corporations composed of Adam Smith’s “order of men” who “were not to be trusted” with proposing legislation? Also as the British East India Company was a “foreign” entity, many of the extractors of today are entities from out of state or even out of the country.
Does “Open for Business” or “Business-friendly” apply to locally-owned companies or to large corporations that will move elsewhere whenever they think an area is not bending to their wishes? Does it mean that large corporations will be given subsidies, including reduced taxes, that aren’t given to locally-owned businesses? If we want truth in government, maybe we should insist that states and localities that claim to be “Business-friendly” should admit being “Corporation-friendly”.
Can you find “corporation” in the U.S. Constitution? That was deliberate. Many of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention remembered well the dominance of a corporation over Colonial affairs and did not want a repeat of that stranglehold. Many of the national politicians of the time had a vision of craftsman and farmers plying their goods in local markets.
But with advances in transportation, the economic situation changed drastically. To build canals required capital. To gather capital, groups of people had to organize to buy shares and/or borrow money. If the enterprise failed, the shareholders didn’t want to be held individually responsible for the losses of the company beyond their own financial contribution. Wouldn’t you? Thus, the limited liability corporation came to the United States.
With the coming of the railroads came ever larger corporations. The Illinois Central Railroad hired a lawyer to get special privileges for it like breaking unions, hiring foreign workers, and gaining privileges not held by people. Yep, that lawyer was the “of the people, by the people, and for the people” guy. Apparently, the Civil War opened his eyes to many things. This excerpt from one of his letters shows this rather strongly:
“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
My, how political parties morph over the generations! I think only two Republican Presidents have had similar misgivings.
Many decades later another war-time leader worried about the “military-industrial” complex. But one of his predecessors pulled a corporate branding trick on the American people. The Department of War was now to be called the Department of Defense. Now corporations weren’t in the business of selling war machines but were fulfilling “defense contracts”.
One of the political ironies is the political party the claims the federal government can’t do anything right bends over backward to lavish more money on the military-industrial complex. Do they not know that snafu and fubar are terms coined by the guys in the foxholes?
So, are corporations the tools of the people or are the people the tools of corporations? If we let the latter happen then we are the fools.
For a lot more about the abuse of and by corporations, see “Life, Inc., How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back” by Douglas Rushkoff.
Mel owns shares in a few corporations and almost always votes against their overpaid executives and boards.
Monday, August 08, 2011
Who needs armies?
Who is going to invade the United States? What would they gain by doing so? Who is going to invade Europe? Who is going to invade Russia? Who is going to invade China? None of these countries or regions have any serious military threats, yet they all have very large military forces. Most if not all call these defense forces, but defense against whom?
North Korea feels or claims that South Korea and the United States are threats to its security. Ironically, any threat to North Korea will be because of its own bellicose behavior.
Pakistan feels threatened by India with some cause. They have had at least three wars since their independence from Great Britain. Pakistan was founded as a religious state, and as such it has a bit of paranoia against the secular state it split from. Ironically, there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan.
Israel feels threatened by almost all of its neighbors, sometimes with reason, sometimes because of its own actions. It definitely could use more imagination in the carrot department instead of overuse of the stick.
What need does Egypt have for a large army? The large army led to a military dictatorship that, despite the downfall of Hosni Mubarak, still wields a lot of political power.
What need does Libya have for a large army? Despite the antics of Muammar Gaddafi, Europe was content to buy Libyan oil without feeling the need to invade it.
These last two countries show one of the downsides of a military that is larger than any foreseeable threat. Someone in the military decides to overthrow the government, legitimate or not, effective or not.
This is one of the reasons many of the writers of the U. S. Constitution were leery of a standing army. They saw how many of the European countries used standing armies for foreign adventures and control of the people.
Unfortunately, they were overridden and shown to be prescient about foreign adventures and control of the people. Let's see, Cuba, Philippines, Iraq, Panama, Granada, and many, many more. The Army was called out to put down many strikes. General Douglas MacArthur and Colonel Dwight Eisenhower had brought out machine guns to forcefully breakup the unarmed Bonus Army camps in Washington DC. The Bonus Army was made up of unemployed World War I veterans who felt they had been promised a bonus for their service.
North Korea feels or claims that South Korea and the United States are threats to its security. Ironically, any threat to North Korea will be because of its own bellicose behavior.
Pakistan feels threatened by India with some cause. They have had at least three wars since their independence from Great Britain. Pakistan was founded as a religious state, and as such it has a bit of paranoia against the secular state it split from. Ironically, there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan.
Israel feels threatened by almost all of its neighbors, sometimes with reason, sometimes because of its own actions. It definitely could use more imagination in the carrot department instead of overuse of the stick.
What need does Egypt have for a large army? The large army led to a military dictatorship that, despite the downfall of Hosni Mubarak, still wields a lot of political power.
What need does Libya have for a large army? Despite the antics of Muammar Gaddafi, Europe was content to buy Libyan oil without feeling the need to invade it.
These last two countries show one of the downsides of a military that is larger than any foreseeable threat. Someone in the military decides to overthrow the government, legitimate or not, effective or not.
This is one of the reasons many of the writers of the U. S. Constitution were leery of a standing army. They saw how many of the European countries used standing armies for foreign adventures and control of the people.
Unfortunately, they were overridden and shown to be prescient about foreign adventures and control of the people. Let's see, Cuba, Philippines, Iraq, Panama, Granada, and many, many more. The Army was called out to put down many strikes. General Douglas MacArthur and Colonel Dwight Eisenhower had brought out machine guns to forcefully breakup the unarmed Bonus Army camps in Washington DC. The Bonus Army was made up of unemployed World War I veterans who felt they had been promised a bonus for their service.
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