OBOF SS & MORE PART 25

WELCOME TO OPINIONS  BASED  ON FACTS (OBOF)

Name	Published
OVERVIEW	Dec. 28, 2010
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 1	Dec. 30, 2010
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 2	Jan. 10, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 3	Jan. 17, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 4	Jan. 24, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 5	Jan. 31, 2011
!!SOCIAL SECURITY PART 6	Feb. 07, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 7	Feb. 14, 2011
SPECIAL ISSUE	Feb. 18, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 8	Feb. 21, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 9	Mar. 01, 2011
SOCIAL SECURITY PART 10	Mar. 07, 2011
SS & MORE PART 1	Mar. 14, 2011
SS & MORE PART 1A	Mar. 21, 2011
SS & MORE PART 2	Mar. 25, 2011
SS & MORE PART 3	Mar. 29, 2011
SS & MORE PART 4	Apr. 04, 2011
SS & MORE PART 5	Apr. 11, 2011
SS & MORE PART 6	Apr. 18, 2011
SS & MORE PART 7	Apr. 25, 2011
SS & MORE PART 7A	Apr. 29, 2011
SS & MORE PART 8	May 02, 2011
SS & MORE PART 9	May 09, 2011
SS & MORE PART 10	May 16, 2011
SS & MORE PART 11	May 24, 2011
SS & MORE PART 12	Jun. 06, 2011
SS & MORE PART 13	Jun. 20, 2011
SS & MORE PART 14	JULY 05,2011
SS & MORE PART 14A	JULY 18, 2011
SS & MORE PART 15	JULY 19, 2011
SS & MORE PART 16	AUG. 03, 2011
SS & MORE PART 17	AUG. 15, 2011
SS & MORE PART 18	Aug.  29, 2011
SS & MORE PART 19	Sept. 12, 2011
SS & MORE PART 20	Sept. 26, 2011
SS & MORE PART 21	Oct.   10, 2011
SS & MORE PART 22	Oct.  24, 2011
SS & MORE PART 22 EXTRA	Nov.  04, 2011
SS & MORE PART 23	Nov.  07, 2011
SS & MORE PART 24	Nov.  21, 2011
SS & MORE PART 25	Dec.  05, 2011

IN  THIS  ISSUE

1.  Opening Comments.

2.  The innocent lead in.

3.  Where are the Republicans trying to take us?

4.  Quite enough.

5.  Parting thought.

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"VOTE  AN  EDUCATED  VOTE"

What is an educated vote?  It is one that has been made with as much knowledge, based on facts, not misinformation, that an individual can obtain.

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OPENING  COMMENTS

In posting 24, I said that I might be posting an extra after the Super Committee reported on their deadline.  There wasn't enough that happened to bother with an extra, or for that matter saying much in this posting about it either.  All that happened was that they failed to produce a deficit reduction plan.  There have been some other developments that I will be writing about, but as far as the Super Committee is concerned, it accomplished nothing. 

On the other hand, there has been some happenings that are important and shows more clearly, the direction the Republicans in Congress want to take us.  Some of our most respected personalities, in our country, are speaking up with, what appears to me, to be the truth and show that the actions support the conclusions being drawn. 

This posting is going to begin where posting 24 left off.

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THE  INNOCENT  LEAD  IN

After the Super Committee failed, the plan that had been agreed upon was for automatic across the board cuts to be made.  However, those cuts don't go in effect until 2013.  When they do take effect, they hit the Defense Department hard and Social Security and Medicare are exempt. 

Next is a budget for 2012. So that the business of the Government could go on, money was made available till Dec. 16th.  In that process, there was a bill put together for the Defense Department.  It was the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) (S.1867 & H.R. 1540) for Fiscal Year 2012, which would fund the Pentagon.  The bill called for $662 billion, which is $27 billion less than the President had asked for and $43 billion less than what Congress gave the Pentagon this year.  It passed in the Senate by a vote of 93-7.

The money, however, is not the big problem, which has brought the President to the point of saying he would veto the bill.  Up to now, this is what I have meant about being an "innocent lead in."  It supposedly, is to be mainly a money bill, BUT.

Besides the money aspect of the bill, it also includes provisions for allowing the U. S. military to pick up and detain, without charges or trial, anyone suspected of terrorism, including American citizens.  There was an amendment to invalidate this part of the bill, but there were 60 senators that voted against the amendment, so it stands, as of now.  The bill now goes to a conference committee with the House of Representatives to iron out any differences.    

THERE HAVE BEEN QUITE A NUMBER OF REPORTS OF CONCERN ABOUT THIS PROVISION OF THE BILL AND WHERE IT MAY BE LEADING US. 

This allows the military to operate domestically within the borders of the U. S.  Forget that the ACLU called it  "an historic threat to American citizens."  This bill is so dangerous not only to our rights, but to our country's security, that it was criticized by the Directors of the FBI, the CIA, the National Intelligence Director and the U. S. Defense Secretary.  For the first time in history, if this Act is not vetoed, American citizens may not be guaranteed their Article III right to trial.

This puts our domestic law enforcement groups in direct conflict with the military.  A lawless military empire COULD now await where U. S. "emergency war powers" trumps the Constitution. The President  becomes King and the Military enters into police state actions in violation of 130 years of Posse Comitatus law, and the Constitution becomes as quaint as the Geneva Conventions.

IN OTHER WORDS, THIS COULD BE THE BEGINNING OF SOMETHING WE SURE DON'T WANT. TELLYOUR REPRESENTATIVE AND SENATORS THAT VOTED FOR NDAA, THAT THEY SHOULD BE ASHAMED, AND TELL THE PRESIDENT HE NEEDS TO KEEP HIS PROMISE TO VETO THIS ACT. 

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WHERE  ARE  THE  REPUBLICANS   TRYING  TO  TAKE  US?

There are a number of responsible people writing various answers to this question.  It's just a matter of what one an individual respects the most and seems to make the most sense.  For me, I go for Robert Reich. 

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, Supercapitalism, and his most recent book, Aftershock.

While the following may seem lengthy to you, I feel it gives us some real food for thought, particularly in view of what we have just seen happening in the National Defense Authorization Act.

I truly hate to say this, but I believe there really is a conspiracy, of long standing, to change our Democracy.  There is the thought that there are two sets of principles in the world.  One is "Justice & Truth."  The second is "Privilege & Power."  The closer you get to Privilege & Power, the more you compromise Justice & Truth.  In order to maintain a democratic system you need large movements in society committed to issues of Justice & Truth.

President Franklin Roosevelt recognized this way back in the 30s.  He wrote:

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself.  That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group."       

                             FRANKLIN DELANORE ROOSEVELT   FDR                               

And now for the recent writings of Professor Robert Reich.  You are going to find this real interesting.

What kind of society, exactly, do modern Republicans want? I’ve been listening to Republican candidates in an effort to discern an overall philosophy, a broadly-shared vision, an ideal picture of America.

They say they want a smaller government but that can’t be it. Most seek a larger national defense and more muscular homeland security. Almost all want to widen the government’s powers of search and surveillance inside the United States – eradicating possible terrorists, expunging undocumented immigrants, “securing” the nation’s borders. They want stiffer criminal sentences, including broader application of the death penalty. Many also want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of private life.

They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, laws against child labor, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve.

They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.

It was an era when the nation was mesmerized by the doctrine of free enterprise, but few Americans actually enjoyed much freedom. Robber barons like the financier Jay Gould, the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, controlled much of American industry; the gap between rich and poor had turned into a chasm; urban slums festered; children worked long hours in factories; women couldn’t vote and black Americans were subject to Jim Crow; and the lackeys of rich literally deposited sacks of money on desks of pliant legislators.

Most tellingly, it was a time when the ideas of William Graham Sumner, a professor of political and social science at Yale, dominated American social thought. Sumner brought Charles Darwin to America and twisted him into a theory to fit the times.

Few Americans living today have read any of Sumner’s writings but they had an electrifying effect on America during the last three decades of the 19th century.

To Sumner and his followers, life was a competitive struggle in which only the fittest could survive – and through this struggle societies became stronger over time. A correlate of this principle was that government should do little or nothing to help those in need because that would interfere with natural selection.

Listen to today’s Republican debates and you hear a continuous regurgitation of Sumner. “Civilization has a simple choice,” Sumner wrote in the 1880s. It’s either “liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest,” or “not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.”

Newt Gingrich not only echoes Sumner’s thoughts but mimics Sumner’s reputed arrogance. Gingrich says we must reward “entrepreneurs” (by which he means anyone who has made a pile of money) and warns us not to “coddle” people in need. He calls laws against child labor “truly stupid,” and says poor kids should serve as janitors in their schools. He opposes extending unemployment insurance because, he says,  ”I’m opposed to giving people money for doing nothing.” Sumner, likewise, warned against handouts to people he termed “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.”

Mitt Romney doesn’t want the government to do much of anything about unemployment. And he’s dead set against raising taxes on millionaires, relying on the standard Republican rationale millionaires create jobs.

Here’s Sumner, more than a century ago: “Millionaires are the product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done… It is because they are thus selected that wealth aggregates under their hands – both their own and that intrusted to them … They may fairly be regarded as the naturally selected agents of society.” Although they live in luxury, “the bargain is a good one for society.”

Other Republican hopefuls also fit Sumner’s mold. Ron Paul, who favors repeal of Obama’s healthcare plan, was asked at a Republican debate in September what medical response he’d recommend if a young man who had decided not to buy health insurance were to go into a coma. Paul’s response: “That’s what freedom is all about: taking your own risks.” The Republican crowd cheered.

In other words, if the young man died for lack of health insurance, he was responsible. Survival of the fittest.

Social Darwinism offered a moral justification for the wild inequities and social cruelties of the late nineteenth century. It allowed John D. Rockefeller, for example, to claim the fortune he accumulated through his giant Standard Oil Trust was “merely a survival of the fittest.” It was, he insisted “the working out of a law of nature and of God.”

Social Darwinism also undermined all efforts at the time to build a nation of broadly-based prosperity and rescue our democracy from the tight grip of a very few at the top. It was used by the privileged and powerful to convince everyone else that government shouldn’t do much of anything.

Not until the twentieth century did America reject Social Darwinism. We created the large middle class that became the core of our economy and democracy. We built safety nets to catch Americans who fell downward through no fault of their own. We designed regulations to protect against the inevitable excesses of free-market greed. We taxed the rich and invested in public goods – public schools, public universities, public transportation, public parks, public health – that made us all better off.

In short, we rejected the notion that each of us is on his or her own in a competitive contest for survival.

But make no mistake: If one of the current crop of Republican hopefuls becomes president, and if regressive Republicans take over the House or Senate, or both, Social Darwinism is back.

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QUITE  ENOGH

While there is a great deal more that I should write about, I think this is enough to digest this time.  I am really concerned about the future of our country.  The change that I think some are wanting, takes a long time to accomplish, but they have been working on it for a long time.  I think that they feel they are getting closer to changing our democracy and they are becoming more daring about their moves.

A PARTING THOUGHT

Do not follow where the path may lead.  Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.    Muriel Strode

If the good Lord is willing and the creek don't rise, I'll talk with you again on December 19th. if not before. 

Floyd