The American Dream

The American dream — a good life in exchange for hard work — is slowly dying.  Take, for example, poor Phil Mickelson.  He won a couple of million dollars last year playing golf and also received well more than sixty million dollars in endorsements.  For those of you who are unsure of who he is, watch some of the golf tournaments on TV and he is always the one who is complaining about something at the end of the tournament as to why he didn’t win.  Johnny Miller, the acerbic TV announcer, described Mickelson once as being lucky he had a short game because otherwise ‘he’d be selling insurance.’  Now Mickelson is complaining about something else; he claims that his take home pay is now less than thirty million dollars a year and it seems that figure is hardly enough to live on, even though he has been raking in that kind of money for the past ten to fifteen years.  He complains that his taxes are now 62% of his income, a figure that sounds both boastful and exaggerated to make people feel sorry for him, along with his arthritis (how much income does he get for his TV ads for an arthritis drug?).  Phil lives in California and says he may have to move because of the high tax rates.  California collects a state income tax at a maximum marginal tax rate of 10.30%, spread across seven tax brackets. Like the Federal Income Tax, California's income tax allows couples filing jointly to pay a lower overall rate on their combined income with wider tax brackets for joint filers. Inasmuch as the maximum tax rate federally is 39%, the true amount of Mickelson’s taxes is at most 49% of his income, meaning that his after tax take home income is certainly greater than 30 million dollars each year.  Investment income is taxed at the rate of 15% and if Mickelson is paying 62% of his income in taxes, he should get himself another accountant.  If Mickelson has managed to save any of the millions upon millions of dollars he has earned, his net worth probably approaches a half a billion dollars or greater. He likes gambling, and from reliable reports he apparently gambles amounts of money greater each year than 99% of the population makes.  I have advice for you, Phil.  Your incessant whining about taxes is tiresome.  A typical male worker’s income in 2011 ($32,986) was lower than it was in 1968 ($33,880), about 800 times less than what you take home, and he does pay taxes too.  Suck it up.  Be grateful for what you have and stop complaining about it.  You want more money for your family?  Stop gambling.   

Just saying . . .

The Detroit Public Schools in Exile

My blog today consists simply of posting the writing of a person far more qualified than I am to comment on the ongoing state of affairs in what was formally known as the Detroit Public Schools.  Elena Herrada is an elected member  of the current Detroit School Board and over the past year, I have developed a high opinion of this remarkable person for her relentless efforts on behalf of Detroit schoolchildren and the citizens of Detroit.

The Educational Achievement Authority is a violation of Brown v Kansas. Will we stand idly by?

by Elena Herrada on Thursday, December 27, 2012 at 10:41pm ·

Dear friends;
I was copied on correspondence tonight between the Michigan Dept of Education director Mike Flannigan and Marianne Maguire, outgoing elected state board of education member. I am one of 11 elected board members of the Detroit Public Schools. The Emergency Manager in Detroit is appointed by the governor, who also set up a parallel district called the "Educational Achievement Authority," which mirrors the "Recovery District" in New Orleans. In every way. Detroit is to Michigan what the 9th Ward is to New Orleans. We did not have a hurricane, so the narrative of failure was created. We have been under state control for 8 of the last ten years and the state has bankruptred our District and then taken us over because we are in financial crisis. The same was recently done to the City Council, which is separate from the Detroit School district. There was a hard push on the part of the philanthropic community and non profits, not the least of which were Southwest Solutions and New Detroit, Inc. which would have profited directly if they succeeded in putting the schools under "mayoral control," which is code for corporate control. That failed because the People stopped "mayoral control." Next, the corporate forces took over the city. School board members remain in place, having been elected by the People. However, the State Attorney General, with our own tax dollars, filed a lawsuit against us for being elected. I am not kidding; no judge wants to take this case, so it has been postponed one time after the next. The judges actually say things like " the law may change, so we need to wait and see what happens." ( Judges Murphy, Gillis and next Berry have postponed hearings while waiting .... )
Although the People of Michigan repealed the Emergency Manager law, the EM has remained in place. The governor simply ignored the will of the voters and instead created another Emergency Manager bill that cannot be repealed.
But the important matter here is the long term consequences of this takeover. A new and separate school district which is state wide but with only Detroit in it so far, is a very inferior school district which many students have no choice but to attend. The students have to attend this failing district because of where they live-- in the areas designated for failure. The students are concerned about their future and some have created a "Social Justice League." They intend to be future plaintiffs and not future prisoners, despite the plans being made for them by people like Governor Snyder and Mike Flannigan, who is said to have assured the white districts that their children would not have to attend the Educational Achievement Authority schools; only students in the Black (and Latino) districts will attend the privatized EAA. No union, no standardized tests, Teach for America in droves, for the poorest and most vulnerable students.
If you believe this is a violation of Brown v Kansas, please contact us to add your voice to this important issue. Thank you for reading this, and please feel free to contact our research task force, full of informed and militant supporters of justice for students in Detroit, Benton Harbor, Flint, Muskegon Heights, Highland Park, and wherever students are being pushed into the School to EAA pipeline.
In faith and solidarity,
Elena Herrada
Detroit Public Schools District 2
In Exile

Aha, I’ve Got It!

Shortly after I woke up this morning, I started thinking that the last year was a major win for me.  Over the past year, scientific evidence revealed that two major habits of mine, coffee and dark chocolate, were no longer vices to be avoided but are, in fact, healthy; a win-win situation if there ever was one.  But this morning, I hit the trifecta.  As reported in the New York Times, a “study by Katherine M. Flegal and her associates at the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health, found that all adults categorized as overweight and most of those categorized as obese have a lower mortality risk than so-called normal-weight individuals. If the government were to redefine normal weight as one that doesn’t increase the risk of death, then about 130 million of the 165 million American adults currently categorized as overweight and obese would be re-categorized as normal weight instead.  To put some flesh on these statistical bones, the study found a 6 percent decrease in mortality risk among people classified as overweight and a 5 percent decrease in people classified as Grade 1 obese, the lowest level (most of the obese fall in this category). This means that average-height women — 5 feet 4 inches — who weigh between 108 and 145 pounds have a higher mortality risk than average-height women who weigh between 146 and 203 pounds. For average-height men — 5 feet 10 inches — those who weigh between 129 and 174 pounds have a higher mortality risk than those who weigh between 175 and 243 pounds.”

Wow.  As I read these words, I stand up from my computer and strut to the closest mirror where I proudly examine the girth of my abdomen while I take my first complete breath in years without a conscious attempt to hold my stomach in.  My substance, my soul, my essence is changed overnight from a sniveling, struggling, overweight, old (putting aside the baldness for a moment) guy to a higher level.  Will my body shape now become the new standard for all those skinny types around me to worship?  Am I destined for Hollywood where millions of theater-goers will flock to the silver screen to admire and scream as my portliness (forgetting still the baldness) as I create a new standard for action figures, i.e. walking rather than running?

Such good news, this trifecta.  I pause in my reverie of the moment to briefly reflect what caused our society to make such a big deal about weight in the first place.  Paul Campos, a professor of law at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in an editorial in this mornings NYTimes writes  “categorizing at least 130 million Americans — and hundreds of millions in the rest of the world — as people in need of “treatment” for their  [overweight] “condition” serves the economic interests of, among others, the multibillion-dollar weight-loss industry and large pharmaceutical companies, which have invested a great deal of money in winning the good will of those who will determine the regulatory fate of the next generation of diet drugs.”

Gee,  there others who also realize that big Pharma, in feeding the beast of corporate profits, will say and do just about anything to sell stuff to “treat” conditions that we didn’t even know need treating; e.g., Viagra and Cialis (ED) and Rogaine and Propecia (baldness).

Just saying.

Stand Up Americans

Men, we all need to grow up and realize how a small group of money men is using us, via the vehicle of the NRA, to make money and more money by creating and selling an emotional climate that all of us should be ‘packing.’ There's a need here for strong womens' voices to tell us that “Guns are America’s insanity.  And it is getting worse, not better.”  There’s a need for strong men to listen to these voices. 

Let’s take a brief look at three examples of my contention of insanity which all occurred after yesterday morning’s tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  The Michigan House of Representatives recently passed and sent to the governor a bill that makes it easy for people to carry concealed weapons in schools. After the massacre, a spokesman for the Michigan House Speaker Jase Bolger, said that it might have meant “the difference between life and death for many innocent bystanders.” implying that the school teachers and school administrators should have been armed. Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, blamed Friday’s shooting on gun control advocates: “Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands. Federal and state laws combined to ensure that no teacher, no administrator, no adult had a gun at the Newtown school where the children were murdered. This tragedy underscores the urgency of getting rid of gun bans in school zones.”  Former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee reacted to the tragedy by asking that since prayer is banned from public schools, "should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?" Apparently Huckabee is not familiar with the separation of church and state embodied in our constitution, but that's another story.


“We need to look at what drives a crazy person to do these kind of actions,” said Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, one of the highest-ranking Republicans in the House.  I respond by saying that these people do these things because they can.  And one of the major factors that they ‘can’ is the easy accessibility of weapons of mass destruction like assault weapons with no conceivable purpose for existence other than taking the lives of other human beings.  Surely, no hunter would use an assault weapon, nor police officer, nor target shooter.  It was an assault weapon that was used to commit yesterday's murders.  It was assault weapons that were used in Aurora, Colorado and in Portland, Oregon.  

Women and men of America; we all need to stand up and do the right thing, the responsible thing, the thing that is most consistent with the spiritual values of our country.  Love your neighbor.  Don’t look for an excuse to shoot him.  Don’t contribute to a emotional climate that says, "Shoot first and ask questions later.”  We need to start somewhere.  Contact your state and national elected officials.  Let them know you want a permanent ban on assault weapons.  Tell them to put politics aside.

Just saying . . .

Not So Fast

The word “lunatic” will be stricken from federal law under legislation that passed the House on Wednesday and is headed to President Obama for his signature. “The term ‘lunatic’ holds a place in antiquity and should no longer have a prominent place in our U.S. code,” said Representative Robert C. Scott, Democrat of Virginia, shortly before the 398-to-1 vote in the House. The word, derived from the Latin word from moon, arises from ancient beliefs that people could become “moonstruck” by lunar movements.  But how we will understand Rick Santorum if this word is removed from our lexicon?  Who but a lunatic could conceivably think an attempt by the United Nations to help disabled people around the world is a direct assault on “us and our family.”  This week, spurred on by Santorum’s ‘lunatic’ thought processes, the Senate refused to ratify a U.N. treaty on the subject. The vote, which fell five short of the necessary two-thirds majority, came right after 89-year-old Bob Dole, the former Republican leader and disabled war veteran, was wheeled into the chamber to urge passage.  The rejected treaty, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, was based on the Americans with Disabilities Act, the landmark law Dole co-sponsored.  But Santorum was upset about a section on children with disabilities that said: “The best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.”  After the vote failed, “We did it,” Santorum tweeted in triumph.   I strongly urge President Obama to veto the legislation striking the  ‘l’ word, because how else could anyone describe Santorum?

Just saying . . .

Mumbly, Grumbly Party of No

I have looked back at my blogs over the past four years and have found that I was quite critical of Obama a number of times.  My areas of concerns included his apparent inability to conduct negotiations properly; For example, he negotiated with himself and rejected a single payer option on Obamacare.  What do I mean by negotiating with oneself?  Consider that there are two parties to an issue.  One of the parties starts the process of negotiations by offering the solution which he/she would like to reach.   Then (normally) the other side responds by offering its proposals.  The process continues with each side winnowing down its various goals and objectives to a point when it can be said that a decision as to the outcome has been reached.

When someone is said to be negotiating against himself, he offers a change in his own initial position before a response is elicited from the other side.  For example, a guy agrees to sell a used car for ten  thousand dollars.  The prospective buyer says “I can’t afford that much.  How much do you really want for the car?”  The seller then offers to sell the car for seventy five hundred dollars and the buyer walks away a happy man because without even entering the process of negotiation he has walked away with a good deal. i.e. the seller has negotiated with himself.  In the conduct of negotiations, the corollary to the principle of not negotiating with oneself is to never begin the process of negotiating unless one is willing to walk away without reaching a conclusion.  In the current situation over avoiding the fiscal cliff, the Republicans, the mumbly grumbly party of No, is behaving exactly like the Romney/Ryan ticket did during the entire campaign (which, in my opinion, cost them the election).  The RR combo then, and the party of No now, refuses to say what it wants; i.e., they are not participating in the negotiating process.  Obama finally gets it.  He is refusing to negotiate against himself.  He is in a position of strength in doing so because if the party of No continues its refusal, the public is smart enough to realize who is the party responsible for placing the American economy at risk.

Just saying . . .

Hell yes, it was racist

Since the landslide election of President Obama last Tuesday (in which fifty five percent of white women voted for him) I have been inundated with comments from all my white old guy private country club republican contacts.  Perhaps the most succinct way to describe these comments is the statement repeated time and time again that the outcome is racist because 95% of African-Americans voted for Obama. One of the recipients of my blogs e-mailed me with the following question; “I'd like your comments as an "independent" on how this guy got elected.  Do you think race had anything to do with it?”  It is noteworthy that the e-mail contained a reference to a website that described a story about a “newly elected state assembly in Michigan [which] includes at least one ex-con: Brian Banks, who's been convicted eight times for felonies involving bad checks and credit card fraud, won a seat representing the east side of Detroit, Harper Woods, and the tony Grosse Pointes.”  I will leave it to the readers of this blog to determine what the reason for including that reference was and just point out that the article contained a photograph of Mr. Banks who, incidentally, is black.  I would also point out that Michigan has no ‘state assembly’, but facts do not appear to be important to the throngs that are now screaming about the racist result.

Getting back to the question, my answer is “Hell yes, I think racism had something to do with the outcome of the election.”  I think there was a tremendous backlash against voter suppression laws bringing more minorities to the polls, not fewer. Republican efforts to block the votes of minorities were attempted in a wide variety of ways; Photo IDs, deliberate misinformation as to places of polling and misprinted ballots to name, but a few. In Ohio, for example, blacks jumped from being 11 percent of the voters in 2008 to 15 percent this year after Republican government officials attempted to eliminate pre-election day voting only in cities with large black populations. The same thing occurred in Florida requiring minority voters in big cities to stand in line up to nine hours on election day in order to exercise their right to vote.  Quite frankly, any black person would be crazy to vote for the party that was attempting this crap.  Particularly when Romney, the leader of the pack, stood silently by, waiting to capitalize on the success of voter suppression.  Perhaps, the best way to understand the racist element to this election is to consider what happened after it became clear that President Obama won.  A protest by students at the University of Mississippi against the election results grew into crowd of about 400 people shouting racial slurs. Two people were arrested on minor charges. The university said in a statement Wednesday that the gathering at the student union began late Tuesday night with about 30 to 40 students, but grew within 20 minutes as word spread. Some students chanted political slogans while others used derogatory racial statements and profanity, the statement said.  Ted Nugent, the poster child for racist idiocy, tweeted his hundreds of thousands of followers “Pimps whores & welfare brats & their soulless supporters hav[sic] a president to destroy America,” and “What subhuman varmint believes others must pay for their obesity booze cellphones birthcontrol abortions & lives.”

For the last four years we have listened to this type of claptrap in a variety of forms and the results of this election brightens my heart and my mind as the citizens of the United States have overwhelmingly rejected this bigotry and hatred.

Perhaps the best advice I can give to my republican friends is the same advice offered to Americans by Justice Scalia after the Supreme Court handed the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000;   You lost so “Just get over it.”