cylons, clones, and corporations

Last night I watched the SyFy channel’s new series Caprica, and I have to say I’m worried. It won’t be that long before we have the technological capability to create cyborgs and human clones and what happens when these creations demand the right to vote. They could both easily out number us real humans very quickly. Do you want to live in a country where the political power of soulless cyborgs dominates and controls the lives of us ordinary soul infested humans? [Okay you quibbling SyFy junkies, I know that one of the premise of Caprica is that Cylons have souls — they believe in a monotheistic god — but really now, can a machine have a soul?).

I mean we already have the political precedent established — you don’t have to be flesh and blood to be a person and have political rights. Corporations have had personhood since the 19th century–the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution was perverted by the Supreme court of that day to achieve that. And this week, today’s Supreme Court reasserted that the corporations as persons have the same political rights as flesh and blood persons. The problem of course being that corporations have a hell of a lot more money and power than most flesh and blood persons.

The time is right to prevent the future take-over of our nation by cylon-like cyborgs and human clones. We need a new amendment to the Constitution that defines once and for all that a person is only a biological human created by the combined sperm of a male biological human and a female biological human. This would not only protect us against future threats (think not only cyborgs and clones, but also aliens from other planets — you think we have an alien problem now!) but would also end the tyranny of large corporations in our political process. If they are no longer persons, then their political rights would disappear. The humans within them would still have full rights, but not the corporations.

This is an amendment that both the Tea Partiers and commie pinkos like myself could get behind. Those Tea Partiers don’t like big banks, big insurance companies, big oil, etc. any more than I do.

 

waste in academia

A friend of mine, an employee of a public college system in a state that’s not quite South and not quite Midwest, told me a tale of wanton waste that would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Seems the head honcho of this public college system has a real thing for marketing slogans. Over the last five or six years he’s paid out money to public relations firms to think up three different slogans or “tag lines” for the college’s in the system to use when presenting themselves to the public. The most recent of these slogans was conceived as part of a lobbying campaign by this public college system to get their state government (which is verging on bankruptcy like every other state in the Union) to give them more money and instead take money away from some other area — like roads, prisons, police, or one of those other unnecessary budget items.

So one of their action designed to convince the governor and state legislature that their college system is more deserving than anything else that state government pays for, they expended money to have some one think up a slogan/tag line, and had entirely new stationary printed up for all the many colleges in their system — and told the colleges to discard all the stationary with the “old” slogan (which was instituted less than three years ago at which time new stationary was printed and the previous stationary was discarded).

What a waste of money and trees.

 

It’s all Obama’s fault

The power elite/corporate class got scared. President Barack Obama got himself elected without PAC money, without corporate money. He did it with millions of little donations (like mine).

Keith Olbermann got it wrong, corporatocracy isn’t any thing new, it’s been with us for at least half a century if not longer. But Obama showed a different way, a way of getting elected without corporate financing. That scared them.

So the corporations and the power elite turned to the Supreme Court. A court that was stacked by the previous corporately backed and funded presidents. And the court did their masters bidding. They made the political process safe from democracy again.

 

Call of Duty: Class Warfare – a modest proposal

This is getting old — it seems like this happens every year at this time. Some new, extremely violent video game with a released timed to take advantage of Christmas buying, makes headlines for its shockingness and lawlessness; headlines that just serve to boost the sales of the game.

Well I have a proposal for a new game that could be ready for the Christmas 2010 season. I call it “Call of Duty: Class Warfare.” It will involve lots of gun play and blood and gore, and its scenarios will all be set in high-rise corporate headquarters and bucolic corporate campuses of America — and maybe some exclusive resorts and golf courses.

The targets will be the overpaid CEO’s and CFO’s of Americas top 500 corporations, especially those that ended up needed federal bailouts in 2008 and 2009. The players as “class warriors” will carry automatic weapons and earn points for kills — the higher the salary of the corporate head the more points. For example knocking off Laurence J. Ellison of Oracle who currently makes $557 million a year would be worth 10 times as many points as a hit on Mark V. Hurd of Hewlett-Packard who is only taking home $51 million this year.

Given the class warfare theme, there would be loss of points, or potential loss of play for collateral deaths of class comrades including secretaries, janitorial workers, or other working class stiffs that might be in the same locality as the “capitalist pig” targets.

Now this is a computer/video game I would buy — and I bet I’m not alone. None of those T-Partyers seem to be particularly fond of Wall Street and the corporate elite and they love guns!

 

death panels revisited

Us folks on the far left should a) actually listen to the folks on the far right and b) tell the truth. How many left/liberal folks have you heard stand up and belittle conservatives for jumping from a proposal for funding advance directives (i.e., living wills) to being concerned about “death panels”? A lot I imagine. Did any of these left/liberal folks ever take even 60 seconds to try to figure out where all you conservatives might have gotten the idea from — or consider that there might actually be some logic to seeing a link between those two things.

The link is Ezekiel J. Emanuel, M.D., Ph.D. Dr. Emanuel is Head of the Department of Bioethics at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health. He is currently on extended detail as a special advisor for health policy to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. These are facts obtained from the National Institutes of Health. Other facts also available from the NIH website include that Dr. Emanuel developed The Medical Directive, a comprehensive living will that has been endorsed by Consumer Reports on Health, Harvard Health Letter, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. also, he has published widely on the ethics of clinical research, health care reform, international research ethics, end of life care issues, euthanasia, the ethics of managed care, and the physician-patient relationship in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, JAMA, and many other medical journals.

One particular publication by Dr. Emanuel is frequently cited by the far right is “Where Civic Republicanism and Deliberative Democracy Meet” in The Hastings Center Report, Vol. 26, No. 6, In Search of the Good Society: The Work of Daniel Callahan (Nov. – Dec., 1996), pp. 12-14. Official URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3528746 –however, since you have to have a paid subscription to see the whole article at this URL, here’s an alternative that that has the entire (brief as it is) article in pdf format: http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/Where_Civic_Republicanism_and_Deliberative_Democracy_Meet.pdf. The portion of this paper that is most frequently cited by those on the right is taken out of context from this larger quote:

Thus, it seems there is a growing agreement between liberals, communitarians, and others that many political matters, including matters of justice–and specifically, the just allocation of health care resources–can be addressed only by invoking a particular conception of the good. We may go even further. Without overstating it (and without fully defending it) not only is there a consensus about the need for a conception of the good, there may even be a consensus about the particular conception of the good that should inform policies on these nonconstitutional political issues. Communitarians endorse civic republicanism and a growing number of liberals endorse some version of deliberative democracy. Both envision a need for citizens who are independent and responsibile and for public forums that present citizens with opportunities to enter into public deliberations on social policies. This civic republican or deliberative democratic conception of the good provides both procedural and substantive insights for developing a just allocation of health care resources. Procedurally, it suggests the need for public forums to deliberate about which health services should be considered basic and should be socially guaranteed. Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity–those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations–are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia. A less obvious example is guaranteeing neuropsychological services to ensure children with learning disabilities can read and learn to reason. Clearly, more needs to be done to elucidate what specific health care services are basic; however, the overlap between liberalism and communitarianism points to a way of introducing the good back into medical ethics and devising a principled way of distinguishing basic from discretionary health care services.[emphasis added]

So here we have a current advisor to President Obama, who is well known for developing the definitive living will (advance directive), who has also published work that refers to the use of “public forums” to make decisions about who should and who should not be guaranteed health care paid for with public dollars. [Note no where does it say that people would be denied health care, just that they would not be guaranteed public money for that care.] So if I’m a conservative, who has been trained since the days of Ronald Reagan to distrust everything about the federal government — except of course the military — and I dislike the current president intensely, perhaps because of his race or just because I think he’s a socialist and I’ve been trained from infancy to have a knee jerk reaction to socialists and socialism, then I learn these facts (above) about someone who is clearly in a position of influence on developing the health care plans of the current administration, well then….

I’m not saying that I is reasonable or correct to decide that a provision in the legislation to pay for a visit to your family doctor to discuss a living will is the same thing as advocating “death panels,” but I am saying that this connection did not come out of thin air, there is a logic — however, twisted — to it. This is why we should listen to the far right. The things they are concerned usually have some shred of truth and reality in them, even if they are highly distorted.

That gets me to part b) telling the truth. Read Dr. Emanuel’s short article. He is speaking truth — we cannot as a society afford to provide all the technologically, medically possible treatments to all the citizens of this society. We do not do it now. Now, we allow the problem of not having enough resources to provide all treatments to all people to be solved by corporations. We let Humana and Cigna and Blue Cross/Blue Shield determine what treatments will and will not considered “basic” and who will be entitled to care. Depending upon the state and on the insurance company, various studies estimate that between twenty and twenty-five percent of claims to insurance companies are denied as “medically unnecessary.” One example in a CNN article from two years ago was surgery for cleft-palates in children in the United States, are frequently denied as being for “cosmetic” purposes.

We should be honest, both the right and the left know that our society cannot afford to provide every possible medical treatment to every single individual in society. The difference between the right and the left is who they want to have make the decision and on what basis they want the decision to be made. The right wants private corporations to go on making the decision about who gets treatment and what treatment they get, and the right wants the basis of the decision to be a monetary decision, based on who has the money to pay. The left wants the citizens of the country to make decisions through the political process, and to based those decisions on societal consensus. What Emanuel suggests is that one criteria that might be used has to do with contributions and participation in society. But that is only one possibility, the idea is for members of society themselves to discuss and debate this and set ground rules.

I suspect that one of the problems that the right has with the left on this, is that folks who are conservative is basically distrusting of human nature, and do not trust their fellow citizens to make fair and equitable decisions. Another problem is that most people don’t want to be responsible for making decisions about life and death, they’d rather leave that to faceless corporations that they can then bitch about if they don’t like what happens, rather than feel responsible for the lives of others.

 

an antique economy

Read something just now that hit me square between the eyes:  our economy is a relic of the 17th century.  We’re trying to deal with 21st century problems with an economic system (capitalism) whose basic principles and mechanisms were designed in the 1600’s. 

This is one of those facts I’ve always known, but some how it took someone else to point out the absurdity of this.

 

and what’s wrong with Europe?

The best thing about newspapers on-line is the comments section. Every local and regional newspaper has its on-line presence and most provide on-line readers with the opportunity to post their reactions to news articles. One learns more about the hearts and minds of Americans from reading these comments than one can possibly learn from a Gallop or Harris poll.

One comment that I see frequently, on any post that has anything to do with American politics, is some one from the right decrying the Obama administrations efforts on the economy, health care or the environment and offering the dire warning that if we are not careful we’ll end up just like Europe.

Which leaves me to scratch my head and say — exactly so, and good for us if we do!

Some smarty pants out there is likely to respond with a “if you love Europe so much why don’t you just go live there?” Because I was born here; this is my home, and I just want it to be as good a home, as comfortable a home, as safe a home, as other industrialized countries. Besides which, outside of England, they don’t speak English and being a product of American schools I don’t speak any thing but English.

Every time I see this comment I wonder, exactly what is it that these folks think is so awful about Europe?  What is the source of their images of Europe? What do they think they know that I don’t know?

 

…and Michael Jackson is still dead.

Is it just me, or does the news coverage of Michael Jackson’s death remind any one else of the classic Saturday Night Live News bit from its very first season during which Chevy Chase gravely intoned “and Francisco Franco is still dead”?

Michael Jackson was an enormous musical talent, and a very troubled individual. The American music scene is diminished by his loss, as is his family, especially his children. But, what is happening with the cable news networks is ridiculous — until Sarah Palin had the good grace to resign and Kim Jong Il blessed us with some missiles, it was impossible to find any news about anything other than Michael Jackson for an entire week.

I mean no disrespect to Mr. Jackson or his family or even to his millions of fans. I’m just floored that every time I turned on cable news for an entire week, the only story I could find concerned Michael Jackson’s death. Where is my hour of political sanity with Rachel Maddow?

 

fear and maybe a little loathing in the heartland

Every time I hear some politician, political pundit, or news person use the phrase “red state” I feel a sense of disorientation.  I thought a “red state” was one that had gone communist — you know like the old Soviet Union or Cuba or North Korea or Vietnam.  Am I the only child of the sixties that thinks this is just plain weird?

So, here I sit in a “red state” — wishing with all my radical left heart that this really was a red state — contemplating the New York times map of political shift, that shows the area where I live has shifted more to the right in the election this week compared to 2004, while most of the rest of the country has moved more to the left.

I can’t help but wonder why? Particularly since most of the people I associate with not only do I think they would gain enormously from “left” programs in areas like health care, they think so too, at least as long as one discusses the specifics of programs and leaves off labels. . When I talk with to people in this region(which I do alot!) about the specifics of what they want to see happen with health care, jobs, energy, etc., the suggestions they make and the ideas they like (when detached from political labels) are in fact the ideas of liberal politicians. 

I am left to conclude that it all boils down to religious weirdness, xenophobia and homophobia.

 

rampaging paranoia

Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean some one isn’t out to get you!

When I visited my favorite political blog this week and read the comments on last Sunday’s post, I was both glad and scared to see that at least two other people out there share my paranoia. It’s been more than twenty years since there was a serious attempt on the life of a president (or presidential candidate), and however, I fear that Obama is a magnet for one now.

Some of us are old enough to remember what this country was like in the months following Martin Luther King’s assassination — riots in almost every large city with a significant African American population.  That historical moment will pale in comparison to the wave of violence that would hit this country if Obama were to be assassinated. The violent reaction would come not just from blacks, but from whites as well, especially young people. 

Moreover, such a wave of violence is likely to be met by a much more extreme repression than occurred in 1968. My real fear — that the result would be a loss of democracy altogether in a police state.