Dear Mr. President

Dear Mr. president

Friday, March 27, 2015

I have heard you hold forth on the subject of infrastructure on several occasions. Your thesis, at least as I registered it, was the wisdom of moving money we are spending on the military to repair what you refer to as “our crumbling infrastructure”. You detail our infrastructure as bridges, highways, updating buildings with new technology, like windows, and energy efficient heating and cooling systems, implementing water savings architecture, using sun and wind to generate energy and so forth.

Besides the huge positive impact on the deteriorating climate conditions these upgrades would make, you point out that they would generate millions and millions of jobs.

All of this is totally “right on”. Not something that would be nice, it is an imperative if we expect to avoid the darkening future towards which we are rushing. However, while it is an imperative, it is  not enough. Neither is it the most essential of the infrastructure collapses.

Far more deadly and serious than any bridge collapse is the ongoing collapse of our educational systems. This system is the seed bed that generated and the base that sustains our country and democracy as a governmental form the world around.

Talk about crumbling infrastructure! There are on your staff individuals who could provide overwhelming data regarding the many nuances of this catastrophe. If we do not prepare our children through decent educational experiences to cope with the onslaught of retrogressive and exclusive thinking that has for over thirty-five years now targeted these systems, we will slide back socially well past 1776. (Visualize Dowton Abbey with modern technology)

Retrogressors are interested in “training” children for jobs. These are not educational goals. These are goals to produce a docile “working class.”

Our brothers and sisters need to know how to think. Any thinking person will insist on “working” on participating in some useful manner in the expansion of the Common Good. It is only reasonable that one would do this. It is what free, thinking human beings do.

Please focus more, a lot more, attention on this problem. I know that it will resonate deeply with the vast majority of the non-one-percent.

Lots of love

-tom

Letter to Paul Krugman

March 21, 2015 Saturday,

Dear Paul,

Your column on Friday was excellent. It was a very needed, and it was not something that I have heard coming from you quite so forthrightly before. It was simple straightforward exposure of what has been going on for some thirty to forty years now.

When you said, “The modern G.O.P.’s raw fiscal dishonesty is something new in American politics.” You gave me pause. However, as you soon pointed out, “Does this mean that all those politicians declaiming about the evils of budget deficits and their determination to end the scourge of debt were never sincere? Yes, it does.” I saw then that what you meant by “something new” was that the dishonesty used to be more cleverly hidden, but now it is “raw”.

This disintegration from clever sophistry to blatant corruption is a frequent development in the psychotic behavior of individuals who suffer from delusions of power. The more they convince themselves of the rightness of their delusions the less interested they are in working with others or in cloaking them in some form of sheep’s wool.  Look at the life cycle of any of the numerous crazy dictators, Nero say or Hitler, who have from time to time sprung up in the world and generated so much pain.

Your closing comment, “Look, I know that it’s hard to keep up the outrage after so many years of fiscal fraudulence. But please try. We're looking at an enormous, destructive con job, and you should be very, very angry.” is well worth repeating over and over.

Our Brothers and Sisters are pretty well immersed in the flood of sophism that streams from all of our media day in and day out. The generation of this huge smokescreen by the way is a major, deliberate, and very smart aspect of the “Con Job”.

One more thing, Paul, you said, “But I'm partial to a more cynical explanation. Think about what these budgets would do if you ignore the mysterious trillions in unspecified spending cuts and revenue enhancements. What you’re left with is huge transfers of income from the poor and the working class, who would see severe benefit cuts, to the rich, who would see big tax cuts. And the simplest way to understand these budgets is surely to suppose that they are intended to do what they would, in fact, actually do: make the rich richer and ordinary families poorer.”

This analysis is not Cynicism, Paul. It is facing and voicing straight Truth. And, we better start being able to face it and deal with it as it actually is rather than to continue to make excuses for it and to hope or wish that these brothers will “wake up.” You can see how well that attitude served us in our relations with some of the “governments” of the Near East.

I hope that you will continue to put your very considerable Light on these issues. The simple straight forward commentary is so much more powerful and helpful  to many of us who are not students of the arcane ins and out of economics.

Lots of love

-tom 

Dear Mr. President

Friday, March 20, 2015

Dear Mr. President:

It seems as if Spring is here, at last.

When Mr. Netanyahu made his simple declarative statement he revealed to the world what has always been the case. He wasn't closing a door to Peace and the only acceptable solution to the Israel/Palestine situation. That door was never open! The door he opened with that bit of Truth was the revelation that as long as he was around there would be no solution.

That, now clearly open door, opens another door for us; and that door leads to the solution. Time after time we have vetoed efforts of the Security Council of the UN that would move all of us forward. Our position that “the borders must be negotiated directly by the parties”  was always a bit of sophistry that promised little chance for success. Now, by the declaration of Mr. Netanyahu, that condition has been revealed to be a pipe dream.

When this issue comes up before the UN Security Council again, as it surely will, we would only be naïve fools to support the Israelis with a veto.

We must not block the efforts of the UN Security Council, the only group in the world that supposedly speaks for the whole planet, to reach an agreement.  Rather than efforts in Brotherhood, our ties to Israel are proving to be chains of racism, cynicism, superiority and far from anything that looks like Justice and Freedom for All.

Lots of love

-tom