Dear Mr. President

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Dear Mr. President.

For you, yours and all the rest of Humanity, I am not wishing but insisting, that we have a wonderful and happy 2014. It's time! I think we have earned it. Enough with the irrational. Time for a little Pure Reason, wouldn't you think?

It is along this line of Reason that I write you today. As Bucky Fuller could clearly see, it is pretty much Humanity's destiny to eventually live off of the dense physical plane of the Planet. So, a tiny step in that direction, the eventual appearance of "Drones" in the skies, was unavoidable.

You are perhaps a bit tired of hearing about Drones. Heaven knows that the Congress is full of such beings who do not work but do a lot of buzzing around and are able to fertilize various irrational pieces of legislation. And of course there those which fly around from time to time blowing up some bad people and the unfortunate individuals who happen to be hanging around. Typical example, by the way, of how irrationality seems to guide our ingenuity and imaginations to come up with stuff to first kill people and only then to make applications that will actually help.

Refreshingly, I read in this morning's New York times  a lengthy article on drones that says the Federal Aviation Administration is authorizing test sites for the commercial applications of drones. A big Hallelujah is appropriate for this decision which is tending toward a rational use of resources to benefit the Common Good, something seldom present in the present actions of Capitalism.

However, I saw nothing in the article that speaks to the People's interest in the creation and use of these machines. Their use will do away with a multitude of tasks that people presently do, thus eliminating the contributions, what we call taxes, that each employed person makes to the Common Good, contributions that support the health and welfare of the People. They will be using the People's energy and air space to do their tasks. They will require the creation of whole State and Federal departments to license and regulate their comings and goings, and what they can and cannot carry, or deliver, or do, plus a whole bunch of other stuff that we can only guess at just now.

Exclusivity has always been irrational. It does not exist except in an illusion. We really, if we are going to be rational about this, we really need to start figuring out how we are going to include these human created machines in the complex of our interrelated existence. As I mentioned in an earlier note to you, We need to figure out how they will make a contribution to the Common Good in which they operate.

2014 is going to be a very interesting year. I feel a growing awareness in the people regarding the irrationality of "business as usual."  Big changes are coming. Expect a great year, hard, but great!

lots of love

-tom

Dear Mr. President

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Dear Mr. President:

As I watched and read your eulogy of Nelson Mandela, I strange feeling came over me. I realized that I was crying and that I was feeling proud to be an American, proud that my President was standing there in that stadium saying the things that you were saying about Nelson Mandela and by extension Humanity because Nelson Mandela, like those before him whom you named, was first and foremost simply a man, a human being. He was a living example of what it means to be a  human being, of what anyone of us can be regardless of our place on the planet.

It was so refreshing to hear you extend the principles upon which our country was founded, and is still based, to all of humanity, to the One Humanity. By doing this you aligned and identified us with all people in the world who strive for what we have, freedom, liberty, justice, and the opportunity, as you put it, to work hard and to achieve a decent living for one's family.

This speech signaled to the world a major shift in the direction of our vision. We know that it was not the first time that you have so signaled, or that such a speech has been made by one of our previous Presidents or great leaders. However, as we have seen, over the past 55 years in particular, such signals have to be given over and over for there are still many who consciously resist, and many others who are simply heart blind and deaf to the expansion of the concept of Democracy and the appreciation of our indivisibility both from each other and the Planet.

I think that through making this speech, you helped release the energy that was Nelson Mandela, the energy that made of him a messenger, a forerunner, a way shower, and hero into the hearts and minds of many, many of our sisters and brothers. Watch for the results.

I thank you for that.

lots of love

-tom   

Dear Mr. President

Thursday, December 05, 2013

Dear Mr. President:

Thank you for your talk of December 4. It was wonderful.  I hope to see/hear many more such talks over the next months.

The 2014 election cycle is presenting us with an enormous opportunity to bring balance back into our systems. Balance means that the system is supporting the Common Good and the General Welfare as opposed to the insane kind of distribution we have at present.

At the breakfast table the other morning, Mary and I who have a relatively secure middle class retirement income because we worked for Los Angeles County whose retirement system is sound, and because we have decent Social Security incomes as well as Medicare, were talking about the impact of robotics on employment and how it is and will continue to be putting people out of work. There are lots of good sides to this, such as freeing individuals from tedious and repetitive labor, and not so good sides, such as how are these people going to make a living?

The employment issue can be largely solved by adding many millions of teachers and support staff to the educational systems, many millions of doctors and support staff to the health systems, and many other human relation roles that machines cannot do. Humans caring about and for each other seems kind of natural, doesn't it?

The loss of jobs to robotics, however, does affect  FICA and income to the Government from tax on wages. There is no reason corporations who "own" these huge manufacturing and distribution systems should benefit from not having to pay humans wages and support the Common Good which consumes their products.

An Idea surfaced: Each robotic device that replaces a human worker should be taxed at some level and made to contribute to the FICA system. The "owners" do not have to pay actual wages, but are still responsible for income tax and FICA for each worker replaced by a robotic device. Why Not?

lots of love

-tom

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Dear Mr. President

This is a Thanks Giving message.

Thanks to you and your Administration for "hanging in there." First, thanks for running for President, and then running for reelection. Thanks for devoting these last five years and the coming three years of yours and your family's life to working for the enduring presence of our  Nation as a symbol and model of freedom and liberty for all.

Nobody said it would be easy, and, as you know, probably better than anyone, it has been at times excruciatingly difficult. There are a lot of individual things that I could name for which I thank you and your Administration, and for which I think that most of our brothers and sisters thank you. However, just let me say that I loved your comments last Monday regarding shifting our efforts from bombs to diplomacy in order to bring rationality and sanity into the International conversation regarding how we all need to live together on this rather tiny planet.

“Tough talk and bluster may be the easy thing to do politically, but it’s not the right thing for our security." To me your "signal" re the Shift from might to Right was the light at the end of the tunnel of ego insanity through which humanity has been plodding for centuries. It is, as you undoubtedly realize, the only way out. Thanks to the tunnel vision of fear and greed which has been driving us over the last 100 years, we can currently, and rather easily, destroy the whole planet.

With this shift I am hopeful that we can as well, rather rapidly now, shift a significant amount of our resources, that is our tax dollars, from might to Right. I have in mind our Infrastructure by which I mean a lot more than our roads and bridges. These are, as we can easily see in videos of collapsing bridges and broken highways, in terrible condition, and putting resources into their reconstruction would greatly improve the circulation of energy; i.e., money through our national body. All good!

Not so easily seen is the 30 or 40 year decay of the basic infrastructure of our Democracy, our educational systems. All of them are in pretty bad shape, but primarily the elementary systems are near collapse. These infrastructure failures are not so easily seen, but very evident in many ways that cannot compete for attention with collapsing bridges, and many, many times more destructive.

This is a problem that can only be fixed by throwing resources, our tax dollars at it. Those dollars would employ vastly more people, thus circulate vastly more energy, money, than working on the dense physical infrastructure. The reconstruction of our dense physical infrastructure is very important. I am sure we can do both simultaneously. This would solve many problems re. unemployment and so forth.

I know that you and your administration know vastly more about this than I do. So, for me it's a matter of priorities. Health care for everyone was/is a huge priority. Educating the electorate is the most significant thing we can do to further the Dream. Healthy, uneducated people are great for totalitarian systems. Democracy only works if the electorate can think.  I am urging that you make the reconstruction of our educational systems priority One

Lots of love

-tom

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Dear Mr. President:

I will be brief:

I just finished reading your "hand written" letter. Wonderful! This letter carries the energy that the people of our country need to feel and hear coming out of Washington, and especially from you and your spokespersons.

I heard Senator Warren talking with Rachael Maddow about Social Security. She carries and delivers the same energy. This energy is lighted. It carries compassion, caring, concern, respect and appreciation for our country and our people, all of our people. It speaks from the heart to other hearts.

Please, do a lot more of this. We all need it, including our Republican brothers and sisters who seem to sometimes forget about our roots. The way into a dark place is to lead with the light of the heart.

lots of love

-tom

Wednesday, November 06, 2013

Dear Mr. President:

I am writing because I am concerned about the overwhelming emphasis that your education policy is placing on vocating rather than educating our young.

I understand the need to vocate or train individuals in the new kinds of skills that our increasingly technologically driven society demands. And I support all of the efforts in that regard. What concerns me is that this effort is being made at the expense of the educational side of the equation.

By "education" I mean being deeply exposed to the great ethical, and moral Principles which underlie our Civilizations and Cultures. These Principles such as goodwill, honesty, courage, love, and compassion are responsible for the relative success of any of our past civilizations. Their presence in our DNA is responsible for the enduring efforts of Humanity to build evermore just and inclusive systems of government that foster liberty, freedom, happiness for everyone.

Democracy is not possible without an educated people. Fascism, totalitarianism is not possible with an educated people.

Those not interested in the democratic principles have always resisted any effort to educate the general population. Their assault on our educational system has been non-stop. One of the more insidious aspects of this assault is the notion that some of our people are too stupid to learn anything other than some vocational skill, so why waste their time on history, literature, art music, or learning how to write. This notion is only a bit less ignorant than the attitude that very smart people who can operate in the technological world do not need to waste their time on such fluff.

Any educational program needs to be anchored in the Humanities. The reason for this is that these fields carry the Wisdom of what Humanity has managed to learn through our enormous struggle over many centuries. They are the archives of all that makes humanity human. To fail to equip our children with these treasures is a crime.

You spent two years at Oxy, and I know you know how important that experience was to who you are now. My view is that if we could have a nation of individuals who had the education that you had, this would be a very much different and a very much better, more inclusive, loving compassionate, intelligent, heart driven nation and model for our brothers and sisters in the rest of our world.

Can you do something about this?

lots of love

-tom 

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Dear Mr. President:

Just a brief note:

I have been monitoring the problems with the roll out of the Affordable Healthcare Program. I was not surprised  that there were a lot of glitches and soft and hardware issues. As long time employees of the Los Angeles County DPSS my wife and I experienced the launch, crash, and resurrection of many of most everyone of our computer programs.

The complexity of the Affordable Healthcare program is many times greater than any of our programs for Food Stamps AFDC, Medi-Cal. I think that the issues facing us in the Affordable Care program are in reality par for the course.

That they are being blown up into a giant issue is also par for the course, typical of the retrogressors processes.

I do have a suggestion on how to fix this thing.

You simply transfer a 100,000 or so of those, probably highly paid, programmers and software program wizards from NSA to work on this problem. Probably take them about week to have it humming.

Probably do a lot more for our National Security too.

lots of love

-tom