Preamble

Not enough can be said regarding hijacking a tragedy as a platform for political purposes. There is a fine line in these matters. Likewise there is fine line in questioning the sincerity in a person's expressions of sympathy. Disseminating the lessons from the countries latest tragedy is a balancing act for all of us.

My hope is the shooting at Virginia Tech will expose the lack of access to mental health treatment. This shouldn't be mistaken with reporting other's needs for such treatment, or forcing such treatment on people authorities perceive disturbed. Perhaps a more drastic measure than collecting guns or placing screeners would be deciding mental health is not a commodity to be traded in the open market. It's a line I use all too often but has yet earned due attention. Will universal health care deter all domestic violence? Obviously not but it's one of best deterrents available in a free society.

Living in a country that aims to maximize civil liberties we accept the risk of dangerous ideas as long as reason is left free to combat. The alternative, history proves, is to control thought in the name of security, and this road leads to tyranny.

Hopefully we'll emerge from mourning and realize we can not rush to establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility without promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty.

ReRead

I am not sure if any of you have picked up the book The Assassin's Gate by George Packer. It's definitely the best survey of America in Iraq, in my opinion. I've just started reading it the second time hoping to absorb everything it has to offer.

Pay particular attention to the issues currently surrounding Paul Wolfowitz. He was the deputy secretary of defense during the build up to Iraq and the aforementioned book really exposed how his neo-conservative ideas where arrogant and misguided. He would literally ignore ANY evidence contrary to his ideas (as did V.P. Cheney). Bush is left, surprisingly, entirely out of the loop.

Wolfowitz is now the President of the World Bank. Among other problems he suspended AID to Uzbekistan after they refused to cooperate with the U.S. in the war on terror. Additionally his position in building developing countries is to displace corrupt governments by force, if necessary. Which is obviously the banner of neo-conservative foreign policy. He appears highly driven ideologically, beyond corporate interests, which raises the question if his arrogance actually blinds him to history. Perhaps my liberal idealogue blinds me to chapters in history.

Don't picture me with hair down to my shoulders, a beret or Che T-shirt and this will all be easier to stomach.

I'm reading a monograph by Leon Trotsky, "Their Morals and Ours: The Marxist View of Morality". Most people in the west only know Communism as perverted by Stalinism, or more accurately substitute Marxism for Communism in that statement. If you can stomach a read of the Communist Manifesto you'll find how far Stalin and successors strayed from Marxism. This short work by Trotsky is further clarifying on Marxist's behalf.

Language is a barrier, in more ways than one.

From Kurt Vonnegut

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC

Here we are, stuck in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

Take Care of the People, and God Almighty will take care of himself.

From Local Elections to the Global Condition...in 7 paragraphs

We held local elections on Tuesday. An appallingly low percentage turned out in the K.C. Metro Area. There was one issue on the ballot in my precinct concerning a tax raise to improve roads. Before going to the polls I took 5min to read through the details of the tax raise and the strategy for road improvements. Not long after leaving my voting location I went to the friendly local pharmacy (read Huge National Mega Chain Pharmacy) and overheard a few people complaining about the very issue at hand, the poor roads in our area of town. I left wondering if they had made it to the polls, we'll assume they did. Well, despite the low turn out our road improvement tax raise passed.

Living in a younger middle to upper-middle class suburb I've found that despite most people voting fiscally conservative on federal issues they tend to be fiscally liberal on local issues. I wonder if this trend is national? If so I've never realized the potential for "Thinking Globally, Acting Locally". Sadly I think my assumptions here are misleading.

Local elections tend to draw little attention compared to federal elections. Instead of gaining the overall consensus of the populace you gain a consensus among those with a deep seeded interest in the issue at hand. I think most people just find themselves to busy to vote and no one tends to use the mandatory time businesses must give to participate in the process.

Is it fair to assume the general population values their role as consumers over their role as citizens? I think so, in fact I think this factor holds true even when considering other variables for people not voting, such as family commitments. Let's think bigger for a second. Imagine the problem of local elections is representative of society at large.

Is it safe and wise to place our happiness in our role as consumers? History actually shows us it might not be that risky for some. In 200+ years we see if people are born to the upper half of society they remain in the upper half and likewise if you're born in the lower half. With only one major and few minor swings the ability of the upper half to consume has been pretty stable.

However our society has a difficult time communicating to the lower class they should find happiness somewhere outside our consumer culture. The majority of domestic problems stem from this difficulty with a small percentage of problems being petty issues of the upper class or a few matters of mere survival in the lower class. If this all stands true, we could probably quite bitching about these problems and realize they are something we'll have to deal with or try one of two solutions. First we could find a way to communicate to the lower class they need to find their happiness somewhere outside our consumer culture or second, we could lower our standards of living to allow a higher degree of comfort for the lower half of society.

If we decide not to change we should probably stop assuming superiority among societies claiming to practice classical liberal principles. After all, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" seems rather silly and rhetorical when capitalism is given such an obvious higher priority. Likewise, these principals probably shouldn't be the banner we march under when forcefully trying to change other societies. After all we didn't see the slaves celebrating our Revolution and you'll find few Iraqis willing to give even lip service to liberty. I imagine they would both tell you the face of tyranny looks the same whether it's forced or designed, foreign or domestic, 1 mile away or 3,000 miles away.

Conflicted Priorities...

...from an interview with Noam Chomsky

There was a famous case called “Dodge v. Ford.” Some of the stockholders of
the Ford motor company, the Dodge brothers, brought Henry Ford to court,
claiming that by paying the workers a higher wage, and by making cars better
than they had to be made, he was depriving them of their profits – because it’s
true: dividends would be lower. They went to the courts, and they won.

The courts decided that the management of the corporation has the legal
responsibility to maximize the yield of the profit to its stockholders, that’s
its job. The corporations had already been granted the right of persons, and
this basically says they have to be a certain type of pathological person, a
person that does nothing except try to maximize his own gain – that’s the legal
requirement on a corporation, and that’s a core principle of Anglo-American
corporate law. So when, say, Milton Friedman points out that corporations just
have to have one interest in life, maximizing profit and market share, he is
legally correct, that is what the law says. The reason the Dodge brothers wanted
it was because they wanted to start their own car company, and that ended up
being Dodge, Chrysler, Daimler-Chrysler and so on. And that remains a core
principle of corporate law.

The United States happens to be pretty much at the extreme of keeping to
the principle that the corporate system must be pathological, and that the
government is allowed to and glad to intervene to uphold that principle.

Like during the New Deal period in the United States and during the 1960s,
the United States veered somewhat towards a social market system. That’s why the
Bush administration, who are of extreme reactionary sort, are trying to
dismantle the few elements where the social market exists. Why are they trying
to destroy social security, for example? I mean, there’s no serious economic
problem, it’s all fraud. It’s in as good fiscal health as it’s ever been in its
history, but it is a system which benefits the general population. It is of no
use at all to the wealthy. Like, I get social security when I retire, but I’ve
been a professor at MIT for fifty years, so I got a big pension and so on and so
forth, I wouldn’t even notice if I didn’t get social security. But a very large
part of the population, maybe 60% or something like that, actually survive on
it. So therefore it’s a system that obviously has to be destroyed. It’s useless
for the wealthy, it’s useless for privilege, it contributes nothing to profit.
It has other bad features, like it’s based on the principle that you should care
about somebody else, like you should care whether a disabled widow has food to
eat. And that’s hopelessly immoral by the moral principles of power and
privilege, so you’ve got to knock that idea out of people’s heads, and therefore
you want to get rid of the system.