Gary Rumor’s Anti-Entropic Continuum

Prez made a smart move today. He is not building that Republican Missile system in Poland. Some contractors are going to be pissed. The Russians will be happy. The American Taxpayer will be a little relieved. Now he just has to get out of Afghanistan and Iraq and we will be headed in the right direction, home. Rachel Maddow says these missile defense systems simply don’t work. There is a conservative hate machine that is trying to paint Obama as an appeaser and weak. This is what Joe Cicerone of Plowshare Fund is saying. They will turn anything Obama does into a negative if they can. It is a psychological war for the minds of the middle Americans. Mostly it is being played with lies. Just like in the healthcare debate. He says the right doesn’t need facts. They simply want to scare.

Seems that the FBI has been going around busting Muslims again for no good reason. I heard on NPR this morning about raids in Brooklyn and agents going shopping in Colorado Walmarts looking for shady buyers of cement cleaning fluid. If it is that easy to make bombs then I suggest they start cleaning up the kinds of chemicals that are out in public or even better that our government stops going around the world pissing every body off.

China and the USA are haveing a little lovers quarrel over Chinese tires. Really China needs to let their workers start making some serious money so they will consume their own tires. Let the capitalists in America start making stuff again instead of buying everything from cheap foreign labor. I mean how rich do you have to be? If everyone was paid a decent wage around the world these trade imbalances would go away and the people in countries that are now poor and oppressed would be able to consume their own goods instead of dumping them on our country. It is a symptom of how dysfunctional capitalism really is when people have to live on starvation wages in one place and have massive unemployment in another just so some financiers and investors can pocket the difference instead of letting the wealth spread around the world equitably. I am sick of having to repeat over and over how badly capitalism is for the world. We need socialism and we need it now.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich, the only one who has pushed the single payer plan in congress consistently is speaking on CSPAN and he is repeating the same thing he has been saying for years. He is criticizing the private insurance industry for killing citizens by not covering people with health issues that make them unprofitable. All the private health insurance representatives are all stating to Kucinich that they are not familiar with the medicare standards and that is why they cannot comment on Kucinich’s request for why they do not use the Medicare model. Every single one of them said they did not know.

We need to have reform of the system. We need to have election reform so that Congress can represent the people and not the big money. Public funding of elections would be a good start. Free access to media by groups that are non profits and advocates of legitimate public policy concerns. Personally I would make private media reverse position with the public media. With most of the channels on TV open to public input and a few limited to commercial programing. Lets take ABC, NBC and CBS, make them share one channel and rotate. They can have all the commercials they want. Let there be one private channel for each language, and the rest of the channels should be public, public access and cooperative commercial free and supported by the government like TV is in Europe. Every political action group, every environmental and social issue if there was a group interested in putting on a program to promote information about their issue would then be able to gain access with all the free channels now available.
Perhaps the culture would change, commercialism would not be the driver, consumption would not be the motivator and social values would be oriented to serious matters, or sports or children’s concerns, but not selling products. What a wonderful world that would be.

ACORN, the group that advocates for affordable housing among the poor has come under attack recently on FOX TV and via entrapment videos put together by some right wing video activists. They have been accused of helping this activist to start a brothel in a couple of ACORN offices. I wonder how many ACORN chapters he had to go to before he found or bribed a couple of employees to make those incriminating statements?
I have worked with ACORN people in the past. I almost went to work for them in the early eighties myself because they were working on the same issue, the gentrification of housing, that I was working on at the time. We had different approaches. They were advocating a Saul Alinsky progressive popular organizing approach. It has its uses. Cesar Chavez used those methods successfully organizing farm workers and using the Boycott to get the growers to negotiate with the workers. ACORN comes out of that kind of a tradition. They do good work. Their director claims there is a witch hunt against them. This is pretty typical of the extreme right, to pick on a relativly harmless, or beneficial group and then attempt to defame them.
At the time I believed in a more radical solution. I believed in confronting the landlords and developers with direct action and property destruction. That was the period when I believed in the use of a few well placed bricks in the windows of particularly piggy developers with flyer’s warning them to back out and leave our communities alone or to incorporate the poor, homeless and elderly in their planning. It worked, to a degree, but not well enough. This was in the eighties when Reagan cut off the funding for low income housing and all of a sudden there was no incentive for builders to create housing for low income and no income people.
That was when we had a great upsurge in the homeless in America. It was when the cities started tearing down all the SRO hotels where the really poor lived. This was where those on the edge of being homeless stayed, in cheap hotels with single rooms. During the seventies there began a large number of urban renewal projects. Old downtown’s began to be torn down. Low income housing was supposed to be built to replace the older hotels and projects. Instead Reagan simply cut the budget and ended the subsidies for low income housing. Those people, victims of urban renewal and cutbacks had nowhere to go and they ended up on the streets. Another part of Reagan’s Morning in America. Wake up and smell the garbage you slept next to last night.
Reagan spent it on the military build up. What has been the excuse since then? Some have actually tried to say that it is normal for thousands to be homeless. Some even try to say people prefer to be homeless. Sure, they would rather be homless than go to a shelter where they are jammed together and forced to listen to condescending sermons by do gooder religionists. Who wouldn’t. But given the option of a place of your own, and a door you can shut and lock, everyone would rather have their own space. But that has been denied the poor, the mentally ill, the disabled vets and the poverty stricken elderly because of mean spirited leaders who have decided that the super rich in America need that extra 1% of income that it would take to cover the cost of housing the homeless.
After 30 years this has become the norm. Even in Calcutta, one of the poorest places on earth there are not as many homeless as in Los Angeles. I should know, I have been to Calcutta and I live in LA. Talk about a nation with dues to pay. The USA has a lot to answer for.

The former Secretary of the Interior Gail Norton is being investigated for corruption after she gave her new employer Shell Oil special lease deals on oil shale lands in the west. Up to a Trillion Dollars worth of leased government land was virtually given away by her according to reports on NPR today. This seems to vindicate the thesis of Thomas Frank in his book the “Wrecking Crew” that Republicans sold the federal government to the highest bidder, or to the closest crony. We have a lot of work to do cleaning up the mess of the past 30 years. I hope the youth of America are up to it. Time to sweep the Republican Party into the dustbin of history. Time for the Democrats to take their place as the new right and we need to get a real left wing party, a green labor party. Right America?