August 30, 2012

Secrets                            8/30/2012

As we digest the twists and turns surrounding the matter of US secrets and the people who have made some of them public, we might remember the men who framed the Bill of Rights and the philosophy they enshrined in it.  The devotees of the Enlightenment, like Jefferson and Madison, held that an indispensible feature of any democracy must be that the People know what the government is doing in their name, so as to hold them accountable for it at the ballot box.  By contrast, the Fourth Amendment guaranteed them privacy in their actions, except for the times when there was reasonable cause to belief that they were violating the laws. These two ways of dealing with secrets were intrinsic parts of their framing of the responsibilities that the democratic state and its people owed each other. When Wikileaks told all who were interested about the lies our government told the world about why we were about to go to war in Iraq, Americans ignorant of Enlightenment philosophy screamed for blood, with many crying out for foreigners involved to be captured and tried for treason, a capital offense. But when Hillary, who had stood first in her class at Yale Law School, joined the jackals, I was glad that I had not chosen to ride her bandwagon. What greater function for subtle higher education than to tame the blood-lust of those who imagine that the privileges of their faction is more important than the duties that advanced thinking lays upon learned people in supporting democracy?

August 16th, 2012

Around the world, it seems, the pundits are gathering to say that Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan for VP will gain him little and lose him much. I must say that when the opinion comes from The Guardian of London, there is a strong smell of wishful thinking about it. And a similar caveat attends the same analysis when the domestic press reports a similar opinion among the Dems. We must all remember that sort of thinking attending the candidacies of Reagan and Baby Bush.  There was disbelief attending those elections.

Given the effectiveness of the billionaires in buying slick PR for Walker, a man without much to be admired, the cheers of the liberals need to be taken with plenty of salt.  So be careful how casually one might dismiss the salesmanship of a billion dollars of TV time in analyzing the potential attraction of a good-looking young man with the heavy cannons of Madison Ave behind him. Still, I hope that the views of those who won the day for JFK may overcome the ads late in the day that proved effective for Walker.  We may not know what swung the day for that empty-headed young drop-out from Milwaukee. I hope that we will find the way to neutralize the poison loosed in our body politic by those like those from the professional liars bought for the defeat of John Kerry.

August 02, 2012

Invention           

One day, a few decades ago, I had a little invention, only it turned out later that a Swiss engineer had had it first. patented it and sold it in EU. Several countries, mainly the Scandinavian ones, had made use of it.  It enabled them to generate electricity as a fringe benefit of heating their homes with natural gas, cutting the total cost nearly in half, but what spoke to them most was that the homes pretty nearly totally insured each other against power failure. It would have saved not only the money, but also precious fuel. I tried to interest MGE in promoting the idea for Madison, but they weren’t up for it. I never really understood it, but it might have had something to do with their investment in the new grid. 

Maybe they were more interested in a bigger profit than in serving the needs of the public. Today, whenever the weather or an accident causes a power outage, I feel sorry that the People are suffering the needless loss.  When private profit stands in the way of pubic needs, we are all the victims of institutionalized Greed. The Scandinavian democratic socialists are much better at putting new technology into the service of the People.

July 27, 2012

Perjury             

The controversy over Romney’s false statements on federal forms has become quite toxic over whether his knowingly false

statements to the SEC constituted perjury, which would surely be a

crime, very likely a felony.  Those of us who have applied for federal grants are familiar with the warning that false claims

intended to mislead federal officials could constitute that crime,

and all are familiar with a similar warning on the annual income tax form.  It seems apparent that there were such misstatements by

Romney on several SEC forms, and the question of whether they

were deliberate is one that might well be decided by a jury. So Mr. Romney’s huffing and puffing amount to the claim that anyone as

rich and important as he is must be above that law, despite the fact

that a naïve appraisal of his behavior could well arouse suspicion of a deliberate deception. In that case, his claim to be above

suspicion rings with a similarity to the claim that banking

improprieties must be ignored because the banks are too big to fail. So Romney’s claim to be above the law on perjury is like the

bankers’ claim on the right to clearly illegally mistreat their

customers. The claim that being rich and important gives Romney the right to lie under oath plainly disqualifies him from any office of trust in our Democracy

Medicaid - July 5th, 2012

Medicaid                          WORT                                    A. Beck                                        7/5/2012

Today WI, like all other states, has been required by the newly confirmed health law to make provision for certain groups in the structure of Medicaid for those whose incomes are below the poverty line to have health insurance at the Federal expense and also the same for those between poverty and 130% of that to have it with payment of 90% from Uncle Sam. The latter number drops to 80% after 2 years.  Fortunately, WI has a perfect model to follow in the health insurance provision for State employees. Those familiar with that program know that the cost to the State and the participants is quite modest compared to modest-sized group insurance plans, and the service is excellent. If the state would open the employees’ plan or copy it for companies that would pay all the remaining costs, if any, that would be an excellent pattern for meeting the Medicaid needs.  Of course, it appears that would not meet the ideology of the billionaires that own Scott Walker, so he is holding off enacting any program there until he knows who will be the President in about 6 months.  Meanwhile, some of those not yet covered will become ill, some of those seriously, and some of those might die while Walker awaits the orders from his masters.  The health, and even

the lives, of the little people, some of whom were foolish enough to vote  for him, are obviously a matter of no concern to the puppet of the billionaires.

Unions 6/21/2012

Unions           WORT                         A. Beck             6/21/2012             

The year 1848 marks the founding of WI as a state and the collapse of the revolutions in Europe named by that date. The German Socialists fled, many of them finding refuge here, bringing with them the intellectual philosophy known as The Enlightenment, the basis For The Age of Reason.  For 100 years it sustained WI as the

“Athens on the prairie”.  By 1948 the USA, drunk with victory, was recruited by Churchill’s dominance over Truman into the Cold War on the side of imperialist capitalism against any expression of democratic socialist thinking. McCarthyism grew at the expense of the Enlightenment and WI inched over into its rural outlook.  When the Civil Rights Movement came along 20 years later, WI unions were crushed between the righteousness of that Cause and the wish of rural White people to retain their privileges at the expense of African-Americans. Many turned away from the Athens of the Prairie and left WI in the middle between the spirit of the 18^th Century and that of the 20^th. The ghost of The Enlightenment  continues to fade here on the prairie and the advanced unions have faded with its fortunes. Today, the spirit of the Cold War is triumphant in America and billions of dollars have taken the place of the Constitution as the model for our political life.

Commentary for June 21st

Unions           WORT                         A. Beck             6/21/2012             

The year 1848 marks the founding of WI as a state and the collapse of the revolutions in Europe named by that date. The German Socialists fled, many of them finding refuge here, bringing with them the intellectual philosophy known as The Enlightenment, the basis For The Age of Reason.  For 100 years it sustained WI as the

“Athens on the prairie”.  By 1948 the USA, drunk with victory, was recruited by Churchill’s dominance over Truman into the Cold War on the side of imperialist capitalism against any expression of democratic socialist thinking. McCarthyism grew at the expense of the Enlightenment and WI inched over into its rural outlook.  When the Civil Rights Movement came along 20 years later, WI unions were crushed between the righteousness of that Cause and the wish of rural White people to retain their privileges at the expense of African-Americans. Many turned away from the Athens of the Prairie and left WI in the middle between the spirit of the 18^th Century and that of the 20^th. The ghost of The Enlightenment  continues to fade here on the prairie and the advanced unions have faded with its fortunes. Today, the spirit of the Cold War is triumphant in America and billions of dollars have taken the place of the Constitution as the model for our political life.