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.

Commentary for June 14th

Electing           WORT                    A. Beck                    6/14/2012

Just in case it wasn’t obvious before, the election we have just witnessed in Wisconsin should tell us all what many of us have

known for a long time: The ability of immensely rich people to buy

very persuasive advertisements without revealing who is paying is

equivalent to putting all supposedly democratic elections up for sale to the highest bidder.  In this election, Scott walker travelled

the whole of the United States in the interest of soliciting funds

from rich people with special political interests, amounting to class

war on working people, a tactic that would have been more

obvious if it had been clear who was paying to spread untraceable messages in the interests of special economic groups. The

difference from the groups that were favored by the majority of the Supreme Court, while not provable, could call up a serious lack of belief in the fairness and creditability of a Court that seem so

unilateral as to undermine credibility in the integrity of said Court. 

The selling of election rules, whether for cash or for intangible and secret  interests, must be seen as a violation of the American social

compact. If the doctrine that money is speech and has the privilege

of private conversation, even when broadcast in loud, but

unacknowledged authorship, is a visible bending of  the spirit of the rule of law, and this election makes that clear.

Beck Commentary for June 7th, 2012

As we face the future of the EU zone, it appears more clearly that the cost of survival to capitalism in EU cannot be found without its abandonment of the predatory version that has been its model since the Milton Friedman model took over the Economics profession. By contrast, the only Social Democratic country to be tested in this period was Iceland, which allowed its economically irresponsible banks to go bankrupt and used its economic muscle to nationalize them, doing better than nationalizing the debt and bailing out the bankers, as USA has done.  Socialism without the medieval tradition of Russia or China has given Scandinavia a democratic social structure without a history of brutal suppression of counter-revolutionary forces and a history of gulags. And these countries are among those with superlative scores for social contentment, with only a few of the wealthier counties joining them for what can only rival them for what we must reckon as economic success. Yet the propaganda machine of predatory capitalism has persuaded the likes of the USA electorate that those gulags are the unavoidable products of even the mildest forms of social thinking, and they also ignore the prosperity of the people who live that way, in most cases without significant mineral resources.  As we watch Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland teeter on the edge of the ash pit of predatory capitalism, with which they are threatened by the failed EU adoption of this 300-year old model of supposed automatic prosperity, it is time for us to learn what we need from Lord Keynes and FDR.