Editor:
Recently, I’ve been wondering about the strange and uncomfortable turns that American politics have taken since I came of age in the early 1970s. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that “taxes are what we pay for a civilized society.” In our “democracy within a republic,” that means the big ideas for government are: Who must pay taxes to support government and who receives the benefits of government spending? So, I ask myself, what has fundamentally changed about the way I think of government today versus how I felt about government fifty years ago?
The Nixon Administration started winding down the Viet Nam War in the early 1970s – which was a good thing. The civil rights movement was still making strides in safeguarding the rights of women and minorities. Immigration reform was allowing the uniting of families in America. The new Environmental Protection Agency was implementing the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts – and bringing back bald eagles which had been seriously threatened by DDT. The Interstate Highway System was largely completed in the 1970s. College was affordable for those who wanted to attend. Women were entering professions beyond nursing and teaching school and could become doctors, lawyers, engineers and business professionals.
Most people paid something in income tax, but the wealthy paid a significantly higher percentage of their income to support government benefits for all. Medicare and Medicaid were starting to provide basic health care to those over 65 – and to people who were too poor to have health insurance. Food stamps were helping poor and working-class people to eat regularly. Housing programs were providing affordable housing to working class families.
It seemed then that the government was helping improve the lives of most Americans including those whose circumstances had been ignored in the past. So, while things had seemed to be getting better for most people, most of the time, polls show that many Americans no longer feel that way – because of actions by the government to take away rights, such as access to abortion, or to diminish access to the nicer things in life such as having enough to eat, equal opportunity for a good paying job, access to basic health care for the poor and working class, and clean air and water. Most people think it is unfair to reduce government programs that help poor and middle-class families in order to pay for tax cuts that benefit the top ten percent.
I learned in high school civics class that American government is supposed to help improve the quality of people’s lives in their pursuit of happiness, not make things worse. What happened to the ideas of striving “to provide for the general welfare and to form a more perfect union?” It seems so unnecessary – and even cruel – to adopt a style of governing that is mean-spirited, spiteful and vindictive. It makes me wonder, what’s the point? And then I realize that cruelty is the point.
Jay Miller
Hillsboro
Editor;
The world’s supply of fossil fuel is limited; at some point we will run out. As the price of solar comes down and new batteries such as those based on salt and other chemistries appear in the marketplace, solar may accelerate as one of the replacements of fossil fuels. Another bright spot is that Tesla is gearing up to produce large quantities of solar panels in the U.S.
One of the big problems with solar is that it is least productive during peak high use evening periods and a lot that is produced during peak sun times cannot be used and is wasted. This is known as the Duck curve and by far is its biggest shortcoming. Large capacity battery back-up is the solution; these battery banks also provide base load to ensure that the grid remains stable when fluctuations in solar output occur.
The collapse of the grid in Spain was in part due to too many renewables and inadequate base load. Tesla’s electric semi-trucks also have reached the point of beating hands down the diesel alternative and are starting large scale production.
Pilot plants that produce aviation fuel from the air and carbon are also coming into service and other technologies show long term promise. This is all encouraging progress and as much as I would like us to become greener overnight, we are not there yet or even close. Dumping fossil fuels before we reach this point is ludicrous. Let’s consider California, despite large amounts of oil deposits in this state the cost of fuel is the highest in the nation. How did this happen? California has become a one-party system with no sanity checks, with a small group of highly motivated individuals approaching environmentalism with a cult-like fervor trying to outdo each other with more restrictive and costly regulations, this resulting overreach has led to the closing of refineries and reduction of drilling permits. The state has gone from 50 refineries in the 1980s to 11 now. While local supply is being crippled, demand for fuel has barely changed requiring massive importation from aboard. This means instead of local production oil and fuels are now shipped many thousands of miles on tankers burning dirty bunker fuel at higher cost. The so-called environmentalists pushing this insanity seem perfectly okay with transferring this pollution and creating more adverse environmental impacts to other parts of the world. I don’t call this environmental stewardship but selfish feel-good stupidity.
I support protecting the environment but diminishing returns from overreaching regulations pushed by relatively small groups of fanatics are not the answer. Even for those that do not live in California, a lot of the produce we consume comes from that state and fuel cost impacts the prices we all pay. The bottom-line cause is many California voters pick leaders like they are voting for Prom Queens and enable these nitwits with big egos and low skill levels to make terrible long-term feel-good decisions not related to reality.
It is up to all of us to do our homework on issues and their complex consequences and pick competent leaders and oppose the highly motivated self-promoting unqualified political hacks that make our lives worse with unobtainable promises. Many Americans never vote in elections, if you are so disgusted, you no longer vote maybe you should reconsider this approach because, if you do not act, you are letting these relatively small groups control policies that hurt yourself and your family.
The ongoing takeover of the Dem Party by Democratic Socialists, communists, is in part taking place because a limited number of citizens vote.
Joe Kaffl
Hillsboro
Dear Madam:
Communism is on the rise again! Like an old horror movie villain that gets annihilated decisively, then comes back to life several times before the movie ends. You just can’t kill it off!
Communism/Socialism is a political and economic system based on wealth and achievement envy, a human characteristic that dates back to the third and fourth human beings – Cain and Abel, no middle name or last name given. For those that are Biblically-challenged, Cain and Abel were the two sons of Adam and Eve, the first and second human beings. Cain killed, or slew as the Bible would put it, his brother, Abel. Each of the brothers had made a sacrifice to God with Abel using his best stuff, and Cain using the equivalent of old, recycled left-overs. So, God accepted Abel’s and rejected Cain’s. Naturally, Cain slew Abel out of jealousy – who wouldn’t – you can’t have someone doing better than someone else. This little Biblical misadventure was the prototype of Communism and its kinder, gentler gateway drug called Socialism, or even Democratic Socialism – maybe even the Warmth of Collectivism – they’ll all end up at the same place.
Margaret Thatcher, the ol’ “iron lady” of England, once said the problem with socialism is that “you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
This certainly happened to a lot of my old college would-be revolutionary friends as their scholarships ran out and their money from home dried up.
Too timid to take part in a real revolution and bomb the Pentagon or join the Symbionese Liberation Army, as some did, and tasked with earning a living, they implemented their fall-back plan and went into teaching. I’m sure there were endless discussions in the faculty lounges across America about the failures of Communism in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, Venezuela, ad infinitem, the reason being, of course, that it just had never been done right. Of course, they had the right plan and this time it would work. Like a Navajo shapeshifter, it just became the same old thing with a nifty new name. These days it’s calling itself Democratic Socialism.
Vladimir Lenin, whose preserved old carcass used to be on display at the Kremlin in Moscow, like a freak show at a carnival, said the purpose of Socialism is Communism. So, you can call it something else and think you’ll get a different outcome, but a future of poverty, slavery of the spirit and concentration camps will eventually be yours, and you’ll be expected to bask in the warmth of collectivism.
Back in the 1960s, when I was a guitar-playing folk singer and left-wing lunatic instead of a rabid right-wing nutcase, my friends and I would crack open four or five bottles of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine and sit around half the night drinking, playing guitars and singing songs. We used to sing a song called “Stealin’, Stealin’” by the Memphis Jug Band, circa 1928. The chorus of this song could possibly be describing the many iterations of Communism throughout the decades – iterations that no matter what you call them always end up back at the same old place with the same old losing philosophy. Here it is:
Can’t believe I love you, lovin’ who I please.
Can’t believe I’ma sinking, what a hole I’m in.
You know I’m stealin’, stealin’, baby, don’t you tell on me.
I’ma’ stealin’ on back to my same ol’ used to be. *
( *My wife did not understand the southern black idiom of stealin’ in the song’s context. After all, it was the Memphis Jug Band. It means the same thing as sneakin’ or slinkin’. Re: gospel spiritual ‘Steal Away to Jesus’)
John Jackson
Huntersville