Month: January 2018

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Wanna run for Congress? Millionaires need not apply

New Rule: From now on, anyone running for U.S. Congress and Senate, cannot have an annual salary more than, oh I don’t know, $100,000.  ?  Sound good?  Still unfair?  No more than $75,000?  Something that would put him or her in the league of regular folks, maybe no more than $40,000?  Come on now, there are a lot of people in this country who earn salaries like $30,000 and $40,000  a year and even raise kids.  But the point I’m trying to make is NO MORE MILLIONAIRE POLITICIANS!!  Yea!!!!!!  Rahhhhhh!!!

With our usual federal government shut downs, it seems it’s not so much a liberal-conservative fight as a disconnection between millionaires and regular folks.  Millionaires have never cared about poor people (and for them that includes the vast middle class), what the Millennials used to refer to as the 99 percent (of us).   Remember when the kids protested on Wall Street just a couple of years ago?  Then we elect a self-promoted billionaire as president?  What’s up with that?  How did our nation change on a dime?  Just wondering what happened to the collective rage against all people rich.

Only millionaires play chicken with people’s lives and livelihoods.  Regular folks would never do such a thing.  We have more empathy toward our fellow man, sort of.  I mean, we are Americans, and since the Reagan ’80s our national motto has been “I got mine. You get yours.”  Works out great for some folks, maybe even most Americans with the wherewithal to earn a college degree or born with business savvy and ambition or tech or high-paid trade acumen.  But not everyone does well in our great land.  There are all kinds of reasons: physical disabilities, chronic illness, mental illness, addiction, low self-esteem, low intellect, anti social personality disorder.  Then there are issues dealing with race, color, sex, religion and ethnicity.  People of color have been saying for decades there are points against them in our great nation when it comes to who gets the jobs and promotions and why.  It doesn’t matter how many bi-racial family ads are on TV now.  The nation as a whole hasn’t let go of discrimination.

Billionaire Boys Club

So now really we have a billionaire club infiltrating politics.  And since politics is about governing people’s lives, I’d say it’s unfair and I’d go so far as to say non-Christian.  Wouldn’t you?  OK, let’s leave the issue of religion out of it.  Let’s not ask “What Would Jesus Do?” when it comes to a government shut down.  After all, the great majority of our nation’s millionaires and billionaires and Congressional representatives proclaim to be Christian.

The first time I was ever aware of our government’s money problems was in 1981.  That was the first time I heard our government was broke.  And we’ve been broke ever since.  Well, there was that shining moment when President Bill Clinton proudly announced our new national debt was $0.  That’s zero dollars.  The politicians, especially the ‘vast right wing conspiracy,’ had convinced us concerned Americans the budget could never be balanced. Shame on them.  Clinton was lucky he rode the perfect wave of the telecom boom … which turned into a tech and dot.com bubble that eventually burst.  Nevertheless, he did prove our national debt could be resolved.

Now I’m just thinking out loud, but does anyone else think our entire federal budget is just a house of cards?  We’re just robbing Peter to pay Paul?  If we are truly unable to keep our government financially operating time and again, then something’s, like, major wrong with our nation.

The one person I would never trust to fix our perpetual federal debacle and international embarrassment is a millionaire.  Wanna know why?  Because I know that millionaires never, ever, ever, never, ever, ever spend their own money.  Trump never did contribute faithfully and willingly and lovingly to his own presidential campaign.  He’s got to be the first in American history to not gamble on his own presidential bid.

And the likes of him, billionaires and millionaires, are in charge of our federal budget?  Something’s out of whack.  And it’s been out of whack for too long.

Roll over Tom Jeff’rson

Our nation’s Founders in their wildest dreams could have never imagined the vast financial mess of our great country, supposedly the greatest and richest on earth.  How could a nation built on democracy, free will, equality, and even everybody’s pursuit of happiness go so profoundly astray financially?  Maybe it is the guaranteed ‘free will.’  Humans don’t do well with free will.  We have a tendency to put off tomorrow what we don’t want to do today, like pay the electric bill.  We get credit cards to take care of our needs then our wants, then we can’t pay them either, blaming high interest rates.  Over a period of five decades—our prime working years—life becomes a series of calamities: illnesses, job losses, home and car repairs, spouse death, divorce, stock market crashes, loans, inflation, recessions, raising kids, college, etc.  We find we aren’t any better off than when we’d first begun to work.  The future looks bleak.

That’s the kind of thinking that got Trump elected.

The bottom line about governing is very simple: THE BILLS HAVE TO BE PAID.  That’s how families do it as well as cities and states.  In government jargon, it’s called a zero budget, where they figure out the money coming in over a year or two and budget it.  We don’t dip into money that does not belong to us like Social Security, Medicare, education and the military.  We don’t borrow from nations to fight our wars, because those nations may turn around and use our debt against us.

The real shame about being an American is how we allow millionaire congressmen (a few of whom, by the way, have nothing better to do than show us their junk on the internet) to play Kick the Can with federal financial obligations.  Why do we allow them to do this?  Too much trouble to get involved?  We don’t want to be thought of as old coots firing off phone calls, letters and emails to our elected officials in hopes they actually will be persuaded by our angry words to change their ways?  Why are we afraid of people we elected into office?  Who’s really in charge of this country?  We’ve forgotten: The people have the power.

For a couple hundred years, our form of government has allowed us to elect others to govern, to run the business of America.  And if the ones we’ve elected can’t govern, then we the people are going to have to start doing it.  A change in qualifications for office—especially banning millionaires—would be a good start.  I think the constitutional framers never intended for a bunch of rich men to run the United States of America forever.  Our 18th century American forefathers, those who lived during the Age of Enlightenment, who were free thinkers and fans of Western philosophy, knew a democratic government could only work and last if it’s tended to by all citizens including farmers and laborers, and not just and only by educated dandies.

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Winfrey for President? O-prah-ther

So the Democrats last hope is to run mega TV star Oprah Winfrey for U.S. President?  She can’t run for any other office in the land?  It has to be the absolute top spot in the federal government and the most powerful position in the world?  Isn’t she already kind of our president anyway?  Since recently receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes, the mass media merged with show biz to gush over the possibility of running Oprah for president in 2020.  To which her longtime companion Stedman Graham replied: If the people want her to run, she would do it.  So there.

Well, not so fast.  Powerful, attractive, intelligent woman that Oprah is, there are skeletons in her closet, and the media if they investigate hard enough will find them.  Certainly her ferocious Republican opposition will.  And Oprah is not running on the Republican ticket, though she’s probably benefited mightily by their policies.  Oprah has never held an elected government office.  Yes, she’s created and operated a media conglomerate including her own network.  But given her background, I have to wonder about her ‘handlers,’—the real know-how people Oprah shrewdly hired to perform actual daily operations, because Oprah’s real job is being a well-put-together celebrity.  [Pssst.  I met one of her TV show handlers who confided Oprah is “high maintenance.”]  Who cares, the Dems would say.  Oprah is the most popular person in the universe.  She would be a shoo-in as first woman president and first African-American female president.  Surely our nation is ready for this by now!

Have you been reading the internet and seeing all the hate groups out there, the ones fully empowered by the Trump presidency?  They are tens of millions of Americans and no fans of Oprah.  Yes, Oprah will have the women’s vote but not necessarily the men, not our red-blooded, beef-eatin’ hairy American men particularly of white stock.  I’m just being honest.  Still, Oprah could win the U.S. presidency simply by placing her name on the ballot.  Americans feel we know her.  She was on TV forever.

Roll ’em

Oprah’s skeletons for scrutiny if she ran for political office include: leaving college to take a job offer in TV media, never marrying (even Gloria Steinem eventually married), former employee lawsuits claiming her business a climate of anti-male harassment (OK, that part is laughable considering the vastly common workplace scenario between the sexes), and declining to support impoverished American youth who asked for computers and bikes instead of a quality education (which she indeed provides for an all-girl school in Africa).  And there’s the issue of her teen-age promiscuity that ended in the birth of a premature baby.  The alt-right would give her the ol’ one-two morality punch even though Oprah’s baby boy died shortly after birth.

But the fairer sex of the American populace would be most forgiving of this and all of Oprah’s skeletons.  Oprah has been candid about her entire life, we believe from watching her every day for twenty years.  She does not feel one bit guilty about leaving college to do what others have done when offered a big career break, plus she eventually finished her degree after fame and fortune.  She has proclaimed her longtime beau, Stedman, to be the only man in her life who always treated her with respect.  By not marrying, she is certainly ‘cool,’ more interesting than if she did go through with a wedding and sign on the dotted line.  The teen-age promiscuity was directly related to her childhood years of sexual abuse by several family members, about which she has divulged in painful detail.  It seems once Oprah became a national sensation, a drug-addicted relative spilled the beans on her love child at age 14.  The relative needed money from a tabloid and attempted to smear the big-name star.  It only served to make Oprah out to be ‘every woman,’ more like regular gals than the upper classes.

Along with surviving the shame of incest and rape, her most empowering story line is her childhood poverty, once living in a home with no running water.  This kind of poverty often instills in a child the big American dream, to chase stardom.  And Oprah did.  She was in her element in The Color Purple, again boasting that her character’s important scene about fighting off male beasts was shot in one take.  Oprah could relate honestly and painfully to the character she played, a hefty black female from the early 20th century South.

Harpo productions

The one criticism about Oprah or her talk show that has left an imprint on America today (yet won’t be a campaign issue) is the condensed sound bite.  Her talk show formula was not unlike Donahue or Geraldo: interview an author, celebrity, panel of experts, psychologists, and assorted regular people (called guests) with the same situation for the show’s daily theme (gay, bi, trans, addicts, family dramas, diseased, impotents, swingers, shop-a-holics, weight losers, childhood stars, social outcasts, etc.).  First the issue or problem would be laid out and discussed and then experts would speak on how to make life better—Oprah always interjecting her brand of homespun yet deeply profound Christian-New Age wisdom.  It worked like a charm.  By 4 p.m. Central Time, viewers felt like they’d really learned something from watching Oprah.  But really, we didn’t.

Unlike Phil Donahue—who left audiences in the ’70s with more questions than answers and certainly unsure of his own opinion on controversial subjects—Oprah’s quasi-educational episodes were just tidbits of information, maybe not worth a full hour of our attention.  If you wanted to delve into the specific issue, read the promoted book fiction or nonfiction.  But for someone who supports education as the most important thing to benefit one’s life, Oprah and her audience never grasped that higher education, like a master’s degree and doctorate, will create more doubt than answers to life’s dilemmas and mysteries.  The highly educated are comfortable with doubt, the less educated frightened by it.  The Oprah formula hoodwinked a generation of Americans into thinking they knew about life and stuff simply by listening to someone else and maybe empathizing.  That’s not real knowledge.  Real knowledge is off the couch and real life lived outside the TV box.  Oprah herself really lived, really experienced life in abundance and splendor.  But her tens of millions of fans not so much.  So the show was a national disservice in this regard.

But, hey, Oprah is the one who introduced our nation to Barack Obama and his lovely wife Michelle way before he ran for president.  He was charming and handsome and unique.  She knew he had star power, plus he was a Democrat.  She backed him financially, and he won two terms as President of the United States.  At his first inauguration, she was spotted among the crowds, leaning on a fellow onlooker, listening to his historic speech, smiling, hazel eyes teary and aglow—she looked so proud, like she really had accomplished something monumental, perhaps the most important thing she ever did with her life.

Now, should Oprah seriously consider running for president?  It is an interesting notion but one I am not inclined to support.  The media should get real and stop promoting her: like they declared Hillary Rodman Clinton when she ran time and again, referring to her candidacy as a ‘coronation,’ like there was just no way she would lose especially that second time when Obama was not on the ballot.  Ugh, Hillary lost to a foul-mouthed boastful rich white man, one Americans felt they knew from watching him on his TV show.

Would it be any different with Oprah?   If Trump is game two years from now, he would fight Oprah the same way he did Hillary.  It would be dirty, unfair, filled with lies and innuendos, and the American TV-watching public would love it.  Oprah, I think, is no match for the kind of filthy politics into which we have lowered ourselves today.  In a different era, perhaps someone with her stature, charisma, class and endless money could compete for the U.S. presidency.  But knowing what we know now, even Oprah Winfrey couldn’t win.  Oprah, after all, is above it.

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The 21st century: How’s that been working out?

Instead of a retrospective commentary on all the major events of 2017, I thought it better to look back at the entire 21st century.  We’ve been living in the ’teens now for almost a decade, most of us born back in the 1900s; learning, buying and updating new tech every year; rather easily accepting social change like gay marriage,  legalized marijuana, and admitting to smart phone and social media addictions.  So far it’s been a century of … adapting.

At the turn of the century, we could see where we were heading as far as the World Wide Web and even cell phones with cameras.  We knew practically every home would have a computer if not one for each family member as well as school classrooms for every student.  We could see that every book would be electronically converted for reading online—as well as every book ever written, every song ever recorded.  With websites, social media like Myspace, and YouTube, we could foresee the day everyone would indeed be famous for at least fifteen minutes.  We could see that each of us would become more independent as far as shopping and paying bills online, watching new movie releases via computer, and—most importantly perhaps—reading and researching scads of information, articles (real and fake), blogs and websites (official and unofficial) courtesy of the internet.  What we did not foresee in that last futuristic insight, however, was how divided our nation would become politically, empowering extreme thoughts and action from the ‘alt right’ and socialist left.  Americans of the 21st century do not seem to share the same basic democratic philosophy and values of our country’s Founding Fathers.

2001 tech odyssey

In the year 2000, I had yet to own a computer.  I didn’t even know how to get online or surf the web.  My only experience was at work where I used computers since the 1980s, learning to handle a mouse in 1992.  The small-town newspaper where I later worked had one new big computer that a newly hired computer technician would operate to put together an online edition.  We reporters would ask the computer tech to print out news stories, research figures, or phone numbers of people we needed to interview if we couldn’t find such information ‘old school’—because the computers in the newsroom were not suited for internet connection.  Too, the computer guy would print out any emails we received.  Reporters each had a work email address tacked onto our published articles and sometimes received email but had no computer on our desks to check such correspondence.

By 2001 not only did I own my first home computer (a blue Mac), started paying a monthly internet bill of $10, and created my first personal email address, but the newsroom also got the same computers.  Finally at work we had the internet at our fingertips.  I relished checking The New York Times every day as well as double check spellings of people, places and things, historic dates, facts and figures.  I also enjoyed surfing the net for entertainment websites, from Lucille Ball to Loretta Lynn, The Beatles to The Rolling Stones—whatever popped into my pretty little head.  The whole world was at my fingertips … I imagine everybody on the planet with internet access felt the same way at this point in human history.

Later that year I had moved to a big-city paper and not only was handed a laptop for the first time but also given a cell phone with an assigned phone number and expected to have at hand 24/7.  I was elated, feeling part of our fast-paced modern times, my own era.  Then suddenly right after 9/11, many websites were down like The New York Times, and network news was covering only this American terror story of the century.  New information was not coming across the internet as fast as everybody wanted and expected coast to coast.  We were thrown back into a dark age of sorts, realizing our modern times without internet, satellite and electronic technology.  We may have feared a bit, but within a few weeks life and high tech went on.  Within the decade, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone and iPad—both turning out to be must-have technology for all consumers, adults to children.

Best of times, worst of times

So far the 21st century has brought into the collective consciousness the best and worst of Man simultaneously: perpetual wars yet life-saving medical advancements; the first African-American president followed by a successor voted in to dismantle his legacies; commonplace mass shootings here in the U.S. while millions of citizens march on world capitols for social and government reform; men of ultimate power and prowess brought down by women who alleged sexual harassment; a plethora of internet fake news stories alongside crucial investigative reporting of the truth; police shootings of unarmed black men, many captured on camera, giving birth to fiery protests and national alarm; hacked websites and internet interference to alter elections as people vote on dubious computer ballots; presidential candidates knocking the U.S. government, one for favoring the rich over the poor, the other for favoring the poor over the rich.  Incredulously, the latter won—and has never ceased to Tweet up a storm.

Nowadays with everyone using 21st century technology—tech that when built is only meant to last three months before another advancement and necessary replacement—it seems there is a lot of static in the air.  We can hear it on cable news with arguments left and right and see it throughout the day with an onslaught of online stories and instantaneous imagery.  It’s as if we don’t know what to believe anymore.

This is because we read online only what we want to read, see only what we want to see, believe what we want to believe.  With all the internet travel and social media fads, we’ve left our brain on auto pilot—everything happening so fast.  No time to think.  Just react.  The Information Age has become … no way to live.

Remember the 1900s?  How simpler life was then?  Why, just the last part of the century, what technology did we have to have: telephone answering machines, electric typewriters, word processors, VCRs, CDs and CD players, Walkman, Pong?  More importantly, for those of us who can recall those olden days, we had more time.  Who would have thought it about the late 20th century, because we were warned then that technology was advancing too quickly and would leave humanity in a tailspin, many incapable of keeping up?  Still we were able to live our lives ‘off line’ instead of online (there was no internet).  We never lost human contact because we left the home to shop and socialize, used our voices for conversation instead of typing disjointed thoughts to send rat-a-tat-tat as emails or Tweets.

In the year 2018 if we’re honest about how we’ve been using and abusing technology, we’ll admit to being frazzled, on edge, fearing everyone in the world even our own family and neighbors.  Our president, after all, is a reflection of us, and this era will go down in American history.  Don’t blame the latest cutting-edge technology, social media or fake news.  We’re the ones with the problem, the sickness, susceptible because we are humans with minds and souls.  All the uproar that has infected millions of us is contained within the mind.  The one thing we’ve seemed to have forgotten amidst all the fun and necessity of high tech is that technology is science: machines and wires, circuits and chips and binary code, and an on/off switch.  Humans are not machines, though machines are getting to be more like us.  Humans are not thinking beings who feel but emotional beings who think—a lesson to contemplate from The Twilight Zone that is the 21st century.