Two Cents Worth . . .

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There is so much I wish to share with you, I hardly know where to start. The continuing problem is time. I've got hundreds and hundreds of photographs all lined up, waiting in the wings, each one has been rehearsing its story, ready to spill the beans to you, but it is just a question of finding time to blog. Around working for a living at the straightjacket factory (and I can assure you, this is one sector where business is booming...) and just trying to keep house and home together, spend some time with daughters who are growing up fast, with la Grenouille, who after 18 years of my company still insists that I speak with her once in a while (that's a joke :-) (see Ralph Fiennes in "The Duchess" if you wish to see a truly terrifying husband model), and all the other time-saving conveniences of modern life which are all conspiring to ensure we have no free time. The poem written the other day about scars is the first I've written in rather too long. "If only I had more time", he lamented !
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Well, time waits for no man. Day before yesterday was the 11th of November, which is Armistice Day in France. The end of World War One. Four long years of pure hell. Hard to believe it has already been a year since I went and spent one week walking and exploring the area around Verdun. Verdun, a name that still strikes people dumb with the horror of what happened there.
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One reason I love living in France is how visible the history is here. In graveyards one can see traces of the past that tell stories, poignant stories which often leave me speechless. Let us remember those who fell.
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PS . . There was a bit of a reflection in that first photo, which thus qualifies this post for a link to James excellent Reflections Weekend series. Happy travelling James...
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For some reason I get the feeling it is going to be a long, cold winter. Just as a few posts down I offered you chopped firewood by the roadside and a nice green truck to deliver it in, here I'm hoping you have a good supply of wood already neatly stacked away in your back shed... just like this :
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And while you are curled up by the fireplace, enjoying the warm glow of embers, I'd like to share with you one of the finest pieces of writing I've come across of late. This blog is not a politically oriented blog, far from it, but every once in a blue moon, there are some words and ideas that are worth fighting for, even if just to paste them to a public wall where someone might perchance read them.
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These next several paragraphs were written by my good old friend Bob, who has figured in a few previous posts in these pages which you can find by clicking here if you're curious. (I just learned today that "curious" in Finnish is "utelias", so now I am one word in to learning Finnish) The below artical is not about Finland however, where I know nothing of their politics either, it is about the United States of America, which for inexplicable reasons continues to monopolize the world's attention to a worrisome degree.
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But back to Bob Wreck ; he e-mailed me this piece a couple of days ago, and it certainly crystallizes, as good writing should, many thoughts that had been occurring to me over the past few months, but which are spoken in the voice that is uniquely Bob's... without further ado :
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Wake Up & Smell the Coffee
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Politicians should stop endlessly regurgitating the new soundbite "The American people" (i.e. "the American people have spoken… ") as if to imply that this recent election was a mandate, which it was not; just a reactionary temper-tantrum from the fringe, which is spreading like the plague because our entrenched national problems have not been solved in two years—problems which have grown from ideological seeds planted during the "Reagan Revolution"; and whose rotting fruits are now being hurled at President Obama. This administration is not responsible for creating the mess we're in, and has been fighting diligently against the ‘army of no’ to reverse the thirty year drift toward a flawed right-leaning ideology. No president—democrat, republican or independent, could get us out of the mess in two years—period.
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I am appalled at the vitriol and contempt aimed at the President from an impetuous, ungrateful and small-minded sector of our electorate which increasingly seems to view any taxation, engaged government, corporate responsiblity and regulation as the four deadly sins—and yet at the same time lament the decline of a vibrant middle-class existence in a civil society. There is a confounding disconnect here.
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And yes, there is also a thinly veiled xenophobic, if not racist, element among the right which has treated President Obama like a janitor called in to clean up the big mess after the eight-year republican bash at the Country Club (on the national credit card) —and then have the gall to blame him for not sweeping up the champagne bottles and cigar butts fast enough. It's a disgusting and shameful spectacle.
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"Tea-party" types who are still employed should be thankful their livelihoods even exist at all. The economic stimulus is no magic bullet, but if the stimulus policies had not been enacted, many of those railing about the "socialist government" would be in line at a soup-kitchen, instead of sitting on the sofa at home frothing over FOX news. Where was the “tea-party” from 2000-2008 when the Clinton era surplus turned into an ATM machine at the Bush White House? Probably not drinking tea.
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President Bush himself, after his second inaugural, stated in a press conference "I earned some capital after this election, and I intend to spend it". Those clamoring to "take our country back", and who reminisce about the prosperous American economy of the 50's & 60’s might want to look again at the American tax structure of that "golden” period (when the wealthy actually paid their proportionate share). Instead of blaming a mexican worker, or a black president for our nations woes, maybe they should re-consider the notion that a fair distribution of wealth is what makes a civilized society possible. Marie Antoinette might have an interesting postmortem on that one.
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If you are one of those who believes you could succeed in your own private, well-armed bubble—disconnected from the larger society, away from the long arm of the IRS and those pesky mexican laborers, perhaps a tour of Somalia or Afghanistan would open your eyes to the anarchy you seem to be encouraging. It’s not a new American Revolution you are embracing—its civil war. My guess is that this marriage of convenience between those of you with the Smith & Wesson’s, and those with the Swiss bank accounts will soon end up in a nasty divorce.
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In your race to the bottom, don’t forget to close the bunker door on the way down. Despite another divisive war (from which apparently no lessons were learned), there was a great national pride in 1969 when American astronauts landed on the moon. I'll bet most Americans who were alive remember exactly where they were the moment it happened. Well, chalk one up for NASA—a government agency—your taxes.
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Forty-one years later, instead of making a "Giant Leap for Mankind", our national mission in 2010 was mopping up the petroleum cesspool in the the Gulf of Mexico caused by a corporate cowboys cut loose from all reasonable regulation, thanks to Dick Cheney & the free-marketeers. One giant step backward for mankind.
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And make no mistake—despite BP's debt of financial & environmental restitution, thirty years of deregulation now translates into your tax dollars being spent on the cleanup and investigation of this unprecedented disaster caused by private enterprise and unrestrained free-market capitalism— tax dollars which should be used for education or infrastructure. Talk about wasteful spending.
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Angry about the bank bailout and all the other corporate welfare queens? Me too—furious. But I won't blame the doctor for my lung cancer if I still have a pack of cigarettes in my shirt pocket.
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In this age of the global economy, the "trickle-down" economic theory has become a "trickle-out" economic reality—it’s a leaky economic faucet. It may have been a believable model for a different era in the U.S. when the economy was a closed loop, but it's turned into a Chinese water torture for the American middle-class. Without that closed economic loop, or tighter regulation of corporate money, power and influence, the extreme free-market philosophy is a joke that only the wealthiest five percent of americans are laughing at—all the way to the bailed-out bank.
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But the joke's on you and me.
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We have been indoctrinated from youth with this notion that unrestrained free-market competition offers more choice and options at a better price. Hmmm… well, now we have no choice and just one option: bail the bastards out, regardless of the price—or face total economic meltdown. A devil's bargain in which no American president from either party would dare risk a worldwide depression (just watch all the republicans rant & rave —and then fall into line when they vote to raise the debt ceiling next year). We are being held hostage by a false economic model which sounds kinda’ like… extortion.
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I would like to see the words government "tax", and the more benign free-market "price" interchangeable. Money is money. For many of us who are self-employed, health care premiums have risen between 15-18 % every year for the past eight years. If that was a "tax" and not a "price increase" in this age of the ‘tea-party’, there would be blood on the streets in this country. A boycott perhaps? Sounds almost quaint. The equivalent of throwing a beer bottle at a tank. Executives would just roll over the dead on their way to work.
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Even acknowledging the government inefficiencies which need correction, nothing could be less efficient than the "free-market" health care system we currently have. If we pride ourselves as such great leaders in business information, technology and efficiency—then why are our doctor's and dentist's offices still lined with metal file cabinets stuffed with manilla folders full of archaic paper forms—all on different systems? Siamese cats could run a single payer, single operating system more efficiently, and less costly than the "price" of the our current health care system.
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The reality is that extreme capitalism, just like its estranged cousin communism, may end up in the boneyard with the Brontosaurus if there is no willingness to to budge from the ideological bunker.
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Time to wake up & smell the coffee.
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Like it or not, WE ARE the government. You and me. And we all need to take a long, hard look in the mirror.
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Yep, it's us alright— and we get what we deserve.
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R.E.K.
November 10, 2010
© REK 2010
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It is getting harder and harder for us kittens to find our way in this confusing world . . . but find our way we must.
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