MuffinBlog

I’m still torn between letting American auto companies fail that are clearly too big to survive on their own (as opposed to the much used “too big to fail”) and saving the many jobs the industry provides. It seemed like Congress had made up it’s mind what it wanted to do, and as long as they required the automakers to retool and come up with plans for making greener cars (which I was under the impression was the plan) I was content.

As usual Congress has completely let us down. They kicked the problem up to a very lame duck president who has been doing nothing but gutting as many environmental rules as he can before he leaves office. So even if Bush decides to do something for the automakers, it will likely be a simple bailout with no attempt to take advantage of a great opportunity to fight our addiction to oil, global warming, and our sour economy. Republicans deserve a good portion of them blame since their only goals seemed to be to stick it to the auto workers. That said, Democrats hold an almost filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a big majority in the house. What in the world are you people waiting for? Jesus?

Way to go, Congress. You missed a big opportunity for helping the country and the planet that may never come again. I can’t wait to see how you’ll take Obama’s plans and flush them down the toilet…

Big surprise, as I predicted, Cheney was responsible for telling the EPA to overrule California’s attempt to set it’s own emissions standards (ok, so I said “Bush”, but I meant “the Bush administration”):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2231965,00.html

In short, the car company executives came whining to Cheney; so he promptly abused his office to intrude on California’s sovereignty for the sake of the auto makers’ profits.

The only question I have is this: why didn’t Cheney send out Christmas cards to everyone with a photo of him and all the car executives naked and in bed with each other. Perhaps with the message “Merry Christmas and a happy new year of screwing you helpless peons over!” I mean come on, he’s not even trying anymore to cover up the fact that he’s just a corporate puppet. Show the country you’re trying to plunder SOME respect ya big bag of crap!

After my last post a few minutes ago, I was just thinking that many people might not ever contact their representatives and senators because they don’t know where to start or how hard it will be. Here are some tips for taking action:

1) The NRDC has a great feature on their website that lets you search for your elected officials, and then easily send a message to them in a uniform manor. Visit http://www.nrdconline.org/nrdc/leg-lookup/search.tcl. This page finds both your federal and state officials. Even though it’s relatively easy to find your federal officials via the federal government’s web sites (see tips #2 and #3), finding state officials is a little harder. In general you can go to <state>.gov (substituting <state> for the actual state name, of course), but each state’s web page is completely different.

2) For finding Senators, you can also just go to http://www.senate.gov and use the drop down selection box in the upper right-hand corner of the page to find your senators by state name, and a link to a web form for communicating with them. This may be easier to remember if you forget to bookmark the NRDC page.

3) For the House of Representatives, you can go to http://www.house.gov and use the form on the upper left-hand corner of the page to search for your representative by zip code. If you don’t know the extra 4 digits of your zip code, go to http://www.usps.com and click on the “Find a ZIP Code” link on the far left of the top navigation bar to search using your home address.

I hope this helps make it easier for any Americans reading my blog to communicate with our government. Voicing your opinion is really only a few clicks and an email away. Use it!

This really chaps my hide. The EPA is saying California can’t regulate it’s own tailpipe emissions from automobiles. It makes some sense from a certain perspective that a state could be overruled on something like medical marijuana use (i.e. protecting all citizens by establishing nationwide standards). It makes absolutely no sense how a state protecting it’s own citizen’s more than the national standard should or can be overruled. If the national standard for marijuana use was to allow it only for treating chronic pain, it would be perfectly acceptable for California to ban marijuana completely. A real example is Illinois’s maximum speed limit of 65 mph when the national limit is 75 mph.

Ok, I’m playing stupid. It makes perfect sense if you are concerned more about corporate profits than your own citizens’ well being. This decision by the EPA was either made by corporate sycophants that Bush already strategically placed in the EPA, or Bush directly told the EPA to overrule California. Either way, the EPA has clearly overstepped it’s power. Let’s hope the courts can quickly free California’s hands from this ridiculous and unprecedented restriction. If not, it will be up to the citizens to raise hell with their congresspeople.

Actually, it wouldn’t hurt to raise hell right now. Excuse me while I go send some emails…

Oh boy am I out of touch right now! All this moving and preparing to go back to school business has been occupying most of my time. I haven’t had the time to really pay attention to the details of what is going on in the world lately, but some things did catch my eye.

The Bushie-infested FCC is trying another push for greater media consolidation. After all, it was great for selling the Iraq war. Why not improve upon this successful mechanism for mass mind control?

Somebody in congress is trying to sneak billions of dollars in “guaranteed loans” (i.e. subsidies) for the nuclear power industry into a spending bill. Apparently none of the big banking entities (the traditional financial allies of the ruling elite) don’t even want to back construction of these plants, so the only choice left for the industry is corporate welfare. One question: where the hell are the billions for alternative energy research and infrastructure?

Finally, I found it quite amusing (and by amusing I mean embarrassing…but in a good way) that Al Gore stood up in front of the world and said his own country is mainly responsible for preventing progress during climate talks in Bali, Indonesia last week. Then news comes in Saturday that the US changed it’s mind and came to some agreement with the other talk participants. I’m not a Gore sycophant, but I do think he couldn’t be more effective right now as an individual trying to “change the world”. If he were POTUS, he’d be bogged down by politics and maintaining the largely unchecked, capitolistic status quo of the country. As a former vice president who isn’t afraid of the political ramifications of putting the US on the spot for being irresponsible, I think he carries a lot of influence.

I was just thinking over the weekend that there is an amusing pattern in the way Bush feels about people at different ages. He absolutely loves non-viable precursors of human life that could be used to save other lives (i.e. banning stem cell research using discarded embryos). He wants to prevent kids from being healthy (i.e. he vetoed SCHIP). He sends young adults off to die for inappropriate reasons (i.e. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran(?)). He more directly likes to kill adults (i.e. record executions in his term as governor of Texas). And finally, he’s just plain sadistic in his attempts to confuse the elderly to death (i.e. his insanely complicated modifications to Medicare).

Of course he thinks of these things in more grandiose terms: religion, complete privatization of government, world domination, black & white justice (metaphorically and literally). But it’s kind of interesting how such “higher” views can lead to such a pattern of hatred for one’s own species. Maybe I should write a book called “A People’s History of the Bush Administration’s Policies”.

I just finished the chapter in A People’s History of the United States on the Spanish-American war. I have to admit that the only thing I knew about this conflict was that it was between the U.S. and Spain. I thought maybe it had to do with Mexico since that is the only country repopulated by Spain I knew that had fought large battles with the U.S. Not only did I enlighten myself to how Cuba came to hate the U.S. government, but also how the U.S. annexed Puerto Rico and Guam as commonwealths, and Hawaii as a state (eventually). I also didn’t realize that we briefly ran a bloody occupation of the Philippines.

Around the turn of the century, William McKinley was president. He was an out right imperialist (along with his successor, Theodore Roosevelt). He wanted war to get rid of the extras resulting in our overproducing industries since U.S. citizens weren’t buying enough (it being a depression and all). There were also the wealthy business people who didn’t want war if the government could simply “open up markets” in those countries that were ripe for exploitation, but they easily capitulated (i.e. completely reversed their stance) to war whenever “peaceful” means didn’t work.

Spain controlled Cuba, and the Cuban citizens didn’t like that. They started to revolt like we did during our war of independence. But McKinley and others realized that a) the rebels were primarily black, and b) if the rebels succeeded in kicking out Spain, there was no guarantee that the new black government would “open their markets” to us (i.e. allow us to come in and exploit their resources). So we sent a warship down their to make our “freedom loving” presence known, and it got attacked and sunk. This helped rile up American sentiment for the “freedom” of the Cubans.

Eventually we declared war on Spain and invaded Cuba, but refused to acknowledge the rebels. We kept the white government that was installed by Spain, but refused to give them sovereignty until they passed the Platt Amendment to their new constitution. The Platt Amendment allowed the U.S. to intervene militarily in Cuba whenever it wanted, and opened up their markets to U.S. business men. We eventually won and also annexed Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and Hawaii as side trophies (Hawaii was already overrun by pineapple business interests, but wasn’t controlled by Spain). We then slaughtered people in the Philippines to keep it under control. Is it any wonder that Cuba went socialist? Who the hell would want capitalism after having your independence revolt undermined and your country exploited by a capitalist invader? The Cuban missile crisis was basically our fault because we wouldn’t leave the Cubans the hell alone after we scared them out of capitalism!

A very similar thing is happening in Iraq. The oil companies want control of Iraq’s resources and markets, so the government trumps up some story about liberating Iraq and WMD as an excuse to invade with a disaster (i.e. 9/11) to rile up the population and the corporate press to spread the propaganda. We then setup a puppet government and–this is a recent development–push the puppet government to “open the market” (basically we’re trying to get Iraqi politicians to give the oil companies control of Iraq’s oil resources).

It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just history repeating itself.

I subscribe to the National Center for Science Education’s news letter, and finally read the latest issue (September 28). One of the articles described how Sen. David Vitter (R-La) is trying to earmark $100,000 to fund a creationist group to degrade the science curriculum in Louisiana. I don’t live in Louisiana, but I am a U.S. citizen. As such, Sen. Vitter is in fact spending my tax money. I decided to write Sen. Vitter to get an idea of why he feels it necessary to hurt our country’s standing in the world in such troubling times as this. Here is the message I submitted via his web site:

First of all, I should say that I am not one of your constituents. That said, you are spending my tax money, so I figured contacting you is appropriate.

I have read that you are trying to give a Christian group $100,000 dollars “to develop a plan to promote better science education.”

To quote you further:

“This program helps supplement and support educators and school systems that would like to offer all of the explanations in the study of controversial science topics such as global warming and the life sciences.”

I wanted to let you know that there is no controversy in the science community about these topics. All you are doing is helping in the demise of U.S. technical leadership by supporting groups who don’t like science.

If that is what promoting better science education is to you, I think you need more than a better explanation of what you are doing with this $100,000. You need to explain why you feel that it is necessary to waste tax payer money on activities that clearly violate U.S. citizens’ right to freedom of religion and hurt our national competitiveness while we have record deficits, declining enrollment in science and engineering education, and are engaged in two costly wars abroad.

I will be posting this message to my blog at www.muffinspawn.com/blog. Feel free to respond there or through my email address. Thank you.

If he doesn’t respond directly here, I will be sure to post any response I get via email.

Earlier in “The 9th Step to Fascism” I alluded to Naomi Wolf’s 10 step program every government that has come to head a fascist state follows. Many of the steps have already been taken in this country. In an email to my mother on September, 11th of this year I predicted how the Bush administration will complete the program:

Bush will use Iran’s supposed interference in Iraq as an excuse to bomb them, people will protest in large numbers, Bush will use his new powers under the John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 to declare martial law, he will arrest and detain without due process thousands of people under the auspices of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 by declaring protesters as “enemy combatants”, and then will call off the 2008 presidential elections on account of the internal disorder.

Unfortunately it looks like the first of my steps to fascism are well in the works:

http://tinyurl.com/2msrb7

By shifting his reasons for bombing Iran to preventing interference in Iraq (never mind that Saudis are purported to be interfering much more), Bush can easily justify attacking Iran on the basis that Congress already gave him all their war powers by both authorizing him to deal with Iraq as he sees fit, and by refunding the war. At least with the nuclear weapons excuse, professional analysts openly admit that Iran was years away from developing such weapons. This gave credibility to the stance that action was not immediately necessary (assuming you believe military action is necessary if they do possess nukes). I’m not hopeful, but let’s just hope protests can halt the bombings before they start. If not, step two of my prediction will most certainly come to pass. After that, as frightening as it may be, it will be entirely up to the president whether the country stays a democracy or not.

The Senate today passed a non-binding resolution rebuking an advertisement by MoveOn.org that used an epithet for General Petraeus that originated in the army. I’m not going to repeat the epithet or discuss whether the Ad went too far. All that is dwarfed by the fact that the Senate has sided with the executive branch in following Naomi Wolf’s 9th step towards a fascist state: officially condemning dissent as treason. Here’s the statement:

“To express the sense of the Senate that General David H. Patraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United State Armed Forces.”

Granted it doesn’t explicitly say “treason” or even anything about patriotism, but it does indicate that they believe it is wrong to question the “honor and integrity” of the general. What would the Senate have done if they had the power to legally retaliate? And don’t think legal retaliation is ridiculous. The Military Commissions Act allows for the striping of habeas corpus rights for anyone deemed an “enemy of the state”.

So all congress would have to do is ask the justice department to label anyone involved with MoveOn.org an “enemy of the state”, and the executive branch could detain those individuals indefinitely without due process of law. It doesn’t really matter too much whether “treason” is explicitly in the legislation. There just needs to be enough pressure on the executive branch to use it’s new found powers to consider dissenting opinions as treasonous. Condemning dissenting opinions in legislation (whether binding or non-binding) is a step towards putting such pressure on the executive. Lets all hope that Bush remains consistent and ignores all advice from outside his inner circle.