Month: February 2019

An existential threat, and our responsibility.

Putin’s One Weapon: The ‘Intelligence State’ ,
Russia’s leader has restored the role its intelligence agencies had in the Soviet era — keep citizens in check and destabilize foreign adversaries.
By John Sipher
Mr. Sipher, a former chief of station for the C.I.A., worked for more than 27 years in Russia and other parts of Europe and Asia.

Build Central America, Not a Wall
Help fix these broken countries so fleeing north won’t seem so urgent.
By The Editorial Board

Both of these stories appeared in today’s (Feb. 25th) New York Times. It’s important to note that each of these articles deals with one of the biggest threats to global peace (and yes, even prosperity) in the 21st Century: instability. Political, economic, and social stability are absolutely necessary for achieving and maintaining a functioning democracy. Any threat to stability is an existential threat, and we need to deal with it swiftly and wisely. And creating stability were none exists, should be high on the list of any democracy’s responsibilities.


Food for thought. There will be a lot more ahead of us. We need to pay attention.

“This planet will not be secure or peaceful when so few have so much, and so many have so little — and when we advance day after day into an oligarchic form of society where a small number of extraordinarily powerful special interests exert enormous influence over the economic and political life of the world . . . Inequality, corruption, oligarchy and authoritarianism are inseparable.”

I’ve left off the attribution for the above quote for the moment. Before you know who said it, ask yourself: Do I believe this? If I do, how do I believe that we, in this nation, should go about remedying this unjust imbalance? This is a daunting question. I’m firmly convinced that a large part of the answer involves you and me–personally, beginning with our will to be a part of that change. We can’t leave it up to someone else and expect that change to happen. The will of the people is the heart of Democracy. This is OUR challenge.

Who said the above statement? Bernie Sanders. He was quoted in this Opinion column by Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times. During the next year and a half we’ll be taking the measure of the men and women who say they want to lead this country as the next President of the United States. There will be a lot of quotations ahead of us to mull over.

A Mischief of Grief of Our Own Making

The Migrant Caravan: Made in USA

Roberto SavianoMarch 7, 2019 Issue


Hondurans living at the Iglesia Embajadores de Jesus shelter in Tijuana while waiting for their US asylum applications to be processed, December 2018

The link in the title above will take you to an article in the new issue of the New York Review of Books. United States history in regard to Latin American has largely been patronizing and ham-fisted throughout it’s long, turbulent course. In this article, Saviano has done an excellent job of illustrating that the law of what-goes-around-comes-around is alive and well in our current troubles with our neighbors to the South.

I’ve followed our often inept relationship with Mexico and other, mostly, Central American, countries since I was in high school, and years later I wrote about the Guatemalan troubles of the late 1980s and early 1990s in my novel Body of Truth. Unfortunately, those troubles are still with us today. The circumstances have changed–a little–but the human suffering remains the same.

I wish we had the national will to take our relationship with these countries more seriously. It’s a national failing that we haven’t and don’t. I hope that will change.

Only in Texas . . .

This excerpt below is from The Texas Tribune which is doing a great job telling the story of Texas politics. That story is often gob-smackingly nutso, as you can see in the excerpt below. You can read the entire article here.

Sen. Angela Paxton files bill that would allow her husband, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, to issue exemptions from securities regulations

Billed as a consumer protection effort, the proposal would allow approved individuals to serve as investment advisers without registering with the state board — a felony under Texas law that Ken Paxton was charged with in 2015.

by Emma Platoff Feb. 16, 20196 PM Republish

Angela Paxton celebrates her victory over Phillip Huffines in the Republican primary for state Senate District 8 on March 6, 2018.
Angela Paxton celebrates her victory over Phillip Huffines in the Republican primary for state Senate District 8 on March 6, 2018. Laura Skelding for The Texas Tribune

Texas Legislature 2019

The 86th Legislature runs from Jan. 8 to May 27. From the state budget to health care to education policy — and the politics behind it all — we focus on what Texans need to know about the biennial legislative session.More in this series 

In what state Sen. Angela Paxton describes as an effort to safely expand Texas’ burgeoning financial tech industry, the freshman Republican from McKinney has filed a bill that would empower the office of her husband, Attorney General Ken Paxton, to exempt entrepreneurs from certain state regulations so they can market “innovative financial products or services.”

One of those exemptions would be working as an “investment adviser” without registering with the state board. Currently, doing so is a felony in Texas — one for which Ken Paxton was issued a civil penalty in 2014 and criminally charged in 2015.

Senate Bill 860, filed Friday, would create within the attorney general’s office an entirely new program — what the bill calls a “regulatory sandbox” — that would allow approved individuals “limited access to the market … without obtaining a license, registration, or other regulatory authorization.” The bill, based on a 2018 Arizona law hailed as the first of its kind, aims to cut red tape for the growing financial tech sector, allowing businesses to market new products for up to two years and to as many as 10,000 customers with scant regulation.

No comment . . . except, well, Wow!

“Amazon paid no federal taxes on $11.2 billion in profits last year”

This headline appeared in the Washington Post today. Following are excerpts from the article.

“Amazon, the e-commerce giant helmed by the world’s richest man, paid no federal taxes on profit of $11.2 billion last year. . . “

“Amazon actually received a federal tax rebate of $129 million last year, giving it an effective federal tax rate of roughly -1 percent.”

” Like many other large companies, Amazon reduces its effective tax rate each year using a variety of credits, rebates, and loopholes. “

“. . . most of the tax breaks used by profitable businesses to reduce or eliminate their tax burdens were instituted at the behest of deep-pocketed and well-connected corporate lobbyists.”

“’Companies haven’t been shy about pouring millions of dollars to prop up a system that benefits them.’”

“Research has shown, for instance, that congressional offices give serious consideration to input from business groups in crafting legislation. Surveys have shown that many staffers acknowledge changing their minds on issues after speaking with lobbying groups, and that they view correspondence from businesses as more representative of constituent opinion than letters from regular citizens.”  [?!?!?!]

*I should add, of course, that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. So it does say something for . . .irony (?) that the reporter was allowed to write the above excerpts. Or, maybe, it just says that when you have so much money that nothing can touch you, neither lies nor the truth matters to you one way or the other.

The Dark Side of Politics . . . The Corruption in Campaign Finance Made Simple in a Five-minute Video.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

This is probably why freshman lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grates on the good ol’ boys club in Congress. Watch this short but riveting video in which she uses a little game of Q & A to create a brutal takedown of Congress’ absurd campaign finance laws. This sharp-witted clarity revealing the ruse behind the shell-game of campaign finance, shows how venal politicians are using it to enrich themselves at the public’s expense. To be fair, there are many honest and conscientious legislators in Congress who are there to act as “public servants” as they were elected to do. But there are also way too many who use their office and their influence to shovel money into their own pockets. This video shows just how ridiculously easy it is to do.

Pinning the tail on the elephant in Texas

Karen Tumulty’s column, Where the Hunt for Voter Fraud is Worse Than the Crime Itself, in today’s Washington Post, points to an underlying reason for the Republicans’ Chicken Little squawking about “voter fraud”. That is, the double-digit turnout in the recent midterm elections is a bright red flag for the Republican good ol’ boys in control of the Texas State House, and it’s not a good sign for the Party color. Instead, it sends the message: your days are numbered.

It may be slow in coming, but times are changing in Texas.

Little guy says “No” to the big guy, and a wail of anguished doom rises from an industrial giant.

“BATON ROUGE, La. — It was a squabble over $2.9 million in property-tax breaks — small change for Exxon Mobil, a company that measures its earnings by the billions.

But when the East Baton Rouge Parish school board rejected the energy giant’s rather routine request last month, the “no” vote went off like a bomb in a state where obeisance to the oil, gas and chemical industries is the norm.”

A School Board Says “No” to Big Oil in this morning’s business section of the New York Times is, I hope, a precursor of things to come. It’s an old cliché, but it’s true nonetheless, that democracy [def.: “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people…”, and, as President Abraham Lincoln stated in the Gettysburg Address, “…government of the people, by the people, for the people.”] cannot survive if “the people” don’t pay attention and participate. When members of Congress, elected by the people to represent the people, start behaving like little lords of the realm, rather than public servants, then, the people and democracy are not served.

But “the people” must stay informed. They must follow closely the behavior and actions of the members of Congress who were sent there to represent them. If instead those members of Congress begin to favor anyone (lobbyists and those who pay them, the special interests of industry and big tech) other than the people, then the people must hold them accountable. They must vote them out of office and replace them with someone who will serve the people’s wishes as promised.

The point is, ultimately, it’s up to “the people” to make democracy function as intended. But if constituents forgo their responsibilities to hold their representatives in Congress accountable, then they will become “subjects” not “citizens.”

I hope East Baton Rouge Parish is a sign of the times ahead. We need many like them in every state in the nation. And, by the way, raise a cheer for the school board. I’m proud that it was a board of education that took a stand against the power of big money. Because without education, citizens don’t even know that they should!