Category Archives: Politics

America – What The Hell Are We?

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France, is now complaining that the U.S.  has been spying on French President  Francois Hollande and other French leaders.  Why?  Are we worried about a terrorist attack from the French?   Do we now routinely spy on all our friends and learn about our government’s activities only because of Wikileaks?

How did Julian Assange and Edward Snowden become international heroes of the early 21st Century?   Is it because they did something wrong, or could it possibly be because they had the courage to point to wrongdoing by the United States?

Why is the United States Senate about to pass a bill approving a massive trade agreement, the TPP,  negotiated in secret by the Obama Administration, which then demanded that it be “fast tracked,” rammed through the legislative process, before the American people could find out what was going on and have time to compare it to NAFTA and CAFTA, both of which helped to gut the American middle class?  What country is this?    Who are these guys working for?

Why is our own President going behind our backs with secret deals,  siding with the wealthy few against his own party,  forcing us to turn to Julian Assange and Edward Snowden to find the truth?

Why do we continue  paying more for health care but getting less than the rest of the developed world?   Why do we continue to accept this madness?

Why does it feel like a victory when the Supreme Court upholds one of the basic tenants of Obamacare, when we should have a nationalized healtcare system that cares for all, like the rest of the developed world?    Medicare for everybody.   Dental care, too.   Why doesn’t the government consider dentistry to be an essential part of our healthcare?    This is insane.

Why are Confederate battle flags still flying in the South?   Why is this even still an issue?   The Civil War ended in 1865.   As many as 850,000 Americans were killed settling the issue of slavery and state’s rights.   It’s over.   The Union won.  Why is this still with us?   Why did it take the slaughter of nine innocent people at a bible study meeting to awaken the country to the ongoing issue of racism?   Why is the Rebel battle flag still flying on the state capitol grounds in South Carolina, where the murders took place,  overtly marking the State’s approval of slavery?   Why don’t they just take it down and apologize for their blind insensitivity?  Who the hell are we, that a whole section of our country can still be called the former slave states?   Why are there people there who continue to celebrate the Confederacy and all it stood for?   How can they possibly fail to understand that honoring bigotry serves as an attitudinal poison going forward?

After more than a dozen years of failure in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East, we continue to engage in unending but profitable warfare.   Promises that we will withdraw are broken as we refuse  to let indigenous peoples work out their own problems.   As a people we have become conditioned to endless warfare.   Peace feels like an anachronism,  something John Lennon sang about and nothing more.  Although it feels as though it no longer has a chance.  There’s too much money in death.

With massive tax cuts for the wealthy, the gap between the rich and the poor hasn’t been so broad since the Great Depression, and still Wall Street is permitted to run amok, as the rich do all they can to suck every last penny out of a beleaguered middle America which struggles to pay for increasingly expensive food and shelter.   Forget a college education, which is now beyond the reach of most average Americans.   Your grandparents were just forced to apply for a “reverse mortgage”  so that they could stay in their house and continue buying food and supplemental health care while, by his own admission,  billionaire Warren Buffet pays a lower percentage in taxes than his secretary.

Want a car?    Take out a 7 year loan.   Want to go to college?   Fine, but you’ll graduate $80,000 in debt.   Want to stay in your house?  Take out a reverse mortgage and max out your credit cards while a reasonable rate of return on money deposited in a bank is an illusion even as CEO’s and board directors, aided and abetted by our politicians,  walk away with billions in their overstuffed pockets.

This is madness.

Our government cuts deals in secret while spying on our allies and our own people while taking orders from bankers who finance their campaigns and promise heavy funding for their families and their causes once they leave office.    A relative handful of royal families, the Bushs, the Waltons, the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Kochs, Dianne Feinstien, John Kerry, Darrell Issa, the Rockefellers and the rest of the uber-wealthy exert their influence and rake in profits while America goes dangerously off course.

Our government cuts deals in secret and spies on our allies and us while those who tell the truth about what’s happening are called traitors and lawbreakers and are forced into exile in foreign embassies and on Russian soil.

Where is the line between political and financial self-interest and America’s best interest?   When did majority rule die?   Can you even remember majority rule?   How about American Democracy?   Remember that?   Our scholars tell us it’s dead.

What the hell are we?

Salvation – A Poem

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Salvation
by Ron Olsen

A flag
A radio mouthpiece
Appealing to all that is the very worst
In human nature
Rushing in
For financial gain
Pitting us one against the other
Black against white
White against white
The past against present and future
A fool believes what a fool believes
A pundit
A flag
The very worst that we can be
All that we were
And still are
Racism
Slavery
Outrageous denial
Human indignity
A species
Needing to prove itself
Worthy of being
Answering to no one
But ourselves
Waiting for a light
To show us the way
When the answer was there
All the while

 
©2015 Ron Olsen/all rights reserved

DNC Chair Turns Her Back On Labor

 

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DNC Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, joined Republicans in the House and voted FOR “fast tracking” the TPP trade bill, which now goes back to the Senate.   Schultz cast her vote in spite of opposition to the bill from both a majority of Americans and labor, including the AFL-CIO and the Communications Workers of America.  There are now calls for her to step down as Chair of the DNC, which too often looks like they are representing a party of centrist Republicans and not the traditional party of progressive working class Americans.

What a strange alliance, with Republicans, Obama and Wasserman Schultz supporting the TPP trade bill with a majority of the House Democrats and labor on the other side.   The behind-the-scenes deal making to get this thing passed has to be outrageous.  One wonders what the 28 Dems who voted for fast-tracking the bill in the House (including no fewer than 5 Californians) are being promised, and what it will take for the Democratic  Party to reclaim its moral and ethical center?

We can all make a difference as the bill heads back to the Senate by e-mailing or calling our U.S. Senators , urging them to vote AGAINST fast-tracking the TPP bill.   Do it.  You’ll feel better.

Hang On Los Angeles, Here Comes The “Obamajam” – Again

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Mr. Obama is coming to town, and they’ll be shutting down much of the west side and two major freeways just to prove how important he is and how badly he needs to raise money for the Dems.   Oh wait, did I say two major freeways?   Scratch that, because here in Los Angeles, they are all major.    You shut down even one freeway and tens of thousands of Angelinos are impacted for miles around as the traffic flows off the freeways and onto surface streets, causing backups reaching into the next county.

Don’t think so?  By one count, the 405 freeway carries 374,000 vehicles per day.  They’ll be closing it not  once but twice for the Obama visit.    If you live here you will understand and probably start weeping.  If not, use your imagination.

The Los Angeles Times lists no fewer than 32 road and freeway closures over the next two days to accommodate the Obama fundraising tour.   You have to wonder if his “people” understand the nature of Los Angeles?  You have to wonder if at some point this won’t begin to have a negative  return at the polls? Oh wait,  LA is so blue, that he doesn’t really need to care about that, does he?

Shut it down.   Shut it all down.  Let the “Obamajam” begin.  And while you’re sitting out there stuck in traffic for hours with your air conditioner blasting to counteract the heat and humidity while your car sucks up $4 a gallon gas, pretend that it doesn’t matter.   Pretend there isn’t a better way.   I’m sure there is, but I have no hope that people living inside the DC bubble will ever figure it out.

Bernie Sanders, Our Last Best Chance?

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It’s kinda like one of those stupid “Mom and Dad Save the World” movies, except this time,  instead of Mom and Dad, its our national grandfather Bernie Sanders who’s doing the saving and it isn’t stupid and it’s not a movie.   And the plot is becoming more and more interesting.

Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats in the House have just turned their backs on President Obama’s effort to fast track the TPP free trade bill.  Well, good for them.   There’s an election coming and they had to do something to try and convince the millions of unemployed, underemployed, the students and others being crushed by debt, that Democrats care about something other than campaign contributions.  They get this way around election time and later seem to partake in selective amnesia.

“That’s not what I said” they say, except that it’s usually exactly what they said and they’ll probably say it again in a year or two and then move on with another round of denials while kissing babies and eating barbecue in someone’s backyard somewhere in West Texas.

Any number of progressives fear that the “TPP” will do what NAFTA, CAFTA and the WTO have done,  further devastate the American middle class by dropping trade barriers even further and sending even more jobs overseas to countries where slave labor is still permissible.

Some Democrats worry out loud whether this split between House Dems and Mr. Obama, will hurt Hillary Clinton at the polls,  as the  giant groaning and hopefully wrong-headed assumption that Hillary Clinton will win the primary continues.

Meantime, if the polls are to be believed, Bernie Sanders continues picking up followers.  And for good reason.  Bernie, has none of the Wall Street baggage Hillary Clinton will carry with her wherever she goes, regardless of what she might say about the evils of what CEO’s  are being paid and the scourge of tax breaks afforded hedge fund managers.  Like her son-in-law for example.   She wants to eliminate her son-in-laws tax breaks?  What overwhelming sincerity.  What forthrightness.   What nonsense.

So many of the Democrats in Congress are doing nothing but carrying water for millionaires, billionaires and big corporations, and Bill and Hillary Clinton are right there, in bed with their Wall Street buddies who have paid out hundreds of thousands in speaker’s fees to Hillary will bolstering Bill’s legacy by writing checks to The Clinton Foundation.   So forget them.   Hopefully America will.   They’ve had their very lengthy moment in the sun.   Hopefully the Democrats will understand this in the runup to the primary.

Hopefully, they will realize that Bernie Sanders may be our best chance to restore some political balance to the country.   He says a “political revolution” is what we need.  He’s right.

An Independent from Vermont,  Sanders is running as a Democrat, because it’s the only way he has a chance of winning.  And he will have a chance, a very real chance,  if America wakes up to the terrible fact that our political system has been bought off, our freedom of self-determination stolen, and that Bernie, may be our last best chance of recovering what we once had, a nation that works for the majority and not just a wealthy few.

At a gathering in Des Moines,  Sanders put it this way, “Today, we live in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, but that reality means little because almost all of that wealth is controlled by a tiny handful of individuals. America now has more income and wealth inequality than any major country on earth, and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the 1920s. The issue of wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time and it is the great political issue of our time.

Let me be very clear. There is something profoundly wrong when the top one-tenth of one percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom ninety percent, and when ninety-nine percent of all new income goes to the top one percent. There is something profoundly wrong when we have a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires at the same time as millions of Americans work longer hours for lower wages and we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on earth. There is something profoundly wrong when one family owns more wealth than the bottom 130 million Americans. This grotesque level of inequality is immoral. It is bad economics. It is unsustainable. That is why we need a tax system that is fair and progressive, which makes wealthy individuals and profitable corporations begin to pay their fair share of taxes. This type of rigged economy is not what America is supposed to be about. This has got to change and, together we will change it.

This campaign is sending a message to the billionaire class:  “you can’t have it all.”  -Bernie Sanders

Good for Pelosi and the Democrats for standing up to Mr. Obama, Wall Street and the corporations on the TPP bill.  Just remember that for years most of these people have been part of the problem.  That there’s no way many of them will take part in the “political revolution” the nation so badly needs.   That Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush and most of the others will only follow in the footsteps of Mr. Obama, by maintaining much of the status quo, continuing on with the best government money can buy while the remnants of representative democracy are nothing but an illusion.

Oh, and Bernie Sanders will not be serving an adequate purpose by simply pulling Hilary farther to the left.  That won’t be enough.   Since Reagan, the country has been pushed so far to the right that those of us who were once moderates, even Eisenhower Republicans,  are now considered to be radical lefties.   No, Bernie needs to win this thing.   Nobody’s perfect, but he could be our last best chance.

FIFA And The U.S. Congress – An Unholy Double Standard

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FIFA officials are under indictment from the U.S. Attorney General,  for taking kickbacks to influence their voting.   Exactly like the U.S. system of paying off members of the House and Senate to influence their voting.   So a soccer federation is being held to a higher legal standard than the White House and the Congress of the United States.  

Bernie Sanders is absolutely right, it’s time for a political revolution in America.  The following, written long ago by American patriot Tom Paine, is once again on point. 

“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”   -‘The Crisis’ byThomas Paine, December 23, 1776 

Why I Just Contributed To Bernie Sanders

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A lifetime in Journalism made me a believer in transparency, which, of course, makes disclosure an important issue even though I currently do what are commonly called “opinion pieces.”  That is to say, I no longer do straight-ahead Journalism, giving readers both sides of the story and then letting them decided for themselves how they might feel about one issue or another.    I stopped doing that kind of Journalism when I left KTLA-TV in 2009 and began writing this blog.   Whether my objectivity and fairness continue now that I am issuing forth with opinion is a question for my readers to answer.

Being able to tell people how I feel about major issues is a real relief following forty years of leaving my opinions and personal bias on the doorstep at home when I left for work each day.   It isn’t easy, but it can be done.   There are any number of outstanding journalists who are doing exactly that, even though many are shown little or no appreciation for their efforts at ethical professional behavior due to the financial pressures pushing down on both print and broadcast news.

But back to transparency.   Today, I made a contribution to the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders.   Some months ago, I made more than one contribution to the Senate campaign of Elizabeth Warren.    I openly support both Sanders and Warren in my writing,  so I don’t feel ethically challenged in sending them money.   Prior to those donations, while I was doing straight-ahead journalism, not only did I never contribute to anyone’s campaign, I  refrained from voting out of fear that having a horse in the race would compromise my ethical position as a journalist.   How could I possibly support a candidate and still expect my viewers to believe I was being objective in my work?   In fact, prior to Sanders and Warren, the only other campaign contribution I had ever made was a small check I made out to George McGovern in the 70’s,  before I got into journalism.

My opinion is that voting for Hillary because she is a woman, is not a valid reason to vote for Hillary.  She’s taken way too much money from Wall Street.   She’s far too tied into the big American banking machine.  In the end, she will favor those who have paid her.   She has to, if only because it’s human nature to favor those who favor you, and she has been favored in a big way.

As for Bernie, yes he leans toward social reform.  Toward re-blancing the nation’s progressive tax structure.  So what?   Who do you think pays for the fire department, the police department, our roads and highways, our food inspectors (such as they still are), maintaining our clean air and water, disaster relief and our military?   Aren’t you burned out on paying twice what the Canadians pay for prescription meds?  If anything, Bernie will bring America back to being a more balanced or “mixed” economy, providing both the incentives offered by Capitalism and the security provided by  Democratic Socialism, without taking us off the rails and into some extremist ideology, which is where this current batch of extremist Republicans want us to go.   The privatization the Republicans are after is no better than Communism.  Both ultimately result in a form of feudalism, absent of adequate self-determination and shared power.

As Bill Moyers recently called to our attention, “…Sanders’s positions are quite mainstream from the point of view of the stances of the American public in general. Of course, the 1 percent, for whom and by whom most mainstream media report, are appalled and would like to depict him as an outlier.”  Moyers points to a recent Gallup poll showing that 63% of Americans support Sanders contention, “that the current distribution of wealth is unfair.”

By my way of thinking, if Sanders has a fault, it’s the same problem Jimmy Carter and George McGovern had.   He’s just too damn honest for American politics.     This isn’t my original thought.   If memory serves,  it came from the shark-toothed brain of Hunter S. Thompson.  I’m not suggesting it’s always a bad problem to have, if only the American people could recognize that honesty is better for us than the lie-fueled, festering,  entertainment driven, mud-slinging frenzy that has come to dominate our political landscape.   It’s so much easier to draw someone’s attention with slime and innuendo than with a discussion of the facts,  a game that plays against politicians who try and deal with the truth to the exclusion of personal attacks.

I think Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are trying to do the right thing against terrifying odds.   In this current environment, that, at the very least, makes them statesmen (and woman), and possibly even patriots.   Real patriots, not one of those flag waving empty bags of rhetorical racket who grow fat on the blood and tears of others while proportionately putting back so much less than they take from the system.

There it is.   All in the interest of transparency.   Were I still on the air, working for a news organization that represents itself as being objective, I wouldn’t be donating to anybody.   But, as I now write opinion pieces, my opinion is that it’s okay to donate to Bernie Sanders.   Considering the bankers and their billions that are stacked against him, I urge you to send what you can by going to his campaign website, berniesanders.com. 

Some are saying he can’t beat Hillary.    Probably some of the same folks who said Obama couldn’t win the primary in 08.

Send Bernie a couple of bucks.  Click here – https://berniesanders.com