People say that Santa knows who’s been naughty or nice. I’m not so sure.
I don’t think there’s any rhyme or reason to the goodies that Santa gives out. Lately it seems that the least deserving people, the people who already had a lot and then made a lot more while screwing up the economy for the rest of us, have been getting the biggest Christmas bonuses.
Maybe it’s best that Santa doesn’t know so much about us. Even jolly old St. Nick might be seduced by such knowledge, withholding gifts from some people and playing favorites with others, taking bribes, making threats. Pretty soon the North Pole would be overrun with lobbyists, pursuing their own special interests. The elves might break into political parties: Better Goodies for the Good versus the North Pole Equality Party. Lobbyists plus parties mean corruption.
Any systematic peeking into our daily behavior, combined with collecting data about our personal beliefs and desires, would threaten our freedom. We must always be vigilant that government does not spy on us, as it did so broadly in the 1960s, and as the Patriot Act continues to allow today. But we are worrying about the wrong snoopers. Right now we are being spied upon on a grand scale unimaginable a few years ago. Not by the government, but by the real Big Brother, Big Brother Computing.
Facebook collects information about what its 800 million members are doing on their computers, even when they are not on Facebook. The “like” and “recommend” buttons on countless other websites act like little cameras, even if you don’t click on them, recording what you do and sending that information back to Facebook Central.
Until they were caught doing it about a year ago, Facebook collected information from everyone this way, whether they were a member of Facebook or not. Facebook stopped only when this became public knowledge, saying it was a “bug”. That’s for sure – it was a like a billion bugged phones all over the world, listening in on people’s lives.
Actually the “bugs” of Big Brother Computing are far more sophisticated than the little devices that spies put on each other’s phones. I discovered that the first time I tried to use Windows Media Player (WMP), after the newest version of Microsoft’s operating system was installed on my computer. Microsoft recommended that I “Make Windows Media Player the default program for playing media, automatically download usage rights and media information to update your media files, and send usage data from the Player to Microsoft.”
Here is what that means, according to Microsoft’s own “Privacy Statement”. Under the guise of bringing “you the performance, power and convenience you desire in your personal computing,” WMP records “what you play and how often you play it,” among lots of other personal information. Then information from WMP “may be combined with information obtained through other Microsoft Services.” It is all shared among Microsoft’s “subsidiaries and affiliates”, and stored and processed in “any country in which Microsoft or its affiliates, subsidiaries, or service providers maintain facilities.” Your personal information, collected each time you get online, is spread all over the world. Your computer becomes an extension of the Microsoft Empire. It sends them information about what you do and they put information that they create on your computer.
Facebook is even more clever: it not only knows what you do, but what you look like. Facebook has become adept at recognizing faces. If you post a photograph to your page, Facebook will compare the faces on it to its vast storehouse of data, enabling it to “suggest” identities for the people it recognizes. Depending on what the photographs show, Facebook might well know if you’ve been naughty or nice.
The volume of data that Facebook and Microsoft collect would have been unthinkable before recent advances in computer technology. Unprecedented numbers of computers all over the world rummage through gazillions of data bits at unprecedented speed to figure out what you are playing, who is in your photographs, what you have bought, whom you correspond with.
Google might be the world’s spymaster. Google also has +1 buttons that watch our internet activities. Through its “free” gmail program, Google reads the content of your emails, looking for keywords that it can link to ads which will be displayed on your screen. Through photographs of every street, through control of millions of gmail accounts, through YouTube, and through the new services that are constantly being offered, Google can put together in one dossier your name, address, phone numbers, email traffic, and video watching. Google Health will store all of your medical records, prescriptions, and test results in one convenient place. Convenient for you and convenient for them.
Google and the others are just trying to make money. They use your information to sell you goods more efficiently, or they sell the information to others. They promise not to abuse your privacy. But they already have. “Bugs” in their systems, inadvertent releases of data, the possibility of hacking, and most dangerous of all, their greed, have made privacy a thing of the past.
So you better be good.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, December 20, 2011
Monday, December 19, 2011
Monday, December 12, 2011
Who’s the Scrooge?
I have two friends whose families are going through hard times. Unemployment, illness, and new babies are individually a challenge to any family. Together they can strain a family’s financial and psychological resources past the breaking point.
My friends take their work seriously and consistently put in their best efforts. They do not need lessons in how to work. They need some real help. They could use a safety net.
The economic safety net, to catch families who encounter problems beyond their resources and then to bounce them back on their feet, is a modern invention. European monarchies created property systems to provide cheap labor to wealthy landowners and political systems to protect the rich, in which the poor had no voice. So millions moved to the New World.
American democracy was designed to promote more fairness: “All men are created equal.” But the political democracy of the Founders was not enough. All men and women were not born with equal chances. In 19th-century America, riches and poverty were considered judgments of God and thus the poor were undeserving. Slavery, prejudice against ethnic minorities, child labor in factories, and systematic discrimination against women were all pieces of the more general rigging of the American economic and social system in favor of the rich, against the poor. The minority who escaped poverty proved that the majority deserved it.
In the 20th century, Americans changed our laws to create an economic and social safety net. Social Security and unemployment insurance in the 1930s, and Medicare in the 1960s were elements of an evolving structure, which offered public help to those without resources. The safety net represents an American consensus that the poor deserve systematic public assistance, not just individual charity. This expression of social solidarity is a statement about American values.
Lately prominent political voices argue that we must take apart the safety net. The calls to flatten the income tax, to eliminate welfare payments, and to repeal regulation of industry are about going back to an earlier America, where the rich and powerful could use their advantages without hindrance. Behind these destructive policies lurk the uncharitable beliefs about the poor that all modern nations have left behind: the poor are lazy and shiftless, don’t know the meaning of work, have frivolous ambitions, depend on handouts, will never amount to anything.
These political leaders don’t like the newly compassionate America. They disdain people who have less than they do. They think the riches of our nation belong to them and their well-connected friends. They offer nothing to my friends.
I admire the way my friends keep going, keep smiling, and keep working. Their burdens are neither kept secret nor broadcast in public. They are shouldered, not avoided or passed onto others.
Are their burdens my burdens, too? I can choose my answer. Are they our burdens? We choose our answer together. Those answers are signs of our friendship, our compassion, and our values.
If we take care of our family members, we do no extraordinary thing. We do what Americans rightly expect family to mean in a good society.
If we take on our friends’ burdens, offer some help, even if not much, we do a less common thing. Americans place a high value on such offers, and offer praise to those who give.
What about a stranger’s burden? What about all those people you haven’t met and never will, who suffer more than you know, who happen to have no relatives or friends with the resources to help? Outside of the drug store, the Salvation Army volunteer rings a bell: “Won’t you give a few coins to help people you don’t know?” Our religions powerfully demand that we help those in need near and far, that we not tailor our compassion to our self-interest.
What kind of family member one is, what kind of friend one is, and what kind of society we are all come from our answers to these questions. If our state, the only organization to which we all belong, in which we all have an equal vote, is not compassionate, if it caters to those with wealth and power, but does not care for those with too little, then how can we pose as an exceptional nation? Among wealthy nations we would be exceptionally hard-hearted.
It is ironic that the public defenders of Christmas have waged a war on the moral value of public compassion, have offered so little to those with little, except condescension. They expound theories to prove that those who have much deserve it all, that their good fortune is our collective salvation, and the rest should just work harder. For them, a “bleeding heart” is a weakness.
If your family has run into hard times, if your unemployment insurance has run out, if your baby does not have health insurance, if there’s never quite enough food on the table, the defenders of Christmas have a message for you.
From the Mitt Romney family, the Newt Gingrich family, the John Boehner family, and all their friends, the warmest Christmas wishes for a happy holidays. They made it, and so can you. As a token of their own values, they’ll make sure that Santa leaves a mop under your tree.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, December 13, 2011
My friends take their work seriously and consistently put in their best efforts. They do not need lessons in how to work. They need some real help. They could use a safety net.
The economic safety net, to catch families who encounter problems beyond their resources and then to bounce them back on their feet, is a modern invention. European monarchies created property systems to provide cheap labor to wealthy landowners and political systems to protect the rich, in which the poor had no voice. So millions moved to the New World.
American democracy was designed to promote more fairness: “All men are created equal.” But the political democracy of the Founders was not enough. All men and women were not born with equal chances. In 19th-century America, riches and poverty were considered judgments of God and thus the poor were undeserving. Slavery, prejudice against ethnic minorities, child labor in factories, and systematic discrimination against women were all pieces of the more general rigging of the American economic and social system in favor of the rich, against the poor. The minority who escaped poverty proved that the majority deserved it.
In the 20th century, Americans changed our laws to create an economic and social safety net. Social Security and unemployment insurance in the 1930s, and Medicare in the 1960s were elements of an evolving structure, which offered public help to those without resources. The safety net represents an American consensus that the poor deserve systematic public assistance, not just individual charity. This expression of social solidarity is a statement about American values.
Lately prominent political voices argue that we must take apart the safety net. The calls to flatten the income tax, to eliminate welfare payments, and to repeal regulation of industry are about going back to an earlier America, where the rich and powerful could use their advantages without hindrance. Behind these destructive policies lurk the uncharitable beliefs about the poor that all modern nations have left behind: the poor are lazy and shiftless, don’t know the meaning of work, have frivolous ambitions, depend on handouts, will never amount to anything.
These political leaders don’t like the newly compassionate America. They disdain people who have less than they do. They think the riches of our nation belong to them and their well-connected friends. They offer nothing to my friends.
I admire the way my friends keep going, keep smiling, and keep working. Their burdens are neither kept secret nor broadcast in public. They are shouldered, not avoided or passed onto others.
Are their burdens my burdens, too? I can choose my answer. Are they our burdens? We choose our answer together. Those answers are signs of our friendship, our compassion, and our values.
If we take care of our family members, we do no extraordinary thing. We do what Americans rightly expect family to mean in a good society.
If we take on our friends’ burdens, offer some help, even if not much, we do a less common thing. Americans place a high value on such offers, and offer praise to those who give.
What about a stranger’s burden? What about all those people you haven’t met and never will, who suffer more than you know, who happen to have no relatives or friends with the resources to help? Outside of the drug store, the Salvation Army volunteer rings a bell: “Won’t you give a few coins to help people you don’t know?” Our religions powerfully demand that we help those in need near and far, that we not tailor our compassion to our self-interest.
What kind of family member one is, what kind of friend one is, and what kind of society we are all come from our answers to these questions. If our state, the only organization to which we all belong, in which we all have an equal vote, is not compassionate, if it caters to those with wealth and power, but does not care for those with too little, then how can we pose as an exceptional nation? Among wealthy nations we would be exceptionally hard-hearted.
It is ironic that the public defenders of Christmas have waged a war on the moral value of public compassion, have offered so little to those with little, except condescension. They expound theories to prove that those who have much deserve it all, that their good fortune is our collective salvation, and the rest should just work harder. For them, a “bleeding heart” is a weakness.
If your family has run into hard times, if your unemployment insurance has run out, if your baby does not have health insurance, if there’s never quite enough food on the table, the defenders of Christmas have a message for you.
From the Mitt Romney family, the Newt Gingrich family, the John Boehner family, and all their friends, the warmest Christmas wishes for a happy holidays. They made it, and so can you. As a token of their own values, they’ll make sure that Santa leaves a mop under your tree.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, December 13, 2011
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Herman Cain is No More
Herman Cain is no longer a candidate for President. First accusations of serial harassment of women. Then a 13-year affair, involving travel and money and midnight phone calls concealed from his wife. Cain’s claims that people are out to get him, from the left or from the right, convinced nobody. He got himself.
But Herman Cain was never a viable candidate. Even if he had been a model husband, Cain should never have been discussed seriously as a possible President.
Herman Cain worked himself up from poverty to enormous wealth, he was hired by a national organization to lobby their interests, and he became a popular spokesman for conservative causes. Those successes are admirable, but not sufficient qualifications to be President.
An American President must understand business and the economy. The most immediate issues facing our nation right now are macro-economic: increasing poverty and inequality; persistent unemployment; an unwieldy tax system; uncertainties about investing; global competition; a housing crisis. No simple plan will be sufficient to deal with the complex, interrelated issues of our changing world economy.
Cain never showed any ability to oversee a national economy. The utter simplicity of Cain’s “9-9-9” economic plan attracted a lot of attention. But he didn’t understand his own plan. When he talked in October with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd about it, Cain produced nonsense. He said about a family of 4 with an income of $50,000, “Today under the current system, they will pay over $10,000 in taxes assuming standard deductions and standard exemptions.”
In fact, using those assumptions, such a family would pay under $800 in income taxes, and about $3800 in payroll taxes, under normal circumstances. Since the SS withholding tax rate has been temporarily lowered from 6.2% to 4.2%, that family’s payroll taxes would be only $2800. Under Cain’s plan, their federal taxes would be $4500, and their sales tax payments would be additional thousands. This is exactly what economists of the left and right have agreed: most people would pay more taxes and rich people much less.
Cain’s “9-9-9” plan would represent a radical change in our economic system. No more deductions for mortgages, no more exemptions for children, and an unprecedented federal sales tax would fundamentally shift economic policy. Cain never demonstrated that he had any idea what his plan really means. “9-9-9” is not a serious policy; it is an advertising gimmick with untried ideas, a marketing slogan for the brand “Cain”.
If Cain at least looked like he had something to say about the economy, he couldn’t even maintain that pretense when the subject went beyond the US borders. He worried about China developing a nuclear capability, when they have had the bomb since 1964; he couldn’t figure out what to say about the Libyan revolution when interviewed at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and then a couple of days later, talked about the Taliban in Libya; at the so-called national security debate among the Republican candidates, Cain said nothing about foreign policy that a high school student couldn’t have said.
How did this happen? How could someone so unqualified to lead our country become a front-runner, even for a day, among Republican Presidential candidates? Cain could talk the ideological talk of the right wing. After years of giving motivational speeches for the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, he could say the correct phrases and repeat the correct slogans. He just needed a script, prepared and paid for by others, that he could deliver with enthusiasm, in exchange for a lot of money.
Is that enough to be President? Are the simple ideas that Herman Cain has been offering over the past few months so impressive that anyone who can say them deserves to be President?
We have seen this all before. Sarah Palin made an enormous splash as a national candidate, because she too made an attractive spokeswoman for sound-bite versions of conservative ideas. She could speak the average person’s language. Then it turned out that she couldn’t speak any other language. She didn’t know anything about Russia, which she could see from her porch, much less about Africa, China, or the euro. She didn’t read and didn’t care. She figured, as Cain did, that a couple of months of tutoring by some “experts” would give her everything she needed to know, in case she was faced with a revolution in multiple Arab countries, the possible bankruptcy of European nations, or a nuclear Iran.
Palin and Cain are not foolish. They recognized that the elemental ideas of the Tea Party supporters could be exploited by slick slogans and political gimmicks. And like the other right-wing favorites, Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann, that’s all they had.
The rest of us deserve more than self-promoters and their gimmicks. We need serious candidates.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, December 6, 2011
But Herman Cain was never a viable candidate. Even if he had been a model husband, Cain should never have been discussed seriously as a possible President.
Herman Cain worked himself up from poverty to enormous wealth, he was hired by a national organization to lobby their interests, and he became a popular spokesman for conservative causes. Those successes are admirable, but not sufficient qualifications to be President.
An American President must understand business and the economy. The most immediate issues facing our nation right now are macro-economic: increasing poverty and inequality; persistent unemployment; an unwieldy tax system; uncertainties about investing; global competition; a housing crisis. No simple plan will be sufficient to deal with the complex, interrelated issues of our changing world economy.
Cain never showed any ability to oversee a national economy. The utter simplicity of Cain’s “9-9-9” economic plan attracted a lot of attention. But he didn’t understand his own plan. When he talked in October with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd about it, Cain produced nonsense. He said about a family of 4 with an income of $50,000, “Today under the current system, they will pay over $10,000 in taxes assuming standard deductions and standard exemptions.”
In fact, using those assumptions, such a family would pay under $800 in income taxes, and about $3800 in payroll taxes, under normal circumstances. Since the SS withholding tax rate has been temporarily lowered from 6.2% to 4.2%, that family’s payroll taxes would be only $2800. Under Cain’s plan, their federal taxes would be $4500, and their sales tax payments would be additional thousands. This is exactly what economists of the left and right have agreed: most people would pay more taxes and rich people much less.
Cain’s “9-9-9” plan would represent a radical change in our economic system. No more deductions for mortgages, no more exemptions for children, and an unprecedented federal sales tax would fundamentally shift economic policy. Cain never demonstrated that he had any idea what his plan really means. “9-9-9” is not a serious policy; it is an advertising gimmick with untried ideas, a marketing slogan for the brand “Cain”.
If Cain at least looked like he had something to say about the economy, he couldn’t even maintain that pretense when the subject went beyond the US borders. He worried about China developing a nuclear capability, when they have had the bomb since 1964; he couldn’t figure out what to say about the Libyan revolution when interviewed at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and then a couple of days later, talked about the Taliban in Libya; at the so-called national security debate among the Republican candidates, Cain said nothing about foreign policy that a high school student couldn’t have said.
How did this happen? How could someone so unqualified to lead our country become a front-runner, even for a day, among Republican Presidential candidates? Cain could talk the ideological talk of the right wing. After years of giving motivational speeches for the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, he could say the correct phrases and repeat the correct slogans. He just needed a script, prepared and paid for by others, that he could deliver with enthusiasm, in exchange for a lot of money.
Is that enough to be President? Are the simple ideas that Herman Cain has been offering over the past few months so impressive that anyone who can say them deserves to be President?
We have seen this all before. Sarah Palin made an enormous splash as a national candidate, because she too made an attractive spokeswoman for sound-bite versions of conservative ideas. She could speak the average person’s language. Then it turned out that she couldn’t speak any other language. She didn’t know anything about Russia, which she could see from her porch, much less about Africa, China, or the euro. She didn’t read and didn’t care. She figured, as Cain did, that a couple of months of tutoring by some “experts” would give her everything she needed to know, in case she was faced with a revolution in multiple Arab countries, the possible bankruptcy of European nations, or a nuclear Iran.
Palin and Cain are not foolish. They recognized that the elemental ideas of the Tea Party supporters could be exploited by slick slogans and political gimmicks. And like the other right-wing favorites, Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann, that’s all they had.
The rest of us deserve more than self-promoters and their gimmicks. We need serious candidates.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, December 6, 2011
Monday, November 28, 2011
Speaking for Myself
I want to be sure that everyone who reads my column understands that here I write and speak for myself. I don’t speak for any institution I am associated with, not for the Sino-Judaic Institute, a small faraway educational organization, nor for Illinois College, our own educational institution as old as Jacksonville, nor for Jacksonville itself, from my seat on the Historical Preservation Commission.
I am not trying to market their brands or advertise their virtues. I represent my own party of one, which is what I believe an opinion columnist ought to do. Being published in my own community is a great privilege, which I hope to earn by talking straight with my readers about my own thinking.
Unlike so many of the people who talk and write at us these days, I am not trying to make a buck or get a vote. I am free to tell the truth, as I see it. I don’t have to make up lies about other people, who don’t share my views. I don’t have to pretend that what I know is true is false, and what I know is false is true.
I am also proud to say that I am a part of these institutions, by my choice. I share their values, I wish to see them prosper and grow, and I promote their programs and people with my own time, labor, and money.
That is why I can represent them when they want me to wear a badge with their name. If I meet prospective students on campus, university administrators in Japan, or scholars at a conference, I identify myself with Illinois College. Over my signature on Sino-Judaic Institute letterhead, messages about membership, dues, grants, and finances leave Jacksonville. I am proud to write local homeowners about designating their houses as local landmarks, in the name of the Historical Preservation Commission.
By pledging allegiance to certain institutions with whom we want to identify, we don’t give up our rights to think about, talk about, even preach about contemporary issues. We simply must accept the responsibility to be clear about how, and especially when, we represent those institutions. Inevitably the line between being true to oneself and representing larger institutions gets fuzzy, since we cannot separate our public and private identities, as citizen or employee.
Right now I’m at home, my mother is in the next room, and my music is playing. The responsibility for what gets published here in my name is entirely mine.
If some authority comes after me because they don’t like what I say, no institution will protect me. But I’m still safe, because I am shielded by a power greater than institutions, the First Amendment to our Constitution.
Still the determined efforts of those who don’t want me to talk at all have surprised me. Because the internet offers virtual anonymity and unparalleled access, anyone who speaks out is yelled at, in every violent, disgusting, hateful way. It’s much worse for women who are attacked both for their views, and as unworthy of having any views. They are threatened with graphically violent sexual violation. Maybe that’s because the nastiest people in the blogosphere are angry men.
The freedom which enables me to write is really based on you readers. The First Amendment was adopted in 1791, but many times in our history that freedom did not effectively exist. I was born at the depth of the Cold War political hysteria, whipped up by conservatives of both parties, symbolized by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, but encompassing Presidents and Congress, FBI agents, labor leaders, and newspaper editors. Civil rights leaders, pacifists and feminists, who voiced ideas uncomfortable to the defenders of a racist, sexist, and militaristic status quo, were routinely deprived of this freedom.
The reinvigoration of our constitutional freedoms in my lifetime came from below, from ordinary citizens, from readers who wanted to end censorship by the powerful. I feel the protection of today’s readers, not just the few who agree with me, but the many who believe in my right to write. Surrounded by the shield of a free readership, opinion writers across America can do our work.
Thanks.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 29, 2011
I am not trying to market their brands or advertise their virtues. I represent my own party of one, which is what I believe an opinion columnist ought to do. Being published in my own community is a great privilege, which I hope to earn by talking straight with my readers about my own thinking.
Unlike so many of the people who talk and write at us these days, I am not trying to make a buck or get a vote. I am free to tell the truth, as I see it. I don’t have to make up lies about other people, who don’t share my views. I don’t have to pretend that what I know is true is false, and what I know is false is true.
I am also proud to say that I am a part of these institutions, by my choice. I share their values, I wish to see them prosper and grow, and I promote their programs and people with my own time, labor, and money.
That is why I can represent them when they want me to wear a badge with their name. If I meet prospective students on campus, university administrators in Japan, or scholars at a conference, I identify myself with Illinois College. Over my signature on Sino-Judaic Institute letterhead, messages about membership, dues, grants, and finances leave Jacksonville. I am proud to write local homeowners about designating their houses as local landmarks, in the name of the Historical Preservation Commission.
By pledging allegiance to certain institutions with whom we want to identify, we don’t give up our rights to think about, talk about, even preach about contemporary issues. We simply must accept the responsibility to be clear about how, and especially when, we represent those institutions. Inevitably the line between being true to oneself and representing larger institutions gets fuzzy, since we cannot separate our public and private identities, as citizen or employee.
Right now I’m at home, my mother is in the next room, and my music is playing. The responsibility for what gets published here in my name is entirely mine.
If some authority comes after me because they don’t like what I say, no institution will protect me. But I’m still safe, because I am shielded by a power greater than institutions, the First Amendment to our Constitution.
Still the determined efforts of those who don’t want me to talk at all have surprised me. Because the internet offers virtual anonymity and unparalleled access, anyone who speaks out is yelled at, in every violent, disgusting, hateful way. It’s much worse for women who are attacked both for their views, and as unworthy of having any views. They are threatened with graphically violent sexual violation. Maybe that’s because the nastiest people in the blogosphere are angry men.
The freedom which enables me to write is really based on you readers. The First Amendment was adopted in 1791, but many times in our history that freedom did not effectively exist. I was born at the depth of the Cold War political hysteria, whipped up by conservatives of both parties, symbolized by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, but encompassing Presidents and Congress, FBI agents, labor leaders, and newspaper editors. Civil rights leaders, pacifists and feminists, who voiced ideas uncomfortable to the defenders of a racist, sexist, and militaristic status quo, were routinely deprived of this freedom.
The reinvigoration of our constitutional freedoms in my lifetime came from below, from ordinary citizens, from readers who wanted to end censorship by the powerful. I feel the protection of today’s readers, not just the few who agree with me, but the many who believe in my right to write. Surrounded by the shield of a free readership, opinion writers across America can do our work.
Thanks.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 29, 2011
Monday, November 21, 2011
Back to the Future?
Washington is a mess. The barriers separating bureaucracy, commercial lobbying, and elected officials are gone, and the same small elite of the rich and well-connected trade jobs and favors and money. Overpaid and coddled federal bureaucrats pretend to manage expensive programs which don’t work. They tell ordinary Americans what to do and how to do it, and don’t care about the cost or what we think.
How did that happen? The conservative answer is very loud and certain: “It’s the Democrats’ fault. We need Republicans, the more conservative the better, to clean up that monumental mess before it overwhelms us.”
That’s the part that seems puzzling. Over the past 30 years, Republicans have controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress for 6 years, and either the Presidency or both houses of Congress for 20 years. In those 30 years, the only time that more than 2 out of 9 Supreme Court justices were appointed by Democrats has been the past 2 years.
If Washington is a mess, then the Republicans have been making that mess, too, for decades. So how do they avoid taking any responsibility?
Well, when was the last time a politician took responsibility for anything wrong? That’s a bit of bipartisanship we would all like to get rid of.
But blaming the Democrats is not just typical political hypocrisy. What the conservatives hate is mainly due to Democrats, but not entirely. They hate the 1960s.
Republicans avoid talking about their leadership and power in Washington for the past 30 years, because they are fighting to undo the changes in our political system that came earlier, during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Conservative Republicans want to do away with the environmental protections that have safeguarded our health since the 1960s. The Clean Air Act was passed in 1963,and the Clean Water Act in 1972. The Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act set the first standards for vehicle emissions in 1965. The Environmental Protection Agency, that Rick Perry says is a “jobs cemetery”, was proposed by Richard Nixon and created in 1970.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission, the federal agency that protects citizens from dangerous products, was created in 1972. The Energy Department was created in the 1970s, because the oil crisis of 1973 made us realize the need to consolidate energy policy.
The movements for equality that conservatives are so angry about, the women’s rights and gay rights movements, grew out of the popular recognition in the 1960s that inequality was rooted in American laws and customs. Roe v. Wade affirmed women’s constitutional right to control their own bodies; it was decided by a 7-2 vote, with 5 of the those affirmative votes by justices appointed by Republicans. The Office of Economic Opportunity was created in 1964 to administer new programs designed to reduce poverty in America, such as Head Start, VISTA, and Legal Aid. Republicans are now trying state by state to reverse the expansion of the franchise to poor people that developed out of the voting rights protests of the 1960s.
Conservatives lost the battles in the 1960s to stop these reforms from being put into place. They have tried for decades to obstruct, weaken and defund them. They point to every problem with programs that they have been in charge of for most of the time. Their message is not, “We failed.” It is, “These programs can’t ever work. Let us get rid of them.”
One person symbolizes everything that conservatives hate about the 1960s. Barack Obama, son of a foreigner, community organizer, black, and liberal, could not have become President, if it hadn’t been for what the American people accomplished in the 1960s, over the vocal objections of conservatives.
But they won’t succeed. The revolution in American politics that was won by American voters in the 1960s and 1970s still commands majorities. A September Harris Poll showed that 51% of Americans support same-sex marriage, 56% support stricter gun control laws, 64% support abortion rights, and 75% support stricter environmental protection. Even after the poor and the immigrants are excluded from the polls, even after the relentless bombardment of billionaire-financed TV ads, most Americans want the rights, the freedoms, and the securities for us and our children that the 1960s brought.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 22, 2011
How did that happen? The conservative answer is very loud and certain: “It’s the Democrats’ fault. We need Republicans, the more conservative the better, to clean up that monumental mess before it overwhelms us.”
That’s the part that seems puzzling. Over the past 30 years, Republicans have controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress for 6 years, and either the Presidency or both houses of Congress for 20 years. In those 30 years, the only time that more than 2 out of 9 Supreme Court justices were appointed by Democrats has been the past 2 years.
If Washington is a mess, then the Republicans have been making that mess, too, for decades. So how do they avoid taking any responsibility?
Well, when was the last time a politician took responsibility for anything wrong? That’s a bit of bipartisanship we would all like to get rid of.
But blaming the Democrats is not just typical political hypocrisy. What the conservatives hate is mainly due to Democrats, but not entirely. They hate the 1960s.
Republicans avoid talking about their leadership and power in Washington for the past 30 years, because they are fighting to undo the changes in our political system that came earlier, during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Conservative Republicans want to do away with the environmental protections that have safeguarded our health since the 1960s. The Clean Air Act was passed in 1963,and the Clean Water Act in 1972. The Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act set the first standards for vehicle emissions in 1965. The Environmental Protection Agency, that Rick Perry says is a “jobs cemetery”, was proposed by Richard Nixon and created in 1970.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission, the federal agency that protects citizens from dangerous products, was created in 1972. The Energy Department was created in the 1970s, because the oil crisis of 1973 made us realize the need to consolidate energy policy.
The movements for equality that conservatives are so angry about, the women’s rights and gay rights movements, grew out of the popular recognition in the 1960s that inequality was rooted in American laws and customs. Roe v. Wade affirmed women’s constitutional right to control their own bodies; it was decided by a 7-2 vote, with 5 of the those affirmative votes by justices appointed by Republicans. The Office of Economic Opportunity was created in 1964 to administer new programs designed to reduce poverty in America, such as Head Start, VISTA, and Legal Aid. Republicans are now trying state by state to reverse the expansion of the franchise to poor people that developed out of the voting rights protests of the 1960s.
Conservatives lost the battles in the 1960s to stop these reforms from being put into place. They have tried for decades to obstruct, weaken and defund them. They point to every problem with programs that they have been in charge of for most of the time. Their message is not, “We failed.” It is, “These programs can’t ever work. Let us get rid of them.”
One person symbolizes everything that conservatives hate about the 1960s. Barack Obama, son of a foreigner, community organizer, black, and liberal, could not have become President, if it hadn’t been for what the American people accomplished in the 1960s, over the vocal objections of conservatives.
But they won’t succeed. The revolution in American politics that was won by American voters in the 1960s and 1970s still commands majorities. A September Harris Poll showed that 51% of Americans support same-sex marriage, 56% support stricter gun control laws, 64% support abortion rights, and 75% support stricter environmental protection. Even after the poor and the immigrants are excluded from the polls, even after the relentless bombardment of billionaire-financed TV ads, most Americans want the rights, the freedoms, and the securities for us and our children that the 1960s brought.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 22, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
Brainwashing
Herman Cain said most blacks are dumb. He should know. He’s talking about his own people.
Cain actually used the word “brainwashed”. That makes me think of Frank Sinatra tracking a robotic Laurence Harvey in the “Manchurian Candidate”. We all know that brainwashers are our enemy. In the film, Russian and Chinese intelligence agents and a Commie-loving traitor, Laurence Harvey’s mother, terrifically overplayed by Angela Lansbury, will stop at nothing to attain their evil ends.
Could there be a good brainwasher? Some corporation, or some government, or some alien offers eternal happiness right here on earth, in the form of pills, or surgery, or radiation. Wouldn’t that be nice? No. From “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” back to Orwell’s “1984”, back further to Goethe’s “Faust”, the cultural message is clear. There is always a sinister motive behind this gift of the good life. The bad guys want to rob your freedom in exchange for some fleeting and ultimately worthless promise of fame, fortune, and good-looking playmates. It’s the Devil’s pact. All brainwashing is bad.
Herman Cain wants to be taken seriously. Let’s listen to exactly what he said. “Many African Americans have been brainwashed into not being open-minded, not even considering a conservative point of view. I have received some of that same vitriol, simply because I am running for the Republican nomination as a conservative. So it's just brainwashing and people not being open-minded, pure and simple .... For two-thirds of them that is the case.”
The brainwashers are the usual Republican devils: liberals or Democrats, if there is any difference. According to Cain, most African Americans are unable to escape the mind-control black magic of those long-time political criminals, led by their Brainwasher-in-Chief, Barack Obama.
A slightly different metaphor comes to the lips of another black conservative, Rep. Allen West from Florida. He compares the Democratic Party to a modern-day “plantation.”
West told Laura Ingraham on FOX News that he is the “modern-day Harriet Tubman“ and that he wants to lead fellow African Americans away from the “21st-century plantation.” Only this time, unlike 19th-century slavery, African Americans voted eagerly for their slave masters. Dumb.
Are Cain and West actually trying to appeal to African Americans by calling them dupes? Certainly. That’s no different than the message proclaimed by all the Republican Presidential competitors. The new line, once put out only by celebrity radicals, like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, but now standard fare for serious Republican politicians, is that liberals are not simply wrong, not simply bad for the country, but determined to ruin America. Bad for blacks and whites, if only they could see it.
The evil deeds of Obama Democrats, like the hoax of global warming, the death panel threat to Grandma, and the betrayal of Israel, are so obvious, that the only explanation for their legions of avid supporters is brainwashing.
These European-style socialists constantly repeat their big lies through the dishonest liberal media. Using techniques perfected by Joseph Goebbels, the American media bombards the public with so many “facts”, that only conservatives have not been put into a trance.
Sounds like “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man,” as Joseph McCarthy said long ago.
Herman Cain is just repeating normal Republican campaign rhetoric. But there is still a difference. White American is pretty evenly divided, with the edge to the right-thinking conservatives. But Cain’s two-thirds of black America, which is really 90% of black voters in 2010, blindly votes for Democrats.
It seems to me that a better tactic to win black votes might be to offer more than insults, such as jobs (African Americans had 13% unemployment in 2010) or health care (44% of black adults have no health insurance). But not one Republican politician has repudiated Cain’s and West’s characterization of black Americans.
Perry and Romney and all the rest agree that African Americans are less able than whites to resist the clever techniques of the liberal brainwashers. Born that way, I guess.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 15, 2011
Cain actually used the word “brainwashed”. That makes me think of Frank Sinatra tracking a robotic Laurence Harvey in the “Manchurian Candidate”. We all know that brainwashers are our enemy. In the film, Russian and Chinese intelligence agents and a Commie-loving traitor, Laurence Harvey’s mother, terrifically overplayed by Angela Lansbury, will stop at nothing to attain their evil ends.
Could there be a good brainwasher? Some corporation, or some government, or some alien offers eternal happiness right here on earth, in the form of pills, or surgery, or radiation. Wouldn’t that be nice? No. From “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” back to Orwell’s “1984”, back further to Goethe’s “Faust”, the cultural message is clear. There is always a sinister motive behind this gift of the good life. The bad guys want to rob your freedom in exchange for some fleeting and ultimately worthless promise of fame, fortune, and good-looking playmates. It’s the Devil’s pact. All brainwashing is bad.
Herman Cain wants to be taken seriously. Let’s listen to exactly what he said. “Many African Americans have been brainwashed into not being open-minded, not even considering a conservative point of view. I have received some of that same vitriol, simply because I am running for the Republican nomination as a conservative. So it's just brainwashing and people not being open-minded, pure and simple .... For two-thirds of them that is the case.”
The brainwashers are the usual Republican devils: liberals or Democrats, if there is any difference. According to Cain, most African Americans are unable to escape the mind-control black magic of those long-time political criminals, led by their Brainwasher-in-Chief, Barack Obama.
A slightly different metaphor comes to the lips of another black conservative, Rep. Allen West from Florida. He compares the Democratic Party to a modern-day “plantation.”
West told Laura Ingraham on FOX News that he is the “modern-day Harriet Tubman“ and that he wants to lead fellow African Americans away from the “21st-century plantation.” Only this time, unlike 19th-century slavery, African Americans voted eagerly for their slave masters. Dumb.
Are Cain and West actually trying to appeal to African Americans by calling them dupes? Certainly. That’s no different than the message proclaimed by all the Republican Presidential competitors. The new line, once put out only by celebrity radicals, like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, but now standard fare for serious Republican politicians, is that liberals are not simply wrong, not simply bad for the country, but determined to ruin America. Bad for blacks and whites, if only they could see it.
The evil deeds of Obama Democrats, like the hoax of global warming, the death panel threat to Grandma, and the betrayal of Israel, are so obvious, that the only explanation for their legions of avid supporters is brainwashing.
These European-style socialists constantly repeat their big lies through the dishonest liberal media. Using techniques perfected by Joseph Goebbels, the American media bombards the public with so many “facts”, that only conservatives have not been put into a trance.
Sounds like “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man,” as Joseph McCarthy said long ago.
Herman Cain is just repeating normal Republican campaign rhetoric. But there is still a difference. White American is pretty evenly divided, with the edge to the right-thinking conservatives. But Cain’s two-thirds of black America, which is really 90% of black voters in 2010, blindly votes for Democrats.
It seems to me that a better tactic to win black votes might be to offer more than insults, such as jobs (African Americans had 13% unemployment in 2010) or health care (44% of black adults have no health insurance). But not one Republican politician has repudiated Cain’s and West’s characterization of black Americans.
Perry and Romney and all the rest agree that African Americans are less able than whites to resist the clever techniques of the liberal brainwashers. Born that way, I guess.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 15, 2011
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
A New American Political Morality
This Thursday the Illinois Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability will decide whether to appropriate sufficient funds to keep the Jacksonville Development Center open, or to close it down in a matter of months. That decision will have major implications for our city, but it also represents one case out of hundreds across the country in which reduced government budgets conflict with community interests.
The JDC has played an integral role in the history of Jacksonville. In 1847 the state legislature established the Illinois State Asylum and Hospital for the Insane, which opened exactly 150 years ago this month. This new public hospital was based on an innovative idea: the state would assume the costs of treating and caring for “the insane”.
Since then, this hospital has undergone significant changes in its name and functions. In the 1970s, care for the developmentally disabled was added to the hospital’s mission. Later in-patient treatment for the mentally ill was eliminated, hence the final name change to the Jacksonville Developmental Center.
While the type of patient has changed, the original idea has not: the state, representing all the people, assumes the medical challenge and financial burden of caring for citizens who cannot care for themselves. That is an expensive undertaking. At the public hearing in Illinois College’s Bruner Fitness Center on October 24, administrators from the Illinois Department of Human Services estimated that the annual cost at JDC is about $200,000 per patient. With nearly 200 patients, the total cost is about $40,000,000, or about $3 per Illinois resident per year.
The JDC is in bad shape. It is heated by outdated coal-fired furnaces, several of which no longer function. Years of inadequate budgets have left an estimated $100 million in deferred maintenance of buildings and roads. In 2010 the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency which administers these programs, nearly decertified JDC due to life safety code violations. Perhaps because of these problems, the JDC is the most expensive among similar Illinois state facilities in per capita cost.
The public hearing revealed conflicts that go beyond budget issues. The Illinois Council for Developmental Disabilities, a state agency which advocates for the developmentally disabled, and the Department of Human Services agreed that institutional care for these patients should be replaced as far as possible with community placement in smaller facilities. They believe this will not only be considerably less expensive, but better for the patients.
The closing of JDC inevitably hurts our local economy. It is one of the largest employers in the area and its 400 staff will not be able to easily find equivalent jobs. The economic ripples of shutting JDC down will extend beyond the employees to businesses which supply food, clothing, materials, and transportation.
The consensus that JDC had outlived its usefulness has developed over many years. This issue has been thoroughly studied, debated, and restudied before the Department of Human Services, following the best medical diagnosis, decided to move its support away from large institutions to smaller facilities.
That is the way we want such momentous decisions about our fellow citizens to be made. Instead the elected leaders of state government, Democrats and Republicans, just wielded an ax to deal with the state budget mess. Jacksonville has to defend our right to survive against hasty partisan decision-making. Closing JDC without sufficient time to allow the staff to prepare the residents for a life-changing move, to allow the community to develop the proper homes to accept so many new residents, to allow staff to find jobs, is incompetent politics.
The crisis at JDC is a small part of a much larger crisis in American political morality. The decision by the young State of Illinois in 1847 is being questioned – should the state, that is, all of us, take care of those who can’t take care of themselves? Or is it too expensive?
On March 15, the New Boston Tea Party was clear about why they want to eliminate most social programs: “The locusts are eating, or should we say devouring, the productive output of the hard working taxpayer.”
At the moment, the developmentally disabled at JDC are the locusts. In other places, it’s the unemployed, the homeless, the immigrants, the poor. Conservatives don’t say that the US isn’t rich enough to care for such people; they say all the time that we are the most prosperous nation ever. They say they don’t want to pay for them. That’s why I’m not a conservative.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 8, 2011
The JDC has played an integral role in the history of Jacksonville. In 1847 the state legislature established the Illinois State Asylum and Hospital for the Insane, which opened exactly 150 years ago this month. This new public hospital was based on an innovative idea: the state would assume the costs of treating and caring for “the insane”.
Since then, this hospital has undergone significant changes in its name and functions. In the 1970s, care for the developmentally disabled was added to the hospital’s mission. Later in-patient treatment for the mentally ill was eliminated, hence the final name change to the Jacksonville Developmental Center.
While the type of patient has changed, the original idea has not: the state, representing all the people, assumes the medical challenge and financial burden of caring for citizens who cannot care for themselves. That is an expensive undertaking. At the public hearing in Illinois College’s Bruner Fitness Center on October 24, administrators from the Illinois Department of Human Services estimated that the annual cost at JDC is about $200,000 per patient. With nearly 200 patients, the total cost is about $40,000,000, or about $3 per Illinois resident per year.
The JDC is in bad shape. It is heated by outdated coal-fired furnaces, several of which no longer function. Years of inadequate budgets have left an estimated $100 million in deferred maintenance of buildings and roads. In 2010 the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency which administers these programs, nearly decertified JDC due to life safety code violations. Perhaps because of these problems, the JDC is the most expensive among similar Illinois state facilities in per capita cost.
The public hearing revealed conflicts that go beyond budget issues. The Illinois Council for Developmental Disabilities, a state agency which advocates for the developmentally disabled, and the Department of Human Services agreed that institutional care for these patients should be replaced as far as possible with community placement in smaller facilities. They believe this will not only be considerably less expensive, but better for the patients.
The closing of JDC inevitably hurts our local economy. It is one of the largest employers in the area and its 400 staff will not be able to easily find equivalent jobs. The economic ripples of shutting JDC down will extend beyond the employees to businesses which supply food, clothing, materials, and transportation.
The consensus that JDC had outlived its usefulness has developed over many years. This issue has been thoroughly studied, debated, and restudied before the Department of Human Services, following the best medical diagnosis, decided to move its support away from large institutions to smaller facilities.
That is the way we want such momentous decisions about our fellow citizens to be made. Instead the elected leaders of state government, Democrats and Republicans, just wielded an ax to deal with the state budget mess. Jacksonville has to defend our right to survive against hasty partisan decision-making. Closing JDC without sufficient time to allow the staff to prepare the residents for a life-changing move, to allow the community to develop the proper homes to accept so many new residents, to allow staff to find jobs, is incompetent politics.
The crisis at JDC is a small part of a much larger crisis in American political morality. The decision by the young State of Illinois in 1847 is being questioned – should the state, that is, all of us, take care of those who can’t take care of themselves? Or is it too expensive?
On March 15, the New Boston Tea Party was clear about why they want to eliminate most social programs: “The locusts are eating, or should we say devouring, the productive output of the hard working taxpayer.”
At the moment, the developmentally disabled at JDC are the locusts. In other places, it’s the unemployed, the homeless, the immigrants, the poor. Conservatives don’t say that the US isn’t rich enough to care for such people; they say all the time that we are the most prosperous nation ever. They say they don’t want to pay for them. That’s why I’m not a conservative.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 8, 2011
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