The Glass Campaign

I am unemployed, yet again. This is only really a failure on my part, to be in a field (IT) where the business model is to hire a "hired gun" to come in and do work until they are done or prove themselves incapable of working to the company's time-lines. I certainly don't blame the President of the United States for my fate -- he has little to do with whether companies actually hire or fire people, despite what you may hear in the popular media.

So as I while away the hours searching for work, fielding recruiting calls, answering questions, setting up interviews, I have the time to absorb the goings-on here in my home state of New Jersey, and the one thing that catches my ear is the constant talk of our Governor, Chris Christie, out on the campaign shilling for his Republican compatriot, Mitt Romney. Governor Christie's favorite subject at these events is President Obama and his "failure" as President, especially when it comes to jobs and taxes. To hear our Governor tell it, the President has single-handedly deprived the economy of labor and shackled the wealthy with draconian taxation in an attempt to keep killing jobs.

As you might have guessed from the title of this tract, those who live in glass houses...

We Do Ordain And Establish

The Establishment is not the problem.

Those who are elected to run The Establishment are the problem.

The Parties Are Over

There may be no "I" in "team," but there is in "independent."

If you look up my voter registration, it will say "Democrat," but only because there are no open primaries in my state. Frankly, I'm not sure why there should be primaries at all, but I avail myself of the system that exists, a system that, frankly, shouldn't exist.

The Constitution of the United States makes no mention of political parties, minority whips, or any of the other baggage that has been dumped on the floor of the House and the Senate, or at the door of the White House, or in the vestibule of the Supreme Court. There are no Articles pertaining to how power shall be apportioned between political parties, or how parties can manipulate the Rules of Order and Procedure to create, maintain, or thwart power. The system in place now -- the unwritten system -- that lies atop those actual rules supplied by the Constitution are fabrications of the political parties that run the nation.

It's time for the parties to depart.

Now How Much Will You Pay?

Putting aside the fact that Wall Street does not represent the entirety of the U.S. economy, and that economy has been a wretched mess for several years now, and that troubles in Europe seem never-ending, can we really be shocked by the follies that have taken place of late in our country and the world? A botched attempt at maintaining our country's credit rating is a trifle compared to hunger in Somalia, political revolution in Syria and Libya, and lawlessness and poverty in Tottenham and elsewhere in Great Britain. Even so...

The hew-and-cry has always been that we need to focus on the problems we have at home. Assuming we could wall ourselves off from the rest of the world, the problems of the globe are not only our problems, too, they reflect the same problems that still plague our nation as deeply, if not as forcefully. So, yes, let us focus on the problems at home, large and small, and let's see where they originate. The answer may surprise you, though it shouldn't.

The problem is us.

What The Debt Crisis Says About America

If you survey the media commenting on the United States debt crisis, from news programs, to blogs, to Op Ed pages, to talk radio, you get an overwhelming sense that a) American citizens are not really sure what the debt ceiling is and what defaulting on our debt obligations means, b) the Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill are in no hurry to explain it to their constituencies, except in terms that denigrate their opposition, c) the President, true-to-form, is trying to get Congress to do its job without having to do it for them, and d) no one can agree on what the actual impact of a Federal default would be, good, bad, or otherwise.

It is interesting to note, in light of the goings-on, that something that is a duty of the Congress -- protecting the economic health, safety, and prestige -- has now become a lightning rod for politicking, a generator of hyperbole, and a highly-visible failure of our national government. No other nation would think to risk its economic power and standing in the world by allowing what should be a trivial matter -- maintaining a balanced budget and protecting the debt it has incurred -- to become a political hot potato. Many a government (Greece, Spain, Mexico, Ireland, etc.) have found themselves in financial dire straits, but have also managed to go about doing what was necessary to bring those conditions under control, even where that meant ceding economic power to other nations in return for loan guarantees. It has not looked good for the presiding government, but austerity and outside help looked a lot better than allowing their nation to collapse.

So what is our problem? Why have we, still the largest economy in the world, let our economic house fall into such disarray. My friends, we have only ourselves to blame.

What Anthony Weiner Says About Us

Representative Anthony Weiner has resigned as of this afternoon.

God help us all.

Shortfall

As the battle for the budget builds into ever-widening crescendo of rhetoric, let us stop to consider, for a moment, how we really got to this point of being so far in debt. Let us critically examine what our government owes us, and more importantly, what we owe it. Not just in monetary terms, mind you, but in our adherence to the responsibility we were given for our government by those created it over two hundred years ago.

Defying The Precipice

There is not much that can be said of the last few years in America that has not already found its way into Presidential speeches, Congressional testimony, pundit-filled shows on cable, talking-head shows on financial networks, and blogs of every description and size. Since the beginning of the precipitous plunge of the nation toward Depression, there has been enough wailing, moaning, gnashing of teeth, and finger pointing to fill volumes. It has been fodder for politics, for industry, for banking, and for the news.

The jabbering, multitudinous and myopic, has left people at odds over what is to be done, provided political ne'er-do-wells the opportunity to ply us with their conspicuously anti-middle class screeds, and turned up the volume on the blathering to the point of obscuring the painful truth -- the precipice is still not that far away. The fact remains: people are hurting. Not the rich... no, their place in American culture is insulated from the vicissitudes of life by their avarice and the generosity of the rest of the citizenry in letting them absent themselves from paying their due. The people who are hurting are the overwhelming majority of Americans who are finding their pay cut, their hours slashed, their jobs eliminated or shipped overseas, and are left floating in a sea of debt they were told they could handle by banks and other agencies who were only interested in the money they could make. And this group, representing just about the full breadth of us, is barely hanging on.

Where The Right Gets It Wrong

I might be tarred as criminally insane by some for attacking the conservative movement in America so vigorously, but I take any damnation of my calling out their hypocrisy as solid praise, for I have struck a nerve to have bothered anyone by my admonitions. For surely, in a world where reason was ascendant, it would be obvious when the fool and the huckster were attempting to woo us with sweet lies and grand obfuscations.

In our world, though, reason has taken a back seat to ignorance. The masses are more concerned with the petulant bombast of drug-hazed actors and the latest tiny glowing box to be foisted unnecessarily upon them to eat up their remaining credit limit, than they are the real and important state of their government and their nation. The victory for independence won over two hundred years ago, they feel no need to be engaged, considering all the important work done as long as they can continue to buy their over-priced, faux-Italian coffee.

Sticks And Stones

Prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, a man would stand before microphones and movie cameras around the country, urging the isolation of America from war-torn Europe. The man was earnest and forthright, convinced that the Nazi cause was reasonable, in wanting to work toward a more genetically pure race, and he stood before large gatherings, haranguing political leaders of the day for their interest in interceding on behalf of Great Britain, before it, too, was overrun by the German war machine. He was a passionate believer in eugenics and admirer of the Nazi regime, for its technical brilliance and innovation. He saw them as the future, and he saw no need for America to interfere in European affairs.

His name was Charles Lindbergh.

Liberty And Justice Weep Silent Tears For America

It is not often I find myself enraged to incandescent incoherence, nor swept by the overwhelming desire to shout from the rooftops, but this is one of those times. Today marks a particularly dark day in American history, one that will not be noted as such for many decades to come, but is clear enough to those of us with patriotic hearts who worship knowledge over ignorance and freedom over tyranny. The event that has me so worked up? The handing of the gavel in the House of Representatives to John Boehner.

There's A Party Going On And On And On...

During the most recent election, you know the one that was a "mandate" from the people, the Republicans rolled out their "Pledge to America," which read suspiciously like every talking point they've used since 1994, and was short on actual details and long on partisan bluster. They promised to go to Washington, D.C. and turn things around, fighting for deficit reduction, smaller government, and the repeal of the Health Care Law, among other things. They were going to work for the people, because the people had spoken, and they didn't like the direction the country is going in. Strangely, they neglected to mention that it was a Republican administration that had put the country on this course in the first place, and that captain had rowed away, leaving the current one with a ship with a mighty gash in the side, taking on water. In the end, some Americans, spoke, and because of the apathy of other Americans, the Republicans got half a loaf and turned it into a feast... sort of.

You see, the party of fiscal conservatism, that stood on the rock and howled at stimulus spending, big bailouts, and health care reform, has been selling America a rotten bill of goods. You see, they are determined not to spend another penny of Federal money -- unless it happens to be going to their friends in Corporate America or those who feed off it for their riches. Rather than ensuring that everyone making two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year or less gets to keep their tax cut handed them by President Bush, they are insisting that their rich friends get their fair share, too. Of course, there's the several hundred billion dollar hole in the budget that will create, but hey, that's just a trivial annoyance.

What Must Come Next

It would be very easy to see the current conditions in Washington, D.C. as symptomatic of a general combativeness between Americans of different political persuasions. If you walk down any street, however, you would generally be hard-pressed to look at any number of people and determine that they are in conflict. People walk together, commute together, work together, recreate together, and in almost all cases, whatever political leanings they have are their business and no one else's, and besides the occasional T-shirt or bumper sticker or yard sign, we do not know where any American we choose stands on the issues of the day. We have various levels in every dimension imaginable, and it is hard to pigeon-hole an individual person as “that.”

What We Do Now

To the victors, the spoils, and it is the victorious who write the history in the short term. In the long term, from the perspective of clear hindsight and a dash of imagination, the true story only reveals itself in fragments. The issues of the last decade in America -- and their repercussions -- are still as fresh as newly fallen snow; until the thaw comes, the truth of what happened and why will always be just a few irregular objects poking up through the snow. Eventually the reality will be exposed, bare soil and sere landscape etched with the tracks of a society struggling to find its way.

Electoral Follies

One begins to wonder if anyone will ever understand politics, and by that, I don't mean the give and take of governance, the “you scratch my back I'll scratch yours” complexity, or the general desire to work toward a common goal through earnest debate and compromise. No, I speak of the knock-down, drag-out, mudslinging, partisan divide that has usurped useful politics, relegating it to dim memory and dusty textbook. We are not in the age of statesmen and diplomats; we instead see self-aggrandizers, boot-lickers, sycophants, and power-grabbers grappling for control of a nation, heedless of the cost to personal virtue, comportment, or American society. They are more eager to draw battle lines and unflattering comparisons than they are to take stock of America's situation and take the appropriate steps to keep the ship of state afloat. They are the crew of a sinking cruise ship arguing over who should get credit for saving the passengers, even though the lifeboats are all in place and a panicked mob stands around them, awaiting action.

What You Can Do For Your Country

When we think of service to the United States of America, we are perhaps lead to a vision of our citizen soldiers,defending our freedom here and overseas, or perhaps members of the Peace Corps, trying to spread knowledge and form relationships all over the world, or maybe even those who work for our government, monitoring land, sea, and sky, trying to predict the things that will affect and influence us for years to come. Invariably, though, we forget about the group that does this country its greatest service, or, in some cases, disservice.

I speak of We, the People.