A Thought on the Republican Party and Its Progeny - The TEA Party

Witness the political organism in mid-evolution. King's efforts may be nothing more than the normal response to the TEA party by its progenitor Repubican party in terms of the survival of the fittest. The political environment is not capable of sustaining both given the competition for the resources that each needs to survive at the level that it seeks: being the sole entity that will exist as the Republican party into the future. This competition isn't a bad thing, it's just what happens organically as the each political cell attempts to establish its dominance for the food of politics: money and power.

What emerges will be a creature of the Republican zietgeist in the party constituents, or at least those that have the influence over the decisions that formulate future Republican policies. This new Republican creature may be an evolutionary dead-end or it may spring forth as a vital and prolific group that overtakes our governance. Perhaps the two contending organisms will diverge and evolve into two separate and incompatible species that are constantly at each other until one is pushed into extinction.

The interesting question is whether whatever emerges in the end is an entity that is symbotic with our American values and freedoms or is a virulent cancer that will eat away at the nation's democratic foundations until it has destroyed the very social body that gave it birth.

I suspect that which path is followed will depend upon whether the organism applies intelligence, integrity, honesty and compassion to its behaviors. Time will tell. Evolution after all is indifferent to what you want, it only provides what you choose to do and the inevitable consequences that flow from those choices.

Who's Over-Paid Here?

Comment on several news outlets articles regarding: College Presidents' Pay

You may have seen a news article with a title like:
-  At several private colleges, president’s payday surpasses $1M
-  Report: Many private college presidents make $1M

Besides your article’s point that salaries for private colleges’ presidents and other executives have increased and that there are 17% more than there were last year, I find the information lacking a salient degree of appropriate informative rigor and intellectual completeness. To be honestly helpful to your readers it would be relevant to provide them with some comparative basis and referential data upon which to assist them in putting this report into a proper perspective. So this is a ‘teachable moment’, as one of the popular performance improvement concepts asserts, that could benefit both media producers and the reading public.

First, the 17% increase sounds like a lot. If I earned 17% more salary or income from investments this year versus last year I would consider that very good and impressive performance. However, I would be less impressed, and it would be significantly less meaningful if my salary was $100 and is now $117 or my investments were $1.00 and is now $1.17. So is the number of presidents that crossed that magic threshold really impressive or only ‘out of context’ apparently impressive? If it represents 6 individuals would readers be more underwhelmed; consider that 6 out of 500 private colleges is a staggering 1.2% increase in millionaires amongst these CEO-like individuals. Now this statistical clarification doesn’t address the question of whether private college presidents are generally paid more than would warranted, but the information provided is well equally insufficient in establishing a relevant assessment on that question either. So what exactly is the point that the 17% is intended to make?

Second, the fact that there was a 17% increase in the number of private college millionaires from 36 before this year to 42 now is perhaps explainable for reasons that are not overly unexpected and may be completely valid and predictable if the starting salary level before their current year increase represented nothing more than a normal ‘keeping pace with inflation’ or COLA increment. What was the average percent increase that each of these 6 individuals received that pushed them over that magic one-million dollar threshold. If they were already earning $975,000.00 then they got a 2.6% raise. Not overly impressive if that’s all that was producing this astonishing result. Now lacking the information that would allow me to know what the underlying mathematical ‘cause and effect’ phenomena is, I am left wondering does your article inform me, educate me, provide me with a rationale for taking a position, or creating a basis for others to question the judgments of the private colleges’ regents or boards in this and related matters.

Lastly, what other factors play into the salaries that these institutions’ presidents are behind the justification and value of paying them such salaries. Now if their arguments are generally that in order to get qualified individuals of the caliber that they need is their basic argument then I would contend that they are either clueless regarding how to efficiently and effectively perform the fiduciary responsibilities that their positions require, or that they are individually or collectively benefiting from this administrative pay-scale educational counter-part to ‘grade inflation’.

So I don’t question the facts in your article, but I think after reading this you might agree that there were one or two other worthy and salient pieces of data that could have served the readers, your organization and yourself better if they had been thought about in the preparation of the article. Don’t feel that this assessment is solely directed at you, I assure you that you are just an unfortunate data sample from the complete universe of new media producers.

Losing My Insurance – Not the Song Title

The President apologized and Congress is looking into who to blame for the flawed implementation of the Healthcare Exchanges. I don’t know why the President apologized or Congress is looking for whom to blame. Everything about the healthcare efforts that have taken place over the last four plus years has been an exercise in incompetence and in politics before duty or public service. Now don’t think that this is directed at the Democrats alone, the Republicans are substantive contributors to the typical waste and ineptitude that we have come to expect of our government. You may want to blame your particular party of the opposition but that’s not an assessment rather it’s one of the contributing factors in the poor quality and value that Congress and the Administration that have proclaimed to serve the public’s interests are delivering – the Healthcare Exchange being just the current headliner.

One of the President’s errors was in not knowing the difference between defining the goal versus implementing the methods of attaining the goal. These are not the same tasks and they do not require nor depend upon skills, capabilities and talents that are shared in common. Implementation is not a political act. It is not a committee process nor is it an endeavor that can be performed by individuals who are unwilling to force decisions on how to adapt the goal to the reality of the environment in which the implementation will or must take place. The President should not be apologizing that unforeseen and undesired consequences have resulted from the ACA’s impacts, but he should be apologizing for allowing the implementation to proceed without anyone understanding the consequences that the law would cause or would allow to be used by healthcare industry players who saw opportunities use the law to their benefit at someone else’s expense. The President should have realized that there should have been a “devil’s” advocate focus looking at how unintended consequences would produce undesired results.

But the President isn’t alone in being responsible for problems with the law, the Healthcare Exchange or the plethora of future unintended consequences that will bleed out over time. Congress (Republicans and Democrats alike) is actually more responsible and more involved in creating the healthcare mess that their efforts have produced through their ineffective, inefficient, and incompetent understanding of the issues, situations, and environments in which the ACA would have to function and exist. Instead of focusing on how to craft a Healthcare program and national policy Congress spent its time and efforts in rank bickering, seeking to obstruct the other side from winning some ideological item, playing to political campaign strategies, and believing that they actually knew what the interests of the American people were.

Congress should have been spending its time on crafting the law so that the law would have the anticipated objectives codified into its structure and so that there were defined responsibilities and requirements on achieving performance, cost and quality improvements; and on rewards and penalties for over-performs versus under-performers. Congress failed to see that their responsibility was not to know how to make the healthcare program or system work but to require that it perform, improve and advance the healthcare for Americans. Congress failed in legislating the law, in defining an effective funding mechanism for the law, in providing an oversight of its implementation, and in affecting no changes to the law to improve it since it was passed.

The President’s apology should have been an all-inclusive, government-wide and bipartisan admission that the Government once again failed the American people. Those who love the law failed to deliver, those who hate it failed to show how to make it work, and those who didn’t pay attention failed to remember that without the attention of someone who cares about the results the results you get are assured to be different than the ones you wanted.

The Supreme Court Doesn’t Have a Prayer: Prayer and the Government

One must have sympathy for the Supreme Court Justices when they are dealing with an issue that in all likelihood is beyond their abilities. Whether you are a Constitutional ‘strict interpretationist’ or of the Jeffersonian view of ‘belonging to the living’ there is no foundational answer to this dispute. People can, and as evidenced by the current case before the Court do, argue every conceivable position for supporting their individual view and interests. Despite this inherent conundrum the Court elected to put this issue on their table and agreed to render a Constitutional decision for the nation. So this may turn out to be a self-inflicted wound.

Whether the Court makes a broad, narrow or side-stepping decision remains to be seen; but I believe that this is exactly the right kind of issue that deserves to be addressed by the Court as it intersects with a number of our Constitutional rights and the role of our government (at the federal, state and local levels) in our society. Enmeshed in this issue are individual rights, religious freedom, separation of church and state, safeguarding minority rights, privacy, censorship, freedom of speech, and equal treatment under the law. So given the broad expanse of our civil structure that falls within the reach of this issue, we can be guaranteed that there will be a notable number of our citizens who will be displeased with the consequences of whatever decision is produced.

Surprisingly there is also an opportunity for the Justices, or at least a majority of them, to approach their decision in an unexpected and insightful way. The Court doesn’t want to get involved in “parsing” prayer for what is acceptable and what is not, nor in creating a societal issue that will raise the issue into the realm of another divisive political issue for our legislative lemmings to follow each other over the cliff. The resolution for the Justices would be to not come down on the side of what is restricted or what is allowed but rather what is required to fulfill all dimensions that societal contract. The Court could set a new course for the proper handling of the divisive positions that different population factions have in such cases where someone want to pit their favorite right or freedom against that of someone else.

The answer to such careless disputes is not to try and determine who is right or who isn’t; because no one is either and that is why this issue creates the mess that it almost surely will.  If we value our rights and freedoms then surely we accept our corresponding responsibilities that entitle us to those rights and freedoms. If you are to choose to include a prayer in a governmental activity then anyone who has their own individual religious orientation should have their own prayer (or statement of belief or non-belief) incorporated into the same proceedings; after all, individuals have an equal right to their views. Before the evocation of prayers, it should be necessary to affirm that the governmental position on any and all views expressed in these prayers are considered of no official value or importance but merely serve to allow citizens to engage in some of our civil rights despite their irrelevance to the proceedings at hand. Because the freedoms are individual in nature, as I don’t believe that the Constitution establishes any group-only based rights, there should be no use of collective terms like ‘we’ or ‘us’ nor should there be any actions required or requested of individuals like standing or ‘bowing of heads’.

Now since this ‘inclusiveness’ principle will not ensure that any given governmental group might not intentionally or inadvertently discriminate against someone by failing to properly accommodate their freedoms into the proceedings there should be a pre-established penalty for such violations. Now there is no reason to believe that jail sentences are a reasonable or prudent punishment; rather there should be a value paid for infringing upon an individual’s rights. The penalty should be paid by those governmental officials who participate in the actions that violated someone’s rights and an equivalent amount to the sum of the officials’ fines would be paid by the governmental entity that the officials represent. The fines would be paid to the individual or individuals whose rights were infringed. Officials would have to actively withdraw their support or endorsement of all prayers before they begin or be subject to the charge of violation of rights.

The level of fines would probably be appropriately scaled on the basis of the number of citizens that the official represented. Thus at the local level fines might be $10K, at the state level at $100K, and at the federal level at $1M per infraction.

Under this system government entities are thus motivated to prevent the violation of anyone’s rights, and to be inclusive in their recognition of every citizen’s freedoms. Of course, there would be no requirement or necessity for a governmental entity to allow prayers to be part of their proceedings as it is not a function of government and thus merely a permitted practice if conducted in a civil and non-endorsed manner.

Free Speech Equals Money, Doesn’t Quite Equate

The Supreme Court is reviewing a case challenging the political contributions limits law. This is a sequel to the challenge made that corporations were people and could spend more on political contributions and causes. The current case focuses on the question of whether the current limits on political contributions are a violation of an individual’s freedom of speech rights. The odds-on favorite decision is for the Court to rule in favor of the plaintiff that it infringes upon his free speech.

The questions that won’t be asked and argued before the Court include what I suspect the Founding Fathers would consider the more significant and important ones. Thus while there are strict interpretation advocates on the Court, they are likely to have a blind eye to worrying about the intentions of the founders on this question as it might cause cognitive dissidence in a non-adaptive mind.

If we consider the easily understood position that money equals speech then it makes perfect sense that limiting the money that an individual chooses to expend toward their political goals is the same as preventing them from expressing their views, and hence their speech. More money allows you to basically shout louder which as we know in watching politicians is always an improvement in the value and virtues of their speech. Maybe money is speech because it allows you to buy someone who will speak on your behalf so you don’t have to; and in the case of politicians we know that you can buy them to say whatever you want them to. Perhaps more money is better characterized as a way to insure that more people listen to your views if for no other reason than sheer repetition of the message in the media distribution systems. But no matter how you characterize it, more money provides a direct, clear and easily associated substitute for speech. So just like everyone has the right to speak their views and opinions, and make their arguments for or against something, and to defend themselves against the opinions of others; being able to contribute money to someone’s political campaign is effectively the same thing.

And just like free speech, money is available to everyone equally. You and I can donate any amount of money that we chose to express our views, we are free to speak on an equal basis with anyone else. There is no bias in allowing someone with money to gain an advantage and privilege in having their speech attended to where someone with funds would be limited to not being able to have their views heard.

But if money is the same as free speech, and free speech is the right of every American, and not to be abridged by the government shouldn’t every American have the same rights? We should all be able to have our views expressed in comparable ways, right? So if someone donates a million dollars to a party that I believe is on the wrong side of an issue and the donated funding is used to present that party’s side to the public, my views should be presented to the public on an equal basis. Now given I don’t have a million dollars the political parties are just going to have to find a way to ensure that my speech is keep on par with their money (which is equal to speech).

Now if money is speech then politicians and parties should be willing to provide me with the same access and consideration that they will provide a money contributor. When they call and ask for a donation, they don’t accept my views or positions as having value and of being sufficient to grant me access. They treat money very differently than free speech.

And that is one of the principles, and principled, differences that the Court needs to consider. Money constitutes something very different than speech, ideas or rights. Money is a media of exchange that is meant to establish a means of trading one thing for another, to place a value on what I am getting for what you are giving up. The issue about money has nothing to do with anyone’s freedom of speech. It may be connected with some other right or freedom, but speech isn’t it.

The issue of money before the Court should be directed at whether there is a Constitutional basis for allowing or prohibiting money to be used to purchase the government? The effort of the wealthy to influence the political process is not new, it is not exclusive to our political system (any more than our system is exempt from it), and it brings consequences to our system of government when allowed and when permitted. As with many aspects of our society, the secret to America’s system is in finding checks and balances, in accommodations and compromises, and in protecting all members of our society from the majority whether the majority is counted in number of voters, or amount of money owned or controlled, or along any of the dimensions that America has present in its social amalgam (race, gender, religion, ethnicity, political affiliation, …). Simply equating money to free speech is the act of a Court that has lost its responsibility to preserve the Constitutional principles that take precedence over the small and narrow minded attempts to gain influence at the expense of our free and democratic system. Politicians already listen to money. Encouraging them to listen to only big money is diminishing the influence of the non-wealthy minority. This can only lead to circumstances and conditions that weaken America and perhaps render it not a democracy but an oligarchy of wealth. Given the incompetence of Congress to protect the nation from their own parties, how would they ever be able to protect the nation from those who own them?

America’s Syrian Chemical Weapons Issue

Should we or shouldn’t we? This has been the essential quality of the style and context of the questions that have permeated the political, national and global debate about American intervention in Syria over their use of chemical weapons. When the politicians, diplomats and experts of various arenas confronted these questions not surprisingly they tended to fall into one of three Venn-diagram regions: “must“ intervene, “mustn’t” intervene and the “this needs to be an international (United Nations) responsibility”. I don’t envy those drawn into, forced into or just finding themselves caught-up in the issue because it is not a simple, trivial or inconsequential issue. But perhaps the issue and the debates that have and still continue to be churned over on this question reveal a characteristic defect in how such questions are handled in our national and political debates and by our political, governmental and media organizations.

The defect is, to paraphrase, in the details. What after all is the question being presented to America for an answer? I won’t presume that my following attempt is ‘the’ quintessential and be-all and end-all proper formulation of the question; but I hope it provides a slight illumination on what American’s should expect and demand from those who serve as our representatives in the debates, discussions and information dissemination (the media). The question that the use of chemical weapons in Syria has birthed is:

What are America’s responsibilities and interests that should define and direct how the United States should respond to the circumstance that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against it own population; and given those responsibilities and interests what course of action is it prudent and appropriate for the United States to take?

A central tenant of this question is that it is incumbent upon those engaged in the discussion of this issue to present the dimensions/factors that define the context that the issue exists within. I do not think that the question is simply that the President of the United States warned Syria not to use chemical weapons against its people and thereby ‘drawing a red-line’ on the issue. This may be a minor issue, and an insubstantial one even if considered, when seeking to understand the question and the problem that America must solve. If you think back upon what you have seen and heard about the issue, do you think that our politicians, government officials, media, or the experts have attempted let alone done?

Shouldn’t the public and their representatives have demonstrated that they have considered the question fully and from all the perspectives that we would think relevant? If this is what we expect and depend upon our leaders to do, don’t you have a problem with where we are on the question today?

Consider which of the following dimensions have been prudently and reasonably discussed:

·         The US being a signatory to a chemical weapons ban

·         The US being a member nation of the UN

·         Whether the massive number of deaths in Syria by non-chemical means is relevant

·         The impact and risks that the Syrian civil-war has and is having on other nations in the region

·         The long-term implications to US interests and influence in the Middle-East or even throughout the world

·         American’s being war-weary

·         What the immediate and the long-term goals and policies are

·         What are the consequences to US relations to other nations both in the region and elsewhere in the world for doing nothing, for intervening

·         Whether there are alternatives that aren’t being considered just because no one is considering and ensuring that the question is being thoroughly assessed and comprehended

·         You can add your own dimensions that I have indicated here …

So the Syrian issue is more than just the chemical weapons point, it’s just that the imprudent decision by the Syrian government to use them has created a global issue that the United States must confront in with some well thought out strategy and policy or accept that it is better to accept America’s decline as a world power which will bring with it it’s own consequences. There is no guarantee that there is a clean, easy, risk-free or desirable course of action or in-action. The only reality that the public should be assured of is that everything you do (or don’t do) has consequences. If you haven’t learned this life lesson, whether you are young or old, you cannot avoid the “laws of physics” that are at play in this as in every issue.

Privacy: Where Are You, You? When Are You, You?

If the government keeps records about everyone's name, their phone numbers and addresses would they be infringing on anyone's privacy? And not just possessing these records but getting updates on every change that occurs. Clearly you are being monitored and watched at the level of this information. Now without going any further than just keep track of these items, would you think the government has stepped over the line and violated your privacy? Is this a first, even if minor, step in government abuse of power?

If you believe it is and you would act to curb even this level of our government overstepping the limits that our Constitution defines in the protection of our individual rights particularly that of privacy then your interpretation of the Constitution is rather strict and conservative. There is nothing wrong with your opinion but I would ask if you truly think this must be stopped and would never relent on your conviction? Is having, using and even acting upon the information all that is required to be invading your personal space? Is nothing more required?

If your are of the opinion that the government hasn't exceeded its authority and intruded upon your person then I would say we will have to look further for yet another dimension of our existence and world for when either your privacy surfaces or where it surfaces. I don't mean to say that this is a simple question or that the range or extent of information about you might not make a difference. So the where dimension may possess a point at which the government crosses the line, and I would argue that there is such a point beyond which your privacy is being violated. But this is the very issue that we and the government must contend over where that line is drawn.

Let's consider the when dimension from a moment. When may actually present more than one facet to the complexity of the question. 'When' could be in terms of when the government seeks to examine information specifically about you; are they doing it constantly but with no objective except to wait until they see something that triggers their interest, or 'when' could be conditions where you engage in something that causes afterwords causes the government to determine that you have done 'something of interest' and now the government seeks out your information and data to see what else they can find. 'When' could also be an event that has no connection with you directly and the government is not actively aware of you. You are not a person who exists from their perception of the world. However, once an external event/action has occurred the government searches the records that contain information about you. Are any of these invasions of your privacy? Again there is an attribute of the time dimension that will present a point where the government would pass from not infringing to violating. But I don't think that is starts at “any time”; there is more required. The simple deciding factor is not obviously defined and determined because by itself the one dimension is incomplete and inadequate. There once again must be more.

To briefly jump-back to the beginning, you did recognize that the information that the government was recording and monitoring: name, address and phone number are a phone book? Something which exists and is held and accessed by many entities. Phone companies keep it; utilities, state and local governments, various businesses come close to having access to such information (and much, much more). Libraries and the internet provide such information and allow people to monitor and research a variety of things using this data as basic data elements. So where did your privacy start, and when did it reach the point of being private?