The blame game is alive and well and living in our nation's capitol. Each party is quick to blame the other for our nation's woes. Everyone claims to hate it. Everyone does it. Each accuses the other of playing the game and no one takes responsibility for problems. Most of the time everyone is to blame because everyone is playing the game.
The problems we have in the face of the S & P downgrade are actually attributable. There is blame. It is no longer a game. All of those Tea Party clowns who glibly pronounced that nothing bad would come of defaulting on our debt have set us on this path. They were told time and time again that this would happen. Just as they refuse to believe the scientists who explain to them about climate change, they refused to believe the consequences of their irresponsible behavior. I suppose if you'd rather believe in fairy-tales than evolution. If you'd rather believe our President is a Kenyan. If you'd rather believe up is down and right is left. If you'd rather believe that Jesus hated gays and Muslims. Well...your just an idiot.
We have a very diverse society. One with room for geniuses and idiots. As charming as that is we don't want the idiots in charge. They are idiots and they have brought us to brink of disaster. It's time for them to shut up and take their proper seats in the back of the building. It's time we get back to the tradition of electing people smarter than us to lead us.
Our democracy and electoral system was built on the premise that the voter is incapable of making sound choices. This is why the President was elected by a handful of people, the electoral college. The Senate was elected by the members of the House. The House was the only branch of the Federal government that was elected by popular vote and had the least amount of power.
In our country's beginning our founding fathers recognized that the people were hampered by a fractious and inadequate system of public information distributed on horseback. Today, voters are burdened with immediate and overwhelming blasts of information and misinformation with no filter as to what is a fact and what is not. By virtue of this phenomenon we are capable of choosing information we wish to be fact rather than informed as to what is factual. The idiots in our society choose to be represented by people who are repeating the misinformation they choose to believe is fact.
The result of this is the Tea Party, a dis-aorganization that rallies around the idiots who have brought us to the brink of disaster. They are to blame for the collapse of wealth in the last few days. That is a fact.
Volunteers are back
Monday, August 8, 2011
Friday, August 5, 2011
Every first Friday of the month we get a jobs report and every one of them seems to show job growth in the private sector being dragged down by sharp decreases in public sector jobs. In fact, I looked at the report that came out today. I’m not completely geeking out here. It is the first time I have ever looked at a jobs report, but I was curious. Everyone is always talking about how many net jobs were created and glosses over the declines in public sector jobs. The fact of the matter is that the private sector has added 333k jobs in the last 3 months. Not very good, but it is gaining jobs. However, the public sector has lost 117k jobs.
Republicans are always saying that government cannot solve our economic woes. True or not, that’s what they think. It is clear with these numbers that government can and is pouring gas on this fire. Cut, cut, cut…that’s all we’ve been talking about over the past few months. When we cut government spending we’re directly contributing to the jobs crisis. This is wrong! This makes no sense! Government should be adding jobs to the economy. Imagine if the federal government invested in a huge jobs program to refit all government buildings to bring them up to the Energy Star standards that the federal government promotes. Or something.
Jobs program? Yeah, that’s not going to happen and we know why. The Republican party is ruthless, mean-spirited and obsessed with any Democrat who lives at 1600 Penn. We know that they will lie. We know they are happy to destroy the lives of anyone to elect a Republican President. Collateral damage is expected. Fourteen million people without jobs is a means to their ends. They’ve just spent 6 months trying to convince the world that we have a spending problem and need to cut, cut, cut. Overwhelmingly it is clear that our spending problem is that we are not spending enough.
So we know the problem. It seems that the President is still giving them the benefit of the doubt. He must think that they have souls and actually care that people don’t have jobs. I remember that, a long time ago…that’s what I thought. Republicans are heartless, greedy and very, very focused. They are willing to destroy the country so they can blame it on Democrats and win back the White House.
I can’t continue to watch this train wreck. We have to stand up and kick their asses.
Republicans are always saying that government cannot solve our economic woes. True or not, that’s what they think. It is clear with these numbers that government can and is pouring gas on this fire. Cut, cut, cut…that’s all we’ve been talking about over the past few months. When we cut government spending we’re directly contributing to the jobs crisis. This is wrong! This makes no sense! Government should be adding jobs to the economy. Imagine if the federal government invested in a huge jobs program to refit all government buildings to bring them up to the Energy Star standards that the federal government promotes. Or something.
Jobs program? Yeah, that’s not going to happen and we know why. The Republican party is ruthless, mean-spirited and obsessed with any Democrat who lives at 1600 Penn. We know that they will lie. We know they are happy to destroy the lives of anyone to elect a Republican President. Collateral damage is expected. Fourteen million people without jobs is a means to their ends. They’ve just spent 6 months trying to convince the world that we have a spending problem and need to cut, cut, cut. Overwhelmingly it is clear that our spending problem is that we are not spending enough.
So we know the problem. It seems that the President is still giving them the benefit of the doubt. He must think that they have souls and actually care that people don’t have jobs. I remember that, a long time ago…that’s what I thought. Republicans are heartless, greedy and very, very focused. They are willing to destroy the country so they can blame it on Democrats and win back the White House.
I can’t continue to watch this train wreck. We have to stand up and kick their asses.
Monday, January 3, 2011
American Justice
We have become a society in which we are judged guilty until proven innocent, and the cost to civility of wrongful and unreasonable prosecution has become tolerable. Why aren't we talking about it?
We talk a lot in this country about human rights and the fairness of our awesome system of justice. We piously condemn other governments for their abuse of their own citizens. And yet, we have by far the most imprisoned citizens per capita than any, that's right ANY, country in the world. More than Russia. More than China. More than Iran and North Korea. More than every other country in the world. We represent only 5% of the world's population, while we hold 25% of the worlds incarcerated population. We spend $68 billion on prisons each year. When you throw in the costs of the court system and law enforcement, we spend over $200 billion a year to put people in jail. With a growth rate of over 500% since the early 80's, our "corrections system" is the fastest growing sector of our economy...even faster than the cost of health care. And yet, the waste, corruption, and efficacy of this taxpayer funded industry goes unchallenged.
Over the Holidays I read Grisham's latest novel, "The Confession", about a young man wrongly accused of murder who was put to death in Texas. It observed a system of justice that was anything but judicial. While this was, indeed, fiction, there have been 138 death row inmates who have been exonerated since 1973. About 3% of all death sentences in that time span. It got me to thinking: If we are this inaccurate with our prosecution of the most serious of punishments, how many people are languishing in prison wrongly convicted of less serious crimes?
I would assume that a jury does not easily arrive at a sentence of death. A death sentence is given an incredible amount of scrutiny both before sentencing and after. And yet we know that at least 3% of the time these sentences were levied upon innocent people. When we speak of ending a person's life, being right 97% of the time is not tolerable. We must be sure. We must know beyond any possible doubt. We cannot be wrong. If we cannot be right 100% of the time we must stop.
Lesser offenses are not afforded the same resources as capital offenses, so it would only make sense that a far greater number of mistakes are made. However, for the sake of argument, let's say that only 3% of our prison population is wrongly convicted. This would mean that there are at least 75,000 innocent people of the 2.5 million currently locked away in our "corrections" system. Putting aside the toll on human rights, the direct financial burden of incarcerating these people is over $1.6 billion each year.
The true waste, however, may not be wrongful conviction. The extraordinary growth is not due to an increase in violent crime. Violent crime has actually gone down slightly. Due in large part to the "war on drugs", the vast increase in prison population is non-violent drug offenders. This nation's failed drug policy is a completely different topic worthy of another post at another time. For now, it's important to note that the only demonstrable result of the increase in the prosecution of drug crimes is the enormous cost to our criminal justice system. Over 500,000 prisoners doing time in our prison system are non-violent drug offenders at a cost to us of over $11 billion per year without including court and law enforcement costs.
I believe that penal and judicial reform is the most overlooked issue of our time. Conservatives and liberals alike are unwilling to even mention this issue for fear of looking soft on crime, but this reluctance is costing taxpayers billions and tears away at our social fabric. This is a subject which we should all agree needs a strong, public and post-partisan debate.
I think we need to start this conversation.
We talk a lot in this country about human rights and the fairness of our awesome system of justice. We piously condemn other governments for their abuse of their own citizens. And yet, we have by far the most imprisoned citizens per capita than any, that's right ANY, country in the world. More than Russia. More than China. More than Iran and North Korea. More than every other country in the world. We represent only 5% of the world's population, while we hold 25% of the worlds incarcerated population. We spend $68 billion on prisons each year. When you throw in the costs of the court system and law enforcement, we spend over $200 billion a year to put people in jail. With a growth rate of over 500% since the early 80's, our "corrections system" is the fastest growing sector of our economy...even faster than the cost of health care. And yet, the waste, corruption, and efficacy of this taxpayer funded industry goes unchallenged.
Over the Holidays I read Grisham's latest novel, "The Confession", about a young man wrongly accused of murder who was put to death in Texas. It observed a system of justice that was anything but judicial. While this was, indeed, fiction, there have been 138 death row inmates who have been exonerated since 1973. About 3% of all death sentences in that time span. It got me to thinking: If we are this inaccurate with our prosecution of the most serious of punishments, how many people are languishing in prison wrongly convicted of less serious crimes?
I would assume that a jury does not easily arrive at a sentence of death. A death sentence is given an incredible amount of scrutiny both before sentencing and after. And yet we know that at least 3% of the time these sentences were levied upon innocent people. When we speak of ending a person's life, being right 97% of the time is not tolerable. We must be sure. We must know beyond any possible doubt. We cannot be wrong. If we cannot be right 100% of the time we must stop.
Lesser offenses are not afforded the same resources as capital offenses, so it would only make sense that a far greater number of mistakes are made. However, for the sake of argument, let's say that only 3% of our prison population is wrongly convicted. This would mean that there are at least 75,000 innocent people of the 2.5 million currently locked away in our "corrections" system. Putting aside the toll on human rights, the direct financial burden of incarcerating these people is over $1.6 billion each year.
The true waste, however, may not be wrongful conviction. The extraordinary growth is not due to an increase in violent crime. Violent crime has actually gone down slightly. Due in large part to the "war on drugs", the vast increase in prison population is non-violent drug offenders. This nation's failed drug policy is a completely different topic worthy of another post at another time. For now, it's important to note that the only demonstrable result of the increase in the prosecution of drug crimes is the enormous cost to our criminal justice system. Over 500,000 prisoners doing time in our prison system are non-violent drug offenders at a cost to us of over $11 billion per year without including court and law enforcement costs.
I believe that penal and judicial reform is the most overlooked issue of our time. Conservatives and liberals alike are unwilling to even mention this issue for fear of looking soft on crime, but this reluctance is costing taxpayers billions and tears away at our social fabric. This is a subject which we should all agree needs a strong, public and post-partisan debate.
I think we need to start this conversation.
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