Uncategorized

I recently posted an article on Facebook about the Secret Service being strapped after the travel associated with protecting large family Trump. The President has the prerogative to travel domestically as well as overseas, so frankly Donald Trump’s travels to golf every weekend is simply the way it is. On the other hand, his son’s travel extensively on vacations and around the world business deals that the Trump organization should not be involved in the first place while their leader is President. It goes against all ethic rules for any of them to traipse all over the world selling Donald Trump brands. Alas however the Republican led congress and Senate are still stuck on defeating Hillary (no one told them Trump won?) and have not done a thing to stop him even though it can and perhaps will come back to bite all of us.

The ethics issues, while gross in themselves was not what the article was pointing out so much as stating that the large family coupled with frequent flyer miles, dozens of properties he visits and golf courses he plays had broken the fiscal bank for the Secret Service. There was no attached comment to my posting the article and I had seen a report on it on Fox just minutes before, so you can imagine my shock to be “disowned” for my supposed hatred of Trump by one of the people on my “friends” list. The misplaced reference to hate is amazing to me since Donald Trump has done everything he can to froth up hate at his rally’s and placed a premium on division to keep his base from looking at his overwhelming short comings, lousy business skills and past legal issues. Not to mention 10 years and counting of the nation listening to how terrible Obama was and is, right down to his birth in HI.

However, to blame Trump entirely for the division is missing what has gone on for the last twenty years and something Bush addressed during his Presidency. The blame primarily rests with redistricting or Gerrymandering as it is properly called. The concept of Gerrymandering set out to horde as many voters favorable to one party candidate or the other to make winning congressional seats easier for said parties. https://apgovernmentchs.wikispaces.com/Redistricting+and+Gerrymandering Gunnison County, Colorado for instance was recently split in half over a redistricting move by the Democrats in Denver to keep an Independent candidate who did not always do their bidding from being elected; they drew the line right behind her house. In recent years Republican’s particularly have redrawn many boundaries across the country to lock out minorities and gather voters favorable to their causes.

If the truth be known, a solid, concise message by either party would suffice to win the hearts and minds of the voters, but there is another very important part of party politics, and that is the money. With the winning of a Supreme Court decision by the group “Citizens United” establishing that corporations are “people” and they can give freely to candidates, a whole new world has opened up in dirty, pay to play politics. The same people who unleashed the dogs are now trying to ram through not only corporate giving, but totally unlimited funding. Since congressional legislators must re-enter the campaign mode every two years they spend an average of four hours every day dialing for dollars from small calling centers “off campus”. If they don’t raise the money or solidify the backing they will likely not be re-elected. Of course, it is expected of them to do the bidding of those corporations or organizations or they will advertise against them in favor of someone who will do what they want. The legislators are trapped between the corporations and the voters and for the most part they cannot win both.

Since Obama’s campaign appeared to be on track for the nomination in the 2008 election the Republicans on the Hill began to push back with advertising against him, but not in the conventional way. They began to use email forwards and social media that was just emerging as a possible tool to sway voters planting seeds of doubt. Their early attempts were unsuccessful, but as time went on people like Karl Rove and Grover Norquist perfected it and we see the results of that today…there are still congressmen repeating what Trump worked hard on; the idea that Obama wasn’t born here. It is a lie of course, but why let go of a good thing when so many people believe it? Of course, the Democrats rack up political discrediting mileage too, but the misinformation show of the last ten years is second to none and is proudly carried forward by some including Trump when he tells his supporters that the media is to blame for his problems. I for one find it distasteful to win at anything by lying or cheating, but greed (another story of our politics) wins at least in the short term.

All of this left the door wide open to the Russians who not only had the luxury of Americans being trained and gullible, but they had the model for a program of disinformation. The Russians have taken all they learned to muddy their hands in elections all over the free world and to divide the minds of people enough to move in economically. Putin is the richest man in the world and rigs with the power of money his own election every time it comes up. His greed is incredible and with him influencing the US or other democratic nations you can be sure it will be you who loses.

There are good reasons you hate your neighbor, but there is nothing reasonable or good that will come from it. To the contrary, if we are divided by the liars out there telling us bullshit we not only will fall, but we will fall hard. Hate is consuming and not a game I will ever play because it is a waste of energy. I will always stand up for what is right and respecting my family, friends and neighbors is part of that.

I have lost too many friends, family and community acquaintances to the money surrounding cancer. This is honest and heart felt and there is in my view zero room for debate. It is time for action and anyone not understanding ought to look around in your community. Notice the pain and suffering and know that much of it is preventable.

For my friend Lori, my Dad, and others who have had to endure the sickness…and lost.

When I was a kid cancer wasn’t even spoken of except in whispers. Very few got it and no one knew what it was. We did not know whether it was contagious and certainly not what to do about it and frankly we still don’t. We dump the equivalent of drain cleaner into the bodies of folks who have “cancer” and pour untold money in to “a cure” for it, which in my view will I doubt ever be found.

My eldest Brother is lecturing this week at the University of California Riverside (UCR) on the incredible amount of chemicals in our lives and how they effect us. His lecture is by invitation of the Chancellor of UCR where he is in standing as somewhat of an authority on the subject. I wish I could attend as we are like minded on this subject.

Cancers have crept into our lives over the course of 120 years or so and has increased at alarming rates in particular the last 50 years or less. Some argue that population increases are bound to expose more of it, but I beg to differ as the two have no numerical parallels. What has increased in my lifetime are the chemicals in our lives. Now there is a parallel.

When I was young my mother did laundry and we bathed in lye soap made from wood ash, we ate home canned foods much of the time and deer, elk and beef bought from a neighbor. If you talk to most folks in their fifties and sixties today most of them grew up on a farm, their cousins did, or at the very least their grandparents farmed. The crops were fertilized with animal waste; you picked the cotton and turned out the cows in that field to consume the stalks and fertilize as they went along. You gave back to the soil what the plants had extracted, by planting other crops, a practice called crop rotation. Crops were not fed chemical fertilizers and pesticides like they are now becoming addicted to the fertilizers and the microbes are killed off by the bug juice rendering the soil useless causing more use of both chemicals.*

At some point in my growing up we started using powdered laundry soap and store-bought eggs and chicken. TV dinners were the rage and we had to have plastic containers to store food in. The car interior went from cloth and wood to plastic… and well, plastic. We breathed deep of our newfound wealth of even being able to afford a new car without realizing that car might be killing us along with those plastic storage containers. The insurance companies and the furniture makers sought to protect us not from being sold cigarettes, but to protect us when we fell asleep with one on the couch and flame retardants were born. They didn’t stop there, they coated every baby blanket, shirt, drape, carpet with toxin emitting retardants now suspected of killing house cats by way of thyroid diseases.

What have we learned? Seems to me, nothing. We are pouring money into the repairs and doing nothing about the causes. The friggin’ wheels are falling off the car and we keep driving. We are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars treating one cancer patient and filling the pockets of the companies causing those cancers. It is not the farmers, they have been told that everything is fine and of course we believe our product salesmen and corporate led research. It is not the sales person in the clothing or furniture store, it is protection of industry giants through lobby of our politicians. For every dollar they spend on legislation and misleading, they get back a hundred for their investors who are like a hungry giant.

My younger Brother worked for a time at a Goodyear service facility where he was hired as the service manager. He worked with integrity and managed to increase traffic to the point that nearly every bay was full, every day. His supervisor came to him one day and told him he had to up his game. Bewildered my brother finally asked just how he was to do that when all the bays were full? His boss told him to increase revenue by lying to people until they believed they needed new brakes, or a transmission, when all they really needed were wiper blades. He quit.

When are we all going to say enough is enough and quit? How many cancer deaths will it take until we start asking questions? How many before the EPA and USDA scientist are not strangled by special interest telling them to ignore their findings? This has become entirely too routine for American’s, this cycle of bathing in chemicals, desperately trying to comfort the dying and allowing these coverups of the causes. Parkinson for one is proven to be related to farm chemicals. Thyroid health is being correlated with fire retardants.

How many Lori’s, Kathy’s, Steve’s, fathers, mothers and children will it take. We must get off this complacent attitude that someone will “figure it out”. They have, wake up and smell the roses that will not attract bees because they have bred the attractors out of them. When will it be you with the cancer? When will we collectively decide we do not want these companies experimenting on us? 98% of all the chemicals in our lives are never tested…think about that.

*To be fair, some of the farm chemicals used are, in small doses perhaps not immediately toxic, but what we do not consider is we eat a variety of vegetables, meats and fruit so added together your liver can only take so much before the toxins start bypassing it.

I dialed in the conservative KOA Denver on the radio coming back from Salida the other day and happened on the Mandy Connell show. I had heard her once before and was impressed with her awareness of what is real in politics. She surely must be Irish with savvy like she has. She was a breath of fresh air for the conservative side of things after listening to Hannity for months, where every other word out of his mouth is “liberals” or “progressives” and more truth stretching than a taffy factory.

Ms. Connell was talking about gerrymandering and how much it controls our collective thinking within a given district and leads to division, because it circles the wagons of opinion around candidates and their drum banging messages. They never have to worry about working for the common good of American life because their districts are ready made for them depending on what color socks they wear in the political arena. They put their name on the ballot and they are in. Ms. Connell is a wise Republican, who although she has political views that differ from some folks she stands for democracy, a vanishing home for us all.

Our local district was split a few years ago and done by Democrats to mostly punish a renegade Democrat who dared to vote for and defend her home district rather than taking the hands signals thrown at her from the balcony to the Colorado Congressional floor. She dared to buck the tiger so they pushed her out of the corral, drawing the district line right behind her house and splitting a Colorado County smack in two.

There is at least as much money spent leading up to a census year on redrawing district boundaries as there is in both sunlit and dark candidate money and the party in charge gets the honor of building the corrals. There are various state initiatives and a large federal level one to tear down the fences, but those district boundaries are incredibly influential so the push back is huge. The American people could put a stop to it just as they are making headway for affordable health care, but the walls that need to come down are the very thing that keeps American thoughts locked up. Most do not even know what is at stake or even that there is such a thing, so they go on about their business as the segregation marches forward…the division is the result.

Within those districts the money buys a big bang for the bucks because they basically know which way the wind will blow when it comes to winning and losing. It is like gambling with a spotter behind the dealer and saves the corporations a ton of money and indigestion and their gaming can go on.

Never in the history of this country have we had so much money thrown at our candidates in a winner take all game. Our candidates are expected to curry favor from the first 48 hours they are elected until they are not. If they don’t play the game, they will not see another year as a legislator; steer legislation their way or they will find another puppet. It takes a skilled politician to stay in the business of actually helping Americans.

The most gut wrenching thing to come out of all of this is people being talked into pitting against each other. The gerrymandering and the money lead to nowhere good. The game of gaining the vote is a science right down to the talk shows we hear on television and radio, where many of them have never taken a journalism class in their lives or for that matter a poly sci course. Some stretch things, or in some cases outright lie to continue to beat the drum. It is a deception and the worst of it is pitting us against each other. If you listen closely and have some semblance of a memory you will find a pattern of windblown statements of defense that only a year earlier were leveled at the opposition.

Christ threw the money changers from the church for a reason and in the United States we are seeing exactly why. The money is buying separation because we are easier to fool that way. Your neighbors are not bad because they think different on some issues. They are not bad because they might have voted for someone else, that is the heart of democracy! As an Independent it is so hard for me to watch people trash each other for pencil necked CEO’s, talk show hosts and politicians, the latter of which for the most part don’t like these games any more than we do.

We will be struggling in a vanished democracy if we don’t wake up to the fact that we are manipulated from the time we get up in the morning until we sack out at night. This game is not ours to play, but it is ours to stop. We do have influence to get rid of the gerrymandering, demand campaign reform where the money is honest, and we have sway on a myriad of issues if we only band together. The current town halls are certainly a demonstration of that. Our Democracy is vanishing one dollar at a time, but there is time to catch it if we only do it together.