Uncommon Sense

When push comes to shove, the political non-leaders we entrust to act move out of the way.  Whether you support Obamacare or believe in the Conservatives’ fight against it, the one thing most of us like to see is decisiveness.  Asking a politician to make and own a decision is like asking an Amoeba to have a backbone.

Cynicism among the electorate runs deep when a politician’s only value is moving his or her lips.  The news media loves to refer to the pending budget deal among the chambers as the government avoiding a default on our loans.  Hogwash.  There is enough tax revenue pouring into Washington DC to pay our debts.

What we do not have in our nation’s capital is a president willing to do what is right for the country versus helping his party.  We do not have a senate willing to stand up for the American people and actually think of the ramifications of its careless spending 10 to 15 years in the future.  We do not have a congress that can get out of its own way and stay focused on what it claims it wants to accomplish.  We do not have a mainstream media willing to be objective and present both sides.

So our non-leaders have pushed off a real decision until January and February of 2014.  No one wants to discuss our debt ceiling, runaway spending, intrusion into free people lives, or the downward slide America is facing.  They want to push it off like a child pushes off telling his parents he received a bad grade.

Much like the child with the bad grade, every politician in Washington failed us.  They deserve an F and e should give it to them come election time.  However, we won’t do that because that entails the American people actually participating.  You see, we are cynical of our leaders and they are cynical of us.  We know they won’t act and they know we won’t act.  In short, we all deserve what we get.

Action begins when fear arises.  In the case of the pseudo leaders we have in Washington, DC action begins when election fears rise.  On October 16, New Jersey voters go to the polls for a special election to fill the seat of the late Senator Frank Lautenberg.

Newark Mayor Corey Booker was the de facto winner when Senator Lautenberg died in June and had a 27-point lead over Republican Steve Lonegan.  But something funny happened on Booker’s presumed victory tour and Lonegan is now behind by 13 points.  That’s still a significant margin for Booker but New Jersey is such a Liberal state that losing half his margin is cause for Booker’s concern.

It is so alarming that President Obama taped a video of support telling NJ voters they have “an opportunity to send a message to the entire country about what kind of leadership we expect from our representatives in Congress.”  President Obama is alluding to the federal government shutdown that is now in its third week.

Not to be outdone, Sarah Palin came out in support of Lonegan this past weekend saying the “eyes of America” are on the state.  The outcome will give the self-absorbed politicians in DC a glimpse of what to expect in the2014 mid-term election.  The last elected Republican US Senator in NJ was Howard Alexander Smith in 1944.  There have been Republicans appointed to complete terms of senators but the people of NJ do not vote Republican too often.

Booker will probably win but if he wins by less than 10 points Democrats in contested states will be singing a different tune on ObamaCare, the debt ceiling, and any other issue that threatens their tenure.  Most politicians only care about their re-election and nothing else.  Those that care about anything other than their political aspirations are either lying or cast as zealots by the myopic mainstream media.

We deserve better from our leaders but deserve what we get because we keep re-electing these people.  The politicians won’t act until they fear for their jobs.  We need to add everyone in Washington, DC to the unemployment line.

By Michael Lordi

I’m bummed that I’m going to miss the AmCham Palooza Party on October 23.

This of course is the stellar, multi-million dollar shindig sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and held at the Hotel Equitorial in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City.  It’s the primo networking event of the year in Southeast Asia, the perfect opportunity for captains of American business to mingle with Vietnam’s burgeoning entrepreneurial class and government budgeters.

This year, the Palooza occurs in the shadow of the death of Vietnam’s General Vo Nguyen Giap, a hero of both the French and American interventions in his country.  Giap, second only to late revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh as modern Vietnam’s most revered figure, was the founding father of the Vietnam People’s Army, whose guerrilla tactics inspired anti-colonial fighters worldwide.  As I write, his body lies in state at the National Funeral House in the city he predicted he would one day liberate from the colonialists, Hanoi.

Too bad Walter Cronkite can’t be at the Palooza.

Walter, you may recall, was ‘America’s Anchorman,’ the iconic news reporter who was familiar to Americans as the nightly news reader of the CBS Evening News for almost two decades.  At the peak of his career in the 1970’s, Cronkite was voted the most trusted person in country and remains today the paragon of American journalism.  Overlapping generations remember him as the person who wished John Glenn ‘Godspeed’ as the astronaut blasted off into space in a 50/50 crap shoot that his Friendship 7 capsule would ever return to earth.  Cronkite was the one who reported the sentencing of Nazi War Crime Trials at Neuremberg; he told the country tearfully that President Kennedy was dead; and that the Vietnam War was lost.

About Vietnam:  He was lying his ass off.

Cronkite’s reporting of the Tet Offensive in 1968 painted a picture of a disappointing effort to hold off the Viet Cong and the failed counter offensive of U.S. troops to regain control of urban areas and disrupt Communist supply lines with China.  After the offensive, Cronkite used his broadcast to tell the county, “Vietnam is lost.”  At the exact same time, however, Gen. Giap, after assessing the irreplaceable losses of men and ordinance from his brutal spring offensive and the recapture of critical urban areas by American GI’s, was telling his commanders that their forces — Charlie — had lost the war.

Following the Tet Offensive, facts meant squat to Cronkite.  Reporting regularly on the anti-war protests in American cities and college campuses, Cronkite then saw his job and that of fellow journalists as the unstoppable effort to replace the brute and oafish Lyndon Johnson with Bobby Kennedy as the nation’s Chief Executive.  If that meant downplaying reports of American tactical victories in the jungle war and routinely showing flag-draped coffins returning home, then so be it.

It worked.  In the midst of a surging military victory by GI’s, Cronkite and others in the media molded public opinion counter intuitively which eventually compelled Congress to defund the war, in essence leaving American troops in the field of battle high and dry in the world’s largest swap.  What’s more, returning soldiers became the object of the media’s ginned-up animus.  They came home and found themselves subject to contempt and ridicule by anti-war punks.

The rest is history, written by today’s college professors, poets, musicians, and fossilized progressives who spent their prime a half-century ago lighting fires in university buildings paid for by their parents and chanting scurrilous rhymes about their country, its soldiers and its president.  They were – and continue to be — the counterculture elites who condemn America as racist, a provocateur of death, enemy of the downtrodden and impoverished, and the primary source of evil in the world.

Since Cronkite and I won’t be at the AmCham Palooza Party, I have a question for those who will be there and for my contemporaries who share a personal history of the War in Vietnam.  It’s a question for Jane Fonda; for draft dodgers like Bill Clinton and campus radicals like Hillary Clinton; for bomb-making assassins like Bill Ayers and Bernadette Devlin; for all the one-trick-pony artists like Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez and Phil Oachs; the self-serving loudmouths like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin; those failed politicians like Eugene McCarthy, Ramsey Clark and John Kerry; for the long-forgotten haters of American Exceptionalism like Noam Chomsky and Saul Alinsky; for the dinosaur hippie billionaires like Ben and Jerry who continually trash free-market capitalism on their way to the bank; and for the journalistic children of Walter Cronkite and others who today comprise the core of the Blame America First Club.

Here’s my question:

Today you can drive down the Nguyen Van Qua highway in Ho Chi Minh City and purchase —

• A grande frappe with a double shot of espresso from Starbucks,
• A number one Big Mac combo from McDonalds,
• A Chevrolet Cruze and fill it with gas from ExxonMobile,
• Wireless phone service from AT&T,
• An assortment of Colgate toothpastes and mouthwashes,
• Any shade of L’Oreal lipsticks,
• And you can ship most of these in a package anywhere in the world with Federal Express,

So remind me again, exactly who lost that war?

Try as they might, those in Washington cannot legislate fair.  It’s impossible.  Life is, unfortunately, unfair.  Some people have talent at a particular sport while others do not.  Some people that have wealth, others do not.  That is just the way it is and no amount of gerrymandering by politicians will cosmetically balance the scales.

People will always find a loophole or discover ways around things.  This is a bad example but I hope it illustrates the point.  Young people posted pictures on Facebook that should have stayed in the darkroom.  When adults advised their younger counterparts that employers use Facebook in hiring decisions, they started using first and middle names to avoid detection. When employers got savvy to that trick, young people began using Instagram.

People want it both ways but reality says it is impossible.  A recent poll found the majority of Americans want Obamacare delayed or defunded but do not want the government shut down.  I suggest asking another question.  “Do you think a discussion on Obamacare would happen if the government were not shut down?”

Without that answer, we face a dichotomy as opposite as reality and fantasy.  People can be upset all they want about the government shutdown but we cannot have it both ways.  We either shut up and accept Obamacare or we “tough out” a government shutdown and not visit parks.

It’s obvious reasonable people do not reside in DC otherwise this fiasco would only appear in fiction.  I suspect the political parties will align once it’s obvious which party stands to lose the most at the polls.  The best we can hope for is to have leaders who do what is best for the majority of people knowing, like life, nothing is going to be perfect.

By Michael Lordi

One Hundred years ago today, (October 3) President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the modern federal income tax.

So where are the parties?

There are no Centennial celebrations I know of; no laudatory commemorative speeches from our politicians, and even Willard Scott overlooked mention of this centenarian on his Today Show birthday wishes.

Why is no one celebrating?

Perhaps it’s because of the way citizens think about taxes.  Some proudly point out that since 1913 federal income taxes have helped our country fight two world wars, put a man on the moon, fight fires, feed hungry children and plenty more.

And then there are others who don’t like that our taxes have been used to run military assault weapons to Mexican drug lords and Al Qaeda jihadists in Libya and Syria, bail out incompetently run corporations, payoff unions and other political cronies, fund the government’s takeover of what —  until now —  was the world’s health care ideal (just ask the Canadians and Brits who used to flock here for treatment), and generally punish the human spirit’s unquenchable desire to take risk and flourish in the world of commerce.

Seems to me what each side is speaking to is the difference in the limits put on the way federal taxes are applied.  That should be easy enough to spot.  When government applies its taxing authority under its Constitutionally enumerated powers, good things can (and we expect to) happen.  It’s when the national legislature (and the Chief Executive) feel they are beyond the legal and moral moorings of the Constitution, as they do now, that societal rot gets its boost.

It’s like what my grandmother once said to me many years ago as she gently rubbed calamine lotion over the poison ivy on my arm.  I asked her innocently if the lotion will make it worse.

“Of course not.  It’s all in the application, Bubula.”

In times of strife, reasonable people can make reasonable compromises to avert disrupting everyday life.  I guess that is why no one in Washington, DC is able to get anything done….there are no reasonable people.

We are in Day 4 of the government slim down.  Call it what you want but, in truth, it is simple stupidity and people holding their breath or taking their ball and going home.  The Obama administration is clearly playing politics by furloughing more than 400,000 civilians at the Pentagon despite legislation passed to keep them on the job.  The administration has closed high profile national parks and monuments while keeping lesser-known ones opened to frustrate more people.

Republicans are playing games by passing smaller legislation to release funds to pay for various services to keep the government open.  They are doing it so they can blame the administration for playing games.  Meanwhile, the Democrats won’t consider these smaller bills and are asking for a “clean” budget.  We get this stance from a party that voted for the Affordable Care Act without ever reading the 10,000-page legislation.

While the children in DC play one up games with each other, the nation stalls.  On one hand, that’s OK because I think the less federal government we have the better.  On the other hand, it’s sad when leaders do not lead and put their own agendas ahead of the nation.

The concept of providing healthcare for every American is noble.  The practice is an exercise in bankruptcy.  All one needs to do is look at Medicare and Social Security for reference.  I do not point to that as a mock to the government’s inability to manage anything successfully.  I point to it as proof that re-distribution of wealth for any grand notion does not work.

Anyone more interested in the moving the nation forward versus his or her careers would not purposefully put the nation on the path to bankruptcy.  They would realize the toughest choice in government is choosing the needs of the many over the needs of the few and act accordingly.  They would also realize they have the ability to structure the nation where private organizations have the incentive to service the needs of the few.

Leaders figure out how to make a philosophy into a reality.

The cure for alcoholism is to drink more.  The best way to treat a gambling addiction is to bet on when you’ll beat it.  The remedy for drug addiction is to take more drugs.

All of the above is absolutely ridiculous and no one takes it seriously.  Then why does it make sense to spend more money when we have a spending problem in Washington, DC?

The media focuses on the big, bad heartless Republicans shutting down the government in the latest media made crisis. Why not focus on out-of-control irresponsible Democrats who want to bankrupt the country even more to gain votes?  Where are those stories?

It’s obvious we need to send President Obama and his Democratic drones to Spenders Anonymous.  The president can stand up in front of the nation and say “Hi.  I’m Barack and have a spending problem.”   To give equal time, let’s send the Republicans to Sensitivity Anonymous. House Speaker John Boehner can stand and say “Hi.  I’m John and I don’t care.”

The media will blame the Republicans for shutting down the government but the Senate rejected by a Congressional counteroffer to delay the individual mandate.  They came right out and said they will not accept any proposal that alters ObamaCare.

The new offer also included a provision to prohibit lawmakers, their staff and top administration officials from getting government subsidies for their health care.  It seems to me the Democrats don’t like a taste of their own medicine and are the ones being difficult.

Instead of focusing on those who voted to keep their subsidies, the media will cast the Republicans as the Democrats’ evil twin. Rather than give a cogent case for why increased pending is better than spending like a drunken sailor on leave, the media will pepper us with stories of poor families hurting beyond comprehension because of the government shut down.

Of course, these stories will appear after one day so how the families are suffering that much after only a day will not be explained.  The media loves to tug at the heartstrings and doesn’t allow facts to get in the way.

I am still waiting for anyone to explain why increased spending is better for the whole nation than austerity. If they make a good case – one devoid of emotional anecdotes or name calling – I may change my mind and support their actions.  I doubt a case can be made because you can’t gamble your way out of a gambling problem much like you can’t drink your way out of a drinking problem

Question:  Which of the two quotes is fiction?

1. “The sky is falling,”      Chicken Little.
2. “We are at one of the      most dangerous points in our history right now — every bit as dangerous      as the break-up of the Union before the Civil War,” Tom Harkin, Democratic      Senator from Iowa.
3. Both

The answer is C with a nod to silly hysteria to Senator Harkin.  The children are at it again.  We hear these dire predictions from Senator Alarmists.  The fight is about de-funding Obamacare in the current round of Budget Roulette.  The Republican led Congress wants to defund it and the Democratic led Senate put it back into the budget bill.  According to news reports, the playful Democratic Senators even unveiled a Doomsday Clock titled “Republican government shutdown.”

Being a wise guy from New Jersey, I would suggest the Congressional Republicans becoming equally jovial and unveil their own countdown clock called “Republican Representing the People.”

OK, a few things.  The world will not end if the government shut down for a few days because millionaire politicians are seeing who can hold their breath the longest.  Can we say the same for the US Economy if Obamacare goes into effect?  There are an equal number of economists with Ph. D’s that say yes and no.  You know what they say about liars and figures.

If economists can’t agree and politicians can’t agree, I’m pretty sure I have no clue which is better from an empirical standpoint.  I suggest we do want the politicians won’t and don’t do and that is listen to people.  From that perspective, I see and hear friends, co-workers, and strangers lament of the pending loss of coverage, hours at work, and the increase in premiums.  I don’t hear them same “Oh darn, Susie/Johnny Government worker won’t be at her/his desk to ignore the public.”

Rather than have the histrionics and hysterical blather the politicians think incite the public, how about they sit in a room and do what is best for the country?  How about, they do what we elected them to do?

Whether you admired Senator Ted Cruz’s 21-hour filibuster as standing on principle or detested it as political theater, one thing is obvious: our political leaders care nothing about the people they represent.

How else do you explain the debacle in Washington, DC over healthcare?

In short, the majority of Americans do not want Obamacare yet everyone but those in Congress or with exemptions must participate.  Republicans use the majority stick to condone their actions while Democrats use the ridiculous argument that if congress listened to the majority in the 60s Civil Rights legislation would have never passed.  Apples meet oranges.

Ironically, Senator John McCain admonished Senator Cruz for wasting his time during his the filibuster “because we were in the minority, and in democracies, almost always the majority governs and passes legislation.”  Perhaps Senator McCain may want to consider his role is to represent the people and his cronies.  Senator Cruz stood on principle, the rest sat on their hands.

President Obama, with a straight face no less, stated “there’s no widespread evidence” Obamacare is hurting jobs — despite extensive reports that businesses are not hiring or are cutting back worker hours to avoid extra costs tied to the law.  He exemplifies the tone-deaf politicians we elect each year.

I guess he conveniently forgot about the July letter from the Teamsters and other unions that stated “perverse incentives” were hurting jobs.  In that same letter, they wrote Obamacare “will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40-hour workweek that is the backbone of the American middle-class.”  To be fair, the Obama Administration recently rejected the Unions’ request for an exemption so at least they are screwing everyone – even their friends, but not themselves.  I wonder how many Democrats will distance themselves from Obamacare when the next election rolls around?

In short, he created this monstrosity so 15 million uninsured Americans can get health insurance whether they want it or not.  To do this, he is forcing people with health insurance to subsidize the rest.  An average American may have to pay three times more for health insurance if their employer does not cover them.  This vicious cycle continues when more people are out of work or have reduced hours necessitating them to join a state or federal health exchange.

I know this sounds naïve but I expect our elected officials to do what is best for the entire country and not just a voting bloc.

By Michael Lordi

Remember Rosie the Robot, the domestic automaton who swept floors and kept house for the Jetsons?  She set the standard for robots back in the 1960’s.  That was until the bubble-headed, claw-handed gizmo of the Robinson family came along and spent the same decade flailing his corrugated arms constantly warning Will of danger.  That’s all he did.  No wonder the Robinsons were eternally lost in space.  Rosie would have figured out how to get the Robinsons home faster than you could brew a pot of coffee in her torso, but she wouldn’t.  They were on a different network.

It’s with these mechanical archetypes in mind that I noticed an article in the Wall Street Journal about Chinese companies investing in a new, more sophisticated wave of industrial robots to supplant people on factory floors.  Seems the ungrateful, flesh-and-blood riff-raff want better wages, better working conditions and more meaningful assignments as they get older.

So much for the Glorious Worker’s Revolution.

China’s shift to integrating more automated devices into manufacturing may take longer than planned, according to some local business leaders.  That’s because of the high price of a new generation of robotic arms and difficulty in reprogramming them once a new assembly task is required.

“If your orders decrease, you can lay off workers,” said Tim Li, senior vice president of Taiwanese PC contract manufacturer Quanta Computer Inc.  “You can’t lay off robots.”

Delta Electronics Inc. Chairman Yancey Hai echoed the concern:

“It’s clear automation is the future trend in China, but the big question is how to bring down the costs for robots.”

Let’s review how China got to this point:

• During the 1920’s Dr. Sun Yatsen leads a workers revolution in China to establish the concept of wealth distribution between government and the working class.
• Mao Zedong spreads the idea of workers’ rights across China as part of his “Great Leap Forward” spanning the 1940’s and ‘50’s.
• In 2005/2006 Steve Jobs decides to manufacture iPods (and later iPhones) in China to take advantage of cheap labor (including child labor).
• September 2013, Chinese industrialists pursue advanced robotics to replace smart-ass workers (and children) who want too much money and better working conditions.  The bosses are honked off at the high cost and long integration time of robots to replace workers.

What do I say about this evolution from working class heroes to animatronics in China’s Workers’ Paradise? Click here.