4 posts tagged “government”
Yeah, you better be saving your pennies, especially as they now officially cost more to make than they're worth. According to data released by the US Mint, each penny now costs 1.26¢ to make.
I used to just toss them aside. Going through drive-thrus, I've been known to simply ditch the pennies out of my change, right there in the drive. Guess I won't be doing that anymore.
So, here we are, in the midst of some serious economic doldrums. People are saying "recession." People are saying, "looming depression." I personally have been saying, "great googly-moogly" and "motherfucker." Yet, we're still throwing money away to produce money that is of limited value. Oh, sure, there's something special about finding a shiny penny on the ground, or carrying an old wheat penny around in your pocket for luck, but the fact that nearly every store I go in these days has a little plastic dish for people to deposit or borrow pennies from? That's a sign.
If you don't hesitate to leave your pennies in those plastic dishes, you probably wouldn't mind not getting them back in change at all. Perhaps at last, that means we, as a society, are finally ready to say good-bye to the penny. Round up all purchases to the nearest nickel and we would simplify a lot of transactions in addition to saving a bunch of money. Somewhere in the neighborhood of $34 million a year.
A current proposal in the House would not do away with the penny, but would take us back to World War II, when pennies were made of steel, a much cheaper metal than copper. Because the nickel is also a profligate in these days of rising nickel and zinc prices, the proposal includes plans to make the nickel out of steel as well. This is considered preferable to the "politically impossible" suggestion of doing away with the penny. There seems to be some sense that people want to keep the penny and yet my brain keeps going back to all those discarded pennies. Do we really want it?
And then, look at all the things we didn't want that we got: the war in Iraq, the USA PATRIOT Act, Guantanamo, tax breaks for the super wealthy. We didn't riot over any of those and they're worried that getting rid of the penny is politically impossible?
Don't, don't even get me started on the willful failure of the dollar coins.
At about midnight, the backyard lit up like daylight. Then pop! Transformer blown, power out. The cats and I went back to sleep, but I woke up at about 4:00 am to the sound of rain. Not freezing rain, not sleet, not snow. Just rain. You know, the stuff that makes my basement flood unless the sump pumps are working, which of course they aren't when the power is out. So, there I was in the basement with a flashlight, checking to see if I had water coming in. Nothing, but I went ahead and moved some stuff in case it did.
At 7:30, the power came back on and I immediately tromped outside to push the reset buttons on all the sump pumps. No flooding still. Even without electricity for almost 8 hours to run the fan on the furnace, the house wasn't too cold, but it gave me a paranoid feeling. Do you ever think about how the newer appliances leave us helpless? When I lived in an old Victorian with a hundred-year old boiler/radiator system, I never had to worry about having electricity to run my furnace fan. If the power went out, I could manually ignite the boiler and heat the house. Same with my old gas stove that had to be lit with matches. Some newer gas stoves have "safety features" which render them useless in a power outage.
Here was my paranoid feeling: imagine if your electricity went out tomorrow and stayed out. How long would it take before you were completely helpless without government intervention? How long before you did whatever the government told you to do? Remember New Orleans? How people were forced to evacuate and then prevented from returning? What would it take for you to be driven from your home?
Yup, it's official. The folks in charge of the US occupation in Iraq have started to suggest that maybe, just maybe, after all, we're not going to be able to bring democracy to Iraq. Nice. So, no weapons of mass destruction, no link to 9/11, and now we're not even going to democratize Iraq. Exactly what are we doing over there?
It's what I've said all along. Everyone was so eager to trash-talk Saddam Hussein, but nobody had any idea how hard his job was. Sure, he killed people, but do you have a clue how hard it is to hold together an artificially created country where three different groups of people want to kill each other? Do you? Suddenly, we're looking around and thinking, "Dang, this is really hard."
Right up until they dropped the trapdoor under him, I thought we'd keep Saddam in reserve, in case we needed to reinstall him as dictator in Iraq. I thought that was an evil and stupid idea, but killing him was a mistake. I mean, we've killed the one guy who knew how to run the country. You don't have to like him, or name your kids after him, but just admit it: he was killing fewer people than we have been on an annual basis. (Not that I think governments ought to be killing any of their people, but I'm always going to prefer fewer dead to more dead. The numbers don't look good for the US occupation.) Plus, under Saddam, Iraqis had schools, electricity, clean water.
Sounds like we've just imported democrazy to Iraq.
So, if Iraq isn't going to have a democracy, does that mean that the US just destroyed the country's entire infrastructure, invited terrorists in, killed an estimated 500,000 civilians, plus 3600 US soldiers, all to topple one evil dictator and replace him with another evil dictator? (Trust me, my people, there is no such thing as a benevolent dictator.) All at a cost of one trill-i-on of dollars?
A bargain at twice the price. If you've got stock in the oil industry or the military industrial complex.
I'm fascinated by China, and by what America can learn from China, so I was pretty pleased to find a nifty little diagram on BBC that explains how China is ruled. It's educational and a bit scary. It's particularly scary when you look back at the last six years. With the Republican Party in control of the House and the Senate and the White House and the Supreme Court, we were heading toward a one party system as secretive, corrupt and oppressive as China's Communist Party. A place where wrong-headed laws of all sorts can be passed almost without meaningful debate (say, the USA PATRIOT Act?) A place where the courts are manipulated by the administrative branch. A place where party politics become national politics, because the party has more power to influence legislation than the voters. Do I need to go on?
Oh, what the heck. Maybe just a few more. Thanks to our brief foray into one party government, we're experiencing some of the same things we criticise China for. Let's look at the list of complaints against China:
Courts not independent (Let's see--we've got Attorneys General being fired for political reasons.) Torture used to get confessions (According to the Bushies, waterboarding isn't torture anymore. Although it was during WW2 when we charged and convicted Axis troops of just such a crime.) Arbitrary detention without charge (Got this one in spades. P.S. Habeas Corpus, we still miss you, dude.) Some prisoners sent to "re-education centres" (I don't know if that's what they're doing at Gitmo, but I'd say that frying someone's brain with prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation probably counts.) More than 700 known executions in 2003 (Amesty International figures) (Although the US only executes about 50-60 people a year. If we look at it from a per capita basis, though, China executes 7 out of every 10 million citizens. We execute 2 out of every 10 million.)
All this to say that I feel as though we've dodged a bullet in turning the House and the Senate over to the Democrats. They're not anything like our saviors, but at least they may be inclined to oppose the Republicans over some things. I mean, as a nation, we're still in a wagon driven by a madman, heading toward a cliff. At least now, there's another person holding one of the reins, who might just manage to steer us away from the edge.
EDIT: Oh, and I meant to recommend Naomi Wolf's article on the 10 Easy Steps to Fascism that ran in the Guardian last week.
(Of course, the sad reality is that America is being ruled by a single party system. The Money Party. So, while we've momentarily thwarted the ambitions of the Republican Party, we're still living in a country ruled by an elite group of people who've amassed power and influence that trumps democracy. A country where rich people and companies have more influence over legislation than the voters. A country where the only vote that counts is the one you make with your checkbook. So, please, if you have the money, vote.)
