Tale of Two Cities:

In Houston last December a young black man was shot in his parent’s driveway after parking his parent’s car by members of the Bellaire Police Department. The finding released in February confirms the facts in this racially motivated shooting. Robbie Toland is to me a case of over reaction by police that should have been punished with jail time. Not only were the officers involved not charged they were not disciplined in any way.

Now we have the case of a Harvard professor returning to his home in Cambridge Massachusetts. This nationally honored personal friend of our president was arrested and taken to jail after he had proven that he was standing in his own living room. As of this writing the arresting officer refuses to apologize to the professor for his erroneous and racially motivated actions. On the Henry Louis Gates matter even the President of the United States of America has commented.

I think we have to seriously consider what has happened. In the case of Robbie Toland a young man’s promising baseball career was destroyed. Robbie will carry a bullet in his liver for the rest of his life which was surely shortened by what this arresting officer did. Pain and suffering do not even begin to describe what has happened to this young man and his family.

While the Harvard professor was not shot the very fact that a man could be arrested in his own home for no reason other than the color of his skin should bring every American to their feet protesting. Yet no such thing has happened. Once again the spin doctors are attempting to justify the arrest. How successful will they be? I fear that this incident like so many before it will be whitewashed and forgotten. Driving while black in America in and of itself has become hazardous.

The Massachusetts statute defining "disorderly conduct" used to have a provision that made it illegal to make "unreasonable noise or offensively coarse utterance, gesture or display," or to address "abusive language to any person present." Yet the courts have interpreted that provision to violate the Massachusetts Constitution's guarantee of freedom of speech. So police cannot lawfully arrest a person for hurling abusive language at an officer. ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-winkler/obama-was-right-about-the_b_244888.html ). The charges were dropped because there was no offense committed. If no offense was committed it was in fact “pretty stupid” to arrest Professor Gates as the president so rightly observed.

Both of these events happened in affluent neighbor hoods. Both of these incidents involver persons of color that represented less than 1% of the neighborhood’s population. Police records in Bellaire show that even though less than 1% of the population is black 30%+ of the drivers stopped in this city are black. I cannot prove it yet but I expect the same can be said of Cambridge. Surely the police do not think that their city is being targeted by the criminal element of Houston. Yet I can sense this argument will be put forward.

America for the love of God wake up and begin to correct these injustices.

American Rot:

American Rot is a condition that I find to be rampant in America today. I am going to give you an illustration that will perhaps help you to understand not only how the problem happens but also a method of identifying this condition. I hope my example is understandable. The example I am going to use is broadcast TV and the switch from analog to digital.

I live south of Houston, Texas on the Gulf Coast. The signal must travel through the air some 37 miles from Missouri City tower farm to my antenna. For the past 40 plus years this has been happening without flaw even during hurricanes and other natural disasters. I have however now experienced a prolonged outage of two of the four major TV stations. After the highly touted switch over to DTV on June 12th things started downhill. At first rescanning seemed to solve most of the problems. The PBS affiliated station announced that they had to leave the air for 13 days to make modifications to their antenna. This was understandable due to their lack of funds. PBS is the least funded of the VHF networks. Without announcement ABC next vanished from my screen soon to be followed by CBS. All the while NBC signal continued to be working perfectly. The higher frequency channels like FOX also continued to broadcast uninterrupted. These channels used the frequencies above channel 13.

For more on VHF vs. UHF click here.


Where the irritant comes is that all the while my signal was not present ABC and CBS continued to be available via cable. That is to say revenues continued to flow into ABC and CBS and they seem to care less about folks that did not contribute to this revenue stream except by viewing advertisements. The fact that I was without service that used the airwaves that belong to me as a citizen of America was blithely ignored, this during the worst financial crisis since 1929. News is not going to make a huge difference to my moral which is admittedly low. However when I cannot see exactly how other parts of America is weathering the storm and what measures are helping or hindering them I feel deprived.

There has been an ongoing erosion of news sources available to the American public. An uninformed public is something I think no American wants. The news paper continues to be delivered. But effectively two thirds of my major TV news stations are no longer casting images to my living room screen. Am I alarmed? You bet I am.

Things like this happen when the decision makers are insulated from suffering the consequences of their actions. Due to the revenue stream from cable TV the broadcasting stations could afford to interrupt the signal to my house and no matter how loudly I ranted they could safely ignore me. In fact they are still ignoring me except for FOX and NBC and a smattering of Spanish speaking channels. I suspect this same logic applies to other problems in America. Health care will not be fixed so long as congress has their own program that is I understand very good and covers you for life even if you only served in congress for 2 years. We saw this with investment banks on Wall Street where golden parachutes insulated upper management from the loss of retirement as their company smashed on the rocks of financial mismanagement. Wake up America. We are getting the shaft and they are getting the mine.

The End of the GOP:

Events of this past weekend had made me wonder if the Republican Party can survive as a political entity. I do not say this lightly and remind everyone that it has happened before. The American two party system has existed for most of our history as a nation. However the parties are not necessarily the same after the passage of time. Political parties are after all human institutions and as such change with the changing membership that form them.

I tend to look at American history through the lens of labor / management. That is to say the major turning points in American history can be defined in management terms or labor terms. Southern slavery was to me an attempt to get labor at abysmally low cost. Free labor is after all about as cheap as labor gets. We hear folks speak of how southern plantation owners cared for their black labor element. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact many of the children of these plantations were sired by the white overseers and masters. Yet these children were often sold as though they had worth only as beasts of burden. Ask yourself where else in the history of the world parents have sold their children and you get a much clearer picture of the horror of the American system of slavery.

The political party that changed this was in fact the Republican Party and their first successful presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln. So successful did the Republican Party become that it elected every single president from 1860 to 1914 a span of some 54 years. Some remarkable things have occurred in the past several years. When Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law he knew full well that the once solid democratic south would be forever shattered. Events proved that to be the case. I do not think the old guard of the south in the form of the Ku Klux Klan was an all powerful force. But the ideas of black men with no political power certainly remained in the American south alive and well. In fact these ideas were assimilated and in Texas they expanded to include the brown population from Mexico.

Harking back to my earlier proposition that cheap labor is what is at the root of much of the thought processes behind political rhetoric. If labor is too cheap then it becomes abusive. The girls in the electronics assembly plants 100 yards south of the American border make five dollars a day. Just a few steps away the wage rate is ten times that amount. To say that another way a day’s wage for them can be earned in less than an hour by their counterpart in America. Is it any wonder these people will suffer almost any hardship to come to America? The Republican Party has at almost every single juncture opposed increasing the minimum wage. The Republican Party has at almost every juncture opposed better health coverage for the average American. The Republican Party has opposed at almost every juncture more money for education.

And now people ask why the Republican Party is imploding. It is imploding because it is seen to be the voice of reactionary thought. The voice of the Republican Party is no longer the measured tones of Lincoln urging that we bind up the wounds of America. The voice of the Republican Party has become the shrill whine of Sarah Palin and inane ramblings of Rush Limbaugh. Those voices are why I think the demise of the Republican Party is at hand.