Mark Twain spoke for me when he said: “I’m opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.”
One danger that such wealth brings is that many who have it become blinded to those who don’t. Thus, the news that more than half of our congress critters are now in the millionaire class helps explain why it has been striving ceaselessly to provide more government giveaways to Wall Street bankers and other superwealthy elites, while also striving to enact government takeaways from middle-class and poor families.
Take the richest House member, Rep. Darrell Issa, with a net worth of $464 million. A right-wing California Republican, he has used his legislative powers to try denying health coverage to poor Americans, even as he tried to unravel the new restraints to keep Wall Street bankers from wrecking our economy again. Issa and his ilk are proof that a lawmaker’s net worth is strictly a financial measure, not any indication at all of one’s actual value or “worthiness.”
I hasten to note that many millionaires in America have been able to rise above their financial handicap, serving the public interest rather than self or special interests. For example, when Rep. Chellie Pingree was elected to Congress in 2009, she was an organic farmer and innkeeper in rural Maine. Definitely not a millionaire, she was a stalwart fighter for such progressive policies as getting corporate money out of politics, enacting Medicare for all, and reigning in Wall Street greed. But in 2011, Pingree married – of all people – a Wall Street financier and was suddenly vaulted into the ranks of the 1-percenters. So, naturally, her legislative positions changed… not one whit.
See, even in Congress, being a millionaire is no excuse for becoming a narcissistic jerk. Siding with plutocrats is not an incurable condition – it’s a choice.
“Millionaires’ Club: For The First Time, Most Lawmakers are Worth $1 Million-Plus,” www.opensecrets.org, January 9, 2014.
“For first time, more than half in Congress are millionaires,” The New York Times, January 10, 2014.

Spymaster wants to outlaw reporting on NSA spying

In the movie plot of a spy thriller, our hero gets captured by agents of a repressive government, and they take him into a dark interrogation room, where the sadistic spymaster hisses at him: “We have ways of making you talk.”
Meanwhile, in real life, the director of our National Security Agency hisses at journalists: “We have ways of keeping you from talking.” Well, not quite in those words, but Gen. Keith Alexander, chief spook at NSA and head of US Cyber Command, did reveal a chilling disrespect for our Constitutional right to both free speech and a free press. In an October interview, he called for outlawing any reporting on his agency’s secret program of spying on every American: “I think it’s wrong that newspaper reporters have all these documents… giving them out as if these – you know it just doesn’t make any sense.” Then came his spooky punch line: “We ought to come up with a way of stopping it… It’s wrong to allow this to go on.”
Holy Thomas Paine! Spy on us, okay; report on it, not. What country does this autocrat represent? Alexander’s secret, indiscriminate, supercomputer scooping-up of data on every phone call, email, and other private business of every American is what “doesn’t make any sense.” It’s an Orwellian, mass invasion of everyone’s privacy, creating the kind of routine, 24/7 surveillance state our government loudly deplores in China and Russia – and it amounts to stomping on our Fourth Amendment guarantee that we’re to be free of “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
That’s the real outrage we should be “stopping.” But no, our constitutionally-clueless spymaster doubles down on his dangerous ignorance by also stomping on the First Amendment. If this were a movie, people would laugh at it as being too silly, too far-fetched to believe. But there it is, horribly real.
“Keith Alexander Says The US Gov’t Needs To Figure Out A Way To Keep Journalists From Reporting On Snowden Leaks,” www.techdirt.com, October 25, 2013.
“NSA chief: Stop reporters ‘selling’ spy documents,” www.politico.com, October 24, 2013.
“Goodbye Free Press? As Europe Erupts Over US Spying, NSA Chief Says Government Must Stop the Media,” www.alternet.org, October 26, 2013.

RIP, Pete Seeger

It never occurred to me that Pete Seeger could die, for I thought of him as a permanent piece of America--like the Bill of Rights. I first met Pete at the Newport Folk Festival in 1969 and it was my good luck to learn from him over the years by joining him in a few of the many grassroots causes he embraced. He genuinely was “of, by, and for the People,” and his exemplary life gives all of us a rich up-tempo, belt-em-out songbook of how common people can team up to battle the bosses, bankers, big shots, bastards, and bull-shitters.