Let’s go Cruzing again! It’s always a trip to cruise down the narrow roads and hard right turns of Sen. Ted Cruz’s mind – a place so dark that no light has ever penetrated it.
Today’s trip was prompted by the Texas senator’s own recent attempt to carjack our entire US government and drive it into financial default, thus causing markets to crash and our economy to collapse. What was he thinking?
Well, about himself, as usual. Cruz is a product of the far-out tea party fringe, and he’s trying to impress them with this own extreme fringiness, hoping they’ll make him their candidate for president next year. Yes, this goofball thinks that by wrecking the government of our country, we’ll elect him to head it. Strange.
Cruz – whose disastrous ego trip of a filibuster last October actually shut down our government for over two weeks, causing an economic loss of $24 billion – recently tried again to be a human monkey wrench. This time, he tried to filibuster a measure to extend the debt limit, forcing his fellow Republicans to stop him. He was toying with the destruction of America’s full faith and credit, and Republicans did not want to go into this fall’s senatorial election as the party of default.
So, to avoid both financial and political catastrophe, a glum and angry Mitch McConnell, the GOP senate leader, had to round up Republican votes to curb Kamikaze Cruz’s megalomaniacal maneuver. Even Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing Wall Street Journal lambasted the narcissistic Texas extremist for making his party “walk the plank” on this “meaningless debt ceiling vote.”
One observer noted how eerie it was to watch Cruz with his hands in his pants pockets, chewing gum, and smirking as he watched his senate colleagues cut off his latest outburst of runaway ego. Cruzing with Ted is not just strange – it’s insane.
“Republicans forced to pay a high price for Cruz’s ego,” Austin American Statesman, February 12, 2014.
“Shutdown took $24 billion bite out of economy,” www.cnn.com, October 17, 2013.
“The Minority Maker Ted Cruz hurts his party by forcing a meaningless debt-ceiling vote.” www.wsj.com, February 12, 2014.

Don’t shut the post office, expand their services

What’s the matter with the post office? The US Postal Service, I mean – the corporate hierarchy that runs this enormously popular public institution. Yes, I know that USPS has lost revenue it traditionally got from first-class mail delivery, but I also know that letter carriers and postal workers have offered many excellent ideas for expanding the services that USPS can deliver, thus increasing both revenue and the importance of maintaining these community treasures.
Yet, the Postal Board of Governors, which includes corporate interests that would profit by killing the public service, seems intent on – guess what? – killing it. The board’s only “idea” is to cut services and shut down hundreds of local post offices. Incredibly, their list of closures include the historic post office in Philadelphia’s Old City, the very building where Ben Franklin presided as our country’s first Postmaster General, appointed by the Continental Congress in 1775.
All across the country, post offices that are invaluable artistic and historic assets are slated to be sold to developers. One is the marvelous 1935 Bronx post office, with classic architectural flourishes and 13 museum-worthy murals. “It’s not just a post office,” says one customer fighting the closure, “it’s part of my life.” No one feels that way about a Fed Ex warehouse. Yet, says a USPS spokeswoman dismissively, the four-story building is “severely underused.”
So, use it! Put a coffee shop in it, a public internet facility, a library and museum, a one-stop government services center – and, as USPS employees have suggested, a public bank offering basic services to the thousands of neighborhood people ignored by commercial banks. Come on, USPS, show a little creativity and gumption, and remember that “service” is a key part of your name!
“Protest Aside, Postal Service Is Taking Next Step to Sell Grand Property in the Bronx,” The New York Times, February 5, 2014.
“Elizabeth Warren Proposes Replacing Payday Lenders With the Post Office,” www.thinkporgress.org, February 3, 2013.

Tom Perkins speaks. Again

The überrich are full of ideas. Not, unfortunately, ideas to help humanity, but to help themselves grab more money and power at our expense.
Take Tom Perkins. He’s one of a growing number of the “put-upon” rich – billionaires who’ve grabbed a fabulous fortune by hook or crook, but now complain that they are victims of a “rising tide of hatred.” Excuse me, Tom, but the words “billionaire” and “victim” are not a natural pairing. Yet, even though he candidly concedes that he lives a life of vulgar excess, Perkins wrote a sob-story letter in January to the Wall Street Journal pleading for relief from the “war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’”
He was roundly ridiculed for that, but he’s since come back with a pragmatic idea for redressing the grievous plight of the put-upon one-percenters. What’s needed, he explained, is a slight tweaking of America’s democratic election system. “The Tom Perkins system,” he lectured, is “you don’t get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes. But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How’s that?”
Gosh, so much vanity and ignorance crammed into only three sentences! Apparently, no one has informed Tom that poor people pay a larger percentage of their income in various taxes than do privileged tax evaders like him. Nor does he seem aware that a democratic government can not be anything like a corporation, for government must serve the whole public, while a corporation is an autocratic hierarchy that serves only a few. And golly, Tom, why should you and all of your billionaire buddies get anything special – like extra votes – just for paying taxes? What you get in return for taxes is what we all get: Civilization.
I thought I would write to Tom about his plan, but then I realized, I don’t know how to spell “Thhhbbbbbllllltttttttt.”
“How One Billionaire’s Idea To Give Rich People More Votes Is Already In The Works,” www.thinkprogress.org, February 14, 2014.
“Cry me a river full of gold: 1% is the loneliest number,” Austin American Statesman, February 2, 2014.