The Flying McCoys by Glenn McCoy and Gary McCoy for March 13, 2011

The “Green Party” is being poorly represented!

Hey where’s the Jolly Green Giant? Did the party hardliners neglect to invite him? It’s a scandal. Where’s an investigative journalist when you need one? Ho Ho Ho my *. Ah, I shouldn’t read these comics at night. Hope you set your clocks back.

“Mr. Hulk, where do you stand on nuclear power?”

“It made me what I am today.”

“Mr. Frankenstein, would you care to respond to your opponent?”

“To be honest, I’m divided. My heart is coming from one place, and my brain from another…”

@tedsini: I don’t need to set my clocks back. It’s one thing that Arizona got right!

Arizona can stay on standard time if it wants - but I love my DST!

Tedsini it’s spring forward, fall back. This is time of year you set your clock ahead 1 hour.

Funny how clock change is brought up here. Now that it was, I’ll let my steam vent!! It’s a peeve to me! Those fools in Washington can’t leave ‘bad enough’ alone. They think they can help us save energy by ‘screwing’ around with our lives again–just so they feel like they’ve done something. Grrr. Okay. Rant over. Nothing changed? Shoot.

Well it goes without saying Mr. Frankenstein is the more level headed one- I hear those groans BUT I happen to think this is one of the more intelligent debates I’ve seen in awhile. At least no one has said love of country family values or hard working.

911 or Ronald Reagan

2012 Republican Presidential Debate

^ How utterly predictable. How utterly reflexive. No thought required for that one, for FishStix to write it or anyone to read it. You know, in Germany, where the Greens have had their biggest success, environmental protection isn’t seen as a Left/Right issue. Even the Traditional Values lot see the importance of clean air and water, forests, wildlife, lakes and rivers full of fish to catch…

Well, whichever one of these winds up with the nomination will debate the Tea Party candidate: “No room! No room!” “I’ve buttered my watch.” Treacle, treacle, treacle…zzzzzzzz………”

Fritz, that\ll be more interesting then if they debate the dems. If they don’t like what’s on the agenda they’ll just run away & hide.

I’ve got no problem with Daylight Savings Time. The only scheme of daily time-keeping that wouldn’t be somewhat arbitrary would be based around Local Noon, which would mean that every degree of longitude would have a different time anyway.

If you kept DST year-round, which seems to be what most people who dislike the semi-annual shift would prefer, all you end up doing is taking noon a whole hour out of synch with the (average) moment the sun is closest to zenith. If you don’t like it being dark when you get off work in the winter, you could get the same effect simply by shifting your working hours (from, say, 9:00-5:00 to 8:00-4:00, or even 7:00-3:00).

The Earth doesn’t give a tinker’s dam whether its path and position while orbiting the Sun is convenient to us or not.

skeeterhawk, except that its been in use in the US since 1918 - that’s a LOT of politicians since then!

I thought, growing up in the 50s and 60s that this was a new phenomenon was was surprised to find it has legs all the way back to WW I.

Which website were you looking at, FishStix? The one I looked at is fiiled with good sense: http://www.greenparty.org/index.php

“The Greens/Green Party USA has been working since 1984 to make the hope of a more democratic, safer, cleaner world real. Our political goal is an America where decisions are made by the people and not by a few giant corporations. Our environmental goal is a sustainable world where nature and human society co-exist in harmony. …

“Today in America the best paid one-fifth of the population receives about one half of all national income, while the bottom one-fifth receives less than 4 per cent. The distribution of wealth in America is even more unfair. Here, the top one-half per cent of all property owners control over 25% of all wealth; while the top 5% sit on nearly 70% of wealth and property. What chance does the average person have for exercising his or her democratic rights under these conditions!

“Behind this unfair distribution of wealth and income stand a few giant corporations who own or control nearly all newspapers, television networks and radio stations, movie companies, book publishers, and other sources of information and means of communication. Both of America’s major political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, are dependent on these corporations and the few super-rich individuals and families associated with them. In fact, nearly all major offices in the US government, whether elected or appointed, are filled by individuals from this corporate network. What chance does democracy have under such conditions? What chance does nature and the environment have?

“Today’s industrial society, driven by a market system based only on profit, is rapidly destroying the very foundations in nature on which human existence depends: air, water, soil, forests, plants and animals, mineral and fuel resources. Over the past century, three-quarters of the Earth’s original forests have been cut. Mechanized, corporate farming is destroying the soil essential for agricultural production all over the world at an alarming rate. Pollution of rivers and lakes, silting of streams, and depletion of underground aquifers threatens the world’s fresh water supply. Even the Earth’s atmosphere is being restructured by this profit-driven economy.”

The 10 Key Values: Grassroots Democracy Ecological Wisdom Social Justice and Equal Opportunity Nonviolence Decentralization Community-Based Economics Respect for Diversity Feminism Personal and Global Responsibility Future Focus and Sustainability

Which of these do you oppose? (Apart from Feminism, which I take is a given.)

“So this is good sense, eh? ’The distribution of wealth in America is even more unfair. Here, the top one-half per cent of all property owners control over 25% of all wealth; while the top 5% sit on nearly 70% of wealth and property.’”

Do you dispute the numbers? Is that not patently appalling? If redistribution of wealth does not occur in a controlled and orderly fashion, it will occur in a violent and uncontrolled fashion. That’s not a threat, but it’s a prediction. We’re headed back to the era of the robber-barons on the late 1800’s and early 1900’s: the conditions which gave rise to the violent revolutions that it’s in everybody’s interest to avoid.

Through no doing of my own, I was born a healthy, middle-class, white American male. I don’t feel the need to apologize for that, but by accident of birth I was born into circumstances wherein I’ve never had to try too hard to “get by.” My parents valued education (more than I did, at the time), so I got a good one. All I’ve had to do in my life is avoid screwing up too badly, and I’ve been able to pretty much write my own ticket. I’ve had no real obstacles to overcome.

There are people in my city, in my state, in my country, and on my planet who got bad rolls of the dice the instant they came into this world. Every single one of them is as much of a human being as I am, and suffers under their deprivation and want as I would suffer.

Have not the poor eyes? Have not the poor hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer as the rich are? If you prick them, do they not bleed? If you tickle them, do they not laugh? If you poison them, do they not die? And if you wrong them, shall they not revenge? If they are like us in the rest, they will resemble us in that. If a poor man wrong a rich man, what is his humility? Revenge. If a rich man wrong a poor man, what should his sufferance be by example? Why, revenge. The villainy we teach them, they will execute, and it shall go hard but they will better the instruction.

A tiny percentage of the poor have managed to rise to wealth, despite having the deck stacked against them. There are just enough of them that the born-wealthy, even the obscenely wealthy, can offer them up as examples and say “See? They did it, and so can you.” But while the bounty of this country, of this world, is locked up in investment portfolios, multi-national corporate holdings, and trust funds, 90% of the world is going to be fighting over the crumbs from the table. If the only way to collect enough crumbs to thrive is to take them from the mouths of the other scramblers, is that what you define as “a role model”?

Others have argued that the wealthy should be indulged, because they create the demand for consumption, and the jobs, which drive the economy. Well, put up or shut up. Yeah, the economy is up, if you’ve got a stock portfolio. Real earnings of the mass of the country is still falling. Your tax breaks will create jobs? You’ve had the tax breaks for years and years now. Where are the jobs? Are the poor impoverished because they’re “unwilling to work”? When the number of living-wage jobs looking for people is larger than the number of people looking for living-wage jobs, I might consider that a question worth looking into.

What profiteth it a man if he gaineth the whole world and loseth his soul? What profiteth it a man if he gaineth the whole world, but leaveth behind a world unfit for living in?

You think the Green Party statement of purpose is just a “prettying up” of communism? I look at the platforms of the GOP and the Tea Party and I see three planks, similarly “prettied up”: 1) Take whatever you can grab. 2) I’ve got mine. 3) Après moi le déluge.

“Capitalism works because it recognizes human nature.”

Capitalism also FAILS because of human nature. Money attracts money and power attracts power, and even Adam Smith acknowledged that the “Invisible Hand” needed periodic “course correction.” Giving supreme power to the guy who can best beat up all comers is also perfectly consistent with human nature.

Anything other than “Those what has, gets” is socialism, to a degree. It’s merely a recognition that we are interdependent with our neighbors, our countrymen, and our fellow human beings for our well-being. The individual need not always thrive at the expense of other individuals. Humans are a communal species; the best chance for survival as an individual is when the community around us thrives. The monkey with the biggest pile of bananas may end up the strongest in his troop, but if the other monkeys aren’t getting enough for themselves they’ll gang up on him and either beat him to death or force him into the jungle to fend for himself.

We don’t merely live in an economy; we live in a society. And if society goes up in flames, the geese at the top will be just as cooked as the ones at the bottom.

If you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime (unless someone else has bought the river as his private property, dammed it upstream, hired sub-fisherman at a penny-per-fish wage, sells at a dollar-per-fish on the export market, and amasses a huge bank account which, once he’s over-fished the river beyond its ability to recover, he uses to buy another river, someplace far, far away. In which case not only the man who gave the fishing lesson and the man who learned it starve, along with everybody else who depended on the river for their livelihood. But Hey! That’s called “Free Enterprise!”).

“It is too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting that the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object. ”

James Madison, Federalist Paper 45 [emphasis added]

Wouldn’t care for Cuba. I’d prefer, say, Denmark or Sweden.

“And Madison would probably be shocked at the size of our activist, meddling federal government.”

Perhaps, perhaps not. We’ll never know. Perhaps he would be appalled that, more than 200 years after we declared “all men are created equal”, we’re locked into a de facto oligarchy where wealth and political power are as firmly entrenched, consolidated, and heritable as they ever were under the British Peerage. Perhaps he’d be stunned that some people make hundreds of times the money of their employees by making the water unfit to drink and the air unfit to breath. Perhaps he’d be puzzled by the fact that our economy and world standing were at their peak while the top tax rate was 90%, but he couldn’t dispute the numbers.

Perhaps the pragmatist who wrote “Were the plan of the convention adverse to the public happiness, my voice would be, Reject the plan. Were the Union itself inconsistent with the public happiness, it would be, Abolish the Union. In like manner, as far as the sovereignty of the States cannot be reconciled to the happiness of the people, the voice of every good citizen must be, Let the former be sacrificed to the latter” would find common cause with the man who said “The question is not whether government is too big or too small, but whether it works.”

Between you and me, we might agree as to the extent to which government as it stands does not seem to “work” particularly well, but we’d have very different ideas about what a “fix” would look like.

I’m not sure about the rest of the Founding Fathers, but Franklin believed the strength and promise of this new nation were in its Middle Class. Yes, he was adamant about the virtues of industiousness and frugality, but he was deeply distrustful of the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the few. He also believed in the progressive responsibility of the well-off towards civic improvements, and the importance of allowing social (and economic) mobility. Our middle class is shrinking, and those dropping beneath it vastly outnumber those rising above it. If the capital and opportunities to rebuild those losses must come from somewhere (and they must), they must be freed up from those with a stranglehold on the system as it is. To some extent “a rising tide lifts all boats”, but to an equal (if not greater) extent wealth is a zero-sum commodity, and the calcification of it in the hands of the few means it simply isn’t there for anyone else.

It’s astonishing to me how the Right has snookered the middle class into believing that it’s the people below them who are the threat to their own prosperity, rather than the people above them.