On United States Socialism

Afraid of socialism? It’s been here a long time. Somewhere between Capitalism and Communism lies the never fully achieved idea of Socialism. The United States is an experiment in combined socialism and capitalism, in a Republic using the tools provided through the practice of democracy.

In socialist fashion the citizens of the United States have collectively determined the need for publicly owned and operated entities such as the local police and fire departments, publicly owned and operated school systems, postal services, and even the military is socialist. All collectively created rules and regulations administered on businesses are socialist practices. All unions are practicing socialism. The shopping clubs are a socialist idea. Our collectively owned and maintained roads and highways are a socialist idea. Social Security is a socialist idea. Medicare and Medicaid is a socialist practice. Collective stock ownership is a socialist practice. So is progressive taxation because it strives toward equality in taxation.

A true conservative in the modern United States favors eliminating all rules and regulations on businesses, privatizing our school systems, tolling our roads and highways, enacting a flat tax system, fully privatizing medical delivery and leaving assistance to the poor entirely up to private charity. A true socialist democratic citizen is optimistic about our collective ability to solve problems after laissez-faire methods have failed; such is the case with health care reform and the rather socialist idea of a publicly owned and operated not-for-profit health insurance company.

Drug Testing and Privacy

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To the editor,

Employee drug testing is a civil liberties violation and a highly flawed practice. The U.S. Department of Labor has reported that 9% of current employees and 12% of job applicants test positive for illegal drug use. Given these numbers, and the fact that drug abuse is estimated to cost business $100 billion per year in lost profits, it is no wonder that many businesses react with knee-jerk simplicity by requiring drug testing.

The urine and blood in my body is sacrosanct, personal, and it is my choice and my business to do with it as I will. That choice and that privacy should not become a personal dilemma under pressure from an employer. This is the primary reason why I will never work for an employer who begins our relationship by testing my body for illegal drugs. There are several other reasons why employees, applicants, and employers should be against workplace drug testing.

Drug testing amounts to unequal treatment under the law. There are hundreds of thousands of employees hooked on pain killers and anti-anxiety medications. Are they compelled to an invasion of privacy and then discriminated against? No. What about alcoholics coming to work with a hangover every day? Are they tested and then discriminated against? No. Fairly distributed employee testing should include pharmaceutical addicts, alcoholics, the chronically fatigued, the emotionally unstable, the attention deficit sufferer, the dyslexic, the hyperactive, and the ill-tempered. Imagine the uncounted trillions of dollars of profit lost to these human flaws.

Human error in the lab, or the test's failure to distinguish between legal and illegal substances, can make even a small margin of error add up to a huge number of false positives. In 1992, an estimated 22 million tests were administered. If 5% yielded false positive results (a low estimate), 1.1 million people could have been fired, or denied jobs because of a mistake.

Drug testing can be abused in many ways. In 1988, the Washington, D.C. Police Department admitted it used urine samples collected from drug tests to screen female employees for pregnancy, without their knowledge or consent.

Drug testing is a slippery slope. If we all sit idly by while this widely-accepted invasion of privacy continues unchallenged, then the genetic traits of you and your family will become the next accepted form of invasion used to discriminate.

Doctors as Bean Counters

Wouldn’t it be nice if doctors stood out of the way, let consumers shape health care reform, and take what they get? After all they are supposed to be serving us, the consumers, right? Not the other way around. And they are supposed to be healers, not social scientists or economists, or “bean counters,” as the President recently exclaimed.

It should go without saying that doctor’s and all health care provider’s care given, should remain the same in quality and quantity, and only be allowed to get better under any new health care reform. Democratically appointed boards or committees of health care representation should see to that, and I don’t doubt that’s what we’ll see when health care universality is complete.

“But we are speaking for our patients! That’s why we don’t want government run health care! For our patients!” Say the doctor’s opposed to change. Gibberish I say. The truth is a doctor in America knows that if he or she takes Medicare recipients, that there is a cap, or a “ceiling” on reimbursement that is far lower than what private insurance pays for its own customers. And that is the measure the doctor’s use to analogize a newer system created by government. And so they fear a money reduction. The answer to how much reimbursement lay somewhere in between. An average perhaps. That average would truly speak for the patients. And in only the interest of the patients, economists and social scientists, who should be the only one’s creating a universal health care system, would be speaking for the people – speaking only for the patients.

We want doctors to live above the average pay line, far above it. We want them to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. We want them to have nice homes, multiple cars, country club memberships and exotic vacations. We don’t want doctors who earn millions. We don’t want them to grow used to mansions, limousines, second homes in foreign lands and luxury motor yachts and tax loopholes.

Understanding Evolution in Part

Evolution theory (yes it’s a theory, which means it’s been tested and retested, and peer reviewed and peer accepted) states that all life on Earth arose from a circumstance of need for survival and need to proliferate.

Generally this change due to a need to proliferate, and synonymously to survive, is called “Natural Selection.” Natural as in: happened in nature, or happened with an effort of naturally cooperative materials, i.e. life forms, and energies. Selection as in: to chose and keep, to make one’s own, to incorporate a part or in whole an addition. “Natural selection,” is a process that is chief in understanding Darwin’s evolution.

The spiked and bristled weed grows in the forest. Insects leave it alone, unable to eat of it’s topsides due to the inhospitable climb to the top. The weed proliferates, its species surviving. Did God give it bristles? Preferring to save the pollen on top for the bees? No, a mutation occurred (like a third arm or a Siamese twin) that proved advantageous to the weed, proved necessary.

Creationists dismiss evolution’s merit due to the unlikely “chance of random events creating such complex structures in life!”

Very little about evolution is dependent upon a random “falling” or “bumping into” of one structure of life upon another. It’s not about random it’s about necessity.

A junkyard sits in the path of tornado velocity wind storms. The idiot who put the junkyard there is no where to be seen. Along comes the fierce winds and lifts every piece of metal up into the air, twists them all around, and drops it all on the ground where it originated. A pile of randomized, chaotic, junk is what’s left. Then imagine the winds come back five hundred times. Now we have something, not a Timex watch the size of a house, but a sturdy metallic windproof junk pile. Environment can cause life to form complex structures towards better survival and more procreation.

If we evolved from apes, then why are the apes still here? Simple, we didn’t evolve from them, we created an evolutionary branch. Most likely the branch is the result of many mutations which favored the species before it, but presupposed an advantage for the species ahead, us homo-sapiens.

If water is wet on the other side of this universe, which it very very likely is, then evolution is a process in place in millions of forms of evolution on the other side of the universe, and everywhere in the universe. In fact examination of stars and galaxies indicates that the entire universe is life form in an ongoing process of evolution. Praise be science and evolution!

Popularity, the President and Congress

“Congress are a bunch of cowards! They need to get a spine! Hell man they’re up against a president with a %24 favorable rating and they can’t get anything done!”

If the popularity of the president, belonging to a party, was the main criterion for accomplishing passage of laws in congress, then the minority party might as well go home for the entire session. But that wouldn’t really work; the president would just veto everything he didn’t like, popular opinion and polls be dammed. In congress the minority may not be voting with the president per say, they just happen to feel similarly about an issue, like withdrawal from Iraq, or spending a sliver of our annual budget on additional health care insurance for kids.

That minority party voting has been enough to stall vital legislation. That voting causes the majority (the Democratic Party) to duck and rethink the session ahead of them. What rationally can be passed becomes the dogmatic prerogative for the Senate. So, what was a full steam ahead charge to stop the occupation, to get health care for kids, becomes a slow and gentle nudging of hold-out Senators to get their points of view changed.

The House of Representatives, the south side of the Capital Building, has voted pretty well in terms of listening to their constituents. But they don’t have to have %60 to get a bill off the floor and into the committee process. The Senate does have to achieve %60, which, even in sheer mathematical ideal is a strong majority. Are they cowards? I say not. The Senate is like a person bound with rope, hopping around the basement floor, trying to reach the stairway, unsuccessfully.

Trying to Understand Our Own Economy

Fractions Thereof and Percentages are Understood

Another thing that must change for the sake of understanding and truthfulness is how we report income of the masses to the masses. Income must, from now on, be reported as percentages of everything relevant and everything being compared with income. Percentage relative to average personal earnings. Percentage of income from per capita persons in existence as earners. Percentages of comparisons, for example “2-1 or 66% of earners below $50,000.” Percentages are fractions and fractions are more easily understood by everyone and place our numbers in relative terms. By expressing our national economics in percentages and fractions, we allow for the less numerically practiced working Americans, to understand economy.

A great specific example of poor reporting on numbers that effect us all, is when we hear the common reporting of “the wage gap between the top 1% of earners verses the bottom 20% of earners is getting larger!” Few if any newspapers or television news reports will explain what this means. It means the bottom 20% is earning less and the top 1% is earning more (not the same . . more . . increasing). Why count these fractions of the population as first 1/5th and then 1/100th? Its easier to count the rich verses the lower middle class and poor, who are more elusive, sometimes don’t even file taxes (not enough income), so getting more participants in the polling of the lower middle class and poor means a more accurate result. The reporting of the “gap” getting larger means that upward mobility in America, a trait that few would disagree grows the middleclass and thus grows productivity and grows the nation in general, is faltering, worse . . . it could be said, actually causing our economy to move backwards.

Truth in Budget Reporting

Few realize that since Ronald Reagan was forced to make-up for his frivolous tax breaks for the upper class, the Social Security trust fund has been raided in budgets every year, save for a few during the Clinton administration. Wouldn’t it be nice to hear this number when the numbers of the annual budget were released, how much of the Social Security trust fun has been stolen (errr borrowed) from? Perhaps the added attention would bring added outrage from the voters?

The same type of reporting needs to be given to the state of Medicare and Medicaid. Two related programs suffering a hemorrhage from rising health care costs, treatment happy doctors, corrupt secondary providers, greedy health care accessories makers, and the programs take a bruising from an uncompassionate congress, which year after year (during republican reign), chose to cut the budgets. These cuts were seldom if not too quietly reported to the people. The people should know, loudly and widespread, when these programs are being cut and or changed in anyway significant.

Understanding our Wallets

For so many people, economics and mathematics are nasty words, to me grammar is a nasty word. Just explaining something mathematical involves negative terms like “ . . then you have to . . .” But television news could do a great job of helping Americans break through this negativity barrier, by using fractions and percentages only whenever possible, by using colorful graphics, funny graphics, memorable images. I know, asking the media to do the right thing is next to impossible if ratings can’t be proved before hand. But the media should consider that this is one of those new and fascinating shticks what’s novel presence alone might just get better ratings for any television news show or newspaper. Percentages, fractions thereof, graphics . . a more understanding population may lead to a congress that writes responsible budgets, and increases all around accountability in programs.