More Random Thoughts (cont.)

Public campaign financing, anyone?

I’ve been reading a lot of posts and hearing and seeing a lot of discussions in the media recently along these lines:  The 2008 elections were an overwhelming repudiation of the Republican party and the principles for which it stands.  Americans stood up last November and literally shouted “No more!” to Republicanism, wars of choice, and corporate control of the government.  So, if the good guys won so big (and they did!), why aren’t any of the big changes happening?  Why are Obama and Congress tippy-toeing around on things like universal health care and saving people’s homes and nationalizing and breaking up the banks as if the other guys still had the power and we can only accomplish that which has bipartisan support?

I think the answer is pretty obvious:  The “other guys” do still have all the power and bipartisanship has nothing to do with it.  Whether the officeholders call themselves Republicans or Democrats, with a few wonderful exceptions, the corporate interests still own our government.  And they’ll continue to own it until Americans demand that our political campaigns by financed by public money, and only by public money. 

An overwhelming percentage of Americans (I’ve seen polls ranging from 56% all the way up to a whopping 87%) want the country to change to a European-style, single-payer public health system.  But does single-payer have a chance in hell of even being seriously considered?  Not on your life!  Nor is it likely to be, as long as the health profiteers put billions and billions of dollars annually into the reelection coffers of our nation’s congresscritters.  Ditto the banks.  Ditto Wall Street (whatever that means). 

As long as it costs more than the GNP of a mid-sized country to be elected to public office, and as long as corporate interests are permitted to give game-changing sums to political candidates, we’re never going to have a government that’s interested in the needs of the working people they’re supposed to be looking out for.

With the Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination, we’ve been seeing Obama on teevee a lot talking about how important it was in the selection process to pick a candidate from the most highly qualified whose decisions reflected a philosophy of standing up for the little guy against the forces of the big and powerful.  I guess that’s only for judges, eh?

Before the election, I responded to several polls about what should be the highest priority for the new administration with “None of the above:  Restore the constitutional balance of powers and roll back the whole unconstitutional ‘unitary presidency’ idea.”  After seeing what’s rolled out in the four months since Obama took office, I have a new answer for those pollsters:  Stop the corporate stranglehold on the American government.  Support public campaign financing now!

Credo, please leave me alone!

Seems like a day doesn’t go by when I don’t receive something from the Working Assets cell phone subsidiary, Credo.  They want me to switch my mobile service from AT&T to their politically correct correct Credo brand.  Today’s message came via snail mail in an appeal that compared Credo to AT&T and Verizon.  Did you know that AT&T and Verizon both support war, laugh about global warming, favor criminalizing abortion, oppose campaign finance reform, and are opposed to free speech?  Not a word about call or network quality.

There are three reasons why Credo isn’t for me:

1. There are only two carriers whose very best phones receive a marginally acceptable signal in all the rooms of my ancient brick apartment, and Credo (Sprint) ain’t one of them.
2. I spend 4 to 6 months of most years either at home in Spain or traveling elsewhere in Europe or Asia.  If I want to own one telephone with all my contacts and data and bookmarks and calendar and personal junk in it, it needs to operate on a GSM network, since they don’t (for the most part) use the U.S. CDMA standard that Sprint—Credo’s actual network provider—uses.  I’m stuck with AT&T or T-Mobile.
3. The whole credo thing is about 90% hype.

Credo Mobile is not a telephone company.  It’s a mobile phone service reseller for Sprint, a company that’s no more ‘progressive’ than AT&T or Verizon (or any of the others).  If Credo had added a ‘Sprint’ column to the comparison chart they sent me today, it would have been just as dirty as the others.

If consumers ever looked beyond the shiny surface of crap like this, they’d realize that the more important message here is that the profits in the telecommunications industry are so obscenely huge that a reseller like Credo Mobile—a company that doesn’t own one stick of real telecommunications equipment—can afford to buy somebody else’s product and turn around and not only sell it to me at a competitive price, but also give me a $450 phone for $60, and give me $200 to buy out my AT&T contract and make generous contributions to good causes (they’re Planned Parenthood’s largest corporate contributor), and spam me by email and snail mail several times a week, and earn a decent return for their investors.

I grew up in Springfield, IL, one of the few municipalities left in the country that still has municipally owned and operated public utilities.  Springfield’s progressive Republican fathers, led by the amazing V.Y. Dallman, saw the wisdom of municipally-owned public utilities and oversaw the creation of City Water Light and Power Company, and still in 2009, Springfield has OK water and electricity (about all anybody can claim these days), and the lowest electric rates in the country.  It’s one of the few places where it’s actually less expensive to heat your home with electricity than with natural gas. 

A mobile phone provider that did that for its users would have my business in a second.  Until you do that, Credo, please lose my addresses.

And finally

One last thought on congregational animal names:  I was tickled to learn that the correct name for a congregation of bears is a sloth—further evidence that I am, indeed, a member in good standing of the bear family.