POLITICAL CIVIL WAR

William Howard Taft was the President of the United States in 1910.  He was a Republican and called the Trust Buster President because he broke up over-large corporations with  monopolies  on products.
He strengthened the Interstate Commerce Commission , promoted Civil Service Reform and strengthened the Postal Service. He also passed the Constitutional Amendment establishing income tax.  The business interests of the day hated him and predicted the downfall of the United States over such horrifying changes.
Instead, we had years of prosperity and a burgeoning middle class. Workers made money and spent it and made  more money for Wall St. than even Wall St. moguls imagined.
Today, we have a political civil war going on, its all about money and power, not the working people of our nation. We have a war on the middle class and an out of touch electorate.
Consider this quote from the past:

“We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers’ salaries and take away their right to strike.”
- Adolf Hitler, May 2 1933

That quote has a frighteningly current ring to it among some politicians and media moguls I’ve heard.

There are hundreds of Electric vehicles being developed around the world. Fast vehicles that go the distance.  Design engineers from every country develop amazing new technologies. These new industries could provide jobs but our politicians can’t see beyond their own personal power cartel called a campaign committee, its sole energy devoted to getting them re-elected.

Published on Monday, May 9, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

Renewable Energy Can Power the World, Says Landmark IPCC Study

UN’s climate change science body says renewables supply, particularly solar power, can meet global demand

by Fiona Harvey

Renewable energy could account for almost 80% of the world’s energy supply within four decades – but only if governments pursue the policies needed to promote green power, according to a landmark report published on Monday.
 
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This is America under a corpocracy, not a democracy. A blighted section of Detroit, after Ford closed their plant and sent production overseas. And, who is getting blamed for a neighborhood that should be bulldozed?  Not the Governor of this state. Not the Feds. It is the poor people, mostly immigrants who have moved into sectors and formed a community. People are rightfully fearful that because it is poverty stricken, crime and drug riddled, we will have a homegrown terrorists breeding ground.
America is getting more and more blighted neighborhoods because of the mortgage crisis. Some states, like Ohio, is taking over from the banks we bailed out with billions of taxpayer dollars, these blighted areas and fixing them up as low cost rentals for people who have marginable jobs, some who lost the homes can rent them back. Its government housing but not the low cost projects called instant slums from the past.

And the business sector that can fix our problems if only we allow them to be unfettered and unregulated?  This is one example of how they do it. This youtube video is very short and to the point.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuGE1VxVsYo

Read the preamble to our constitution and ask yourself, what part of Promote The General Welfare do our politicians not understand?
promote the general Welfare
This, and the next part of the Preamble, are the culmination of everything that came before it — the whole point of having tranquility, justice, and defense was to promote the general welfare — to allow every state and every citizen of those states to benefit from what the government could provide. The framers looked forward to the expansion of land holdings, industry, and investment, and they knew that a strong national government would be the beginning of that.
I’ve had my rant for today. I hope to blog in the days ahead, as we travel the road south, some positive values to counteract the negative here.

SHANGHAI

Saturday morning, we bus to the airport and fly to Shanghai. Shanghai is the business center of China and Beijing is the government center, much like New York and Washington D.C.  We notice the air here is awfully polluted.
We tour the city by bus and  important buildings are pointed out to us by our City Guide, Michelle. A Soviet building from 1952 called the Wedding Cake. All the important banks and financial institutions of the Bund. The Bund is China’s Wall Street, the financial center of China, in the old days,  and now. My one gigabyte sandisk , as it filled to the end, had blank spots during the unloading, and burning process and many of my pictures were lost. The best way to see The Bund is at the following website.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bund

My one surviving picture of the modern skyline of Shanghai from across the Yangtze. Our City Guide, Michele tells us Shanghai means to the sea. We think of Shanghai as kidnapping and that is part of  Shanghai’s reputation when able-bodied men were taken against their will and brought down the river and put to sea on an ocean-going vessel. Shanghai is regarded as a baby city since it is only 200 years old. What was once an opium shipping port in the 1840’s to the 1930’s, with only 100,000 populations has become one of the biggest container shipping ports in the world. Their biggest exports are silk and tea. Now an astonishing  21,000,000 people live here.   They have the highest building in the world and more  skyscrapers than New York City and Hong Kong. Yet in 1964, no building was over ten stories high. . Chinese people want to be the biggest, the tallest, the fastest and the best.
The city is so modern, yet we still see people driving on different types of  slow-moving motors, and a zillion bikes. Here and in Beijing  people are licensed to drive on Mondays and Wednesdays, others on Tuesdays and Thursdays and so on.  We see one man carrying a full size bed on just an ordinary bike. The loads people in China carry on bikes are legendary. There are many beggars swarming us at bus stops and anywhere tourists congregate selling rip off watches, hand bags, shoes, you name it. One member of our group, though warned, bought a Micky Mouse watch and before the bus had pulled away, it fell apart. She laughed the hardest at her own folly.

Traditionally, Chinese babies and toddlers do not wear diapers. They wear split pants. I tried many times to get a picture of them and finally caught one. The problem is, the children squat in the street and the parents pick up after them;  part of  old China where nothing, including human fertilizer was wasted. The government discourages this practice but notice  resistance from young mothers like this one.

In the afternoon, we visit a silk factory. They harvest these small cocoons, boil them to kill the worm, then dye the silk various colors and spin the silk into large batts.  They sell silk “quilts” and we had a hard time understanding how you could have a quilt made of silk until we watched them take a silk batt and stretch, stretch, and stretch it until it was bed size.

In reality, the silk quilt is a comforter not a  quilt. Silk quilts are reputed to be  very warm for their weight. You do not wash them, we are told.  You air them out twice a year and only wash the outer cover in shampoo. They machine squeeze them so small, you can carry a queen sized quilt like a medium-sized purse.  These factory visits are sales pitches, all tours have them.  They can be educational and worth going to. The whole silk making process was interesting.
We passed a section of freeway where a cement column supporting an over crossing was approximately twelve  feet in diameter?  It was beautifully decorated with writhing dragons. I asked why the need for such a heavy support column. Our city guide explained that it allows the dragons to escape. The road worker found trouble in that spot. They insisted there was a dragon there  and it would be bad luck to cover it up. The government architects came up with a solution. The column is partly hollow and has an exit window. Now, knowing what we do of Chinese culture,  and their superstitions of centuries embedded in  their character, we understand.
We stayed at the Gorgeous Hilton Hotel and ate out our first night. Food here tastes bland compared to the spicy Szechuan food we enjoyed and prefer. The hotel rooms sell condoms and you can buy a large bottle of water for $28. Expensive in this city. To buy a small condo here costs about $200,000. Seems high when they pay workers so little. It was nice to have a good scotch at the bar instead of the tasteless Chinese beer and wine.
That night, we are taken to visit the tallest building in the world, a brand new building with 88 floors.  It costs us $7 to ride the elevator to the top in 45 seconds. Amazingly, you feel no stomach churning lift, it is a seamless ride. The lines to get on the elevators are never-ending. We suspect the building will be paid for by tourism. From the top, we look at a new building being built right next to it by the Japanese which will be even higher at 105 stories. The view from the top is stupendous.

It is a Saturday and all the city lights are lit on the weekends, but not during the week;  a cost saving measure. At the top we see a video of men parachuting from the building. It is against the law, but they did it anyway. What an amazing technology. We have no doubt that China will some day replace the U.S. as the pre-eminent super power. There are, by the way, 20 million Christians in China.
(The photo above  is copyrighted by the Creative Commons Attribution given to wikipedia.)

ESSAY OF INTEREST

In my last blog I identified a cow parsnip as angels lace and I appreciated the correction.

 A showy plant that grows very well in this cool, wet area. A Western Garden book would help, but its huge in a small motor home where space is at a premium.
Yesterday, we curled in with our books. Into reading John Lescroart legal thrillers. Took a swim before dinner and it felt good. The pool has a unique design, two shallow ends and the deep part in the middle.  Today is also moving day.

I read a lot. Sometimes junk, sometimes serious stuff. And, I thought the following essay by Will Moore had some interesting things to say. He is a political junkie and a member of the World Affairs Counsel.

Humans are a predatory species. We got to the top of the food chain on  this planet by preying on everything else. We prey on  animals, fish, on mollusks, and the other predators in the seas. Humans don't eat a lot of insects, we prey on them for honey, silk and certain beetles whose shells we use for dyes. We prey upon many more killing millions and millions of tons of insects in the process of agricultural competition with them. All those millions of  tons of insects are the food supply for birds, fish and other species, so we're preying indirectly on those species as well.
 We prey on everything including other humans.  We no longer kill and eat other people, but we prey upon their products, their labor, their lands and their resources.  Humans  preying on other people is the source of all the wars that are going on.
In the old days raiding distant lands and "lesser" peoples seemed like a good idea. It was profitable. The world has changed. The idea that we have a God given right to raid and cheat "others" and plunder the earth is an idea that has outlived its time like cannibalism and slavery have gone with their times.
Wall Street is now the top predator on this planet and the working man is the prey of  Wall Street imperialism for their mental resources, their labor and the products of their labor.
A lot of anti-liberal, anti-socialist, anti-communist small government advocates think that socialism is evil and capitalism is good. They seem to think that the government is the enemy of the people and Wall Street is our friend. That isn't true. We're the prey species in the  unholy marriage of Washington and Wall Street.
 There is no such thing as a power vacuum. If you take a bone away from a  dog some other dog will take the bone. If you take power from one force in a power struggle, the power struggle doesn't end. Some other power will immediately fill that power vacuum. We're going to have a government whether we want one or not. If we don't have the government we have, we will have something else. We will have a warlord, a dictator, a military junta, a panel of judges, a Pope, or something else. That  something else will be Wall Street. We will have a corporate plutocracy, a corporatocracy (which is where we are going). If Washington takes a penny from us in taxes, everybody knows about it;  it's a visible tax. But we actually get something for that tax penny - roads, clean air, fresh milk, mail delivery, police protection, paramedics who  will rush to your house when you have a heart attack, and many other services that we all take for granted. There can be such a thing as enough taxes. There can never be such a thing as enough profit. The corporatocracy is trying to diminish, defund, demolish, dismantle and disenfranchise the government we have with no clear idea as to what is going to replace it. The government we have is legally limited as to how predatory it can be and it has a constitutional mandate to serve the "general welfare" of "We the people." Those who are trying to dis-empower the government that we have are merely handing more power over to Wall Street capitalism. They are granting an unrestricted license to the primary predator on the planet to prey upon  "We the people" with no legal limits and with no mandate to serve the "general welfare." Yeah, taxes are high, but government for profit will be ever more onerous. Perhaps we can agree that there can be no real freedom for debt slaves, and  that the greatest threat to us all is the unholy marriage of two powerful predators, government and capitalism and that we should work to dissolve that marriage.


Food for thought.