It is once again the Church of the Holy No(t if we can’t take credit for it) versus the Church of the Holy Handout bringing Congress to a standstill.  This time it’s a group of Republican Senators wanting to block stimulus funding of alternative energy because some of the manufacturing will take place overseas.  Rather than address WHY that happens and how to solve the problem, they just want to block it.  And if it keeps us in thrall to Holy Oil, so much the better.

The reason we have not seen the investment we need in manufacturing of alternative energy products in the US is because the investment is not going to happen until and unless there is  stable environment for it so investors can have a reasonable chance of making a return on their money.  Temporary stimulus bucks don’t do that.  A long term plan that prices carbon emissions will.

It is time for Congress to recognize the science side of capitalism as well as the religious one.   Pricing carbon will steer the market forces towards creating a United States that is self-sufficient in energy and can lead the world out of the Carbon Age.  Or we can keep on as we are doing, and eventually manufacturing will come back – as sweatshops where our grandkids and great-grandkids make cheap trinkets for the Chinese and Indian middle class.

John Linder (R-GA) announced  on February 27 that he will not seek re-election to Congress.  Following on the heels of similar announcements from Joseph Kennedy and Evan Bayh, this is an excellent trend.

I have disagreed with Linder on just about everything, and found him such a frustrating person to correspond with that at one point I finally put in a letter to him something I had been thinking about many politicians for years:  ”Are you really that stupid, or do you just think I am?”  He supported laws which trash our Constitutional liberties in the name of delusions of security.  When asked specific questions, he did not respond.

To those who are thinking of running for these seats in November,  I ask the following:

Are you an American first, or a [insert the name of your favorite church or political party]?

If you are not willing to tell the Republican or Democratic bishops that you are voting your beliefs and not theirs, then please do not run.  Better yet, run as an independent.

I guess this really shouldn’t be a surprise, since what Congress does even by design is spend other people’s money, but Rep Tom Price (R-GA) is taking this to ridiculous levels. A few months ago, there were robodialing calls made to my family’s cell phones.   After those calls, I used the contact form on Rep Price’s Congressional web site demanding to be removed form his list, and also Rep Linder’s web contact form about it.  No reply was received from either one, beyond the automated “thank you for contacting” email.

Today it was text message spam:

From 969 3
Rep.Tom.Price.mail.House.gov
Do you support the Democratic leadership plan to increase the nat’l debt limit by 1.9 trillion? Support Oppose Opt Out

The really sad thing is we don’t even live in Mr Price’s district. We are misrepresented by Mr Linder.

I sent the following replies:

(1)”Opt Out”
Opt in permission based marketing is the only kind there should be, especially when the message cost is borne by the recipient and not the sender. Particularly sad for a message allegedly protesting the spending of other people’s money.  Typical Congressional hypocrisy.

(2)”I am going to vote a straight none of the above ticket until all 537 of you have been fired.”

(3)”I am glad you are not my Congressman. I am very glad you are not my doctor. Spam sucks.”

I also called AT&T (my cell phone provider) to file a complaint about the spam text messages and also to inquire how Mr Price got our cell phone numbers.  AT&T’s rep insists that they do not give, sell, or rent their customer’s info to anybody.

So how did Congressman Price get the numbers?  He’s not my Congressman, so I certainly never gave any of the cell numbers to him.   I’d really like a straight answer on this.

The recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission just struck down even the veneer of a pretense that there were limits on what corporations could contribute to election campaigns. It totally ignored the reality that money is power and power corrupts.

So I guess we need a new Constitutional Amendment that very clearly states that Corporations are NOT people under the Constitution and have only the rights specifically granted them by Congress or the states which charter them, and that ONLY actual living flesh and blood people are eligible to participate in the political process.

In the meantime, read up on what corporate contributions are made to those who vote against your interests, and contact those companies and tell them you are taking your business elsewhere.

I haven’t written much lately. Not that I was apathetic. It was that I was so disgusted with the PigFest that the Health Care bills (aka the insurance industry bailout instead of the insured citizens bailout) had become that anything I wrote about it would just have been one long string of curses.

Amazingly enough, the Republican Senator from Massachusetts seems to have awakened some common sense in President Obama. This afternoon he called for a scaled down health care bill to cover the following:

• Limit the ability of insurance companies to deny coverage to people with medical problems
• Allow young adults to stay on their parents’ policies
• Help small businesses and low-income people pay premiums
• Change Medicare to encourage payment for quality care instead of quantity

If we just add tort reform (in a separate bill, let’s not run up the page count again) so that we could let doctors just practice medicine and not have to practice law as well, we could take care of all the “DUH”s that should have been voted into law last February and already be in effect.

Now let’s see if the Republicans are capable of doing anything besides playing “You can’t win”.

It looks like the latest excuse for opposing health care reform in Congress is that the illegal immigration issue has not been solved. It really isn’t that difficult to solve – you just have to follow the money. And the money in illegal immigration is the additional corporate profits it generates.

How do you solve that?

1. Stop giving companies warnings of impending immigration checks.
2. Make finding a certain threshold number of illegal immigrants at a plant legally defined as “willful violation” of the relevant laws, and make the penalty for “willful violation” include the immediate forfeiture of the location, its buildings and equipment.

After a few chicken plants or carpet mills are seized, you can bet that corporate policy will no longer reward plant managers who cut their labor cost by hiring illegal immigrants. No tax dollars need be wasted on fences or other ridiculous attempts to convince voters that Congress has “done something” about illegal immigration. No immigration enforcement dollars need be turned into health care dollars. We need to reduce health care administrative costs, not add to them.

There has been an enormous amount of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) spread around by those who want to see the current status quo continue – ie, a few big insurance companies adding 25-30% to the cost of health care for us all. They see a government health care plan as threatening their guaranteed profits, and have somehow managed to convince quite a number of people that corporate profits are somehow more of a “right” than health care.

They would like us to believe both that:

• Government health care would be grossly inefficient.
• Private insurance companies would be unable to compete and therefore go out of business.

How could both of those be true? If the private companies are both more expensive and less efficient than government, shouldn’t they deserve to go out of business?

Next, adding a government option is portrayed as taking away our freedom.

Now, what freedoms does adding a choice take away? The freedom to lose your coverage if you become seriously ill? The freedom to lose your coverage if you lose your job?

If you currently have your own individual insurance, are you happy with the choices you were given? If anyone in your family has any chronic conditions, go shop for your choices if you become unhappy with your current provider. For at least a year, you would be paying both your premiums and the full cost of treating that chronic pre-existing condition.

For anyone currently covered under an employer plan, go try that exercise. Tell me how “free” you feel to quit your job and start your own business.

Politicians of both political parties routinely pay lip service to small business as the engine of both innovation and economic development. In practice, very little of what they do supports it. Big corporate dinosaurs have been bailed out form problems directly of their own making. Even the bailout recipients are still allowed to hand out millions in bonuses for short term excesses that actually contribute to long-term failure.

Small business owners, on the other hand, are more likely to take a long-term view. That is, if making the next payroll doesn’t overrule all other considerations. Not only are we (yes, I am a small business owner) not eligible for bailouts, but the bailouts handed out to the financial institutions that caused the current recession under the pretence that “we need to keep credit flowing” have not kept the credit flowing for small businesses.

We like to think of the US as the world capital of small business success. However, a recent report “An International Comparison of Small Business Employment”, points out that, among developed countries, the United States is actually has one of the “smallest small business sectors, as a proportion of total national employment”. One of the reasons for this is the lack of universal health care in the US. This chains employees to their cubicles. It makes it harder for small businesses to compete for talent. It makes it impossible for creative entrepreneurs with existing medical conditions to strike out on their own, unless they have a spouse with a large company health plan.

A vast majority of new jobs are created by small businesses, and those new jobs are much more likely to be created locally, rather than outsourced around the world. New jobs are what we need right now. Wall Street seems to be back on its feet (largely thanks to government-backed fire sales that have greatly reduced competition in what was already an oligopoly), but Main Street is still hurting.

American Small Business needs to have the health care worries of the current system lifted off the backs of its owners and employees. That would be adding to freedom, not talking it away.

Why has health care reform become over a thousand pages of gobbledlygook? Why can’t it be something we can all read and understand, instead of getting our information from fearmongering distortions?

Hear it is, plain and simple (comments welcome – remember, the whole bill, including your changes, cannot go over two pages):

Yes, I left the actual subsidies for universal coverage out of this bill. It is a separate issue. Lumping too much together is how we end up with thousand page bills that no one reads with ridiculous unintended consequences, some real and some imagined. This bill is one we don’t need Sarah Palin or Nancy Pelosi to interpret for us.

The House of Representatives passed a Pentagon Spending bill 400-30 this week that includes billions of dollars in spending that the Pentagon doesn’t want.

While money for additional F-22s was deleted, some of that was turned into spare parts for the F-22. Additional C-17 cargo planes and an alternate engine for the F-35 are included, even though the Department of Defense says we don’t need them. New presidential helicopters at almost half a billion dollars each that are unwanted overbudget toys made it into the bill.

Rep John Murtha of Pennsylvania insists that we must complete paying for programs that have proven they don’t work because otherwise we have to acknowledge that they were a complete waste of money from that start. But since the corporate backers are paying for his campaigns, he wants us to keep throwing good money after bad.

Additionally, the bill contains over 1100 earmarks worth about $2.7 billion. Rep. Jeff Flake tried to add amendments to remove the earmarks, but was voted down overwhelmingly by both parties, once again proving we have the best representation money can buy.