The “first woman President”

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When Hillary first declared her Presidential candidacy I said  that I wanted to vote for policies, not gender, and if Hillary was going to run on the platform of the “first woman President” then she would not succeed. Actually, she didn’t run on this platform, but others sent out that message all the same.

In the event 53% of white women voted for Trump. As Susan Chira of the New York Times (November 13, 2016) points out, what is more important to women than gender is party, class and racial identity, party identity being the principal predictor of how women (and men) vote. It turns out that Democtrats never win the majority of votes from white women. “All the talk about angry white men glosses over the fact that they are married to angry white women”. Education is a big factor. Trump won 62% of women without college educations, Hillary only 34%. Many women were/are worried about immigration, terrorism, the effects of trade on jobs, intrusive and over- large government. Others, college educated, minorities and young, unmarried women were the ones who did vote for Hillary, including a significant number of educated former Republicans.

I think Epicurus, were he with us today, would say that women should in every respect be treated as equals to men, be paid equally for equal work, and that nothing should stand in the way of women reaching the top of any profession they choose (without being bullied and groped!), including the Presidency. Some woman, during the election commented that it was inappropriate for a woman to be Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. Nonsense! We need intelligent and thoughtful strategic thinkers – their gender is irrelevant.

Reforming Congress (ah! if only!)

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Warren Buffet, in a recent interview with CNBC, offered one of the best quotes about the debt ceiling:
“I could end the deficit in five minutes,” he told CNBC. “You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election”.  Meanwhile, here is his answer to reform of the whole institution:

Current rates of pay, voted for themselves, regardless of effectiveness or even any knowledge:

Salary of retired US Presidents .. . . . .. . . . . .. $180,000 FOR LIFE

Salary of House/Senate members .. . . . .. . . . $174,000 FOR LIFE This is stupid
Salary of Speaker of the House .. . . . .. . . . .     $223,500 FOR LIFE This is really stupid
Salary of Majority/Minority Leaders . . .. . . . . $193,400 FOR LIFE Ditto last line
Average Salary of a teacher . . .. . . . .. . . . . .. ..  $40,065
Average Salary of a deployed Soldier . . .. . . ..  $38,000

Congressional Reform Act of 2016

  1.  No Tenure / No Pension:  A Congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they’re out of office.
    2. Congress (past, present, & future) participates in Social Security.  All funds in the Congressional retirement fund would be move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds to flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.
    3. Congress will purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.
    4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
    5. Congress loses its current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
    6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.
    7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective 12/1/16. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen/women. Congress made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and go back to work.

The 26th Amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only three months and eight days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971 – before computers, e-mail, cell phones, etc.
Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took one (1) year or less to become the law of the land – all because of public pressure.
In three days, most people in The United States of America will have this message, that is, if you would  be good enough to send it to your friends. This is one idea that really should be passed around.

 

England prepares to leave the world

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‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world you are a citizen of nowhere.’ Mrs May will pass into folklore with that line, just as Mrs Thatcher is remembered for ‘There is no such thing as society.’ It’s her own Mad May Queen utterance. And yet the sentence reveals a lot. It comes out of a solid, unexamined nationalism.   (Neal Ascherson)

As an unabashed citizen of the world I believe in the Epicurean ideal of moderation in everything:  courtesy, kindness and tolerance and getting on with all the people of the planet.  On balance I believe that most people have good instincts and mean well.  I thought, or hoped, that Teresa May would not prove to be a typical, narrow-minded conservative, still harbouring out of date ideas about the Empire and British Exceptionalism, and hoped that she hadn’t added moslems to the list of (mostly European)  countries to be suspicious of.  Teresa May could be throwing red  meat to her Right Wing of Little Englanders (which means they despise foreigners, and have roaring superiority complexes). But the  jury is out on the lady May.

We have been through various spurts of nationalism, all of them disastrous. We need more citizens of the world, open-minded, and educated in the histories and cultures of the world.  Shameful ignorance of history and culture got us into Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet the conservatives in America want to “make America great again” (meaning, I suppose, even more wars on behalf of the military industrial complex) , and the British Tories, living in a mythical past, think that the world can’t wait to deal with an “independent” Britain, whose GNP is a rounding error next to that of, say, China.

If there is anyone up there, please help us!

Heathrow expansion, not unconnected with the issue of motor cars.

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“For years there has been a lively debate about the pollution and disruption caused by building a new runway at Heathrow, (now to go ahead); these are valid concerns. But almost everyone ignores the issue that dwarfs all others: climate change. If our airports are full, there’s a solution: fly less. Is this beyond contemplation? If so, our ethics are weaker than those of 1791, when 300,000 British people, to disassociate themselves from slavery, stopped using sugar, reducing sales by a third. The perceptual gulf between us and the victims of climate change is no wider than the ocean that lay between the people of Britain and the Caribbean. If we do not make the leap of imagination that connects our actions with their consequences, it is not because we can’t but because we won’t.” (George Monbiot in The Guardian).

I think everyone ought to be  conscious of their contribution to climate change and what problems they are stacking up for future generations.

On the positive side my wife and I walk everywhere we possibly can, and use our tiny car very sparingly.  It is three years old and to all intents and purposes new. We use public transport exclusively in London.  On the minus side I admit that we do use aircraft, both coming and going across the Atlantic and to and fro to Florida. We  probably use the same amount of fossil fuel taxi-ing to take-off as we do all year in the car.  This is a moral issue, actually.  I don’t like to have to accuse myself of hypocrisy, but it is a fact that I stand among the guilty,  conveniently justifying myself  with the fact that the planes were leaving with or without me.  Me culpa. Stay at home?  “It’s not because we can’t but because we won’t”.

 

The motor car (follow-on from yesterday)

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From Greg de Paco, New Westminster, British Columbia

“George Monbiot is correct that if a transportation system were designed today with the objective of moving people around efficiently it would not focus on the private automobile. In North America our transportation systems were not designed for efficient movement but for auto industry profit.

“The car companies bought up the street car systems of almost every North American city – Toronto and San Francisco alone successfully resisted – in order to tear up the rails and create a market for their product. This eventually resulted in an anti- trust conviction – and a fine of a single dollar.”