Senator Warren, you are making a wonderful impact

Aside from a ridiculously small number of people, politicians everywhere receive my steadfast ire. The goal of politics as it is today seems vastly different than it was in Aristotle’s day, when the term was created. In my view, modern-day politics is a race to see who can attain the most power. Look at the two major political parties in the United States as a perfect example. Both the Donkey Clan and the Elephant Group will make promises that will positively effect a majority of the populace in order to get elected. Yet when it comes to fulfilling those promises once in office, both groups renege; instead, the policy decisions that are made line the pockets of the politicians or the lobbying groups who control them. Regardless of which of the two main political parties wins the presidency, the common people in this country are the ones who will be worse off because of it. Democrats and Republicans are part of the same corrupt over-arching organization.

One person who seems to fit into the ridiculously small number of politicians who is making a positive affect on the common U.S. citizen is Senator Elizabeth Warren. She is in her first term, yet she has shown more of a backbone in sticking up for what is just than some members of Congress have shown in decades of “service.” Senator Warren has already challenged the Senate Banking Committee to prosecute the big banks that took bailout money and yet are repeating the same mistakes; she questioned the practices of the Food and Drug Administration in allowing tainted pharmaceuticals to hit the market; now she has brought up the potential doubling of interest rates on student loans, saying that students should be given the same interest rate that big banks get when they borrow money from the Fed (0.75%). There is a sincerity in her actions right now that is exceedingly admirable.

The cynic in me says that Senator Warren will succumb to outside pressure. Every member of Congress has done the same thing. However, my hope is that this is a politician who is smart enough to play the game and then come in like a wrecking ball and destroy the current power structure once in the Oval Office. I know that this is quite a lot to expect, but I can definitely see her attaining that post. As a middle class citizen who is paying off a large sum in student loans, I cannot help but support Senator Elizabeth Warren for her gumption. This is a politician who actually seems to be making good on her promises. Fancy that.

Politics should be noble

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

-George Bernard Shaw

I just watched the documentary about Ralph Nader titled “An Unreasonable Man,” and the previous quote appears at the beginning of the film. I can only hope that I can become an unreasonable man in my lifetime.

I have known about Ralph Nader since the 2000 presidential election, but I know that all of my information about him was at a surface level. This documentary illuminated Ralph’s unyielding quest for justice for the common man versus corporate interests from the 1960’s until the moment you read these words. He gained popularity for taking on the auto industry to incorporate safety standards into their base model cars. General Motors did not like Nader’s stance on this matter, so they tried to smear him, and ultimately had to pay Nader a settlement of $425,000 for irreparable damages. Nader was targeted by the auto industry because he was trying to upset the balance. This man sought a change in an industry whose products were responsible for a tremendous amount of deaths each year, and he simply wanted the industry to incorporate changes that could protect the consumers who purchased the products. Mr. Nader has always been a consumer advocate, and he needs recognition by the general populace, not scorn by people of the Democratic party who think that Nader’s efforts in both the 2000 and 2004 elections allowed George W. Bush to stay in office.

Ralph Nader’s consumer advocacy has required companies to have seatbelts and airbags in cars, warning labels on cigarettes, directions and warning labels on pharmaceuticals, nutrition labels on food and beverages, to name a few. He has been responsible for the creation of the following acts or agencies: Safe Drinking Water Act, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, and the Consumer Product Safety Administration, again, to name a few. His life’s work has been to make life equitable and fair for the masses. Mr. Nader is a gentleman who should be lauded for his work, and celebrated for being a stalwart in the fight against injustice everywhere.

In the documentary, Ralph Nader spoke about Athenian politics as being a noble entity in ancient Greek life. The word ‘poilitics’ in that era was associated with the highest praise possible. Mr. Nader then went on to talk about the word ‘politics’ today, and how common people conjure up strictly negative images in their minds upon hearing the word. This situation can be fixed with great effort. Stop voting for the lesser of two evils, because evil will be allowed to persist. Vote for your own best interest! Though the system may be rigged, change can happen. It may not happen in this generation, or the next, but we can become agents of long-term positive change instead of settling for being cogs in the never-ending  cycle of oppression. People like Ralph Nader have proven that by getting the issues out there in the public, true change can occur. ‘Politics’ can once again become a noble word.

Thanks for the guidance, Ralph!

Let’s define the term weapon, shall we?

Ten years ago, give or take a few days, the President of the United States launched an invasion of Iraq, a country that never bombed, threatened, or harmed the United States or its citizens directly. About a month and a half after this invasion began, the same man said that major combat operations in Iraq were over, and that the war was won by the United States military. If that really was the case, then why is the United States military still in Iraq today, ten years later? The cost of this invasion is astronomical, and the biggest costs are yet to come, when this generation of injured soldiers will need major medical help to make life livable in a few decades.

The entire war was predicated on the knowledge of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programs, and Iraqi involvement in “aiding and abetting” masterminds of the September 11th terrorist attack. When the George W. Bush administration went to Congress to seek approval of the war, they presented evidence of an Iraqi purchase of uranium yellowcake from the country of Niger in the late 1990s. The uranium, said the administration, could only be used for one reason: creating a nuclear weapon. Therefore, Iraq needed to disarm the program or face military intervention. Iraq did not comply with the United States ultimatum, and the invasion of Iraq officially kicked off.

Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense for the Bush administration, said eleven days after the invasion of Iraq began, “We know where [the weapons of mass destruction] are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, west, south, and north somewhat.” The weapons were being moved around throughout Iraq, according to Colin Powell on February 5, 2003. On that day, Powell concluded that there was irrefutable evidence that Iraq had WMDs.

By January 2005, United States weapons inspectors declared their search for the Iraqi WMDs to be officially over. No such weapons were ever found. Iraq was also never found to be “aiding and abetting” those affiliated with the 9/11 attacks. The war began under false pretenses, yet is still going on ten years later.

To me, a greater weapon than a WMD is deceit. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Bremer, Condolleezza Rice, and every other member of the administration in charge of fabricating evidence in order to attack a sovereign country that had not wronged the United States deceived everyone into thinking that a war against Iraq was justifiable. The total cost of the war (monetary, human, social) has crippled this country. The monetary cost of the war has been put on the backs of the United States populace, and the burden is immense. Ethically, there is no reason for any country to believe what the United States has to say going into the future.

So, if you ask me what a weapon really is, I would say it is any action intended to bring about harm to others. Politicians seem to carry the largest weapons, and they do so with ease. How can they sleep at night?

Would you vote for this person?

But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States. … I think it is high time that we recognize the contribution of our forbearers who worked tirelessly — men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.

Michele Bachmann uttered these words. My guess is that she wasn’t employing either a speech writer or speech coach during that time in her public speaking life. The founding fathers did not work tirelessly for anything, because most of them fully supported slavery. According to Encyclopedia Brittanica, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, John Hancock, and Benjamin Franklin, among others, were all slaveholders. John Quincy Adams was not a slave owner, so Mrs. Bachmann did get that correct.

I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out under another, then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter. I’m not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.

Here is another Bachmann original. The swine flu in the ’70s began when an Army recruit died within 24 hours of saying that he felt too tired and weak to perform drills. He had a strain of influenza that hadn’t been seen since the 1918-1919 flu epidemic that killed 20 million people worldwide. The Army recruit died on February 6, 1976, when Gerald Ford, a Republican, was President of the United States.

If we took away the minimum wage — if conceivably it was gone — we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.

Guess who has a solution to unemployment? Michele Bachmann!!! Since Republicans are also seeking to shred collective bargaining, how does Mrs. Bachmann envision workers to earn enough money to provide even the basic needs for themselves and their families? If there is no minimum wage, which other “developed” countries employ -only because collective bargaining each year states what workers in a specific industry will receive as compensation, then collective bargaining must step in and stand on behalf of the worker. This is not sound logic.

I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?

Easy there, Michele. Are you related to Joe McCarthy? Who will set up the definitions of pro-American and anti-American? Does your term “American” relate to central and south Americans as well? If that is the case, I’m pretty sure that the overall viewpoint of the U.S. Congress will be decidedly anti-American, in relation to U.S. policy and how it negatively affects and views nations that are also “American” nations.

Can you, in all honesty, imagine the United States being led by this woman?

Under the influence

This is not an homage to heavy drinking. Instead, it’s a sappy piece about the people who I think are neat. If you want to continue reading, you might want to grab some two-ply tissue.

I have always sought to be a combination of all of the best people in my life and the most honest characters I’ve read about or seen in books or media. My number one influence is my dad. Like most boys, I knew that my dad was who I wanted to become; plus I knew that he could beat up other dads if he had to. When I was an angry teenager, I shuddered at the comparisons that seemingly everyone would make: “You are just like your dad.” My poor reaction wasn’t due to thinking that my dad was not a great person, it was because I wanted so badly to be my own person. It turns out that I am an exceedingly goofy elementary teacher, just like my dad, and I couldn’t be more proud of that comparison. My brother is my other main influence. Chris collected baseball cards, so I collected baseball cards. Chris wore baseball hats, so I wore baseball hats. Chris listened to punk rock, so I listened to punk rock. Chris broke his leg, so I decided to one-up him by breaking my leg twice. Ha! I still want to be just like my big brother.

Those two gentlemen are my main influences. I have also followed the lead of my sweet wife Tami, my mom and my sister, my grandparents, my in-laws (who I get along with splendidly), my aunts & uncles, and my cousins. With zero hesitation, I can say that family is my main influence. I am the person I am today because I have consistently been surrounded by selfless people. I can’t believe my good fortune at being a part of such a morally outstanding collection of family members.

The other influences of mine are too numerous to write about at length, so I’ll just list them: Martin Luther King Jr., Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Paine, George Orwell, George Carlin, Barry Sanders, and Steve Yzerman. This group of people had a lasting effect on the way that I chose to live my life. King, Gandhi, and Thoreau were instrumental to my understanding of why being a quality person is important for humanity. Paine and Orwell shaped my knowledge of how to govern, which is very handy when dealing with twenty children. Carlin taught me that the way in which we use language is ultimately how we will be received as people. Sanders and Yzerman demonstrated that people can be graceful and respectful when achieving greatness.

I am completely indebted to all of the people who have had an influence on my life.