Tom Glenn's Blog, page 76

Things We Need to Change (2)

Continuing my list of needed changes from yesterday:

Too many guns. The United States has the highest rate of deaths from gun violence of any western democracy: 4.43 deaths per 100,000 people in 2017. It also has by far the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world—120.5 guns per 100 residents in 2017, more guns than people. The ratio between gun deaths and gun ownership is constant throughout the world—the more guns, the more deaths.

A disabled post office. Before the 2020 election, President Trump ordered the man he had named Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, to disrupt the postal service so as to stop Democrats from voting by mail in hopes that would allow Trump to win the election. DeJoy knew nothing about the postal service when he was appointed. His only claim to a federal job was that he had donated millions to Republican candidates, including the Trump campaign. DeJoy did as he was told. Unreliable mail service continues to this date.

The filibuster. A tactic often used to derail measures intended to reduce racism, the filibuster effectively requires sixty votes rather than a simple majority to pass a law in the Senate. The Republicans are using it to block measures proposed by President Biden and his Democratic congressional majority.

The electoral college. Because of our dependence on the electoral college for finalizing the election of the president of the U.S., we allow a candidate who loses the popular vote to become president. In 2016, Trump received only 62,984,828 votes compared to Clinton’s 65,853,514. But because of the vagaries of electoral college distribution, Trump was declared the winner.

The death penalty. The U.S. is the only Western nation that applies the death penalty regularly. Our federal government had refrained from executions since 2003, but then Donald Trump became president. He resumed executions. Before he left office, thirteen people had been put to death. But on January 4, 2021, congressional Democrats introduced the Federal Death Penalty Abolition Act of 2021. The bill is currently before the House Judiciary Committee. If it passes and President Biden signs it into law, the U.S, will join the rational and humane nations of the world who have banned the death penalty.

Each of the flaws listed above is amenable to correction. What’s needed is a strong enough Democratic majority to carry the day. I see that majority in the offing, maybe in 2022, maybe in 2024.

Maybe we’ll finally clean up our act.

Things We need to Change

As I stated in my blog post about rugged individualism, “To my way of thinking, the United States of America is the greatest country that has ever existed. But it’s not without its flaws.” What flaws, a reader asks. Let me run through my list of perennial favorites.

Failure to address climate change. The world, including the U.S., is rushing toward disaster. As world climate becomes warmer and warmer, we fail to reduce the human activities that produce warmer weather. We reached our all-time low under the Trump administration. President Biden is finally taking initial steps to remedy the situation.

Two Senators per state. Both Wyoming (the state with the smallest population, 580,000) and California (the state with the largest population, nearly 40 million) have two Senators in the U.S. Senate. Wyoming’s population is more than 90 percent white, and its politics overwhelmingly Republican. Because it has as many Senators as California, its tiny conservative population is able to nullify California’s progressive multiracial majority.

Voting restrictions. Wikipedia reports that, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, as of March 24, 2021, Republicans, reacting to their losses in the 2020 election, have introduced more than 361 bills in 47 states that would restrict voting access. Most are aimed at limiting mail-in voting, strengthening voter ID laws, shortening early voting, eliminating automatic and same-day voter registration, curbing the use of ballot drop boxes, and allowing for more aggressive means to remove people from voter rolls. The Washington Post described the effort as “potentially amounting to the most sweeping contraction of ballot access in the United States since the end of Reconstruction.”

More next time.

Memorial Day Reading

For many years, I have participated in readings on the Washington D.C. Mall hosted by Dick Epstein every Memorial Day and Veterans Day. None were held during the last year due to the pandemic, but Dick has arranged this Memorial Day to hold the session remotely via Zoom. Here’s the full information you need to access the session:

What:  Tribute to our Veterans
An Open Mic Event (Poetry, Prose, Song)
When: May 31, 11:30 to 5:30
Where:  ZOOM USA

The Memorial Day Writers’ Project will hold its twenty-eighth bi-annual open mic reading (via Zoom), May 31, 11:30 to 5:30.

Bring your original poetry, essay, short story, funny story, or read from your full-length book about life in the military or civilian life at home.  New voices wanted. Active duty, retired, spouse, relative or friend of the family.  RSVP and I’ll add your name to our Readers List.  For more information contact dick_epstein@hotmail.com or see our website at memorialdaywritersproject.com. 

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87462040414

Meeting ID: 874 6204 0414
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Republicans (2)

At the national level, Republicans are opposing legislation proposed by President Joe Biden to ease the hardships Americans are suffering due to the pandemic. They are against Democratic legislation to improve the lot of the common man, accusing Biden of promoting “woke education” and a Marxist-based philosophy. I’m sure they’ll do all they can to stop Congressional efforts to help the poorest of the poor and assure that Trump’s 2017 tax cut for the rich isn’t repealed.

My reading of the political landscape is that the Republicans will lose heavily in 2022 and 2024. Either a new party will emerge (moves are already underway to make that happen), or the Republicans will enter a long period of minority.

Couldn’t happen to a more deserving clique.

Republicans

The Grand Old Party, or GOP, as the Republicans are known, is—or at least should be—on its last legs. Led by the worst president in U.S. history, Donald Trump, the party has refused to accept the outcome of last November’s election and propagates the Big Lie that Trump actually won the election. The majority of Republican lawmakers voted to overturn the election. They refused to convict Trump for inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol, they tell bald faced lies about what happened that day, vote against a bipartisan commission to investigate the attack (obviously fearful that Trump’s complicity will be proven), and they purge their own members, like Liz Cheney, who won’t embrace Trump’s lies.

Instead of working to help the country through the pandemic, the Republicans are doing all they can to scuttle President Biden’s initiatives. Mitch McConnell was candid. He stated publicly that “100% of my focus is on stopping this new administration.” Kevin McCarthy is opposing the creation of a commission to investigate the events of the January 6 invasion of the capitol, obviously afraid that it will headline the complicity of Republicans and the overwhelming evidence that Donald Trump incited the mob.

Now across the nation, Republicans are changing local voting laws to make it more difficult for ordinary people, especially minorities, to vote. They hope that by restricting the votes of the common people they will be able to regain power. And they are slashing jobless financial aid in the midst of pandemic unemployment with the purpose of forcing people to take available jobs.

More next time.

American Focus: the Individual

To my way of thinking, the United States of America is the greatest country that has ever existed. But it’s not without its flaws. Many of the nation’s shortcomings are rooted in a cultural foundation—our emphasis on individualism as opposed to encouraging members of our society to work together for the common good.

That leads to our admiration for “rugged Individualism,” defined by Merriam-Webster as “the practice or advocacy of individualism in social and economic relations emphasizing personal liberty and independence, self-reliance, resourcefulness, self-direction of the individual and free competition in enterprise.”

As a result, the emphasis, in American life, is on competition, not cooperation. We reward the winners and penalize the losers. Instead of working together to find solutions to our nation’s problems, we vie with one another and seek credit and recognition for our ability to dominate rather than our willingness to join forces.

I learned during my years in Vietnam the extraordinary value of teamwork. I learned to be a leader rather than a manager, not controlling my subordinates but doing all I could to encourage them to be the best they could be and to work together for the greater good of all. The least successful commanders were those who acted like rugged individuals, seeking to excel rather than to work for the welfare of the subordinates. Being a leader, I learned, required the humility to put followers first and oneself last.

As a country, we need leaders. That means highlighting cooperation and teamwork and deemphasizing rugged individualism.

No One Left Behind

The organization called No One Left Behind is committed saving the lives of interpreters and translators in Iraq and Afghanistan who worked with U.S. forces and are now in danger as U.S. forces withdraw. To be admitted to the U.S., those Iraqis and Afghanis must be granted a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV). To obtain one,  an applicant must go through a 14-step process requiring a three-and-a-half year wait time. Nearly 18,000 Afghanis who risked their lives working for the U.S. military are trying to leave Afghanistan ahead of President Biden’s September 11 deadline to withdraw remaining U.S. forces from the country. The number of Iraqis who have applied for admission to the U.S. and are still waiting for a decision runs to the tens of thousands.

The numbers admitted to the U.S. are miniscule. According to NBC News, “In fiscal year 2016, 325 Iraqis who had worked as interpreters were admitted to the U.S. In 2017, the number dropped to 196. And for fiscal year 2018 ending in September, only two former interpreters from Iraq received visas, a more than 99 percent decline over three years, according to statistics from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).”

I have no figures on the numbers of Afghanis admitted, but what data I have suggests that they are comparable.

The pattern here is all too familiar. When the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam, we abandoned many thousands of South Vietnamese that had worked with us to oppose the North Vietnamese invaders. When our enemy was victorious, many of those left behind were executed on the spot; the remainder were sent to “re-education camps,” really concentration camps, where they languished for years.

We are, in other words, once again abandoning our partners and leaving them to their fate at the hands of people known to be cruel killers. Can we blame other nations of the world for their hesitancy to cooperate with us?

American Corporations that Pay No Tax

I was shocked to discover that, in the U.S., 55 major corporations paid nothing in federal taxes on their 2020 profits. My personal tax bill was in the thousands. The shielding of the wealthy from taxation comes largely from Trump’s successful 2017 push to reduce taxes for the rich, a move supported by Republicans.

Biden is now working to reverse that change. He’ll be successful only if the Republicans fail to thwart him. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have offered legislation that would impose a 3 percent total annual tax on wealth exceeding $1 billion and 2 percent total annual tax on wealth from $50 million to $1 billion.

None of these changes will go forward unless Democrats are able to unify all their members in support of the proposed legislation. If even one Democratic senator balks, the legislation will likely fail. My sense is that we may have to wait until after the 2022 elections. I suspect that, thanks to Trump and his supporters, the Republicans will suffer an historic defeat. Then we can move ahead on creating fair taxation in the U.S.

Flea Market

On 15 May, I participated in an outdoor flea market at the Hawthorne Center, one of the village centers here in Columbia, Maryland. For four hours, I manned a table showing off my six published books and talked to readers. Given the pandemic, I wasn’t expecting much of a turnout, but, due partly to the beautiful weather, a good many people came. I ended up selling about a dozen books (I should have kept a tab but didn’t), and the by the end of the session, I had a group of four readers who had come to the event to see me all standing around my table talking away and advising prospective customers on which book to buy.

I started out the day wearing a mask, one provided to me by Médecins sans Frontieres (Doctors with Borders—an international humanitarian medical non-governmental organization of French origin best known for its projects in conflict zones and in countries affected by endemic diseases). But soon I and everybody else abandoned the masks as unnecessary. For the first time in well over a year, I shook hands with friends and strangers alike. As more and more are vaccinated, life will begin to return to normal.

It was a day of fulfillment for me. The men gathered around my table were other authors and friends who knew my work well and very much enjoyed each other’s company. I was singularly complimented that they came to the event to celebrate with me.

A day to remember.

Bobbies Carry No Guns

The lead editorial in Washington Post on Wednesday, May 12, excoriates the U.S. Congress for failing to pass gun control measures. It notes that we Americans suffer about a hundred gun deaths a day. More statistics: 2020 was the deadliest year for gun violence in the last 20 years; 49,492 Americans died from gun violence in 2020; and there were 611 mass shootings in 2020.

The problem is that we have so many guns, more than 120 for every hundred people—we have more guns than people. Compare us to the U.K. which has 4.6 guns per one hundred people. The U.K. suffers .2 gun deaths per 100,000 people; the U.S. has 12.21 deaths per 100,000 people. Worldwide, the ratio between number of guns in the hands of the population and number of people killed by guns is constant.

The British, in their wisdom, do not arm their policemen. In London, more than 90 percent of the bobbies, as British policemen are called, carry out their daily duties without a gun. We Americans are not so fortunate. The Washington Post reports more than 5,000 fatal police shootings since 2015. Worth noting: Blacks are killed at more than twice the rate of Whites.

What does it take for us to learn from our British allies? Currently, we can’t put police on the streets without guns because they would be defenseless against our population which has so many guns. The only way we can disarm our police—thereby reducing the number shot to death by police—is by first taking guns out of the hands of the citizenry. Doing that would also lower the numbers killed by gunfire.

I know of no sensible arguments in favor of permitting Americans to have more guns than people. The arguments against it are overwhelming. So why do we allow this deplorable situation to persist?

What does it take for us to learn from Britain’s bobbies?