Month: October 2022

As we approach the midterm elections and then the general election in 2024 here are some things to keep in mind. But keep in mind that THIS IS ONLY A VERY PARTIAL LIST OF REPUBLICAN PARTYWIDE LIES:

Trickle down economics is good for the economy.

Tax breaks for the top 10 to 20% of (the richest) Americans and corporations should be made permanent.

Big governmental spending is always bad (except when republicans are doing it or when its for what Republicans want).

Social Security and Medicare are bankrupting the government.

What republicans, and most democrats are NOT saying is that the Social Security and Medicare funding problem could be easily and permanently solved by getting rid of the cap on the upper limit of income taxed for them.

Abortion should be banned. Completely. And those aiding and abetting abortion should be prosecuted.

Labor Unions are bad. Organized labor is a threat.

Subsidies to the large, multi-billion dollar a year in pure profit corporations are good and should remain unchanged.

The deficit needs to be slashed.

I do not disagree with this. We should not have a deficit that continues to grow. But republicans always seem to make the deficit much larger through bad management or wrong spending policy priorities and never really do anything to reduce it when they are in power. It’s only the democrats who consistently really seem to ever achieve deficit reduction.

I will stop with these few (of many many more) Republican lies to the American people.

We have to choose our representation. The question is do you want your representatives to represent you or to represent themselves and other interests? That is up to you in how you vote.

Ukraine has been coveted, contested, fought over, and controlled, by outside empires for well over a millennium. As a place of importance it has existed since before the Russian empire came into being.

Among the outside empires that have had some interest in having control of Ukraine or have occupied Ukraine are: the Vikings, the Mongols, Lithuanians, Poles, Imperial Russia, the Ottoman Empire the Austro-Hungarian dynasty, Cossacks, Swedes, French, Austrians, Germans, Romanians and Czechoslovakians.

Joseph Stalin, who led the Soviet States from 1924 until his death in 1953, paid particular attention to Ukraine and was responsible for the death of more than seven million Ukrainians including more than a million Jews. Relations between Russia and Ukraine from after the death of Stalin up until the time of the Orange Revolution in 2004 were not bloody and imperialistic until Putin started his full scale war on Ukraine in 2022.

There has been a long history of Ukraine being tossed back and forth between large, aggressive and powerful forces that wanted it for themselves. But the fact is that Ukraine has a population of 44.13 million (2020). Even though they are a slavic people, Ukrainians speak Ukrainian and have a culture and traditions that set them apart from Russia and other slavic nations. Putin can dismiss Ukrainians and claim that there is no such thing as Ukrainian and that the are really just Russians and are not a distinct branch of the slavic tree as he does. But that doesn’t make it true.

Ukrainians have been independent of Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. They are a sovereign nation. They have their own distinctive slavic culture and language. They are not Russian or Russians. They are Ukrainian.

Collectively, Ukrainians want to ally and align with Europe and the rest of the world. This does not exclude Russia. But they do not want the same pre-independence relationship that they had with Russia before the fall of the Soviet Union. They do not consider themselves to be a vassal state to Russia. So, if Russia wants to live peaceably with Ukraine and the rest of its neighbors and drop its imperialistic drives which are the fantasy of Putin and his close circle, there could be peace and both Ukraine and Russia could join the rest of the world and become part of the world community.

I am attaching a link to a very good, very brief synopsis of the history of the conflict that has been a presence in Ukraine for well over a millennium. It’s a quick, very condensed read that outlines the major shifts that have been the history of Ukraine for the last one thousand plus years. The last thing I will say is that Ukraine, I believe, just wants to be free to live independently, make its own laws, be responsible for taking care of itself, without outside interference. That is all most nations want for themselves. Ukraine is no exception to this.

Ukraine Has Seen Centuries of Conflict – HISTORYhttps://www.history.com › ukraine-timeline-invasions

PS. If this link doesn’t open to the article, you can copy and paste it to access the link to click into the article.

I have a few questions for you.

What do you need? How much of it do you need? Could you be happy living with less? Do you commute? On average how many times a day do you drive a car? For how many miles? Do you ever take a bus instead of driving? Do you ever walk more than a few steps? Do you ever do without something that you want? Do you want things that other people have for no reason other than other people have those things? Do you have things that you don’t need or use? Do you have things that you use once (or never) and then throw away? Do you use fossil fuel produced energy every day to heat your water, heat and cool your home? Do you spend a significant, (5% of your income or more) amount of your income on paying for gas, electricity, oil, etc.? How often do you buy things that are not essential? Do you waste water, electricity, gas, etc.? Have you ever tried to live with less? Have you ever tried to live more simply? Do you ever consider using less energy? What do you think about making sacrifices to achieve any kind of a goal? Is that something that you have ever done or would ever consider doing? Does the thought of living more simply, with less terrify you and leave you feeling dazed and confused?

Will we be able to survive climate change? It will not be a matter of simply adapting to more severe weather extremes. It will mean living on a planet that may become too hot for humans to survive. But it will mean that sooner or later we will have to make lifestyle changes and it will have to be a complete paradigm shift. It can’t be voluntary and piecemeal or come too late. Eventually we will have to live with less. Eventually we will have to live more simply. Does that terrify you?

Brazil is having an interesting presidential election.

There were 11 candidates running in the general election. Brazil has a kind of ranked choice system for voting. Brazil, as a country, allows for a wider expression of politics than a system that is a much more limited and restricted in terms of representation and expression of political thought and ideology such as we have here in the United States where two political parties, republican and democratic, dominate the electoral process and impose their rules on the electoral process of the states and the country as a whole. Another major difference between Brazil’s and the US’s electoral systems is that Brazil has no such thing as an electoral college so the vote is the vote. It’s the voice of the people. The people of Brazil elect their president, not a group of 538 partisan political operatives, the electoral college, after the popular vote has taken place. In Brazil, the eligible voters of the 213 million plus people get to elect their president. The Brazilian vote is not fraught with all of the ways that an election can turn into a constitutional crisis because of the electoral college, such as fake electors, disrupting or preventing certification, and using the electoral college to ensure minority rule over majority rule and obliterating the importance of the popular vote by overriding it.

None of the 11 candidates running in the presidential election received 50% or more of the vote which would have meant that the winner won the election outright. So, the top two vote getters will now go on to a runoff election on October 30.

The top two candidates are a liberal former union leader and former president of Brazil, and a fascist far right megalomaniac similar in temperament and politics to Trump. The two candidates could not be more different from one another.

The former president was a union leader and a liberal who has had legal problems related to corruption. His legacy as president is that he had to deal with corruption scandals, but also because he did a lot of good for the country and pulled millions of Brazilians out of poverty with his programs.

The incumbent, a fascist, who is known for his inflammatory and provocative targeting of women and the LGBTQ community and for his desire to eliminate gun control laws and his promotion of gun violence, has also been responsible for policies that open up the Amazon for vast deforestation and violence against indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin.

On October 30, I am hoping that Brazil will elect the man who made the lives of so many Brazilians more secure with food security and anti-poverty measures, and that they will retire the current president who is a man who has inflamed the country with his violent and divisive rhetoric and done a great deal of harm to the global climate and devastated the vast precious resources of the Amazon.

Brazil deserves a president who will work for the people. I hope that they can forgive his sins of corruption and look past them, vote for him, and let him get back to work for the people of Brazil.