 |
|
|
|
And what to my wondering eye should appear when I picked up this morning’s (Sunday, February 27, 2011) Columbus Dispatch if not the astounding news that the politician of make-believe, Johnnie Kasich, had declared “I’m Not Anti-Union!” Could have fooled me---and several million others. Kasich seems to have difficulty in distinguishing his spins, prevarications and outright fibbers from reality. For example: Factors
challenging this make-believe solution include these:
Fascism
as Mussolini said is “when you can’t force a tissue
between government and business. Economic “successes”---and failures I think it’s back to the drawing board for Kasich and his tribe who, like Mark Kvamme, have proven no financial wizardry. For illustrations, consider the following. 1. As a congressman, John was an outspoken advocate of that bipartisan disaster, NAFTA. NAFTA was instrumental in creating the transfer of jobs from the US to overseas venues. Many of those jobs, including many of those John is referring to when he lists the loss of some 400,000 Ohio jobs over the second four years of the Clinton presidency and the eight years of Dubya Bush’s reign. Those projected golden NAFTA years which were to see “all boats rise.” haven‘t happened. INSTEAD DURING THE PAST FOUR DECADES THERE HAS BEEN A MASSIVE TRANSFER OF WEALTH FROM THE BOTTOM 90% OF THE POPULATION TO THE “UPPER“ 10 % Perhaps we would not need a massive jobs creation push if we hadn’t had politicians who helped corporate America ship American jobs out of the country in the process of serving the will of the financial , ever greedy for more profits and power. It didn’t require great smarts, financial or otherwise, to foresee these consequences to NAFTA.
There
is very little data about the distribution of wealth in America.
There is one source, the Survey
of Consumer Finances, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Board,
that does provide data from 1983. Sometimes
it's the small gesture that defines the end of an age. Richard
Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, the single financial firm the Bush
administration allowed to collapse into bankruptcy in what may
someday be thought of as the slow-motion Crash of '09, made one
of those gestures recently. Just to be clear, we're talking about
a man who, between 1993 and 2007, took home a tidy $466 million
in pay. (That's no misprint, though it's a pay level that it would
take factories of workers cumulative lifetimes to each.) Then,
in 2008, the year his firm would collapse, Fuld was awarded another
$22 million in what was called "retirement pay." Tin-eared
Titans BY TOM ENGELHARDT
2. Kasich seems to confuse his success at personal profiteering
with the establishment of financial health and well-being for
the body politic. When Strickland brought this out during the gubernatorial campaign, John responded with his famed “Zanesville defense”---”Blaming me for Lehman Brothers is like blaming a car dealer in Zanesville for the collapse of General Motors.” I find Strickland’s response to be more persuasive. Strickland said “Was he a relevant player at Lehman? And if he wasn’t, what did he do to deserve a bonus of over $400,00 at a time when the company was getting ready to go down the tube?” Strickland also questioned the financial wisdom of Kasich’s plan, offered early in the gubernatorial campaign, to phase out Ohio’s state income tax. Calling both Lehman Brothers approach and John’s tax plan, a “hot dog approach to the economy.” Strickland noted “The State income tax over the last 10 years has been 48% of total revenue. To talk of eliminating the state income tax---say he did it in eight years---it would represent a devastating, cataclysmic result on libraries, schools, public safety, everything the state of Ohio has a responsibility to support. All the public services would be decimated.” The lunacy of this proposal seems to have dawned on John’s tribe for it was dropped by mid-campaign. Maybe John also got a degree in French literature rather than economics. Maybe I don’t trust John to make primary financial decisions for the state. On respecting democracy. Sometimes---for example when he calls a police officer an idiot because he is giving him a perfectly legitimate ticket and when he calls union people thugs---John’s tongue seems to get out in front of his brain. Perhaps his wife’s remonstrations over such slips of the lip will make a difference. But perhaps these slips were not so much accidental as they were insights to what John actually thinks of people who are not part of his club. If so, this does not bode well in a supposed leader in a democracy, a governmental system based on the people, warts and all. Or it may be that John is generally lacking in compassion, empathy, a feeling-with the people he is supposed to govern. Without the respect which is at the heart of compassion, the people are no more than a herd to be manipulated, a not uncommon position among those who feel called upon to “lead.” I don’t think that John has the wherewithal to fake his way through his blatant disrespect.
Kasich is a man with ready, simple and vague solutions to all problems. Kasich’s arrogance determines that he sees no need to look at criticisms or alternatives. This is nowhere more evident than in what he has to say about education, claiming that the heart of the problems with our schools is unionized teachers. “”Now my concern with the teacher’s union,” he says, “is that I am convinced [and therefore it is obviously true) that they are a lot more concerned with their own situation rather than the situation of our children.” “We need more school choice, we need to break the back of organized labor in the schools (emphasis added to this comment which doesn’t fit well with the Dispatch headline on February 27, 2011), and we need to turn our schools into institutions that excite our kids and teach them, and the best way to get it done is to give mothers and fathers the power to take their kids out of bad places and put them in good.” Over against educational theory and practice and experience, John knows. Also no need to clarify what is meant by “bad” and “good” nor is there any need to give specifics on how to get from one to the other.” Only a general and cost-free and vote-mongering pat on the backs of moms and dads accompanied by repression of hard-won union rights to negotiated contracts and binding arbitration.
The
right-wing bias of Fox News has long been self-evident and admitted
by legions and I see no need to illustrate and argue this beyond
the following confession by Scott Norvell, London Bureau chief
for Fox . “Even
we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally,
and often let them finish their sentences before we club them
to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly. And
those who hate us can take solace in the fact that they aren't
subsidizing Bill's bombast; we payers of the BBC license fee don't
enjoy that peace of mind. I can’t see the likelihood of Kasich, while at liberty to drape his right-wing ideology over the news great and small, to challenge the company paying his bills.
There is abroad in America the widespread opinion that no one knows more than anyone else, that all one needs to validate their opinion is that opinion, and that study may very well lead to error of the most grievous sorts. One area in which these positions hold is the popular discussions of climate change. However, nowhere are these views promoted more strenuously than in the field of religion. Such non-thinking as led to the radical distortion of Christianity in general and of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in particular. Because of this I do not use the term, “Right-wing Christianity,” a term I see as a rather advanced oxymoron. In fact I hesitate to elevate pop “religion” in America to the status of religion for it is generally no more than a bizarre combination of superstition, bourgeois moralisms and bullshit. This is how I characterize Kasich’s two ventures into publishing of his “religious” views, which he seems to consider as infallible as any of his other pontifications. John is not bothered by extravagnt humility. His two books are entitled Every Other Monday: Twenty Years of Life, Lunch, Faith and Fellowship (2010) and Stand for Something: The Battle for America’s Soul (2007). Reviewers comments include the following: Concerning Every Other Monday a reviewer writes“Kasich has written a conversational account of the Bible study he organized more than 20 years ago in Westerville, a suburb of Columbus. Reared a Roman Catholic, Kasich drifted away from his religion as an adult but came to embrace an Anglican faith after both his parents were killed in a car crash by a drunk driver. The Bible study's eight members, who meet at a local diner, have changed over the years, but most seem to share his middle-class presumptions. The biggest faith challenge for these men is a preoccupation with theodicy: how can bad things happen to good people? The answers are mostly commonplace, as is Kasich's reading of the Bible, in which all the major characters, from Noah to Paul, are faithful and courageous examples of men worth emulating. For Kasich, the Bible study serves as a kind of therapeutic way to wrestle with perennial questions about mortality. The Christianity that emerges from these pages is tame and has nothing profound to say.” Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. A reviewer comments on Stand for Something that “Kasich…sermonizing cultural commentary that makes up half the book lacks…authority. "I'm not a moralizer," he writes, as he details his horror over a Roots CD and the Coen brothers' movie Fargo, which he harassed Blockbuster to ban from its shelves. Family values proponents will find their views confirmed in this call for personal accountability. (May 10) From Publishers Weekly. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
In Conclusion I’d rather not be unkind since my old momma said if I couldn’t say something nice I shouldn’t say anything at all. But as Kasich urges, I must seek to be honest whatever the cost. In conclusion let me say that I find that the words which comes most readily to my mind when thinking of John are the words “juvenile” and “arrogant,“ a nasty combination. Juvenile and arrogant from head to toe, from cover to cover, from congress to Lehman Brothers to Fox News to the Ohio governorship---juvenile arrogance. If a wee bit of humility occasionally surfaced Kasich would not be so obnoxious. Without justification he plays the roles of a renaissance man---politician, financier, media journalist, film critic, theologian, moral leader, and more. Arrogant and juvenile---if I saw occasional glimpses of the integrity he urges on others I might search for a kinder terms. May Ohio survive his years in office. Even Oliver Cromwell, not noted for his open-mindedness, once urged “From the bowels of Christ I beseech you: consider the possibility that you may be wrong.” Kasich, consider the possibility that you may be wrong before you wreak more chaos and destruction. While the state is mired down under his bufoon leadership major problems go ignored. For starters, consider the following:
- the failure of the American Empire, obvious to all but right-wing
ideologues. This
list can be expanded at least threefold. We deny this at our mortal
peril, We cannot afford to submit to the egos of the Kasichs of the world. Carl
Skrade
|
|
