Is America Reaping What it has Sown - Part I

I’ve often pondered that one of the great surprises of history is that America has never been involved in a coup d’état. Considering the fact that the military chain of command starts at the top with two civilian officers – the President and the Secretary of Defense – it is difficult to believe that none of the brass below has ever attempted to alter that command line through a coup, which is one of the great surprises of American history. Up until a few years ago, the military coup was the most popular method used to transfer governments around the world. Now that Democracy has taken a real foothold in our modern society, the trend seems to be reversing; however, there are generals who still want to hold supreme power, and we must wait and see to determine if coups become a relic of the past.

In a real sense, our nearly 250 years of unbroken civilian leadership is a true testament to the ideal of Democracy. With that being said, do I sense some tension in the ranks over civilian leadership with the publication of the RollingStone’s article titled, “The Runaway General,” where 4-star, General Stanley McChrystal and his staff were dismissive and critical of the President and his administration? As a consequence to this public denigration of the Obama Administration, McChrystal was fired.

Certainly, if McChrystal took the risky approach of criticizing Obama publicly, then one could reasonably argue that this RollingStone’s article was not the first time that he made his opinions known. As urgent as a victory in Afghanistan is to Obama’s presidency, one must wonder why he did not have any informal lines of communication built into his strategic approach to the Afghan War. It is the old Godfather proverb of keeping your enemies close but your friends closer. It is unfortunately an axiom that holds as true today in politics as it did during the 1972 film.

Many organizations use these informal lines of communication – gossip lines, grapevines, rumor-mill, etc. – to keep their fingers on the pulse of how the organization is really thinking. How many regional managers will condemn a firm’s CEO for what they believe are ridiculous policies during a formal, corporate staff meeting? However, that same regional manager is more willing to pour his opposition into the grapevine, and if the CEO has “ears” listening to the grapevine, then he/she will at least have the unvarnished and unguarded opinions of his/her subordinates. Understanding the “pulse” of an organization is essential in a bureaucratic setting, but it becomes imperative during a war, where one wrong policy can spell death and disaster at a minimum, but it could sow the seeds of defeat and destruction of an entire civilization in a worst case scenario.

Although there is no place in the American military for McChrystal’s insubordination, I do see an upside: This incident should place President Obama on notice that there are men in the military who do not embrace his war-time leadership…but after a moment of reflection, shouldn’t he have known that? President Clinton had his detractors during his tenure for lacking military experience, as did George Bush, who got a “cushy” job in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War. Obama has no military experience, and he certainly had less international expertise than his predecessors. Consequently, it is self preservation to know of his critics within his own administration, and if not, then his staff is falling asleep at the switch.

Notwithstanding the current shake up in Afghanistan, the bigger question is Why did President George Bush invade Iraq and Afghanistan? If you said September 11^th, then the propaganda campaign of plausible intentions convinced you too. I have written extensively on this blog concerning the egregious mistakes that were made by the Bush administration in planning for war in the Middle East, so I will not rehash the same arguments. (Please see An Appraisal of the Bush Presidency – Parts 1-4 in the People’s Pulse.)

Let us back-peddle for a moment and consider the “initial” impulse for our invasion into Afghanistan and Iraq: George Bush wanted to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction; to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism (particularly al-Qaeda); and bring democracy to the Iraqi people. The U.S. went into Afghanistan, because the Taliban run government refused to hand over Osama bin Laden and to discontinue its support of the al-Qaeda terrorist. Both of these motivations appear on their face to be noble objectives: certainly if Saddam had anything to do with September 11^th, and if the Taliban was supporting bin Laden, then it would be our leaders’ patriotic and constitutional responsibility to overthrow both governments and bring them to justice. However, after more than seven years in Iraq, we have not uncovered one morsel of evidence that Iraq supported al Qaeda and neither did the Bush Administration find the weapons of mass destruction that we were assured were there. And certainly after nearly nine years in Afghanistan, there are no signs of al Qaeda. The only terrorists that America seems to be fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are the ones that were created because of its occupation in the Middle East.

If we consider that this country’s initial motivation to invade the Middle East was flawed at best and illegal at worst, do we have a moral imperative to apologize? If so, then that responsibility rests squarely on the shoulders of President Obama. But I’m sure that some of the president’s own supporters, who condemned the war initially when it was launched by Bush, will defend him by saying that he had nothing to do with the initial decision to go to war and his only obligation is to win and get out. Well, isn’t this the same resistance that whites have today about apologizing for the egregious act of slavery that was committed by their forefathers? Why should they have to apologize?

I say that Obama must consider apologizing to preserve America’s moral leadership in the world, and to reverse the law of causality; which says “what goes around, comes around,” or “you’ll reap what you sow.” This is a universal truth, and not even the mighty United States of America can escape the jaws of this divine law.

You’ll see in An Appraisal of the Bush Presidency that I demonstrate that there were clear signs that Bush was headed for disaster when he committed this country’s resources and young men and women to war. Without an intelligence apparatus, I knew Bush’s “damn-the-torpedoes” pathology in his run-up to war in Afghanistan and Iraq was possibly illegal. And he had at his disposal the resources of the finest intelligence system that the world had ever seen, and he still got it wrong. But, the real question is, do countries such as America make mistakes in judgement of that magnitude? Once you pierce through the propaganda campaign that is designed to condition the citizenry to patriotically embrace the war drums, it is very difficult to consider that Bush had the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the N.S.A., Naval Intelligence, the D.I.A., and a host of other intelligence agencies, and he still fumbled the ball. This is a challenge for me to believe! Consequently, I must conclude that his foray into the Middle East had a deeper purpose that we are not privy to.

If Bush lied about our involvement in a military campaign, he would not be the first U.S. president to do so. More recently, President Johnson expanded the war in Vietnam after lying to the public about an attack on an American military vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin, and President Reagan lied about a private war in Nicaragua where he was funding the Contras, which later became known as the Iran-Contra Affair after the scandal broke. Lying seems to come with the Oval Office. Although Obama did the right thing by firing McChrystal, I would like to hope that this 4-star general stuck to his guns in his private meeting with Obama and did not back away from his criticism. He owes the president an apology for betraying the single rule of conduct that must be followed from the foot soldier to the top in order to preserve discipline among the ranks: He failed to give deference to those who are in authority. However, if he stayed true to his criticism, then hopefully Obama will become stronger as a war-time leader, and a clear message will have been sent to the rank and file that insubordination will not be tolerated. If we fail to grasp those two points, then perhaps this perfect string of 44 democratic elections will be in jeopardy and the divine law of reaping what one sows will rear its unwanted head, if it hasn’t already.

…to be continued

A Not So Subliminal Message - Part 1

Are you being sexually stimulated by this photo? If not, then apparently you are in the thirty-eight percent of those who were not. According to Wilson Bryan Key, in his classic study on media manipulation titled, Subliminal Seduction, sixty-two percent of one thousand male and female test subjects described feelings of “satisfaction,” “sensuousness,” “sexuality,” “romance,” “stimulation,” “arousal,” and “excitement,” and several subjects reported feeling “horny” when presented with this advertisement. Without doing a step-by-step examination of all the subtle suggestions in this add, according to Key, the following are noted:

• The word “sex” is spelled in the ice;
• There is a face, with one eye peering out at you in the top ice cube and a face in the bottom ice cube;
• The melting ice on the frosty bottle suggests seminal fluid; and
• The ice is engaged in a sexual intercourse, among other suggestive images (Subliminal Seduction, pp. 3-8, (photo is figure 1 in Key’s book and was the advertisement for the back inside cover of time magazine dated July 5, 1971)).

Now some may be saying that it is a stretch to claim that Gilbey ran an ad to sexually arouse Time Magazine’s readers. To those I pose this simple question: Would one expect the devil to arrive with his tail in his left hand and a pitchfork in the other, with horns sprouting from his head? Subliminal messages are not designed to be recognized with one’s conscious mind. They target the unconscious mind where one has fewer defense mechanisms. To the average person, If I said, “satan is god,” they would immediately reject that absurd notion; but, if I said “dog si natas,” most people would only recognize gibberish. However, the unconscious mind can make sense of backward speech, and possibly would make a note that satan is god. This is an extreme example to make the point that hidden messages are just that.

Gilbey and a host of other advertisers used/use subliminal selling to market their products; however, looking at the photo above, one must wonder if Gilbey is selling gin or sex, since the lines seem to be blurred.

The 1970s were a watershed for media manipulation at the advertisement level, at the television programming level, at the cinema level, and at the news level. In fact, it may have been impossible to turn anywhere in society without being bombarded by suggestive images. When the Blaxploitation films of my youth hit the scene – Superfly, Shaft, and Cleopatra Jones, among many more – they encouraged drug use, gratuitous sex and effeminate attitudes for men. I still scratch my head over the fact that the social planners had me and many black men like me wearing high heel shoes, puff-sleeve shirts and elephant leg pants.

Looking back on the Blaxploitation of the 1970s, it is so painfully clear in hindsight that the subliminal messages were really not so hidden. They were in your face type messages: Good Times was when you didn’t have a job or couldn’t make ends meet; All in the Family had a patriarch who was highly racist and inconsiderate of women; and perhaps the Academy Award of Blaxploitation media – Diff’rent Strokes demonstrated that a black man could never grow beyond a certain point, but still needed a white man to raise him (RIP Gary Coleman).

If it is possible, even the producers of the Blaxploitation television programming of the 1970s demonstrated remorse and shame with a new cast of characters and programs with more positive themes for blacks in the 1980s and 1990s: The Cosby’s; Different World; Fresh Prince of Bel Air; and a number of hugely popular cross-over programs with blacks in prominent roles. This is why the current KIA ad campaign, advertising the Soul automobile with a bunch of rodents grooving to some rap music deeply troubles me. The ad begins with two hood-rats coming out of an apartment complex and then one of them poses the question to the beat of rap music – “Who’s the black sheep?” The theme of the song suggests that one of his homeys can either get with the KIA Soul or anything else that is inferior, as a rat is riding down the street on a toaster.

KIA Soul Commercial

Whoa! Have we returned to the 1970s? I’m not sure, but as I ponder the possible motive(s) behind the KIA ad campaign, I can’t help but remember the words of the late Samuel Huntington in Who are We, The Challenges to America’s National Identity; his handbook on why multiculturalism and bi-lingualism in the United States needs to done away with:

“…[T]he various forces challenging the core American culture and Creed could generate a move by native white Americans to revive the discarded and discredited racial and ethnic concepts of American identity and to create an America that would exclude, expel, or suppress people of other racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. Historical and contemporary experience suggest that this is a highly probable reaction from a once dominant ethnic-racial group that feels threatened by the rise of other groups. It could produce a racially intolerant country with high levels of intergroup conflict (Who Are We, p. 20, emphasis mine).”

What is most troubling about the KIA ad campaign is not the metaphor of rodents depicting blacks in an urban center, but that there has been no national move to boycott KIA and force an apology from the highest level of management. Where’s Jessie and Al when you really need them?

Disclosure: I am aware that KIA claims that the rodents are hamsters, but rats and hamsters are too closely related for me to make that distinction.

...to be continued

Have You Thanked a Veteran Today?

There are holy days on the American Calendar; however, like living simultaneously in the best and worst of times they are neither the Lord’s Day nor the Sabbath. One of those holy days is Veterans Day. Veterans Day is the day that has been set aside for Americans to give thanks to all men and women who have served this country during wartime and peacetime, and it gives us an opportunity to show our appreciation for their distinguished service.

It is easy for Americans to take for granted that our liberty is guaranteed, not only by the Constitution, but also by the brave men and women who are willing to risk their lives for the welfare of us all. It is amazing to me that the military can take young men, many of whom have never seen a bad automobile accident, and mold them into one of the greatest war machines the world has ever seen. Journalist Tom Brokaw described the men who grew up during the Depression and went on to bravely fight World War II; the Greatest Generation.

Because I understand the great sacrifice that our veterans have made in defense of Freedom, Veterans Day is a day that I lead my family in a day of commemoration and thanks. Our way of honoring the fine men and women who have served this nation was to look at the greatest war movie in cinematic history: Saving Private Ryan. Saving Private Ryan is a forceful look at what goes on in War. Prior to this movie, which was directed by Steven Spielberg, war films had an almost sterile look. Spielberg brought the battlefield, with its blood and guts, into our living rooms for the first time.

As I write this article, I am recalling the opening scene, when the infantry landed at Normandy on D-Day. As one of the more than 5,000 ships is landing on the French shores, the infantry became target practice for German soldiers who were held up on the beach. One particularly intense moment in the battle, has a young man running up the shore line, getting his right arm blown off, and then reaching back as if he dropped something. He picks up his shattered arm and continues to run in absolute shock. This was a dramatic scene of the real world that has been shielded from most Americans…thanks to our Veterans.

There was a time in American history that war meant sacrifice, not only for the soldiers, but for the citizens of our nation; whether it was; sugar rations, rubber rations, no new automobiles, curfews, etc. However, during the Vietnam War, combat became transparent to the American citizen. Notwithstanding the brutality of the campaign in Southeast Asia, most Americans were oblivious to its toll on the citizens of South and North Vietnam and the collective damage that it perpetrated on many of the men who returned. Unfortunately, this is one of the consequences of this country’s ability to wage war efficiently.

No matter your opinion or suspicion of the current wars – War on Terror and the Iraq War – America is in a conflict with a foreign enemy. Recognizing this fact, how often do we as a nation take time out of our day to consider, with a moment of silence or a word of prayer, the brave men and women who are risking their lives for an ideal that has been handed down to them by men wearing neckties and sitting in plush, leather armchairs? I lament because Americans have been desensitized to the ravages of the outside world. We post the casualty numbers of the Americans fighting in the Middle East and rightfully so, but we have forgotten about the nearly 100,000 innocent Iraqi/Afghan men, women and children that have been killed during these wars. Don’t their lives count for something? Perhaps not. And I say this with the deepest regret, but as a nation, if we are more concerned with discovering cures for erectile dysfunction than on providing childhood immunizations for the poorest nations of the world, then maybe we're not concerned at all about their lives during a time of war either. What a sad commentary.

Despite our…some would say hubris, but I say narcissistic, me-only attitude, more than 230 years and many wars later, America still stands as the beacon of hope for a lost world; and for that you can thank a Veteran!

God Bless those who have served our country and defended the principles of freedom and self determination; the characteristics that have, in many respects, made the United States the envy of the world.

God Bless America,
Land that I love.
Stand beside her, and guide her
Thru the night with a light from above.
From the mountains, to the prairies,
To the oceans, white with foam
God bless America, My home sweet home.

God bless America, My home sweet home.

Stealing from the Working Class

Americans who are older than 30 years of age witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union and the destruction of Communism throughout Eastern Europe. (I use the term “Communism” loosely here, because the Former Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites were more properly socialist societies. In fact, the former Soviet Union’s name betrayed its communist label – the USSR or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.) When the Berlin Wall fell, it was a breathtaking moment in American history as commentators and politicians extolled the greatness of the United States and eventually tagged it as the only superpower; notwithstanding China and its 5 million-man army.

The collapse of the former Soviet Union was not only a colossal moment in U.S. history, but it will be written as one of the great surprises of the 20th Century. No one predicted Russia’s fall. It was sitting on an arsenal of tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, and it had a brainwashed public who were conditioned to believe that if they worked just a little harder for a little longer, they would finally get their piece of the pie. Despite the fact that Russia’s demise surprised the world, a 10-minute discussion with a room of businessmen, politicians and economists should have revealed to them that an economy that provides no incentive for superior effort, will eventually fail.

Is the United States not juxtaposed in a similar place in history as the former Soviet Union? Just as 10 minutes thought back in the late 1980s should have made it clear that the USSR would not sustain itself much longer, less thought than that should make it equally and painfully clear that enormous budget deficits will be the ruin of this great nation, arguably the greatest ever. I mean, anyone who has successfully completed Economics 101 should recognize that America is on a crash course with bankruptcy. This country cannot continue to accrue massive debts and expect to survive.

To place our spending in perspective, the U.S. debt was about $5.5 trillion when Bill Clinton left office, and eight years later President Obama has inherited a deficit that is twice that much. So President George W. Bush accrued a deficit in eight years equal to what it took the country to accrue over a 224 year period. Now that’s a masterpiece of reckless spending. If George Bush’s eight years’ of deficits were seconds, they would be 174,883 years, and if they were dollar bills touching end-to-end, the distance would make nearly three round trips from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to the sun.

These are enormous sums of money that one cannot count without the aid of a computer. President Obama’s 2010 budget request has a projected $1.2 trillion deficit without considering any emergency funding that is bound to take place before the end of that fiscal year. Although Obama inherited most of this financial problem, I still must ask, “Where is the creativity of leadership?” For Pete’s sake, anyone can fling money at a financial problem, but is saddling our descendants’ financial future with this enormous debt load going to solve the problem? And even if it does, will it create a new problem for them?

I would venture to say that if seven people who may be reading this article each invited the most brilliant economic mind that they know to go on a three-day retreat and develop a financial bail-out plan, what they create would probably be more creative than what we see under the Obama Administration. I mean where is the leadership that J.P. Morgan demonstrated to save the country's gold reserves in 1893? Or that Lee Iacocca demonstrated to save Chrysler in the late 1970s? What frightens me is that it appears we may be witnessing what the wisest man to ever live said about a nation that lacks vision – Where there is no vision, the people perish (Proverbs 29:18a).

By the time the 2010 budget is enacted, America will be nearly $13 trillion in debt. Thirteen trillion! How do our current leaders propose that we are going to pay this back or do they expect us to ever pay it back?

The brilliance of the men who established this country was that they provided a procedure that future generations could employ to change constitutional provisions that weren’t applicable to them or that the majority of the country’s state and federal leadership thought should be altered. It is not easy, but an amendment to our Constitution must be ratified by ¾ of the state legislatures or by constitutional conventions specifically elected in each state before it can take effect. There are significant challenges to altering a Constitutional law, but it can be done. However, this nation’s forefathers did not provide any procedures that I am aware of that makes the national, elected leadership liable for the debt they incur while in office. Consequently, this means that our current presidential and congressional leadership is placing a financial albatross around the throats of our grandchildren’s children. Our descendants will be burdened with trillions of dollars in debt before they are conceived.

The generations that come behind us will be literally taxed to death!

Please do not let Obama’s talk of a tax cut for the majority of the middle class fool you into thinking that you will have additional, discretionary money available. I suspect that he will enact a tax cut; however, when the government brings in less revenue it will cut services and other obligations to the states, including allocations to health and human services, safety, education, transportation, etc. Consequently, we will see a tax cut on the one hand, but the state you live in will surely begin to furtively increase taxes to make up for its revenue shortfalls. Maryland, the state where I reside, recently increased its sales tax by 20 percent, and it also increased three additional taxes with the prospect of additional tax increases.

You ever wonder why you can never get ahead? Because a hidden hand is ever-present to steal from the working class and give to the AIGs, the Citigroups and the Wall Streets of the world.

You Can Make the World a Better Place - Part II

If I surveyed 1,000 people and asked them to name the five most pressing issues in our society, there would probably be one topic on most people’s short list – our country’s spiraling energy costs, including the high price of gasoline. To be fair, there are other issues that require our urgent, national attention – the mortgage crises; the credit crunch; losing factory jobs to oversees’ manufacturers; children’s lack of respect for authority; etc. However, most American’s are similarly affected by high energy costs, while we can debate the extent of other national problems.

If a special interest group planned a rally on Capitol Hill to push for legislation that limited credit card companies from arbitrarily raising customer interest rates, chances are there would not be bus loads of people from around the country making the trek to wave their protest placards. Likewise, if the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, aka ACORN, planned a gathering in Washington to urge our lawmakers to develop meaningful legislation to assist homeowners facing foreclosure, the event probably wouldn’t cause any traffic delays in Washington, D.C. And despite the fact that gasoline prices are climbing into nose-bleed territory, consumer advocate Ralph Nadar probably couldn’t organize a demonstration on the National Mall that would be mistaken in size for the Million Man March or the 1963 March on Washington.

The lack of participation in bringing about social change is not because Americans view these and other issues as unimportant. In fact, most would probably agree that these issues are central to the preservation of the ‘unalienable Rights’ guaranteed us by the founding document of this country – the Declaration of Independence. Since the 1970s there has been an erosion of our national inclination to dissent, and this, I propose, is the main reason why the majority of Americans will not engage in the struggle for social change. Sure, we’ll protest at the water cooler on the job, or in the carpool ride to work, or across the fence while chatting with a neighbor, but we’re woefully absent when the rallying cry is made to collectively express our discontent with the way things are.

Has America crossed the Rubicon into an era where our democracy is in peril, because we lack the social motivation to collectively demand change? Change does not always profit the beneficiary, as we are now experiencing at the pump. In the year 2000 crude oil was selling for $11 per barrel and the average cost of a gallon of regular gasoline was a little more than one dollar. Now, in less than two presidential administrations, crude oil is selling for almost $140 per barrel and a gallon of regular gasoline is selling for more than four dollars, with some places in the country selling gas for more than five dollars per gallon.

I recently met a Christian who attends one of the mega-churches in the Washington metropolitan area. She advised me that the Church cost more than $60 million to build, and as soon as the congregation moved in, there was a steep decline in contributions. In response, I shared with her that at the end of the Clinton administration, I was paying about $35 to fill up my truck with premium grade gasoline. Now, it is costing me more than $85 to fill up today. That’s $50 that use to be discretionary that is now being siphoned into the gas tank. If I fill up eight or nine times in one month, simple mathematics reveals that I’m paying nearly $500 extra per month for fuel expense. That is the dilemma that all Americans are facing and for some, it is the difference between getting back and forth to work and giving a charitable donation to one’s Church. I hesitate saying it, but I think the Church is going to find itself on the losing end of this proposition every time.

What factors are driving these outrageous costs?! We can debate whether it’s market forces, or the greedy manipulation of the commodities market, or some other nefarious activity that has brought many households to the brink of bankruptcy, but one thing is certain, at the expense of the working class, the oil companies are posting inhumane profits. Buoyed by soaring oil prices, Exxon Mobil posted $40 billion in profits in 2007. These earnings are so enormous, one could not count them in a lifetime without the aid of a computer.

A number of Congressmen have suggested that they are willing to enact legislation that would reduce the price of gasoline. However, oil company executives and those lobbying on their behalf are outraged that Congress will consider tampering with what they say are market forces. Speculative oil trades are being blamed by some lawmakers for the irrational increase that we’ve seen in the price of a barrel of oil. Although executives from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, two of Wall Street’s largest investment banks, argue just the opposite; that speculative oil trades have no impact on the price of oil. In fact, they countered that it builds a certain efficiency in the international market.

Since the testimony of these Wall Street executives is being met with skepticism from me and many in Congress, I make the following suggestion to help Americans get to the root of our outrageous energy costs. However, first allow me to provide some background relative to how we may have arrived at a $40 billion profit for Exxon Mobil: One of the first major efforts that President Bush pursued after he entered the White House in 2001 was to authorize the National Energy Policy Development Task Force, commonly referred to as the Cheney Energy Task Force, since Vice President, Dick Cheney was appointed as the chairman. According to the President, the composition of the task force was limited to government officials; however, reports later leaked that the task force met early and often with oil executives, including then Enron President Kenneth Lay and a number of lobbyists.

After the task force completed its work, it refused to make its findings public, claiming ‘Executive Privileged.’ This appears to be in violation of the Federal Advisory Commission Act (FACA), which mandates that certain documents, task force members, meetings, and decision-making activities be open to the public. Judicial Watch, a government watchdog agency and the General Accountability Office filed suit to force the administration to release the task force report. However, to this day, the Bush Administration has yet to release the report.

I’m sure that this comedy (or is it a tragedy) is not lost on anyone, but allow me to identify the players: We have a president who has a long, albeit limited, history of making profitable oil deals; we have a vice president who once led Halliburton, one of the largest energy companies in the country; we have energy executives and lobbyists advising the White House on its energy policy; we have an administration which refuses to release the task force report; and seven years later gasoline prices are out of control.

Does anyone else see anything wrong with that picture?

As I sit back in my Lazy Boy solving the problems of the world, I’ll suggest a possible remedy here: I recommend that Barack Obama challenge John McCain to join him in a bi-partisan effort to urge the Bush Administration to release the findings of the Cheney Energy Task Force. Obama should make that demand part of his stump speech, so that everywhere he goes, the citizens of our great nation will see his campaign theme in action – “Change you can believe in,” as well as his mantra of not being beholden to the special interests. He has a golden opportunity to distinguish himself from his opponents by standing up to the administration and its big oil chaperon.

And if you would like to be heard on this issue as well, I encourage you to email Senators Obama and McCain demanding that they press the Bush Administration to exhibit more transparency to the American public by releasing the task force's report. Senator Obama can be reached by clicking here and Senator McCain can be reached by clicking here. Remember, one snow flake will melt on the shoulder of a passerby, but if enough of them fall, they can paralyze a city. Let your voice be heard.

...to be continued

Copy sent to Senators Obama and McCain

You Can Make the World a Better Place - Part I

It is easy to be a critic; especially a Monday morning critic. I often find myself offering unsolicited advice to the President of the United States and other public officials; superstar athletes and Hall of Fame coaches, Fortune 500 business leaders; and pastors of mega-churches. However, although most of us critics believe that our advice is sacred, it rarely reaches the ears of the intended beneficiary, because we do not take the extra steps to be heard. However, true change agents will be constructively critical, plus they will work tirelessly to alter the way things are. In some instances all it may take is a telephone call, a letter, an email or a visit to someone’s office to effect change in a situation.

A few years ago I walked into my local grocery store and was greeted with a large placard that read, “We prosecute shoplifters to the fullest extent of the law.” Immediately it struck me that this sign was more of an insult to the working class community of Prince George’s County than a warning to would-be thieves. I mean, what shoplifter doesn’t know that he/she will be prosecuted for theft? Consequently, I demanded to speak with the store manager to express my displeasure at being accosted by such a warning. She apologized, removed the sign and I have not seen it since. I’m certain that I was not the only customer who took offense at the sign; however, it was evident to me that no one took the extra five minutes that it took me to request that the manager remove it.

Being proactive in our criticisms would help make our world a better place to live. I recently discovered that the Civil Air Patrol program at my son’s middle school had become a casualty of the budget ax. Yes, I could have murmured and complained about the school system removing one of the most discipline building and leadership inspiring programs in its curriculum; not to mention that this is a military style program and we are at war. However, I spent 30 minutes constructing a letter of complaint to the superintendent of Prince George’s County Schools and requested that he reconsider his decision to remove the program. I have yet to hear back from him, but I am hopeful that my voice along with protests from other parents will cause the school system to reverse itself.

I am not sure why our country has lost the 1960s zeal of dissent: During that period there was a robust Civil Rights movement; anti-war movement; female rights movement; environmental movement and a host of other organized efforts to alter the social landscape. However, our national lack of motivation to protest the high energy costs and gas prices; high food prices; the lack of candor in government seems to belie everything that the decade of the 1960s stood for.

When I last checked, the power to govern the nation still resided in the American people and was authorized/guaranteed by the Constitution. However, it seems as if we have surrendered our civic obligation to a handful of elected officials who have gambled our future away working on someone else’s behalf. I do not mean to undermine the dedication and loyalty of some of our congressional representatives, but it is clear to me that there is a cabal of men who sit in the seats of power who do not have the working class’s best interest at heart. If they did, do you really believe that our future would have been mortgaged by an additional $3 trillion during the past 7 years? Or do you believe that we would be fighting a war in Iraq under false pretenses? Or do you believe that we would be paying a price for gasoline that is approaching $5 per gallon? Or do you believe that Congress would still be passing legislation that continues to give handouts to those who don’t need them?

To give some perspective to our current political climate, in June of 2007 the richest man in the world, according to this year’s Forbes 400, Warren Buffet, blasted the tax system that he says taxed his $46 million salary at 17.7 percent, while his secretary’s $60,000 salary was taxed at 30 percent. Or to go one step further, the country had a $6 trillion debt when George W. Bush took office, and when he leaves that debt will have ballooned to $9 trillion. If someone were to physically count those additional dollars at the rate of one bill per second, take a guess how long it would take to count it (answer at the end of the article). Notwithstanding whether it would take10 years or 1,000 years to count the additional debt, America as a nation did not accumulate $3 trillion in debt until 1990. Consequently, what it took the country 214 years to accrue; the current administration matched it in less than eight years.

Now that’s a masterpiece of reckless spending!

In closing, I’d like to challenge everyone who reads this article to take a stand. Whatever it is in your personal world that you believe needs changing, make yourself the change agent – make a telephone call, send an email, write a letter, visit your congressman or organize a group to work on changing. Whatever problems lie within your control to change, make the effort to change them, and if everyone made one small change in our world, it would make it a better place to live.

…to be continued

How long would it take to count three trillion $1 bills at one per second?
Answer: Approximately 96,000 years
Formula - Take 3 trillion and divide by 60 seconds, then divide by 60 minutes, then divide by 24 hours, then divide by 365 days.