The Way the Future Blogs

 

Remember that great old black-and-white movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? That was the one where Jimmy Stewart, the Boy Scout leader who becomes a senator by accident, discovers what a gang of crooks many politicians are and filibusters until their misdeeds are exposed. It’s a great moment in the movie — unfortunately not quite as great when the filibuster is used in real life to paralyze action.

For instance, there’s what is going on in the Senate right now. A few Republicans in the Senate don’t like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that Congress voted into law over their objections. Now they’ve got a second shot at crippling it.

By Constitutional law it is the President’s duty to appoint someone to head it, and the Senate’s to vote, aye or nay, to confirm. When the President did what the Constitution requires and passed the name of his nominee to the Senate he learned that one senator was blocking it by filibuster. So the headless Bureau can’t function as well as it should, and “financial protection” for many Americans is still just a promise.

A handful of senators have pulled the same trick on scores of other nominees, particularly judges. There are nearly a hundred federal courthouses sitting vacant today because a senator has filibustered a veto on voting for them. This has caused some real hardships, not just for judge-appointees who sometimes can’t take other jobs before their confirmation hearings (are they supposed to apply for unemployment insurance?) but for many persons up for federal trial. The Constitution promises them a speedy hearing, since “justice delayed is justice denied.” But any single senator can delay a trial indefinitely.

Most Senators, both Democrats and Republicans, will admit that the filibuster rule needs to be fixed, since it is just as immoral when the roles of the two parties are reversed, as it was in the Bush years. But that doesn’t stop almost all Republicans from chiding the President for not getting enough done, even when it’s their own party that does its best to tie his hands.

By the time the dozen or so of us hungry MidAmeriCon-goers got desperate about food we learned that the Kansas City Rot had spread through the whole city. The hotel’s own coffee shop would take no reservations before midnight, and their fancier restaurant had already closed its doors. Still, one person among us claimed to know a great restaurant no more than a block away. Since all of us were by then beginning to feel rapid emaciation starting to occur in our bodies, we headed there.

We had no trouble finding the place. Unfortunately, when we got to that great restaurant no more than a block away the doors were closed and the lights were out.

Bad luck; but it wasn’t a major setback because we could all see another restaurant a block or two away, and that one was brightly lit with hospitable-looking tables set out by the curb. But to get there required a few minutes walk, and as we were heading there people were coming out the door, looking disgracefully well-fed, and walking away. And the lights were beginning to go out and the tables were being taken in until, when we arrived, it was as dark and unwelcoming as the first place.

And that was only the beginning.

I don’t remember how many places we tried, but, one after another, they all declined our custom. In the few whose doors were open at all their kitchen had just closed and their chefs were on their way home, or they had run out of the ingredients for most kinds of meals entirely.

At last we found a restaurateur willing to take pity on us. Well, reasonably willing. The best the proprietor said he could do was give us a few wooden chairs and tables scattered around an unused dance floor, but, of course, one that was also lacking in musicians or ballroom-type lights.

By then our yearning for gracious service and perhaps a candle or two was outvoted by our famished condition. We placed the most cursory orders we could imagine, and then pleaded with the waiter to tell us what foul event had turned Kansas City hosts into misanthropes. The waiter, as well as his partner in the folded-menu business, helping our guy out because the plague had scared away customers, too, was pleased to fill us in. That’s when we learned that the precipitating event had been the 1976 Republican National Convention, charged with the task of nominating candidates for the Presidency and the Vice-Presidency of the United States, to do battle with the Democratic candidates for those same offices in the November elections.

Since the Presidential candidate they nominated was the incumbent, Gerald Ford, who hadn’t much wanted to be President in the first place and wasn’t particularly good at running a nation-wide election, since he had never experienced one of his own — and who went on in November to lose to a nearly unknown Georgia peanut farmer — they might as well not have bothered.

But, of course, they didn’t know that at the time. Exuberant after hearing themselves telling each other that they couldn’t lose, the delegates wanted to celebrate the impending victory. Celebrate they then did, and in the course of doing so they laid waste to Kansas City’s entertainment industry in a blizzard of bum checks and invalid credit cards and mouths that were adrool for food and drink, mainly drink.

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Barack Obama.

When an election is near, politicians do their best to avoid doing or saying anything unusually evil or asinine because they know that people are watching. At times like the present, though, they know that most voters are sick of the subject and aren’t paying much attention any more.

So let’s fool them and pay attention. What I am doing, for example, is writing a letter, essentially the same letter to each individual politician in an office I voted on — from President and U. S. Senator down to local councils. It goes like this:

Dear President Obama:

First, let me congratulate you on your victory in the 2012 election, and I wish you the best of luck in your task of trying to fix some of the things that are wrong with areas of our government. I know there are many important questions that must be resolved, but there is one — in many ways, the most important of all — that has fallen through the cracks. It threatens the future of our whole world. And yet in all the debate, almost everywhere in our country, it was hardly mentioned.

If we don’t find some way of lessening the violent storms, droughts, floods and other consequences of our reckless tampering with the very air we breathe we endanger everything we attempt. Nearly every legitimate scientific organization in the world has joined in the warning that the inhabitability of the Earth cannot survive our forever increasing the carbon load in the atmosphere.

May I ask, then, what new steps or plans you will offer to slow the endless burning of fossil fuels?

Yours sincerely,

Frederik Pohl

 

Dear pals and other people, is that not one hellishly handsome birthday cake? It was delivered at Windycon, a gift from Malcolm Phifer, and the only thing that isn’t exactly right about it is that I won’t actually turn 93 until the 26th of this month. But better early than never is what I always say — or more accurately, I’ve never said it before, but now for the sake of gratitude for a kind thought I’ll say it loud and clear. Thank you, Malcolm!

In fact, I’ll go further than Malcolm or anyone at Windycon may have intended. I take this cake to be a testimonial to the fact that people who live a long time and don’t lose the ability to recognize bunkum when somebody tries to sell it to them deserve to be listened to now and then.

Me, for instance.

Through this blog and every other way I have to communicate an opinion, I’ve been urging you guys to sniff what the employees of the Koch brothers have been handing you before you swallow any of it. They spent fortune after fortune on TV ads and hired “commentators” to try to make you and the rest of the American people believe that tax cuts equal prosperity. That’s not true, and anybody who has tried to understand our country’s history knows it isn’t true.

One of the most prosperous periods our country ever had was in the years just after WWII. There were a lot of reasons for that prosperity, but cutting taxes wasn’t one of them. Our highest tax rate now is 30%. The highest tax rate then was three times that — 90%! — and the prosperity sailed on.

Does anybody really believe in such other fictions as that making drastic tax cuts for the extremely wealthy helps anyone but the same extremely wealthy? Can you imagine that Mrs. Romney would have tripped down the White House stairs to where her husband was chuckling over the latest Wall Street Journal and said, “Oh, darling, thank you for that new tax cut. Now I can afford that fourth Cadillac, and maybe you won’t have to put Detroit in bankruptcy!”

Well, it isn’t good form to kick people when they’re down, although with all that money I can’t feel real sorry for the man. It’s an enjoyable sport, but I’m going to turn to other subjects, including a few ideas that I’ve been turning over in my mind.

For instance, there are a few hundred people scattered around the world who get up early every morning to try to save some of our wildlife. They check the ground around every skyscraper to take away the dozens, sometimes hundreds, of bodies of songbirds that have committed suicide during the night by flying head-on into the banks of fiercely bright lights aimed at the sky in almost every tall building. (If the seekers are very lucky, they may find a few birds that can be saved.)

So what do we do about it? We (1) create a tax on high-up lighting above a certain brightness which (2) gets more expensive every year, thus giving landlords time to make changes to lower the tax, at the same time (3) making our cities less deadly to wildlife as well as (4) slowing down the yearly increase in burning oil, coal and natural gas to generate electricity that has been increasing the carbon loading on the atmosphere and currently getting worse every year, and — oh, yeah (5), giving our mayors, governors and presidents what they’ve all been looking for so desperately, something new to tax.

You’re welcome,

Fred

Anybody here remember the Stuxnet computer malware? That was the one that pretty nearly put Iran out of the nuclear warfare business for a time when one of its mean little computer worms bollixed Iran’s nuclear enrichment plants.

Well, Stuxnet is old stuff now. There are much more powerful programs that could paralyze any large-scale industry, utility, transportation system, police agency or government function that relies on computer control — and can you think of any of those entities that don’t?

We could do that to any enemy in a hot minute. But the flip side of that is that almost any enemy could do it to us, for we have no monopoly on computer talent. There is only one thing that could protect us against a sudden cyber attack. That is an effective and continually updated cybersecurity system.

Unfortunately, we don’t have one. We could have had it. There was a bill in Congress that would have gone a long way toward achieving that goal, but our friends at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce bleated about the amount of tax money it would take to finance it. Leave it to voluntary action by business itself, they said, as though there were any chance that voluntary spending on something that didn’t turn an immediate cash profit would work, and the Republican bloc in Congress took up their cause. They couldn’t defeat the bill if it came to a vote because it was obviously meeting a real and urgent threat. So they filibustered it to death

So here’s to the Greedy Old Party, always ready to put profits ahead of patriotism.

They do a great job for their masters, that top 1%. But can any one tell me a reason why anyone earning less than, say, half a million dollars a year should vote for them?