How everything is connected, and what that means...

A Facebook friend of mine, the Science Fiction Author David Gerrold, posted this on Facebook the other day.  I agree with every word of it.
"Anyone who studies science, especially biology, is going to come to the very messy discovery that everything is connected to everything else.

There's no such thing as one cow. A cow exists as a member of a herd. It exists as a process for converting grass to manure which fertilizes more grass. It exists as a micro-ecology in which vast hordes of microorganisms thrive and interact. It exists as a product, a commodity, a source of milk and meat. It exists as an economic entity. And it has a thousand other existences that are as hidden from us as the other nine-tenths of the iceberg.

In the same way, no man is an island--not even a peninsula. A human being consumes food -- where does it come from? It comes from other human beings growing and harvesting and trucking and marketing. A human being wears clothes, lives in a house, drives a car, watches television. Who makes those clothes, who built that house, who delivers the electricity, who built that television, who provides the fuel for that car?

A human being exists as a member of a community, exists as a process, exists as a micro-ecology of microorganisms, exists as a unit within a macro-ecology of other human beings. A human being exists as an economic entity and an economic process. A human being exists as a member of a family and a member of a community. A human being draws sustenance from the Earth and produces waste of all kinds that either sustains or soils the Earth.
Everything is connected to everything else. We are all part of a gigantic interconnected web of processes and relationships and interactions.

If we take care of each other, we all benefit. If we cheat each other, we are pissing in the water we swim in. If we soil our relationships and make it harder for others to survive, we make it harder for ourselves.

The right wing has made a bogeyman out of "collectivism" -- arguing that government is the enemy and any attempt to use public funds for the public good is socialism.

Bullshit.

The founding fathers knew better. A simple reading of the preamble shows that: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." The Constitution is a foundation, a definition of the mechanisms by which we will create a society that works for all of us. Not some of us. All of us.

Lincoln said it: "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people." Accountable to the people as well. This isn't collectivism, it's how a representative government is supposed to work.

Our government is not the enemy. Our government is us and we get the government we deserve because we get the government we create.

It is our job to be well-informed. A representative government works best when the population is well-educated and well-informed. Anyone trying to subvert either education or information is the real enemy. Because history demonstrates that when the American people are given honest information about the choices in front of them, they will choose wisely.

That we choose to take care of each other will drive the selfish minority crazy, yes. But anyone with real life experience has learned the lesson that cooperation works better than isolation.

That's not collectivism. It's common sense."

What Henry Ford knew that today's business "leaders" have forgotten:

By Hedrick Smith in Today's New York Times:

"In the rancorous debate over how to get the sluggish economy moving, we have forgotten the wisdom of Henry Ford. In 1914, not long after the Ford Motor Company came out with the Model T, Ford made the startling announcement that he would pay his workers the unheard-of wage of $5 a day.

Not only was it a matter of social justice, Ford wrote, but paying high wages was also smart business. When wages are low, uncertainty dogs the marketplace and growth is weak. But when pay is high and steady, Ford asserted, business is more secure because workers earn enough to become good customers. They can afford to buy Model Ts.

This is not to suggest that Ford single-handedly created the American middle class. But he was one of the first business leaders to articulate what economists call “the virtuous circle of growth”: well-paid workers generating consumer demand that in turn promotes business expansion and hiring. Other executives bought his logic, and just as important, strong unions fought for rising pay and good benefits in contracts like the 1950 “Treaty of Detroit” between General Motors and the United Auto Workers.

Riding the dynamics of the virtuous circle, America enjoyed its best period of sustained growth in the decades after World War II, from 1945 to 1973, even though income tax rates were far higher than today. It created not only unprecedented middle-class prosperity but also far greater economic equality than today.

The chief executives of the long postwar boom believed that business success and workers’ well-being ran in tandem.

Frank W. Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, voiced the corporate mantra of “stakeholder capitalism”: the need to balance the interests of all the stakeholders in the corporate family. “The job of management,” he wrote, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups,” which he defined as “stockholders, employees, customers and the public at large.”

Earl S. Willis, a manager of employee benefits at General Electric, declared that “the employee who can plan his economic future with reasonable certainty is an employer’s most productive asset.”

From 1948 to 1973, the productivity of all nonfarm workers nearly doubled, as did average hourly compensation. But things changed dramatically starting in the late 1970s. Although productivity increased by 80.1 percent from 1973 to 2011, average wages rose only 4.2 percent and hourly compensation (wages plus benefits) rose only 10 percent over that time, according to government data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute.

At the same time, corporate profits were booming. In 2006, the year before the Great Recession began, corporate profits garnered the largest share of national income since 1942, while the share going to wages and salaries sank to the lowest level since 1929. In the recession’s aftermath, corporate profits have bounced back while middle-class incomes have stagnated.

Today the prevailing cut-to-the-bone business ethos means that a company like Caterpillar demands a wage freeze and lower health benefits from its workers, while posting record profits.

Globalization, including the rise of Asia, and technological innovation can’t explain all or even most of today’s gaping inequality; if they did, we would see in other advanced economies the same hyperconcentration of wealth and the same stagnation of middle-class wages as in the United States. But we don’t.

In Germany, still a manufacturing and export powerhouse, average hourly pay has risen five times faster since 1985 than in the United States. The secret of Germany’s success, says Klaus Kleinfeld, who ran the German electrical giant Siemens before taking over the American aluminum company Alcoa in 2008, is “the social contract: the willingness of business, labor and political leaders to put aside some of their differences and make agreements in the national interests.”

In short, German leaders have practiced stakeholder capitalism and followed the century-old wisdom of Henry Ford, while American business and political leaders have dismantled the dynamics of the “virtuous circle” in pursuit of downsizing, offshoring and short-term profit and big dividends for their investors.

Today, we are all paying the price for this shift. As Ford recognized, if average Americans do not have secure jobs with steady and rising pay, the economy will be sluggish. Since the early 1990s, we have been mired three times in “jobless recoveries.” It’s time for America’s business elites to step beyond political rhetoric about protecting wealthy “job creators” and grasp Ford’s insight: Give the middle class a better share of the nation’s economic gains, and the economy will grow faster. Our history shows that."

Remember that Carnegie Hall thing?

I DID IT!!! On the 19th of February, I and 269 other singers took the stage at world-famous Carnegie Hall in New York to perform spirituals under the direction of the INSANELY talented Jacqueline Hairston. We performed 8 songs, 7 of which appear on this video, and we got 5, count 'em 5 STANDING ovations. I'm STILL levitating.

cathleen @ carnegia hall (just a few photos & very imperfect audio - cough cough!!) from susan graves on Vimeo.

Robert Reich says: "Stop starving public universities and shrinking the middle class".

"Last week Rick Santorum called the President “a snob” for wanting everyone to get a college education (in fact, Obama never actually called for universal college education but only for a year or more of training after high school). Santorum needn’t worry. America is already making it harder for young people of modest means to attend college. Public higher education is being starved, and the middle class will shrink even more as a result. Over just the last year 41 states have cut spending for public higher education. That’s on top of deep cuts in 2009 and 2010. Some public universities, such as the University of New Hampshire, have lost over 40 percent of their state funding; the University of Washington, 26 percent; Florida’s public university system, 25 percent. Rising tuition and fees are making up the shortfall. This year, the average hike is 8.3 percent. New York’s state university system is increasing tuition 14 percent; Arizona, 17 percent; Washington state, 16 percent. Students in California’s public universities and colleges are facing an average increase of 21 percent, the highest in the nation. The children of middle and lower-income families are hardest hit. Remember: The median wage has been dropping since 2000, adjusted for inflation. Pell Grants for students from poor families are falling further behind; they now cover only about a third of tuition and fees. (In the 1980s, they covered about half; in the 1970s, more than 70 percent.) Student debt is skyrocketing – the New York Federal Reserve Bank estimates it at $550 billion. Punitive laws enforce repayment, and it’s almost impossible to shed student loans in bankruptcy. There is no statue of limitations for non-repayment. And yet, Santorum’s rant notwithstanding, good-paying jobs in America are coming to require a college degree. Globalization and rapid technological change are putting a premium on the ability to identify and solve new problems. A college degree is also a signal to prospective employers that a young person has what it takes to succeed. That’s why the median annual pay of people with a bachelor’s degree was 70 percent higher than those with a high school diploma in 2009 (the latest Census data available). But public higher education isn’t just a private investment. It’s a public good. Our young people — their capacities to think, understand, investigate, and innovate — are America’s future. We used to understand this. During the great expansion of public higher education from the 1950s to the 1970s, tuition at public universities averaged about 4 percent of median family income (compared to around 20 percent at private universities). Young Americans received college degrees in record numbers – creating a cohort of scientists, engineers, managers, and professionals that propelled the economy forward and dramatically expanded the middle class. But starting in the 1980s, as in so many other areas of American life, we took a U-turn. Tuition at public universities began climbing. By 2005, it was more than 10 percent of median annual family income. Now it’s approaching 25 percent – still a good deal relative to private universities (where it’s nearly 70 percent), but high enough to discourage many qualified young people from attending. Public higher education has been the gateway to the middle class but that gate is shutting – just when income and wealth are more concentrated at the top than they’ve been since the 1920s, and when America needs the brainpower of its young people more than ever. This is nuts. What’s the answer? Partly to make public universities more efficient. Every bureaucracy I’ve ever been associated with (and I’ve been in some very big ones) has some fat to be trimmed. Yet universities are necessarily labor-intensive enterprises; research and teaching can’t be outsourced abroad or turned over to computerized machine tools. Another part of the answer is to raise tuition and fees for students from higher-income families and use the extra money to subsidize medium and lower-income kids. Even now relatively few pay the official sticker price; many receive some discount proportional to family income. But this won’t solve the underlying problem, ether. A big part of the answer has to be more government support for public education at all levels. This requires more tax revenues – especially from Americans who are best able to pay. Most Americans still believe in the ideal of equal opportunity. And most harbor the patriotic notion that we have responsibilities to one another as members of the same society. The two principles lead to an obvious conclusion: America’s richest citizens have a duty to pay more taxes so kids from middle and lower-income families have chance to make it in America. A pending initiative in California would raise taxes on millionaires and use the proceeds to fund public education at all levels. It’s a good idea, and it comes at the right time. Other states should follow."

Full article Here.

The GOP, then and now.

Goldwater called it. So now we have an idiotic theocrat who is no better than the Taliban being taken seriously as a candidate for President of the United States. I Guess Robert Heinlein was correct when he wrote, "never underestimate the power of human stupidity". If Santorum doesn't scare you, there is something SERIOUSLY wrong with your thought processes.

The reason for this holiday...(edited to correct the link)

Thank you forever, Dr. King. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smEqnnklfYs

From http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2012/01/republicans-dont-care-about-voter-fraud

Iowa Republicans are trying to dismiss claims that the vote count in Tuesday’s Iowa Caucus was wrong. An Iowa voter told a local TV station yesterday that he noticed a 20-vote discrepancy in the count – and that Rick Santorum was the real winner of the Caucuses. Republican Party officials, though, are sticking to their first count – showing Mitt Romney as the winner by 8-votes - and there will be no recount. The Republican Party has launched a war on voters around the nation this year with strict new laws that will disenfranchise over 5 million Americans. They claim these laws are necessary to combat so-called voter fraud. Yet in Iowa – where there are no such laws – and where a very, very close and questionable election was just held – Republicans don’t seem to care at all about getting it right. Clearly – the war on voters isn’t about making sure the people’s voices are represented accurately – it’s about making sure poor people, young people, and minorities who tend to vote for Democrats – can’t vote at all.