Why Warren Buffet is the Commentator's Favourite Ba-zillionaire

From an article on forbes.com:

"[Buffett] had long promised to give away his fortune posthumously. But in the summer of 2006 he irrevocably earmarked the majority of his Berkshire shares to charity, most going to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

At the time, the gift was valued at $31 billion. However, assuming that Berkshire shares continue to rise, the final amount of the donation will far exceed that sum. Buffett gives 5% of his shares to charity every July.

In October, Buffett issued a challenge to members of the Forbes 400 richest Americans list, saying he would donate $1 million to charity if the collective group (or a significant number of them) would admit they pay less taxes, as a percentage of income, than their secretaries.

Days after issuing the challenge, Buffett appeared before Congress to encourage it to keep the estate tax. Armed with a few Forbes 400 issues, he told the hearing that "dynastic wealth, the enemy of a meritocracy, is on the rise."

(full article here)

Here we have a self-made man, who is certainly not a socialist, and yet social concerns top his priority list. He is aware of and not afraid to point out the inequalities in our current taxation system and is concerned about the future of our society even when considering his own departure from it. I'm sure the man needs no fan mail from me, but I certainly wish and hope that successful business people will follow his lead.

Proud to be an American

Well, clearly I am happy, proud, relieved, thankful, stunned, thrilled, etc about what my great country did yesterday, but I know a lot of people are not and I hope maybe if you're reading that you can read these words with an open mind and heart.

This morning, I woke up in a new country, a new world- I woke up in a world where the United States of America elected an African American man as the President of our great country. This morning I woke up in a country that allowed the voice of the people to change the course of history. This morning the ideals of my future children were altered.

My grandparents were alive when slavery was a, although fading, fact of life. My grandmother tells me a story of being a little girl and sitting in the lap of a black man that her grandfather knew, and feeling the scars of branding on the palm of his hand from when he was the property of another man.

To my parents, slavery was simply history, but they knew what it looked like to see bathrooms that were only for white people, and they remember having to decide whether or not you were for black and white kids going to school together.

To me, segregation is a part of American history, but I know how it feels to wonder if my country would ever be able to look past race and elect the better man.

And to my children, the idea that at one time anyone but a white man could be the President of our country will be a piece of American history. It will be as unreal to them as slavery and segregation are to me. Sure, they will understand the impact, they will see the effect. But they will not know the reality. And what might happen then, what their children will know, and their children, gives me hope in our country and our world.

This is an exciting, breath taking time. Barack Obama is not a socialist. Barack Obama is not a terrorist. Barack Obama does not have all of the answers, he will make mistakes, and our country's problems will not all be fixed this time next year, or even two or three or four years from now. But Barack Obama is a smart man who believes in an America where people who work get to live, children who try get to learn, and people who care about other people can have a voice. And if that means that my taxes might go up a little someday, well as a Christian, as a woman, as an American, that is a price I'm more than happy to pay.

God bless America

"Vote the Bible"

I saw this sign last week and it really irked me, because I think it's exactly the kind of pat phrase that is used to herd sheeple and discourage any sort of independent thinking. But being the independent kind of thinker I am, I'm going to break it down as succinctly as possible (for me).

If "vote the Bible" to you means "vote pro-life, and therefore Religious Right" let me assure you that a candidate's stand on abortion rights is actually a non-issue. What?? I know, it's shocking that I just said that. But consider this. From 1995 until 2007, Republicans had a majority in every Congress except for a Democratic majority of the Senate from June 2001 until January 2003. During that same time, the Supreme Court had a majority of nominees from anti-Roe administrations (Ford, Reagan, GHW Bush, and GW Bush) - 8 justices - compared to those nominated by the pro-choice Clinton administration. Also, the executive branch has been considered pro-life for all years since 1973 save again for the pro-choice Clinton administration.

My point in all of this is, if the GOP were actually interested in outlawing abortion and saving unborn babies, they'd be passing legislation to make those things happen rather than using them as hot-button issues to bring voters to the polls but never taking any real action on their pro-life position.

If you are hung up on a particular candidate based on their pro-life or pro-choice position ("I'd like to vote for Candidate A but I don't want to vote for the pro-choice guy so I'll just go with Candidate B"), just ask yourself -- honestly -- will electing the pro-life candidate actually bring about changes in abortion legislation? Or is this just a talking point that brings people to the polls? And if you're going with that pro-life candidate, what are you willing to do in the future to hold them accountable to their promises? And what are you willing to do or ask them to do that can help reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies? And what are you willing to do or ask them to do to support the women who choose not to terminate their pregnancies? I'm putting a call to Christians in particular to examine the entirety of the abortion issue much more closely, and to start a dialogue about what we can do to effect real change in our country today, and thus to truly "vote the Bible".

Vote Early, Vote Often

Voter fraud is something that is, clearly, on the mind of a lot of people right now, and the ability of people in our country to get to vote is something that has been on my mind for a while, so it seems like a good time to write about both and show how they are connected.

The phrase "Vote Early, Vote Often" was coined, most people agree, by Al Capone and has been attributed to mayors of Chicago in the early 1900's when there was a lot of corruption in Chicago politics. It has come to be used by liberals largely as a joke (Obama actually said it in a rally I went to, stating that as everyone knows in Chicago they like to vote early and often) and by conservatives largely to refer to any problems with voter fraud. It is especially being used right now when people talk about ACORN.

ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform (this is their wiki page www.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN and this is their home page www.acorn.org), and it is basically an association for grass roots organizations, non-profits, lobbyists, etc who are fighting for better access rights for low and middle income people in regards to housing, public services, and voter registration among others. They have been around since the 1970's, I think, and over the years have sponsored enormous voter registration drives for low income individuals. They have also been found to have registered people incorrectly, people too young, illegal people, people who don't exist, etc. You can read more about their controversy at this section of their website http://www.acorn.org/index.php?id=17855.

Now, I don't want to say a whole lot more about that except to say that I think there clearly were people who were hired for these drives who did things they shouldn't have. However, I also think that a lot of what is called "voter fraud", especially as it is being investigated right now in Ohio, is not so much about outright fraud as it is about how difficult it can actually be in this country to get to register to vote. And here is what I mean.

To be able to register to vote you generally need to have a state issued or government issued photo id, and the address on that id must match up with your voter registration and your district. If it does not you can usually bring some proof of permanent address, too, like a recent bill. Sounds simple, right?

For those of us in the middle class and up, it is pretty simple. But for a lot of people its not so simple. For one thing, state and federal ids cost money, and sometimes quite a bit of money. When you live on a fixed income $25 is a lot of money and if its between getting a state id to vote or putting that money towards a bill or food or medicine, well obviously, the state id is not going to win out. Also a lot of low income people move around a lot, or live with family members, or just otherwise do not actually have a permanent address. We refer to these people as "doubled up", meaning that they are homeless but not living on the street (homeless means you have no income and you do not pay to live somewhere, and you are not legally bound to someone like a spouse or parent who has income and pays to live somewhere). I've had quite a few clients who might have some kind of ID, but its not their address or current address and they do not have mail with their name on it because they don't really pay any bills because they live with someone. Those people simply cannot vote except for provisionally. And clearly, homeless people on the street are just out of luck.

The problem with all of this is that voting is a guaranteed right for all American citizens over the age of 18 who have not committed a felony (which, don't get me started on that), and yet some people just cannot vote. Now a lot of this "voter fraud" launguage comes up when someone decides to do a cross check of a list of voter registration cards and lets say, the DMV. Right now, if someone cross checked my voter registration with the DMV I would be disqualified because I moved two times within two years and never updated my driver's license. But I am an eligible citizen. But I have my bill with my address and name for my district, so its fine. But what if I didn't? And that is not actually fraud- I am not trying to say I'm eligible when I am not.

Ok so I know we have to have a system to make sure that only citizens are voting, we have to have a system to make sure people are not voting more than once. I understand all of that. But we also have to have a system where all people who are citizens can vote without having to spend any money, because that's a poll tax, and we do not have that. Its a tricky thing. I haven't done enough research to see what other countries are doing, but I will and probably follow up with this.

An important point I'd like to make right now is that readers realize that most people whose votes do not get to count as a result of these "voter fraud" investigations are low income people. Most low income people vote Democrat. Most people who are doing this "voter fraud" challenging are Republicans. Instead of putting efforts into helping these people get to vote or making the system better, they are spending effort and time to just get them disqualified. Remember that our government is not of some of the people, by some of the people, and for some of the people. Or at least it should not be.

The Great Tax Debate

If you're planning to vote McCain for his conservative taxation policies, please straddle the fence with me and read this summary of Obama's plan, and this comparison of the 2 plans (from Obama's site, I couldn't find one on McCain's site).

Also, via FactCheck.org, here are a couple of interesting quotes in relation to taxes from the VP Debate a few weeks ago.

"Palin also repeated the exaggeration that Obama voted 94 times to increase taxes. That number includes seven votes that would have lowered taxes for many, while raising them on corporations or affluent individuals; 23 votes that were against tax cuts; and 17 that came on just 7 different bills. She also claimed that Biden and Obama voted for "the largest tax increase in history." Palin is referring here to the Democrats' 2008 budget proposal, which would indeed have resulted in about $217 billion in higher taxes over two years. That's a significant increase. But measured as a percentage of the nation's economic output, or gross domestic product, the yardstick that most economists prefer, the 2008 budget proposal would have been the third-largest since 1968, and it's not even in the top 10 since 1940."

"Palin repeated a falsehood that the McCain campaign has peddled, off and on, for some time:

Palin: But when you talk about Barack's plan to tax increase affecting only those making $250,000 a year or more, you're forgetting millions of small businesses that are going to fit into that category. So they're going to be the ones paying higher taxes thus resulting in fewer jobs being created and less productivity.

As we reported June 23, it's simply untrue that "millions" of small business owners will pay higher federal income taxes under Obama's proposal. According to an analysis by the independent Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, several hundred thousand small business owners, at most, would have incomes high enough to be affected by the higher rates on income, capital gains and dividends that Obama proposes. That counts as "small business owners" even those who merely have some sideline income from such endeavors as freelance writing, speaking or running rental properties, and who get the bulk of their income from employment elsewhere."

I'll post more on this later this week but that should get us started. Comments are encouraged!

Cultural Dissonance

Just heard about this on the BBC and I find it intriguing. It seems that a couple of Brits have been arrested for having sex on a beach in Dubai and their sentence was pretty harsh (by Western standards): 30 days in jail, a thousand-Pound fine, and deportation from Dubai. It's not as bad as it could have been, according to that AP article:

"The pair, both in their 30s, face up to two years in prison [emphasis mine] if convicted of engaging in sex outside marriage, public indecency and drunkenness."

Here's the thing that gets me about this. In the past 10 years and particularly in the past 5, Dubai has built a slew of extravagant hotels and resorts that are eye-catching and headline- making, most notably The Palm Islands Project and the hotel Burj_Al_Arab. As these projects have developed, I've been thinking that Dubai is more and more becoming a giant phallic symbol for the power of pure capitalism. Now, let me say as a segue that I'm not anti-progress; in fact, I like to consider myself to be fairly progressive. But particularly for a nation rooted in traditional Islamic values, this place is shockingly devoted to the pursuit and prominent display of wealth. Yet the people of Dubai hold fast to their conservative and modest values, which is bound to result in friction as the leaders push for increased tourism and commerce from Western cultures and the residents are in an uproar over the behavior of those tourists. And as we all know, you cannot have your cake and eat it too. It seems to me that pandering to all that Western capital and setting up the current party atmosphere would certainly result in just such a situation.

Let me clarify that I am not arguing for anyone's right to have sex on a beach; there are obviously laws against that at beaches around the world. And let me also say that I firmly believe that as a guest in another country, one should attempt to defer to the local culture as much as possible, just as one would attempt to be a considerate guest in another person's home. But having said all of that, I think Dubai is in the midst of a culture clash between the people who come to visit and the people who make it their home. My personal assessment is that, as so many anecdotes have been used to illustrate throughout the history of mankind, unchecked capitalism always results in violent confrontation. And if the leadership of Dubai don't make an executive decision of some sort, there will be Big Trouble on the Horizon. Though that Big Trouble might be nothing more than a slump in tourism and trade.

tee-hee-hee

We do intend for this blog to be smart and witty and thought provoking, but just for a second, before the shiz goes down, click
here because ooh geez guys you just gotta take a look here at this!. Make sure you use your mouse and find all of the surprises!

Welcome Comrades!

Ok just kidding about the comrades, but I, the Socialist, also want to extend my welcome to the readers of our new blog. We have been very excited about this for some time and I do hope that it will be thought provoking across political lines, religious views, socio economic status, and yes, even across the vast chasm that divides Bengals and Steelers fans (that I like to call good old morality, but that's for another time...and another blog...)

The Commentator spells out the expectations for us and for you the noble reader pretty well in her welcome, so the only other thing I have to do before we get down and dirty with the posting is the following announcement/endorsement:

Although the Socialist is actually a Democrat and the Commentator officially declares no partisan allegiances, Social Commentary by a Socialist and a Commentator does officially endorse the Obama/Biden ticket in the coming election, which also happens to the be the Socialist's birthday. So make my and Barack's big day a happy one for all of America and VOTE FOR CHANGE on November 4th!!

Welcome!

So, the Socialist and I have been talking about doing this blog for a looooong time. Like, at least a year, but probably longer. We're glad you stopped by and we hope you join the conversation once in a while.

We plan to keep this blog focused on society, politics, and economic issues, because we have other blogs for family and fun. We enjoy an open dialogue and exchange of ideas so we welcome all comments but of course we reserve the right to delete comments as we see fit and in particular, we will not tolerate racism, sexism, or any other form of hate speech, nor of course, SPAM. That's not censorship, that's ownership...of this blog. If you like those kinds of things, there are plenty of other places where you can go. (Like Hell...)