Letters – Daily Lobo – Opinion

Political arguments need more than just the facts

Editor,

The column by Andrew Price, “The true meaning of ‘liberal,'” in Tuesday’s Daily Lobo provides a good lesson to all of us at UNM on the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

Price has apparently done his homework. Apparently, the word described a set of political beliefs that at that time in history were more in line with what we would call “libertarianism” today: Free markets, limited government, etc.
I applaud that academic rigor, but that’s where knowledge without the benefit of wisdom leaves us without anything of worth.

Price says today’s liberals, or “modern liberals,” are “more accurately described as ‘welfare liberals,’ who don’t believe the average person is capable of conducting his or her life.” He further states that “bureaucrats” – the word the right loves to use to degrade our fellow Americans who work in the government – should “make all the decisions and dole out the rights and freedoms as they see fit.”

I wonder if Price has spent time with anyone who identifies himself or herself as a “liberal,” because if he had, he wouldn’t have missed the mark so widely.

While I think labels such as “liberal” and “conservative” have been rendered mostly useless by the complexity of the political landscape in America, I’ll accept that label as indicative of my own beliefs: Appropriate governmental control over profit-motivated industry, environmental protections and health and welfare “safety nets” for those of us in need.

In all of my relationships with other “liberals,” I have never heard anyone express the thought that the average person isn’t capable of conducting his or her life. Where did that come from?

Liberals feel that due to circumstances beyond their control, some among us need help. I know that’s beyond the understanding of those on the right, who feel there are always jobs for everyone who wants one and bootstraps to pull oneself up by.

And the part about doling out rights and freedoms as they see fit? I love saddling liberals with that charge when today we live under a conservative regime that thinks it can dictate the appropriate level of rights over one’s body, the right to choose when not to extend life artificially and which people are appropriate marriage partners.

Price also takes on the Democrats and their opposition to the privatization of a portion of Social Security, saying former President Clinton was in favor of such a plan. That may be true, but since that time we’ve witnessed an unprecedented rise in corporate crime, the kind that can, and did, reduce some people’s life savings to a pittance.

Surely you remember the Enron scandal? These are the people we should trust with our retirement money? Surely you jest.
Price then embarks on teaching us a lesson on representative government and how the filibuster is a threat to it. This method of allowing a measure of control to the minority has been a part of our government since around the time the word liberal had its old meaning in the 1800s. In fact, the filibuster was used during the Clinton administration by right-wing senators to defeat gun-control laws.

Wise up there, Price. Your arguments sound more like a “Best of Rush” show than an intelligent argument.

John Steiner
UNM staff

“Friday, the Stock Market suffered its third triple digit loss in a week. The good news is your Social Security funds aren’t in there YET.” — Amy Pohler, Weekend Update, SNL

Radical Feminist Writer Andrea Dworkin Dies (washingtonpost.com) By Adam Bernstein, Washington Post Staff Writer

Ms. Dworkin spent her career exploring what she considered the subordination of women, which she saw everywhere from marriage to pornography to conservative politics.

Using terms such as “gynocide” to describe a cultural holocaust against women, she was adored by some who found in her writings and lectures a refreshing rebelliousness, and decried by others….

“I was good at holding the politicians’ feet to the fire, in private and in public, to excoriate them, to move their constituents, but from a basis of principle. That I can do. I have good practical instincts on where dominant structures are vulnerable. This requires a high tolerance for risk and conflict.”
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[m-pyre writes: Personally, Andrea Dworkin was not my icon.]
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Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | With pot and porn outstripping corn, America’s black economy is flying high

The annual number of hardcore video rentals in the US has risen from 79m in 1985 to 759m in 2001. Hardcore pornography in the shape of videos, the internet, live sex acts and cable television is now estimated to generate around $10bn, roughly the same amount as Hollywood’s US box office receipts.

Americans spend more money at strip clubs than at Broadway, regional theatres and orchestra performances combined. The industry has mushroomed since the 70s, when a federal study found that it was worth little more than $10m.

Now the US leads the world in pornography; about 211 new films are produced every week. Los Angeles area is the centre of the film boom and many of those in the trade are otherwise respectable citizens.

Nina Hartley, a porn star, told Schlosser: “You’d be surprised how many producers and manufacturers are Republicans.”

The majority of women in the films earn about $400 a scene. At the moment, there is a surplus of women in California hoping to enter the industry.

The internet has provided a fresh and profitable outlet. In 1997 about 22,000 porn websites existed; the number is now closer to 300,000 and growing.
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Reading Group Guide | THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by John Irving

“In this dirty-minded world,” Jenny thinks, “you are either somebody’s wife or somebody’s whore–or fast on your way to becoming one or the other. If you don’t fit either category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong with you.” …

“Jenny Fields discovered that you got more respect from shocking other people than you got from trying to live your own life with a little privacy.” … “Between men and women, only death is shared equally.”
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Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilised. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace.”

The Founders broke with England, a class-based society. They recognized the limitless accumulation of wealth over generations inevitably leads to an aristocracy.

The Republican party today has made itself the party of that aristocracy. On behalf of the super rich, ‘folksy’ pseudo-conservatives have cleverly couched things in terms of “death taxes,” “losing the family farm” and “basic fairness.” The Super Rich will keep every penny; they can buy what they need and have no need for a government.

ABQjournal: House Votes To Perpetuate Loophole for Wealthy By Sergio Pareja, Assistant Professor, UNM School of Law

With huge deficits as far as the eye can see, calls for urgent program cuts, claims that Social Security is in crisis, and war in the Middle East, House lawmakers passed a bill Wednesday that would make a huge tax giveaway permanent. The giveaway, part of a bill to make estate tax repeal permanent, is a $5.6 million income tax loophole for the nation’s richest families that is unknown to most Americans. …

Most proponents of this tax believe that it is a statement of who we are as a country. We are, ideally, a place where the person who becomes wealthy does so because of hard work and industriousness. We are not a country where who you are is determined entirely by the family into which you happen to be born. In short, we are not Louis XIV’s France, a place with a gilded class of nobles. …

In my nearly decade of tax law practice, I never personally heard of one operating family farm or small business that was shut down because of the estate tax. Not one. As most estate planners who serve the ultra-wealthy would know, people who engage in complicated estate planning are quite often the aristocratically wealthy, people from families in which members have not had to work in three, four, or even five generations. …

Suppose Daddy and Mommy Warbucks buy stock in Microsoft for $10 million and it increases in value over several years to $15.6 million. They die and leave it to their son, Richie Rich Warbucks. Although that $5.6 million of appreciation was never taxed at all, Richie inherits the property with no estate tax and a $15.6 million income tax basis. When Richie sells the stock, he, like his parents, will not pay a penny of tax on that entire $5.6 million of gain. Nada. Zilch.

So, while you and I toil away at our jobs and pay income taxes equal to, say, a third of our income, Richie pays absolutely nothing solely because he was born into the Warbucks’ family.

Start powdering your wigs. Louis XIV would be proud.

One can easily foresee John Dimdahl’s next column in which he rages about “class warfare” and “liberal professors.” Yawn. mjh

Architectural rendering software doesn’t handle people so well. Or do these units come with a robot housekeeper?

I do like the wall poster. It could be Eisenhower or Mao. Maoist metrosexuals considering The Lofts should know it’s an Eisenhower neighborhood. mjh

..:: The Glenwood Lofts ::..

The Albuquerque Tribune: Science By Anna Macias Aguayo, Associated Press

Federal officials are still at a loss to explain how the potentially deadly strain could be sent to more than 4,000 labs around the world.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is operating under the presumption that the H2N2 strain was purposefully included in the panels designed to test the labs’ proficiency in identifying viruses.

“I’m sure it was not an inadvertent use,” said Julie Gerberding, CDC director, “because it would be almost impossible to believe that they didn’t know they were dealing with H2N2.”

Mike Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said Congress should review how the strain was so easily distributed.

“We can’t have this happen,” Osterholm said. “Who needs terrorists or Mother Nature, when through our own stupidity, we do things like this?”

This Associated Press story appeared in the Albuquerque Tribune. Albuquerque Journal readers should note you didn’t see that part of the article; you only got the first 8 paragraphs which ended on a very confident “no problem here” note. mjh

Is Congress doing the right thing by opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration? Yes. by Sen. Lisa Murkowski

But if Arctic oil development was going to harm the environment or wildlife, then I would agree opening it would not be worth the cost. But the vast majority of Alaskans, including Alaska’s Eskimos who know it best, support ANWR’s development because we know 21st-century technology guarantees the land’s protection.

Planet Ark : Pipe Leak Spews Gas, Oil at Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay

An estimated 1.4 million cubic feetof natural gas and an unknown quantity of crude oil spewed from a leak in a pipeline at the Prudhoe Bay oil field on Alaska’s North Slope, state environmental regulators said Tuesday.

The resulting mist of crude oil coated an area nearly a mile long and averaged about 300 feet wide, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation said in a statement.

adn.com | alaska : Oil spill set at 10-30 barrels

That’s not a large spill compared with others that have occurred since the Prudhoe oil field production began 28 years ago. But the spill was remarkable because of the large area it touched.

US Republicans set to turn Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge into oilfield by Svend Soeyland

Several leaks caused by current drilling in Alaska have been reported, and the Exxon Valdez incident in 1989 released crude oil in a coastal zone and kept oil development efforts at bay for some years. Most recently on March 26th this year, some 500,000 litres of produced water was spilled onto the frozen tundra. In March 1997, some 1.8 million litres of diluted seawater were spilled, causing widespread salination. …

Previous exploration activities in Alaska have left massive oil spills, abandoned roads and waste deposits that have caused irreparable damage to the sensitive permafrost environment. Development advocates argue that improved exploration methods will result in smaller environmentally damaging “foot-prints.”? A study by the American Academy of Sciences form 2003 concluded that activities of the magnitude proposed for ANWR will include access roads, air strips, disposal sites, housing and other infrastructure in addition to the oil wells that, as the history of oil drilling in Alaska shows, will be left abandoned once the proposed 2015-2020 project is complete.

A recent study released by the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) states that Alaska is already demonstrating tangible evidence of climate change. Due to thawing of permafrost, entire coastal communities, such as Surmac, have to relocate further inland. Oil and gas pipelines are sinking in the melting permafrost and vegetation is threatened. Migration by non-native animal species, and possibly mosquitoes carrying the fatal Nile virus have been facilitated by this climatic shift, claims the ACIA study.