7% Solution? Media have been extravagant in their evaluation of what happened last Tuesday, with words like "tsunami" swirling about in the mediasphere. The reality is much more modest. (Very long post. I enjoyed reading it, and it flew by for me much faster than its 3,300-some word tally might suggest. If you are busy, I'll understand if you skip this entirely or come back when you have more time. It's really good, tho.)
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As Pat Buchanan (the only Presidential candidate who ever heard of me; he interviewed me by phone many years ago for a column he was writing about annexing Canada) observed on MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews" on election nite, the total switch in votes in Congress will be on the order of 7%, hardly a "tsunami".
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The election last Tuesday established the proportion of Democrats vs. Republicans ("versus" being a totally apt word, alas, for this ratio) for the 110th Congress.
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The number that attaches to a Congress is determined by the sequential number of the biennial election for the House of Representatives. This will be the 110th Congress. 2 x 110 = 220 years, from 2007 (when the new Congress first meets) = 1787, the year the present U.S. Constitution came into force.
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Altho only 1/3 of the Senate can change in any two-year cycle, in that each Senator serves a six-year term, the entire House could change every two years. What a great idea!
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The House of Representatives in the (outgoing) 109th Congress had 233 Republicans, 201 Democrats and 1 Independent. The incoming House will have 234 Democrats and 201 Republicans.
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There is a total of 435 seats in the House (a number that has held since 1912, even tho the population of the Nation has more than tripled in that time). The old House was thus 54% Republican and 46% Democratic. The new House will be 46% Republican and 54% Democratic. That is a shift of 8%.
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The Senate in the 109th Congress was 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats, and one Independent who caucused with the Democrats. The new Senate will be 49 Republicans, 49 Democrats, and 2 Independents, both of whom "plan" to vote with the Democrats. The Republicans lost 6 seats, but the Democrats technically picked up only 5, giving each of the Republican and Democratic Parties 49 votes. The other two seats were won by the former Democrat Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who was defeated by Democratic voters in the primary but elected (stupidly) by the electorate overall in the general election, and a Socialist in Vermont, who replaced another Independent from Vermont. Technically speaking, then, there has been a shift from Republicans to Democrats of 5 seats. Independent James Jeffords of Vermont, who left the Republican Party a few years ago, was replaced by Socialist Bernie Sanders. Both Sanders and Jeffords generally aligned with the Democrats.
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In that Sanders is Jewish, the number of Jews in the Senate may rise (I have not checked whether any of the present Jews in the Senate was defeated) from 12 to 13. Given that there are at present exactly 100 members of the Senate, the number of Jewish members equals their proportion of the world's greatest, and most powerful, deliberative body: 13%. Almost no one in the United States appreciates how TINY a minority Jews comprise of our total population: 2%. We have been propagandized into regarding Judaism as one of the "three major religions" of the United States, along with Protestantism and Catholicism.
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Even putting to one side the fact that Protestantism and Catholicism are only variations on a theme, Christianity, there is no way that Judaism, which appeals to only 6 million Americans, 2 percent of the general population of the Nation, should be viewed as one of this country's 'great religions'. It is not. 13% of the Senate equals 650% their proportion of the population. So despite the change in party affiliation, the new Congress is likely to continue to side mindlessly with Israel, no matter how horrifying its crimes and no matter how many hundreds of millions of people U.S. Government complicity in the crimes of Israel enrages. In regard to foreign policy, then, this election's effect is most unclear. Sadly, it is probable that Congress will continue to side with Israel in every single act of excess and mass murder it commits, which will continue to enrage the Arab and larger Moslem world even if we pull out of Iraq, and continue to mark for death every single American, under the theory that in a democracy, the people are responsible for the acts of their government. Our Government is Radical Zionist, and backs every murder committed by Israel in our name? Then we, each and every single one of us, will be held to account for our complicity in those crimes. Should we be? Not if we have spoken out and demanded our Government end its backing of Israel.
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If you (Americans), personally, have done nothing to influence the Government to stop making war on Arabs, then yes, each of you can legitimately be held to account for the crimes on behalf of Israel committed in your name. To exempt yourself from righteous reprisal, you need actively to object to U.S. complicity in the crimes of Israel. You can do so by writing email to the President (comments@whitehouse.gov) , Vice President (vice_president@whitehouse.gov) — who is in truth more like the real President, Dubya being only a puppet who mouths the words his betters write for him, — and/or your Senator and Representative. If you object to our Government's Radical Zionist policies but do not actively disown such behavior and try to change it, you consent to the continuation of policies that misrepresent your will, and our national will, and, thus, you do come to share guilt for the crimes committed in our name.
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If U.S. withdrawal from Iraq produces full-scale civil war, with vast death and the dismemberment of that country, we, the ordinary, decent people of the United States, will be hated with all the more passion because of the actions of our "representatives" — even tho they aren't the slitest representative of us, really — for having destroyed a country that was doing fine until we pushed our nose in where it just plain did not belong.
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I have always been very proud of having spoken — nay, shouted, in print terms — against U.S. assault upon Iraq. Months before the Bush Administration launched its utterly unwarranted attack upon Iraq — with support from many (stupid) Democrats — I attempted to dissuade Americans from committing that massive crime against humanity. No one listened. That, however, is not my fault. What would have been my fault is my saying nothing. I said plenty, 31,000 words of objection.
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In any case, a shift from Republican to Democratic of 6% in the Senate and 8% in the House amounts to a grand total of less than a 7% shift in party affiliation in Congress overall. Big f*king deal (remember that the wildcard * can stand for any number of characters).
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How much can change with a 7% shift in Congress? Can so slim a majority pass a legislative program? Sure, if they all hold together, but that's most unlikely, in our system. We don't have "party discipline" in the United States, and every member of each house is entitled to vote his or her conscience on every single measure considered. Parties, even state delegations within a single party, fracture over issues all the time.
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But even if the Democrats could "get their act together" to pass legislation, there is nothing to keep Dubya from vetoing any and every measure a Democratic Congress passes. What then?
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The electorate did NOT give the Democrats a "bulletproof majority", one capable of overriding a Presidential veto. So the only way a Democratic program can pass is if Dubya signs off on it. That means that only the most timid and useless legislative initiatives from Democrats will, likely, become law. Again, big f*king deal.
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Will Democrats be able to restore high tax rates on the rich and super-rich, while keeping tax rates low or even cutting them for the middle class and poor? Not bloody likely.
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Will Democrats be able to mandate a new, substantially higher minimum wage? Maybe. Maybe not.
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Will they be able to institute a national usury law in which anything over 10%, or even 20%, is illegal? No way in hell.
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Will they be able to institute universal health insurance so that no American has to die because s/he doesn't have medical insurance? Of course not. The rich would MUCH prefer that sick or injured Americans among the poor and middle class DIE than that the rich have to pay higher taxes. Literally. They would rather you DIE than that they have to pay higher taxes. DIE. And good riddance to you. If you're not rich, you deserve to die — that's the way the rich really do feel. If you didn't know that before today, I have told you now.
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Do you consent to die so the rich can keep more of "their" money (which has our name on it: "United States of America")? I don't. This trivial 7% election shift will not empower us to institute universal health coverage. Americans will continue to die from things they would survive if this country were not controlled by the rich and super-rich. And it is all the Democrats' fault. Because they could have won this election HUGELY if they had not contented themselves with winning a slim majority by hammering away only on an unpopular war, rather than on the one issue that really has people in this country feeling oppressed and desperate: personal debt and the usury that makes it all the worse.
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The Democrats now in power are not, I'm afraid, that much more the friend of the common man or woman than the Republicans have been. Their hearts may be in the right place, but, experientially, they have no idea what our lives are like. The System they are content to work within not merely favors the rich but also selects-for the rich, because nobody else can afford either the money or time away from work to run for office. So we get people who are deviant in the practical sense: people who are not remotely like us.
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For one thing, they are hugely richer than we are. The typical member of both houses of Congress is a millionaire, or very close to being a millionaire. Very few ordinary Americans are even remotely close to being millionaires. Essentially all members of Congress pay off their entire credit-card bill every month, so know nothing about interest rates charged by credit-card companies. They certainly know nothing about "default rates" of 27%, 34% and even more. They aren't charged any late fees or over-limit fees. They don't receive any dunning letters from collection agencies with red lettering on the front, or telephone calls at home and even at work harassing them for payment. They are so busy at a job they love (unlike most of us, who are lucky to have a job we can stand) that they don't have time to lie back in the recliner at nite and watch television — whereupon they would see commercial after commercial after commercial for debt counseling, debt consolidation loans, home equity loans to pay off bills, or any of the rest of the wallpaper of misery the rest of us see. And even if they did see it, they wouldn't know what they're seeing. They are that much out of touch.
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They wouldn't understand that the reason people might consider taking out a home-equity loan, and thus endangering their continued ownership of their house, is that they are drowning in consumer debt that carries usuriously high interest rates, so need desperately to find a way out. Our "Representatives" and Senators would think, if they thought about it at all, that people just want to have a little extra cash for luxuries, not that 234 million people in this country have no money for luxuries but can just barely get by, or are indeed falling further and further into debt every month — thanks to Congress letting lenders charge criminally high interest rates and impose astoundingly high fees on people in trouble. Never mind that interest IS a "late fee", such that the longer it takes you to pay off a loan, the more interest you have to pay. No, consumer-credit companies aren't satisfied with the very-high interest they charge as a base. They want to inflict a surcharge that ratchets the interest rate up into the stratosphere. And Congress does nothing, because the MEMBERS of Congress have no idea what the rest of us are going thru.
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What will change with this new Congress?
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As regards Iraq, the Democrats have no unified vision. Some want a timetable to be set and adhered to, as to permit phase-in of central-government force to maintain order. Some want the UN to take our place; some, the Arab League. Some want immediate withdrawal, the hell with the consequences. That is, if U.S. withdrawal should result in the takeover of Iraq by a military dictatorship (à la Saddam) or a Shiite or Sunni "Islamic Republic", so be it. Is that what we spent $300 billion and over 3,000 American lives (military and civilian) to achieve?
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The Democrats and Republicans are major parties not because they solve our problems or do our bidding but just because they are there, and have the money and 'troops' to maintain their position. They never solve any problem. They don't even know what it IS to solve a problem. Their thing is to make the people believe they are MANAGING the problem. If they were to SOLVE our problems, we wouldn't need them, would we? They make themselves needed by managing problems rather than solving them. And they keep everybody else off the ballot so the electorate will continue to believe there is no other way but to vote either Democratic or Republican, no third way.
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I'll let you in on a secret, folks. There IS another way. There are LOTS of other ways. The Expansionist Party, which I and a friend formed in 1977, has lots of the answers to lots of the problems of this country and the world, which cannot be solved unless we understand that bad borders are a very large part of the problem. You won't hear that in media. But you can see it on the Internet.
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Is the United States really doing so well with only two major parties controlling everything? Are our "Independents" really independent, or do they really align, almost uniformly, with one major party or the other?
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Is any solution to our most tenacious problems likely to come from the major parties? Or are they so implicated in the complex of forces they have set in motion or smiled upon that they cannot extricate us? Do they even care to extricate us?
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People who have criticized my approach, in establishing a "Third Party" rather than working within, say, the Democratic Party to aspire to high position or influence, and criticized the idea of Third Parties in general, need to reconsider. They say that a Third Party hasn't the chance of a snowball in Hell of winning the Presidency or dominating Congress. But what would the politics of the United States look like today if the Expansionist Party controlled 7% of Congress, the Republicans controlled 46%, and the Democrats controlled 47% of the votes? That would be a real 7% solution.
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Neither "major" party could pass so much as a single piece of legislation without either Expansionist votes or votes from defectors from within the other major party. Think about that. Third parties need not be powerless. They don't have to control a majority. They need merely be able to FORM a majority with a major party or coalition of forces from within the two major parties. That is a much lower standard for critical, even dominant influence than most people understand, isn't it?
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Think how the internal and external policies of the United States might look if (a) Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, united, were a State of the Union, with 2 votes in the Senate and 6 in the House (all these House numbers are predicated on enlargement of the House to accommodate new States, whether Congress were thereafter to decide to shrink the House back to 435 members, which would be absurd, or make the enlargement permanent); (b) Canada (which has universal healthcare) were brought into the Union as 7 states, with 14 votes in the Senate and 48 votes in the House; (c) Britain (which also has universal healthcare) became part of our Union as up to 5 states, with as many as 10 votes in the Senate and 87 votes in the House; (d) Mexico comprised 10 states of the Union, with 20 votes in the Senate and 160 votes in the House; (d) the Philippines were 3 states, with 6 votes in the Senate and 116 votes in the House; (e) Taiwan were a state, with 2 votes in the Senate and 33 Representatives; and (f) other areas, from the small insular territories of the West Indies and Guyana nearby, to the big, rich lands and large population of Brazil, to the hugely populous states of India were under our control and part of our national economy, and their people were completely fairly represented in Congress and the vote for President. And what if Iraq were admitted as a State of the Union, with 2 Senators and 36 Representatives, and U.S. antidiscrimination laws mandated fair treatment of Christians, Sunnis, and Shiites? If Israel were a State of the Union, and American antidiscrimination laws gave Moslem and Christian Palestinians absolute parity in law with Jews in historic Palestine?
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We need not be powerless to protect Amazonia, make India fair for Untouchables and Christians, end religious strife in the Mideast, or solve any of a host of other problems we now cannot touch.
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We can change the world, but in order to have the RIGHT to change the world, we have to grant that world rights to contribute to the central decisionmaking, in Congress and the White House, that affects them.
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That's what federalism is all about. Federalism is what empowered us, in our Thirteen very different original States, which had been separate for as much as 150 years before the Revolution, to entrust "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" to each other, and which has enabled us to make a single hugely wonderful Nation out of many separate groups: "E Pluribus Unum" indeed.
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The future is not for the timid. The future is OUT THERE, beyond our present borders. But, then, California was "out there" when the Thirteen Colonies became the Thirteen States. Few of the colonists of Virginia had ever even heard of California then. It was a world away, a conception away, part of the Spanish Empire, not something we needed to concern ourselves with. Today, it is our largest State (tho not, perhaps, wisest, given its vote for Governor last Tuesday).
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Who, in Massachusetts in 1787, had ever heard of "Texas" (then more likely spelled "Tejas"), home to our current President?
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The Constitution created a hollow form into which we could pour peoples and lands to create a harmonious Union, united not by sameness but by allegiance to an agreed set of principles, principles set out handily in a single legal document, the Constitution, and one nonlegal document, the Declaration of Independence. What holds us together is not our fractious and divided Congress, nor a divisive President who pretended to want to be a "uniter", but the principles we hold, equally and dearly, in our 300 million separate hearts: that "All men are created equal" stuff.
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That's what makes us a Nation. Not tribe, not race; not creed (religion); not land nor language nor culture. It's that "All men are created equal" stuff. We really believe it. And the world really needs it.
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Good fences may make good neighbors, but bad borders make a bad world.
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The phrase "7% solution", which one can find in many uses, is a literary allusion to the fictional character Sherlock Holmes's using a 7% solution of cocaine in his recreational drug use. The author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries was a very odd bird who apparently did not fully appreciate how dangerous cocaine is, even tho he did have Dr. Watson actively disapprove of Holmes's drug use. The Sherlock Holmes mysteries are, apparently, available online, for free — if you don't mind reading at length from a monitor screen.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,844 — for Israel.) I'm starting to get depressed by this. I have wanted the military to hurt in order to make the people think about withdrawing from Iraq, and felt little or no sympathy for the people involved in this crime against Iraq. But now I'm oppressed by the numbers. Too many have died, on both sides. That far more Iraqis have died is small solace. I'm mourning the Americans too, now. It hurts. I didn't expect it to hurt, because I am so angry with the military, which is always, in every country, a force at odds with democracy. But the individual human Americans conned into joining the military, usually because their options in the private economy were poor, didn't usually have so much as the slitest idea what they were really to fite for (Israel), and didn't deserve to die in the dishonor they brought upon themselves by becoming conquerors and tyrants. It did not occur to them that they were sent to slaughter Iraqis to make Israel safe, not help Iraqis achieve democracy. I am very sad for them, and not just for their utterly needless sacrifice, but for the dishonor with which they left this world, when they thought they were doing the honorable thing.




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:07 PM