Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institute
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the sunny island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Sunday morning, an early one here on Cape, as the sun rises to my east outside of my office window, peaking above Cotuit Bay, beaming the first light of day upon the green marshes and the Great Blue Heron who lives in those marshes, unfettered by the goings on of us human beings as we scamper about, hopefully enjoying this planet as much as our feathered friends who make this whole experiment called LIFE worth living… The Sunday morning talk shows will be fun to watch this ‘morn, for we all know what the topics at hand to be discussed will be, or should be–centered around JOBS and WAGES–the two fundamental problems facing our country today, no matter what kind of spin ‘they’ might put on it. Robert Reich, one of the most prominent and best minds in the field of economics today, and the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, has joined forces, albeit in a talk circuit mode, with the “Occupy Wall Street” movement that has caught FIRE across this great land of OURS, with protests of Wall Street and Plutocratic GREED covering the nation from sea to shining sea, please pardon, again, the sometimes jingoistic tendencies of this particular writer. He gave a lecture recently, that I watched on CSPAN the other day that caught my attention, for he spoke of ‘the big lie’ that the radical right wing hijackers have continued to spin, namely, consistently stating that the problem in Washington is ‘runaway spending’ and that taxes are too high for corporations as well as individuals, rich individuals. That the current state of the economy is all the ‘fault’ of President Obama, and that by raising taxes, it would, somehow, even with all of the empirical and historical evidence dismissing this notion outright, ‘hurt’ the ‘job creators’, the old VOODOO economics, i.e. the ‘trickle down’ economics started in earnest by then President Ronald Reagan, who propelled the top one percent in this nation to OWN 35 percent of the wealth, while the average wage for the common man or woman has remained stagnant for the past thirty years, yes, Robert spoke to that big lie and the fact that this republican movement towards total rule by the wealthy will come to fruition IF the republican puppet show in congress continues telling their empty lies as if they were FACTS–brainwashing 101… By ‘employing’ propaganda machines like Rupert, arrggghhhh matie!, Murdoch’s FOX NEWS, the ruling elite can ‘fool all of the people some of the time, or fool some of the people all of the time’, but, as WE all know, they cannot, per Abraham Lincoln, fool ALL of the people, ALL of the time! That is why we have elections, a brain and a heart, given to us by GOD, not a wizard from Madison Avenue, and thus, may, if applied en masse, bring this nation into an alignment with the TRUTH and put these bums out of business for GOOD. The only snag to this solution is the now thirty state wide push to make it more difficult to vote, as tougher new voter ID laws have been put into place, making it next to impossible for people of color, the elderly, the young and the indigent to make their ‘little’ voices known. Slick republican strategists, sharks (my apologies to real sharks everywhere in the seven seas of this world) for lack of a better word, have made this their central issue in the next election, for they know that if they make it more difficult for those aforementioned people to vote, while using intimidation tactics to keep them away from the polls in the first place, they may have enough wiggle room to propel, GOD FORBID, someone like Mitt, ‘corporations are people too’, Romney into the Executive, spelling doom for progressive ideas that involve the concepts and applications of evolution, intelligence and compassion, words the republican party disavows with every fiber of their collective being. Reich, who also worked as the secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, also spoke of HOPE, however, for he knows that progressive ideas always win out when pitted against their REGRESSIVE opposite. For that IS the definition of this current, ‘not your grandfather’s GOP’, republican offering, as they, the puppets who occupy much of congress today, do their master’s bidding (the corporate milieu), who pine for the days before the Great Depression, you know, around 1920, when Prohibition came into focus, days that saw limited government that favored the rich as it does today, while the whole of the nation floundered, not knowing it was about to go off a cliff in what was that depression that saw soup lines, homeless men building shanty towns in New York City’s Central Park, and one out of every four adults without work, as children in Boston walked to school with cardboard on their feet, as most could not afford shoes, let alone buy them, for the factories were all closed… This plutocratic grab, i.e., ‘not your grandfather’s GOP’, is not on your side. Make that perfectly clear. The only thing ‘men’ like David and Charles Koch see, when they look at this beautiful country of ours, are so many dollar signs. For they know, that if they OWN the small, not to be questioned ‘government of the corporation’, they also know they can, as the ENFORCEMENT of our current laws has been de-funded and de-toothed, continue to rape and pillage our land, air and water at will, PROFIT OVER PEOPLE, bringing nothing of value to those people whom this land was gifted, and thus, only become more and more powerful, as they step on these here ‘little people’ with all of the glee and sadistic joy normally reserved for villainous monsters, destroying one family homestead, with their fracking (chalk full of 596 deadly, unregulated, chemicals used in the process of attaining ‘natural gas’) fluids, at a time. God help you ‘Brother’s Koch’, God help you, for your actions will be exposed and your deeds will not go unpunished. Have a nice day folks and keep those wooden nickles offered up by FOX NEWS out of your breakfast cereal, they were never meant for human consumption… PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
