The Spokane Record

Another round of spending by the United States federal government is coming up.  Our leaders seem to think borrowing money to spend in the economy is the way to go.  We are living in hard times.  More and more of us are out of work, do not have enough work to do, or are not being paid enough for our work. 

More government spending will not solve our problem.  In fact, the spending is going to make our problem worse, more intractable.  Why?  Because we cannot afford the debt service on the new spending and because we there is not money enough coming in to pay off the debt.

Our government thinks spending on its credit cards will be just fine.  But without a sure source for repayment we will have instability.  We are planting the seeds of our destruction.  We “want peace in our time” — we want immediate satisfaction.  It will not happen because a new future has to be made.  Our past cannot be recreated.  We have to pass through real economic change, a revolution of change.  Instead of this revolution of our economy, the people of the government party, want the government to take over more and more segments of our society, of our economy.  The government party seeks a “national socialism.”  The only way this brave new world will be able to sustain itself will be for government to expand into ever greater taxes on the fewer and fewer people who have real incomes.

The best approach would be to start paying the price of the creation of a real economy.  An economy where goods and services have real value.  An economy based in large part on the power of workers and investors to create real things.  An economy which is not based on illusion.

I drive south on Highway 195 most every day.  As I pass the its intersection at the Cheney-Spokane Road I notice that more and more tributes and remembrances are being placed at the intersection where a 16 year old girl was killed in an auto accident several months ago.  Every time I pass by I think how sad and how senseless her death was.  It probably would not have happened had government been more wise about controlling traffic at the intersection.  It probably would not have happened had government been more cautious.  It probably would not have happened if one or two people in government  stood up and said something, said what needed to be done to better to protect people driving vehicles at the intersection. 

The intersection controls, the way the intersection was managed, was a product of the thinking of people who act as members of groups within government.  Had one or more members of the groups expressed concern and had stood up for the concern expressed, the young lady would probably be alive today.

Yesterday, for the very first time in the years I have travelled through the intersection I saw a police officer checking the speed of the northbound traffic with a radar gun.  That’s something I thought.  But why is the speed limit 55 mph at the intersection?  Why does government require that speed when it would be more reasonable for all concerned to reduce it to protect all the people who use the intersection? Why? 

What motivates people who are making the decisions?  I suspect it is the notion of the group, the “we”, the collective mind, over the notion of the individual mind, over the notion of elemental good sense. It is as if the we has a right to be unreasonable.  It is the notion that the we has a right to act such that some affected by the decision are to unnecessarily suffer.  It is as if there is a sort of ongoing government condemnation, a taking, which operates within the force of the government which is controlled by a certain government party mindset.  And then I ask, who is this government party?  Is there something the people who are in the groups who control the government have in common with one another?  I suspect one common element is that these people do not speak for themselves very often and pretty much yield to the mindset of the group when they do – they are not courageous.

The news of the passage of the health care insurance legislation is disturbing.  How good a thing is it if the Senators who voted for it did so because of the things they were able to get the government, our government, to give to their constituents?  The Senators votes were for sale and the votes were sold.  Once again I am impressed by the lack of integrity, honesty and character of political leaders in the United States.  It is business as usual, government benefits for sale.  Our system is not based upon reason.  It is not based upon what is right and what is wrong.  It is based on power and how much a person will sell his power for.  We are a culture based upon the ethic that the “end justifies the means.”  We simply do not know any different these days.  Our world is a judgment of power, not a judgment of justice or morality, or right and wrong.

From atop the American Legion Building in downtown Spokane from about 2002 to 2008 there is this news:  Scott Shane, 2 U.S. Architects of Harsh Tactics in 9/11’s Wake, New York Times, August 11, 2009.

What did Spokane do during the recent war?  Some of us instructed others of our country in the art of terror and crimes of illegal interrogation.  We did this in the name of good.   We practiced the principle that the “end justifies the means.”   The principle of the “judgment of power.”  We are all tough guys these days!

One is somehow reminded of the towns where the good people lived which were next to the concentration camps and mass murder factories in Germany and Germany occupeid Eastern Europe during World War II — Dachau, near Dachau,  Auschwitz-Birkenau, near Oswiecim, Treblinka, near Małkinia Górna, Chelmo, near Chełmno nad Nerem, Buchenwald, near Weimar, Bergan-Belsen, near Belsen, Flossenburg, near Bayreuth, and the list of camps and towns goes on and on.  A tribute to the divinity of man?

In these towns, the people looked up to the people who ran the camps, looked up to them because of their power, their military bearing, their great self-confidence and authority, their high connections.  So they did, just as the people of Spokane over the last few years looked up to doctors [sic] Mitchell and Jessen and were in some awe of their secret operations atop the American Legion Building in downtown Spokane.

The Real Clunkers in this Deal, By Steve Chapman.

For an understanding of how an apologist for the government of good things sees the role of government see Them versus us by Joesph Ellis in the Los Angeles Times.

I think he has the us vs. them turned around.  The politics of good things sees government as the answer to all of our ills, all of our hopes, all of dreams.  Government is viewed as the great understanding father or mother, the great provider.  This is unrealistic and I think is based upon the childish presumption that government is not “us” and instead is an it or a god which is supposed to provide.

By the way, have you taken advantage your government gift (the tax payer’s gift) to you so you can buy a new car or truck, or Hummer?

Tonight, August 3, 2009, the Spokane City Council is going to consider two resolutions regarding the Envision Spokane Community Bill of Rights Initiative, Initiative 2009-2.   Here are the resolutions being proposed:

RES 09-63  Relates to the advisory vote proposition asking the voters whether the City should pursue additional funding sources in order to fund the implementation of the provisions of the Envision Spokane Community Bill of Rights if approved by voters.

RES 09-64 Relates to the advisory vote proposition asking the voters whether the City should reduce funding in existing General Fund programs to reallocate funding in order to fund the implementation of the provisions of the Envision Spokane Community Bill of Rights if approved by voters.

 These proposed resolutions are beneath the dignity of the Spokane City Council.  They are nothing less than a political effort to defeat the Initiative.  The council would use its power to muck up the ballot for purely political reasons.  The resolutions are not legislation, they are misuse of the power of government for purposes of partisan political debate.

If the council was worth its salt it would have challenged whether the Initiative complied with the initiative requirements of the Spokane City Charter.  It did not and in doing so turned the initiative process into a logrolling free for all of legislation for and of “good things.”  Some council members have even suggested that the way in which Envision Spokane is making use of the initiative process is ”democracy.”  (These council members should take a course in civics and perhaps logic.  Or, maybe just read the city charter.)

The council should know that the initiative is illegal to its core.  Not only does it violate the single subject rule, fail to present amendments to the laws being changed in the proper form, have a ballot title and summary of measure which were not approved by the council as required by law, it seeks to create laws and rights which the people of Spokane have no right under the law to create. 

Initiative 2009-2 is shear nonsense.  And so are the resolutions to be discussed tonight.  No court in Washington would conclude that the Initiative is legal.  (This case will more than likely go to the Washington Supreme Court, and not Division III of the Court of Appeals (which has judges unlawfully elected to it – see this page and the Article to be found there).)

And there is another point which must be made.  What the council seeks to consider is exactly the sort of thing the Government Party thinks government should do.  The notion of the Government Party and its adherents (whether they be Republicans, Democrats, Capitalists, Marxists or proponents of Keynesian Economics by local governments which do not have resources to adopt fiscal policy or a money printing press for a monetary policy) is that government is to be used for the parochial power desires of the “current trustees” of the Government Party.

Spokane would do well if it gradually elected people to the City Council who were not members of the Government Party and instead who saw themselves as trustees of the public trust of the true government of the people of City of Spokane.

What is a political party? It has been defined “as an organization to gain political power.” For example, in 1992 Ross Perot, a Texan with roots in Arkansas who had become a successful and respected businessman, tried to organize a third party at the national level of the United States of America.

We have political parties, that is for sure; the Republican Party, the Democrat Party. But there is another party, one which includes within it the Republican and Democrat parties. It is the party which has, as its essential belief and commitment, that government is to be had and controlled and used for the purposes of the power then currently expressed by the particular party in control of the government.  It is the Government Party.

What might be thought of as party politics is really the politics of who is going to control, for the moment, the Government Party.

To the members of the Government Party, the government is not something which is a public trust, a fiduciary responsibility — the government is something to be used. Used for the purposes of the aggrandizement of the people who currently are in possession of the Government Party and who control the power of government. The people who have gained the power of the government and are now able to use the government for their own purposes. They are the people who currently hold the power of the Government Party.