Everybody seems to have one, usually more than one. Yeah, you thought you knew what I was going to mention, until I said that usually it was more than one. Actually, you would have been close.

Arms? Fingers? Toes? Televisions? Cars? No. I am not alluding to anything desirable or useful. I refer to idiots supposedly representing our interests. I speak of simpleminded politicians.

Here in Tennessee we may not have the most, but only because there are much larger states. On a per capita basis we must be a leading contender. Our “representatives” may have set a new standard for stupidity.

My Personal Embarrassment

Deborah Maggart is my state representative. Checking out the bills she sponsored in the latest session, one might come to the conclusion that she has some expertise in education, mental illness, taxes, the Constitution and such. Not really.

She is concerned with the safety of our children. She sponsored a bill that keeps local government from storing magazines or gun powder within a mile of a daycare center or school. Presumably, it is acceptable for private companies or individuals to do so.

It’s just a guess but she does appear competent to assign names to bridges and highways.

Miss Debbie joined with her peers to commit what may be the supreme act of legislative witlessness.

Specifically, the bill is an amendment to the Tennessee Code Annotated Title 39 – Chapter 17 – Part 362. Harassment.

(a)  A person commits an offense who intentionally:
(1)  Threatens, by telephone, in writing or by electronic communication, including, but not limited to, text messaging, facsimile transmissions, electronic mail or Internet services, to take action known to be unlawful against any person and by this action knowingly annoys or alarms the recipient;

Edited here for length and pertinence.

(4)  Communicates with another person by any method described in subdivision (a)(1), without legitimate purpose:
(A)  (i)  With the malicious intent to frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress; or
(ii)  In a manner the defendant knows, or reasonably should know, would frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress to a similarly situated person of reasonable sensibilities; and
(B)  As the result of the communication, the person is frightened, intimidated or emotionally distressed.

Back to the real world

It seems impossible to write a bill with a broader brush. Particularly given the animus of present public discourse, is there any comment or action to which this law could not be construed to apply? I would not recommend spending wasting too much time musing on that question.

I considered not mentioning this and holding my home state up to such ridicule. Then I saw it as a story on a national newscast. Maybe I should take this as an opportunity to feel better about myself; to see myself as superior to the bozos that elected this bunch from their midst.

Many of you may be familiar with our new governor’s family business. It is Pilot, by far the largest company in the business of operating truck stops along our nation’s highways. I should think a person operating a billion dollar business would have vetoed such a monstrosity. Silly me.

Since the state is already a laughing stock, my actions cannot possibly put it in a worse light. This law should be challenged and the remnants hung around the necks of those responsible. Having been disappointed in my home state with some frequency, it may not be challenged if I fail to do so. Here is my attempt to challenge this embarrassing, ridiculous law. Come and get me. I am putting myself in jeopardy of a year of imprisonment and a $2,500 fine.

Blacks can certainly claim that the flag above leads to emotional distress. So can any true American; anyone of normal human sensibility. My calling it a symbol of treason should piss off everyone else. So there, I admit to the proscribed action and to the illegal nature of the symbol.

Before signing off let me attend to two details. That flag is not the flag of the Confederacy. It was Lee’s battle flag. Few worshipers of it know that little tidbit of history. The other detail has to do with the title of the act. It covers harassment. Almost everyone mispronounces the word. It springs from the same root as the words to harry, harried, harrier (as in the vertical take-off jet fighter) and my own surname, Harris. The emphasis is on the initial syllable: har’ ass ment.

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One of my great grandfathers was the last surviving veteran of the Civil War from Tennessee.

William Nelson Morgan was known to everyone as Uncle Bill. He survived 2 days beyond his 105^th birthday. I was 9 years old at the time.

The lieutenant governor came to his funeral. Others waved what they thought was the Confederate flag. In reality it was Lee’s battle flag.

The family and close friends knew that he had fought for the Union.

While the State of Tennessee was the last to secede, East Tennessee, unsuitable land for plantations, sided with the Union.

Most Southerners, however, sacrificed against their own interests. One did not need a plantation to own slaves but the elites certainly were the ones whose lifestyles depended upon the institution of slavery.

This time the sacrificing against ones own interests isn’t limited to one region of the country. The patsies are spread around the map.

The following article is one that needs to be read, and taken to heart, by at least 98% of Americans.

Still fighting against own cause
by: Robert McElvaine
January 13, 2011

Mississippi seceded from the Union 150 years ago this week (Jan. 9). But the intermittent, sometimes bitter, argument over whether the Civil War was “about slavery” again is the focus of public debate.

Actually, both sides are right. And deciphering this paradox can go a long way toward explaining a perplexing aspect of our current political struggles.

Many have been puzzling over why so many middle-class Americans were persuaded to demonstrate and vote against their own interests — supporting low taxes for the very rich.

Here in Mississippi, we have a lot of experience with that sort of thing.

On one side of the debate over whether the South seceded and fought because of slavery is irrefutable evidence. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” the Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union begins, “the greatest material interest of the world.”

The sentiment in the Union, the declaration complains, “denies the right of property in slaves.”

On the other side are those Mississippians who point out that their great-to-x-power granddaddy, who fought valiantly for the Rebel cause, owned no slaves — so clearly, he was not fighting for slavery.

Obviously, Mississippi and the other Southern states seceded and fought the Civil War to protect their “peculiar institution” — as they plainly stated in their documents of secession. When South Carolina seceded, three weeks before Mississippi, its declaration focused on the North’s attacks on slavery and the “election of a man to the high office of president of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”

The Confederate Constitution contained a provision that no law denying “the right of property in negro [sic] slaves” could ever be passed.

Yet it should be almost equally obvious that the vast majority of those who fought on the Confederate side but owned no slaves were not fighting to defend slavery. Rather, they were duped by the planter aristocracy into fighting to protect the slave “property” of the rich.

Slaveholders riled the region’s less affluent whites by talk of a struggle to maintain their freedom from the federal government that, the planters told them, wanted to take away their liberty.

The slaveholders were able to persuade other white Southerners to fight, kill and die for a cause that was, in fact, against their own interests. Slavery worked against whites who owned no slaves. They had to compete with those who had this cheap source of labor. Protecting slavery also made the South hostile to other reforms, including industrialization, that could have benefited less affluent whites.

This story line should sound familiar to us now.

What is happening in the nation’s political economy today is all too similar to what transpired a century and a half ago. The benefits now accruing to middle-class Americans from concentrating more and more wealth and power at the very top — like the benefits 150 years ago of slavery to non-slaveholding whites — can be measured in negative numbers. Unemployment remains high in large part because a consumption-based economy is dependent on a less inequitable distribution of income.

Once again, talk about putative threats to “freedom” and “liberty” is being used to scare ordinary citizens into acting in the interests of the wealthy, who are focused on their own concerns, not on behalf of the people they are stirring to anger.

As was true 150 years ago, one way less affluent people are being misled into acting against their own interest is through the argument that the threat to their well-being comes from people with darker skins — now Latino immigrants — rather than from those with much greater wealth.

To my knowledge, slaveholders never thought of the brilliant marketing ploy of using something like the tea party as their symbol. But they found it expedient to identify their cause with that of the American War for Independence. They sold their undertaking as the War for Southern Independence — in which the Confederates were fighting for freedom against the federal government in the same way that Americans had fought for freedom against the British.

“For far less cause than this,” the Mississippi declaration asserts, “our fathers separated from the Crown of England. . . . We follow their footsteps.”

The Civil War, however, was far from a “war for Southern independence.” It was a “war to maintain Southern dependence.” Its objective, for the members of the white Southern elite who had engineered secession, was to preserve their dependence on slaves to work their land.

Unlike the Spirit of ’76, the Spirit of ’61 saw no contradiction between liberty and slavery. Rather, it defined liberty in terms of the right to deny liberty to others. It was not about states’ rights but about states’ wrongs.

Slaveholders lost on the battlefields in the 1860s. But the cause of the top 2 percent of the nation won at the polls in 2010, when politicians opposed to any increase in top tax rates and any meaningful regulation of financial institutions were victorious. For less affluent people, who voted against their interests last year, the cause remains what it was for the less affluent people deceived into fighting against their own interests 150 years ago: a Lost Cause.

Robert McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm professor of arts and letters at Millsaps College. He is the author of “The Great Depression: America 1929-1941” and is finishing a book, “‘Oh, Freedom!’ — The Young ’60s.”

© 2011 Capitol News Company, LLC

My apologies for my lack of production the past month or so. The holidays, family visits, two forms of the flu and two surgeries have kept me occupied of late.

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Let’s do something that the Republican Party is totally incapable of doing. Let’s be honest.

They have announced their Lemon Pledge to America, six weeks before the mid-term elections. Newt released his Contract With America six weeks before the 1994 mid-term elections.

Let’s shine a little light on their lies and cynicism.

Permit me to start this off with a reminiscence. If you are lucky, you have never heard of Zack Wamp. He just lost the Republican primary race for governor here in Tennessee.

Before that he was an 8-term congressman. Of course he ran on a pledge of limiting himself to three terms, but you have to expect that of a Republican, or most other politicians.

Zack never moved his family to the District. He lived in that C Street house of sin that is registered as a church and illegally subsidizes the rent of its tenants, all congressmen and senators.

This “church” helped hide the peccadillos of several tenants that we now know about. South Carolina’s Governor Mark Sanford lived there, not on the Appalachian Trail, when he was in Congress. Zach’s side dish hasn’t yet become public.

There is is a new book on this subject, out just this month. I have not yet had time to read it but I was impressed with an interview with the author and the reviews. It is C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy by Jeff Sharlet.

Although I am 20 years older than Zach, we are fellow alumni of a prep school and one of the colleges I claim as an alma mater. His family has been in real estate for decades. I was in that business for a couple of years. He was deacon of a church I attended.

Zach ran twice for Congress and lost. When the congresswoman retired, Zach was the only one with district-wide name recognition. He campaigned on the Contract With America. He used to ask me lots of questions before he won. I guess I might have been a demi-mentor. No longer.

Zach shares something other than the bachelor life in Washington with his roomies at C Street. He is a Super American. So much so that he wishes for Tennessee and other states to secede. During the governor’s race he praised Texas Governor Rick Perry for broaching the subject and said he hoped that the voters would elect Republicans in 2010 and 2012 so that the states would not have to consider secession. What was the Republican cry in the last campaign? Party First?

After the election of 1994 but before he was sworn in and took his seat, we talked. I had known Newt Gingrich about 5 years before he first was elected. I told Zach that if Newt was really serious about term limits, a key item in the Contract, all he had to do was not run for reelection. He had already been in Congress 16 years at that time.

Zach responded that the Republicans had not promised to enact any parts of the Contract. They had only promised to bring them up for discussion. They had paid for a poll to determine the top 10 issues of Americans and the majority opinion on each one. They used the results to contract with America to . . . what? Oh, according to Zach it was just to discuss those issues. Can you tell me any of those items that they actually passed? I thought not.

This time the Republican Party isn’t even going that far. Their web site asked people to click on their most important issues. Visitors did. The Party just ignored that.

What was the number one issue for the people? At 42%, stimulating the economy and job creation led the way. What trailed at the very bottom? It was tax cuts, at 4%.

So, what was the primary issue of the Republicans’ press party? Taxes, of course.

With tax cuts for the wealthy leading the way, what is their number 2? Cutting the deficit, naturally. It appears that Jesus is a Republican and is returning for a single performance, just to perform the miracle of cutting revenue while simultaneously reducing the deficit. He does this by performing the same brain wipe on all Americans that he did for John Boehner and Mitch McConnell several years back.

Next comes what they consistently call ObamaCare. If someone refers to it as ObamaCare, it really means two things. They are appealing to your emotions, rather than your brain. The other is that they are unable or afraid to discuss the merits.

Here is some of what goes into effect today, as a result of the healthcare reform:

Insurance companies will no longer be permitted to exclude children because of preexisting health conditions. Insurers also will be prohibited from imposing lifetime limits on benefits.

The law will now forbid insurers to drop sick and costly customers after discovering technical mistakes on applications. It requires that they offer coverage to children under 26 on their parents’ policies.

It establishes a menu of preventive procedures, like colonoscopies, mammograms and immunizations, that must be covered without co-payments. And it allows consumers who join a new plan to keep their own doctors and to appeal insurance company reimbursement decisions to a third party.

They are promising to repeal or defund the reforms. Perhaps they should listen to the ones who own them. According to Karen Ignagni, “It is really the Manhattan Project because of the scale and the scope.” She is the chief executive of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the trade group.

The insurance companies have been spending 30-32% of every dollar they take in on administration. The law requires that 85 cents of every dollar go to paying for care. That means the companies have eliminated thousands of jobs. They have had to retrain over half of their staffs to understand the changes and answer customers’ questions. They have had to perform major overhauls of their computer software. That is what Karen was referring to as the scale and scope.

The Republicans want to try to reverse all of that for what they perceive as political gain. Ironically, polling the public on specific aspects of the reform elicits 60-78% support for almost every part of the reform. They have objected to reality for so long that they no longer know how to do anything else.

They haven’t told us how they will override Obama’s veto. Are they convinced they will control 2/3s of both houses of Congress?

To the Republican’s dismay, a couple of facts have cropped up in the last couple of days. First, it appears that only 2% of small business owners will be effected by letting the top marginal tax rate lapse. The other fact just arrived today. It is that well over half of all people in the top 2% are better off financially than they were last year. Congratulations. Please don’t tell any average Americans though.

Well, there it is: a small dose of truth. The Republican leadership lies. They are trying to emulate their successful deceit of the people in 1994. They know that they don’t have the better argument on healthcare reform, so they feel it necessary to resort to childish name-calling. They attract, even to positions of responsibility, the radical fringe that hate America, if it can’t be exactly as they want it to be.

They hate their fellow Americans. They call them lazy when they can’t get a non-existing job. They want at least 18% of their fellow Americans to do without health care. They want to burden us with further massive debt to the benefit of millionaires. They want this, though it weakens the overall economy and puts us just that much closer to 3^rd-world status. They misrepresent every aspect of their plans.

The Democrats are not your BFFs but, vis-à-vis Republicans, it is like comparing a mud puddle to quicksand. The former gets you dirty. The other get you.

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No. I’m not talking about a do-it-yourself lobotomy. I am, however, speaking of something with about the same level of difficulty – taking control of the government away from the oligarchs, the career politicians and the corporations.

That seems like a nice little project to keep us busy for a few weeks.

Am I a committed revolutionary? Am I a delusional idealist? Am I a disgruntled geezer? Well, . . .

First An Apology

It may appear that I have been among the missing for a couple of weeks. Life is messy. My wife fell and broke her arm in three places. An aunt died and a new granddaughter was born. An upgrade of the blogging software created some problems, for which a jury-rigged solution has been found.

Some may suspect that I harbor some tendencies usually described as OCD. I signed up for ancestry.com about 3 weeks ago. I have already exceeded 900 people on my own family tree and 465 on my wife’s. One strand has reached as far as 1370, to Salisbury, England, famed as the location of Stonehenge. I thought I remembered when we were building it.

I am writing this from Fall Creek Falls, Tennessee’s nicest state park. It may seem ill-advised to come to a place so named when my wife was the 6^th of 7 members of her family to fall within a period of less than 3 weeks. But, it’s her family’s annual reunion.

Back To Matters At Hand

It costs tons of money to keep getting reelected. Congressmen spend more time raising money for their reelection than for any other purpose. Who has the greatest amount of disposable funds? Corporations. You cannot help but feel an obligation to the one who owns you. You and I get left out of the game.

People say we can just vote them out. That’s theoretically true. However, the primary factor in how people vote is name recognition. Next comes party affiliation. Other factors include personality, looks and other such important considerations.

It would be nice to have legislation providing for term limits. That is not going to happen. The pigs will not limit their time at the trough.

First we need a simple stratagem. Then we need to identify our allies, actual and potential. These are key. Let’s take the latter first.

Enemies and Friends

The hue and cry of recent political campaigns has everyone thinking that the tea partiers are off to one side of the spectrum and the progressives are on the other. And never the twain shall meet. Hold on. Don’t jump to conclusions, particularly the obvious ones.

The political divisions that are generally accepted are artificial. They were designed to keep us busy chasing chimera. They were structured to ensure that there appeared to be no solution to our lack of power.

There are many possible political positions. Disagreements do not always mean that the parties to a disagreement are thereby mortal enemies. The powers-that-be have told you that these petty disagreements are of paramount consideration. This is untrue. This is done to distract you from the fact that we share, or should share, unifying principles that dwarf those that get our undies in a wad about.

With all of the matters over which we express dissention, we ignore the unifying element. And it is?

There is a basic division. There has been since the begnnings of civilization. There have been those with power and those who have been the victims of that power. Any progress on the spectrum of civilization is measured in terms of how much say-so the people have over their own fates.

Is the result of the exercise of power always bad? In the hands of one or a few, very seldom is it otherwise. Once upon a time there was an historian named John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, (1834–1902). He was known simply as Lord Acton. In a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887 he expressed a sentiment you have likely heard many times, at least in part: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men. It is a difficult proposition to dispute.

You may use money to clothe your body, fill your belly, provide shelter or a trip to Disney World. But, how many clothes can one wear? How much can one eat. How many houses can you use? There are practical limits on how much money one can spend to provide the necessities. Even Bill Gates would have trouble spending all of his money on Mickey Mouse t-shirts and ears.

Corporations have even more money. When you have more than you can spend to gratify your needs and sate yourself in pleasure, you look for another outlet. That usually exhibits itself as a desire for power. Money can be converted to power.

There are quite a few wealthy people with infantile personalities who only see money as a means of keeping score in the silly little game they play. Most of these are found to gather around Wall Street. Those who are slightly more advanced crave power. It is also the sign of a stunted personality but marginally more complex than simple addition.

All developed societies also have a sub-class of people who have personality disorders centered around diseased egos. These people rarely have sufficient disposable funds to transmute into power but they are willing to grovel at the Berluti Rapiécés Reprisés- or Prada-clad feet of the self-styled Masters of the Universe. They are frequently called politicians; sometimes prostitutes.

The oligarchs, the corporations and the politicians are the enemy. Getting rid of the influence of the oligarchs and corporations simply requires ridding ourselves of the scourge of career politicians.

Who are our allies? Everyone else. You mean those funny people screaming at the politicians and cameras that  wear tea bags as earrings? You mean those bleeding-heart matrons and self-important college kids who should be studying? Yes and yes. How can that be?

Let’s get down to basics. It may be that the government is too big. It may be that the government is not doing enough for us. It may be both, but that is not the point. The point is not the size or involvement of the government.

The problem is that government is not responsive. It is not responsive to our needs or our wishes. It ignores us except for the incessant blather intended to rile us up or quiet us down, depending on the immediate needs of the masters or their flunkies.

It sometimes seems that almost everyone uses the term populist with their own special meaning. The media and many politicians spit it out as though it were some foul-tasting excrement. Some associate it with whatever  the unwashed are saying. Few ascribe to it any element of nobility.

There are two interest groups. The people and those who wish to exert power over the people. Populism is politics that favors the interests of the people. Politics that favors the interests of the other side are sometimes called corporatists. Benito Mussolini defined corporatism and fascism as the combination of corporate power with the power of the state.

Listen closely to the stances of the people who are the angriest. Anger reduces ones analytical powers. You see someone having been screwed out of his retirement savings by corporate thieves and/or financial parasites mouthing the talking points of the politicians and media mouths that owe their livelihoods to those selfsame thieves and parasites. Couched in colorful language, it is gobbled hook, line and sinker by its victim.

Oh. We need to leave it to the “free market.” As if they could define or recognize a free market, even if one existed. Prayer in the schools, sex education, anything to distract or manipulate the people. Those are not what we should be bothering with; certainly not being divided by. That is what the powers-that-be intend.

Hell, we have two major wars and numerous smaller fires that need to be put out. We have 10 million unemployed. We have an environmental and economic disaster in the Gulf. We have real problems while career politicians try to score points against each other instead of solving them.

Family purchasing power reached its peak in 1973. Even with a slight uptick in the 1990s, the trend for nearly 40 years has been down. Is that the fault of the Democrats or of the Republicans? Yes.

Since 1981 we have gone from the world’s biggest exporter of finished goods to the world’s largest importer; from largest importer of raw materials to the largest exporter. We have gone from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation. Is that the fault of the Democrats or of the Republicans? Yes.

Is our infrastructure important to you? Do you know how old it is? Sink holes in Florida or steam pipes exploding on the streets of Manhattan, you have no idea where the next failure will happen. Who didn’t invest enough in infrastructure, Democrats or Republicans?

Who’s been screwing you? The corporations, the oligarchs, the politicians, the Democrats, the Republicans, the Tea Party, the liberals, the conservatives are all working very hard to screw you, and most of you aren’t even that attractive. The person out there under the banner of the Tea Party has much, much more in common with the college student who campaigned for Kucinich than either has with any of the corporatists or their flunkies.

The Strategy

Now that we know who our friends and enemies are, what do we do? How do we do it? It is even simpler than it sounds.

Vote against every incumbent. That means for the Senate, for the House of Representatives, for your state legislature, for judge, for sheriff, for city council, for county commission, for any position that attracts career politicians and is not term-limited. I did not list the presidency, as it is term-limited. The same is the case for governor of most states. You are more than welcome to vote against them too, but they are less critical.

Does that mean you should vote for a Democrat because there is a Republican in office? No. Vote for a different Republican in the primary, if you still believe it makes a difference. It is important to get incumbents out, regardless of the party.

Will this result in a different balance in the legislatures. Possibly. Probably, but not significantly, even if there were a real difference. Keeping or getting rid of a party is not the issue. Such thinking is based on the bull they have been feeding the public for generations.

Admittedly, it is, it will be, difficult to break the intellectual bonds but it is absolutely necessary. Keep focused on the goal, the real goal.

You may have a particular incumbent that you are fond of. He may deserve your positive feelings or he may not. It doesn’t matter. Are there any incumbents who can be described as good guys? Possibly. It doesn’t matter.

The purpose is not to get rid of the bad guys. The purpose is to change the way we do the public business. The purpose is to break the death grip that corporations have on the government. Will there be casualties? It is likely there will be a few nice guys lose an office. Is that vital? No, but accomplishing the goal is as vital to the survival of our society as any issue before us.

Even nice guys don’t own the seat they hold. We own it. We can find other nice guys to sit there.

There is another consideration here. While polls show public approval of the Congress to be in the teens, almost all incumbents are reelected. Why? Because it is easier to blame some faceless congressman from several states away. Your congressman has name recognition. He belongs to the right party for your area. He is probably personable. But, the odds are he has sold you out. You don’t really know. And, once again, it doesn’t matter. Get rid of him.

What this accomplishes is sending a message. We are the government. Elected officials must serve our interests. Failure to do so will guarantee replacement. Getting rid of even a few good guys will show that we are serious; we are united.

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Pew Research has come out with a new poll. I know it’s difficult to believe but people complain of big government.

Only 22% feel that big government is acceptable. Would you like to be in that elite group? Would you care to guess where my sympathies lie?

I would appreciate you reading this post and letting me know not just where you stand but whether this caused you to reassess the issue to any extent.

First allow me to confess. I have been audited three times. Once they discovered it was a clerical error and that they owed me more than what they had claimed I owed them. Another time I went to tax court sans attorney and my bill was reduced by a little more than half. The last time they wanted to avoid tax court and negotiated an amount that was almost reasonable.

You really get to experience the power of the government through the auspices of the IRS. I know that, had our resources and power been comparable, I would have not had to pay any extra those last two times. As the song goes, you have to know when to fold them.

I also had the opportunity to experience the power of the government as meted out by sergeants in general and one captain in particular. The captain denied me the right to marry. He ignored the evidence of the Korean ceremony we had as an option after his denial. His actions meant that the only time I saw my wife in the following three years was when I paid for a trip as a civilian to marry again in the American Consulate.

My wife was pregnant when I was shipped home ahead of schedule and my son died without me ever having seen him. I don’t imagine too many members of the Tea Party have more reason than I to be concerned about the power of big government.

After fifty years my perspective on the subject is somewhat less the prisoner of passion than formerly. I am aware that there are dangers. I am aware that there are abuses. But, I am also aware that the issue is not as simple as one person’s subjective experience.

You have probably heard of the SEC bringing fraud charges against Goldman Sachs this past week. Although Senator Dodd says the financial reform bill he is putting together would have kept that fraud from occurring, many say that the government has all along had the tools to remedy that problem. If that is the case, one might think that the problem to this point is not that the government was not sufficiently large but that there was at least one part of the government that was not doing its job.

I imagine that I would find many agreeing that if the government already has the size and the tools to accomplish its obligations we might be well-advised not to be precipitous in enlarging it. That really isn’t a tough call.

If as they say, the government has the tools to protect us from Wall Street, do they really have the size? One case against the financial industry may require reading hundreds of thousands of emails and a host of other documents. It requires battalions of forensic accountants. It requires specialized legal teams. With the scope of the problem, one case at a time would be analogous to trying to empty an ocean one thimble full at a time. The SEC must be greatly enlarged.

It would help to give the SEC as much authority as the FDA. The FDA fails to use its authority on behalf of consumers but that is due to the relationship its staff and executives have with the industry. That needs to be rectified. Just making the SEC larger and giving it greater authority is insufficient. We have to demand they protect the right segment of our society.

What authority should we give the SEC? One way to cut down on the need for unlimited staff would be to re-engineer the front end of the system. We should prohibit the financial industry from offering any new products without permission. This is at least the supposed policy of the FDA. Such a policy could have prevented Credit Default Swaps and other forms of derivatives. Or, it could have insured that the government knew they were coming, what they were, understood the dangers and imposed real regulations and rules.

The issue of enhancing our protection from the Wall Street mafia seems to find that rare commodity, bipartisan support. We expect to find substantial agreement that a large military comes in handy, when it is not being used as a police force. There are obviously other areas that require a government with sufficient resources to serve and protect us. Think mine safety inspectors, food inspectors, port inspectors, et al.

There admittedly are areas that could be run with fewer people. At least 60% of our prison population is due to nonviolent drug offenses. You don’t always get to see or recognize the money and other resources being spent on this. It clogs our courts. It consumes law enforcement resources and manpower. One of every four prisoners in the world are in U.S. prisons. Are we that bad as a people? Or, do we always vote for whoever is ‘toughest on crime?’

I am certain that you know of other areas of need for big government and other areas where it could be reduced.

Some government services actually bring us social and financial benefits. The state parks system in Tennessee has been voted the best in the nation. A recent study found that for every dollar the state spent on this system it saw a return of $16. So, what do we do? Do we listen to Blue Dog Democrats and Republican fiscal conservatives and cut the parks budget? We shouldn’t but to them such a government service is considered low-hanging fruit. Cut. Cut. Cut.

It isn’t as simple as ‘the government is too big.’ Nor is it a simple ‘the government needs more resources.’ It’s both. It’s neither. Government is complex. And, it is not going away; nor should it. We have the responsibility to decide where government can serve us and where we need it to butt out. We can’t do this to our best advantage with ideologies, slogans and shouting at each other.

With well over 300 million souls to be responsible for, one shouldn’t expect a small government. With a society as complex as ours is, we need services. With all of the dangers we face, in our local and national security, mad cow disease, botulism, Wall Street, internet and other fraud, medicines that kill, increasing stress that affects and endangers us, Toyotas and all of the rest, we will frequently find a place for government.

As I’ve stated in previous posts, the present economy doesn’t inspire us as individuals to go on a spending spree. Neither does it have that effect on businesses. Local and state governments are cutting back, adjusting to greatly reduced revenues. The economy needs stimulation. People need jobs. The federal government is the only entity with the resources to do that.

It would have been nice if we hadn’t partied so hardy on credit when the economy was in better shape. We would have less of a problem accepting temporary but necessary deficits to help us ride out the hangover. We could have a 10-year recession as Japan did or we can bite the bullet and pay for our economic sins.

Much of the Tea Party thrust is for small government. They are puppets. Most all of the behind-the-scenes organization for this phenomenon is being paid for by big money interests. They want distraction from actually dealing with our problems. They want a government that has not the resources to police their activities. I wish these people in their tri-corner hats and parading around with misspelled signs would take a break – take time to think. They don’t have any solutions. They have slogans and cant.

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The astronauts had their Tranquility Base on the Moon’s Mare Tranquillitatis. They wouldn’t share so I had to find one for myself. It is Buzzard’s Roost in Tennessee’s Fall Creek Falls State Park. And no, it wasn’t named for me.

Once again it’s time to veg out and gain some more weight. How else will I justify a new wardrobe?

I’m off in the morning for the annual nine days at the park. At more than 25,000 acres it is easily the state’s largest. It sits up on the Cumberland Plateau. That’s usually good for 5-8 degrees of relief from the Summer’s heat. I think that, being at a higher elevation, it is slightly further from Hades.

I know it sounds as though I will be enjoying a quite, peaceful, bucolic week staring at sunsets and shooing away hordes of Whitetail deer. If you were wondering, I have no intention of getting up in time to see any sunrises. I’m trying to take a temporary break from my alarm clock, which is otherwise set at 4:50 a.m. every morning.

All of that nonsense about peace and quiet doesn’t account for the fact that this is the annual reunion of my mother-in-law’s family. It rarely attracts more than 75 people. For the week I will respond to anyone calling out for Mr. Sheila.

But, what really disrupts the quietude is the July Fourth Parade. This is a tradition in the park of long standing. The parade is led by an antique fire engine. This may account for the direction in which the festivities have developed over the years. A world-class water fight.

I’m certain that at some point someone was the victim of a small toy water pistol. Waiting a year for revenge it would be natural if the original perpetrator experienced an escalated level of return fire.

The park has an inn, cabins and campsites, for both tents and more expensive quarters. As the parade, composed of those from the inn, cabins and those there for just the day, weaves its way through all of the camping sites, it becomes a non-lethal approximation of World War III.

The campers have the advantage of hoses hooked up to a scattering of faucets. The parade has a number of pickup trucks. In the beds of some of these vehicles are 55-gallon drums fitted with high-powered pumps and sprayers. Even the conscientious objectors need their own super soaker. I have no idea where these come from but they have begun showing up every year, without fail.

I fully intend to write one or two posts while there. Lassitude or revenge may be the motivating factor. Events will decide.

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