Emma Berry

Archive for the ‘Problem Solving Strategies’ Category

WE NEED LEADERS WHO CAN DO BETTER THAN THINK IN CLICHES!

The problem with most Republicans and darn near all Tea Party anarchists and even a few Democrats  is their shallow-minded approach to problem solving.  “Just apply a little common sense.”  They say.  “Take profiling for example.  What’s wrong with that?  Why that’s just common sense.  Are going to profile someone’s grand pa?  Just profile the swarthy types.”

In fact, Dan Fanelli, one of  the many Republican fools in Florida vying for Alan Grayson’s seat in the House even made a political video of what he would recommend for profiling if he is elected.  Basically what the Fanelli purports in his video  is that we should only profile brown people.  It would be laughable but this ass and others like him no doubt think that would be a good idea and this is very scary.

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But the problem with Mr. Fanelli’s simple-minded solution, as well as the simple-minded solution of U.S. Representative Sam Johnson to blow Syria off the face of the earth is that both solutions fail severely the litmus test of reality. Mr. Bolton  who is currently urging Israel to bomb Iran would do well to also take note.  Bombing Syria or Iran “off the face of the earth” would kill millions of innocent people, most likely also wipe their beloved Israel off the map as well, and would alter weather patterns god knows how for how many  generations.

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LET’S TAKE A LOOK AT A FEW OF THE ONES WHO WOULD ESCAPE FANELLI’S  PROFILING SCHEME:

According to Fanelli’s profile, there would be no need to check this nice-looking white couple:

Only trouble is:  This happens to be Thomas Robb and his wife. Thomas happens to be a pastor at the Christian Revival Center and also the national director of the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan. I don’t know what circles that Mr. Republican Dan Fanelli travels in, but I would definitely be in favor of having these two frisked at any airport.

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We’re not going to check old white men.  Are you kidding?  How would you like for  YOUR grandpa to be frisked?  Why that’s just common sense.  Old people don’t hurt others.

Wrong again!  You can’t get much older that this old white coot without being dead. This is a photo of James von Brunn, the 89 year old “harmless” white supremacist who gunned down a black security guard at the Washington Holocaust center in January of 2010.

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We can give White boys a pass too.  They are not planning any crimes against our nation.  It’s just the Muslims and the immigrants who want to hurt us.

Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber. On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh, an American Militia movement sympathizer detonated an explosive-filled truck parked in front of the Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City.  The blast claimed 168 lives including 19 children under the age of 6 and injured more than 680 people.  The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings.

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You can’t get much whiter than this fellow below without being Casper the friendly ghost.  He is even exercising his second Amendment rights.  Why Sarah would cheer him on and no doubt Fanelli with her.

Daniel Cowart, white supremacist who planned a cross-country robbing and killing spree that would end with an attack on Obama.  According to Fanelli’s profiling scheme, people like Cowart would be given a free pass.  Heck if Sarah were one of the watch dogs at the gate, I’m sure she would let Cowart exercise his 2nd Amendment rights.

If there is to be change in the stranglehold that Wall Street has on America,  it will have to begin with people in  local governments and local Chamber of Commerce’s who stop making any kind of a deal with Wall Street corporations to attract Wall Street business to their communities.

It is absolutely ridiculous.  In Plano Texas, for example, their local government raised property taxes in 2006 to the extent that people owning a home valued at $244,000 were paying an extra $40 a year.  And what did the local government do with this added revenue?  They did things like give a cash incentive of $1.2 million to Pizza hut to move its corporate headquarters to Plano on a tax free piece of property.  ABSURD!  The people who most benefitted from this were not the local people in Plano but the global investors of Pizza Hut.

In Texas, we see this at a state level with our governor who is willing to allow industry to pollute our air and our water.

This faulty logic of an “either/or” mentality must end if we are sustain life on our planet. We have been hoodwinked for years by special interests into thinking that either they must have their way and be allowed to pollute and take unnecessary risks with worker safety and all without paying their fair share of taxes or they won’t bring their business to town.  We must have local leaders who have the courage and insight to say no.  No it is YOU who must be responsible and pay your taxes to the community that you use.  It is YOU who must reduce YOUR profits.  It is YOU who must not put our community at risk for your profits.

OTHERWISE, we will use our tax dollars to create community corporations.  Every community in America should have at least two community corporations that are owned by shareholders who live in the community.  This is the only way to stabilize local economies.  Wall Street corporations do not own their alliance to the communities that they pollute.  They owe their alliance to their global shareholders.

If local communities don’t start making them behave–no one will.

DEMAND THAT YOUR LOCAL GOVERNMENT STOP HANDING OVER YOUR COMMUNITY TO WALL STREET.

Another area where local communities are vulnerable is with food security.  To the extent possible, all food consumed locally should be grown locally and/or in the nearby region.

APPARENTLY SAM JOHNSON’S SOLUTION TO “NUKE ‘EM” IS NOT LIMITED TO THE 20 MILLION MEN WOMEN AND CHILDREN WHO LIVE IN SYRIA.  He includes China as well.

I have previously reported on Sam Johnson’s suggestion to murder the 20 million people in Syria. Yep!  Sam Johnson, U.S. Representative of the Third U.S. Congressional District of Texas actually said that at a February 19, 2005 pancake breakfast in Collin County.  It is not hearsay.  He actually bragged about saying that.  According to the Washington Post, Johnson said he was talking with President Bush and Rep. Kay Granger (R-Tex.) at the White House about weapons of mass destruction that troops failed to find in Iraq. If you don’t find evidence to support doing what you want to do, just murder 20 million people in another  nation, alter the weather patterns in the Middle East for several generations, quadruple the incidence of cancer in the area,  and declare that the WMDs were there but that you destroyed them.

And “Christians” vote for Johnson? How do they justify voting for a man who suggests murder as a solution? Where does that fit into the teachings of Jesus Christ?

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Today as I was gathering the signatures for my ballot petition in our Third District, a veteran who is about Sam’s vintage, told me that two years ago he attended a meeting of veterans where Sam was the featured speaker. During that speech Johnson mentioned that we should have nuked China years ago.

How can people continue to support a candidate who goes around suggesting the annihilation of innocent men, women and children as a solution? I find that even more unsettling than Johnson’s unstable rhetoric.  What kind of people do we have in the Third District?  Regardless the party, Sam Johnson does not deserve re-election.   But there will no doubt be hundreds if not thousands of people in Collin County who will vote for Johnson simply and only because he is a Republican.

When the name of the political party is the bottom line on which voters base their decisions, all Americans lose.  Our political system is hardly distinguishable  from a goofy college fraternity.

Melissa Del Bosque of The Texas Observer reports on a press conference she attended on Monday that features Reyes Ferriz, the mayor of Juarez.  Ferriz spoke the truth.  I hope that US government officials will listen and then do something.

HERE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT NEWS: After 40 years of the fighting the War on Drugs, the U.S. hasn’t made a dent in its drug consumption. Instead it’s increased.

“Mexican government officials are losing their lives to stop drugs from reaching the U.S.,” he said. “And once they are in the U.S. nothing happens.  .   .  Since President Calderon declared war on the cartels Mexico has reduced the amount of cocaine being funneled through the country from 90 percent to 60 percent, says Reyes Ferriz.

The cocaine is still being produced in copious amounts, only now it’s being funneled through the Caribbean as it was in the ‘80s. Already, drug related violence is increasing in Puerto Rico and other countries in the Caribbean, he said.

“Our definition of success for Mexico unfortunately, is to have the drugs go somewhere else, because it’s not stopping. We just don’t want it in our backyard. That’s the only definition we can have as long as the United States is the biggest consumer of drugs in the world.”

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THAT’S IT FOLKS!  UNTIL WE STOP OUR OWN CITIZENS FROM BEING THE BIGGEST CONSUMERS OF ILLEGAL DRUGS IN THE WORLD NOTHING IS GOING TO CHANGE.

I wish the Mexican citizens the best, but  until those of the USA stop pretending that we are not part of the problem, little will change.

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AGAIN!  We go back to one of the primary premises of my campaign and what I will do that is different from the others:  I will address problem solving by addressing the ROOT CAUSE and not the symptom.

We need to address the factors that make drug use so appealing to American citizens.  Until those are changed, nothing changes.

The Robin Hood plan was a media nickname given to legislation enacted by the U.S. state of Texas in 1993 to provide court-mandated equitable school financing for all school districts in the state. Similar to the legend of Robin Hood, who “robbed from the rich and gave to the poor”, the law “recaptured” property tax revenue from property-wealthy school districts and distributed those in property-poor districts, in an effort to equalize the financing of all districts throughout Texas.  On the face of things, it seems  like a fair and democratic plan, but definitely one that warrants a revisit.

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THAT WAS THEN AND THIS IS NOW.  (77 years later)

Things change over 77 years.  Although as a nation we are almost economically where we were in 1933,  many other factors have changed.  Some laws like the Glass-Steagall Act also passed in 1933 (but repealed by Bill Clinton and his Republican Congress in 1999) should never have been touched.  If  Clinton, aided and abetted by a Republican Congress, had not repealed the Glass Steagall Act, our economy would not be in half the mess it is today.  “Bipartisanship” between the Democrats and the Republicans since 1988 when they formed their own corporation to control the Presidential debates has been more like the collusion and price fixing that we see from Wall Street Corporations and Banks like Archer Daniels Midland and Goldman Sachs and a sharing of ideas that benefit the majority.

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CONSIDERATIONS

Some argue that although Robin Hood reduced the spending gap between Texas’ property-poor and property-rich districts by $500 per pupil, it destroyed about $27,000 per pupil in property wealth”.  I don’t know if these figures are accurate, however, looking on the bright side,  the Robin Hood law may be the very thing that is saving Texas from the huge disaster in the housing foreclosures that other states are facing.  It has kept the prices of homes from rising to insane bloated values that we see elsewhere in the nation.  Texas ranks 28th in foreclosure rates and the lowest among the big states.

Some claim that the Robin Hood law has reduced the  value of Texas real estate by $81 billion, an amount far in excess of the revenues received. This resulted from unintended positive feedback  forces. As taxes went to benefit districts other than those taxed, property values decreased. People moved to other districts with more favorable taxation, which further decreased values. Lower assessed values lowered tax revenues. I think that home prices in Texas are much closer to their real value than in any other state in the Union.

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TWO GOOD  SOLUTIONS

BUT ALL THAT BEING SAID.  There is something in me as a true supporter of democracy for all that doesn’t sit right with the Robin Hood Law.  We’ve got one Robin Hood already–a Robin Hood in reverse with his Texas Enterprise Fund.   Unfortunately he is our governor unless more of you Republicans can get out there and beat the bushes for Kay in between now and next week’s primary.

I don’t like to see any American unfairly put to use–even the rich.  We need money for our schools so where can it come from if we don’t take more from the districts with higher property taxes?  Here are a few solutions that come to mind:

1.  We could close the carried interest loophole for private equity and hedge fund crooks.  We should do that any way for many other reasons such as I’ve mentioned before.

2.  We can reclaim more money from our state lottery for our schools.  The state of Texas only dedicates a $.0025 portion of the state sales tax and the net proceeds from the Texas Lottery  as well as earnings from the Permanent School Fund, to primary and secondary education.

ONLY $.0025 FROM THE LOTTERY!  RICK!  WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU DOING WITH THE REST OF THAT MONEY?  GIVING IT TO BANK OF AMERICA via YOUR “TEXAS ENTERPRISE FUND”?

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A WARNING TO BOTH SIDES

BEWARE  WHAT YOU WISH FOR.  YOU MAY GET IT.

Yes, and forget the cliche about not looking a gift horse in the mouth.

I say:  “Look very carefully.”

One possible side effect of repealing the Robin Hood Law is that the value of homes in Texas will swell up like a beached whale.  Look at California.  Is this what you want?  I could be wrong, but I do believe that the Robin Hood Law, although not entirely just, has provided a side benefit to the majority of the people in our state by keeping the prices of our home at values that are more in keeping with their true worth.

Beware what you wish for is what I tell my Democratic friends who are jumping on the health care bandwagon to deliver 50,000,000 Americans over to the very Wall Street crooks who are lying, stealing and cheating the American people daily.  And then to heap insult onto insult, taxpayers will have to make up the difference in payments to these crooks for those who can’t afford the squeeze.  I don’t mind helping my fellow Americans with a hand up, but I do mind even one more penny of my tax money being forked over to Wall Street Crooks.

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As your representative in Washington, I will not immediately jump on the bandwagon of any piece of legislation “because my party says so”.   You, the people in my district, are my party.  I won’t have Rahm Emanuel or  Rush Limbaugh to fear–only my constituents and that’s the way it should be.   I will consider all angles for all people.  I will think beyond the rhetoric of the bill to its possible ramifications on other seemingly unrelated areas.  And I will share my reasons with all, just as I share them here on my blog.  Transparent government begins with transparent elected officials.

I hope you visit my blog often because it is the best way to get a well-rounded picture of who I am and what I represent and will do for you in Washington if  you provide me the opportunity by voting for me.

SO THAT  YOU CAN BE CLEAR ON WHERE I STAND ON ABORTION:  I support the Hyde Amendment which states that no federal money can be used for abortion except in three cases:  1) to save the mother’s life  2) rape   3) incest

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Abortion is indeed a huge wedge issue in politics–often a deciding factor as to how some people select their candidates.  And like all problems that we face as a society, many of our politicians and mainstream pundits treat the symptom and not the root cause and, as a consequence,  little or no progress is made.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, abortion is one of the most divisive and emotional issues facing U.S. policymakers today. We should not be surprised since individuals’ attitudes about abortion are shaped by their convictions regarding religion, morality, human rights, public health and the status of women in society. Moreover, lawmakers in the United States are not alone in their struggle over abortion policy. Abortion is controversial in many countries, and nations from every region of the globe are wrestling with questions about abortion, unintended pregnancy and the appropriate role of government in these matters.

Many of these policy debates are driven by the motivation to reduce abortion rates, and among some policymakers, the answer is to make abortion difficult to obtain or even illegal. Yet an examination of statistical trends reveals that the legal status of abortion in a country is not strongly correlated with the rate at which it occurs. Indeed, in many countries where the procedure is illegal, women obtain abortions at very high rates. Similarly, in some countries where abortion is legal and very widely accessible, abortion rates are low.

Thus making abortion illegal does not necessarily reduce the number of abortions. In fact there is strong evidence to the contrary.  These are just the facts, please don’t shoot the messenger.  I believe that we need to approach this highly emotional topic with a little more sensibility–if indeed our true goal is to eliminate abortions and not demonize other human beings who may be in situations that are more desperate than we, as outsiders, are capable of fully understanding.

A country’s abortion rate is not closely correlated with whether abortion is legal there. For example, abortion levels are quite high in Latin American countries, where abortion is highly restricted. (In fact, as you can see from the chart above, most abortions occur in countries with restrictive abortion laws.  You might also notice while you are looking at the chart that there seems to be a positive correlation between the poverty in a country and its abortion rate. ) At the same time, abortion rates are quite low throughout Western Europe, where the procedure is legal and widely available.  For example, in the Netherlands, which has the lowest abortion rate of all the countries, abortion is allowed to be done on demand until the 21st week–yet they have the lowest rate of all the countries.  Then again Vietnam which has a high rate of abortions has a very liberal legal policy toward abortion and they have the highest rate.  The point is that there is no correlation between legality and abortion rate for a country.

Chile, the Country with the Most Restrictive Abortion Law is also a country whose leadership has a history of violence against all its people. Chile was ruled by the illegal military and criminal dictator ship of Pinochet–a despot who was put into office by Richard Nixon and the CIA and ruled from 1974 until 1990.  At the time of Pinochet’s death in December of 2006, he had around 300 criminal charges pending against him for various human rights violations

In Chile, in the period 2000-2004 abortion was the third cause of maternal mortality in the country at 12%.  Thirty-five percent of all pregnancies end in abortion; this is 4.5 abortions for every 100 women aged 15 to 49. While there are no accurate statistics, it is believed that between 2000 and 2002 there were between 132,000 and 160,000 abortions in the country.  To circumvent legal problems, some women seek an unsafe abortion and many end up injured from it, afterward necessitating hospitalization. Once hospitalized, a woman may be reported to the police and imprisoned.

The illegality of therapeutic abortion extends to cases of tubal or ectopic pregnancy. Although embryos implanted in the fallopian tube cannot survive, the law requires waiting until the final stage of pregnancy before termination, risking the woman’s health and raising the probability of the loss of a fallopian tube.
Source:  WIKI

If legality is not the determining factor, what drives the rates at which abortions occur in a given country?

Is your goal honestly to reduce or eliminate abortions? If it is, then there are some steps that you can take that will make a difference because even if you are someday victorious in making abortion illegal in the USA, you still will not have made any  appreciable difference in the rate of abortions that are performed in this nation.

This is the first step to reducing abortions:  Find the answer to what factors drive the rates at which abortions occur in a given country.  Then work to reduce and perhaps even eliminate those factors.

Alan Grayson, although one of my favorite people in the House of Representatives, displayed his own version of what I call the Homer Simpson/John Wayne problem solving methodology on The Ed Show last night.  However, I’ll let him off with a hand slap this time because he provided  yet another wake up call for the majority of Americans on the economy.

To quote Representative Grayson:

“Wall Street steals from us. [Yes they do and this is not news to the vast majority of us. Those of us who have any sense and care about preserving democracy have moved our assets to local community banks and credit unions and are investing in our local communities--not Wall Street stock.]

In the last 18 months of the Bush Administration, we lost $12 trillion of our nation’s net worth.  That’s $40,000 for every man, woman and child in the USA. Twenty percent of our nation’s wealth that we had accumulated over the course of 200 years was gone in 18 months.

Wall Street continues to play the game of heads I win and tails you lose.  When they win, they keep it.  When they lose, you lose and you refers to the American people.” [Even though we have changed administrations and now have a Democratic administration, the heist continues and our President just a day or so ago congratulated the leading crooks on their take .]

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Representative Grayson diminished  his good works when he suggested that we need to find the culprits and punish them.  [Not that I'm beneath punishing the guilty.] We know who the culprits are, or at least most of them:  Congress who allowed and continue to allow this to happen, George Bush and now Barack Obama, Lloyd Blankfein, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Jamie Dimon,  and others.

“Finding the Culprits and punishing them” will never work as a problem solving approach because such an approach does not treat the root cause of the problem:  The culprits are the ones in charge! They are the ones passing the laws that enable crooks to do what they do. Many of them have been in Washington for 20 or 30 years as professional politicians.

If we want change, we are going to have to change who we send to Washington.  Americans are going to have to vote for other ordinary citizen candidates like me who are not beholding to EITHER party who will grow the very few in Congress who are standing up in outrage to what is being done to the American people.

In this mid-term election we can install a few citizen candidates  and then a few more in 2012.  By then we may be able to see real change and not more of the same as we are seeing now.  It only takes a few good people standing up and speaking the truth to turn the tide.

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We the people do not have the power to punish the culprits.  We do have the power of the vote to replace the officials in Washington with elected officials who will fix the broken system that enables Wall Street crooks to rob our nation.

It’s your vote.  It’s your stone against the Goliath of corruption in Washington.  Use it wisely and give a stone to another citizen by helping them to register to vote and telling them how important it is–not only for our nation, but for them and their family.

If each person in the Third District would either register to vote or help just one more person to register to vote, we would be taking one giant step for democracy and a rule of the true majority.

LET’S CHANGE CONGRESS BY CHANGING WHO WE SEND TO CONGRESS.

When it comes to mechanical devices, Americans are great problem solvers, but when it comes to solving social problems, the punitive strategy that we most often follow reminds me of one that a Homer Simpson/John Wayne clone would advocate:

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The Homer Simpson/John Wayne Problem Solving Strategy

1. Find the people  responsible, or at least a scapegoat to blame.

2. Put them in jail.  Kill them on the spot  if they have been designated as “the enemy” by a US President or Congress,  or bomb entire nations like Syria off the face of the earth, never mind that you would take most of Israel with them as well as other chunks of the Middle East.  Never mind that such nuclear warfare would change the climate conditions in the area for generations to come.

3. Problem solved. [But of course such a strategy is actually only the treatment of one symptom that may have been identified and the "solution" not only exacerbates the underlying problem, it often creates even more problems.]

The Homer Simpson/John Wayne solution is a dysfunctional problem solving strategy and we need to develop better and more successful models for solving our social problems.

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It does not seem to be a plus in our favor that we have 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s population in prison.  This is in part a reflection of our Homer Simpson approach to problem solving. It is also a reflection of what happens when social institutions are privatized and run for profit.

Here is one example of problem multiplication as opposed to problem solving by privatizing social institutions:

5,000 juveniles were tried and 2,000 were found “guilty” by two judges in Pennsylvania who received kickbacks from the builders and owners of private prison facilities where these youngsters were sent. The two judges pleaded guilty in a stunning case of greed and corruption that is still unfolding. Judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan received $2.6 million in kickbacks while imprisoning children who often had no access to a lawyer.

$2.6 million in kickbacks for destroying the lives of innocent children. This is what happens when we allow social institutions to be ruled by the bottom line of corporate privatization.

And who can say at what cost just this one incident will be to the American taxpayers over the long haul?  We have no idea beyond the fact that it most likely will be a great deal more than the backroom deals that the prison corporation made with these two judges.

The bottom line is a short-sighted and greedy viewpoint that rarely encompasses future consequences beyond the next quarter.