Presentation to Verde Valley Leadership training – April 25, 2008
A 20 minute presentation followed by a panel discussion with Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians represented
Mike Cosentino – speaking for Democrats of the Verde Valley I need to pay homage to Bill Timberman, member of DOVV for his invaluable help with this.
Thanks for the invitation. I came to Arizona courtesy of the USAF in 1969 stationed at Luke, AFB near Phoenix and never left except for a tour of duty in South Korea. I was in Korea one Friday in May 1972 and in Sedona, Arizona on the following Monday. I had just received admission to Northern Arizona University from which I eventually earned a BA and an MA. I taught Reading to Navajos in Page Arizona and on other locations on that res before teaching and administering the reading program 24 years at Mingus Union High School.
I raised three children in the Verde Valley. I have had over 30 jobs, half blue collar and half in education, which, in Arizona, is also treated as blue collar labor. Many of those jobs were part time since I have only two education employers in 28 years of teaching.
We were told to spend 5 minutes talking about ourselves and how we became leaders of our organizations. I am not sure I know the answer to that and I am done talking about myself.
Let me get right to the issues I came to talk about.
I can say it all right here: a comparison:
When invited to a barn-raising, A Republican brings a cost-plus contract and a lawyer. A Libertarian brings a bullhorn and book of slogans. A Democrat brings a hammer, a bag of nails, and a cooler of beer.
So, let me expand on that.
The following is from “Where have all the leaders gone?” Lee Iacocca’s 2007 book of the same name.
Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course."
Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the Titanic.
I have left out several expletives already from Iacocca.
I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don't need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I've had enough. How about you?
I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have.
My friends tell me to calm down. They say, "Lee, you're eighty-two years old. Leave the rage to the young people." I'd love to—as soon as I can pry them away from their iPods for five seconds and get them to pay attention. I'm going to speak up because it's my patriotic duty.
My 32 yr old son calls the parties “demikins” and republicats” He sees no difference in the parties.
Well, son,… here is the difference and why I belong to the dems.
From Alan Wolfe (mostly), political science prof at Boston Univ.:
What’s the difference in the parties?
Liberals think of conservatives as potential future allies; conservatives treat liberals as unworthy of recognition. Liberals believe that policies ought to be judged against an independent ideal such as human welfare or the greatest good for the greatest number; conservatives evaluate policies by whether they advance their conservative causes. Liberals instinctively want to dampen passions; conservatives are bent on inflaming them. Just look at Fox News or talk radio that, even with Air America, is according the NAB, 90 percent conservative. Liberals think there is a third way between liberalism and conservatism; conservatives believe that anyone who is not a conservative is a liberal. Liberals want to put boundaries on the political by claiming that individuals have certain rights that no government can take away; conservatives argue that in cases of emergency – and conservatives always find cases of emergency -- the reach and capacity of the state cannot be challenged.
Liberals think of politics as a means; conservatives as an end. Politics, for liberals, stops at the water's edge; for conservatives, politics never stops
Liberals, properly speaking, can never be political. Liberals tend to be optimistic about human nature, whereas "all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil."
conservatives win nearly all of their political battles with liberals because they are the only force in America that is truly political. From the 2000 presidential election to Congressional redistricting in Texas to the methods used to pass Medicare reform, conservatives like Tom DeLay and Karl Rove have indeed triumphed because they have left the impression that nothing will stop them. Liberals cannot do that. There is, for liberals, always something as important, if not more important, than victory, whether it be procedural integrity, historical precedent, or consequences for future generations.
Liberals believe in the possibility of neutral rules that can mediate between conflicting positions, but to Republicans, there is no such neutrality, since any rule -- even an ostensibly fair one -- merely represents the victory of one political faction over another.
Liberals, in a word, are uncomfortable around power, and, because they are, they criticize politics more than they engage in it. It is why conservative get elected, the liberals stay home too full of self righteous superiority to bother is vote or too convinced it does not matter, the whole system is rigged anyway.
See the work of U of A prof Ted Downing, a world wide expert on rigged elections.
The hope Wolfe offers is this: With this George Bush/Karl Rove GOP they stand against not only liberals but America's historic liberal heritage. Their power above all tactics may help them in the short run; conservative slash-and-burn rhetoric and no-holds-barred partisanship are so unusual in our moderately consensual political system that they have recently gotten far out of the sheer element of surprise, leaving the news media without a vocabulary for describing their ruthlessness and liberals without a strategy for stopping their designs. But the same extremist approach to politics could also harm them if a traditional American concern with checks and balances and limits on political power comes back into fashion.
Search hard enough and you might find a pundit who believes what George W. Bush believes, which is that history will redeem his administration. But from just about everyone else, on the right as vehemently as on the left, the verdict has been rolling in: This administration, if not the worst in American history, will soon find itself in the final four.
About the only failure more pronounced than the president's has been the graft-filled plunder of GOP lawmakers--at least according to opinion polls, which in May gave the GOP-controlled Congress favorability ratings in the low 20s, about 10 points lower than the president's. This does not necessarily translate into electoral Armageddon; redistricting and other incumbency-protection devices help protect against that.
Pundits say that what worked in 2000 and 2004, getting working people to vote against there own self interest by labeling liberals as anti-family- anti gun and pro gay marriage will not cause people to ignore the economy, the corruption, the denial of most of the bill of rights, the separation of powers including Bush’s 750 “signing statements attached to the laws passed by congress that, basically, say that the executive branch does not have to follow those laws.
Back to Iacocca for a minute – he says:
So here's where we stand. We're immersed in a bloody war with no plan
for winning and no plan for leaving. We're running the biggest deficit
in the history of the country. We're losing the manufacturing edge to Asia,
while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care
costs. Gas prices are skyrocketing, and nobody in power has a coherent
energy policy. Our schools are in trouble. Our borders are like sieves.
The middle class is being squeezed every which way These are times
that cry out for leadership. But when you look around, you've got to
ask: 'Where have all the leaders gone?' Where are the curious, creative
communicators? Where are the people of character, courage, conviction,
omnipotence, and common sense?
I may be a sucker for alliteration, but I think you get the point. Name
me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us
take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo?
We've spent billions of dollars building a huge new bureaucracy, and all
we know how to do is react to things that have already happened.
Name me one leader who emerged from the crisis of Hurricane Katrina .
Congress has yet to spend a single day evaluating the response to the
hurricane, or demanding accountability for the decisions that were made
in the crucial hours after the storm.
Everyone's hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping it doesn't happen
again. Now, that's just crazy. Storms happen. Deal with it. Make a plan.
Figure out what you're going to do the next time.
Name me an industry leader who is thinking creatively about how we can
restore our competitive edge in manufacturing. Who would have believed
that there could ever be a time when 'The Big Three' referred to
Japanese car companies? How did this happen, and more important, what are we
going to do about it?
Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down
the debt, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem.
But these are the crises that are eating away at our country and milking the middle class dry, Iacocca says.
What is everybody – politicians - so afraid of? That some bonehead on Fox News will call them a name? Give me a break. Why don't you guys show some spine for a change?
The truth is that some bonehead on Fox news will almost certainly call him or her a name if they propose anything outside the conservative agenda. Alaexandar de Tocquiville said, “To expose of fool, rent him a hall.” Even Fox news audiences eventually get the idea when every the pretense of impartiality always ends with personal attacks or off topic diversions from the issue.
Back to personal:
I am here speaking to you today, as the direct product of what conservatives have called one of the biggest government giveaway’s in the last century- The GI Bill. I am one of two million mostly men who received educations through this program. I left Korea on a Friday and was standing on a corner in Sedona on Monday with a letter granting me $178.00 a month to go to school and the want ads that said the USFS would pay $4.95 per hour for a job at the Brewer Road facility. For the next four years I worked all over Sedona including three seasons at Junipine bringing in 3 apple crops. When owners Tom and Joann Anderson finally gave up taking $25K of fruit off of a million dollar piece of land a few years later. I was a proud volunteer member of the Sedona-Oak Creek Fire Department. In 1980 I joined the Arizona Army National Guard and was in until 1987 to help pay back my student loans.
Someone did the math…the government has been paid back in increased taxes thousands of times since this WWII - Viet Nam era GI Bill ended in 1975, thanks to this investment in its people. Not to count, and this is even more important to a democrat, the enhanced quality of life for those vets and their families in the last 60 years.
Chance for activism:
Last week Democrats introduced the 21st Century G.I. Bill to overhaul the outdated legislation that doesn't provide our veterans real access to education. Republicans have introduced a watered-down version of this bill in the Senate. They're trying to undermine real reform of the G.I. Bill.
http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=m9kpM7XM2LzWBnKUfSVtoxN2s1evAjdL
Tell them to cosponsor the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008 in the Emergency War Supplemental, not any watered-down reform.
Democrats are fighting for veterans by giving them real support. Rep. Harry Mitchell (D-AZ) and Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) have introduced HR5740, the Post-9/11 Veterans Education Assistance Act, in the House and Senate and it already has this level of support:
334 cosponsors in the House
57 cosponsors in the Senate
Here's what the 21st Century G.I. Bill will do:
• Benefits for tuition, housing, and books for up to 36 months of education for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans
• 15 years to use the benefits after leaving the military
• For more expensive schools, the government will match dollar for dollar voluntary contributions from the school to cover a veteran's tuition above the 21st Century G.I. Bill's maximum tuition assistance level
In Closing:
The libertarian might say that I want to steal his money, and create the nanny-state, which tells him that he can't ride a motorcycle without a helmet, etc and, somehow, the conservative media equates this with the Democrats concerns' about civil rights, environmental preservation, respect for the principle of a commons which encourages all men to prosper and contribute regardless of their station. What you have now is the privatization of profits and socialization of risk, which leads to disaster. Explain what that means by pointing to the Bear-Sterns bailout or welfare for billionaires. Compare it to the Republicans' Welfare Queen myth.
A friend of mine, a Republican said, “it is too hard to be a democrat. “You guys worry about everyone…the poor, the homeless, college educations. Leave all that to mother Teresa.”
Conservatives are not bothered by injustice because they recognize that politics means maximizing your side's advantages, not giving them away. If unity can be achieved only by repressing dissent, even at risk of violating the rule of law, that is how conservatives will achieve it.
The conservative will probably attack from the national security standpoint: a) you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs (Mr. tough guy thinks 600K Iraqi dead can be likened to eggs) and b) The Constitution isn't a suicide pact. (These people want to kill us. Why get all weepy if we torture a bunch of them? Why shouldn't we spy on the weak sister anti-war folks who are crippling our fighting spirit?)
Please people. We do not need to give up the country Iacocca and the rest of us knew and loved because of terror threats. The Soviet Union had nuclear weapons, not to mention 20,000 tanks and 8,000,000 million men on the German border for more than 40 years, and we didn't torture anybody. We also had an active Communist Party in the U.S. and we still didn't think we needed to listen to everybody's telephone conversations and read their mail without court orders or warrants, or imprison them without recourse to Habeas Corpus -- ALL of which we do today.
Government exists to do for the public what private interests will not or cannot, is fundamental. Capitalism is excellent at creating wealth, but terrible at distributing it. The taxation necessary to support the Democrats' vision of government isn't burdensome if you consider the costs exacted by the alternative -- an unhealthy and unbalanced society -- which you always get when you short things like education, health care, child welfare, etc. Why, exactly have we traded all of this -- our birthright, really -- for a military which since the end of the cold war has had no reason to exist on the scale it does exist except for trumped-up reasons such as Islamofascism. This oversized military is beggaring us, and leading us into world-wide conflicts which we don't need to fight. Without it, we could have a country which would once again be the envy of the world.
Spending what a VV resident makes in one year every day equals 9,125,000. Contnue that level of spending, everyday for over 100 years, and you get to $1billion
273,750,000 912,500,000
Sources:
From Wikipedia
Alan Wolfe is a political scientist and a sociologist and is currently on the faculty of Boston College and serves as director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Future of American Democracy Foundation[1], a nonprofit, nonpartisan foundation in partnership with Yale University Press and the Yale Center for International and Area Studies[2], "dedicated to research and education aimed at renewing and sustaining the historic vision of American democracy". He received a B.S. from Temple University in 1963 and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. He has honorary degrees from Loyola College in Maryland and St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia.
Wolfe has written many articles and books about the American people's political and religious views, including:
• One Nation, After All (1998)
• Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice (2001),
• The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Practice our Faith (2003).
• Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What it Needs to Do to Recover It (Princeton University Press, 2005)
• Does American Democracy Still Work? (Yale University Press, 2006)
Lido Anthony "Lee" Iacocca (born October 15, 1924) is an American industrialist most commonly known for his revival of the Chrysler Corporation in the 1980s[1], serving as President and CEO from 1978 and additionally as chairman from 1979, until his retirement at the end of 1992. Among the most widely recognized businessmen in the world, he was a passionate advocate of U.S. business exports during the 1980s. He is the author or co-author of several books, including Iacocca: An Autobiography (with William Novak), and Where have all the Leaders Gone?
Mike Cosentino 5/7/2008
What Mr. Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that we're not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we're living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: the faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern.We need your help. DOVV can and does make a difference in our state and in the national elections. But I am worried about our future.