Author Archives: John Flannery

The Best Legislature Money Can Buy

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giftMoneyWhy should our state legislators in the General Assembly get any gifts at all?

Don’t we pay them enough already?

If we don’t pay them enough, then we should raise their salaries, if we think they deserve more, but, otherwise, they shouldn’t get any gifts from high-paid lobbyists and independent operators seeking legislative or executive branch “favors.”

Former Governor Bob McDonnell plainly couldn’t afford to serve as Governor, given his “unconscionable” credit card debt, and certainly not without private gifts to cover his expenses.

Legislators and executives who can’t afford to serve without betraying the public’s trust may not “serve” at all. Continue reading →

Birth Control Is Pro-Life

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Population_explosion_birth_controlBirth control is pro-life.

Birth control means we have the children we want, that we can afford to raise and care for, and that we are bearing those children we can sustain.

There is an impulse in this nation to reproduce children without regard for whether the children are wanted or sustainable.

That’s why we have 400,000 children in this nation in foster and state homes. Half of these children in foster care have chronic medical problems. Those who age out of foster care endure homelessness, poor health, unemployment, incarceration and worse.

In response to a question online, “Should pro-life activists be morally obligated to adopt, love and provide for a ‘saved child’ currently living in state care,” 71% responded that they feel no obligation to adopt any unwanted child themselves.

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Drinking Water – wasted, polluted, and at risk

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Water_faucetWe’ve all been taught that we are mostly made of water, how we need it to live, to drink, to clean, to grow anything we eat, to nourish the trees that produce the air we breathe, and yet our world right down to the county level where we live fails to protect this precious life resource – like we could survive without water.

300,000 men, women and children in West Virginia found that the water in their home faucets from the Elk River made them ill and smelled something like licorice.  It was the scent of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol.  A negligent coal mining company, Freedom Industries, earning 30 million dollars last year, had 13 tanks all sixty years old and one 35,000 gallon tank leaked 7,500 gallons of this chemical through cracks in the containment wall into the Elk River. Incidentally, the waste water treatment plant’s intake pipe took in the tainted water even after it had notice of the chemical spill, and pumped it out to its customers.  Needless to say, the treatment had not removed the chemical waste.

In Virginia, on January 8, 2014, State Senator Charles W. Carrico, Sr. (R-40SD), perhaps eager to mimic West Virginia’s careless regulatory system, offered a bill, SB 217, in the General Assembly that, if it passes, shall increase the likelihood that we’ll have coal waste in our rivers polluting our drinking water.  Continue reading →

Saving For A “Rainy Day” – Not Really!

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Saving for a “rainy day” (Photo by John P. Flannery)

Saving for a “rainy day” (Photo by John P. Flannery)

A recent poll said that 40% of our friends and neighbors have made their New Year’s resolution – to save more – in savings accounts, automatic transfers, savings bonds, and certificates of deposit.

We once did save at a decent rate.  Our national saving rate was 12.2% in November 1981.  But the rate fell like a stone starting in 1982 and went as low as less than 1% a number of times between 2000 and 2010.  Easy credit meant you didn’t have to save – so some wrongly thought.

The rate climbed back up when the 2008 recession hit, going from 1.3% in January 2008 to 4.2% in December of 2009.

The latest report from the U.S. Department of Commerce, from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, says our current rate of savings is an anemic 4.2%.

The dilemma for families that want to save is that they likely owe in debt at a higher interest rate than what they can get saving their money.  From 1990 to 2008, the nation’s citizens were convinced, Benjamin Franklin’s advice to the contrary notwithstanding, that being a borrower was not so bad.  Unfortunately, if a nation’s citizens don’t save, then the nation has to borrow from other nation-states who do save. Continue reading →

Our Toxic Public Dialogue

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No one should admire the exploitation movie headlining Leonardo DiCaprio as “the Wolf of Wall Street” who holds a false fixed grin for three hours, selling us, inviting us to share the life of a greedy, sex-crazed sociopathic stockbroker, who dupes naïve middle class investors to buy worthless stocks so that DiCaprio’s character can live in a mansion, and have a helicopter, trophy wife, yacht, prostitutes galore, countless lines of coke, morphine, and endless quantities of Quaaludes.

One movie reviewer claimed the movie was “lethally hilarious.”

There’s nothing “hilarious” about porn, drug addiction, prostitution and marathon boiler rooms stealing from hard-working middle class “marks,” all the time glorifying the thugs in suits that laugh at their off-camera victims.  This movie is not “ordinary” movie fare; its aim is unrelenting painful excess that some mistake for the American dream.

The lead FBI agent who pursues DiCaprio’s criminal character, is featured in one of the movie’s final scenes, a disparaging setting, riding anonymously home on the Manhattan IRT with other working “stiffs” – underscoring DiCaprio’s earlier accusation in the flick that the Agent led a sorry life riding the subway home to an ugly wife (whom DiCaprio didn’t know to describe) while DiCaprio stood high and mighty on the deck of his lily white yacht throwing greenbacks at the agent.  Continue reading →

Our Closed Political System

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Katherine Clark special election photo from the Boston Globe.

Katherine Clark special election – photo Boston Globe.

We throw around the word “democracy” when we are in fact a “republic,” meaning that we vote for who “represents” us.

The glaring defect in this young republic is that this vote we have is less than meets the eye – it is a forced choice among carefully chosen candidates in a closed system.

We need to strike the choke points that bar our participation and dilute our vote.

First, a very few people decide who runs for office; this has got to change. 

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A Magical Time!

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German and British Troops together in No Man’s Land

German and British Troops together in No Man’s Land

The seasonal commercial onslaught notwithstanding, this is a magical time of the year, full of family, warmth, intimacy, compassion, togetherness, efforts to find one another, and abundant good will.

It has always been so, or so it seems, as the light of the sun is reborn, the rays shining longer day by day, a time when we renew ourselves from each other, resolving that for the next year, in the New Year, we will do things differently, reform ourselves but also perfect how we can deal better with each other.

While many of us watch film classics of the season about giving and risking for others, about the magic and miracle that is this holiday season, we don’t always appreciate the lesson.

99 years ago, somewhere in Flanders, in the Northern region of Belgium, there was singing in watery and flooded muddy pastures and trenches.

Some say guttural voices were first heard in German, singing, “O Tannenbaum,” and then other voices were heard in the King’s English, singing “The First Noel,” but the voices were conjoined when, in Latin, known to Germans and British alike, they could all sing together the familiar words, “Adeste Fidelis, laeti triumphantes.”

World War I had been underway for four months and it had wrongly been anticipated at the outset of the war, that it would all be over in time for Christmas.  But it wasn’t.

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A Bare Minimum

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The minimum hourly wage

The minimum hourly wage

We are against slavery.

So, how little in wages may we pay so that we are not some latter day variant of the old South’s peculiar institution?

Are we going to pay so paltry an hourly wage that someone has to force an employer to do the right thing – to pay a decent wage?

The answer is yes – that’s exactly what we’ve had to do, and now the established “minimum” is itself too little.

This nation has an unflattering history of employers taking advantage of workers unfairly.

Children were forced to work in sweat shops under such harsh conditions that we had to outlaw this child abuse.

Workers were in harness for so many hours, they’d drop, and we had to establish legislative standards limiting how long an employer could force one to work.

There have also always been employers who paid too little for an hour of work.

We talk about compassion, but too many employers scrimp on what they pay a worker, take advantage of their desperation, increase their profits at the expense of a worker’s misery, by denying him a decent wage. 

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Enough Sniping at Health Care

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ACA_logoEvery time in every nation throughout history we have had those hold-fast sniveling snipers who cower at advances that favor others because they “got theirs.”

We are now undergoing the latest attack against the daunting national effort to insure health care insurance for millions of Americans who have none and who will pay for it out of their own pocket (unless they are too poor).

9.2 Million Americans participate in a single payer system called Tricare that provides health care for service men and women.  Medicare, another single payer system, provides for anyone over 65.  Others have employer-sponsored health insurance coverage, and there is small-group and individual insurance coverage.  But many millions more have no insurance at all.  There are those too poor to afford insurance or health care; the emergency room is their sole source of health care.

Still we have those who decry the need for an Affordable Care Act – for “Obamacare.”

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Black Friday – “Blunted Conscience”?

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Black_Friday_bright“I’m having 21 over for Thanksgiving dinner,” said Evelyn Newlin, with her husband Harry looking on, “I’m doing the cooking, and there will be my 4 sons, my daughter, and 9 grand-children.”

More often than not, if you ask someone, they’ll tell you that Thanksgiving is about family, friends, getting-togetherness, love, and affection.

How do we reconcile our loving affection for family on a Thursday with the impulse to elbow one another to buy what we don’t really need at all — on “Black Friday?”

Continue reading →