Don’t get me started: Union Busting

As I watch events in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and other states, taking note of the attempts by Republican and some Democratic governors, legislators, and more than a few local governments to undermine organized labor, I see two noteworthy trends of truly remarkable stupidity taking an even deeper hold on this country.

Before I get into that, however, let me clarify my personal feelings about unions. I have never belonged to a labor union, have never wanted to belong to a labor union, have never seen or heard of a labor union I particularly liked. The problem with labor unions is that they became big business and—just like big business—they started thinking they were about money instead of about people, products and services.

That being said, labor unions had their uses and, thanks to the way big business is running things, their time will come again. But big business is just part of the problem, and I’ll get to them later.

First, however, I want to tell every non-management blue, white and no-collar worker in America who wants to see public employees lose their bargaining rights or take cuts in pay or benefits: you are shooting yourselves in the foot!

It’s not bad enough that you sit idly by while one elected body after another gives more and bigger tax breaks to corporations and wealthy business owners; or that you’re so forgetful as to zone-out the obscene profits and the outrageous pay, benefits and bonuses of the leaders of one major industry after another; or that it’s our tax dollars that went to bail out so many of those businesses while we lost our homes and jobs; nor is it that you've twiddled your voting levers for the trickle-down Reagonomists who promised us new jobs for over a quarter century while shipping our old jobs overseas—noo-oo-oo, you have to clamor for the last bastion of decent pay and labor rights to be brought low so that there is nothing left to show for American labor's century-long struggle.

Are you out of your minds? Do you think “misery loves company” is actually a functional employment plan?

On top of that, these are the people that work for us. Do you want the cheapest police officers, fire fighters, teachers, EMTs, dam operators and bridge builders that money can buy? ‘Cause I sure as heck don’t. I want the best people working for me.

Besides, it's not that public employees make so much money, it's that private sector pay scales have fallen so far behind over the last 35 years; American workers had to shift to borrowing money as their paychecks shrank in relation to business expansion. When I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, it didn't take two working parents to provide a good home and private parochial school for four kids. Now it's the exception when both parents don't work, and still quality of life suffers; American workers today put in more hours annually than they did 30 years ago.

Get your act together. You’re being sold a load of swine swizzle and you seem to like the smell.

As for big business, your problem is that you think it’s all about money. It isn’t, but you know what? It’s a subtle topic, I’m going to have to work very hard to make it simple enough for you to understand and, right now I’m tired, and I couldn’t care less.

What a bunch of ... ah, the heck with it!

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You’re not going to like this

Here are a few policies I think we should pursue to help reduce the federal deficit.

ð  Phase out, over the next 20 years, at 5% increments each year, the federal tax deduction for home financing (mortgage) interest.

ð  Discontinue all home mortgage/financing deductions for new instruments beginning in five years.

ð  Phase out, over the next 10 years, at 10% increments each year, all federal farm and agricultural subsidies, not subject to renewal or replacement for five years.

ð  Sunset all other federal subsidies annually, subject to specific, itemized renewal.

ð  Immediately discontinue federal subsidies, tax exemptions and deductions for all oil, gas, and coal exploration, extraction, production, refining, distribution, marketing, management or other application of any kind.

ð  Increase, permanently, the federal highway fuel tax by 5% for each of the next two years; reserve for transportation use.

ð  Set corporate federal income tax rates to coincide with married-couple tax rates.

ð  Make all individual and (for-profit) corporate income, including all benefits, bonuses, contributions, discounts, stock options, personal perks and the like, subject to federal income taxes beginning at the federal poverty level plus one dollar (fpl+$1). No exclusions; this means Social Security retirement and disability and other now-exempt incomes.

ð  In conjunction, revamp the tax code with a lowest rate of 10% and a highest rate of 33%, the latter for income in excess of $1.5 million; graduated in an exponential curve with gradients not to exceed $500.

ð  Tax carbon emissions.

And that’s just for starters.

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If you're so smart, why ain't you intelligent?

Earlier this week, I observed an e-free-for-all on the New York Times (NewYorkTimes.com) web site regarding race, intelligence and conservatism versus liberalism. Many readers were incensed by an article, “Social Scientist Sees Bias Within,” and the subsequent comments by other readers. It was quite the feeding frenzy. Unfortunately, even though I read the article before 8 AM, I was too late to join in, as the comments, having already reached the 500 mark, were closed. I joined the also-rans, sending an e-mail to the hard copy Times, which may or may not be printed. I did not join the general debate, but instead criticized the methodology of the research, mostly anecdotal, cited in the article.

But I do want to talk about intelligence here.

As you may be aware, intelligence testing has gathered itself some controversy in recent decades, with special concerns over how disparate scores often are when looked at in terms of race. Some social scientists have been caught up in this controversy as a result of their research, being demonized for the results that they compiled.

Apologists have suggested that there are different types of intelligence, by way of explaining some of the racial divides. This has caused other controversies in kind.

Personally, I think the problem is the supposed concept of "intelligence."

Intelligence is an arbitrary value. In other words, we—or some of us, somewhere, sometime—made it up. We decided what was intelligent and what was not. And whoever it was that decided those things had very specific reasons of their own for making those decisions. He or she was not handed the first IQ test on a mountain top from a burning bush. No, those people simply decided what they, and we, were going to call intelligence.

Here’s what I think: forget intelligence. I think the important factor is cognition. Cognition, the ability to receive, process and apply information, including such functions as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.

And people receive, process and apply information in quite a variety of ways. I’ll give you two personal examples.

I hate reading directions and instructions. My normal approach to any new task is to take a quick glance at the directions, give them a exasperated “Huh?” and then proceed to attempt the task until I run into trouble. At that point I can look at that part of the instructions and have a much clearer understanding of what the heck they’re talking about. But I know many people who can sit down and read the instruction manual and then get right down to it. I’m more of a “Help screen” type of guy. Other folks much prefer to see a diagram than written instructions. Still others do better when they see a demonstration.

I think that these are different ways of receiving and processing information. Different ways because our brains are different, though still roughly categorized because our sensory receptors are of finite variety.

Another example: My daughter can think in math—almost like it’s another language. Me, I always got good grades in math, but it was always a chore. My daughter enjoys math. Go figure. She was even considering getting a teaching degree so she could teach math, but then decided on a music major instead. Well, guess what. Turns out math and music are just two facets of the same general concept. Hey, don’t ask me to explain it; I just read it somewhere. Not surprisingly, the music my daughter likes to play on her tenor saxophone is a very technical style of jazz, unlike any that I was familiar with prior to attending her recitals. She says it is very math based. That didn’t surprise me in the least. My type of jazz is Chuck Mangione; she, however, tends not to share my enthusiam.

So my daughter and I, while both successful in school, still have some very different ways of slicing and dicing the world around us. If we were to go head-to-head in a math challenge, she’d wipe the floor with me. In social sciences, I think I might have the upper hand. Our brains are just different enough that we end up with different strengths.

But here’s the thing: she chose to become a music professional, while I spent my career mostly in various types of social, health and service industries. In other words, we did what we were good at. We found comfort zones, and success, in pursuits that took best advantage of how our brains processed information. One wasn’t better than the other, simply different.

I think that’s a key to understanding cognition as opposed to intelligence. There may be some racial differences, but I would suggest that they are differences in cognition. Further, I would suggest that these differences may have evolved, to a large degree, based on the specific demands of living in various environments or have been self-selecting due to preferences of associating with, literally, like-minded folks. This is a somewhat simplistic explanation for the actual evolutionary processes involved, but I hope you catch my drift.

Intelligence is arbitrary. Cognition is intrinsic.

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To put a name to it

I need a systemic nomenclature, dedicated terms to help clarify my thinking, especially as it relates to the thought processes described in my last two posts.

We'll start with the basics: names for the two opposed positions on my recent subject continuum.

I have researched some standard terms: liberal, conservative, progressive, reactionary, socialist, fascist and several more in the same vein. Turns out that various socio-political philosophies have mixed and matched these terms for the past few centuries; pinning down a consistent meaning is a task that seems beyond me, anyway.

I decided to go with a couple of other terms. Though they, too, have been used in socio-political contexts, it has not been extensively so in recent decades. These terms have the additional advantage of speaking directly to the continuum of emotional response to which I have alluded over the past two weeks, that of the degree of comfort with or acceptance of change and uncertainty.

The terms I have determined to use are these: reform and resistance. I’ll define these terms here, as I intend to use them. I will also open a new page, “Glossary,” linked on the right under the Pages heading.

Reform: a preference for change in policies and practices that will, from this perspective, be the approach more likely to improve socio-economic conditions.

Resistance: a preference for the status quo or for a re-establishment of ultimately traditional former policies and practices that, from this perspective, are more likely to improve socio-economic conditions.

Let’s call those definitions works-in-progress. I suspect already that they will need further development and clarification. I will update the definitions on the Glossary page and will probably preserve the revisions there for editorial reference.

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