Catching up on the Mail

Although there is a "comment" feature to this blog people seem to want to respond by email. No Problemo. But really...

So Representative Wingard was kind enough to respond to my quoting the union official about the use of the rainy day fund. He wrote:

"Mr. Uren:

The Democrats control the House and Senate in this State. They and they alone decide whether or not we use the Rainy Day Fund money. Your union organizer has you focused on the wrong party. Democrats currently run this state.

Rep. Matt Wingard"

So I am pleased that Representative Wingard is in favor of using the rainy day fund to tide over state employees and schools and apologize to anyone I might have misled (the union will have to do its own apologizing) for associating Representative Wingard with "Republicans."

And the same to Senator Kruse...

Dear William,

You have that wrong. The republicans have been advocating for the use of the rainy day funds for months. It has been the Governor and the democrats, but mostly the Governor who have been saying no. In fact the Governor said he would veto any bill spending any of the rainy day fund.

Sincerely,

Senator Jeff Kruse

I hope they will write me soon and let me know how they feel about the NW Republican website's lying about the Employee Fair Choice Act, too.

At the bottom...comment...

So I haven't heard from the union organizer...about this...where do we suppose she got her information?

Another Big Lie in the Relentless Class War on the Middle Class

You have to admire their nerve. The NW Republican website is the worst commercial ever for free speech and is a prime example of why the Greeks and our Founders had it right when they feared factions and tyrannical government based on democracy.

When you step out of the picture--and trust me some day you will be joining me "out of the picture"--you'll see what a shocking irony it is that there is a now a political party called "Republican" that has no idea what a republic is. Well, maybe they do and cynically use the name, but I rather think that they are hiding something that they don't know anything about, to begin with.

This party of republicans (and if you stop long enough to reflect you'll realize that those two words are in contradiction to one another) has ruled and is attempting to regain power, with bankroll democracy.

They spend vast amounts of money to manipulate, brainwash, condition and confuse people so that they either don't vote or vote against their own interests. They have waged a class war against the middle class for more than 40 years now and they aren't about to quit now. They have successfully convinced the American middle class to commit mass suicide. Smart Republicans, like Mark Hannah, understood that a strong middle class...never mind. Another story, for later, maybe.

The NW Republican is but one small, home grown example of how this works (for "writ large" look at Rupert Murdock). Take this website's Big Lie Piece about the Employee Free Choice Act. This legislation, they say, will take a way the "right to a secret ballot" in the process of workers choosing whether or not to be part of a union. It does not do that, at all, and if you don't believe that go here, or here, or here. Or do your own Google search. If I am lyin' I'm dyin'.

So it's untrue. Yet the NW Republican website repeats the lie.

A great line I saw on on this is that business has been claiming that union membership has been declining for years--proving that workers don't want unions. Yet a bill comes along that would provide some balance against the power businesses have to stop union organizing and business has gone completely off of the farm with fear and dire warnings of...of..."socialism" and the loss of the "sacred" right to a secret ballot.

(You want to know about socialism? Google "single tax." You'll be as glad as I am that I failed that that one!)

So, if workers don't want unions how come the hysteria over the non-loss of the "sacred" secret ballot?

(And frankly the only thing "sacred" to Republicans is keeping secret the fact that the real ballots--the ones that really count in getting elected and running the state and the county--are dollars contributed)

Why is it necessary to lie about doing away with the secret ballot to defeat the enhanced ability for workers to get something they "don't want?"

The idea is to repeat this lie so often that middle class people (or people who once were middle class or people who would like to be middle class) will be convinced that it's true.

The only thing sadder than to see such a blatant lack of integrity on the part of the NW Republican is the numbing realization that so many people are going to believe it's true.

The people behind the NW Oregonian web page should be ashamed of themselves. But I don't know they are capable of shame. It appears to me that their corrupt ways have finally made them blind.

Had enough, Oregon?

Enough is Enough in Oregon?

When?

a great one liner

I heard a union organizer say the other day that some Republicans in the Oregon legislature are hesitant to use the "rainy day" fund to help get through the next year or so.

You are looking at cuts in the school year, big increases in tuition as state schools, massive cuts in the state workers who make up the social safety net and who knows how many people thrown out of the middle class or what other kinds of hardship will heaped onto them as the country works its way out of this mess--and the R's can't put their hand out the window and feel the wetness?

And you have the second highest unemployment rate in the country (being just a little bit better off than Michigan in this regard is like having a few more paved roads than Mississippi).

"If there was ever a rainy day," said this union organizer, "this has got to be it."

Perhaps Fox News needs a weather channel.

Buddy, can you spare $959,800,617?

Thousands of Oregonians who thought they were members of the middle class have been dropped into free fall; laid off, their savings and their homes sucked into the black hole of corporate privilege and profit.

How are you doing? Trying to figure out what to do when the unemployment runs out? When the beginning of the fall semester in Corvallis starts?

So, your cut of a billion dollars pulled out of the collective ears of middle class Oregonians would come in handy, right now.

But it's not in your collective ear. You paid that much last year in reparations...taxes...for having lost the class war waged on you by the Insider District of Columbia Corporate Funded Public Relations Shops and Lobbying Groups (IDCCFPRSLG) on behalf of the corporate tax relief.

That particular group, by the way, with one of its subsidiaries in Oregon, asked you to tie tea bags on your glasses yesterday and blame progressive taxation and spending on a social safety net (two things that don't really exist, anymore, if they ever did) for the fact that you are being impoverished.

The United States Public Interests Research Group (USPIRG) and The Oregon State Public Interest Group (OSPIRG) marked the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's death and the deadline to pay federal taxes by issuing reports to tell you that the middle class is being downsized by use of the federal and state tax codes.

You are not dead, yet, are you?

By the way, the total amount of tax subsidies paid to US corporations, according to these reports, is $100 billion per year. And in case you think this is something new the total for last ten years is $1 Trillion.

Why hasn't Bill Sizemore snapped to this?

As I have pointed out: dollar for dollar you are all equal in Oregon, in this country.

How much equality do you have in your wallet?



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Getting Rid of Party Primaries

I used to be big on party primaries.

I am one of the people who left you saddled with them.

Sorry.

Lame, I know, to say this, but I wasn't alone.

We Populists and Progressives liked the idea that the people would go to the polls and choose the candidates who would run for office representing their parties. Made sense. Candidates that most of the people in a party wanted to vote for was the person to be the standard bearer. Much better candidates would emerge, we were sure, than those chosen by the bosses of the parties in smoke filled rooms.

I'm not much on "makes sense," anymore--I am more into results. Death has made me an empiricist. What are the results of having party primaries? Have they done for you what we thought they would?

No.

And so much "no" that it begs the question: how could we have been so wrong?

(I've been over this with you before but the answer to that question is so obvious that it bears repeating often. If those at whom reforms are aimed can spend as much money as they like to resist them then all such efforts will be undermined and turned into vehicles to perpetuate the evil it was hoped they would eliminate. Live--or in my case, die--and learn.)

So, check the outcomes.

Get to know some of people in political office today. If you have a long perspective you will find that the quality is not a bit higher, today, than it was when we started agitating for primaries; not one little bit better.

The Oregon Legislature, for example, is just as much a "representative body" today as it was 1n 1890--you will still find some of the smartest and finest people you ever met there, and you will also still find some of the most ignorant and corrupt popinjays to every walk the face of the earth. And you will find that most of those legislators know this is true although they have different lists of which among them is in which category.

Although there are far more women there now (one of the few real improvements in government that we actually made back then was helping women get the vote), as many of them have joined the ranks of the latter as the former group.

These "representatives" still, of course, represent the same forces as those who, before them, were chosen at conventions. If you doubt that check out the campaign financing. Buying "access" means getting to hold the strings that make them dance and making sure they dance with them that brung them.

OK. No change. None. Nothing. (Today I believe you call that "Bupkis?")

So, how many millions of (your) dollars are spent on these primary elections that have not changed the quality of candidates running for office or helped build the middle class? How many of those (your tax) dollars came from those among you who don't care about any party on the ballot; from those who cannot get the party they do care about on the ballot, from those who are not particularly inclined toward any party except those on tailgates at Civil War games?

Party primaries have turned out to be a government (taxpayer) subsidy for political parties--for the two party stasis--and to ingrain in power the very factions that the Founders of the Republic predicted would be a pox on our political houses.

In other words, the descendants of the wealthy and powerful interests that chose the candidates before party primary election system still choose the candidates but now in a dog and pony show of democracy that is paid for by you.

If the result is the same, why not save the money (or spend it on schools--many of your children still cannot afford college) and let the parties choose their own candidates any way they want to?

The only difference party primaries has made to your system is that vast amounts of money get raised and spent to manipulate you in to casting vote after vote based on slogans and lies to elect people acceptable to (and ultimately funded and owned by) the same kinds of wealthy and powerful interests that selected them in the 19th Century. And they get to call this "democracy" like that was some kind of great deal for you to pick up the tab.

The only way to get control of all this democratic tyranny you have going on is to get control of the money.

(Another quick review: You will always be equal to one another in this country--dollar for dollar. If you have $100 to contribute then you are $900 less equal than a guy with $1000 to give. If you want everyone to be equal in your "democracy" then everyone has to be worth the same small amount of money to the candidates).

Because if you don't get control of the political money it will subvert anything you try to do--just as it has turned around the initiative, party primaries and most every other reform I or anybody else ever took a shine to.

I'll be discussing most of these reforms, in time, as I have discussed some of them, previously.

Because I think that sooner or later you are going to wise up.

I have lots of time and little else to do.

Me and Bill Sizemore? As if...

I have a news flash for Rick Attig, Associate Editor at the Oregonian, and for Greg Wasson, a lawyer and all around democracy activist from Salem who’s been working on a book documenting the initiative in Oregon—which is necessarily (I guess, sadly) also about me.

Mr. Attig writes

“If the father of Oregon's citizen initiative and referendum, William S. U'Ren, were alive today, what would he say about Bill Sizemore, the electoral pest responsible for most of the initiatives on the November ballot?

“The answer probably would surprise you.

“Greg Wasson, a Salem lawyer who is writing a book about the history of the Oregon initiative, says that U'Ren would have "felt a certain kindred spirit" with Sizemore.”

The truth of the matter is that I don’t have dirt in common with Bill Sizemore (he, for example, is on top of it and I am under it).

To say that I, the person who headed up the implementation of the initiative in Oregon, feel like a kindred spirit with Bill Sizemore is like saying that Wright Brothers would feel like a kindred spirit with those who firebombed Dresden or lit up the London skies during the Battle of Britain because they used airplanes to do it.

It’s true that, like Bill Sizemore, I took cash from an out of state underwriter to pursue the single tax, which I am now glad didn’t pass because it would have been even more effective in destroying the middle class than the initiative has turned out to be.

If I had succeeded at that I’d have one more thing to be sorry I helped to start. The initiative, the referendum, recall, primary elections—all of these things have worked to accomplish exactly the opposite of what we had in mind for them, as well as destroying representative government (with all its warts) and replacing it with democracy. As I have said in previous posts, money has perverted all of these things and I repudiate all of them. There are a couple of things I am proud of, but for the most part...can you say co-optation?

Sometime I’ll write more about some of these other things that I wish I had nothing to do with. But for now let me just say two things about me and Bill Sizemore.

The first is that he has used the initiative in so many well documented underhanded and dishonest ways that he could be an exhibit in any debate to prove that the Greeks and our founding generation in this country were absolutely right about why democracy is a terrible form of government and why destroying a representative republic to create "democracy" is the beginning of tyranny.

We Populists and our Progressive Republican cousins were not dishonest, we didn’t cheat, and we didn’t lie. And we didn’t make war on farmers or workers, on lower and middle class people. We were honest and above board and in so far as we “made war” on anyone it was wealthy, powerful people (like the railroads and timber companies) who had their hands around our political/economic throats, just as their descendants have their hands around your throat, right now.

And that is the second thing I have to say about me and Bill Sizemore: he's not only a convicted crook but he has used the initiative to make war on the very people we Populists and the Progressive Republicans were trying to help and used it to benefit the people around which we were trying to put some limits.

Bill Sizemore’s use of the initiative petition has been one front on the 40 some year war on the middle class that has created your current “recession” as one manifestation of the centralization of wealth and power.

Mr. Attig’s article ends with this paragraph:

"’Everything that's been done to make it harder for Sizemore, has made it harder for everyone else,’ Wasson said. ‘U'ren would be very upset about the loss of respect for the Oregon initiative.’

Give a guy (even a dead guy) a little credit for being able to see how things have turned out and to change his mind about things—in my case, a lot of things.

Until there isn't one anymore you can't make it hard enough for people trying to use the initiative.

So, if you've been reading you know that I have changed my mind about a lot of the things I used to think would help the middle class (and those hoping to get into it) because they have been shown to do the opposite. If you’ve been reading this blog you know the things like the initiative have been used to destroy the middle class by destroying our republican form of government and replacing it with democracy.

Remember Benjamin Franklin, asked about what he and founders had produced in the new Constitution. “We have given you a republic, if you can keep it.”

We haven’t and it's a disaster. My complicity in its destruction is what has me going on and on here—from the grave, no less--to keep trying to get this across to you.

Mend? Why not end? The Initiative in Oregon

Time to say die, Oregon.

Well, it may seem easy enough for me to say I'm willing to do that, but it's time for people in Oregon to "say die" in regard to the initiative and referendum (and throw in the recall, too).

But instead of facing the situation squarely, the City Club of Portland is putting a lot of effort into "Mending not Ending" this institution of mass democracy that has been taken over and is now rip snorting its way through Oregon's statutes, constitution and budgets just as the legislature does when the anti-middle class forces can get it to sit, stay and heel the way it could back in my day.

And you are wondering where the middle class went?

Money now buys and sells and places things on the ballot, and manipulates voters more and more and resources are shifted gradually from supporting and strengthening the middle class.

Look, I am responsible for the initiative in Oregon. I didn't invent it or even start it although sometimes people say I did. I was one of the leaders to implement it in Oregon and I will go to my grave regretting that.

OK, I didn't actually start regretting it until I was in my grave. But in my defense it didn't become the Frankenstein's monster I now urge you to kill until after I died.

As I have said: because, dollar for dollar, Oregonians (and Americans in general) are equal you in the middle class will never be the equal to the people who are behind most of the initiatives (or even political candidates), these days.

We Populists and our cousins in the Republican Party, the Progressives, thought we could beat them and put the farmers and those of us who would some day be called "cloth coat Republicans" in charge of government. But our experience makes abundantly clear that you will never beat them, you can only beat them back, temporarily, and then beat them back again when that needs to happen. It's like having forsythia planted outside. Keep the pruning shears handy--and sharp--or it will fill your yard.

The initiative is a perfect example of their ability to bind their victims with leash intended to control them. Originally intended to get around the lock that capital (in the form of the timber industry and the railroads) had on the legislature, it is now just one more tool in the box of pumping resources out of the middle class. Wealth now uses the initiative and the initiative delivers more wealth.

Follow the money.

Who funds most initiatives these days?

That you can look up. It's undeniable that initiatives are rarely funded by the middle class.

Who does it serve?

That you have to think about.

All that tax limitation stuff? Don't think about how many property owners got "tax relief." Think, rather, about the 100 "property owners" who got the most money from those limitations.

(It's like the "kicker" checks: don't think about the average amount of the kicker--demand to see who got the 100 largest kicker checks. "It's our money." Pul-eeze)

The primary beneficiaries weren't individual human beings, at least they weren't considered such prior to a certain line of US Supreme Court holdings that read the civil war amendments to apply to "super human" "citizens."

So, did the initiative serve the middle class regarding the tax limitations? No. This is one example of how the initiative has been used systematically destroy the middle class.

The crime initiatives? Help the middle class?

These caused a massive transfer of wealth from education and the social safety net to the people who build and sell things to a bloated prison system. And what has been the impact on the middle class of the dismantling of education and the social safety net?

(Don't forget--as has been said many times--Measure 11 caused crime to start going down in Oregon at least a year before it passed and in 49 states where it didn't apply. You can look it up.)

Follow the money.

I do not disagree with the thinking of those who are currently trying to reform the initiative system in Oregon. Republicans (and everyone else) in Oregon should read what they have to say and think about it and tell their friends about it.

And read what the Federalist Papers had to say about "democracy," while you're in the library (if the library in your community is still there--supporting and maintaining the strong middle class that is the base of freedom and capitalism).

These "mend not end" people are guilty only of timidity and pulling punches.

The only place they are wrong is in their conclusion.

Take it from me, from the "Father of the Initiative."

We Populists and Progressives were wrong. We didn't foresee paid petition circulation, we didn't foresee the 30 second ads and the "yes means no" titles and we really didn't foresee the ridiculous idea that "money is speech."

Their money will always bend it, so don't mend it--end it.

So, although you will never beat them, you can beat them back. And to maintain a wide and strong middle class--the base of the republic, any republic--you need to do that, over and over.

Put legislative power back in the imperfect but far better republican process of representative government. Money will usually win there, of course (at least as long as we have the "dollar for dollar" equality of "money is speech"), but it can no longer win as big, there, as it can on the playing fields of Sizemore. After all, if it could, why would it be out using the initiative process? If the people behind the Bill Sizemores of the world could use the legislature as well as they could back in the Gilded Age we would not even know his name.

If you think I don't have more to say about this you don't take into account the amount of time I have on my hands.

I am just getting warmed up.