August 2010 Meeting President's Remarks

Mastering the Hot Button Issues

This month's club meeting falls on my birthday (August 11, 1949) and I will be in Hawaii for a vacation with my lovely wife Andrea. Vice President Tom Newman, acting as President in my absence, may have his own opening remarks at the meeting, but for completeness, I am publishing these monthly remarks as usual.

Last month's article, Conservatism is Confused, was about how Repugliganism isn't really conservative any more, so I can no longer call the manipulators of the media "conservatives." I'll just call them Repugligans (repugnant ugly thugs and hooligans). It's well know that they use the hot button issues to stimulate their base, so let's review those issues to see how liberals, progressives, and other Democrats can use them to our own advantage. Those issues include taxation, guns, immigration, gays, and abortion. In alphabetical order:

Abortion

Repugs call it "right to life," but it's really balancing a woman's right to her own life against the life of her zygote, embryo, or fetus. They frame it by calling the liberal position "pro-abortion," yet liberals actually work to minimize abortions by increasing knowledge through education and encouraging responsible behavior in young people.

We need to emphasize the fact that outlawing abortion will not decrease undesired pregnancies; only education and responsible behavior can do that. We also need to emphasize the freedom side of of the pro-choice position. We should emphasize the importance of privacy rights, derived from the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights.

Gays

There are literally thousands of rights granted by both Federal and State laws to married couples. Those rights are currently denied to same sex couples. Examples include inheritance, taxes, and hospital visitation rights. These rights are granted by law using the term "marriage". A same-sex union is not a marriage, by law, and granting those marriage rights to same sex unions would require changing thousands of laws, something that is totally impractical. The only solution is to recognize same sex marriage by law. Let the churches recognize what they want to. They don't grant rights by law.

Repugs capitalize on the fear that same sex marriage is a stepping stone to total licentiousness. They bring up the red herrings of marriage to animals or children as the "logical" next steps if we legalize same sex marriage. This is easily refuted. Neither children nor animals have the ability to give informed consent, so those issues can never even be on the table.

Guns

They say "you can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers," but nobody on the liberal side is suggesting that guns be confiscated. It's another red herring to get their base excited. Our position is that reasonable regulations should apply to guns, especially in high crime areas.

We need to emphasize that the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, is a liberal document guaranteeing rights to all. We should emphasize that liberals have a tradition of advancing liberty that goes back to before the Revolutionary War and the founding of our nation. Tom Paine was a liberal.

Immigration

As Thom Hartman is fond of saying, we don't have an illegal immigrant problem. We have an illegal employer problem. The administration has started cracking down on some illegal employment operations, but it's the immigrants that get walked out of the chicken packing plants in handcuffs, not the executives. It's time to start putting some illegal employers in jail. When we enforce our laws about employee documentation by employers, the illegal immigration problem will decline of its own accord.

The problem originated with the corporatist wing of the Repugligan party. They like lax enforcement of laws regulating corporations because it allows them to obtain cheap labor. They can exploit people who are afraid to report safety violations and union busting activity. It's time to enforce the laws of the land. Jail illegal employers.

Taxation

Working people have a hard time making ends meet. I know, because I have held a full time job of one kind or another for over 40 years. I had my first job at the age of 14, picking asparagus in the fields of the Salinas Valley. Any amount of tax on a working person seems like too much, so it's no wonder that the Repugs can appeal to working people on a tax-reduction issue. We need to point out that we can reduce the taxes that honest working people pay by getting the wealthy to stop shrugging off their fair share. Many of the wealthiest people pay little or no taxes. While working people can't dodge paying 30% income tax, the billionaires are paying only 15% capital gains on most of their income. Time to close the loopholes and make the rich pay their fair share.

Take the example of a trucking buisness owner who has 100 trucks. He benefits from good public roads 100 times as much as the owner of one truck. This is just one example of how business benefits from public infrastructure. We have a well educated work force, fire protection, police protection, clean water, waste disposal, etc. Businesses couldn't be nearly as profitable without these things. They should pay their fair share.

The Repugs say that making them pay their fair share will result in reduced jobs because the business owners will have less money to expand their businesses. That's an outright lie. Remember, income tax is paid on profit. All business expenses, including employee salaries, are deductable from taxes. It's what the owners skim out of the businesses that isn't available for hiring workers. Raising taxes on income from businesses will have the effect of encouraging owners to keep their money in the business and hiring workers. Don't be fooled again.

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