The SoSA Perspective

Unintended Consequences

It seems you can’t mess with any part of the world with out messing with the whole thing. We have apparently decided that we need to be less dependent on oil in fueling our economy. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out, so far so good. Pursuant to this brain storm we’ve fallen face first into the production of ethanol from corn. Why turning fuel for your body (which is fairly fuel efficient) into fuel for your SUV (which isn’t) escapes me, but that’s another blog.

Here is where an impressive streak of unintended consequences begins. Using corn to produce ethanol drives up the price of corn. Farmers in the grain belt stop growing soy beans and plant corn instead, to take advantage of the high price. This drives up the price of soy beans. Dog food makers (who use a lot of corn in their product (don’t tell fido) can’t afford the pricey little kernels and so they substitute sweet potatoes. Society of St. Andrew (who normally distributes millions of pounds of cull sweet potatoes to the poor each year is left holding the proverbial (empty) bag. There, I’ve whined and I feel better. But wait! There’s more!

Remember the soy beans? They’re still expensive. So, cattle farmers in the Amazon basin plant soy beans in what used to be pasture land for their cattle. Meanwhile they still need pasture for the cattle business so (you guessed it) they speed up the cutting of the Amazon rain forest to provide more pasture. I understand from the nice people at Time magazine that they cut down an area the size of Rhode Island just last year!

Now the rain forest absorbs a lot more carbon dioxide (green house gas) that does pasture so global warming gets progressively worse, because of ethanol! Who knew? Is there a solution to all this? Beats me. But it might be a good idea (given the girth of the average American) to invest in a bicycle and use it when ever possible. Just a thought.

Recession! You think?

Alright, let’s everybody panic. The feared recession seems to be upon us. What to do, what to do?

Pardon me if I don’t jump right on that panic stricken band wagon. In almost all ways that really matter to people (the quality of life we lead, day to day) we’ve been in a recession since the middle seventies. Therein hangs the tale.

How can it be that there’s been a recession in our quality of life for the last thirty years and we never read about it? Well, because we don’t pay attention to anything but our Gross Domestic Product in measuring our economic well being. And GDP is a lousy measure of our actual well being. GDP measures only goods and services that are traded for money. GDP excludes everything else. So if you have an oil spill, for instance, GDP goes up when you pay someone to clean it up. No one in his right mind thinks the oil spill contributes to our well being. In the same way everyone knows that to stay home and raise our young children is very important. Yet, when we do that, because we’re not paid to do that, GDP doesn’t record our increased well being. When we go to work and pay for day care, then GDP goes up!

The point of this tirade is simply that we will have better quality of life when we begin to pay attention to those things that make for a better quality of life, and not before. As long as GDP is our God, then we’ll get more of what that God offers. Quality of life is not necessarily one of that Gods’ blessings.

Gas on the fire?

Am I the only one who thinks that the “economic stimulus package” presently plowing its’ way through congress is a bad idea? I know, I know. Recession looms and our fearless leaders have to be seen as “doing something” about it. Republicans want to stimulate the economy because they don’t want to get to the November election with half the country out of work. Democrats will go along because they can’t afford (in November) to be seen as the party that blocked the “stimulus package” if half the country’s out of work.

It seems to me that the coming recession is the result of lots of factors, principal among them, our huge federal deficit. Our fearless leaders (fiscally responsible republicans all) insist on spending billions more than we have. In the seven years of their most recent reign our federal debt has risen from $ 5.7 Trillion to $9.7 Trillion! In the more immediate picture, the situation that has precipitated the present crisis is that many of us have taken out loans we can’t afford, and bankers, who should know better, have gleefully lent us the money! Again, spending money we don’t have.

The solution our “leaders” come up with? ‘Let’s spend $150 billion more (that we don’t have) and that will make it all better.’ Well…… it may stave off recession long enough to get the bozos re-elected, but in the end, it’s pouring gas on the fire. The saddest part of all this is that the bulk of this deficit bill will be with our children, and grandchildren, for a long long time.

Marketing Department Run Amok

There I was, minding my own business, watching a little mindless TV, and this advertisement appears. Evidently I need to buy a something or other pill so that my digestive tract will become that of a small baby, as apposed to that of a 61 year old--no longer small--man. The catch is I can only get the holy pill via a doctors prescription. So now I’m left in the position of scheduling a visit to the doctor, so I can tell him what’s the mater with me, and further aid the poor old soul by telling him what medication he should prescribe!

I wondered how this scheme could possibly work for the drug company that makes the pills in question until I read that they’ve been simultaneously working on my doctor to prescribe the same pills. In fact, it seems that in 2005 the various drug companies spent $7 billion (yes billion with a B) paying their representatives to visit doctors all the while pushing the latest and best the druggies have to offer. When the visits were over they (the drug company reps) left $18 billion worth of free samples of the aforesaid latest and best as added inducement to use the stuff.

My question is two-fold. In the first place what has any of this high-priced lobbying got to do with maintaining my health? I would hope that my doctor knows more about what's actually wrong with me than I do. That’s why I go to a doctor in the first place. I also hope that my doctor has enough professional self respect to prescribe the most effective and safest medication available; even if the drugs turn out to be generic (I’m not made of money you know). My second question is; do you suppose that this kind of marketing run amok might have something to do with the obscenely high cost of health care? Just a thought.

Another inevitability

Why do you suppose our fearless leaders can’t bring themselves to do things that they will inevitably be forced to do? For instance, we have nearly 50 million people in this country without health care because they can’t afford insurance. We have another very large number of people who have lousy health care because the insurance they can afford is basically a rip off.

So ask yourself, ‘are we going to allow people to die of treatable diseases on the doorstep of the hospital?’. The answer is obviously, no. That means we’re going to have health care for everyone, whether they can afford it or not. The only question is; how’s the best way to do it?

Because our leaders won’t face up to the above stated reality, we are relegated to suffering the worst, stupidest universal health care system imaginable. The fact is, everyone in this country has access to health care. Our present system calls for treating those who can’t afford to pay at our emergency rooms when their illnesses reach crisis proportions. That way we wind up maximizing the suffering of poor individuals and insuring that they receive the most expensive possible treatment but only after allowing the illness a chance to get as serious as it possibly can! The unpaid bill gets forwarded to the rest of us who can afford insurance (for a while longer we hope) and, one assumes, the only party to go home happy is the insurance company. Surely we can do better than this and for my money it’s high time we insisted on it.

Inevitabilities

The older I get the more it becomes apparent to me that an awful lot of life is inevitable. Once you’re born, you will grow up, go to work, seek (and in most cases find) relationship(s) with the opposite sex, generate offspring (or successfully avoid generating same), grow old, decline and die. Somewhere along that line you will come to grips with the meaning of life (or lack thereof). As a result of that epiphany you will then relate yourself to whatever deity, moral code, and/or metaphysical system that appeals to you.

The choices we get to make are involved only with the details of life. (Which job/career, which spouse/significant other, kids, no kids, adopted kids, Christian, Muslim, Jew, first church of what’s happening right now, etc.) If you look at life that way the details can be a lot of fun to pick out and the stress of the whole exercise is much lessened because the over all outcome is, well, inevitable.

Oh, that our fearless leaders could look at our social policy that way! Take my field, hunger, for instance. There is an ongoing struggle to find ways of insuring that all the poor people (35 million by recent count) are fed. This debate has gone on for all of my 28 years in hunger work and we are no closer to finding a solution than we were when we started. The bickering, back biting, posturing and bloviating that goes on between liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, is enough to tax the patience of Job.

If you just look at the inevitability of the situation, the solution can’t be that hard to find. Here’s the thing. Are we going to stand idly by while people starve to death in America? No, of course not. Well then Senator, Governor or whoever, that means we’re going to feed them. Inevitably. The only question is how is the best, most effective way to do that. Finding the answer to that question won’t be all that hard for a nation who can send a man to the moon. It might even be a fun and rewarding thing to do.

Oh yeah, and Merry Christmas.

In praise of newspapers

Everyone has an opinion, especially on politics and religion. In addition, it appears that most everyone is willing to share their opinion. In many cases this is unfortunate. It is unfortunate because there seems to be a widely held belief out there amongst the ‘opinion havers’, that their opinions are not merely opinions, but “truth”. This misconception is fueled by a veritable avalanche of books, web sites and magazines that serve to reinforce virtually any opinion you may have, on any subject that interests you.

There are political and religious web sites that will tell conservatives (ad nauseam) how right they are, and others that do the same for liberals. Books catering to the left and right poles in religion and politics are equally prolific. Most ‘opinion havers’ tend to read those books and visit those web sites that reinforce their own opinions. This, it strikes me, is an excellent way to breed a nation of opinionated idiots.

It would be much better, and we’d be much better informed, if we would read both (or all) sides of most major questions before forming an opinion. As far as I know newspaper editorial and op-ed pages are the only places where we are regularly confronted with differing views on a common issue. Come to think of it, the popularity of tunnel vision political and religious talk show dummies may be the result of decreased readership of our great newspapers.

At any rate, it seems to me that a disciplined reading of all sides of any issues should precede our voicing of opinions. Were we to adopt this strategy we would come to a much more balanced view of the world, and the solution to many of our problems would, I believe, become obvious. This is because the world is not black and white, or even red and blue. The problems we face every day come in varying shades of grey, and that means that their solutions will inevitably be some shade of purple.