Dear Readers,
I just read the article "New Online World Ahead for Indian Reservations" in the Sunday March 6th edition of the Arizona Republic newspaper. It's about how lots of stimulus funds are going to Indian reservations in Arizona to provide Internet access to rural Native Americans. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (a.k.a. the Stimulus a.k.a. the Porkulus) is giving $32.19 million to the Navajo tribe, $17.4 million to the Tohono O'odham tribe, $10.4 million to the San Carlos Apache tribe, $3.6 million to the Hopi tribe, and $2.2 million to the Havasupai tribe.
That's a whole lot of money!
And do Native Americans even want the Internet? According to Robyn Kayquoptewa, a Hopi student at Northern Arizona University, the answer is no. Robyn said of the Hopi village she grew up in, "The village has chosen not to [put lots of modern communication technology in their village] because they feel it is better for people to not disrespect the land."
So, many of the Native Americans feel that putting in cell phone towers, phone lines, and fiber-optic cables will disrupt their environment and their traditional ways of life.
Nizhoni Marks, another Native American said, "A lot of them [tribal elders] don't know anything about the Internet or have even used the computer."
So, many of the Native Americans have no interest in using computers or the Internet.
But this is the most shocking statement: Charles Wiese, the Tohono O'odham Utility Authority general manager, who has a lot of say in how the millions of dollars are spent, said, "We're going to have to have to try to create our own demand. I'm just having nightmares of the thought of providing all this fiber to these homes and nobody uses it."
He has to create a demand for the Internet?!
I think we should let things like this happen naturally. If the Native Americans really want Internet access, they'll pay for it themselves. That would be really expensive I know, putting phone lines and Internet in remote areas is always expensive, but you know a lot of those tribes get a lot of money from casinos. And they are supposed to be independent nations, right? So maybe they can spend their own money on Internet access if they want it.
Or, if they would prefer the modern, technologically advanced life, they could move to Phoenix or Tucson or something.
The article talks about how the Native Americans, once they get Internet access, can do online education and engage in e-commerce, and it will eventually in a roundabout way maybe stimulate the economy. But if you go to the public library, most of the computers are being used for MySpace and Facebook and watching You-Tube videos and playing games and other time-wasting things.
I don't buy the argument about Native American becoming online entrepreneurs once the taxpayers give them Internet access. I was listening to the Dave Ramsey show on my way home from work the other night, and he made a great point. He said that the Internet doesn't automatically make people run good businesses. You have to know how to run a business in the real world before you can run a business in the virtual world.
Now, a very stubborn and politically incorrect fact to bring up is the fact that Navajos don't run the stores on the reservations. It's the white folks who are the managers at all the trading posts and country general stores and shops on the reservation. Navajos just don't do it. It's not that their genetically inferior to whites, and it's not because some Jim Crow-esque laws are preventing them from rising in management, it's because... well, I don't know why. I guess it's because they don't have the responsibility or work ethic. Or maybe they just don't feel like assimilating to modern American capitalist culture. But if you go up to remote parts of the reservations in Northern Arizona, you'll see what I mean.
Providing Internet access to Native American tribes reminds me of a lot of Neil Postman's writings. Postman writes in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology that people fundamentally change their culture and value systems to accommodate some new gadget. The gadgets are telling the people what to do. In the words of Henry David Thoreau, "We do not ride the railroad, the railroad rides us." Putting the Internet into remote Indian villages will further erode traditional Indian customs.
Ha ha ha! This is so absurd. We're spending millions of dollars to give them stuff they don't want and it won't stimulate the economy and we're wasting money and America is going to collapse and we're all going to die.
And look what they're doing in Finland! The Finnish government has made Internet access a human right!
It's fun to complain about the Internet for Indians, million dollar suicide prevention walls and turtle tunnels, but the real issue pressing upon the American people is entitlements.
Entitlements make up the majority of federal spending. To balance the budget, we need entitlement reform. I work with this guy who knows this guy who worked for the military for 20 years and then retired, and then became a firefighter for 20 years and then retired again, and now he draws Social Security and stuff, so he gets $10,000 a month, (that's $120,000 a year) for the rest of his life! And he doesn't work anymore!
We need to reform entitlements now. Well, I guess we should wait until 2013 when Mitt Romney is the President.
I applaud Governor Scott Walker from Wisconsin and Governor Chris Christie from New Jersey for fighting public sector unions. I'm sure there are a lot of other heroic governors out there, but those are the two that I hear about on the news so those are the ones I'm talking about now. Now we just need someone in the White House who will fight public sector unions, reform or abolish social security, Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare.
Sincerely,
Telemoonfa
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7 comments:
"Now we just need someone in the White House who will fight public sector unions, reform or abolish social security, Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare."
And protect the hedge funds (my dear and generous godson, who lives in NJ and works in Manhattan, is a partner at one and he earned only $57 million in 2007!) from greedy schoolteachers and other state workers.
You're right to applaud Walker. He has totally energized the union movement more than anyone since Sam Gompers!
The words *UNION POWER* have just come roaring back into public debate, with the decades-long attacks against our unions recently reaching a new fever pitch and turn-around in Wisconsin.
Mass protests don't occupy capitol buildings every day, let alone 16 days straight. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's push to eliminate basic union bargaining rights was a brazen attempt to balance the government/commerce crisis on working people's backs.
In response, many Wisconsinites--inspired by the revolutions in Egypt and around North Africa--created a vibrant "Tahrir Square" rallying spot right in the middle of the "scene of the crime."
Here, rank-and-file unionists, with K-College educators leading the charge, proclaimed a more equitable vision for Wisconsin.
Suddenly, the broad U.S. left is being urged to become much, much more politically aggressive!
AND WE WILL TAKE BACK AMERICA FOR WORKING FAMILIES! AND WE'LL SMASH THOSE WHO HATE REAL AMERICANS THE WAY BILLIONAIRE-SPONSORED FAT CAT GOV. WALKER AND HIS WANNABE-OVERLORD APOLOGISTS DO!
public workers think the government is a bottomless pit of money for them to take. Tax payers are the only real source of money,and cannot be a bottomless pit of money. Government can not create wealth by passing a law or printing money. It can only take wealth from people ( taxpayers) who do create it.
pp
"pp," I suspect your name describes the worth of your comment. You fail to understand what America is all about. Let me tell you about our country a little.
Like ignorant people like yourself and the blogger, Republicans in Wisconsin are seeking to reverse civic traditions that for more than a century have been among the most celebrated achievements not just of their state, but of their own party as well.
Wisconsin was at the forefront of the progressive reform movement in the early 20th century, when the policies of Gov. Robert M. La Follette prompted a fellow Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, to call the state a “laboratory of democracy.” The state pioneered many social reforms: It was the first to introduce workers’ compensation, in 1911; unemployment insurance, in 1932; and public employee bargaining, in 1959.
University of Wisconsin professors helped design Social Security and were responsible for founding the union that eventually became the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Wisconsin reformers were equally active in promoting workplace safety, and often led the nation in natural resource conservation and environmental protection.
But while Americans are aware of this progressive tradition, they probably don’t know that many of the innovations on behalf of working people were at least as much the work of Republicans as of Democrats.
pp, let me give you a lesson in American history and what our country is all about.
Now that a Wisconsin judge has temporarily blocked a state law that would strip public employee unions of most collective bargaining rights, it’s worth stepping back to place these events in larger historical context.
Republicans in Wisconsin are seeking to reverse civic traditions that for more than a century have been among the most celebrated achievements not just of their state, but of their own party as well.
Wisconsin was at the forefront of the progressive reform movement in the early 20th century, when the policies of Gov. Robert M. La Follette prompted a fellow Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, to call the state a “laboratory of democracy.” The state pioneered many social reforms: It was the first to introduce workers’ compensation, in 1911; unemployment insurance, in 1932; and public employee bargaining, in 1959.
University of Wisconsin professors helped design Social Security and were responsible for founding the union that eventually became the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Wisconsin reformers were equally active in promoting workplace safety, and often led the nation in natural resource conservation and environmental protection.
But while Americans are aware of this progressive tradition, they probably don’t know that many of the innovations on behalf of working people were at least as much the work of Republicans as of Democrats.
Although Wisconsin has a Democratic reputation these days — it backed the party’s presidential candidates in 2000, 2004 and 2008 — the state was dominated by Republicans for a full century after the Civil War. The Democratic Party was so ineffective that Wisconsin politics were largely conducted as debates between the progressive and conservative wings of the Republican Party.
When the Wisconsin Democratic Party finally revived itself in the 1950s, it did so in a context where members of both parties were unusually open to bipartisan policy approaches. Many of the new Democrats had in fact been progressive Republicans just a few years earlier, having left the party in revulsion against the reactionary politics of their own senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, and in sympathy with postwar liberalizing forces like the growing civil rights movement.
The demonizing of government at all levels that has become such a reflexive impulse for conservatives in the early 21st century would have mystified most elected officials in Wisconsin just a few decades ago.
When Gov. Gaylord A. Nelson, a Democrat, sought to extend collective bargaining rights to municipal workers in 1959, he did so in partnership with a Legislature in which one house was controlled by the Republicans. Both sides believed the normalization of labor-management relations would increase efficiency and avoid crippling strikes like those of the Milwaukee garbage collectors during the 1950s. Later, in 1967, when collective bargaining was extended to state workers for the same reasons, the reform was promoted by a Republican governor, Warren P. Knowles, with a Republican Legislature.
The policies that the current governor, Scott Walker, has sought to overturn, in other words, are legacies of his own party.
But Mr. Walker’s assault on collective bargaining rights breaks with Wisconsin history in two much deeper ways as well. Among the state’s proudest traditions is a passion for transparent government that often strikes outsiders as extreme. Its open meetings law, open records law and public comment procedures are among the strongest in the nation. Indeed, the basis for the restraining order blocking the collective bargaining law is that Republicans may have violated open meetings rules in passing it. The legislation they have enacted turns out to be radical not just in its content, but in its blunt ends-justify-the-means disregard for openness and transparency.
Republicans in Wisconsin are seeking to reverse civic traditions that for more than a century have been among the most celebrated achievements not just of their state, but of their own party as well.
Wisconsin was at the forefront of the progressive reform movement in the early 20th century, when the policies of Gov. Robert M. La Follette prompted a fellow Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, to call the state a “laboratory of democracy.” The state pioneered many social reforms: It was the first to introduce workers’ compensation, in 1911; unemployment insurance, in 1932; and public employee bargaining, in 1959.
University of Wisconsin professors helped design Social Security and were responsible for founding the union that eventually became the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Wisconsin reformers were equally active in promoting workplace safety, and often led the nation in natural resource conservation and environmental protection.
But while Americans are aware of this progressive tradition, they probably don’t know that many of the innovations on behalf of working people were at least as much the work of Republicans as of Democrats.
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