Category: Politics

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5 Keys to Civil Political Discussions with Friends and Family

men-having-political-discussionAccording to Professor Nolan McCarty of Princeton University, it seems that political rancor today has reached heights not seen since Reconstruction after the Civil War. A Stanford University report found that Americans have become increasingly polarized along political party lines, primarily due to “political candidates relying on negative campaigning and partisan news sources serving up vitriolic commentary.” As a consequence, the report concluded that the level of political animus in the American public exceeds racial hostility.
 
Conservative columnist Gerry Feld claims that politics has turned into a “sewer of insults, name-calling and character assassinations like we have never experienced before.” He cited examples of jokes on an MSNBC program about presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s black grandchild and disparaging remarks about former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin’s child with Down’s syndrome.
 
Liberals and conservatives alike are to blame. Wendy Davis, a Democratic candidate for governor of Texas, was called “Abortion Barbie” by a Republic party country chairman and “retard Barbie” by her opponent and eventual winner of the gubernatorial race, Greg Abbott. At the 2013 Missouri State Fair rodeo, a clown wore a Barack Obama mask and was run down by a bull to the delight of much of the crowd. Feld bemoans the undignified ways we treat each other and says “to move forward and be productive, we need to drop disparaging remarks and name-calling.”

Keys to Civil Political Discussions

Political disagreements can end friendships and destroy family relationships. According to a YouGov.com poll, more than one in four respondents (28%) have serious political disagreements with a family member, and more than one-third of those aged 18 to 29 experience political friction.
 
While friends and family have a lot in common, it can be shocking when you uncover political disagreements. Discussions can quickly degenerate into name-calling and hurt feelings. One blogger writes that political discussions can be “down right painful and fill one with such angst,” and another says that “We have to brace ourselves before any political discussions in the family because they get nasty fast.”
 
Family members of former Vice President Dick Cheney (whose daughter Mary Cheney is gay) took their feud over gay marriage publicly to Facebook. Liberal Democrat Melissa Reylek-Robinson, a 34-year-old mother in San Diego, married to a conservative Republican, notes that “Election time is probably the worst time for us. We definitely get into some heated debates.”
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If you want to be sure that partisan politics stay out of your personal relationships, consider these tactics to reduce the heat:
 
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How to Live Off the Grid

off-grid-log-cabin-918x516Open frontiers, freedom to live one’s life without restrictions, and the romance of living in harmony with nature have long been part of the American psyche. Authors and filmmakers have captured the desire to live independently and rely solely on one’s abilities for centuries.For example:
 

Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau, a 19th century poet, writer, and naturalist, explained the fascination with a simple life in his 1854 book “Walden“: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Ayn Rand

The Russian-born American author, writing “Atlas Shrugged” a century later, detailed the success of a community of industrialists and inventors who rejected the strictures of society to build Galt’s Gulch, a hidden community in the wilds of Colorado with little law and where everyone worked.

Ned Buntline and Prentiss Ingraham

The pair, best known of the dime novel authors, wrote fictional stories that focused on the frontier with fictional accounts of strong, self-reliant Western heroes from Daniel Boone to Wyatt Earp, finding huge audiences between 1860 to 1920.

Lee Child

The pseudonym of author Jim Grant is best known for his more than 20 novels featuring his nomadic Jack Reacher character. Reacher, a retired military policeman, travels the United States by walking or traveling by bus. He stays in cheap motels using made-up aliases, has no possessions other than the clothes on his back, and eschews such modern conveniences as credit cards, cell phones, and computers.
 
The idea of escaping societal obligations has appealed to certain Americans since our country’s formation. Many historians characterize the Plymouth Colony, established in 1620, as the nation’s first commune, its founders leaving England’s restrictive laws to create a community in the wilderness on a new continent an ocean away. The colony initially depended on upon collectivism, and each individual’s sense of personal responsibility to sustain the colony.
 
Much more recently, Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, has proposed a new nation-state composed of banded-together platforms floating in the ocean 200 miles from San Francisco. Known as Libertarian Island, the community would have “no welfare, loose building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.”

The Meaning of “Living Off the Grid”

The term “living off the grid” appeared in the mid-1990s and is credited to environmentalist Nick Rosen, founder of Off-Grid.net. Some define off-grid as being independent of electrical utilities and having a smaller carbon footprint (“going green”). Some claim it to be a self-imposed exile from the modern world and its conveniences (“dropping out”), while others define it as being anonymous (“being untraceable”). Andrew McKay, a journalist with Survival Mastery, calls it “living without any dependence on the government, society, and its products.”
 
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Understanding Economic Subsidies & Incentives for Relocation

walmart1-ken-wolterThe taxpayers of America are unknowing victims of corporate extortion, effectively subsidizing big companies at the rate of billions of dollars each year for corporate relocations. The subsidies are often in the form of tax benefits, but may even be cash payments to companies threatening to move from their existing location—or to companies willing to move if the bribe is sufficient.
 
Consider moves from California and Texas alone. According to an April 2014 editorial in the Dallas Morning News, more than 250 companies have relocated from California to Texas in recent years. Corporate and Texas officials claim that the moves are motivated by Texas’ almost nonexistent regulatory environment, low wage costs, and lack of a state personal income tax. Not surprisingly, officials rarely mention what the news refers to as “a handsome dowry”, including outright cash payments, subsidization of relocation costs, and years of property tax abatements.
 
It is not just Texas and California where a battle for incentives occur, and the companies with their hands out include the largest, most profitable corporations in the world. Since the 1970s, there have been more than 240 mega-deals across the continental United States, each with subsidies of $75 million or more. According to the Walmart Subsidy Watch, Walmart – the largest company in America, with earnings in excess of $16.5 billion in 2014 – has benefited from more than $1.2 billion in “tax breaks, free land, infrastructure assistance, low-cost financing, and outright grants from state and local governments.”
 
In an era of state and local government budget shortfalls, requiring cut-backs in education and infrastructure spending, academic studies report that state and local governments offer more than $50 billion annually in incentives either trying to keep businesses or to lure them from other U.S. locations. According to University of Iowa Professors Alan Peters and Peter Fisher, after decades of policy experimentation and hundreds of scholarly studies, there is little evidence that incentives work.
 
Thomas Peterson of the Goldwater Institute is more blunt, saying, “They just don’t work…You have average citizens and taxpayers subsidizing wealthy corporations.” Some critics note that relocations are a zero-sum game since, according to CityLab, few new jobs are created, but are simply moved from one locale to another.
 
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Regulation vs. Responsibility: A Wall Street Story

Coin stacksThe tensions between Wall Street and the Federal Government and the cries to rein in bankers and level the playing field for the average worker existed long before ‘Flash Boys.’
 
In response, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was passed in 2010 with the hope that it might bring about much-needed reform of the financial services industry. Predictably, the industry resisted any attempt to curb its immense power, flooding the halls of Congress with lobbyists and the campaign coffers of legislators willing to roll back parts of the 2010 bill. As a result, many regulations are still not in place, and the Securities and Exchange Commission and CFTC budgets have been slashed, limiting their ability to investigate wrongdoing.

What Is Responsible Regulation?

Critics of Dodd-Frank assert that it does not address institutions deemed too big to fail since it explicitly permits bailouts via a “resolution authority” provision to be initiated at the discretion of government authorities. Many people – including Sandy Weill, John Reed, and Richard Parsons (all former Citigroup chairmen) – argue that banks are, in fact, too big. Federal Reserve Governors Tarullo, Fisher, Stein, Plosser, and Bullard argue that the only solution is to break up the mega-banks.
 
However, others would simply require that banks raise their capital ratio to 10% or more of their assets, and require more cash reserves. They note that during the Great Depression, large New York banks maintained more than 15% of their assets in equity and cash reserves in excess of 25% – and none of these banks failed.

 
Cam Fine, CEO of the 7,000-member-strong Independent Community Bankers of America, bluntly claims, “Too-big-to-fail firms should be downsized and split up.” Rather than reducing the risk that mega-banks pose, the Dodd-Frank Act has aggrandized the advantage of large banks over smaller competitors, imposing such a burden on the latter that “they will simply have to sell out to larger institutions that have the staff to deal with the massive volume of new reports and rules,” according to American Bankers Association President Ed Yingling.
 
The provisions of Dodd-Frank extend well beyond bankers to other segments of the financial industry. While unpopular, many players have reluctantly prepared for its new rules and discovered that the situation is not quite as dire as initially projected. According to Wulf Kaal, a University of St. Thomas professor who surveyed 94 private equity, venture capital, real estate, and hedge fund advisers, 7 of 10 say that the new laws haven’t affected their investors’ rates of return, nor do they plan to alter their investment style. In other words, the regulations have been diluted and defanged to the extent that no real change is required.
 
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