There is intermittent blue sky overhead with random periods of sunlight. Flocks of song birds, sparrows, finches, nut hatches, and a college of Cardinals compete for feeding space and time on the feeders. The current temperature at 1321 is 35.7°F. The frozen glaze of sleet, rain, and snow on the back deck has begun to melt, except for the area closest to the door that remains in shadow most of the day. I’ll have to spread anti-ice pellets tonight.
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision concerning freedom of speech for corporations has me as seriously concerned as it does most people who have given the matter thought. Despite nearly a century of precedent and history, the Bush appointees and Reagan appointees persist in their efforts to return the nation to those thrilling days of yester-year when Robber Barons got the government they were able to pay for and the rest of the citizenry was steadfastly ignored unless they had something the wealthy wanted. The Roberts Court may well be the worst thing Bush II left the nation, his most grievous assault upon the republic.
The Bush years were filled with complaints from the right about “judicial activism.” These usually revolved around social and cultural matters, the hot-button concerns that I believe are best left to individuals such as birth control and abortion. The question of equal rights under the law for homosexuals was also hotly contested. The Religious right, the Theocon base for the GOP wants desperately to outlaw abortion and birth control so that women no longer have any choice in the question of reproduction. That the “sacred fetus” becomes a “burden upon society” once it is delivered, never seems to change the equation. The GOP base will attend rally after rally to stop abortion but will never contribute or propose money for immunizations, adequate meals, housing, day care, education, or any of the other items that the no longer sacred child needs in order to become a functional member of society.
The question of “gay marriage” somehow is tied to the Theocons’ insistence that two men or two women marrying will somehow cause millions of heterosexual marriages to fall apart and become valueless. I fail to understand how anyone else’s marriage changes the value of mine.
Now that the conservative time bomb planted by Bush has begun to detonate, the “judicial activism” of the Roberts Court is somehow magically acceptable, and appropriate. The Court has reinforced the legal opinion that corporations have the same 1st Amendment rights as do individual citizens. This works out well if “you” happen to be a “corporation” in need of purchasing an elected official. “You” are now able to spend as freely as you can afford to buy the best Congress you can purchase. Of course, the ability to designate those funds used to buy elected influence as a “business expense” makes the deal even sweeter.
I, as a private citizen, have freedom of speech guaranteed by the 1st Amendment. What I do not have; what most private citizens do not have, is the cash reserves necessary to buy Congress. I can vote in primary elections – sort of a joke where I live – and I can write letters to local media. I can e-mail, call, and write my elected officials. I can ask to speak to those officials face-to-face in order to convey my concerns to them. I have done all of these things repeatedly. Once in a while my letters are printed in local media. Since our Congresswoman in Florida never bothered to set up the e-mail link on her official web page until I called the local office and complained, since our current Congressman here in TN has no working e-mail link on his official web site despite my complaints, I doubt seriously that anything I have submitted by e-mail has ever seen the whites of their eyes. As for the face-to-face meetings that might actually provide an opportunity for conversation; I don’t travel in the right circles, belong to the right church, eat at the right restaurants and country clubs, or have sufficient discretionary cash to catch their attention. Like most citizens, I can be safely ignored by my Congressman and Senators; and I am. Corporations, capable of funding an entire re-election campaign if they choose, cannot be. Historically, they haven’t been. But now, following the Roberts’ Court’s recent decision, corporate voices have been transmuted from the loudest on the playing field, into a heavily amplified presence capable of shouting down single citizens or the collective voices of private citizens. We have just become, officially, USA, Inc. It was wonderful to have been a citizen of the USA that we once knew; the nation that once had the courage and leadership to tell corporations, “No!” I don’t think I’m going to like the corporate version of my nation at all.
In other news, the Obama budget puts a halt to any plans to return men to the moon and to establish a working colony. NASA’s engineers, rocket scientists, support staff, and other workers now face job loss and worse. The dream of a moon colony has been in my mind for ever. I’m of the generation that watched Willi Ley on Disney explain how the circular space station would look and function, how the three-stage lifting vehicles would take men to the moon and bring them back safely. Then we watched those things become reality. Apollo worked and we watched men from the USA walk on the moon and return home. If the ISS-1 is not the bicycle tire space station proposed by Ley, it will do nicely and for the most part, we, NASA, put it there. Now our shuttles are falling apart and we have not completed the Ares I lifting vehicle needed to replace them. The Aries V was also to provide lift to return to the moon. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/ares/index.html
The loss of the moon mission, the retreat from space exploration as a manned program and the potential loss of NASA in coming years speaks volumes about our status as a great power in today’s scientific world. India, Japan, and China are all poised to take their place in the space race. Obama’s people hope that our previous leadership role will be filled by commercial concerns. I don’t see that happening. I don’t see the corporations we have today doing anything that would advance national status at the expense of their executives’ bonuses for doing nothing but place-holding. There is no nationalism in our corporations sufficient to develop and spur a manned-space exploration program. The need for annual profitability precludes any long-term program such as Apollo being launched by private concern. While Virgin Air plans a space tourism thrill ride to lift rich people into an interval of weightlessness, this may not pan out due to cost/participant or it may cease operation once Branson has discovered whether or not he is subject to “space-sickness.”
Certainly no private corporation will be willing to undertake a large-scale program involving private citizens and high-risk, experimental, rocket-propelled vehicles. Government programs provide staff drawn from the ranks of our military, ready to risk their lives in such vehicles for the advancement of the program and for the benefit of science and engineering, doing a job that will, by definition, lead to multiple and repeated fatalities. Imagine the lawsuits that would have plagued a corporation that constructed the poorly designed and built Apollo module that took Grissom, White, and Chaffee to their fiery end. The first shuttle failure would have been the last, as without a government program to provide a market, there would have been no corporation willing to continue flying the shuttle for commercial purposes.
Heinlein postulated and wrote of a commercial venture to launch a moon trip. He was right in many predictions but I don’t believe his prediction of a corporate-driven moon colony will ever take place. Greed, corporate returns and huge, unwarranted bonuses are more important to men who seek power in business and finance than are science, engineering, and exploration.
To see a corporate venture to the moon take place will require the discovery of some material as valuable as gold, or a pocket of weapons-grade uranium the size of Cuba.
Apollo 14 Mission
Crew Alan B. Shepard Jr. Commander
Edgar D. Mitchell Lunar Module Pilot
Stuart A. Roosa Command Module Pilot
Launch Jan. 31, 1971; 4:03 p.m. EDT 39 years ago today.
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