Congrats New York, But.......

I suppose that congratulations are in order for the gay and lesbian community in New York state this week. They can now be married and have all the advantages and disadvantages associated with the institution. One wonders if they fully thought out the downside of this event. Now they will find their way into divorce courts, child support cases, and the myriad of other legal potentialities in modern marriage. Good luck with that!

Now don't misunderstand me. I really don't care about gay marriage. I am more interested in the distraction it brings that helps keep truly political and economic issues buried in media BS. In my humble opinion it would have made more sense to make civil unions legal nationally, thereby affording them the same legal status as marriage, but without offending those who oppose gay marriage on religious grounds. If you're interested, the statistics tell us that single parent families, especially those of unwed mothers are far more deleterious to our society than homosexuality. Our current group of politicians won't let these facts get in the way of their posturing on family values. Many in our government continue to attempt to legislate morality often with disastrous results.

Anyway...... There is some irony in New York state showing this level of tolerance and progressiveness considering it is the same state that houses the majority of our financial crooks and swindlers. Too bad the legislature couldn't focus on that. The chief crime fighter in that state was Elliot Spitzer who fought Wall Street while attorney general, but managed to get caught in some adulterous behavior as Governor of the state. You don't here much out of the NY Attorney Generals office on prosecutions these days, do you?

The media outlets continue to focus on moral issues which arouse the fanatics on both the right and the left. While our focus is on these issues, the more critical and important political issues are left to the insiders to handle (or not) as they see fit. Indeed the right has managed to convert purely religious issues into political dialogue, forgetting or ignoring the separation of church and state so crucial to our constitution.

This has gone on for so long now that we take it as the norm. Few people object often or loudly enough to force reporting about the real and important issues that face our country.

What are those issues you ask?

Here are just a few issues on which I think we ought to focus.

• True progressive reform of our financial system, including the FED
• A national debate on our continuing global military intervention and the costs to our military, our economy and our national character
• An accurate assessment of our nations need for infrastructure growth and maintenance
  
• Reform of the individual and corporate tax system with emphasis on creating skilled jobs in the US and penalizing those who send work offshore, (also corporations who hide offshore to escape taxes)
• Creating a realistic national drug policy and ending the so called war on drugs, (it has had a similar effect to prohibition and created drug billionaires worse than Al Capone)
• Take the money out of our elections and rescind the Supreme Court's decision to give corporations unlimited access to our politicians with no individual responsibility for the corporate officers.

There are no doubt many more issues that could be brought to mind, but if the ones above were seriously addressed we would have a much better country for our middle class.

Fat Chance? Maybe, but I continue to hope.

RT