Returneth

I see you have well and faithfully filled your stint at the post, blog soldier!  Well done.

I will leave it to others to comment on the DOMA decision this week by the SCOTUS. As my faculties settle into some coherence, I would like to briefly speak on two issues this week.  Although I hope to get it in, as I am off traveling again within a fortnight, I may beg to presume on your good graces again for next Sunday.  As the little genie said to Sinbad: “I will try, I will try” (to get in a blog post next week).

The first issue is the one that was overshadowed by the DOMA decision: the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.  I am vastly oversimplifying, but John Roberts, writing for the majority, essentially said that it was being struck down as unconstitutional because it wasn’t needed anymore. 

I can understand and in some respects sympathize with discomfort over some of the actions resulting from the Voting Rights Act—ballots in different languages, interpreters, etc.  If one is a US citizen, language proficiency enough to vote should be presumed in most cases.

However, that sort of thing is minor next to what still happens, incredibly in the 21^st century and nearly 50 years after the Act was passed: voter discrimination.  After an election cycle in which voter discrimination was attempted in droves, one could have made a case that the Act should have been strengthened, not gutted.  And as a voting rights federal observer for several years, I can tell you from experience that some serious discrimination—some of it ethnic and racial, some of it partisan—takes place with regularity in far too many places still. 

It is hard not to feel the plutocratic directors are constantly moving to tamp down pockets of potential resistance to effectively complete control.

The second matter, related to the same group of folks, concerns, what else, money.  It wasn’t greatly noticed, but this past week, the two rating agencies of and about Wall Street—Moody’s and Standard and Poor—were revealed to have shaded their ratings to make firms look better than they were.  Like corporate auditing, where the auditors are paid by those they are auditing, it is (to be kind) an inherently conflict of interest system.  Because, like auditing, the Wall Street raters are paid by the companies and banks. Not into a central fund, but directly.  As I was told long ago by an auditing firm manager: “Why would we tell the public about that?  Who do you think pays our fee?”

It doesn’t have to be that way.  You don’t have to scout around far to find countries that do things differently.  And that don’t have endless financial crises brought on by greed, irresponsibility, and lack of regulatory oversight.  Our favorite Scandinavians of course.  And Canada.

What they must think of us…