Disasters - An Election Week Editorial

A liberal Democrats view of the Second Mile Sandusky Scandal 
by Barry Bozeman 

Here near the end of the first 12 month's since Linda Kelly, Attorney General of PA. started the assault on Penn State University we are seeing unprecedented natural disasters: 

• Freak Storm Hurtles Towards East Coast... Obama: 'This Is Serious'... Millions At Risk... Projected Storm Surge A 'Worst Case Scenario'... Power Outages Could Hit 10 Million... Over 5,000 Flights Canceled... D.C. Federal Offices Closed On Monday... NYC Mass Transit Suspended... Schools Closed... 'On Track To Become Record Storm'...
• Canada Earthquake: British Columbia Hit, Tsunami Warning ForAlaska, Hawaii
• Japanese tsunami: 2,184 people still missing 18 months on Police and volunteers are again scouring the coast ofnorth-east Japan, searching for the remains of the 2,184 people still missingafter last year's devastating Great East Japan Earthquake.

and many see unprecedented man made disasters in the making: 

• Warning: Oil supplies are running out fast Catastrophic shortfalls threaten economic recovery, says world's top energy economist
• Greenhouse gas levels pass symbolic 400ppm CO2 milestone Monitoring stations in the Arctic detect record levels of carbon dioxide, higher than ever above 'safe' 350ppm mark
• AN ECONOMY STILL BUILT ON SAND Friday's GDP figures could cheer only those believing that today’s anemic recovery can be sustained powered and even boosted by promoting not only personal consumption, but defense spending as well. In fact, the new data revealed that the nation moves farther away from the President’s  goal of creating an economy “built to last.”

As a liberal Democrat I'm concerned about Climate Change, the power of the Plutocracy or the growing gap between the privileged few and the rest of us, the interference in personal choices dealing with family size, world population, and sexual orientation, the size of the prison population over recreational drug use, the destruction of the unions, the assault on Social Security and medical care initiatives, rewarding multi-national corporations that avoid fair taxes and export jobs, corporate personhood, ownership of the public airwaves and media, and the food & water supply, and the destruction of the middle class. 

Baby Boomers - those born after the war from the mid 40's to mid 50's to depression tested parents, entered a life of incredible prospects - particularly as white males. We were sold on America the land of opportunity, Freedom, and justice threatened by the Red menace and nuclear annihilation. 

Well we have lived in an interesting era - one where "democracy and freedom" triumphed over totalitarianism. It wasn't very pretty and it still isn't. Our democracy is threatened by something far worse than the hapless Russians - we are threatened by the unscrupulous use of wealth and power by the few at the expense of the middle class, the destruction of the fourth estate, and the most outrageous theft in the history of the world perpetrated by our financial institutions between 2000 and 2008. The greatest redistribution of wealth in the history of the world has happened in the US since 1980 when trillions of dollars in wealth was redistributed from the middle class to the wealthiest 2 to 10% of the population. 

We once had a fourth estate that was primarily about getting to the truth and making it known. Now those 'independent' news departments are part of a corporate structure that places profit above principal. Without that principal we have lost the key element required in Democracy. A misinformed electorate is worse than an uninformed electorate. Many of us join political parties based on some affinity for their principals and many ignore the reality in favor of that affinity. We have lost the ability to comprehend the reason and rely instead on the myth. 

One Disaster that is the subject of this website and it's relationship to political opinion 

Often the things that seem most obvious to some are completely ignored by many. That's one reason I find the situation involving Penn State, Joe Paterno, and the Second Mile Sandusky Scandal so informative. It doesn't matter if you are a liberal Democrat like me or a conservative Republican like my friend and partner Ray Blehar. We can both see eye to eye on this situation despite political affiliations that would likely have us screaming names at one another in any other election year. 

1) The corporate media has misinformed the public: 

John Ziegler would likely call this the Liberal Media - a term that seems quite absurd to someone who sees the media as primarily a corporate profit center. It doesn't seem to matter if it's Faux News or the NYT, the corporate owned media has been 95% wrong from Pulitzer winning Sara Ganim of The Patriot News with her insider relationship with the Corbett administration to ESPN the corporate owned professional sports leader that speaks for a primarily Republican wealthy sports community of millionaire athletes and billionaire owners. It doesn't matter what you call it - 95% or more of the media had this wrong and they continue to have it wrong. 

2) The leadership of major university - usually considered a part of liberal academia - has through it's millionaire corporate Board of Trustees, destroyed the legacy of a conservative Republican football coach who gave 61 years of sterling leadership and service to that institution. 

Why would a liberal Democrat like me care about that? We will get to that later in this post. But this characterization seems reasonable. Seeing John P. Surma the CEO of US Steel, Ken Frasier the CEO of Merek Pharmaceuticals, Karen Peetz of the Bank of NY Mellon, Ira Lubert the multi-millionaire Real Estate tycoon, and Republican Gov. Tom Corbett as corporate conservatives isn't a stretch is it? So why would they be the people who would throw Joe Paterno under their bus? 

This is a strange situation when you think about it. Football teams and the moneyed elite that donate huge sums for stadiums suites in order to influence the programs are naturally the most conservative elements of the ostensibly liberal academic institutions. How does the old saw go? "Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains." - Winston Churchill