The Ministry of Truth of the United States of America

President Obama revealed his educational agenda by telling children to stay in school and study hard. He also told them that hard work leads to good things. The very thing that President George Herbert Walker Bush told schoolchildren in 1991.

At that time, the Democratic Party wrongly complained about Bush’s agenda and even investigated the money that was spent to broadcast the speech. Yes, wrongly, since nothing illegal was done. The whole incident made the Democrats look silly. Yet during the last few days, the Republicans, instead of learning from the silliness of the Democrats, blustered about Obama’s lust to preach the doctrines of socialism to schoolchildren, his desire to set up a personality cult, and his abuse of presidential power.

Before Obama gave his speech, a forthright conservative parent worried that Obama would turn public schools over to some socialist agenda. A guest on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program compared Barak Obama to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il. Another radio pundit, fearful for his child’s safety, said, "I wouldn’t let my next-door neighbor talk to my kid alone; I’m sure as hell not letting Barak Obama talk to my kid alone." These assessments of Obama’s speech appeared in The New York Times on Friday, September 4, 2009, four days before Obama spoke, and three days before the text of the speech was released.

I would think that these concerned citizens might be embarrassed now that Obama’s speech has been delivered. Some others might even expect these good people to admit they were wrong and support Obama’s statements to American schoolchildren. But they cannot and they will not. Without realizing it, these folks have themselves become indoctrinated by the American version of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s novel, 1984.

The Ministry of Truth was run by the Party, which was divided into the Inner Party and the Outer Party. The Inner Party was in complete control of all economic and political activity. It also broadcast news of glorious military victories and increased manufacturing production. The data was repeated again and again. And again.

The Outer Party’s members, who obeyed all rules promulgated by the Inner Party, had to listen to the news everywhere, in the street, in restaurants, in train stations. Even in their homes, where television sets, installed by the Ministry of Truth, could not be turned off. The uninterrupted news distracted them from the rusty plumbing in their flats, their utter dependence on the Inner Party for employment, and the ever-diminishing vocabulary that they were allowed to use. Their world was a vast echo chamber of ideals preached by the Inner Party.
Members of the Outer Party never thought of examining the data they were told; to do so would have been a thought crime, punishable by public humiliation, torture and maybe death. So, they repeated the data to each other in conversations that became ever more restricted in subject matter. There were no discussions of sex, politics and religion, only the repetition of data and the three principles of the Inner Party: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.

Repetition and more repetition taught them the truth, and they believed it because their fellow members of the Outer Party believed it. As a matter of fact, it comforted them and, as Winston Smith the protagonist did, they overcame their individuality and learned to love Big Brother.
In his afterword to the novel, Erich Fromm wrote in 1961: "It is one of the most characteristic and destructive developments of our own society that man, becoming more and more of an instrument, transforms reality into something relative to his own interests and functions. Truth is proven by the consensus of millions: to the slogan ‘how can millions be wrong’ is added ‘and how can a minority be right.’ Orwell shows quite clearly that in a system in which the concept of truth as an objective judgement concerning reality is abolished, anyone who is a minority of one must be convinced that he is insane."

The American Ministry of Truth is a creature of radio, television, and the Internet, which can be used to inform, persuade and entertain. They are also used by the majority to repeat ideas that ruin careers, distort government policy, and hide destructive activities.

Think of the times in which the majority was wrong. Until Joseph Welch revealed Joseph McCarthy’s lies and distortions, the majority thought that Communists had taken over the government. Until Alexander Butterfield revealed that the Nixon White House had tapes of conversations held in the oval office, the majority of Americans believed that Richard Nixon had not been involved in the Watergate break-ins. Until the US invaded Iraq, the majority of Americans knew that Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction, and until September, 2006, the majority of Americans knew that Hussein and Osama bin-Laden had plotted the attack on the World Trade Center. In all these cases, the truth was what the majority said, and the minority was shouted down and vilified as being unpatriotic.

Despite the number of times the majority is proven wrong, we Americans continue to seek out popular public figures who express popular opinions that mirror our own prejudices and ignorance. We revel in radio and TV talk shows that feature shouting opinionizers who are retired military officers, political activists, think-tank scholars, government officials, and columnists who role-play as liberals and conservatives. The George Will and Sam Donaldson Act is a favorite among the majority of Americans who prefer vaudeville to journalism.

The information we receive from each of them is biased toward the views that we already hold, because we avoid programs that do otherwise. We find comfort in the "fair and balanced" doctrine, which simply means that a liberal and a conservative sit in front of a microphone and camera to shout at each other for our benefit. When our favorite scores a point, we cheer; when the other guy does, we boo. We are entertained, but are neither persuaded nor informed.

Celebrities know what their audiences want to hear. Thus Rush Limbaugh tells his audience: "Remember, now, the Alinsky rule: ‘You speak within the realm of your audience's experience.’ The American people want to hear children motivated to be good, to do the best they can, to work hard. Okay, so go out and use the language and use the philosophy that makes your audience comfortable with you when your objective is the exact opposite of what you say. Barack Obama wants as many of these kids in school to grow up needing government services as he can."

Limbaugh uses the Alinsky rule, and then tells his followers that Obama said something that he didn’t. I do not believe that Obama wants kids in school to grow up needing government services. Nor have I seen any evidence of actions taken by his administration that demonstrate Limbaugh’s assertion.

However, if I were to get all my political and economic information from no one but Limbaugh, I would whoop with delight every time he insulted a government official in the Obama administration. I would repeat the latest Rushism to my fellow believers in conversation or via e-mail and ask them to send it on to their friends. Thus I would become an instrument of the American Ministry of Truth.

I have to give Limbaugh credit; he uses language very well, and he is in Don Rickles’s league when it comes to insults and put downs. The difference between them is vast. Rickles is an entertainer; Limbaugh is a thrice-divorced, recovering drug addict posing as an advocate for American family values. And pretending to be a Christian-American’s Minister of Truth.

The Ministry of Truth also uses e-mail to repeat untruths. (Look up my blog of December 27, 2008, which examined the lies spread by someone posing as a historian.) A recent e-mail, which has been making the rounds, uses a good cause to assert a religious prejudice. It uses all capital letters to show its indignation and heart break. I have left it in its "flaming" format for full effect.

"RECENTLY THIS WEEK, UK REMOVED THE HOLOCAUST FROM ITS SCHOOL CURRICULUM BECAUSE IT ‘OFFENDED’ THE MOSLEM POPULATION WHICH CLAIMS IT NEVER OCCURRED. THIS IS A FRIGHTENING PORTENT OF THE FEAR THAT IS GRIPPING THE WORLD AND HOW EASILY EACH COUNTRY IS GIVING INTO IT. IT IS NOW MORE THAN 60 YEARS AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN EUROPE ENDED. THIS E-MAIL IS BEING SENT AS A MEMORIAL CHAIN, IN MEMORY OF THE SIX MILLION JEWS, 20 MILLION RUSSIANS, 10 MILLION CHRISTIANS, GYPSIES AND 1,900 CATHOLIC PRIESTS WHO WERE MURDERED, MASSACRED RAPED, BURNED, STARVED AND HUMILIATED WITH THE GERMAN AND RUSSIAN PEOPLES LOOKING THE OTHER WAY! NOW, MORE THAN EVER, WITH IRAN, AMONG OTHERS, CLAIMING THE HOLOCAUST TO BE "A MYTH," IT IS IMPERATIVE TO MAKE SURE THE WORLD NEVER FORGETS. THIS E-MAIL IS INTENDED TO REACH 40 MILLION PEOPLE WORLDWIDE!"

There are indeed people who deny the occurrence of the Holocaust, the President of Iran being one, and Roman Catholic Bishop William Richardson of the UK being another. However, this e-mail seeks to inflame hatred of Islamic people by claiming that Muslims forced the British Education Ministry to remove the Holocaust from its curriculum. Which is not true.

There was a controversy in a town in Northern England (both BBC and The Guardian have stories about this on their websites), where Muslims wanted a local council to remove the Holocaust from the curriculum. But it wasn’t removed by the local council; nor, I repeat, was it removed by UK’s Ministry of Education.

Another similar e-mail said the same thing about the Kentucky public schools, but it wasn’t true either. Both are being circulated by that party of Americans who believe that Islam is evil. However, what they believe, in this instance, is a lie.

The Ministry of Truth of the United States of America gets its ideas from prejudices—that shadow world of narrow minds and mean spirits who transform reality into something relative to their own interests and functions.. They have made themselves instruments of circulation and repitition, because that is the only way the flimsiness of their reasoning can appear solid. After all, if a million people believe it, how can it be wrong?

Our Health Care Brawl

"What we have here is a failure to communicate!"
Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke

In the current health care brawl we are not listening to our political opponents. At our town meetings, we are shouting down our elected representatives, and we are threatening our opponents with violence and death. We scream epithets at politicians, and brand them liars, socialists, communists or fascists. We admire those of us with the loudest voices that interrupt our opponents with satiric rejoinders rather than relevant information. We all have become members of a political WWF, and we smack down our political opponents with animal roars and vulgar gestures that we should have left on the elementary school playground. Some of us even carry pistols to town meetings and rallies, in the belief that the Second Amendment means it’s okay to intimidate people with weapons. On television every night, we are presented with the alarming spectacle of our feeding on our own emotions.

We can’t communicate because we are afraid. Many of us agree with the voter who screamed, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare." Yes, it was an amusing slip, but the man is not stupid. He is genuinely afraid. Afraid that, even though Medicare is a government program, we will not receive proper medical attention if we adopt national health services such as those in England and Canada. Some of us shrink from a government bureaucracy that we have been told will stand between Americans and their physicians. Others of us shudder at the reports of federal death camps for our ailing elderly who cannot pay for medical care. We fear, and we will literally fight to the death those that are advocating evil policies. Even if our fears are based on lies or our own ignorance.

Ignorance is the bane of political discourse, and we can’t communicate because we simply don’t know what we are talking about when we discuss the national health services of England and Canada. They aren’t perfect, but those of us who claim government provided health care is wicked do not understand those programs. In England and Canada surgery, births, end-of-life counselling, vaccinations, medications, physical exams are all provided free, and without permission from a bureaucrat or insurance claims adjustor.

The ultimate in ignorance was an editorial in Investor's Business Daily, which claimed, "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless." However Professor Hawking denied the assertion. "I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS," he told The Guardian. "I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived." I hope that the IBD’s editorial board expressed their views out of ignorance of Professor Hawking’s nationality (he is British, not American), not out of a wish to deceive their readers. Investors Business Daily later corrected their editorial blunder.

We are divided into camps that justify lies, exaggerations, and intimidation of our opposition. And we get away with it, because no one has explained what health care reform will do. However, health care is not the problem. The US has excellent health care. The problem is getting to it. We do not need health care reform, we need health insurance reform.
We are debating the wrong issue. We need to directly address the federal regulation of the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the hospital industry, and the industry that manufactures medical devices and implements.

Federal regulations will not destroy capitalism, privacy and family values. We need regulations to protect consumers of health insurance that pays for the drugs, pace makers, urine analyses, liver transplants, spinal taps, and the machines, tubes, meters, monitors and all the other gadgets and materials that are attached to or inserted into our bodies.

Consumer protection is the issue we should be debating. How do we protect consumers from being denied medical care by corporate bureaucrats and insurance clerks with no medical training? How do we protect consumers from unjustifiable cancellation of medical insurance? How do we protect consumers from unnecessary and fraudulent medical tests and procedures? From losing insurance coverage when our employers go out of business? From emergency rooms overcrowded with ill and injured people with no insurance at all. From fees on our medical bills that pay for the medical treatment of others who are uninsured?

President Obama, Vice President Biden, the United States Senate, and the US House of Representatives have not dealt with these problems. Instead they have kept the debate about health care, a topic so broad that it can be easily manipulated. Obama has not presented a plan that says, specifically, what it will do to protect health insurance consumers. Senators and members of Congress haven’t either.

They can’t, because they are in the pockets of the very industries that need regulation. As long as their re-election campaigns are financed by these corporations and their lobbying groups, consumers will continue to suffer. When Congress re-convenes in the fall, nothing will happen. Health insurance reform will not happen. The number of us with no health insurance will increase, but government workers, including The President, his cabinet and aides, members of the Senate and House of Representatives, will be covered. To them, and to executives and employees of the health insurance industry, "God’s in His Heaven, and all’s right with the world."

As long as they keep us ill-informed and deaf to one another’s reasonable words.

White Male Victims and Judicial Activists

During the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, no one learned much about Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy, but there was enough drama to fill a reality TV show. Over four days, seven white, conservative Republican Senators sought to portray themselves as victims of Sotomayer’s ethnic prejudice and judicial activism. They became, in effect, the White Senators Council of the Judiciary Committee. And they were very upset by a statement Judge Sotomayor had made to a group of Hispanic law students at the University of California, Berkeley.

And this is what Judge Sotomayor said: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experience, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Judge Sotomayor’s statement asserts that a Latina woman’s experience is richer than that of a white man who has not had to raise families in drug-ridden neighborhoods with poorly equipped schools, a white man who has not had to endure jokes about wetbacks and funny accents, a white man who has not had to prove that he was an American citizen when applying for a job. These experiences, which are commonplace in the Latino community, are sources of wisdom for Latina women who succeed in spite of them.

Sensible Americans understood the judge’s meaning, but the members of the White Senators Council were really hurt. To the quick. After all, they as white men had every right to be expected to reach conclusions that were at least as good as those of a wise Latina woman. They were Senators. Some of their best friends were Latinos.

They drew themselves up in righteous indignation and attacked Judge Sotomayor for being prejudiced against white people. They so eagerly took on the role of victim that I expected them to bring charges against the judge under the Civil Rights Act. One injured member of the White Senators Council, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, felt constrained to say in his own defense, "If I ever said something remotely like that, my career would have been over."

Senator Graham spoke in code, White Speak Code. Translated, the message was: "White people, despite a three-hundred-year history of racial and ethnic bias, slave trading, miscegenation, and murder, are really nice folks whom non-whites must love, respect, and never say anything negative about."

White Speak Code used to be difficult to decipher, but it is now so prevalent that it is easy to translate. We all have heard the complaint, "I don’t want my tax money spent on people who are too lazy to work and too lazy to learn English." Believe it or not, conservatives think that such statements are assertions of good American virtues. They also believe that only conservative white voters can decode the message. "You-know-who" are lazy, jobless people who refuse to learn English.

In the old days, members of the White Senators Council were more honest about their beliefs. I remember another South Carolinian, the late Strom Thurmond, who yelled "Segregation NOW! Segregation FOREVER!" He also fathered a black girl out of wedlock.

Suppose Senator Graham had said, "I would hope that a wise white man, with the richness of his experience, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived his life." Would his career have been over? I doubt it. There is still an elite who believes that the lives of white people are richer than and superior to those of all other ethnic groups. They believe that a white man’s wisdom is gained from telling jokes about the way "illegals" speak, attending schools in all white, drug-free neighborhoods, and making sure their tax money does not go to people who are too lazy to work or learn English. These folks would continue to vote for Lindsey Graham. And for the time being, they will be able to re-elect Graham and all the other members of the White Senators Council.

But not for long. And this is why Graham and his colleagues on the White Senators Council act like victims. They are frightened.

The world is no longer of the white, by the white and for the white. The world contains a growing Latino and African-American population that no longer asks for help but demands its rights, a population that votes and no longer depends entirely on white men for employment. This world contains Junot Diaz and Toni Morrison, Edward James Olmos and Denzel Washington, Ricardo Sanchez and Colin Powell, Mario Molina and Mark Dean. Not to mention Sonia Sotomayor and Eric Holder.

The White Senators Council simply does not understand what is happening in the world. They do not understand that they can no longer order Latinos and African Americans around. Nor can they patronize them. They have to cooperate with them.

And they don’t know how. Frank Rich in his column for The New York Times (July 19, 2009) describes what to me was the most embarrassing moment in the Sotomayor hearings.
"…When Tom Coburn of Oklahoma merrily joked to Sotomayor that ‘You’ll have lots of ’splainin’ to do,’ it clearly didn’t occur to him that such mindless condescension helps explain why the fastest-growing demographic group in the nation is bolting his party.

"Coburn wouldn’t know that behind the fictional caricature Ricky Ricardo was the innovative and brilliant Cuban-American show-business mogul Desi Arnaz. As Lucie Arnaz, his and Lucille Ball’s daughter, told me last week, it always seemed unfair to her that those laughing at her father’s English usually lacked his fluency in two languages. Then again, Coburn was so unfamiliar with Jews he didn’t have a clear fix on what happened in the Holocaust until 1997, when he was 48. Party elders like Bill Bennett had to school him after he angrily berated NBC for subjecting children and 'decent-minded individuals everywhere' to the violence, 'full-frontal nudity and irresponsible sexual activity of Schindler’s List."

Senator Coburn’s wisdom is the true White Man’s burden: ignorance through complacency. What the White Senators Council doesn’t know is not important to them, because it doesn't touch them personally. And here we arrive at what I have observed about conservatives. Conservatives believe that if something hasn’t happened to them, it hasn’t happened. If it has happened to other people, it is unimportant.

Maybe they will acknowledge problems in the Latino and African American communities when those votes push them out of office.

The White Senators Council also assumed the role of Constitutional Scholar-Philosophers when they accused Judge Sotomayor of being "a liberal judicial activist." As explained by the White Senators Council, judicial activism is the unConsitutional assumption of legislative powers by any part of the judiciary, but especially the Supreme Court. However, the term "liberal judicial activist" is really White- Speak Code for any judges whose decisions they disagree with.

Truth to tell, all judges serving in Federal courts—conservative, moderate, or liberal—are judicial activists. They write opinions explaining their decisions of the court, and the decisions and opinions, even the dissents, become a part of the law. The interpretation of the law becomes a part of the law by explaining how the law may or may not be applied, how and why the processes of the courts may or may not be correct, or even whether a Federal or State law is Constitutional. Even whether a past Supreme Court decision is still in effect.

Historians, journalists, and professors have pointed this out. James MacGregor Burns (Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court, Penguin Press, 2009) gives us a history of the conflict between the Supreme Court and the President, between the Congress and the Supreme Court, and shows us that judicial activism began with John Marshall’s opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803). Marshall wrote: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." Marshall went on to say that this judicial power "extended to all cases arising under the constitution." Burns tells us, "With these words, Marshall laid the basis for a power of judicial review of acts of Congress—indeed over the acts of all branches of national and state governments—so absolute and sweeping that it would eventually create supremacy of the Supreme Court over American government (emphasis Burns’s)."

Thus began partisanship in the process of the appointment of judges by the President and the confirmation by the Senate. Presidents want judges to decide cases so that their political party’s goals will be supported. So do Senators. Sotomayor is a judicial activist, and so are John Paul Stevens, Antonin Gregory Scalia, Anthony Mcleod Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Gerald Breyer, John Glover Roberts, Jr., and Samuel Anthony Alito.

The White Senators Council wants justices to be umpires, but the analogy is ridiculous. Imagine in a baseball game a close play at third base. Now imagine the runner who was called out appealing to the chief of the crew of umpires on the field. Imagine the manager of the opposing team presenting his arguments in support of the call. Imagine the crew chief stopping the game, listening to the arguments that are presented in a calm, deliberate manner. Imagine, the umpires in a closed meeting presided over the crew chief. Imagine the crew chief getting a vote of all the umpires that were on the field at the time of the play, then assigning a particular umpire to write an opinion that will have to be researched and footnoted by an umpire’s clerk, then submitting the written opinion to the full crew for review, and finally publishing, and maybe, reading the opinion to the fans along with dissents from other disagreeing umpires.
Supreme Court Justices are no more baseball umpires than talkshow pundits are US Senators.

Unfortunately for the citizens of our republic, the White Senators Council behave like talkshow pundits instead of members of what was once known as the world's greatest deliberative body.

Promoting the General Welfare

Medical care is a human need.

Medical care should not be a commodity to be sold for profit the same way that supermarkets sell canned tomatoes and toilet paper. But it is.

Medical care should not be a privilege acquired by family wealth and connections, nor a perquisite bestowed by corporate committees. But it is.

Insurance for medical care should not be paid for by employers who resent the expense, nor by employees who lose their medical insurance coverage when their employers go bankrupt or leave town. Employees who become ill should not lose their coverage, when they change jobs, because of "pre-existing conditions." But all this is true.

Those who need medical care should get it immediately. No one else but physicians and their patients should determine what treatments should be provided. Then physicians and medical technicians should provide it. All without obtaining permission from insurance clerks untaught in science and medicine.

We the citizens of the United States of America should receive, at the very least, the same health care that our elected officials (correctly called "the hired help" by Will Rogers) give themselves. After all, we pay to the Federal and state governments income, excise, property, sales, airline ticket, and gasoline taxes, and we the employers should control the benefits that our hired help receive.

The best way to assure all Americans the excellent medical care that they need is a government-sponsored, single-payer plan that is financed by a flat tax on all gross personal and corporate income, regardless of its source. It would be collected by the Department of Health and Human Services, through the Internal Revenue Service. The money would be deducted from paychecks, stock and bond distributions of all kinds, including those that are currently "tax free." Those reporting their income quarterly would pay when submitting their quarterly returns. This plan would increase revenue because medical expenses would no longer be deductible on income tax returns. Most important, this plan would eliminate the need for Medicare and Medicaid.

All medical expenses, approved by the patient and physician, would be paid by HHS directly to the doctors, clinics, hospitals, pharmacies and medical laboratories involved in the treatment.
Would some doctors, clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, medical laboratories and patients take advantage of this plan and cheat the government out of billions of dollars? Possibly. Do some of them cheat the government now? Yes. No law has ever prevented fraud, any more than a stop sign has kept speeders from racing through intersections. We do not pass legislation to keep crime from occurring. We pass laws to give victims of crime a just system of redress. We also pass them to benefit citizens that obey the law. And we pass them to fulfil the mandate of the Constitution’s Preamble: to form a more perfect Union and to promote the general welfare. A single payer system will do just that.

Unfortunately, this won’t happen, because insurance companies won’t allow it. They have more influence over lawmakers than we voters do.

Why did American insurance companies and their clients, the employers of American workers, become the gatekeepers to American health care? Because we American citizens gave them the keys to clinics and hospitals during the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties. Our human need for medical care became an integral part of our employment compensation, as important as salary.

At first, medical insurance was considered something of a gift from a benevolent employer. The company would take care of you as long as you worked hard and were a productive employee.
However, employee productivity rose, but company benefits shrunk. The employee share of group medical insurance premiums increased, and in some cases the employees paid 100%.
Some companies dropped group medical insurance altogether.

Others offered a so-called "medical savings account," which allowed the employer to deduct money from the employee’s paycheck and send it to medical insurers. The money accumulated in these accounts was then used by the employee to help pay medical bills.

Help pay medical bills, but not completely pay. Most normal medical procedures, e.g. appendectomies, childbirth, cost tens of thousands of dollars, and few people could afford to save that amount of money. Employees might have thought that, after three or four years, their medical savings would grow to an amount that allows them to pay their medical bills. But most medical savings plans paid no interest, and any savings that the employee did not spend in one calendar year went to the insurer.

Insurance companies profit at the expense of human need, and we Americans have surrendered our human values to money. Why should insurance companies and their clients continue to control this human need? Because American culture values money above all else.

As do our elected officials. They cannot be re-elected without campaign contributions from the health care industry. Until our election campaign laws are changed, insurance companies will buy the votes of elected representatives. Consequently, very little will change in our municipal, state and federal governments.

To see how much your elected representatives accept from insurance companies, go to www.MAPLight.org.

The Clown from Georgia's 6th

Newt Gingrich is a public man with a public record. He lives in a glass house, but he revels in throwing stones. His most recent target has been Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. To ABC radios’ Robert Marcus Wilson, he said her recent press conference on the CIA’s use of torture was "the most despicable, dishonest and vicious political effort I've seen in my lifetime. … She is a trivial politician, viciously using partisanship for the narrowest of purposes, and she dishonors the Congress by her behavior." I am no fan of Speaker Pelosi, as I wrote in my blog October 9, 2008, but Newt Gingrich is in no position to throw stones at Nancy Pelosi. Despicable? Dishonest? Vicious? Gingrich, as aggressive, nasty, and hypocritical as Rush Limbaugh, lives in a glass house. A quick look at his record as a human being and as Speaker of the House reveals narrowness of mind, sexual hypocrisy, and unethical behavior.

Gingrich’s viciousness is clear to all in one of his more famous statementsd to Republican Party members: "I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around a campfire but lousy in politics." He wants Republicans to be nasty, and he encourages his fellow party members to avoid neatness, obedience, loyalty, and faithfulness.

As for viciously using partisanship for the narrowest of purposes, Gingrich is a star Republican who virtually shut down the government in 1995. He is also the victim of his own compulsive logorrhea. As Speaker of the House of Representatives, he refused to submit a revised Federal budget allowing previously approved appropriations to expire on schedule, thus causing parts of the Federal government to shut down for lack of funds. He claimed the Republicans only wanted to slow the rate of increase in government spending. However, his motor mouth led him to reveal that his adamantine budget position was in part due to his being insulted by President Clinton, who made Gingrich sit in the rear of Air Force One on the return trip from Yizhak Rabin’s funeral in Israel. You can’t get any narrower than Newt Gingrich.

As for dishonesty, Gingrich should remember his own sins before casting the first stone at Nancy Pelosi. But he has a very short memory, or he must believe that no one else remembers the ethics investigations of his actions while Speaker of the House. Gingrich claimed tax-exempt status for a college course that he had run for obviously political purposes. During the investigation, he was forced to admit to providing inaccurate statements about the college course. He agreed to pay $300,000 for the cost of the investigation, despite denying the charges over misuse of tax-exempt funds. The House Ethics Committee concluded that inaccurate information supplied to investigators represented "intentional or ... reckless" disregard of House rules. For more about Gingrich’s dishonesty, begin your internet search with Wilkipedia.

Let us also remember the dishonor he brought on himself and his family when it was revealed that he was having an extramarital affair during the height of the congressional investigation of President Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. Let us also remember that he has married three times, and that he told his first wife of his plans to divorce her as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from cancer. Let us also remember that the thrice-married Newt Gingrich (reminds me of Rudy Giuliani) has just joined that bedrock of family values and sanctity of marriage, the Roman Catholic Church.

Gingrich writes the same way he speaks. Aggressively, nastily, and often inaccurately. He wrote about Nancy Pelosi in the conservative newsletter, Human Events, "The person who is No. 2 in line to be commander in chief can't have contempt for the men and women who protect our nation. America can't afford it." What makes the statement aggressive and nasty is the inaccuracy. Nancy Pelosi does not have contempt for the men and women who protect our nation. She supported the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. To my chagrin, she even refused to allow an impeachment process to begin in the House of Representatives. Bush and Cheney, by their own words, admitted to having committed war crimes, and should have been impeached. But New Gingrich forgot Pelosi’s positions and shot his mouth off for the narrowest of political purposes. He loves the media spotlight.

And there he stands, center stage, and not just on Fox News or MSNBC. The ABC network loves the man; he is great for ratings. So, since we are stuck with this windbag, I suggest that the only thing we can to do is laugh at him. Laugh at him just as we do at clowns. Laugh at him just as we do self-important dottores and pantalones from the commedia dell’arte. Laugh at him, just as Mel Brooks, in The Producers, laughs at Adolf Hitler

Noble, Noble Cruelty

The front page of The New York Times, May 14, 2009, shows a photograph of Explorer Scouts participating in a program that trains them to kill terrorists. Jennifer Steinhauer reported for the Times that the training could involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as facing down terrorists and taking out active shooters who bring gunfire and and death to college campuses. In a simulation raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout. "Put him on his face and put a knee in his back," a Border Patrol agent explained. "I guarantee that he’ll shut up." As A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy said in the article, "This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl. It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boys Scouts."

A knee in the back and taking out shooters on campus is the path to honor and bravery. Is it a path to a merit badge? In any case, violence is now noble, and its practitioners see themselves as self-sacrificing knights.

America is medieval. It is saturated with cruelty justified by paranoia and xenophobia. So saturated, in fact, that the United States government cannot face the truth that under the Bush administration, it committed crimes against humanity when it tortured detainees at Guantanamo Bay and the aptly named "black sites" all over the world.

President Obama wants to close the book on the Bush administration, but many, myself included, want to keep it open on the page where George W. Bush, Richard B. Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condaleeza Rice are proven to be sadists in the worst tradition of Tomás Torquemada.

This late 15th-century Dominican friar, called by one contemporary, "the hammer of heretics, the light of Spain, the savior of his country, the honor of his order," sought to protect Christianity by burning people at the stake, forcing confessions by torture, and hounding Jews and Muslims out of Spain.

Cheney, the American Torquemada, has been making the talk show circuit, hammering the heretics who still believe that torture is illegal, claiming that President Obama has made America safe for terrorists and trying to preempt any investigation of his national security activities while in office. He, along with George W. Bush, denied that the US was using torture to get intelligence from prisonders, then when the torture became public knowledge, they first said it was a matter of a few bad apples disobeying orders, then they started to justify it.

As they sought information to protect the Homeland (at least they didn’t call it the Fatherland), Bush and Cheney worked hard to be the saviors of their country. They tortured detainees to get information that they claimed would prevent another terrorist attack.

They would not tell us what information they had gained through waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques, because doing so would reveal sensitive intelligence sources. Presumably that would lead to the deaths of spies loyal to us, the strengthening of terrorist cells, and finally more terrorist attacks. However, after seven years of Bush-Cheney intelligence gathering, Osama ben Laden still roams freely, and stories of American torture are used to recruit new suicide bombers for al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hamas.

Despite the blackout on the intelligence gathered from detainees, information about many suspected terrorists have been handed over to journalists. One example is Captain James Yee, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and Muslim Chaplin in the US Army. Yee was assigned to the Guantanamo Bay prison. In 2003, while going home on leave, he made headlines when he was arrested in Jacksonville, Florida, because, according to government agents, he was carrying suspicious documents. He was then subjected to the same treatment as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay: the agents shackled and blindfolded him and jammed soundproof earmuffs over his ears. He was taken to a U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., where he spent 76 days in solitary confinement. Eventually he was charged with sedition, aiding the enemy, spying, espionage and failure to obey a general order. These are capital offenses.

Despite all the media hoopla and the posturing by the Bush administration and the military, no evidence against him was ever presented. In 2004 all the criminal charges were dropped, and Yee was released from custody. Major General Geoffrey D. Miller, Commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, cited national security concerns that would arise from the release of the evidence, and reportedly made his decision after consultation with government lawyers and intelligence officials.

Miller’s statement implied that the evidence against Yee, if presented in a court of law, would have shown him to be a dangerous spy. For our protection, the general released a person he believed to be a dangerous man back into our society.

Yee resigned from the military. His purported danger to our security was ignored by the US Army when it granted Yee an honorable discharge and awarded him a medal for "exceptional meritorious conduct."

Richard Cheney yammers on, as does Rush Limbaugh. Bush and Rumsfeld remain silent, as do the former Justice Department lawyers who worked hard to convince them that the wrongs they all committed were right. Despite the torture, the lies, the twisted logic, the romantic assertions of patriotism, Osama ben Laden is still at large.

Maybe they should turn over all anti-terrorist activities to the Boy Scouts.

Stress Tests: What We Don't Know and Won't Learn

Our government does not know how much has been lost in sub-prime mortgages, derivative instruments, and other bad debt. What is called for is a complete and independent audit of all the organizations being bailed out by taxpayer money. The independent auditors, appointed by the President or Congress, would examine the company’s accounts to judge their truth and correctness. They would scrutinize the amounts and sources of all their income, the amounts and purposes of all their expenses, the amounts and distribution of all their profits and losses. With this information, the government could realistically assess the damage to our economy and make realistic plans with realistic goals to alleviate the current crisis.

Instead of dealing with hard facts obtained by a rigorous audit, the Obama administration will work with information derived from a so-called "stress test", which is a computer program using economic models based on assumptions for the future. An economic model, according to the Dictionary for Business and Finance (John V. Terry, University of Arkansas Press, 2nd edition) is "The consideration of quantifiable factors which may be either variables or constants and the construction of relations among them that may be expressed in the form of an equation." That's business school language for, "If any activity can be measured, it can become part of an economic model."

Unfortunately, it is usually what cannot be measured that brings economic troubles: greed, arrogance, stupidity, political ambition—these cannot be measured, but they adversely affect our economy. Unforeseen and unpredictable events—hurricanes and tornadoes, droughts and floods—also directly affect jobs, industry, food production, and shipping, to name only a few economic activities.

To make things worse, the stress test will also include other predictive models created by the banks themselves. Those who survive the stress test—that is, those bankers who create models that show that their organization can survive—will receive government aid. Unfortunately, any MBA or graduate-school economics major can create an economic model that will show high profits and enormous growth in the future.

It is arrogance on the part of economists, bankers, brokers, and financial analysts that lead them to believe that they can predict economic activity through the use of models, and it was their economic models combined with greed, stupidity, as well as unforeseen and unpredictable events that put us into this mess.

Another reason for the need of a complete audit is the law prohibiting the regulation of derivatives, which are at the heart of the subprime mortgage crisis. The mortgages were bundled into single financial instruments, whose value was then divided further into other securities and sold to investors as security-swap or credit-swap agreements. The value of these agreements, also known as derivatives, were based on a model—another model!—of what the issuers thought the value would become.

Derivatives are not regulated by the SEC. In fact, the SEC is forbidden to regulate these chancy investments by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. It states in part, that " the Commission is prohibited from registering, or requiring, recommending, or suggesting, the registration … of any security-based swap agreement." Also the SEC is prohibited from making, interpreting or enforcing rules "… as prophylactic measures against fraud, manipulation, or insider trading with respect to any security-based swap agreement."

Another result of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. Glass-Steagall prohibited commercial banks from acting as investment banks. Commercial banks could lend money, but they could not underwrite any stock or security. With the repeal, commercial banks took ownership of investment companies and began offering investments as well as savings accounts.

Banks’ profits from their customers’ investments grew faster than those from their customers’ savings accounts. They were affected during the Reagan administration by banks and by law. First, banks began to require minimum balances, usually in the thousands of dollars. If a young worker tried to accumulate a nest egg via his savings account, but had less than three thousand dollars, his account was charged a service fee, very often an amount equal to the modest addition that worker could make to his account. Thus, workers stopped saving, and banks increased their profits by paying little or no interest on savings accounts.

Second, almost simultaneously, laws were passed so that banks offered IRAs to their customers and corporations, 401Ks to their employees. Both involved investing in stocks or money market accounts. Conspiracy theorists, mysteriously, have yet to pick up on this coincidence, but IRAs and 401Ks increased banks’ profits and helped Wall Street recover from a decline that had begun during the Carter administration. Workers’ savings became dependent on their employers’ payroll departments.

All this leads me to believe that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act must be repealed as soon as possible and the Glass-Steagall Act, or its modern equivalent, be re-enacted. Part of this legislation must be the creation of an Auditor General who can check a corporation’s books and enforce the law. To those who protest because they are committed to small government, I respond by protesting the financial services industry’s fradulent behavior makes this kind of law necessary.

How did the banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions get away with it for so long? Where did our money go? We may never know, because the financial services industry sponsored the re-election of almost all members of Congress, as well as the President and Vice President. See my blog about campaign finance "Of Time, Money, Elections and the Constitution," November 16, 2008. Few elected officials in Washington are pressing for a complete disclosure from their benefactors.

These benefactors have also helped the two men appointed by President Obama to oversee America’s economic recovery. Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner were involved in the very activities that put us into our current crisis. Frank Rich reported in The New York Times (12 April 2009) that Lawrence Summers had received over $5 million from D. E. Shaw, a hedge fund, and almost $3 million in speaking fees from Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and other such institutions which have gotten money from the taxpayer bailout. Summers also tried, and failed, to have a co-founder of another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisers, appointed to the job of running the TARP bailouts. This was clearly a conflict of interest, because while president of Harvard, Summers had done consulting work for Taconic.

The other man responsible for creating our economic chaos is Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner. Before President Obama appointed him Secretary of the Treasury, President Bush appointed Geithner President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. As such, he was responsible for the regulation of the largest bank holding companies in the USA. However, following standard operating procedure of the Bush administration, he did nothing. He sat in his posh office at the Fed and watched cash gush from the banks under his supervision. He watched assets dwindle, and then claimed in Congressional hearings that there was nothing he could have done. He even claimed that there had been too much regulation in many sectors of the financial services industry!

During his confirmation hearings, we learned that Geithner had not paid income taxes for several years. He apologized and paid the back taxes. The man chiefly responsible for re-invigorating our economy, the man with degrees in international economics and experience in domestic banking, did not have the financial acumen and legal awareness to pay his own taxes.

So, we have laws that encourage unethical behavior and fraud, and we have government officials who do not pay their taxes, accept money from the organizations they are supposed to regulate, and ignore what they cannot cover up.. This is a scenario that Lewis Carroll would have thought too implausible for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

For more on coverups, go to www.PBS.org and look at Bill Moyers’s interview of William Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One.