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.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
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
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
Sunday, May 17, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
The Conservative Mind
As I examined what the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation profess on their websites, I learned that their first principles are almost always figures of speech rather than actions to be emulated.
Both the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation profess individual liberty; limited government; free and private enterprise; strong, vigilant, and effective national defense. And they both believe in traditional American values, political accountability, and open debate.
Conservatives used to profess small government, but since World War II, the federal government has increased in size, even under Republican administrations. So, their wish is for limited government, an abstraction that doesn’t tell us how we can limit government and still have strong, vigilant, national defense. As for individual liberty, national security, and political accountability. I will mention only in passing, Richard Nixon, who was never held accountable for the White House enemies list. Nor was he held accountable for his part in the Watergate break-in, which is a monument to failed conservative ideals of national security and individual liberty. Nixon was forced to resign, but he left office believing that whatever a President does is legal. He even kept his Presidential and Congressional pensions because his successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him.
Citizens suffer the consequences any time a Conservative brings up "traditional American values." That phrase is now as meaningless as "the American dream." I regret to report that, when put into action, Traditional American Values means keeping various ethnic groups separate and conforming to the code of "Do as I say, not as I do," and "Do whatever you want; just don’t talk about it."
The Traditional American college alumnus holds an MBA and values his university’s football stadium more highly than its chemistry laboratory. A Traditional American values Walt Disney more than Henry James, and theme parks more than art museums. A Traditional American seeks the dominance of Christian evangelism and a material comfort level equal to Nero’s palace. A Traditional American takes his rights for granted, but becomes agitated when his opponents demand theirs.
The American Dream means simply, "Get rich, and don’t worry how."
During my reading on the Heritage Foundation’s website, I came across the summa of conservatism. It is Heritage Lecture #81, "The Origins of the Modern American Conservative Movement" (2003), by Lee Edwards, PhD, Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation. Dr. Edwards took as his text, The Conservative Mind (1953) by Russell Kirk, a book which Edwards credits as the origin of modern conservatism. Unfortunately, the most telling quality in Kirk’s ideas is his weakness for tropes instead of concrete deeds.
Edwards tells us, "The central idea of The Conservative Mind, upon which American conservatism is essentially based, is ordered liberty. It is a blending of the sometimes contending requirements of the community and the individual, of individual freedom and individual responsibility, of limited government and unlimited markets." More nouns but no active verbs, which shows that Conservatives are no longer vigorous activists; they are simply tiresome nags.
At the heart of conservative values are Russell Kirk’s six basic "canons" of conservatism. Unfortunately, the canons are all values, not actions. The Ten Commandments tell people specifically what they are NOT supposed to do, and the Constitution of the United States tells the governed and their governors what they may and may not do. Actions, not values.
I had expected to read something like the following: "Conservatives vote only for candidates who pledge to reduce the number of employees working for the federal government, and if they do not fulfill their pledge, conservatives complain to the officeholder in person. Or they send letters and e-mails, and phone his office until he complies or resigns." Instead, I found six limp creeds made up, as all creeds are, of abstractions and metaphors. They suggest, but do not illuminate. They are vague.
The following is the list of the six canons:
1. A divine intent, as well as personal conscience, rules society.
2. Traditional life is filled with variety and mystery while most radical systems are characterized by a narrowing uniformity.
3. Civilized society requires orders and classes.
4. Property and freedom are inseparably connected.
5. Man must control his will and his appetite, knowing that he is governed more by emotion than by reason.
6. Society must alter slowly.
These six canons would be frightening, if they could ever be put into practice. But they can’t, because they are all image and no substance. Kirk uses the terms "divine intent" and "personal conscience" as personifications of political agents. If divine intent and personal conscience ruled society instead of mankind, we would practice religious, ethnic, and racial prejudices and start religious wars. Some Americans try to put this canon into action by not only shunning Islamic people, but also torturing and killing them. Others find new nicknames for members of non-white, non-Christian races and creeds. The latest I heard from a woman who called them, "people of a different demographic."
No one has settled the question "What is ‘divine intent’?" No one can. It has been asked in a variety of ways, including George W. Bush’s query, "What would Jesus do?" To which there are a thousand answers. When one religious group believes their answer is better than another’s, society gets very ugly. Religious denominations become political action committees, and true believers of divine intent, in good conscience, bulldoze homes and houses of worship or fly airliners into skyscrapers.
We may be a society of people with consciences, but our varying attitudes, opinions, and beliefs make personal conscience an arbitrary, contradictory ruler. As a society, we may be aware of our consciences, but we must obey laws passed by a duly elected legislature and enforced by police who must obey the laws themselves.
In the second canon, "traditional life" and "variety and mystery" are oxymorons . People cling to traditions as a means of eliminating variety and mystery. Traditionalists prefer the known to the unknown. They seek that which is acceptable to their peers rather than what is satisfying to themselves alone. Traditionalists would rather have Hilary Rodham Clinton and Condaleeza Rice at home vacuuming their rugs or at church arranging flowers on the altar.. They would keep gays and lesbians from marrying, and they would have all public school children recite "The Lord’s Prayer" daily. Thus they ask "What would Jesus do?" instead of the more difficult question, "What should I do, and how can I do it?" Conservatives are Traditionalists, and theirs is the narrowing uniformity.
In the third canon about orders and classes, I guess Kirk means that the higher orders and upper classes, much in the manner of Plato’s guardians, control the lower orders and lower classes. In concrete terms for the 21st century, it means that Conservatives want to eliminate the minimum wage and labor unions. Conservatives believe that the guardians in the managerial class must keep workers on a tight leash, and the workers should accept their wages gratefully, regardless of the working conditions they labor in, regardless the size of their families, and regardless of their skills.
The upper class’s attitude toward the lower orders was shown when former first lady Barbara Bush visited a refugee center set up in Houston’s Astrodome after Hurricane Katrina. There she was, surrounded by people smelling terribly from the lack of showers and clean clothing, people weeping for lost homes and family members, people numbed by the inhumane treatment they had received from FEMA and their police department. Mrs. Bush surveyed her fellow citizens and said, "They never had it so good." Compassionate Conservatism, indeed. To Barbara Bush, these people were poor before the hurricane, and government aid was a step up for them.
Many Conservatives thought it was okay for the lower orders to huddle in an improvised shelter, but they were afraid that they would want to live in the Astrodome for the rest of their lives. That they would become dependent on using chemical toilets and community showers, not to mention standing for hours in line for food rations. That these people would love being separated from their families and their homes.
In the fifth canon, Kirk states that property and freedom are inseparable. In keeping with this canon, George W. Bush announced to his fellow citizens that America was an ownership society. Unfortunately, this is true, and those who own little, or who have recently lost much, are prisoners of the current economic downturn. Parents have lost their jobs and their homes through foreclosure, and they raise their children in cars, motel rooms or tent villages springing up in vacant lots. Similar camp sites along railroad tracks in the 1930s were called Hoovervilles. These new tent villages should be called Dubyavilles.
Conservatives have yet to admit their role in creating the current Depression. Instead they believe workers should have known that their factories would close with no notice, even though their employers did not. Conservatives also believe that these workers should have anticipated the fall in market values of their homes, even though bankers and real estate brokers did not.
The fifth canon, about controlling one’s appetites and will, is a cliché similar to "Enough is as good as a feast," "Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill," or "Where there’s a will, there’s a way." Hearing these old saws causes superficial men to nod seriously during business-club luncheons and forget all about them at dinner. Certainly self-control is the mark of a mature person, but in the past eight years Conservatives have shown much self indulgence and little if any self control. Imagine Roman Catholic priests controlling their will and appetite for children, Richard Cheney controlling his will and appetite for power, Rush Limbaugh controlling his will and appetite for illegal drugs.
I am glad to say the sixth canon about gradual social change was ignored by the Continental Congress of 1776. And by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi.
There is much lacking in these conservative canons. Nowhere did I find any mention of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, and sheltering the homeless. Nor anything about learning the law and obeying it. That’s why we won’t find in any Conservative’s canon, "Actions speak louder than words."
Both the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation profess individual liberty; limited government; free and private enterprise; strong, vigilant, and effective national defense. And they both believe in traditional American values, political accountability, and open debate.
Conservatives used to profess small government, but since World War II, the federal government has increased in size, even under Republican administrations. So, their wish is for limited government, an abstraction that doesn’t tell us how we can limit government and still have strong, vigilant, national defense. As for individual liberty, national security, and political accountability. I will mention only in passing, Richard Nixon, who was never held accountable for the White House enemies list. Nor was he held accountable for his part in the Watergate break-in, which is a monument to failed conservative ideals of national security and individual liberty. Nixon was forced to resign, but he left office believing that whatever a President does is legal. He even kept his Presidential and Congressional pensions because his successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him.
Citizens suffer the consequences any time a Conservative brings up "traditional American values." That phrase is now as meaningless as "the American dream." I regret to report that, when put into action, Traditional American Values means keeping various ethnic groups separate and conforming to the code of "Do as I say, not as I do," and "Do whatever you want; just don’t talk about it."
The Traditional American college alumnus holds an MBA and values his university’s football stadium more highly than its chemistry laboratory. A Traditional American values Walt Disney more than Henry James, and theme parks more than art museums. A Traditional American seeks the dominance of Christian evangelism and a material comfort level equal to Nero’s palace. A Traditional American takes his rights for granted, but becomes agitated when his opponents demand theirs.
The American Dream means simply, "Get rich, and don’t worry how."
During my reading on the Heritage Foundation’s website, I came across the summa of conservatism. It is Heritage Lecture #81, "The Origins of the Modern American Conservative Movement" (2003), by Lee Edwards, PhD, Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation. Dr. Edwards took as his text, The Conservative Mind (1953) by Russell Kirk, a book which Edwards credits as the origin of modern conservatism. Unfortunately, the most telling quality in Kirk’s ideas is his weakness for tropes instead of concrete deeds.
Edwards tells us, "The central idea of The Conservative Mind, upon which American conservatism is essentially based, is ordered liberty. It is a blending of the sometimes contending requirements of the community and the individual, of individual freedom and individual responsibility, of limited government and unlimited markets." More nouns but no active verbs, which shows that Conservatives are no longer vigorous activists; they are simply tiresome nags.
At the heart of conservative values are Russell Kirk’s six basic "canons" of conservatism. Unfortunately, the canons are all values, not actions. The Ten Commandments tell people specifically what they are NOT supposed to do, and the Constitution of the United States tells the governed and their governors what they may and may not do. Actions, not values.
I had expected to read something like the following: "Conservatives vote only for candidates who pledge to reduce the number of employees working for the federal government, and if they do not fulfill their pledge, conservatives complain to the officeholder in person. Or they send letters and e-mails, and phone his office until he complies or resigns." Instead, I found six limp creeds made up, as all creeds are, of abstractions and metaphors. They suggest, but do not illuminate. They are vague.
The following is the list of the six canons:
1. A divine intent, as well as personal conscience, rules society.
2. Traditional life is filled with variety and mystery while most radical systems are characterized by a narrowing uniformity.
3. Civilized society requires orders and classes.
4. Property and freedom are inseparably connected.
5. Man must control his will and his appetite, knowing that he is governed more by emotion than by reason.
6. Society must alter slowly.
These six canons would be frightening, if they could ever be put into practice. But they can’t, because they are all image and no substance. Kirk uses the terms "divine intent" and "personal conscience" as personifications of political agents. If divine intent and personal conscience ruled society instead of mankind, we would practice religious, ethnic, and racial prejudices and start religious wars. Some Americans try to put this canon into action by not only shunning Islamic people, but also torturing and killing them. Others find new nicknames for members of non-white, non-Christian races and creeds. The latest I heard from a woman who called them, "people of a different demographic."
No one has settled the question "What is ‘divine intent’?" No one can. It has been asked in a variety of ways, including George W. Bush’s query, "What would Jesus do?" To which there are a thousand answers. When one religious group believes their answer is better than another’s, society gets very ugly. Religious denominations become political action committees, and true believers of divine intent, in good conscience, bulldoze homes and houses of worship or fly airliners into skyscrapers.
We may be a society of people with consciences, but our varying attitudes, opinions, and beliefs make personal conscience an arbitrary, contradictory ruler. As a society, we may be aware of our consciences, but we must obey laws passed by a duly elected legislature and enforced by police who must obey the laws themselves.
In the second canon, "traditional life" and "variety and mystery" are oxymorons . People cling to traditions as a means of eliminating variety and mystery. Traditionalists prefer the known to the unknown. They seek that which is acceptable to their peers rather than what is satisfying to themselves alone. Traditionalists would rather have Hilary Rodham Clinton and Condaleeza Rice at home vacuuming their rugs or at church arranging flowers on the altar.. They would keep gays and lesbians from marrying, and they would have all public school children recite "The Lord’s Prayer" daily. Thus they ask "What would Jesus do?" instead of the more difficult question, "What should I do, and how can I do it?" Conservatives are Traditionalists, and theirs is the narrowing uniformity.
In the third canon about orders and classes, I guess Kirk means that the higher orders and upper classes, much in the manner of Plato’s guardians, control the lower orders and lower classes. In concrete terms for the 21st century, it means that Conservatives want to eliminate the minimum wage and labor unions. Conservatives believe that the guardians in the managerial class must keep workers on a tight leash, and the workers should accept their wages gratefully, regardless of the working conditions they labor in, regardless the size of their families, and regardless of their skills.
The upper class’s attitude toward the lower orders was shown when former first lady Barbara Bush visited a refugee center set up in Houston’s Astrodome after Hurricane Katrina. There she was, surrounded by people smelling terribly from the lack of showers and clean clothing, people weeping for lost homes and family members, people numbed by the inhumane treatment they had received from FEMA and their police department. Mrs. Bush surveyed her fellow citizens and said, "They never had it so good." Compassionate Conservatism, indeed. To Barbara Bush, these people were poor before the hurricane, and government aid was a step up for them.
Many Conservatives thought it was okay for the lower orders to huddle in an improvised shelter, but they were afraid that they would want to live in the Astrodome for the rest of their lives. That they would become dependent on using chemical toilets and community showers, not to mention standing for hours in line for food rations. That these people would love being separated from their families and their homes.
In the fifth canon, Kirk states that property and freedom are inseparable. In keeping with this canon, George W. Bush announced to his fellow citizens that America was an ownership society. Unfortunately, this is true, and those who own little, or who have recently lost much, are prisoners of the current economic downturn. Parents have lost their jobs and their homes through foreclosure, and they raise their children in cars, motel rooms or tent villages springing up in vacant lots. Similar camp sites along railroad tracks in the 1930s were called Hoovervilles. These new tent villages should be called Dubyavilles.
Conservatives have yet to admit their role in creating the current Depression. Instead they believe workers should have known that their factories would close with no notice, even though their employers did not. Conservatives also believe that these workers should have anticipated the fall in market values of their homes, even though bankers and real estate brokers did not.
The fifth canon, about controlling one’s appetites and will, is a cliché similar to "Enough is as good as a feast," "Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill," or "Where there’s a will, there’s a way." Hearing these old saws causes superficial men to nod seriously during business-club luncheons and forget all about them at dinner. Certainly self-control is the mark of a mature person, but in the past eight years Conservatives have shown much self indulgence and little if any self control. Imagine Roman Catholic priests controlling their will and appetite for children, Richard Cheney controlling his will and appetite for power, Rush Limbaugh controlling his will and appetite for illegal drugs.
I am glad to say the sixth canon about gradual social change was ignored by the Continental Congress of 1776. And by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi.
There is much lacking in these conservative canons. Nowhere did I find any mention of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, and sheltering the homeless. Nor anything about learning the law and obeying it. That’s why we won’t find in any Conservative’s canon, "Actions speak louder than words."
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Principles and Their Consequences: The Cato Institute
Before I examine certain professed principles of Conservatism, I would like to add a post script to the previous blog, Embryonic Stem Cell Research. It is about the Roman Catholic Church, with whose faith I have no civic dispute. However, I do dispute their moral authority which they assume when they express the value of human life—the sacredness of young life, as they term it.
To me, the Roman Catholic Church in general, and the priesthood in particular, lost their moral authority when Catholic priests and bishops sexually abused children, while the Roman Catholic hierarchy not only covered up the abuse, but kept the guilty priests and bishops in positions of authority over children. Although I believe in forgiveness, I simply cannot accept any pronouncements from people who have not yet proven to me that they practice what they preach. Until they do, I will exercise my citizen’s right to ignore their hypocritical dicta.
The Church’s failing to protect the children under its care is only one example of Conservatives’ ignoring the gap between their professions of belief and the actions they take. A more recent example of this pragmatic gap was seen when Michael Steele, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, was recently interviewed by GQ (see GQ’s website). In the interview Steele remarked that abortion was an "individual choice" and gay-marriage decisions should rest with the states. However, at no time did Steele endorse gay marriage or abortion, and if you read the complete interview he comes across as a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative Republican. He declared himself to be "pro-life."
Nevertheless, Steele’s statements upset many party leaders. As reported by NPR, former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, one of Steele's rivals for the RNC chair, told the conservative Web site, www.Townhall.com. on Thursday that Steele needs to "re-read the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, and the 2008 GOP platform."
So, who is the real Conservative? What, in fact, do real Conservatives stand for? To get the answers, I visited three Conservative websites. This essay is about the highly respected Cato Institute*. This organization states its mission as follows: "The mission of the Cato Institute is to increase the understanding of public policies based on the principles of limited government, free markets, individual liberty, and peace."
The institute also says, " … ‘liberal’ may well be the perfect word in most of the world—the liberals in societies from China to Iran to South Africa to Argentina are supporters of human rights and free markets—but its meaning has clearly been corrupted by contemporary American liberals."
The Cato Institute believes that liberals in other lands are uncorrupted supporters of human rights and free markets, and it believes that if free market capitalism exists in a country, so do human rights. Unfortunately, for people in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), capitalism has never guaranteed human rights.
James A. Dorn, China specialist and vice president of academic affairs at the Cato Institute, agrees. Partly. In the institute’s Policy Analysis No. 553 (November 2, 2005), he wrote, "Although it is proper to criticize China for its human rights violations and its lack of a transparent legal system, we should not ignore the substantial progress China has made since it embarked on economic liberalization in 1978. … To avert the risk of conflict, the United States needs to treat China as a normal great power, not as an adversary; ensure that only those commercial transactions that genuinely threaten national security are blocked; and recognize that by increasing economic freedom we increase personal freedom. Our economic security, as well as China’s, will depend on sound free-market policies, not on destructive protectionism."
To the Cato Institute trade with PRC and free markets are more important than "… human rights, individual liberty and peace." PRC, which has been a member of the WTO since 2001, also believes in free markets, but not individual liberty and human rights. I am disappointed that Mr. Dorn ignores PRC’s prison systems. They are called Laogai and are filled with rapists, thieves, and corrupt politicians. However, this system includes the Laojiao, which is a form of administrative rather than judicial detention, where dissidents, petty criminals, and vagrants can be imprisoned for several years without a trial or any other legal proceedings. For more information on this system go to www.laogai.org.
Mr. Harry Wu, the Executive Director of the Laogai Research Foundation, testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission hearing on "The Memorandum of Understanding Between the United States and China Regarding Prison Labor Products" on June 19, 2008. He reported that, despite the US law forbidding the importation of products made by forced prison labor, many of those products have made their way into American markets. In fact 314 laojiao camps are listed by Dun and Bradstreet, the prestigious credit reporting company that gathers information on businesses throughout the world, enabling companies to check on one another before conducting transactions requiring one company to extend credit to the other. Mr. Wu also reported, "The 314 entries for Laogai camps found in the D&B databases represent 72 different products (specific) and/or product categories (broad)."
Laogai is translated to "reform through labor," and laojiao means "reeducation through labor." Together those names sound a frightening echo of Nazi Germany’s motto for their concentration camps, Arbeit macht Frei, or "Work makes you free." All this leads me, sadly, to conclude that it has been the Cato Institute, not contemporary Americans, that have corrupted the word "liberal."
The institute goes on to say, "The Jeffersonian philosophy that animates Cato's work has increasingly come to be called ‘libertarianism’ or ‘market liberalism.’ Many Conservatives, as well as conservative organizations, hold Thomas Jefferson as an exemplar of conservative values, even though many of his actions belied his professed beliefs. Historian Joseph J. Ellis, in American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1996), described the problems Jefferson encountered when his philosophy in action actually seriously damaged the American economy. Ellis points out that Jefferson believed in fiscal austerity, so much that he tried to dry-dock or destroy America’s navy, which had been developed by his predecessor, John Adams. Unfortunately, that interfered with his need to protect American commercial ships which were being captured by British and French frigates. So, to get back at the Europeans, whom Jefferson saw as corrupt and belligerent, he got Congress to pass the Embargo Act of 1807. This closed all American ports to foreign trade and thus violated two of the Cato Institute’s principles. First, it removed the United States from the free market (emphasis mine). Second, as Ellis tell us, " … [it] required the federal government to exercise coercive powers to enforce the embargo, thereby contradicting the Jeffersonian principle of limited government" (Emphasis mine).
We should also remember that despite his expressed antagonism to the institution of slavery, Jefferson owned at one time more than 200 slaves, and at his death most of his slaves were sold off to pay for his estate’s enormous debts. During his lifetime he practiced the tradition of Southern plantation owners and fathered several children by slavewomen that he owned. This is the face of his writing "… the amalgamation of whites with blacks produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent.". I know of no Liberal worthy of the name who agrees with Jefferson. I hope no Conservative does.
The Cato Institute also "… combines an appreciation for entrepreneurship, the market process, and lower taxes with strict respect for civil liberties and skepticism about the benefits of both the welfare state and foreign military adventurism." At this time America’s market process is an invalid, queasy with greed, crippled by immorality, and in extremis brought on by inaccurate prognoses of vigor and long life. Its corporations pay few if any taxes even when they file a return.
They are skeptical about the benefits of the welfare state, but they have not developed any serious opposition to the corporate welfare that may bring our free enterprise system off its knees. Yet, how free can our various enterprises be when businesses get income tax breaks for the losses their incomes suffer because their managers make bad business decisions and fail to detect changes in the marketplace? Where are the capitalist adventurers when they screw up? In their board rooms giving themselves congratulatory bonuses for leading their various enterprises to ruin.
So far I have found that Conservatives hold to their beliefs in the face of brute actuality. First principles are very important to them. More important than the consequences of the actions they take in the name of their beliefs.
I must point out that, although the Cato Institute’s mission statement about limited government and free markets can be argued with, its stand against foreign military adventurism stands up under examination. It has, as far as I can discover, never supported the invasion of Iraq. In fact it has held many conferences to find a way out for the US armed forces.
___________________________________________
* I will write about The American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation in my next blog.
To me, the Roman Catholic Church in general, and the priesthood in particular, lost their moral authority when Catholic priests and bishops sexually abused children, while the Roman Catholic hierarchy not only covered up the abuse, but kept the guilty priests and bishops in positions of authority over children. Although I believe in forgiveness, I simply cannot accept any pronouncements from people who have not yet proven to me that they practice what they preach. Until they do, I will exercise my citizen’s right to ignore their hypocritical dicta.
The Church’s failing to protect the children under its care is only one example of Conservatives’ ignoring the gap between their professions of belief and the actions they take. A more recent example of this pragmatic gap was seen when Michael Steele, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, was recently interviewed by GQ (see GQ’s website). In the interview Steele remarked that abortion was an "individual choice" and gay-marriage decisions should rest with the states. However, at no time did Steele endorse gay marriage or abortion, and if you read the complete interview he comes across as a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative Republican. He declared himself to be "pro-life."
Nevertheless, Steele’s statements upset many party leaders. As reported by NPR, former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, one of Steele's rivals for the RNC chair, told the conservative Web site, www.Townhall.com. on Thursday that Steele needs to "re-read the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, and the 2008 GOP platform."
So, who is the real Conservative? What, in fact, do real Conservatives stand for? To get the answers, I visited three Conservative websites. This essay is about the highly respected Cato Institute*. This organization states its mission as follows: "The mission of the Cato Institute is to increase the understanding of public policies based on the principles of limited government, free markets, individual liberty, and peace."
The institute also says, " … ‘liberal’ may well be the perfect word in most of the world—the liberals in societies from China to Iran to South Africa to Argentina are supporters of human rights and free markets—but its meaning has clearly been corrupted by contemporary American liberals."
The Cato Institute believes that liberals in other lands are uncorrupted supporters of human rights and free markets, and it believes that if free market capitalism exists in a country, so do human rights. Unfortunately, for people in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), capitalism has never guaranteed human rights.
James A. Dorn, China specialist and vice president of academic affairs at the Cato Institute, agrees. Partly. In the institute’s Policy Analysis No. 553 (November 2, 2005), he wrote, "Although it is proper to criticize China for its human rights violations and its lack of a transparent legal system, we should not ignore the substantial progress China has made since it embarked on economic liberalization in 1978. … To avert the risk of conflict, the United States needs to treat China as a normal great power, not as an adversary; ensure that only those commercial transactions that genuinely threaten national security are blocked; and recognize that by increasing economic freedom we increase personal freedom. Our economic security, as well as China’s, will depend on sound free-market policies, not on destructive protectionism."
To the Cato Institute trade with PRC and free markets are more important than "… human rights, individual liberty and peace." PRC, which has been a member of the WTO since 2001, also believes in free markets, but not individual liberty and human rights. I am disappointed that Mr. Dorn ignores PRC’s prison systems. They are called Laogai and are filled with rapists, thieves, and corrupt politicians. However, this system includes the Laojiao, which is a form of administrative rather than judicial detention, where dissidents, petty criminals, and vagrants can be imprisoned for several years without a trial or any other legal proceedings. For more information on this system go to www.laogai.org.
Mr. Harry Wu, the Executive Director of the Laogai Research Foundation, testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission hearing on "The Memorandum of Understanding Between the United States and China Regarding Prison Labor Products" on June 19, 2008. He reported that, despite the US law forbidding the importation of products made by forced prison labor, many of those products have made their way into American markets. In fact 314 laojiao camps are listed by Dun and Bradstreet, the prestigious credit reporting company that gathers information on businesses throughout the world, enabling companies to check on one another before conducting transactions requiring one company to extend credit to the other. Mr. Wu also reported, "The 314 entries for Laogai camps found in the D&B databases represent 72 different products (specific) and/or product categories (broad)."
Laogai is translated to "reform through labor," and laojiao means "reeducation through labor." Together those names sound a frightening echo of Nazi Germany’s motto for their concentration camps, Arbeit macht Frei, or "Work makes you free." All this leads me, sadly, to conclude that it has been the Cato Institute, not contemporary Americans, that have corrupted the word "liberal."
The institute goes on to say, "The Jeffersonian philosophy that animates Cato's work has increasingly come to be called ‘libertarianism’ or ‘market liberalism.’ Many Conservatives, as well as conservative organizations, hold Thomas Jefferson as an exemplar of conservative values, even though many of his actions belied his professed beliefs. Historian Joseph J. Ellis, in American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1996), described the problems Jefferson encountered when his philosophy in action actually seriously damaged the American economy. Ellis points out that Jefferson believed in fiscal austerity, so much that he tried to dry-dock or destroy America’s navy, which had been developed by his predecessor, John Adams. Unfortunately, that interfered with his need to protect American commercial ships which were being captured by British and French frigates. So, to get back at the Europeans, whom Jefferson saw as corrupt and belligerent, he got Congress to pass the Embargo Act of 1807. This closed all American ports to foreign trade and thus violated two of the Cato Institute’s principles. First, it removed the United States from the free market (emphasis mine). Second, as Ellis tell us, " … [it] required the federal government to exercise coercive powers to enforce the embargo, thereby contradicting the Jeffersonian principle of limited government" (Emphasis mine).
We should also remember that despite his expressed antagonism to the institution of slavery, Jefferson owned at one time more than 200 slaves, and at his death most of his slaves were sold off to pay for his estate’s enormous debts. During his lifetime he practiced the tradition of Southern plantation owners and fathered several children by slavewomen that he owned. This is the face of his writing "… the amalgamation of whites with blacks produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent.". I know of no Liberal worthy of the name who agrees with Jefferson. I hope no Conservative does.
The Cato Institute also "… combines an appreciation for entrepreneurship, the market process, and lower taxes with strict respect for civil liberties and skepticism about the benefits of both the welfare state and foreign military adventurism." At this time America’s market process is an invalid, queasy with greed, crippled by immorality, and in extremis brought on by inaccurate prognoses of vigor and long life. Its corporations pay few if any taxes even when they file a return.
They are skeptical about the benefits of the welfare state, but they have not developed any serious opposition to the corporate welfare that may bring our free enterprise system off its knees. Yet, how free can our various enterprises be when businesses get income tax breaks for the losses their incomes suffer because their managers make bad business decisions and fail to detect changes in the marketplace? Where are the capitalist adventurers when they screw up? In their board rooms giving themselves congratulatory bonuses for leading their various enterprises to ruin.
So far I have found that Conservatives hold to their beliefs in the face of brute actuality. First principles are very important to them. More important than the consequences of the actions they take in the name of their beliefs.
I must point out that, although the Cato Institute’s mission statement about limited government and free markets can be argued with, its stand against foreign military adventurism stands up under examination. It has, as far as I can discover, never supported the invasion of Iraq. In fact it has held many conferences to find a way out for the US armed forces.
___________________________________________
* I will write about The American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation in my next blog.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)