President Obama has turned out to be more Kennedyesque than some of his fans expected. One does not have to be an opponent of Obama, or of the once-young Boston-accented politician of the past, to mean "Kennedyesque" in the realpolitik and less than idealistic sense.
I was once told that when the beloved Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was shown where, as archbishop of Chicago, he would be buried, he learned that his spot was to the left of his predecessor, John Cody, who died just before the feds could indict him of misusing church funds.
"I was always a bit to his left," Bernardin is said to have quipped.
John F. Kennedy, since the 1964 Democratic Convention the icon of liberals, stood in many respects to the liberals' right. Barack Obama, in trying to reverse course on the Bush Administration's campaign of state-sponsored terror, has revealed himself more pragmatic about Guantánamo and torture evidence than his supporters from, say, Code Pink or Move On would like.
If Obama can compromise on Nuremberg-scale inhumanity, some worry, what will he give away to get something through in health, consumer protections and workers' rights to collective bargaining? To my mind, that's the wrong question.
Obama doesn't want to say the right things for eight years, as Bill Clinton did, so some Republican can come, like Bush did, and turn peace in Ireland and Yugoslavia into unending war throughout the entire Arab world. He doesn't want to tidy up the books, turning Republican deficits into surpluses as far as the eye can see, just so some crass successor can undo it with a sea of red ink and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
That would not be good for the country, any more than it would burnish Obama's legacy. As a man of extraordinary intelligence, Obama knows this. The man knows what he is doing.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Three Deaths
George, Lew, my father. Two generational contemporaries dead within days, one dead almost 30 years ago recalled by fluke in the same week.
George was a humorous cyberfriend I never met in the flesh, but I had a good sense of his character.
Lew would not have died in the arms of his wife if I had not told him, years ago, that she planned to dump him as a boyfriend. And if he had not redoubled his campaign to win her heart.
My father's death was a tragedy for the personal mess he left in his wake, but it's a psychic mess I had long ago cleaned up until I ran into someone who asked me if I had heard of a man by the same name ... my father, by the details.
Then there's my own death, of which I have dreamed. I dreamed of everyone carrying on just fine without me. (Drat!) No funeral cortege to Arlington, no heads of state flying in. Nothing. Just another nobody gone.
Death talk is unfashionable in this society, in which we proclaim the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet death is a reality of life. Closer when those not far from one's own age begin to die.
Now you know why I haven't posted anything. I was thinking about death.
George was a humorous cyberfriend I never met in the flesh, but I had a good sense of his character.
Lew would not have died in the arms of his wife if I had not told him, years ago, that she planned to dump him as a boyfriend. And if he had not redoubled his campaign to win her heart.
My father's death was a tragedy for the personal mess he left in his wake, but it's a psychic mess I had long ago cleaned up until I ran into someone who asked me if I had heard of a man by the same name ... my father, by the details.
Then there's my own death, of which I have dreamed. I dreamed of everyone carrying on just fine without me. (Drat!) No funeral cortege to Arlington, no heads of state flying in. Nothing. Just another nobody gone.
Death talk is unfashionable in this society, in which we proclaim the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet death is a reality of life. Closer when those not far from one's own age begin to die.
Now you know why I haven't posted anything. I was thinking about death.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
A Gift for TANF Mothers
The term "welfare mother" has been so loaded that I chose for the heading the bureaucratic abbreviation of the current program. After all, ever since Ronald Reagan invented out of whole cloth a public aid cheater in Chicago, some people deem a welfare mom as practically a criminal -- all to justify sending poor mothers with infants to work outside the home.
Indeed, I found myself nodding when, during a visit to Washington a few years ago, the head of the United Kingdom's social programs under Tony Blair made clear that, forcing a mother with children under six to leave home to perform mindless low-skill work was so horrifying to the British public, that it had never been even suggested in Parliament.
What we have done since 1996 to poor women heading households with children in the United States is unspeakable. What we did before wasn't much better.
Now we tell them to go out get the first menial job they can, or else we'll cut them off the cash from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (the TANF in the heading) -- and amount ranging from about $230 a month in Mississippi to about $950 in New York.That's below poverty? Add SNAP (the new name for food stamps) and public housing subsidies. It comes close to the poverty line. Not much more.
Since when is making sure a child is fed, loved, cared for -- in a word, mothering -- less important than flipping burgers or sitting at a cash register?
Conservatives argue that these women make lousy mothers, since they are all on [add drug of the day here] and work as [insert sexual occupations serving conservative customers here]. Or they're lazy and uneducated and [add whisper] black.
In fact, most welfare mothers are white. Let's factually adjust the picture just enough to conjure up an image to which most Americans, even the stupidest, will react to with a smidgen of compassion. A poor white woman is a WPA work of art, no?
But even if we think the worst of welfare mothers, isn't the drugs, prostitution, compulsive TV watching, etc., largely a result of nurture rather than nature? Couldn't this behavior be changed?
Imagine a modern equivalent of a "sewing circle": a daily, neighborhood gathering of TANF moms with non-TANF peers and an older, motherly role model who had raised children of her own.There would be opportunities for peer-to-peer problem solving, career exploration, even eventual job search or home-brewed microenterprises (yes, I know all the lingo).
Wouldn't that be much, much better than merely throwing them out into the labor market with no skills? Wouldn't that be better than denying cash, food, housing? Throwing them and their children out like garbage?
Some brave people are attempting things like this, but it's far from being national policy with serious resources. That should be our Mother's Day's gift to all TANF moms.
Indeed, I found myself nodding when, during a visit to Washington a few years ago, the head of the United Kingdom's social programs under Tony Blair made clear that, forcing a mother with children under six to leave home to perform mindless low-skill work was so horrifying to the British public, that it had never been even suggested in Parliament.
What we have done since 1996 to poor women heading households with children in the United States is unspeakable. What we did before wasn't much better.
Now we tell them to go out get the first menial job they can, or else we'll cut them off the cash from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (the TANF in the heading) -- and amount ranging from about $230 a month in Mississippi to about $950 in New York.That's below poverty? Add SNAP (the new name for food stamps) and public housing subsidies. It comes close to the poverty line. Not much more.
Since when is making sure a child is fed, loved, cared for -- in a word, mothering -- less important than flipping burgers or sitting at a cash register?
Conservatives argue that these women make lousy mothers, since they are all on [add drug of the day here] and work as [insert sexual occupations serving conservative customers here]. Or they're lazy and uneducated and [add whisper] black.
In fact, most welfare mothers are white. Let's factually adjust the picture just enough to conjure up an image to which most Americans, even the stupidest, will react to with a smidgen of compassion. A poor white woman is a WPA work of art, no?
But even if we think the worst of welfare mothers, isn't the drugs, prostitution, compulsive TV watching, etc., largely a result of nurture rather than nature? Couldn't this behavior be changed?
Imagine a modern equivalent of a "sewing circle": a daily, neighborhood gathering of TANF moms with non-TANF peers and an older, motherly role model who had raised children of her own.There would be opportunities for peer-to-peer problem solving, career exploration, even eventual job search or home-brewed microenterprises (yes, I know all the lingo).
Wouldn't that be much, much better than merely throwing them out into the labor market with no skills? Wouldn't that be better than denying cash, food, housing? Throwing them and their children out like garbage?
Some brave people are attempting things like this, but it's far from being national policy with serious resources. That should be our Mother's Day's gift to all TANF moms.
Friday, May 08, 2009
Gay Style?
I am going to get killed here, but Andy of V and A in Milan prompted me to finally give vent to an idea I have had for many years when he wrote, in what seemed like a bit of exasperation, "I have been called the straightest of gay men."
The topic of our sermon, boys and girls, is: Is there a gay style and if so what should it be? This could also be: Is there a "straight" style and what should that be?
This is interesting to me, someone who is often taken in cyberspace to be a woman (see latest in the comments section here), even though I am of the male persuasion (although I have expressed an interest in becoming lesbian, for which I have been told I have an aptitude). Perhaps the confusion arises because I don't punctuate every sentence with "eff'in A!"?
This is also interesting because I was there when a college roommate declared himself gay at 3 am, after an evening at the local gay alliance; unfortunately, I had a final exam the next morning and really needed the sleep, so that discussion was postponed, much to his drunken chagrin.
CR, as I'll call him, had been up to that point a normal, average ... um, what am I saying? He liked opera, fer cryin' out loud! (OK, so my father loved opera -- his Italian heritage -- and that's why I hate it, but that's a whole other story).
All right, what I mean is that CR didn't have any noticeable mannerisms in his gesture or voice. He wasn't "affeminate."
Fast forward to a few years ago, when I hired him at what was his fast-approaching middle age (he is a few years older than I am). All of a sudden, he behaved like a typical 40-ish female secretary of the 1950s.
You know, the kind that has her hair up in a bouffant and whose fingers taper into painted claws and whose mouth and cheeks are rouged and powdered and whose perfume can be smelled a mile away. One day she quits in a huff and her desk drawers are found to be filled to the rafters with tissue paper and various female cosmetic and medical supplies. Gary Larson used to draw her to great effect (see here).
No, CR didn't look like one. He just talked like one, freaked out like one (you won't believe his antics on 9/11 ... OK, so we were a block from the White House, but honestly!) and generally behaved in a way that completely belied his physical appearance as a tall, lean, Brahmin WASP man.
What is it about a man's sexual preference for other men that demands behavior that apes the worst stereotypes of a traditional woman? I mean, most women today are more "macho" than that!
Give me a woman who knows how to handle a power drill any day.
Frankly, I have no answer. I am relieved to learn that Andy, a gay man, doesn't seem to have an answer, either. It shows that it's a not just me, a straight guy, asking an unreasonable question.
The topic of our sermon, boys and girls, is: Is there a gay style and if so what should it be? This could also be: Is there a "straight" style and what should that be?
This is interesting to me, someone who is often taken in cyberspace to be a woman (see latest in the comments section here), even though I am of the male persuasion (although I have expressed an interest in becoming lesbian, for which I have been told I have an aptitude). Perhaps the confusion arises because I don't punctuate every sentence with "eff'in A!"?
This is also interesting because I was there when a college roommate declared himself gay at 3 am, after an evening at the local gay alliance; unfortunately, I had a final exam the next morning and really needed the sleep, so that discussion was postponed, much to his drunken chagrin.
CR, as I'll call him, had been up to that point a normal, average ... um, what am I saying? He liked opera, fer cryin' out loud! (OK, so my father loved opera -- his Italian heritage -- and that's why I hate it, but that's a whole other story).
All right, what I mean is that CR didn't have any noticeable mannerisms in his gesture or voice. He wasn't "affeminate."
Fast forward to a few years ago, when I hired him at what was his fast-approaching middle age (he is a few years older than I am). All of a sudden, he behaved like a typical 40-ish female secretary of the 1950s.
You know, the kind that has her hair up in a bouffant and whose fingers taper into painted claws and whose mouth and cheeks are rouged and powdered and whose perfume can be smelled a mile away. One day she quits in a huff and her desk drawers are found to be filled to the rafters with tissue paper and various female cosmetic and medical supplies. Gary Larson used to draw her to great effect (see here).
No, CR didn't look like one. He just talked like one, freaked out like one (you won't believe his antics on 9/11 ... OK, so we were a block from the White House, but honestly!) and generally behaved in a way that completely belied his physical appearance as a tall, lean, Brahmin WASP man.
What is it about a man's sexual preference for other men that demands behavior that apes the worst stereotypes of a traditional woman? I mean, most women today are more "macho" than that!
Give me a woman who knows how to handle a power drill any day.
Frankly, I have no answer. I am relieved to learn that Andy, a gay man, doesn't seem to have an answer, either. It shows that it's a not just me, a straight guy, asking an unreasonable question.
Monday, May 04, 2009
End of the American Façade
Most of us have been disappointed with some essentials of American culture, mostly because they were never any deeper, any more solid than a Hollywood set, since at least 1968. This is one of those moments in which such myths can be recreated or be superseded -- and this little essay aims to aid the latter.
Let's look at the year 1968 for a moment. That is the time when, to hear candidate Barack Obama tell it last year, one group of Boomers pit itself against another in a hatred that has lasted a generation.
The year 1968 was the year of the Tet Offensive, when the fortress myth of American invincibility was first breached in the war that would deal the nation its first defeat. That was the year Martin Luther King, Jr., and the notion of successful nonviolent change suffered a deadly blow. That was the year the last great white hope, Robert F. Kennedy, perished -- he was consumed, I still think, by the self-destructive forces of the power of money from which, ironically, he sprang.
The news media told us of students in Paris accused of instigating a deep crisis and later of peers in Prague hailed, from the West, as heroes -- yet all of them (us, it was my generation) were in the same dionysian revolt against our apollonian elders. And what did we achieve?
The cult of youth, too, turned out to be a false god, especially evident now that we are no longer young. The only surefire result of the Democratic Convention riots was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 -- if only it could have been foreseen and prevented!
But it couldn't. At heart we Americans are much too fond of our essential self-delusion that we can overcome everything and anything.
Everything about an American and the degree of his or her success is fake. Fake it 'till you make it, runs what seems to be the quintessential American nursery rhyme. We spend lifetimes telling one another that "everything is great."
Happiness is a constitutional right, we believe (and no, it's not there). And it is a duty. If you are sick or you are poor, it's your damned fault.
Yet none of it is true. Indeed, not only is America the land of the false optimism, it's also the land of the scam.
Go back to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and even to Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Our Protestant, Calvinist, capitalist ethos and its anxiety inspiring lies are writ large in our literature and culture.
Yet at times such as these, when the wages of our collective prevarication come due, we have the remarkable opportunity to tell ourselves the truth: perhaps we have just muddled through with a bit of luck and perhaps we could recognize that not all that glitters is gold. Or is that too Catholic, medieval and fatalistically feudal?
Let's look at the year 1968 for a moment. That is the time when, to hear candidate Barack Obama tell it last year, one group of Boomers pit itself against another in a hatred that has lasted a generation.
The year 1968 was the year of the Tet Offensive, when the fortress myth of American invincibility was first breached in the war that would deal the nation its first defeat. That was the year Martin Luther King, Jr., and the notion of successful nonviolent change suffered a deadly blow. That was the year the last great white hope, Robert F. Kennedy, perished -- he was consumed, I still think, by the self-destructive forces of the power of money from which, ironically, he sprang.
The news media told us of students in Paris accused of instigating a deep crisis and later of peers in Prague hailed, from the West, as heroes -- yet all of them (us, it was my generation) were in the same dionysian revolt against our apollonian elders. And what did we achieve?
The cult of youth, too, turned out to be a false god, especially evident now that we are no longer young. The only surefire result of the Democratic Convention riots was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 -- if only it could have been foreseen and prevented!
But it couldn't. At heart we Americans are much too fond of our essential self-delusion that we can overcome everything and anything.
Everything about an American and the degree of his or her success is fake. Fake it 'till you make it, runs what seems to be the quintessential American nursery rhyme. We spend lifetimes telling one another that "everything is great."
Happiness is a constitutional right, we believe (and no, it's not there). And it is a duty. If you are sick or you are poor, it's your damned fault.
Yet none of it is true. Indeed, not only is America the land of the false optimism, it's also the land of the scam.
Go back to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and even to Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Our Protestant, Calvinist, capitalist ethos and its anxiety inspiring lies are writ large in our literature and culture.
Yet at times such as these, when the wages of our collective prevarication come due, we have the remarkable opportunity to tell ourselves the truth: perhaps we have just muddled through with a bit of luck and perhaps we could recognize that not all that glitters is gold. Or is that too Catholic, medieval and fatalistically feudal?
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Preparing for Living
In advance of the coming economic bad news -- bank "stress test" results on Monday, unemployment on Friday -- allow me to ponder what is really happening at a level that affects all of us: a profound job insecurity that won't get better even when the so-called "macro" numbers look better.
Then allow me to bring up a comment by my friend and reader Luciano in response to my post of March 19: "Post-industrial production is production without labor. This means the END OF THE JOB. Repeat after me: The AGE OF THE JOB is past. The traditional 'job,' which has determined our consciousness for 300 years, is gone forever. The jobs now being lost will not come back. We don't need the workers anymore."
In technical principle, this has been possible for at least half a century. A relatively small -- and declining -- proportion of the population is needed to produce the materials essential to human dignity, such as food, clothing and shelter, much as was foreseen by John Maynard Keynes in his 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren."
He saw the end of "the struggle for subsistence" in the then-unthinkable year of 2030. That struggle persists today largely due to disparities and injustices, but not actual need. We have and produce more than enough for everyone.
Confront the equity issue, however, and we come to the real future problem, also prophesied by Keynes:
Then allow me to bring up a comment by my friend and reader Luciano in response to my post of March 19: "Post-industrial production is production without labor. This means the END OF THE JOB. Repeat after me: The AGE OF THE JOB is past. The traditional 'job,' which has determined our consciousness for 300 years, is gone forever. The jobs now being lost will not come back. We don't need the workers anymore."
In technical principle, this has been possible for at least half a century. A relatively small -- and declining -- proportion of the population is needed to produce the materials essential to human dignity, such as food, clothing and shelter, much as was foreseen by John Maynard Keynes in his 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren."
He saw the end of "the struggle for subsistence" in the then-unthinkable year of 2030. That struggle persists today largely due to disparities and injustices, but not actual need. We have and produce more than enough for everyone.
Confront the equity issue, however, and we come to the real future problem, also prophesied by Keynes:
... for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.This is what today's children -- who will be young adults in 2030 -- should be learning: the art of life itself. This is education not merely to have a skill to make a living, but education to learn how to learn and live and grow, in harmony and fairness.
The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
The Ugly American as a Nunny Bunny
You know how when you notice something it's suddenly all around you? This is happening to me with international do-gooder women and their irretrievably imperious Ugly American attitudes.
One of them is a nun who writes an innocent enough blog, La Paz de Susan. What could be wrong with that? Plenty. Sister Susan jetsets back and forth from El Salvador to the States and lives in obvious luxurious digs with a complement of paid guards. A Poor Claire she is not. There's more.
She has gone to help the benighted Salvadorans delivering volunteer health care. But she hasn't bothered to learn the language beforehand. Oh, how "cute" she is speaking pidgin Spanish! Salvadorans who mess up her name or make some other mistake concerning her status are ridiculously silly and subject to mockery.
Of course, being a Catholic nun she's not above the occasional fund-raising scam based on -- wait for it! -- a needy child. And let's not forget to post the picture of the woman with the basket on her head to delight the folks back home with a picture of the "natives."
Reading her blog I have no doubt why the Salvadoran military men knew they could murder four American religious women in 1980 with impunity. Without a doubt, these insufferable, self-absorbed dogooders have no clue as to their surroundings.
All they want is to feel good allegedly helping the poor subhumans.
One of them is a nun who writes an innocent enough blog, La Paz de Susan. What could be wrong with that? Plenty. Sister Susan jetsets back and forth from El Salvador to the States and lives in obvious luxurious digs with a complement of paid guards. A Poor Claire she is not. There's more.
She has gone to help the benighted Salvadorans delivering volunteer health care. But she hasn't bothered to learn the language beforehand. Oh, how "cute" she is speaking pidgin Spanish! Salvadorans who mess up her name or make some other mistake concerning her status are ridiculously silly and subject to mockery.
Of course, being a Catholic nun she's not above the occasional fund-raising scam based on -- wait for it! -- a needy child. And let's not forget to post the picture of the woman with the basket on her head to delight the folks back home with a picture of the "natives."
Reading her blog I have no doubt why the Salvadoran military men knew they could murder four American religious women in 1980 with impunity. Without a doubt, these insufferable, self-absorbed dogooders have no clue as to their surroundings.
All they want is to feel good allegedly helping the poor subhumans.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Education for the Future
As I continue to outline details of my "revolutionary manifesto," this time I'll focus on education policy. If you're a regular reader have written some of the basics about this before (see here).
What is there to do, in addition to federalizing education, consolidating bureaucracies, connecting educational schools to work preparation, putting all university students in education service for at least a year and coordinating education with public assistance programs? Lots.
Let's merge private and public education so that everybody has the same stake in the same system. And let's fund schools by population, not political clout or wealth.
Let's establish one national curriculum designed for a world power, not a county fair. It's incredible that Americans who have supposedly been educated cannot place a substantial number of countries on the map, nor recognize an amendment of the Constitution, nor speak a foreign language with at least passable fluency!
To rid the system of its deadwood, let's establish an exit career track for educators at 5, 10, 15, 20 years of service. Most teachers who can't teach won't leave because there is nowhere to go with a teaching credential.
Similarly, let's liberalize credentialling to allow people who actually know and have experience at something useful to share their expertise with young people, even if they don't speak pedagoguese.
Let's replace unions, which are more suitable for industrial settings, with professional societies that promote excellence in exchange for salary and job security.
What is there to do, in addition to federalizing education, consolidating bureaucracies, connecting educational schools to work preparation, putting all university students in education service for at least a year and coordinating education with public assistance programs? Lots.
Let's merge private and public education so that everybody has the same stake in the same system. And let's fund schools by population, not political clout or wealth.
Let's establish one national curriculum designed for a world power, not a county fair. It's incredible that Americans who have supposedly been educated cannot place a substantial number of countries on the map, nor recognize an amendment of the Constitution, nor speak a foreign language with at least passable fluency!
To rid the system of its deadwood, let's establish an exit career track for educators at 5, 10, 15, 20 years of service. Most teachers who can't teach won't leave because there is nowhere to go with a teaching credential.
Similarly, let's liberalize credentialling to allow people who actually know and have experience at something useful to share their expertise with young people, even if they don't speak pedagoguese.
Let's replace unions, which are more suitable for industrial settings, with professional societies that promote excellence in exchange for salary and job security.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Reversal as a Path to Understanding
In e-mail discussions with a correspondent in another country, I have hit upon a method of bridging deeply embedded biases of largely cultural origin that I thought I would share with the world. It's very simple: switch sides.
What if people were able to do this, gaining similar insights as we did, along a whole variety of issues? What if we held a debate at some hallowed hall of Harvard or Yale in which
Role reversal is a technique I intend to continue to use in all my interactions whenever conflict arises. I really believe in it.
What if people were able to do this, gaining similar insights as we did, along a whole variety of issues? What if we held a debate at some hallowed hall of Harvard or Yale in which
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued for the illegitimacy of the State of Israel and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defended the right of Israel to exist?
- Barack Obama were to spout the anti-liberal rhetoric, while Rush Limbaugh took up the defense of every position of the Obama Administration?
- Richard Dawkins were to be an apologist for Catholicism and Joseph Ratzinger, the pope, to rant about the likely nonexistence of any deity?
- Gloria Steinem were to defend the traditional roles of women, while Phyllis Schlafly were to defend feminist single moms having everything including a cracked job ceiling?
Role reversal is a technique I intend to continue to use in all my interactions whenever conflict arises. I really believe in it.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
1001 Airheads
Left over from my post with a notable lack of glückenfreude (see 1000 Readers) is the still broiling issue of why our culture is awash with semi-literate nonsense. It wasn't so much that so many are craven enough to click elsewhere, but that elsewhere is so low brow.
One would prefer to be bested by Paul Krugman or Robert Reich or Maureen Dowd.
One of my favorite professors in college, a Canadian author of short fiction whom the fickle goddess Pheme has so far undeservedly passed over, was fond of regaling the dozen of us in his short story seminar with a wide range of intensely memorable stories and vignettes from his life. It was, I suppose, a way of teaching us how to tell a story.
This included the one about the former student who, dropping by his office, declared that he was "into a new kind of reading." Intrigued, my prof asked what, assuming perhaps that the young man had discovered the then-hot Donald Barthelme. The answer, my prof said, amid gales of laughter that forced him to repeat himself so we could make out the words, was TV Guide.
Indeed, I later learned, when circulation and subscription figures became of professional interest, that TV Guide used to have tens of millions of readers and still garners 3.2 million. In contrast, Newsweek has a circulation of 2.7 million and the magazine I would have died to see my byline in, The New Yorker, only 164,000.
So, what's with that?
One would prefer to be bested by Paul Krugman or Robert Reich or Maureen Dowd.
One of my favorite professors in college, a Canadian author of short fiction whom the fickle goddess Pheme has so far undeservedly passed over, was fond of regaling the dozen of us in his short story seminar with a wide range of intensely memorable stories and vignettes from his life. It was, I suppose, a way of teaching us how to tell a story.
This included the one about the former student who, dropping by his office, declared that he was "into a new kind of reading." Intrigued, my prof asked what, assuming perhaps that the young man had discovered the then-hot Donald Barthelme. The answer, my prof said, amid gales of laughter that forced him to repeat himself so we could make out the words, was TV Guide.
Indeed, I later learned, when circulation and subscription figures became of professional interest, that TV Guide used to have tens of millions of readers and still garners 3.2 million. In contrast, Newsweek has a circulation of 2.7 million and the magazine I would have died to see my byline in, The New Yorker, only 164,000.
So, what's with that?
Monday, April 13, 2009
Tax All Inheritance 100%
This is my all-time favorite show-stopping plank. Everybody thinks of their darling orphaned children, little realizing that even in the land of Horatio Alger, it still takes on average five generations for someone who is poor to become rich or the less-desirable reverse.
American economic mobility is not what most people think. The streets of America aren't paved with gold. Indeed, they never were.
As we all, know, the United States arose because a group of wealthy bewigged landowners and businessmen was too cheap to pay taxes for the defense of their holdings from Indians. Just as they and their heirs have been to cheap to pay for slaves, indentured servants, industrial workers and everyone else who made their fortunes possible.
Why not, then, abolish all inheritance, plow it into a common pot from which the biblical widow and orphan shall be provided for generously and well? What we could fund with the fortunes of the 400 richest Americans, who had a combined net worth of $1.57 trillion in 2004 (or $3.9 billion on average)! And that's just the tippy top.
Imagine a wisely husbanded fund of several trillions devoted to care for all parentless children and all surviving companions unable to work. Imagine returning the 80 percent of all assets, owned by only 20 percent of the people, to 100 percent of the people. Imagine sharing.
American economic mobility is not what most people think. The streets of America aren't paved with gold. Indeed, they never were.
As we all, know, the United States arose because a group of wealthy bewigged landowners and businessmen was too cheap to pay taxes for the defense of their holdings from Indians. Just as they and their heirs have been to cheap to pay for slaves, indentured servants, industrial workers and everyone else who made their fortunes possible.
Why not, then, abolish all inheritance, plow it into a common pot from which the biblical widow and orphan shall be provided for generously and well? What we could fund with the fortunes of the 400 richest Americans, who had a combined net worth of $1.57 trillion in 2004 (or $3.9 billion on average)! And that's just the tippy top.
Imagine a wisely husbanded fund of several trillions devoted to care for all parentless children and all surviving companions unable to work. Imagine returning the 80 percent of all assets, owned by only 20 percent of the people, to 100 percent of the people. Imagine sharing.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
What's Progressive About it?
The comments on my last post about progressive taxation suggest that I should have made myself a lot clearer about what was I proposing -- and spelled out what other options there are. In brief, I suggested we return to a graduated set of tax rates that levy a higher proportion of income from those who earn more and a lesser share from those who earn less.
This is "progressive" in a very simple, mechanical way: the rates progressively get higher, according to income. This has been the basic framework of U.S. taxation of income since the Supreme Court declared such levies constitutional in 1913.
Taxes became ever more progressive and leaned ever heavier on the upper income strata from Presidents Franklin Roosevelt to Carter, then reversed under Reagan and under the second Bush -- both of whom cut the upper tax rates sizably (to benefit the wealthy), as I mentioned in my post.
There have also been "regressive" forms of taxation. The most common one is the sales tax: everybody who buys X pays a certain percentage of the price. This is regressive because it ignores the disparity in ability to pay. Rich people buying X pay a smaller proportion of their income in sales taxes, while poor people pay a higher proportion -- so even both pay the same amount of money, it hurts richer consumers less than it hurts poorer one.
In the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections, Steve Forbes proposed a modified version of the "flat tax," a levy of 17% on all personal and corporate earned income above $33,000. This is the sales tax principle applied to income.
Like sales tax, it is regressive -- otherwise you can bet your sweet patooties that Forbes, now publisher of the eponymous business magazine, would not have proposed it. This would have meant that folks paying the lowest tax rate at the time, 15%, would have experienced a tax increase, while those paying at the highest rate, then 39.6%, would have had their taxes cut by more than half!
And it would have bankrupt the government faster than you can say "George W. Bush" or "Ronald Reagan." Guess who wins there? Those who have big incomes and don't need anything from government, except the occasional war on which to make profits.
This is "progressive" in a very simple, mechanical way: the rates progressively get higher, according to income. This has been the basic framework of U.S. taxation of income since the Supreme Court declared such levies constitutional in 1913.
Taxes became ever more progressive and leaned ever heavier on the upper income strata from Presidents Franklin Roosevelt to Carter, then reversed under Reagan and under the second Bush -- both of whom cut the upper tax rates sizably (to benefit the wealthy), as I mentioned in my post.
There have also been "regressive" forms of taxation. The most common one is the sales tax: everybody who buys X pays a certain percentage of the price. This is regressive because it ignores the disparity in ability to pay. Rich people buying X pay a smaller proportion of their income in sales taxes, while poor people pay a higher proportion -- so even both pay the same amount of money, it hurts richer consumers less than it hurts poorer one.
In the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections, Steve Forbes proposed a modified version of the "flat tax," a levy of 17% on all personal and corporate earned income above $33,000. This is the sales tax principle applied to income.
Like sales tax, it is regressive -- otherwise you can bet your sweet patooties that Forbes, now publisher of the eponymous business magazine, would not have proposed it. This would have meant that folks paying the lowest tax rate at the time, 15%, would have experienced a tax increase, while those paying at the highest rate, then 39.6%, would have had their taxes cut by more than half!
And it would have bankrupt the government faster than you can say "George W. Bush" or "Ronald Reagan." Guess who wins there? Those who have big incomes and don't need anything from government, except the occasional war on which to make profits.
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Let's Return to Progressive Taxation
People who hate taxes and hate government must hate roads and schools and libraries and police and courts, not to mention certified foods and medicines and a whole host of other hallmarks of a civilized society today. The issue is not whither taxes, but whither unfair taxes.
From the 1930s until the 1980s, the United States had a progressive tax system that did a mildly good job of undoing the vast shift toward income and wealth inequality of the late 19th century through the 1920s. Under that great red revolutionary, Dwight David Eisenhower, the top marginal tax rate was 92%.
So why does the political marketplace of ideas accept as dogma that anything worse than Reagan and Bush rates of 28% and 35% are sacrosanct? Why should there be just three rates topping at little more than a third, when the revenue they produce simply fails to pay for a good health care and retirement system for all (not to mention the odd war our country must somehow always be fighting)?
Given that 20% of the people own 80% of the nation's assets, shouldn't they who are more able, contribute substantially more to a society that has made their riches possible?
These are rhetorical questions. President Obama (how nice that still sounds ...!) is being overly timid in suggesting that rates merely return to President Clinton's 39.6%. That's not how a changed America will come about.
(By popular acclaim, I am returning to my clarifications concerning the revolutionary agenda I proposed, which I admit was never my wholly original idea. In the next few posts I shall be attempting to review the points in greater detail.)
From the 1930s until the 1980s, the United States had a progressive tax system that did a mildly good job of undoing the vast shift toward income and wealth inequality of the late 19th century through the 1920s. Under that great red revolutionary, Dwight David Eisenhower, the top marginal tax rate was 92%.
So why does the political marketplace of ideas accept as dogma that anything worse than Reagan and Bush rates of 28% and 35% are sacrosanct? Why should there be just three rates topping at little more than a third, when the revenue they produce simply fails to pay for a good health care and retirement system for all (not to mention the odd war our country must somehow always be fighting)?
Given that 20% of the people own 80% of the nation's assets, shouldn't they who are more able, contribute substantially more to a society that has made their riches possible?
These are rhetorical questions. President Obama (how nice that still sounds ...!) is being overly timid in suggesting that rates merely return to President Clinton's 39.6%. That's not how a changed America will come about.
(By popular acclaim, I am returning to my clarifications concerning the revolutionary agenda I proposed, which I admit was never my wholly original idea. In the next few posts I shall be attempting to review the points in greater detail.)
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
The Tabloidization of Michelle Obama
Just as Condoleezza Rice made a splash in Europe with her boots, MIchelle Obama is making a news with bare arms and -- gasp! the salts! -- hugging a queen. Obviously, Rice had fun amid her prevarications about Iraq and Obama decided to play with the hand she was dealt.
Does anyone remember what Rice, no dummy by any standard, had substantively to say and how she fell short of her oath of office? Has anyone remembered that Obama -- who did not run and was not elected -- is a lawyer with training and experience every bit as rigorous as her husband?
Why are people discussing Obama's looks and manners when the world is beyond the brink of disaster?
Perhaps it is that the powers that be, who own the "news" media, don't want anyone to be thinking, lest they realize how badly they have been shafted. Perhaps we are all too lazy or lobotomized to rub those two brain cells we've got left.
The G-20 meeting was important but essentially secret. Why was there no questioning of how come those democratically elected heads of governments were keeping secrets from their electorates?
We, the public, owe it to ourselves not to feed on lazy, tabloid journalism.
Does anyone remember what Rice, no dummy by any standard, had substantively to say and how she fell short of her oath of office? Has anyone remembered that Obama -- who did not run and was not elected -- is a lawyer with training and experience every bit as rigorous as her husband?
Why are people discussing Obama's looks and manners when the world is beyond the brink of disaster?
Perhaps it is that the powers that be, who own the "news" media, don't want anyone to be thinking, lest they realize how badly they have been shafted. Perhaps we are all too lazy or lobotomized to rub those two brain cells we've got left.
The G-20 meeting was important but essentially secret. Why was there no questioning of how come those democratically elected heads of governments were keeping secrets from their electorates?
We, the public, owe it to ourselves not to feed on lazy, tabloid journalism.
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Snowball in April
A friend suggested that it would begin to happen more frequently now. My parents died more than a decade ago and surely they would have been dead by now if they hadn't. A very close friend's older sister just died. Now a school classmate has cancer and is undergoing chemo.
For the first time in my life, I'm older than the president. My father died "young" and I will soon be older than he was at the time. Then what?
I've been at the top of the hill for a while now and I'm beginning to feel that that plateau in which one is at one's prime is running out. All I can say is that I wish myself and my contemporaries a swift and painless death, whenever it comes.
For the first time in my life, I'm older than the president. My father died "young" and I will soon be older than he was at the time. Then what?
I've been at the top of the hill for a while now and I'm beginning to feel that that plateau in which one is at one's prime is running out. All I can say is that I wish myself and my contemporaries a swift and painless death, whenever it comes.
Friday, April 03, 2009
Getting No Better Than Anyone Else
One of my favorite Beatles songs was always "Getting Better All the Time." You remember the song? No? Well here are my favorite verses:
In the manner of Dante, I spent years consigning my deceased father to the deepest circles of hell for having abandoning my mother and me when I was a child. In the end, although I haven't copied the history and I am a distinct person, I realize I'm not much better than my father.
And that's what I really call getting better.
I've got to admit it's getting better, betterLet me do a little twist on that.
A little better all the time, it can't get no worse
I have to admit it's getting better, better
It's getting better since you've been mine
Me used to be angry young man
Me hiding me head in the sand
You gave me the word, I finally heard
I'm doing the best that I can
In the manner of Dante, I spent years consigning my deceased father to the deepest circles of hell for having abandoning my mother and me when I was a child. In the end, although I haven't copied the history and I am a distinct person, I realize I'm not much better than my father.
And that's what I really call getting better.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
1000 Readers
Call it sour grapes, dyspepsia or mere grumpiness, but I was flabbergasted to learn that a blog whose name itself is a bit edgy has 1,000 Google Reader subscribers (actually it's 1,136). This one has a mere 10.
OK, so there are other forms of subscribing to my blog, but even if I add up all those, this blog is still woefully out of the ballpark. That's not the point.
Here I go, offering insights into the way our politics and economics work and intertwine, trying to sort out philosophical questions, attempting the odd poem. I am offering pensées. My friends and a few new cyberacquaintances pop in now and then. Maybe 2 leave a comment.
But "Black Hockey Jesus," the blogger of the site noted above, posts an invitation to join his "cult" and posts something titled Suicidal Jesus, which -- yes, yes, yes -- is wickedly funny, and he gets 60 comments.
What's wrong with this picture?
OK, so there are other forms of subscribing to my blog, but even if I add up all those, this blog is still woefully out of the ballpark. That's not the point.
Here I go, offering insights into the way our politics and economics work and intertwine, trying to sort out philosophical questions, attempting the odd poem. I am offering pensées. My friends and a few new cyberacquaintances pop in now and then. Maybe 2 leave a comment.
But "Black Hockey Jesus," the blogger of the site noted above, posts an invitation to join his "cult" and posts something titled Suicidal Jesus, which -- yes, yes, yes -- is wickedly funny, and he gets 60 comments.
What's wrong with this picture?
Monday, March 30, 2009
After the Revolution: FAQ
Here are answers to a few frequently asked questions concerning the views I've been presenting regarding the need for a revolution.
1. Your agenda sounds like you're proposing Soviet Communism.
No. I propose neither a violent overthrow of the government, which I don't see as the problem, nor an end to any of our civil liberties. I don't think a command economy such as that of the USSR could work here. Although Sweden or Israel offer intriguing examples.
2. Didn't Communism fail?
That depends on what you expected Communism to accomplish. Politically, the Leninist theory of the state and the ruling political party, eliminated any possibility of an open society. This has been roundly criticized from the Left, a criticism in which I happily join. However, Communist revolutions achieved quite a lot in social and economic terms, when one takes into account that they took place in very backward, pre-industrial and politically neo-feudal countries.
3. So if you are not a Communist, what are you?
I'm unhappy with the political parties available to us in the United States. The only viable political parties, Democratic and Republican, accept the same economic dogmas, myths and taboos. There is no political party of the left that is particularly worthy: the socialists are tiny, the trotskyists are a tad too doctrinaire and the Communists carry the monkey of Stalin on their backs. I see myself as someone who advocates for a social and economic democracy that is at least as sturdy and open to popular influence as our political democracy is, particularly since January 2009.
1. Your agenda sounds like you're proposing Soviet Communism.
No. I propose neither a violent overthrow of the government, which I don't see as the problem, nor an end to any of our civil liberties. I don't think a command economy such as that of the USSR could work here. Although Sweden or Israel offer intriguing examples.
2. Didn't Communism fail?
That depends on what you expected Communism to accomplish. Politically, the Leninist theory of the state and the ruling political party, eliminated any possibility of an open society. This has been roundly criticized from the Left, a criticism in which I happily join. However, Communist revolutions achieved quite a lot in social and economic terms, when one takes into account that they took place in very backward, pre-industrial and politically neo-feudal countries.
3. So if you are not a Communist, what are you?
I'm unhappy with the political parties available to us in the United States. The only viable political parties, Democratic and Republican, accept the same economic dogmas, myths and taboos. There is no political party of the left that is particularly worthy: the socialists are tiny, the trotskyists are a tad too doctrinaire and the Communists carry the monkey of Stalin on their backs. I see myself as someone who advocates for a social and economic democracy that is at least as sturdy and open to popular influence as our political democracy is, particularly since January 2009.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
The Lemon Named Excess
Much as the play and film "A Streetcar Named Desire" was a eulogy of a bygone U.S. class and ethnic social structure, the decline of Detroit automakers and the culture they spawned perhaps deserves a new work of art, one titled "The Lemon Named Excess."
In his 1948 play, Tennessee Williams pit Blanche DuBois, a faded lady of the Old South that was really a stand-in for the entire WASP Brahmin class, against the vigorous rough-and-tumble Stanley Kowalski, emblematic of the rising industrial, urban and white "ethnic" immigrant class. Today, we might pit Walt Kowalski (a coincidence?) from Clint Eastwood's recent film Gran Torino and its evocation of the pollutemobile, the umpteen-lane highway and the sprawling smogopolises with their white-flight suburbs, against what ... a figure and lifestyle yet to come.
Behind every fortune lies a crime, remarked Balzac, and behind the apogee of the combustion-engine vehicle lies a seldom recounted scandal.
Between 1936 and 1950, for example, Federal Engineering Corporation, Firestone Tire, General Motors, Phillips Petroleum, Mack and Standard Oil of California, and acting through a cutout holding company called National City Lines, conspired to destroy 100 electric streetcar transit systems in 45 cities. The cities include Detroit, New York City, Oakland, Philadelphia, Phoenix, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Los Angeles. (All this was once brought out in court.)
Add to that the gargantuan federal and state subsidies to highways and oil production over the past decades.
Now, at long last, the rapacious auto companies are on their knees and big oil is at last seen as a threat to our security and even our future existence. This is not the time to help them. This is the time to nationalize the car industry and transform it into the engine of new, pollution-free vehicles produced by a public enterprise devoted to serving the general public.
In his 1948 play, Tennessee Williams pit Blanche DuBois, a faded lady of the Old South that was really a stand-in for the entire WASP Brahmin class, against the vigorous rough-and-tumble Stanley Kowalski, emblematic of the rising industrial, urban and white "ethnic" immigrant class. Today, we might pit Walt Kowalski (a coincidence?) from Clint Eastwood's recent film Gran Torino and its evocation of the pollutemobile, the umpteen-lane highway and the sprawling smogopolises with their white-flight suburbs, against what ... a figure and lifestyle yet to come.
Behind every fortune lies a crime, remarked Balzac, and behind the apogee of the combustion-engine vehicle lies a seldom recounted scandal.
Between 1936 and 1950, for example, Federal Engineering Corporation, Firestone Tire, General Motors, Phillips Petroleum, Mack and Standard Oil of California, and acting through a cutout holding company called National City Lines, conspired to destroy 100 electric streetcar transit systems in 45 cities. The cities include Detroit, New York City, Oakland, Philadelphia, Phoenix, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Los Angeles. (All this was once brought out in court.)
Add to that the gargantuan federal and state subsidies to highways and oil production over the past decades.
Now, at long last, the rapacious auto companies are on their knees and big oil is at last seen as a threat to our security and even our future existence. This is not the time to help them. This is the time to nationalize the car industry and transform it into the engine of new, pollution-free vehicles produced by a public enterprise devoted to serving the general public.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Don't Salvage, Nationalize!
The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of this crisis is that it exposes for all to see the moral faultlines of the capitalist way of life. This is not the time to rescue the wage-slave system, along with its banks and stock and commodities exchanges, as the latest Geithner/Paulsen plan to aid banks proposes, but to strip out the ill-gotten, wastefully spent gains.
Don't rescue the banks, nationalize them. Don't shore up Wall Street, close it once and for all. These are no more than the casinos of and for the rich, who essentially play with our hard-earned money.
You think banks are merely safe places to put money at a tidy return? You wish! Banks are constantly gambling that enough people will keep their money in so they can lend out most of what they've got -- if everybody withdraws at once, banks fail. Moreover, compare the interest rate you can get paid with the rate you're likely to be charged to borrow.
You think stock exchanges are merely places where the "invisible hand" of the quasi-divine "market" arrives at fair values for a whole range of assets? That textbook description has never taken into account the speculation, almost entirely divorced from the actual workings of businesses, that actually fuels upward runs by "bulls" and downward falls by "bears."
When their gambles prove wrong, who loses the jobs and the homes? Not the top 20 percent of assetholders, who own 80 percent of all assets in the United States. So let's seize the moment to make this land our land, as Woody Guthrie sang, from California to New York Island. "This land was made for you and me ..."
Don't rescue the banks, nationalize them. Don't shore up Wall Street, close it once and for all. These are no more than the casinos of and for the rich, who essentially play with our hard-earned money.
You think banks are merely safe places to put money at a tidy return? You wish! Banks are constantly gambling that enough people will keep their money in so they can lend out most of what they've got -- if everybody withdraws at once, banks fail. Moreover, compare the interest rate you can get paid with the rate you're likely to be charged to borrow.
You think stock exchanges are merely places where the "invisible hand" of the quasi-divine "market" arrives at fair values for a whole range of assets? That textbook description has never taken into account the speculation, almost entirely divorced from the actual workings of businesses, that actually fuels upward runs by "bulls" and downward falls by "bears."
When their gambles prove wrong, who loses the jobs and the homes? Not the top 20 percent of assetholders, who own 80 percent of all assets in the United States. So let's seize the moment to make this land our land, as Woody Guthrie sang, from California to New York Island. "This land was made for you and me ..."
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Abolish the Corporation*
Let's not first "kill all the lawyers," as Shakespeare's Henry VI suggested. First thing we do, instead, let's slaughter the legal "persons" that choke off any attempt to put blame where blame is due for the undemocratic concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few: the corporation.
Through the magic of corporate law, there exists an entity that is separate from the people that form it, own it, direct it and are responsible for what it does -- such as spilling tons of crude oil into the ocean, hiding information showing that cigarettes are addictive and cancer-producing, buying up public urban transit systems to destroy them and eliminate competition for the car.
If these actions ever come under scrutiny of the authorities, veritable armies of lawyers can be counted upon to spar for years. In the end, the corporations in question pay for the damage -- if they lose, which is not often. None of the actual people involved -- not the CEO, not the managers, not the stockholders, not the directors -- pay for their misdeeds. The corporation -- a thing that is not alive and does not actually exist in any real sense -- did it.
Moreover, the decisions that led to these actions are never made within earshot of the customers and citizens and workers who are most affected. We, the people, have no say as to whether the corporations will bilk us, poison us or get our children killed -- before it happens. It's only long after the damage is done that, maybe, with fingers crossed and lots of luck, a few hapless victims get something back.
It's time to end the charade. Let's stop pretending the corporations exist -- they don't; instead, let's take names and kick butt. Let's assume the power to control the crucial economic activity that defines whether we survive and how.
*(In response to private comments concerning the revolutionary agenda I proposed, which is not wholly original, I would like to clarify at least what I mean by the planks I put forth. In the next few posts I shall be attempting to review the points in greater detail.)
Through the magic of corporate law, there exists an entity that is separate from the people that form it, own it, direct it and are responsible for what it does -- such as spilling tons of crude oil into the ocean, hiding information showing that cigarettes are addictive and cancer-producing, buying up public urban transit systems to destroy them and eliminate competition for the car.
If these actions ever come under scrutiny of the authorities, veritable armies of lawyers can be counted upon to spar for years. In the end, the corporations in question pay for the damage -- if they lose, which is not often. None of the actual people involved -- not the CEO, not the managers, not the stockholders, not the directors -- pay for their misdeeds. The corporation -- a thing that is not alive and does not actually exist in any real sense -- did it.
Moreover, the decisions that led to these actions are never made within earshot of the customers and citizens and workers who are most affected. We, the people, have no say as to whether the corporations will bilk us, poison us or get our children killed -- before it happens. It's only long after the damage is done that, maybe, with fingers crossed and lots of luck, a few hapless victims get something back.
It's time to end the charade. Let's stop pretending the corporations exist -- they don't; instead, let's take names and kick butt. Let's assume the power to control the crucial economic activity that defines whether we survive and how.
*(In response to private comments concerning the revolutionary agenda I proposed, which is not wholly original, I would like to clarify at least what I mean by the planks I put forth. In the next few posts I shall be attempting to review the points in greater detail.)
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Dictatorship and Other Hazards of Capitalism
The great thing about this depression recession is that a lot of people are finally paying attention to this thing called capitalism as it really is, not as fabled. Indeed, we're all discovering that, for a small-d democratic country, we sure have and encourage a lot of capitalist dictatorship in our society.
We go through theseslick marketing political campaigns every four years in which we wonder whether we like the preacher of a man who, come down to it, can't really feed our family, any more than he can stop teenagers from getting pregnant or help us reach our healthiest BMI level. Yet we surrender every personal right to an unelected individual who can tell us in precise detail what we must and must not do for most of our waking hours: our boss.
Who is our boss answerable to? Ultimately, some "chief executive officer." And the CEO? To a board of directors. And the board? To the stockholders. And all of them together? To a misty legal fog designed, essentially, to make sure that them who've got keep getting more.
You have free speech in the public park, but not at the business meeting or in the lunch room (try organizing a union there). Your boss doesn't legally have to give you a vacation or paid sick leave. Or a raise. Or pay you more than $6.15 an hour. If you don't like it, you can starve.
We don't elect these people. We have no say in how they run things. They have power just because.
We go through these
Who is our boss answerable to? Ultimately, some "chief executive officer." And the CEO? To a board of directors. And the board? To the stockholders. And all of them together? To a misty legal fog designed, essentially, to make sure that them who've got keep getting more.
You have free speech in the public park, but not at the business meeting or in the lunch room (try organizing a union there). Your boss doesn't legally have to give you a vacation or paid sick leave. Or a raise. Or pay you more than $6.15 an hour. If you don't like it, you can starve.
We don't elect these people. We have no say in how they run things. They have power just because.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Revolution?
My teenage years took place in a time and place in which the word "revolution" was as alluring to the young as it was forbidden by the elders. Decades later, I wonder what all that mouthing the r-word accomplished. Yet, as I watch a pauperizing worldwide crisis unroll before my eyes, I wonder ... isn't it time for revolution, a worldwide revolution?
Don't get me wrong. Millions of tortured, imprisoned, dead and "disappeared" people have convinced me that merely overthrowing a government accomplishes nothing. Indeed, most governments are not really the problem.
At the source of the economic crisis is a system of money power that serves the greediest few and corrupts the many. That's what needs overthrowing. Let's democratize economic decision-making and take it out of the hands of the tailor-suited financial elite. Profits generated by efficiencies and collective labor should be shared throughout the complex society that makes such profits even possible.
Could ordinary folks do any worse than these MBA geniuses have done? Let's try a few revolutionary steps:
Don't get me wrong. Millions of tortured, imprisoned, dead and "disappeared" people have convinced me that merely overthrowing a government accomplishes nothing. Indeed, most governments are not really the problem.
At the source of the economic crisis is a system of money power that serves the greediest few and corrupts the many. That's what needs overthrowing. Let's democratize economic decision-making and take it out of the hands of the tailor-suited financial elite. Profits generated by efficiencies and collective labor should be shared throughout the complex society that makes such profits even possible.
Could ordinary folks do any worse than these MBA geniuses have done? Let's try a few revolutionary steps:
- Turn for-profit corporations into sectorally organized publicly owned and controlled enterprises, run by specialists serving councils of elected workers and citizens;
- nationalize Chrysler and GM and turn them into producers of public, low-energy-consuming light and heavy rail and other systems of transportation, eventually making the car unnecessary, to be replaced by bicycles and light motorcycles.
- Re-establish progressivity of taxation and higher tax brackets;
- tax all inheritance 100% and put the proceeds into a fund for the education and support of all children and the support of those unable to work;
- expropriate all capital fleeing the country to avoid revolutionary rules;
- nationalize the banking system;
- close all stock exchanges and other markets of speculation, compensating account holders up to $5,000,000 per household;
- replace insurance companies with public trust funds;
- merge private and public education into a national free system incentivized through vouchers;
- abolish private medicine and private health institutions, creating a single health care system open to all.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
The Loser Goes to the Press
Details now leaking out suggest that, at the heart of the Tim Geithner-AIG bonus story, lies a political stratagem explained to me years ago by a master news manipulator when I was a very green journalist: never go to the press, unless you lose behind closed doors.
AIG paid the bonuses on Friday. News leaked out during the weekend, with The Washington Post apparently breaking the story. Now we know that Geithner was on the horn to New York all week trying to stop the bonuses.
Why not announce an outrage that was about to happen rather than a fait accompli? Because if you're a wheeler dealer you're most powerful behind closed doors, when you and those in the room are the only ones with the knowledge to act. Information is, after all, power.
If Geithner had gone public and pointed his finger, and à la Èmile Zola cried out "j'accuse," his power of persuasion over AIG would have vanished instantly. Naturally, once that power had been lost behind closed doors, Geithner -- and President Obama -- were free rend their garments in public.
This is how the power game is played. Reporters know to look for the disgruntled for their leaks. Never ask why the news was leaked, merely ask who the leaker was in order to understand what happened in a power struggle waged behind closed doors.
AIG paid the bonuses on Friday. News leaked out during the weekend, with The Washington Post apparently breaking the story. Now we know that Geithner was on the horn to New York all week trying to stop the bonuses.
Why not announce an outrage that was about to happen rather than a fait accompli? Because if you're a wheeler dealer you're most powerful behind closed doors, when you and those in the room are the only ones with the knowledge to act. Information is, after all, power.
If Geithner had gone public and pointed his finger, and à la Èmile Zola cried out "j'accuse," his power of persuasion over AIG would have vanished instantly. Naturally, once that power had been lost behind closed doors, Geithner -- and President Obama -- were free rend their garments in public.
This is how the power game is played. Reporters know to look for the disgruntled for their leaks. Never ask why the news was leaked, merely ask who the leaker was in order to understand what happened in a power struggle waged behind closed doors.
Monday, March 16, 2009
It's our AIG, isn't it?
The real AIG bonus scandal is that a majority stockholder cannot prevent nonsense set in motion before the stocks were eagerly tossed like confetti at the federal government by management begging on its knees for cash.
We, the people, now own 80 percent (!!!) of AIG at a cost of about $170 billion of our money; about $165 million in bonuses was scheduled to be paid by March 15; some of the individual bonuses range between $1.5 to $3 million, but most are merely in the thousands; the government-appointed overseer was told by lawyers that the bonuses must be paid under pre-existing employee-retention contracts.
The single fact that stands out to me is that March 15 is the deadline for filing corporate taxes. Typically, corporate expenses booked as 2008 prior-year accruals (in English: owed, but not paid, in 2008) must be actually paid out before that date. So the overriding urgency to make the payments is a tax filing.
Well, hell, Tim Geithner, let's have our AIG accountant file for an extension of the deadline while we figure out why these bonuses are being paid at all. There's still time: extension applications can still be filed today.
But what about the alleged top talent AIG stands to lose? Let's challenge them to go get another job with "AIG" on their résumés.
We, the people, now own 80 percent (!!!) of AIG at a cost of about $170 billion of our money; about $165 million in bonuses was scheduled to be paid by March 15; some of the individual bonuses range between $1.5 to $3 million, but most are merely in the thousands; the government-appointed overseer was told by lawyers that the bonuses must be paid under pre-existing employee-retention contracts.
The single fact that stands out to me is that March 15 is the deadline for filing corporate taxes. Typically, corporate expenses booked as 2008 prior-year accruals (in English: owed, but not paid, in 2008) must be actually paid out before that date. So the overriding urgency to make the payments is a tax filing.
Well, hell, Tim Geithner, let's have our AIG accountant file for an extension of the deadline while we figure out why these bonuses are being paid at all. There's still time: extension applications can still be filed today.
But what about the alleged top talent AIG stands to lose? Let's challenge them to go get another job with "AIG" on their résumés.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Why Does Wrongdoing Persist?
Bernard Madoff is probably the most egregious example, but let's not kid ourselves, wrongdoing large and small is pervasive. This fact rubs against the grain of my notion that the basis of all ethics is survival: are we all that self-destructive?
Now, granted, I never said that human beings were ethical. I merely suggested that if, out of curiosity, we wished to consider what we ought to do, human survival was as universal a principle available for discerning right from wrong.
On that basis I developed a decalogue, as if it made any difference, only to find myself waking up in this new era of deception and plunder to the reality that no one -- or very few -- takes ethics seriously. Unless they run the risk of getting caught and punished.
Frankly, I can't say that, when rubber hits the road, I'm any better. Boiling down l'éthique cecilieuse to its boy-scout-manual essentials, am I confident, sincere, joyful, respectful, nurturing, trustworthy, truthful, giving, loving, content? Not by a long shot.
Bless me, father, for I have been wracked with self-doubt, layered in pretenses, miserable, callous, lustful after what belongs to others, deceitful, grasping, selfishly licentious and chained to my artificial needs. This is why I will not survive.
Indeed, this is what dooms all humanity to a life that is, as Hobbes put it, nasty, brutish and short.
Now, granted, I never said that human beings were ethical. I merely suggested that if, out of curiosity, we wished to consider what we ought to do, human survival was as universal a principle available for discerning right from wrong.
On that basis I developed a decalogue, as if it made any difference, only to find myself waking up in this new era of deception and plunder to the reality that no one -- or very few -- takes ethics seriously. Unless they run the risk of getting caught and punished.
Frankly, I can't say that, when rubber hits the road, I'm any better. Boiling down l'éthique cecilieuse to its boy-scout-manual essentials, am I confident, sincere, joyful, respectful, nurturing, trustworthy, truthful, giving, loving, content? Not by a long shot.
Bless me, father, for I have been wracked with self-doubt, layered in pretenses, miserable, callous, lustful after what belongs to others, deceitful, grasping, selfishly licentious and chained to my artificial needs. This is why I will not survive.
Indeed, this is what dooms all humanity to a life that is, as Hobbes put it, nasty, brutish and short.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Is it a D-word yet?
Signs abound that the economy is slumping deeper and faster than anyone expected. At about 6,500 last week, the Dow will reach what I -- a nonexpert, noneconomist journalist -- think is the infamous "bottom" before the summer. That's too soon, as the economic stimulus effects won't begin to be felt at least until the fall.
Could it go lower than "Dr. Doom" predicted? Don't panic, but the D-word may soon aptly describe prevailing economic conditions.
In fact, I understand that Japan's much-feared "lost decade" was less severe, at an average 5.5 unemployment, than our current much higher jobless rate. The Japanese tanked and stayed tanked for a decade, but at much higher levels of well-being than the United States is at right now.
And they kept up their cradle-to-grave universal national health system, which we don't have.
It's no reason to cheer, but even in the depths of the Great Depression -- and we're not even remotely going there -- 77 percent of the workforce was employed. At worst we'll hit maybe 90 percent. That's bad if you're one of the unemployed, but ... you'll still have 9 in 10 chances of keeping your job -- and even better chances right now.
You're going to live through the fourth economic depression the United States has ever experienced. It's OK, we can all make it if we stick together.
Could it go lower than "Dr. Doom" predicted? Don't panic, but the D-word may soon aptly describe prevailing economic conditions.
In fact, I understand that Japan's much-feared "lost decade" was less severe, at an average 5.5 unemployment, than our current much higher jobless rate. The Japanese tanked and stayed tanked for a decade, but at much higher levels of well-being than the United States is at right now.
And they kept up their cradle-to-grave universal national health system, which we don't have.
It's no reason to cheer, but even in the depths of the Great Depression -- and we're not even remotely going there -- 77 percent of the workforce was employed. At worst we'll hit maybe 90 percent. That's bad if you're one of the unemployed, but ... you'll still have 9 in 10 chances of keeping your job -- and even better chances right now.
You're going to live through the fourth economic depression the United States has ever experienced. It's OK, we can all make it if we stick together.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
The Next Power
One of my favorite speculations since the end of what Walter Lippmann famously called the American Century concerns the country that will "own" the 21st century. In my last post I proposed the European Union.
Naturally, a European was the first to doubt it. China worried her, as she gave voice to the terror of yore concerning what my parents' generation called the "yellow peril." At the beginning of this decade I thought this would be the Chinese century, too. After all, even now the Chinese are upset their GDP growth slowed to a positive 9 percent last year, poor darlings.
Yet, in the end, modern China is really a bustling coastal shell with a huge very underdeveloped, very poor, very backward inland core. Good luck with that.
And let's not worry about Inja, shall we? India will undo itself. How long can a modernizing country sustain a socioeconomic canyon bolstered by ancient prejudices before it all explodes or the country enters what Marx eurocentrically called "the Asiatic mode of production"?
That leaves the EU, with a landmass about half the size of the United States and a population about one and a half as large, composed almost entirely of skilled workers. Their natural resources include arable land, bauxite, coal, copper, fish, hydropower, iron ore, lead, natural gas, petroleum, potash, salt, timber, uranium and zinc.
Who can beat Italian shoes, French wines, German engineering, Spanish olives, skilled and cheap Eastern European labor and British bullshit?
Moreover, because of their 20th century experience of self-annihilation (and their similar history in the 19th and 18th and ...), the Europeans have finally learned the wisdom of nonpower and the prowess of nonmilitary leadership. Who but the Europeans to usher in the eventual EU to end all EUs, the Earth Union?
Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the 21st century, the European Century.
Naturally, a European was the first to doubt it. China worried her, as she gave voice to the terror of yore concerning what my parents' generation called the "yellow peril." At the beginning of this decade I thought this would be the Chinese century, too. After all, even now the Chinese are upset their GDP growth slowed to a positive 9 percent last year, poor darlings.
Yet, in the end, modern China is really a bustling coastal shell with a huge very underdeveloped, very poor, very backward inland core. Good luck with that.
And let's not worry about Inja, shall we? India will undo itself. How long can a modernizing country sustain a socioeconomic canyon bolstered by ancient prejudices before it all explodes or the country enters what Marx eurocentrically called "the Asiatic mode of production"?
That leaves the EU, with a landmass about half the size of the United States and a population about one and a half as large, composed almost entirely of skilled workers. Their natural resources include arable land, bauxite, coal, copper, fish, hydropower, iron ore, lead, natural gas, petroleum, potash, salt, timber, uranium and zinc.
Who can beat Italian shoes, French wines, German engineering, Spanish olives, skilled and cheap Eastern European labor and British bullshit?
Moreover, because of their 20th century experience of self-annihilation (and their similar history in the 19th and 18th and ...), the Europeans have finally learned the wisdom of nonpower and the prowess of nonmilitary leadership. Who but the Europeans to usher in the eventual EU to end all EUs, the Earth Union?
Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the 21st century, the European Century.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
On Unemployment Rate's Eve
Today I bet 25 cents that the national unemployment rate -- announced tomorrow at 8:30 am -- will hit 8 percent and another 25 cents that the month's job loss will near 700,000. I wrote an imaginary lede for such a story and then played with headlines starting with P until someone called out "Peak Reached." We all laughed: we won't know the peak until long after this recession depression.
Are we at the end of the United States' ascendancy, as many people abroad think? Will the next power be the European Union, which as a nonpower will transcend power?
Every moment feels like a crisis to those who live it, as we do not know the outcome of what we are undergoing. What we know seems static and necessarily the state of things. Did an American slave in 1840 guess at a Mr. Lincoln drawing up the Emancipation Declaration? Who during the Cold War expected the Soviet Union to dissolve without a shot fired?
How odd that we only know the meaning of what we are experiencing long after it has happened, long after our power to change events has faded. Who knows? Maybe the rate will go down and it is a recession, after all.
Are we at the end of the United States' ascendancy, as many people abroad think? Will the next power be the European Union, which as a nonpower will transcend power?
Every moment feels like a crisis to those who live it, as we do not know the outcome of what we are undergoing. What we know seems static and necessarily the state of things. Did an American slave in 1840 guess at a Mr. Lincoln drawing up the Emancipation Declaration? Who during the Cold War expected the Soviet Union to dissolve without a shot fired?
How odd that we only know the meaning of what we are experiencing long after it has happened, long after our power to change events has faded. Who knows? Maybe the rate will go down and it is a recession, after all.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
The Lost Art of Conversation
Monday evening I had the rare pleasure of engaging in a wide-ranging discussion with a friend who shares with me the craft of journalism and experiences of Europe, Latin America and North America that make us both culturally displaced people. We also share a love of discussing the economic and political fundamentals of our time from a variety of perspectives.
Not since university, back when the dinosaurs roamed, had I done this. He is retired in Central America, where he sacrifices his time to wine, women and song, but we have a remarkably similar professional trajectory and shared memories of the same news wars.
Also, as we both explained to a non-journalist with us, we have in common the reality that journalists can rarely hold an open, wide-ranging conversation about topics in which they become well versed. People who know enough are always peering over our shoulders at cocktail parties, in search of the network connection that will advance them to the next career rung. Reporters are rarely reliable stepping stones.
Thus we found ourselves reconstructing the political and economic history of the last 30 years through the prism of thousands of interviews and fact-chases, throwing in Keynes, Marx, Freud and Dostoevsky as our unnamed sources well into the wee hours of Tuesday ...
Not since university, back when the dinosaurs roamed, had I done this. He is retired in Central America, where he sacrifices his time to wine, women and song, but we have a remarkably similar professional trajectory and shared memories of the same news wars.
Also, as we both explained to a non-journalist with us, we have in common the reality that journalists can rarely hold an open, wide-ranging conversation about topics in which they become well versed. People who know enough are always peering over our shoulders at cocktail parties, in search of the network connection that will advance them to the next career rung. Reporters are rarely reliable stepping stones.
Thus we found ourselves reconstructing the political and economic history of the last 30 years through the prism of thousands of interviews and fact-chases, throwing in Keynes, Marx, Freud and Dostoevsky as our unnamed sources well into the wee hours of Tuesday ...
Sunday, March 01, 2009
Moral Hazards of a Coarser Time
Roughly three years ago, I stumbled upon an economist who, in the measured tones of a Harvard academic, proposed before an audience what some described as the "Voltairean" idea that economic growth brings "moral positives." Today, with only my own observation to guide me, I would argue that the reverse is equally true.
In the 12 months ended last December the gross domestic product declined a staggering 6.2 percent and now everywhere you go there is the language of the hustle. The phone company, the banks, the major corporations, they're all chiseling, double-dealing and outright lying at every turn, as if they were bookies, drug dealers and pimps.
What does it all remind me of? That used-car dealership portrayed toward the beginning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. In other words, what's come down to us from the 1930s: the unrelenting flim-flammery oozing from every pore of a society in decay.
What happened then, besides poverty? Lynching. The rise of the Mafia. Father Coughlan, the antisemitic radio priest from Detroit. In Europe there were black shirts and brown shirts and blue shirts marching all about; and millions of bullets expended on the back of someone's head.
That is why we must risk everything to pull ourselves out of this economic disaster. We humans are a selfish, materialist species that becomes meaner when times are leaner.
In the 12 months ended last December the gross domestic product declined a staggering 6.2 percent and now everywhere you go there is the language of the hustle. The phone company, the banks, the major corporations, they're all chiseling, double-dealing and outright lying at every turn, as if they were bookies, drug dealers and pimps.
What does it all remind me of? That used-car dealership portrayed toward the beginning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. In other words, what's come down to us from the 1930s: the unrelenting flim-flammery oozing from every pore of a society in decay.
What happened then, besides poverty? Lynching. The rise of the Mafia. Father Coughlan, the antisemitic radio priest from Detroit. In Europe there were black shirts and brown shirts and blue shirts marching all about; and millions of bullets expended on the back of someone's head.
That is why we must risk everything to pull ourselves out of this economic disaster. We humans are a selfish, materialist species that becomes meaner when times are leaner.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Washington Ins and Outs
Every January 1, The Washington Post's Style section runs a silly, light page of what in the new year is "in" and what is "out." Every January an administration changes reporters in Washington get weeks of another bit of silliness: who is "in" and "out" of the power loop.
Everyone knows by then who has been elected. But I'm thinking of the folks who emerged last December from eight-year hibernation to play musical chairs for one of the 3,000 to 5,000 top noncareer, nonelected appointed staff posts. They come in one of five varieties:
Everyone knows by then who has been elected. But I'm thinking of the folks who emerged last December from eight-year hibernation to play musical chairs for one of the 3,000 to 5,000 top noncareer, nonelected appointed staff posts. They come in one of five varieties:
- The Early Birds -- They vanished into the Obama bubble in December or early January and unless you have official business to conduct with them, fuhgeddaboudit!
- The Puffinbirds -- They have literally 15 seconds of fame and hint at what they would tell you if they could, but they're just performing their one-shot emergency deed so the Early Birds can carry out new policy "X." They know where some bodies are buried, but they're utterly dispensable technocratic Mr. Fix-Its with no real power and no real secrets.
- The Screechers -- They're quotable and talk in vivid terms about issues from a perspective compatible with that of the Obama Administration, but they weren't invited to the party and they haven't heard from any of their longtime friends who now work in the White House.
- The Hangdogs -- The loyal supporters who slaved in other Democratic administrations but since settled into comfortable lobbying, academic or even -- gasp! -- out-of-the-Beltway activities. No one is talking to them, even though they know countless fascinating background details.
- The Cheshires -- They sometimes look similar to the Hangdogs but are really late-developing Early Birds. They're sitting quietly biding their time, sure their turn is coming. If you don't know who they are, no one will tell you.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Barack Blair or Tony Obama?
A contrarian blog by my cyberfriend Alex Fear raises the issue, as seen from Britain, that perhaps the canonization of St. Obama the Elephant Slayer has gone a bit too far. Alex, who is politically much too far to my right, goes so far as to suggest that Obama is our Tony Blair.
Funny, but I thought Blair was a British Bill Clinton, someone willing to draw on union support during elections, without batting an eyelash as he subsequently stabbed them in the back (need I spell out NAFTA and New Labour for you?).
Obama, in contrast, is probably the first president on record to win an election on the shoulders of millions of donors of no more than a few $30 checks -- rather than corporate and special interest "bundles" worth lots more. He agrees with labor, but doesn't owe them.
As for the many Clintonites in the new administration, the folks who in the past gave us no health reform, a regressive and pauperizing diminishment of public aid, without any real checks on corporate power, I am glad that they are ultimately not in charge. Obama appears to be unusually his own man.
An eloquent orator, he's also aware of the dire need to lower expectations, which is my explanation for his relatively flat inaugural speech. In sum, I see Obama as a very cool and controlled individual with a few very clear goals in mind who is a virtuoso in the art of persuasion and leadership.
Funny, but I thought Blair was a British Bill Clinton, someone willing to draw on union support during elections, without batting an eyelash as he subsequently stabbed them in the back (need I spell out NAFTA and New Labour for you?).
Obama, in contrast, is probably the first president on record to win an election on the shoulders of millions of donors of no more than a few $30 checks -- rather than corporate and special interest "bundles" worth lots more. He agrees with labor, but doesn't owe them.
As for the many Clintonites in the new administration, the folks who in the past gave us no health reform, a regressive and pauperizing diminishment of public aid, without any real checks on corporate power, I am glad that they are ultimately not in charge. Obama appears to be unusually his own man.
An eloquent orator, he's also aware of the dire need to lower expectations, which is my explanation for his relatively flat inaugural speech. In sum, I see Obama as a very cool and controlled individual with a few very clear goals in mind who is a virtuoso in the art of persuasion and leadership.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Goodbye to Peter and Paul
The German film Goodbye to Lenin, a sensitive and humorous look at an end of an era, recently summoned to mind not the end of Communism, but the end of Christianity as I once knew it.
In the film, a committed East German Communist woman goes into a coma just as the Berlin Wall is falling in 1989. She wakes up during German reunification. Her doctor tells advises that she should be kept calm. The hitch: she thinks her beloved Honecker regime is still in power.
In my life, there was once a boy who once experienced ecstasy upon having the eucharist placed on his tongue, a young man who -- absent celibacy -- might have become a priest, an adult catechist who told quibbling pre-teens they would be excused from the Sunday Mass obligation if they found themselves literally in the bind of the guy on the classroom crucifix.
But, yes, that boy sinned, that young man doubted and that adult ultimately gave up a lifetime of pretending to be committed to what he wasn't. Committed Christians, like committed Communists, were always rare, indeed probably nonexistent.
At this thought I stumble upon the always aged Br. O'Connor, whom we boys called "the mummy" in the Irish Christian Brothers school I attended. He was unchanged in the 1990s, last I saw him.
If he lived through the recent years of shame and a Nazi pope, what did he think, after all those years of loyal service to his order, going from Ireland to Argentina to teach rich ranchers' sons? How did that life end up squaring with the man from Galilee? Was it a failure to watch a world turn its back on everything to which his life was devoted?
Fare well, Simon Peter and Paul of Tarsus! It was all for naught.
In the film, a committed East German Communist woman goes into a coma just as the Berlin Wall is falling in 1989. She wakes up during German reunification. Her doctor tells advises that she should be kept calm. The hitch: she thinks her beloved Honecker regime is still in power.
In my life, there was once a boy who once experienced ecstasy upon having the eucharist placed on his tongue, a young man who -- absent celibacy -- might have become a priest, an adult catechist who told quibbling pre-teens they would be excused from the Sunday Mass obligation if they found themselves literally in the bind of the guy on the classroom crucifix.
But, yes, that boy sinned, that young man doubted and that adult ultimately gave up a lifetime of pretending to be committed to what he wasn't. Committed Christians, like committed Communists, were always rare, indeed probably nonexistent.
At this thought I stumble upon the always aged Br. O'Connor, whom we boys called "the mummy" in the Irish Christian Brothers school I attended. He was unchanged in the 1990s, last I saw him.
If he lived through the recent years of shame and a Nazi pope, what did he think, after all those years of loyal service to his order, going from Ireland to Argentina to teach rich ranchers' sons? How did that life end up squaring with the man from Galilee? Was it a failure to watch a world turn its back on everything to which his life was devoted?
Fare well, Simon Peter and Paul of Tarsus! It was all for naught.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Episcopal Symptoms
Sunday, as a favor to a friend, I went to an Episcopal church I had attended in the 1980s, located about ten blocks north of the White House. To my great disappointment, its peculiarly Episcopal symptoms of the terminal illness affecting Christianity convinced me of the relative wisdom of my current apostasy and agnosticism.
First, of course, the church was near empty at the mid-morning second service of the day, typically the best attended. They'd disguised it with the oldest church trick in the book: removal of pews. But the church still looked empty.
Second, the black female homilist was a walking, talking Republican advertisement against affirmative action. It wasn't bad enough that she read her flat, uninspiring and derivative sermon. She simply could not read! I'm not kidding. The words and their pronunciation were entirely foreign to her, although she spoke with an accent as American as apple pie.
Third, there were a slew of announcements by church committee heads. All expressed that false American Protestant cheer ("ha, ha") to signal the good, clean fun of a book and CD sale or the fulfillment of hearing teens' "profound" questions to the church's seminarian about his trip to the Military Republic of Kumbaya, where distressing things are happening. They all made a pitch for more volunteers since, from the look of things, they were the only members of their activities -- and no wonder.
The rector (not the homilist) was the parish's second female in that position, not the elegant former actress I had had a hand in selecting, but one who made an earnest Episcopal try to sound horsey and look dowdy, all reinforced by robust bursts of entirely forced laughter.
Let's not leave out the after-service coffee and its swarm of men with bejewelled ears and tones borrowed from their mothers.
No wonder the Episcopal Church is falling apart.
First, of course, the church was near empty at the mid-morning second service of the day, typically the best attended. They'd disguised it with the oldest church trick in the book: removal of pews. But the church still looked empty.
Second, the black female homilist was a walking, talking Republican advertisement against affirmative action. It wasn't bad enough that she read her flat, uninspiring and derivative sermon. She simply could not read! I'm not kidding. The words and their pronunciation were entirely foreign to her, although she spoke with an accent as American as apple pie.
Third, there were a slew of announcements by church committee heads. All expressed that false American Protestant cheer ("ha, ha") to signal the good, clean fun of a book and CD sale or the fulfillment of hearing teens' "profound" questions to the church's seminarian about his trip to the Military Republic of Kumbaya, where distressing things are happening. They all made a pitch for more volunteers since, from the look of things, they were the only members of their activities -- and no wonder.
The rector (not the homilist) was the parish's second female in that position, not the elegant former actress I had had a hand in selecting, but one who made an earnest Episcopal try to sound horsey and look dowdy, all reinforced by robust bursts of entirely forced laughter.
Let's not leave out the after-service coffee and its swarm of men with bejewelled ears and tones borrowed from their mothers.
No wonder the Episcopal Church is falling apart.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Geithner: Too Many Zeroes
A better idea than the Tim Geithner plan to lend trillions to the financial sector would be to make the financiers pay. I mean, really pay. From their banks, their companies and their pockets. For once.
The very same bank that on this very day would charge you more than 5% interest on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage for a home (assuming you offer your first-born child as collateral) can borrow the money from the Federal Reserve -- that's you and me -- for 0.5%. You knew that, right?
They've been making a killing all our lives off our tax money.
So why not sell their houses, cars, offices, fancy office furniture and office bars, yachts and jets, golf courses, the jewelry they've given their wives and mistresses, and so on and on and on? Then, why not throw them in jail and toss the key when it turns out that selling everything is not nearly enough to repay us?
After that, let's nationalize the business of lending and borrowing and never let any financial shark play with our money ever again.
The very same bank that on this very day would charge you more than 5% interest on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage for a home (assuming you offer your first-born child as collateral) can borrow the money from the Federal Reserve -- that's you and me -- for 0.5%. You knew that, right?
They've been making a killing all our lives off our tax money.
So why not sell their houses, cars, offices, fancy office furniture and office bars, yachts and jets, golf courses, the jewelry they've given their wives and mistresses, and so on and on and on? Then, why not throw them in jail and toss the key when it turns out that selling everything is not nearly enough to repay us?
After that, let's nationalize the business of lending and borrowing and never let any financial shark play with our money ever again.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Bama Got Spine
Did you miss President Barack Obama's swat at the Republican gnats at the press conference last night?
It's so refreshing to see a Democratic Party leader who has a spine.
Now if only Congress would get rid of Majority "Leader" Harry (Jellyfish) Reid and Speaker Nancy (Can't Count Votes) Pelosi ...
I suppose what I could have done is started off with no tax cuts, knowing that I was going to want some, and then let them take credit for all of them. And maybe that's the lesson I learned.The message I get is: No more Mr. Nice Guy, Repubs. I gave you what you wanted and you threw it in my face. See if I do that again.
It's so refreshing to see a Democratic Party leader who has a spine.
Now if only Congress would get rid of Majority "Leader" Harry (Jellyfish) Reid and Speaker Nancy (Can't Count Votes) Pelosi ...
Monday, February 09, 2009
Neither Rude nor Wrong
Pit good manners against a thought-out moral standard and I'll always choose the latter.
In the play A Man for All Seasons, which chronicles Sir Thomas More's refusal to accept the putative children of Anne Boleyn as legitimate heirs to the throne, the question is put this way:
Indeed, what principles? Both are of tepid, Episcopalian upbringing, a worldview in which purity is wearing white gloves. Yet both had the effrontery of agreeing with each other as they shared the laughter of female camaraderie -- Norfolk's fellowship -- that I had been "inappropriate."
In the name of what morals was I at fault for telling of a boy who acted on a matter of conviction that did not meet with the approval of peers? One need not agree with the boy's views to admire his moral courage.
I could not get a response philosophically sharper than the edges of a jellyfish. Impropriety seemed to consist only of whatever feels edgy. Propriety seemed to amount to a mannerly anomie of studied indifference.
Manners be damned.
In the play A Man for All Seasons, which chronicles Sir Thomas More's refusal to accept the putative children of Anne Boleyn as legitimate heirs to the throne, the question is put this way:
DUKE OF NORFOLK: But damn it, Thomas, look at those names.... You know those men! Can't you do what I did, and come with us, for fellowship?Something like this arose when, in the context of a conversation about the upbringing of boys as opposed to that of girls, I mentioned a teenage boy who, on principle, had declined girls' invitations to bed. My interlocutors, two middle class American women, cringed at my allegedly "inappropriate" talk of sex, without ever quite citing a principle.
THOMAS MORE: And when we stand before God, and you are sent to Paradise for doing according to your conscience, and I am damned for not doing according to mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?
Indeed, what principles? Both are of tepid, Episcopalian upbringing, a worldview in which purity is wearing white gloves. Yet both had the effrontery of agreeing with each other as they shared the laughter of female camaraderie -- Norfolk's fellowship -- that I had been "inappropriate."
In the name of what morals was I at fault for telling of a boy who acted on a matter of conviction that did not meet with the approval of peers? One need not agree with the boy's views to admire his moral courage.
I could not get a response philosophically sharper than the edges of a jellyfish. Impropriety seemed to consist only of whatever feels edgy. Propriety seemed to amount to a mannerly anomie of studied indifference.
Manners be damned.
Friday, February 06, 2009
Efficiency vs. Well-being
Should society be primarily an efficient arrangement or should it aim to promote the well-being of its members? If it's efficiency you favor, then go ahead, lay off as many workers as you wish so long as you can still provide the goods and services demanded by paying consumers. However, if it's the general welfare you're concerned with, get ready to accept some inefficiencies.
This is the fundamental debate underlying key policy decisions: Should we stimulate the economy? Should we subsidize arts, education or public transportation? Should we spend resource on people unlikely to produce something of equivalent value?
I'd argue that, at heart, human beings are fundamentally inefficient. Let's do the return on investment (ROI) math.
This is the fundamental debate underlying key policy decisions: Should we stimulate the economy? Should we subsidize arts, education or public transportation? Should we spend resource on people unlikely to produce something of equivalent value?
I'd argue that, at heart, human beings are fundamentally inefficient. Let's do the return on investment (ROI) math.
- Most human beings take about 22-23 years of utter subsidization -- infancy, parenting and schooling -- at a cost of $125,000 to $250,000, depending on household income level, not counting college.
- Add college: from about $40,000 to $200,000 for a 4-year undergraduate degree.
- So society has invested between $125,000 and $450,000 on each person before they have produced a single widget or service of any economic value.
- Then, let's assume that for about 40-45 years this person works.
- Subtract from this person's income his or her living expenses, then ask, at age 65, has society recovered $125,000-$450,000, adjusted for inflation?
- Wait! From age 65 to whatever (100?), as a norm human beings go back to being non-productive resource consumers; in most cases, they end up being subsidized by someone else. So subtract what is spent in those years. Do we still have a profitable ROI?
Monday, February 02, 2009
Toothaches, famines and other minor mishaps
The paradox of which I am fondest is the notion that my toothache is always worse than a famine in India. In that spirit, I'm also aware this week that my cold is much more severe than the illness that has gripped the economy. Still as events flutter past me I want to put my own corrective stamp.
OK, so Daschle is thankfully out, but what's with cabinet appointees who can't do their taxes? (And I blame Daschle because he was asked about taxes and he said there were no problems.)
And Repubs, hey, the stimulus bill is not perfect (I would put 100% into food stamps and unemployment compensation), but without a stimulus package ... we're in deep, deep, deep (did I say deep?) trouble.
Interesting how Papa Nazinger listens to Angela Merkel. The Vatican is now demanding that the British flake whose excommunication was revoked recant his Holocaust denial. (Tidbit learned from Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me: Bishop Richard Williamson, who denies Jews were gassed, also hates The Sound of Music.)
Oh, and great going Kadima and Labour governing coalition of Israel! Looks like Likud will bring a conservative sweep in the coming elections and even Tony Blair is talking of Hamas at the negotiation table (which was not on the horizon before the latest adventure) !!!!
Lastly, turning to local matters, the recurrent motorcades in and out of the White House seem lots less annoying now, even though they are as noisy and flashy and cumbersome as ever.
And that's the news from Cecilieaux's Cave.
OK, so Daschle is thankfully out, but what's with cabinet appointees who can't do their taxes? (And I blame Daschle because he was asked about taxes and he said there were no problems.)
And Repubs, hey, the stimulus bill is not perfect (I would put 100% into food stamps and unemployment compensation), but without a stimulus package ... we're in deep, deep, deep (did I say deep?) trouble.
Interesting how Papa Nazinger listens to Angela Merkel. The Vatican is now demanding that the British flake whose excommunication was revoked recant his Holocaust denial. (Tidbit learned from Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me: Bishop Richard Williamson, who denies Jews were gassed, also hates The Sound of Music.)
Oh, and great going Kadima and Labour governing coalition of Israel! Looks like Likud will bring a conservative sweep in the coming elections and even Tony Blair is talking of Hamas at the negotiation table (which was not on the horizon before the latest adventure) !!!!
Lastly, turning to local matters, the recurrent motorcades in and out of the White House seem lots less annoying now, even though they are as noisy and flashy and cumbersome as ever.
And that's the news from Cecilieaux's Cave.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
"goddacode"
William Henry Harrison, the ninth U.S. president, served for the shortest period of time, 32 days. Like me, he caught a bad cold on inauguration day.
Harrison was sworn in on March 4, 1841, facing an extremely cold and wet day. without an overcoat or hat. He also delivered the longest inaugural address in American history: it lasted two hours. In an era without penicillin, he died by April 4.
Now you know why I have been silent. I think I will live to blog again.
Harrison was sworn in on March 4, 1841, facing an extremely cold and wet day. without an overcoat or hat. He also delivered the longest inaugural address in American history: it lasted two hours. In an era without penicillin, he died by April 4.
Now you know why I have been silent. I think I will live to blog again.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Jesse Jackson Encounters Change
As President-elect Barack Obama was probably going over his speech in his head while having his morning coffee with then-President Bush, I found myself entangled in an exchange about egalitarianism with none other than the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who showed me that not much had changed yet.
The scene was 1st and D Streets Northwest, Washington, D.C., about 9 am or so, on Jan. 20, 2009. This was the second presidential inauguration I have attended.
The first was the swearing in of John F. Kennedy in 1961, when I was a child of privilege whose diplomatic father snagged tickets to a historic, if cold, perch. Fast-forward 48 years and there I was in a crowd accompanied by two very close friends, one of whom long ago was also a child of privilege with Kennedy inauguration seats.
This time, we were all just plain citizens, without strings to pull. Well, not entirely.
My friend had worked very hard to elect a new congresswoman, who had given us tickets such as the one shown here. If you knew my friend, however, you'd now that she's as regular citizen as they come.
In fact, just to prove it, let me relate that later in the day, when my friend befriended her 1,000th stranger, we had to drive this unknown woman to a very fancy mansion in the upper Northwest so she would not miss an inaugural ball. Next morning my friend confessed that her first thought upon leaving the mansion-dweller was why she was not taking her household staff to the ball.
That's the kind of egalitarianism that came into question on Tuesday at 1st and D, when a bunch of burly cops began to push and shove their way through a standing-room-only crowd. We were all waiting patiently to be admitted to the standing area facing the Capitol.
What was the purpose of this fascistoid human bulldozer? To allow the His Excellency Grand Poobah Jesse Jackson to make his way to some better spot.
"This is the ultimate in elitism," I shouted at Jackson the minute he neared where I was.
To me it was outrageous that -- precisely on a day set aside to enshrine the equality of all in the eyes of the law, through the swearing-in of the first black president -- this supposed standard-bearer of the banner of equality should make use of police power to push his way through a crowd.
Jackson turned to me and saw my anger. I like to think that for a moment the awkwardness of the moment struck him. He said, "Hey, I'm working here."
I said it was still elitist what he was doing. So he put his hand on my left shoulder and said, "It's OK, it's our day."
His voice seemed to be attempting to reach me. My friends say they felt moved.
I'll admit that Jackson was clever. He temporarily pacified me with a phrase that was deliciously ambiguous in its meaning and was delivered in the practiced tone of a preacher expressing sympathy to a bereaved family.
I still feel that Jesse Jackson did not quite get it.
Yes, January 20 was "our day." Yet, to paraphrase George Orwell, it was more "ours" to those who had phalanxes of policemen at their command, than it was the day of the rest of us.
The scene was 1st and D Streets Northwest, Washington, D.C., about 9 am or so, on Jan. 20, 2009. This was the second presidential inauguration I have attended.
The first was the swearing in of John F. Kennedy in 1961, when I was a child of privilege whose diplomatic father snagged tickets to a historic, if cold, perch. Fast-forward 48 years and there I was in a crowd accompanied by two very close friends, one of whom long ago was also a child of privilege with Kennedy inauguration seats.
This time, we were all just plain citizens, without strings to pull. Well, not entirely.My friend had worked very hard to elect a new congresswoman, who had given us tickets such as the one shown here. If you knew my friend, however, you'd now that she's as regular citizen as they come.
In fact, just to prove it, let me relate that later in the day, when my friend befriended her 1,000th stranger, we had to drive this unknown woman to a very fancy mansion in the upper Northwest so she would not miss an inaugural ball. Next morning my friend confessed that her first thought upon leaving the mansion-dweller was why she was not taking her household staff to the ball.
That's the kind of egalitarianism that came into question on Tuesday at 1st and D, when a bunch of burly cops began to push and shove their way through a standing-room-only crowd. We were all waiting patiently to be admitted to the standing area facing the Capitol.
What was the purpose of this fascistoid human bulldozer? To allow the His Excellency Grand Poobah Jesse Jackson to make his way to some better spot.
"This is the ultimate in elitism," I shouted at Jackson the minute he neared where I was.
To me it was outrageous that -- precisely on a day set aside to enshrine the equality of all in the eyes of the law, through the swearing-in of the first black president -- this supposed standard-bearer of the banner of equality should make use of police power to push his way through a crowd.
Jackson turned to me and saw my anger. I like to think that for a moment the awkwardness of the moment struck him. He said, "Hey, I'm working here."
I said it was still elitist what he was doing. So he put his hand on my left shoulder and said, "It's OK, it's our day."
His voice seemed to be attempting to reach me. My friends say they felt moved.
I'll admit that Jackson was clever. He temporarily pacified me with a phrase that was deliciously ambiguous in its meaning and was delivered in the practiced tone of a preacher expressing sympathy to a bereaved family.
I still feel that Jesse Jackson did not quite get it.
Yes, January 20 was "our day." Yet, to paraphrase George Orwell, it was more "ours" to those who had phalanxes of policemen at their command, than it was the day of the rest of us.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Let's Make the Next 8 Years about Now
Let's put an end to the political clichè that education is the panacea for all that ails our society. It's mistaken: education can leverage the human resources student bring to school, but educators can't reverse inequalities and injustices.
Eliminating poverty in the still-richest country in the world can't be pushed forward to the fabled day in which schools make the current generation of slum kids into self-made entrepreneurs of the future.
That's the trick all politicians play during electoral campaigns -- Obama played it, too. The game gets repeated every four years in four easy moves:
1. Campaigns are occasionally made to face up to social problems, profound radical socioeconomic inequality, hell, the ongoing class war (which is waged by the rich on the rest of us, not by selected interest groups the GOP picks on).
2. The press interrupts the circus around nonissues governments have no business in and no real power over, such as sexual morality, and tosses a cream-puff economic question.
3. The politicians respond in wise-sounding tones that what we need are schools that will help raise up every child, no matter his or her background.
4. The elected politicians proceed to forget no. 3 and leave education, training and public aid programs that support work as underfunded as before -- at least after the first year, when the TV twinkies have turned their attention to the pressing issue of Britney's weight.
So everything stays the same. After all, politicians are bought and kept bought for the purpose of keeping things the same.
In reality, although funding schools instead of torture "contractors" would be a better use of our tax money, what really needs to happen is to throw money at the parents of the children who go to school.
Make sure every parent has the skills and work support to get, keep and advance in jobs that pay family sustaining wages. Inspire more parents to read to their children, to enjoy learning for its own sake.
Throw money at family food baskets so every parent and child is well fed, at nutrition programs that teach what food to buy, at rent and home buying.
Throw money at adult literacy and job skills training for adults.
Throw money around so that no child ends up coming to school from a home run by uncles and grandparents, where food and clothes and good, clean fun are scarce and books and reading even scarcer. Throw money around so all children will feel safe in the homes of well-paid, secure working parents.
Then the children will be able to learn, yes, in well stocked schools that have roof leaks repaired and heating or air-conditioning working and windows pristine and clean, with teachers motivated by real leaders, not educationese speakers, to inspire learning.
But that costs money, political will and commitment to see change through. Now, not when the kids grow up.
Eliminating poverty in the still-richest country in the world can't be pushed forward to the fabled day in which schools make the current generation of slum kids into self-made entrepreneurs of the future.
That's the trick all politicians play during electoral campaigns -- Obama played it, too. The game gets repeated every four years in four easy moves:
1. Campaigns are occasionally made to face up to social problems, profound radical socioeconomic inequality, hell, the ongoing class war (which is waged by the rich on the rest of us, not by selected interest groups the GOP picks on).
2. The press interrupts the circus around nonissues governments have no business in and no real power over, such as sexual morality, and tosses a cream-puff economic question.
3. The politicians respond in wise-sounding tones that what we need are schools that will help raise up every child, no matter his or her background.
4. The elected politicians proceed to forget no. 3 and leave education, training and public aid programs that support work as underfunded as before -- at least after the first year, when the TV twinkies have turned their attention to the pressing issue of Britney's weight.
So everything stays the same. After all, politicians are bought and kept bought for the purpose of keeping things the same.
In reality, although funding schools instead of torture "contractors" would be a better use of our tax money, what really needs to happen is to throw money at the parents of the children who go to school.
Make sure every parent has the skills and work support to get, keep and advance in jobs that pay family sustaining wages. Inspire more parents to read to their children, to enjoy learning for its own sake.
Throw money at family food baskets so every parent and child is well fed, at nutrition programs that teach what food to buy, at rent and home buying.
Throw money at adult literacy and job skills training for adults.
Throw money around so that no child ends up coming to school from a home run by uncles and grandparents, where food and clothes and good, clean fun are scarce and books and reading even scarcer. Throw money around so all children will feel safe in the homes of well-paid, secure working parents.
Then the children will be able to learn, yes, in well stocked schools that have roof leaks repaired and heating or air-conditioning working and windows pristine and clean, with teachers motivated by real leaders, not educationese speakers, to inspire learning.
But that costs money, political will and commitment to see change through. Now, not when the kids grow up.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Partisan or Critic?
Barack Obama's presidency will undoubtedly change the way current events feel to me -- perhaps to all of us --introducing to my analyses the perennial problem of objectivity. Obama is a bright, appealing man who has yet to disappoint, whereas I mistakenly took Bush for a wrongheaded fool before I realized that, for reasons unknown, he is a skilled and malevolent dissembler.
This blog is not an exercise in journalism, as I have said. I already do that at work.
Yet even as a philo sophos 1-- Greek for "lover of truth" -- who is epistemologically agnostic, I am perfectly able to see a difference between partisanship and criticism.
Political parties being what they are in the United States -- largely capitalist cheerleaders who are either centrist to mildly reformist (Democratic) or center-rightist to economically darwinian (Republican) -- partisanship takes the form of dogmatic sycophancy. Everything the party leaders, especially if it includes a president, say or do is defended; everything the other side says or does, especially their president, is attacked.
That, at least, is what the political attack dogs and spinners do. Inside the no longer smoke-filled rooms where real decisions are made, there is a great deal of winking and nodding among accomplices in the conspiracy to keep things as they are for the benefit of those who profit most. They call it the art of "compromise."
A true critic (from the Greek kritikos, or "one who is able to make judgments") renders a truer, or at least less partial, version of events and policies. The origin of kritikos, after all, is the verb krinein, "to separate" or decide.
Besides, I have never been able to be a lockstep member of any political or religious organization. My partisanship, if any, runs further to the left than most of the Democratic Party, toward a peaceable and mild anarchism that questions the very foundations of human association -- much as we humans need social links to survive.
This is a long way to warn everyone that the gloves are off insofar as Obama and the incoming administration and the Democratic blowhards in Congress. Yes, potentially Obama represents change; but the present social and economic status quo has swallowed changers whole before.
1 I'd like to call attention to the fact that in categorizing posts, I draw on a pseudo-Aristotelian typology of ideas. Thus "philosophy" is the search for ultimate truths, "ethics" the moral branch of philosophy (with "decalogue" a particular subset of my own). This is why I have separated "politics" meaning political theory or political philosophy, from "current events" meaning comments on the headlines and "political economy" meaning, with what I deem charming anachronism, analyses of the social and economic relations within nation-states. And, yes, if you have read this far, you spend way too much time on the 'net.
This blog is not an exercise in journalism, as I have said. I already do that at work.
Yet even as a philo sophos 1-- Greek for "lover of truth" -- who is epistemologically agnostic, I am perfectly able to see a difference between partisanship and criticism.
Political parties being what they are in the United States -- largely capitalist cheerleaders who are either centrist to mildly reformist (Democratic) or center-rightist to economically darwinian (Republican) -- partisanship takes the form of dogmatic sycophancy. Everything the party leaders, especially if it includes a president, say or do is defended; everything the other side says or does, especially their president, is attacked.
That, at least, is what the political attack dogs and spinners do. Inside the no longer smoke-filled rooms where real decisions are made, there is a great deal of winking and nodding among accomplices in the conspiracy to keep things as they are for the benefit of those who profit most. They call it the art of "compromise."
A true critic (from the Greek kritikos, or "one who is able to make judgments") renders a truer, or at least less partial, version of events and policies. The origin of kritikos, after all, is the verb krinein, "to separate" or decide.
Besides, I have never been able to be a lockstep member of any political or religious organization. My partisanship, if any, runs further to the left than most of the Democratic Party, toward a peaceable and mild anarchism that questions the very foundations of human association -- much as we humans need social links to survive.
This is a long way to warn everyone that the gloves are off insofar as Obama and the incoming administration and the Democratic blowhards in Congress. Yes, potentially Obama represents change; but the present social and economic status quo has swallowed changers whole before.
1 I'd like to call attention to the fact that in categorizing posts, I draw on a pseudo-Aristotelian typology of ideas. Thus "philosophy" is the search for ultimate truths, "ethics" the moral branch of philosophy (with "decalogue" a particular subset of my own). This is why I have separated "politics" meaning political theory or political philosophy, from "current events" meaning comments on the headlines and "political economy" meaning, with what I deem charming anachronism, analyses of the social and economic relations within nation-states. And, yes, if you have read this far, you spend way too much time on the 'net.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Geithner Should 'Fess Up
So Timothy Geithner knows where the bodies are buried in the sham "rescue" of banks, brokerages and insurance companies -- that's obviously why Barack Obama picked him for secretary of the treasury. That still does not excuse Democrats and Republicans in Congress bending over as if for a prostate exam in the face of the fact that the guy knowingly failed to pay taxes for several years.
And he didn't discover the "error" himself. He even tried to get away with it until the IRS audited him.
I had a summer job at the IMF eons ago. Without his level of expertise, every U.S. citizen I knew who worked for the IMF knew full well they had to take care of their own taxes because the IMF is an international organization and is exempt from U.S. tax laws as they affect employers.
In fact, the Senate Finance Committee released this week a piece of paper Geithner signed at the time, acknowledging that he knew his obligations. Moreover, after the IRS audited him on three years in 2006, the Obama Transition Team found in December 2008 the same irregularities in the previous two years that the IRS had not found.
It was then that Geithner "voluntarily amended his tax returns," as the release states.
But there's another reason Geithner should withdraw: he knows where the bodies are buried and he's not ratting out who put them there.
The fact of the matter is that we're on the verge of seeing yet another banking debacle -- if it hasn't broken by the time I finish this -- and there are many months of debacles to come. The truly knowledgeable people have predicted a much, much lower Dow by the time it's all revealed to the public and a number of officials have been hinting at one coming up.
They knew. Some guys in Congress know. Probably Bush knows. Geithner surely knows this in full orchestration and four-part harmony. We the public are the only ones who don't know.
It's just like during the Cold War when the CIA and the KGB knew exactly what each other's government was doing, but they let "surprises" pop up so they could justify their existence and go on asking for ever bigger budgets for themselves and the purveyors of the arms race. We were the dupes.
Geithner has been an accomplice in the conspiracy of silence of the Bush Administration concerning the culprits and the size of the financial swindle.
He's been one of the guys who allowed, nay, made possible the use of $350 billion -- just think of the schools and food assistance and social security stability we could have bought for all that! -- for dividends to stockholders and bonuses to executives and business as usual for the 1 percent that has sucked up most of the gains and profits produced by 90 percent of all Americans.
Appoint him? Even after there's egregious evidence on tax cheating? He should be punished.
If, because he knows where the bodies are and can guide the hapless Democrats to them, he needs to be kept in the tent, he ought to apologize and profusely. He ought to be made to stand up in front of all of us and 'fess up -- and I don't mean just about the tax cheating.
Tax Cheating?
And he didn't discover the "error" himself. He even tried to get away with it until the IRS audited him.
I had a summer job at the IMF eons ago. Without his level of expertise, every U.S. citizen I knew who worked for the IMF knew full well they had to take care of their own taxes because the IMF is an international organization and is exempt from U.S. tax laws as they affect employers.
In fact, the Senate Finance Committee released this week a piece of paper Geithner signed at the time, acknowledging that he knew his obligations. Moreover, after the IRS audited him on three years in 2006, the Obama Transition Team found in December 2008 the same irregularities in the previous two years that the IRS had not found.
It was then that Geithner "voluntarily amended his tax returns," as the release states.
Tell Us All Where the Bodies Are
But there's another reason Geithner should withdraw: he knows where the bodies are buried and he's not ratting out who put them there.
The fact of the matter is that we're on the verge of seeing yet another banking debacle -- if it hasn't broken by the time I finish this -- and there are many months of debacles to come. The truly knowledgeable people have predicted a much, much lower Dow by the time it's all revealed to the public and a number of officials have been hinting at one coming up.
They knew. Some guys in Congress know. Probably Bush knows. Geithner surely knows this in full orchestration and four-part harmony. We the public are the only ones who don't know.
It's just like during the Cold War when the CIA and the KGB knew exactly what each other's government was doing, but they let "surprises" pop up so they could justify their existence and go on asking for ever bigger budgets for themselves and the purveyors of the arms race. We were the dupes.
Geithner has been an accomplice in the conspiracy of silence of the Bush Administration concerning the culprits and the size of the financial swindle.
He's been one of the guys who allowed, nay, made possible the use of $350 billion -- just think of the schools and food assistance and social security stability we could have bought for all that! -- for dividends to stockholders and bonuses to executives and business as usual for the 1 percent that has sucked up most of the gains and profits produced by 90 percent of all Americans.
Appoint him? Even after there's egregious evidence on tax cheating? He should be punished.
If, because he knows where the bodies are and can guide the hapless Democrats to them, he needs to be kept in the tent, he ought to apologize and profusely. He ought to be made to stand up in front of all of us and 'fess up -- and I don't mean just about the tax cheating.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Missing in the Stimulus Talk
Absent from almost all the discussion about stimulating the economy is any mention of the poorest Americans and the unemployed, even though the stimulus bang for the buck is highest for food stamps (aka SNAP) and unemployment compensation and the lowest for tax cuts.
Take today's discussion on NBC's Meet the Press. Only former congressman David Bonior (D-Mich) brought up the notion that the essential problem of the American economy is the growing disparity between the rich and the rest of us.
Bonior mentioned something I have come across at least once a week for the past few years: that 90 percent of all the income gains since the last recession went to the top 10 percent of all income earners. I've mentioned this disparity before (see here).
Yet everyone else was worried about the debt, the deficit, whether infrastructure projects would happen fast enough and whether there were enough tax cuts.
Yet the most effective way to get money circulating out there is to put federal dollars into food aid and unemployment checks. Why? Because the folks who get that aid aren't going to bank the money, they'll spend it right away on necessities. That spending will get consumption back up, build confidence and generate jobs.
The infrastructure projects are great for the skilled middle class, which is fine -- we need a robust middle class. But it's slower and most low-skill, low-wage workers won't benefit.
Tax cuts don't help at all. To owe taxes you have to have income, remember? If you have income, at a time like this you'll likely bank any more money you get. That's right: it will sit in the vaults of the same banks that aren't lending to anyone any more.
See an excellent explanation of how this works here.
Yet instead of the important things that ought to be discussed, Meet the Press host David Gregory did not ask a single question about disparity or about suffering, as if the whole world was composed of comfortable Washington policy gnats like himself and his guests.
Take today's discussion on NBC's Meet the Press. Only former congressman David Bonior (D-Mich) brought up the notion that the essential problem of the American economy is the growing disparity between the rich and the rest of us.
Bonior mentioned something I have come across at least once a week for the past few years: that 90 percent of all the income gains since the last recession went to the top 10 percent of all income earners. I've mentioned this disparity before (see here).
Yet everyone else was worried about the debt, the deficit, whether infrastructure projects would happen fast enough and whether there were enough tax cuts.
Yet the most effective way to get money circulating out there is to put federal dollars into food aid and unemployment checks. Why? Because the folks who get that aid aren't going to bank the money, they'll spend it right away on necessities. That spending will get consumption back up, build confidence and generate jobs.
The infrastructure projects are great for the skilled middle class, which is fine -- we need a robust middle class. But it's slower and most low-skill, low-wage workers won't benefit.
Tax cuts don't help at all. To owe taxes you have to have income, remember? If you have income, at a time like this you'll likely bank any more money you get. That's right: it will sit in the vaults of the same banks that aren't lending to anyone any more.
See an excellent explanation of how this works here.
Yet instead of the important things that ought to be discussed, Meet the Press host David Gregory did not ask a single question about disparity or about suffering, as if the whole world was composed of comfortable Washington policy gnats like himself and his guests.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Thinking from the Gut
In the plethora of responses, on-blog and off, concerning Israel and Gaza, I keep coming across instances of visceral, rather than cerebral, thinking. To some people, anything having to do with that troubled area of the world is so tied up with who they are that anything "their side" does must necessarily be defended and anything the "other side" does must be attacked.
Bystanders who are neither Arab nor Jewish are regarded as either neo-Nazis or neo-colonialists if they dare question the moral and political infallibility of either the government of Israel or the various movements and governments of the Arab world. Yet -- in actual fact -- the Israeli government, as well as Hamas and the many others on the other side, are both composed of quite fallible human beings.
As a Gentile in the West, I am most exposed to Jews who take personal offense at any criticism of Israel. (I am sure, and in different occasions I have experienced it, pro-Palestinian Arabs can be just as obdurate.)
Yet I am an American who criticizes the U.S. government often and hard, a former Catholic who has put the Catholic philosophical system through the shredder and excoriated the leadership of the Catholic Church, a Democrat who thinks Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are ineffectual wimps, a man who believes in the rights of women and the wrongs of many men, including myself, and so forth.
We will never make progress as human beings until we can all step back and look at our own pet ideas, nations, cultures or groups with detachment. At least when we engage in discourse.
Bystanders who are neither Arab nor Jewish are regarded as either neo-Nazis or neo-colonialists if they dare question the moral and political infallibility of either the government of Israel or the various movements and governments of the Arab world. Yet -- in actual fact -- the Israeli government, as well as Hamas and the many others on the other side, are both composed of quite fallible human beings.
As a Gentile in the West, I am most exposed to Jews who take personal offense at any criticism of Israel. (I am sure, and in different occasions I have experienced it, pro-Palestinian Arabs can be just as obdurate.)
Yet I am an American who criticizes the U.S. government often and hard, a former Catholic who has put the Catholic philosophical system through the shredder and excoriated the leadership of the Catholic Church, a Democrat who thinks Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are ineffectual wimps, a man who believes in the rights of women and the wrongs of many men, including myself, and so forth.
We will never make progress as human beings until we can all step back and look at our own pet ideas, nations, cultures or groups with detachment. At least when we engage in discourse.
Monday, January 05, 2009
On Equality
With Martin Luther King Jr. Day coming, it seems appropriate to share some thoughts prompted by a discussion I've been having on the subject of equality. Defining equality, its source, whether it is desirable or achievable is a little harder at first blush than it might seem.
There is, of course, the possibility that the expenditure of effort attempting to achieve equality is wasted.
Equality, after all, cannot be a state in which there are no differences between human beings. Such a state is not possible, at least at the observable level from the perspective of human beings.
Seen from the more distant perspective of the grand scheme of things -- the "God's-eye view," if you will -- the differences we see among ourselves are not operationally significant to the cosmos. Yet from our perspective, which is the only one we can possibly hold with some degree of plausibility, there are differences and they are significant to our existence.
We are different in the principal dimensions, height, length, volume, space and time -- let alone skin color, sex or nationality. No single human being is equal to any other in an algebraic, a-equals-a sense -- except conceptually.
It's the abstract concept of a human being, of which we are individual instances, that gives rise to the idea of equality before the law and material equality.
The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges evoked some of the problems that such abstract conceptions entail in his 1942 short story Funes, the Memorious. Long one of my favorites, the story is about a ranch hand who hits is head and acquires a memory so prodigious that "he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front)."
We are different, indeed, from ourselves. Which "me" has a right to equality: the "me" in pre-school, the "me" in university or the "me" nearing death? Am I less or more equal as a child, an active adult or a senescent man?
In any case, is theoretical legal and material equality of all human beings -- assuming that it is possible -- desirable?
Legal equality means that the same principles should apply to all. Yet in legal systems that attempt a rough kind of equality, such as the case of most Western systems, the principles often have to be twisted in knots to establish "equality" between vastly disparate individuals. Is it really equality if we have to redefine the terms so that they can apply?
Something similar might be asked of material equality. There might be no contest that all human beings should be able to satisfy basic survival needs (although we might argue about what those are), but if one man has a mansion, should everyone have a mansion?
Finally, we come to the cause of inequality, which is twofold: nature and nurture. Some of us are born female, some rich. One is a natural happenstance, the other an entirely human construct.
Dr. King was fully cognizant of the philosophical problems. He merely asked that we use a logic of the heart in our behavior toward one another.
There is, of course, the possibility that the expenditure of effort attempting to achieve equality is wasted.
Equality, after all, cannot be a state in which there are no differences between human beings. Such a state is not possible, at least at the observable level from the perspective of human beings.
Seen from the more distant perspective of the grand scheme of things -- the "God's-eye view," if you will -- the differences we see among ourselves are not operationally significant to the cosmos. Yet from our perspective, which is the only one we can possibly hold with some degree of plausibility, there are differences and they are significant to our existence.
We are different in the principal dimensions, height, length, volume, space and time -- let alone skin color, sex or nationality. No single human being is equal to any other in an algebraic, a-equals-a sense -- except conceptually.
It's the abstract concept of a human being, of which we are individual instances, that gives rise to the idea of equality before the law and material equality.
The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges evoked some of the problems that such abstract conceptions entail in his 1942 short story Funes, the Memorious. Long one of my favorites, the story is about a ranch hand who hits is head and acquires a memory so prodigious that "he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front)."
We are different, indeed, from ourselves. Which "me" has a right to equality: the "me" in pre-school, the "me" in university or the "me" nearing death? Am I less or more equal as a child, an active adult or a senescent man?
In any case, is theoretical legal and material equality of all human beings -- assuming that it is possible -- desirable?
Legal equality means that the same principles should apply to all. Yet in legal systems that attempt a rough kind of equality, such as the case of most Western systems, the principles often have to be twisted in knots to establish "equality" between vastly disparate individuals. Is it really equality if we have to redefine the terms so that they can apply?
Something similar might be asked of material equality. There might be no contest that all human beings should be able to satisfy basic survival needs (although we might argue about what those are), but if one man has a mansion, should everyone have a mansion?
Finally, we come to the cause of inequality, which is twofold: nature and nurture. Some of us are born female, some rich. One is a natural happenstance, the other an entirely human construct.
Dr. King was fully cognizant of the philosophical problems. He merely asked that we use a logic of the heart in our behavior toward one another.
Saturday, January 03, 2009
Zionism and the Diaspora
The Israeli lobby has learned to play the Jewish diaspora in the West with a virtuosity rivaling Isaac Stern on the violin. The phenomenon is reminiscent of the way the Republican Party successfully snowed Catholics and the evangelical right on the issue of abortion.
An instance of unthinking, knee-jerk support for Israel was on display in comments posted on my blog this week by individuals I know to be Jewish. It reminds me of the pro-lifers who chose to vote for right-wing politicians who show contempt for life outside the womb..
The issue is not whether Israel should exist or whether abortion should be legal.
The question is whether it makes sense to support a politician or a country unconditionally -- no matter what they do -- simply because they claim to represent a single position or identity about which one feels strongly.
There's a slippery slope once one goes down that route. For reasons of common identity Italian-Americans would be duty bound to support the Mafia and non-smoker Adolf Hitler would be a suitable poster boy for anti-cigarette campaigns.
One need not be anti-Israel or anti-Semitic to conclude that the present government of Israel is engaging in a transparent ploy to look tough to its electorate just as the hard-line Likud Party is making gains in the polls.
Israel is plainly in the wrong in its military adventure in Gaza on any number of counts and stands to lose -- once again in a very short time -- in the court of world public opinion. That's not just me speaking: you can read a similar assessment from Shmuel Rosner in the Jerusalem Post.
Yet the diaspora -- meaning the Jewish communities outside the traditional Jewish homeland -- embraces unquestioning, unstinting, uncritical support for Israel no matter what. Go to the Anti-Defamation League's website and you'll find one link after another pointing to the wrongdoing of others and to the support that Israel supposedly deserves.
That kind of blind support, especially when it involves killing by the hundreds, is unconscionable and reprehensible.
There's a difference between the Israeli cabinet and any random spiritual descendant of Abraham. Folly -- or worse -- on the part of the former should not command blind, goosestepping loyalty from the other.
An instance of unthinking, knee-jerk support for Israel was on display in comments posted on my blog this week by individuals I know to be Jewish. It reminds me of the pro-lifers who chose to vote for right-wing politicians who show contempt for life outside the womb..
The issue is not whether Israel should exist or whether abortion should be legal.
The question is whether it makes sense to support a politician or a country unconditionally -- no matter what they do -- simply because they claim to represent a single position or identity about which one feels strongly.
There's a slippery slope once one goes down that route. For reasons of common identity Italian-Americans would be duty bound to support the Mafia and non-smoker Adolf Hitler would be a suitable poster boy for anti-cigarette campaigns.
One need not be anti-Israel or anti-Semitic to conclude that the present government of Israel is engaging in a transparent ploy to look tough to its electorate just as the hard-line Likud Party is making gains in the polls.
Israel is plainly in the wrong in its military adventure in Gaza on any number of counts and stands to lose -- once again in a very short time -- in the court of world public opinion. That's not just me speaking: you can read a similar assessment from Shmuel Rosner in the Jerusalem Post.
Yet the diaspora -- meaning the Jewish communities outside the traditional Jewish homeland -- embraces unquestioning, unstinting, uncritical support for Israel no matter what. Go to the Anti-Defamation League's website and you'll find one link after another pointing to the wrongdoing of others and to the support that Israel supposedly deserves.
That kind of blind support, especially when it involves killing by the hundreds, is unconscionable and reprehensible.
There's a difference between the Israeli cabinet and any random spiritual descendant of Abraham. Folly -- or worse -- on the part of the former should not command blind, goosestepping loyalty from the other.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Consequences
"What is a sin in your decalogue?" asks a regular reader of this blog, "Something that makes me unhappy?"
In outlining the ethics of survival I have never mentioned "sin," a religious term for deeds, words or even thoughts that violate a moral code. My purpose was to concentrate on what one ought to do, rather than on what one ought not to do, assuming in that Kantian, categorical imperative way that good is worth doing for its own self.
It is true, however, that most historical moral codes have been linked to what I'd call the Santa-Claus threat: he's checking his list to see who's been naughty or nice. Heaven, Nirvana, 70 Virgins, toys or whatever for the nice; hell, samsara, coal in stockings or whatever for the naughty.
That never did much for me.
Even when I was a believer, doing good for the reward seemed cheap. In Catholic morality there was always the distinction between imperfect contrition (being sorry you sinned because you deserved punishment) and perfect contrition (sorrow for sin out of regret for having offended one's loving and dear God). I always thought the reverse would hold as well: you could be good, literally for goodness' sake.
In the grand philosophical edifice of the ethics of survival, a distinctly godless set of propositions, there's an additional issue. The whole raison d'être of these ethics is the universal esteem in which survival is held, coupled with the logic that since ethics are about human behavior an essential requisite of any ethical system would have to be that there be humans alive to behave.
In this light, there are only wrongdoings, not "sin," and the punishment comes in the form of inexorable consequences. Violating these ethics is wrong because it imperils one's survival.
Of course, this is where the survival system diverges from religious systems of ethical compulsion: there is no no possible "pardon" nor "remission of sins." You live or you die.
You pollute, you cause conflict, you bomb, you start wars, you steal from the poor and you get the present mess humanity finds itself in. Will we survive? Individually, as John Maynard Keynes quipped, "we're all dead in the long term."
How about collectively? The jury is out on that one, but at the outset of 2009 I am not uproariously optimistic.
Reality "pardons" to the extent that we are, mercifully, quite resilient and, in cosmic terms, insignificant. Smoking cigarettes is not an automatic ticket to the oncology ward and despite our depredations the planet continues to sustain us.
The law of the jungle is never as absolute and fierce as we think. Jungle species have ample resources to survive.
Sure, these ethics assume that we are, at best, intelligent animals with material needs. Our first concern is our own survival. We are a bit wild, still.
We have the capacity to destroy ourselves and our kin. We ought to avoid that.
In outlining the ethics of survival I have never mentioned "sin," a religious term for deeds, words or even thoughts that violate a moral code. My purpose was to concentrate on what one ought to do, rather than on what one ought not to do, assuming in that Kantian, categorical imperative way that good is worth doing for its own self.
It is true, however, that most historical moral codes have been linked to what I'd call the Santa-Claus threat: he's checking his list to see who's been naughty or nice. Heaven, Nirvana, 70 Virgins, toys or whatever for the nice; hell, samsara, coal in stockings or whatever for the naughty.
That never did much for me.
Even when I was a believer, doing good for the reward seemed cheap. In Catholic morality there was always the distinction between imperfect contrition (being sorry you sinned because you deserved punishment) and perfect contrition (sorrow for sin out of regret for having offended one's loving and dear God). I always thought the reverse would hold as well: you could be good, literally for goodness' sake.
In the grand philosophical edifice of the ethics of survival, a distinctly godless set of propositions, there's an additional issue. The whole raison d'être of these ethics is the universal esteem in which survival is held, coupled with the logic that since ethics are about human behavior an essential requisite of any ethical system would have to be that there be humans alive to behave.
In this light, there are only wrongdoings, not "sin," and the punishment comes in the form of inexorable consequences. Violating these ethics is wrong because it imperils one's survival.
Of course, this is where the survival system diverges from religious systems of ethical compulsion: there is no no possible "pardon" nor "remission of sins." You live or you die.
You pollute, you cause conflict, you bomb, you start wars, you steal from the poor and you get the present mess humanity finds itself in. Will we survive? Individually, as John Maynard Keynes quipped, "we're all dead in the long term."
How about collectively? The jury is out on that one, but at the outset of 2009 I am not uproariously optimistic.
Reality "pardons" to the extent that we are, mercifully, quite resilient and, in cosmic terms, insignificant. Smoking cigarettes is not an automatic ticket to the oncology ward and despite our depredations the planet continues to sustain us.
The law of the jungle is never as absolute and fierce as we think. Jungle species have ample resources to survive.
Sure, these ethics assume that we are, at best, intelligent animals with material needs. Our first concern is our own survival. We are a bit wild, still.
We have the capacity to destroy ourselves and our kin. We ought to avoid that.
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