American "Exceptionalism" in the 21st Century

"For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind..."

Hosea 8:7

Houses on the Jersey shore torn to shreds like matchbooks.  Homes burned to the ground in the Rockaways.  Lower Manhattan flooded, subway tunnels awash, the largest public transport facility on Earth shut down because of weather, millions of people in the nation's most populated corridor still without electricity in late autumn cold, schools with no power, electricity wires strung on poles snagged by falling trees, the list can go on ad nauseum.

Politically expedient deniers of the almost universal scientific opinion about global warming have their work cut out for them.  They are faced with what Andrew Cuomo says, "a once in a generation storm every two years." 

Weather patterns are changing.

Building codes that allowed frame construction almost everywhere on the Atlantic seaboard are suddenly and unequivocally now subject to hasty revision. No justification possibly exists for such malfeasance.   Hurricane Sandy was not, by any stretch of the wildest naysayer's imagination, unforeseeable.  Floodgates have protected the low-lying areas of Europe for many years.

If people insist on living near the frequently violent sea, they should be prepared for its fury.  Global warming is showing the consequences of warmer seas--more violent storms and freakier weather patterns--all to the detriment of our feckless infrastructure, sown by generations of myopic politicians who, in all fairness, clearly did not see what was in store for stricken communities from DC to Massachusetts.

Now the wake up call has come.  In Florida, there are building codes that have arisen since Hurricane Andrew have strengthened, however, FPL still thinks that burying power lines is economically not feasible; a few years ago, they replaced some of the traditional wooden poles in my neighborhood with higher concrete ones.  The trees still overhang the lines anyway.

The early Republican debates were a cacophony of voices denying climate change; Mitt Romney still has nothing to say about it, his perfidious calculative demeanor evident. And frankly, the President has not done enough to awaken the public, which mostly cares now about the economy.  

The tea partiers and fundamentalists are now calculating what a woman should do with her body and if the candidates are sufficiently religious to hasten the erosion of the constitutional wall of separation between church and state,  instead of preparing for national disasters like Hurricane Sandy.

Deniers of man-made climate change include almost the entire Republican Party, and those who think that government serves no useful purpose except starting wars, nurturing the military industrial complex and transforming primitive Islamists into Jeffersonian democrats. 

Florida continues to set a new low bar for election shenanigans.

The State Legislature, in concocting an indecipherable ballot has struck another new level of loathsomeness.  It has composed ballot initiatives, among which is one that is labeled "Religious Freedom."  It is fraudulently conceived and evilly promulgated.  What it really represents is an attempt to interject religion in the educational system by providing state funding to religious schools, voucherized money that could be used instead to improve public education rather than defunding it.  These are the same people who are apostles of the same ilk of creationists in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas who would teach creationism to our children.  We are living a 21st century nightmarish re-run of Inherit the Wind.

The Presidential Campaign grinds to a lowly end.

There was seemingly no end to the negative commercials, the meaningless dialog, the emails during which both parties attempt convincing voters that the other side is going to ruin the country, the economy, the world itself.

The campaigns have been financed by copious amounts of super PAC cash coming from special interest groups airing offensive announcements denouncing each other's candidates, adding to a witch's brew of obfuscation, misinformation and distortion. 

The debates, a glibness and disappointing appearance contest, droned on and on, giving the electorate only a superficial sample of what  qualities a leader really requires.  Nothing in the end was revealed but a continual and seemingly unending parade of talking points. The debates did not tell us who would be a good President or a bad President. Who would shine in a moment of crisis?  Who is a deep thinker? A problem solver?  A person who could break the legislative gridlock? A person with a definite agenda?  None of this was revealed in the debates, even if it were fact.

A two-year, $2.5 billion election cycle  slows down the efficiency of government and places politics above the national interest.  Our Federal system is severely broken.  The negativity of the past two years demeans those who do win and expands the polarized divide.  It diminishes the governing ability of the winner, who inevitably suffers diminution by the misinformation saturating the airwaves.  The election campaigns should last 6 months beginning to end; the Electoral College should be abolished.  There should be public financing of the campaigns and a constitutional amendment shutting down of all the extra money that has distorted the process beyond all recognition.

Mythology in 2012 as a Political Force

"Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time."
Richard Dawkins

Forty six percent of the American voters believe that religion is the litmus test for political leadership.  Many of them believe that Mary ascended to heaven on a white cloud and that Mohammad ascended to heaven on a winged horse. Ultra-Orthodox Jews pray to God morning, noon and night, and relegate their women to wearing wigs and bandanas.   They seem inhabit in America, a Saudi Arabian, burka-wearing world of subjugation, including the bearing of a child a year. Some believe that if people do not accept Jesus as a savior they are condemned to burn in hell in perpetuity.  They discount the beliefs of others and the Roman Catholic Church has perpetuated the infallibility of church dogma for centuries, and used its dogma as a basis for burning people at the stake, racking heretics, refusing to respect the rights of women and generally promulgating a world view that is irreconcilable with notions of modern science as well as its own dogma by accumulating great wealth, denying basic human sexuality and creating an atmosphere often tolerant of sexual predators.

In addition, religious fundamentalists think that men walked the earth with dinosaurs; the bible is the literal word of God, and that those that do not respect its edicts will not be rewarded with heavenly afterlives. “My ancestor was not a monkey,” said one recent Republican candidate for the Presidency.

There are people who live in my neighborhood who actually believe that mutilating the foreskins of young males is a civilized practice, conducting religious services to celebrate the event.  This practice, now the subject of medical debate, is a throwback to a primitive tribal ritual that binds the male child to its Judaic tribe.  The practice was instituted at a time when men believed the world was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth.  According to the Old Testament, Jacob died 2255 years after the creation of Adam.  Jewish scholars first translated the Torah into Greek in the 3^rd Century BCE. They were polytheists, tolerating local gods as well as their own. When monotheism came along, automatically discounting other’s gods, it sowed the seeds of intolerance that continued down through the holocaust, ultimately smiting its originators, the Jews.  

Dating the world as a few thousand years old cannot, through the stretch of the wildest imagination, be reconciled with modern science.

Many of the fanatical Jewish zealots claim that Biblical injunctions prevent them from compromising their settlements with Muslims on the West Bank of the Jordan River.  Muslims also claim that the land was given to them by God.   The outcome of two distinct groups claiming deified backing cannot, by definition, be reconciled.   Religion evolved as an adjunct to tribes being successful against competing tribes, mostly in combat.

The origins of Jews and the Exodus from Egypt have never been confirmed by any scientific, archeological, paleontological or genetic evidence.  To the contrary, geneticists and primate paleontologists are now debating the origins of homo sapiens, and the general consensus is now that humans emerged from Africa some 50-60,000 years ago.  Moreover, a story recently appeared in the New York Times about the debate among scientists and paleoanthropologists as to the origins of Homo sapiens, that modern humans arose in Africa 200,000 years ago and that all archaic species of humans then disappeared, surviving only outside Africa, as did the Neanderthals in Europe.  New worlds of knowledge concerning human existence are emerging almost daily.  Most of this knowledge is coming from fossil evidence, DNA evidence, the decoding of the human genome, and radioactive carbon dating, which incidentally, states the world, is 4-5 billion years old, not 5,000.

What it does not come from is some bronze age tract by which US politicians seem to be bound to hypocritically extol, in the hopes of garnering votes from an ignorant electorate.

Mythology still rules our lives and our politics and it is 2012. 

Citizens United

Recently, a friend of mine, quite conservative, argued that the Citizens United case decided by the United States Supreme Court has not distorted the political process, but was a reaction to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, which was the first serious attempt in ages to restore some sanity to the overwrought process of electing officials of our government.  He argued that full disclosure of the source of financing would be the cure-all for the unlimited right of corporations to spend as much money as they wished to ensure the election of candidates that would be less threatening to their bottom line.  He also unconvincingly argued that labor unions have the same rights as Exxon, for example and the same amount of monies to spend on their candidates.

Perhaps in an earlier time he would be correct in his assumptions.  He referred to a political cartoonist, Thomas Nast, of the 19^th century who exposed the Standard Oil trust with his acid pen. These days, however, the scene is quite different.  There are so many talking heads on the networks that any position is overwhelmed by the breadth and penetration of varied points of view, but especially subject to advertising saturation ads, both negative and positive.  The candidates who win are the ones who can raise the most money and feed it into the overwhelming media exposure they can buy.  

The  McCain Feingold Act was designed to address two issues:  The increased role of soft money in campaign financing, by prohibiting national political party committees from raising or spending any funds not subject to federal limits, even for state and local races or issue discussion;

 The proliferation of issue advocacy ads, by defining as “electioneering communications” broadcast ads that name a federal candidate within 30 days of a primary or caucus or 60 days of a general election, and prohibiting any such ad paid for by a corporation (including non-profit issue organizations such as Right to Life or the Environmental Defense Fund) or paid for by an unincorporated entity using any corporate or union general treasury funds. The decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission overturns this provision, but not the ban on foreign corporations or foreign nationals in decisions regarding political spending.

In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Citizens United, ruled that corporations and unions are entitled to the same political speech rights as individuals under the First Amendment. It found no compelling government interest for prohibiting corporations and unions from using their general treasury funds to make election-related independent expenditures. Thus, it struck down a federal law banning this practice and also overruled two of its prior decisions. Additionally, in an 8-1 decision, the Court ruled that the disclaimer and disclosure requirements associated with electioneering communications are constitutional.

These were horrible rulings and serve to do nothing more than further distort our political processes.

                        

Now, “Super Pacs,” ostensibly not connected or coordinating with the candidates are spending untold millions on media commercials to sell the candidates, or even worse, fill the airwaves with negative information, much of it out of context and misleading.            

My friend’s full disclosure caveat holds no water, I am afraid.  

But from a conservative, the 19^th century perspective is not surprising.

We live in an increasingly polarized atmosphere, burdened by the disappearance of moderate Republicans who used to be able to work with moderate democrats to accomplish  useful legislation.

Now we cannot even have that.  The Republican party has been hijacked by evangelical and social conservatives, backed by millions of dollars, to convince the electorate to vote against their own interests by using their checkbooks to take stands on gay marriage, abortion, contraception, religion in public places and  creationism  instead of trying to reach an accommodation on education, infrastructure investment, job creation, and expanding the middle class.  

The United States in Afghanistan 2012

"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it."  Winston Churchill

Among the follies of our foreign policy is the belief that the United States is serving its national interests by continuing its failing attempts to guarantee a democratic solution in a culture so primitive, so alien to our Western mores that it defies the boundaries of our collective imagination.

Cultures take centuries to change.  Cultures imbued by theocracy take even longer.   Afghanistan is such a place.

One only need compare the history of our own country to realize that the political and cultural forces militating against change are so embedded in the Afghan people that we are faced with a Sisyphean task so overwhelming, so impossible, that our efforts, no matter how noble, are doomed to ignominious failure.

As an historical analogy, the American Civil War ran roughly four years from Ft. Sumter to Appomattox, but actually continued for another 150 years thereafter. Vestiges linger even yet. Those states that seceded from the Union did so not only because they wanted to keep their slaves, but also because they were culturally different from their Northern brethren.  Southern agrarian, slave-holding society bore a religious ethos, based upon inequality of the races, not only upon economic disparity between it and their northern countrymen.  Southerners believed that white men had the God-given right to hold slaves.  The morality of holding slaves was never really open to debate among Southerners.  Holding slaves was the droit de seigneur. The South would fight to the death, and did, to uphold its principles.   Northern culture was an anathema to it, a base, industrial, immoral society inhabited by crude, irreligious, and yes, heathen Yankees devoid of any pretense or genuineness of refinement, a threat to southern paradigms, virtues and ways of life.  Margaret Mitchell wrote about it; we all viewed it in the 1939 classic film of her novel, the name of which does not here need repeating.

Evidence of those deeply held beliefs could not and did not change overnight, despite the posting of Federal troops in Charleston, Atlanta, and New Orleans after open hostilities had ended and after Lee surrendered.  Nor was the imposition by the radical US Congress of black legislatures in the south which lasted only as long as Federal troops remained stationed there to override the deeply held beliefs of the populace.  The sad history of reconstruction, of Jim Crow laws, of lynching, of black post-bellum economic servitude and segregation bears wretched testimony to the excruciatingly slow pace of cultural change.  Yes, the south is different now, but it was not so different in 1960, a hundred years after the Civil War had ended. And this in a country with a Constitution founded on democratic principles authored by the founding fathers of all of America, many of whom were southerners.

Cultural differences in Europe now, for a further example, threaten to destroy the Euro, pitting hard working Germanic culture against profligate Greek culture.  Germans do not wish to pay for Greek irresponsibility, but are forced to do so because the Greeks are their customers.  This problem is almost intractable and Greece may very well be printing Drachmas again, rather than surrender to Germanic austerity.  And this is a problem between culturally different democracies, a minor problem compared to the problems we face with Islamists and the Taliban, religious zealots all.

Space here does not allow a full history lesson, but the British were among the many nations interfering unsuccessfully in Afghan politics, the Brits using a divide and rule strategy between Afghani Pashtuns and Baloch territories.  Later, Afghanistan experimented with reform in the 1920s including the banishing of the burqa and establishing co-educational schools, alienating religious leaders.  All reforms were abandoned in 1929 when a new leader Mohammed Zahir Shah became king in 1933, ruling until 1973.  After that, the United States financed the Mujahadeen religious warriors against the Soviets, who had invaded in 1979.  After the Soviet  defeat, (after killing 1 million Afghans), the Taliban assumed control of the country, ultimately creating an Islamofascist nightmare, women subjugated, religious police, and a culture that precluded the development of any modernity.

Now we delusionally expect that this primitive, Islamist, women-stoning society that executes women for adultery, is to grasp liberty and equality for all?  A society that throws acid on the faces of women who dare to go to school to seek an education?  A society that has a caste of theocrats that superstitiously believes in practices such as honor killings is going to find its Thomas Jefferson in an abbreviated epiphany under beneficent American auspices?

The politicians in Washington are dithering over a decision to abandon that place, a decision that should have been made long ago.

Religion and Politics in America 2012

"Verily, men gave themselves all their good and evil. Verily, they did not take it, they did not find it, nor did it come to them as a voice from heaven. Only man placed values in things to preserve himself--he alone created a meaning for things, a human meaning. Therefore, he calls himself 'man,' which means: the esteemer." 

F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Bk.1

Some liberal souls, I understand, have named Rick Santorum as an ideal 13^th century president.  The particulars of this appellation are well known to those who have been following the interminable Republican debates, some of which have actually revealed the vacuousness of a few of the candidates, including Rick Perry, the governor of Texas whose gaffe of not remembering which governmental agency he wished to guillotine or how many death row inmates in his state have actually met a similar fate, albeit with a needle instead.  

Then there was Michelle Bachman whose IRS credentials, foster children, and bible-thumping husband presumably rendered her capable of running the world’s most powerful country.

After that we had Ron Paul, a libertarian, who plainly feels that the underclass should have their healthcare needs met by their local churches and charities, and that the US should disengage from the rest of the world.  In some respects he is correct in alluding to the misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.  However, hegemons do not voluntarily surrender their place in the world and most moderates do not think we should isolate ourselves from a world increasingly globalized based upon a 19^th century interpretation of a constitution arguably in need of serious revision.

And then that inimitable paradigm of hypocrisy, Newt Gingrich, a miserable human being, powered by his somewhat hard to ignore intellectual credentials and his use of the words “profoundly,” and “fundamentally,” as well as his colossal arrogance.  He seems to have learned, moreover, very little, from his ethics violations in Congress and his, to use his words, “profound” fall from grace. His conversion to Catholicism and his abandonment of his cancer-ridden wife for Calista, a helmet-headed blond with whom he prays often and who would, no doubt, be a loathsome first lady.  His billionaire supporter Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate, single handedly has prevented Newt’s campaign from plunging over a cliff the size of Mount Rushmore, a place, fortunately, he will never inhabit, although Newt probably believes he should replace George Washington on the prominence. Mr. Adelson apparently has now hedged his bets and is rumored to be giving  money to Mitt Romney, a man who cannot seal the deal even with moderate Republicans, let alone evangelicals who think that Mormonism is a devilish and heretical cult.

Mr. Romney bases his qualifications for the presidency because he was a successful venture capitalist and therefore understands how to run a profitable government (as though the government were a for profit corporation.)  and that he is now a conservative who unsuccessfully denies his fostering a successful (egads! socialist)  health care plan for Massachusetts.  He is sinking fast, however.   We are not sure he will not survive, however, since the Republicans usually pick the next in line.

That brings us back to the possibility of a Santorum nomination, a thought  I suspect, not without some logical basis, that the American Union may be further infused with theocratic ideals, since Santorum has made pronouncements like President Obama is conducting a war against religion.  The White House would be clearly gleeful if that happened, since Mr. Santorum was given the unceremonious boot by blue collar Pennsylvania after his undistinguished time in the United States Senate. Mr. Santorum also denies global warming and believes that he can single handedly cure the economy, but really does not say how.  Dinosaurs really do walk the earth with people---Santorum being living proof discrediting the observations of Charles Darwin.

How the American public can swallow these arguments is stupefying.  Are we back in the 1920s? Why are we even discussing issues like abortion? Birth control? Contraception? Who prays more?  Which church is not inhabited by heretics?  Are we about to have another Scopes monkey trial?  No country in the western world has not left these issues far behind.   But of course, the threat these intellectually challenged candidates envision is that the United States will become more like Europe.   And Europe has uncivilized and heathen institutions like high speed rail, good roads, health care for all its citizens, and a more enlightened populace that does not tolerate such pandering infantilism in its political discourse.

Malefactors of Great Wealth

" Too much cannot be said against the men of wealth who
sacrifice everything to getting wealth. There is not in
the world a more ignoble character than the mere
money-getting American, insensible to every duty,
regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a
fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest
uses —whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and
wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a
life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross
debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high
social position, foreign or native, for his daughter. Such
a man is only the more dangerous if he occasionally
does some deed like founding a college or endowing a
church, which makes those good people who are also
foolish forget his real iniquity. These men are equally
careless of the working men, whom they oppress, and
of the State, whose existence they imperil. There are
not very many of them, but there is a very great number
of men who approach more or less closely to the type,
and, just in so far as they do so approach, they are
curses to the country.”

Theodore Roosevelt. February, 1895

I have been having a continuing dialogue with some Republican friends of mine, ardent defenders of our capitalist system.  And so they should be.  It is a system that has provided, all throughout the 20^th century, a nation with probably the grandest middle class and the greatest lifestyle the world has ever known.  But that lifestyle was not easily won, and is now again under threat by individuals and corporations not unlike the description voiced above by, can you imagine, a Republican President of the United States, who must now, by even the narrowest stretch of any imagination, be spinning in his proverbial grave.

These Republican gentlemen, having achieved considerable wealth on their own or by whatever device, now strain mightily to justify their unimaginable insensitivity to the problematic society in which we now live.  One of them said that he wished he had an airplane, four homes instead of two, and other needless accoutrements of decadence.  I have no problem with that, because he did not achieve it at the expense of the poor.  However, such a mentality enables a “scorched earth” policy and a sanctioning of Congressional refuseniks who have been purchased by lobbyists to protect governmental subsidies of banking, corn, oil, and other interests too numerous to catalog in this meager column.

We now live in a country that no longer has a growing middle class. The American dream has, through a darkly lit tunnel, departed the station. We live in a country that is increasingly plutocratic, where those inhabiting the strata of the upper one percent control more of the wealth than ever before.  The figures, staggering and depressing,  advanced by a party that has lost its moral compass, looms as a guillotine over the heads of working people who have lost their homes, been evicted in the street, cannot afford health care, and can no longer buy food. Forty six million Americans are now living in poverty.  People are taking to the streets.

Nightly news shows a litany of neighborhoods, such as in Cleveland, where Cuyuhoga county has decided that abandoned homes should be demolished, rather than bring lower the homes of those people who, either conscientiously or stupidly, make mortgage payments to banks that will not readjust their financing, even though they are “under water.”  These souls, representing the essential staunch character of the American middle class, choose to stay in homes valued at $50,000 carrying $100,000 mortgages.  They are faced with banks, which would choose to foreclose, evict and leave the home vacant, subject to scavengers and vandals thereby depreciating the entire neighborhood rather than adjust the financing based upon their diminished value since the housing bubble burst.  

Of course, banks are in the business of making a profit.  But in times like these, does it not make more sense for a bank to collect a lower payment rather than no payment at all? And with no one to whom the house may be sold?  These are the same banks, bailed out by taxpayer dollars, too big to fail, that are sitting on hoards of cash and are refusing to lend any money.  These are the same banks (Bank of America/Countrywide) that faces Justice Department fines that it charged African-Americans a higher interest rate than whites, purely based on race.  

The Bank of America's Countrywide Mortgage was required today to pay $335 million in fines for discriminating against Black and Latinos who were steered to higher interest rates than white borrowers.   Anthony Monzillo, the CEO of Countrywide earned $531 million during 2003-2008 based upon his misdeeds. This criminal has, to date, escaped prosecution. Countrywide did about 49% of all adjustable rate mortgages in the U.S. in 2008 and engaged in systemic fraud.

Republican politicians should fear the next election.  People are now aware that they have been hoodwinked by a congress that is not responsive to the needs of its people and are dedicated solely to obstruct the present inhabitant of the White House, who, despite all his faults, including timidity, some pandering, some absence of courage to confront obstructionists, and who, may in this election year, find some way to bring a message to the people that their cause will not remain hijacked.  Hijacked by the Malefactors of great wealth.

Miscellanea, November 2011 and the Religion of College Football

Miscellanea, November, 2011

I had written earlier about the Presidential debate format being changed to tête-a tête between the candidates.  I was wrong.

The Republican debates have served a useful purpose, by showcasing the empty suits of most of the candidates, and by highlighting Mitt Romney’s stronger appeal to the general electorate.  In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

Rick Perry’s gaffe about abolishing government departments and then not remembering which one he was going to axe, is not really the important point.  It was his lack of a policy understanding and a failure to prepare and be acquainted with policy positions rather than memorizing positions coming from his handlers’ talking point memos.   His authenticity quotient swan dove into a media hurricane.  Memories often fail when there is only rote memory of the thoughts behind the statement.  That is why he could not remember.

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

Comments on the Religion of college football.

I cannot remember reading anything as loathsome as the Penn State football coach scandal except the ongoing priestly scandals plaguing Catholicism. The idea that men entrusted with the welfare and the education of children could be so callous and even depraved is unimaginable. The idea that football is a more important enterprise than the educational establishment to which it is wedded is evocative of the Catholic Church’s placing its hierarchical power structure before the interests of children, and the shuffling about of pedophilic priests to avoid responsibility for repulsive grotesqueries that would make even the most perverse Hollywood directors blush.  You could not make a horror film on this subject.  There is no film rating for this.  It is just another life destroying mechanism that people will remember, like 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, without the bombs and explosions.

That is what the coaching staff including the legendary (now, in my opinion, disgraced) Joe Paterno as well as the sacked president of the University did, placing the University’s $76 million revenue machine ahead of the children whose lives have now been scarred  by a monster.

The siege mentality of the Penn State football staff—them against us, the lack of transparency, the para-military discipline  that robs young men of their dignity, sublimating their individuality to the team and that subjects their bodies to indentured battering in the name of an academic institution, has escorted our society to a new low of moral and intellectual bankruptcy.  The fact that college football players are encouraged to take courses that do not demand much study, so they can devote their time to playing football is another indication of why our country is falling behind nations that prefer educating their studentry instead of head bashing them.  Most of these misguided souls will not play professionally, and then when they graduate, if at all, they will not be trained in the skills necessary to succeed in an exponentially growing meritocracy.  The origins of college football have been distorted and corrupted beyond all recognition. A game that began as an amateur pastime has lost its compass and the Penn State scandal is just another example of the decay, the rotting corpse of American big college football academia.

How much Coach Paterno knew, as well as his staff and the higher ups knew, will now be subject to the harsh scrutiny of the courts, both criminal and later, civil.  Those who decry the legal system will now see it seek justice once again for those who could not protect themselves.

May the wheels of justice grind exceedingly fine.