New City of Friends

Still pushing drugs American style

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 04:23:00 +0000

There is no justification whatsoever for running expensive advertisements on television that end with the line “Ask your doctor whether…is right for you.” There is no need to make the patient into a sales representative for a product that the patient may end up buying. If someone has, say, osteoporosis, then it should be sufficient for the physician to suggest a range of possible treatments, and to tell the patient the desired effects and the likely side effects of each of the possible treatments. And that information should be given directly to the physician in the form of the results of clinical trials, not in the form of slick presentations delivered in the context of work-vacations at expensive resorts. The cost of disseminating objective information is relatively low, whereas the cost of trying to persuade a physician to prescribe product A rather than the almost-identical product B is much higher.
Pushing drugs, American style

Still as concerned about the high cost of healthcare in the United States as I was when I wrote those words in February 2017, during the past week I made a note of prescription drugs that were advertised on television programs I happened to be watching—mostly network or cable news programs. I then looked up the advertised products on the Internet to discover more about them, including pricing information. I then calculated approximately how much it would cost to take each of these products for a month, bearing in mind that a patient carrying insurance would probably not pay the full price out of pocket. Nevertheless, the prices listed do reflect the amount of money the pharmaceutical company marketing the products aspires to get from some combination of an insurance plan and a patient's co-pay. Here is a list of the prescription drugs I saw advertised in alphabetical order.

Austedo (deutetrabenazine). This drug is used to treat involuntary movements (chorea) caused by Huntington's disease. The initial dose is 6 mg orally once a day. Tho dosage may be increased in increments of 6 mg/day at weekly intervals up to a maximum dose of 48 mg/day. The cost for Austedo oral tablet 6 mg is around $4,286 for a supply of 60 tablets.
Biktarvy This drug is used to treat HIV, the virus that can cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Dosage is 1 tablet orally once a day. The cost for Biktarvy oral tablet (50 mg-200 mg-25 mg) is around $3,553 for a supply of 30 tablets.
Cabenuva (cabotegravir and rilpivirine). Cabotegravir and rilpivirine are antiviral medicines used to treat HIV. The cost for Cabenuva intramuscular suspension, extended release (200 mg-300 mg/mL) is around $4,144 for a supply of 4 milliliters.
Caplyta capsules contain lumateperone, an antipsychotic medicine. Caplyta is a once-daily capsule used to control the symptoms of schizophrenia in adults. The cost for Caplyta oral capsule 42 mg is around $1,470 for a supply of 30.
Cosentyx (secukinumab) is an immunosuppressant that reduces the effects of a chemical substance in the body that can cause inflammation. The dosage is 150 mg subcutaneously every 4 weeks. The cost for Cosentyx subcutaneous solution (150 mg/mL) is around $6,200.
Dupixent (dupilumab) is used to treat moderate-to-severe eczema that cannot be controlled with topical medicines applied to the skin. A maintenance dose is usually 300 mg subcutaneously every other week. The cost for Dupixent subcutaneous solution (200 mg/1.14 mL) is around $3,354 for a supply of 2.28 milliliters.
Gardasil 9 is used to prevent human papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted disease. The cost for Gardasil intramuscular suspension quadrivalent is around $175 for a supply of 0.5 milliliters. The typical dosage is two or three 0.5 ml injections, making the cost of full vaccination around $525.
Humira (adalimumab) is used to treat psoriatic arthritis. The usual adult dose of Humira is 40 mg taken subcutaneously every other week. The cost for Humira subcutaneous kit (40 mg/0.8 mL) is around $6,240 for a supply of 2 kits.
Imbruvica (ibrutinib) is a cancer medicine that interferes with the growth and spread of cancer cells in the body. The typical dosage is 560 mg orally once a day until disease progression or unacceptable toxicity. Imbruvica costs $484 per capsule/tablet regardless of the strength (70mg, 140mg, 280mg, 420mg, 560mg). This works out to $13,546 for a supply of 28 tablets/capsules.
Ingrezza (valbenazine) is used to treat symptoms of tardive dyskinesia, a nervous system disorder that causes repetitive uncontrolled muscle movements, usually in the face. The initial dose is 40 mg orally once a day, which is increased to 80 mg orally once a day after one week at the initial dose. The cost for Ingrezza oral capsule (40 mg-80 mg) is around $7,362 for a supply of 28 capsules.
Jardiance (empagliflozin) is an oral diabetes medicine that helps control blood sugar levels. The recommended dose is 10 mg once daily. The cost of 10 mg oral tablets is around $582 for a supply of 30 tablets.
Keytruda (pembrolizumab) is a cancer medicine that interferes with the growth and spread of cancer cells in the body. According to the Keytruda website, “The list price for each indicated dose of Keytruda when given every 3 weeks is $10,268.72. The list price for each indicated dose of Keytruda when given every 6 weeks is $20,537.44.”
Opdivo (nivolumab) is a medicine that is used alone or in combination with other medicines to interfere with the growth and spread of cancer cells in the body. According to its website, “For patients receiving Opdivo 240 mg every 2 weeks, the list price is $6,779 per infusion. For patients receiving Opdivo 480 mg every 4 weeks, the list price is $13,559.”
Otezla (apremilast) is used to treat active psoriatic arthritis in adults. A typical maintenance dose is 30 mg orally twice a day. The cost for Otezla oral tablet (10 mg-20 mg-30 mg) is around $890 for a supply of 27 tablets, so a month's supply would be around $1780.
Rybelsus (semaglutide) is used treat type 2 diabetes mellitus. The maintenance dose is 7 to 14 mg orally once a day. The cost for Rybelsus oral tablet 3 mg is around $899 for a supply of 30, so if one were taking 14 mg daily the monthly cost would come to around $2687.
Toujeo (insulin glargine) is a man-made form of a insulin that is used to treat diabetes. The cost for Toujeo SoloStar subcutaneous solution (300 units/mL) is around $415 for a supply of 4.5 milliliters.
Vraylar (cariprazine) is an antipsychotic medication used to treat schizophrenia or bipolar disorder type I in adults. The recommended dosage range is 1.5 mg to 6 mg once daily. The starting dosage is 1.5 mg daily. The dosage can be increased to 3 mg on Day 2. The cost for Vraylar oral capsule 1.5 mg is around $892 for a supply of 20. Taking two pills a day would come to a monthly cost of around $2676.
Xiaflex (collagenase clostridium histolyticum) is used to treat Dupuytren's contracture in adults. This condition causes an abnormal thickening of the tissue in the palm of the hand. Xiaflex is also used to treat a related condition called Peyronie's disease in adult men, a condition resulting in an abnormal curving of the penis during erection. The dosage is 0.58 mg as a single injection and up to two follow-up injections at 4 week intervals, if necessary. The cost for Xiaflex injectable powder for injection 0.9 mg is around $5,687 for a supply of 1 powder for injection.

No doubt people who are suffering from the afflictions that these pharmaceutical products are designed to treat are grateful when their conditions are ameliorated, but seeing slick television advertisement for those products is not what provides the relief. Relief comes when a qualified physician makes a diagnosis and prescribes a medication. Being asked by patients whether a given product is right for them is not likely to help the doctor make an accurate diagnosis or prognosis or prescription of treatment. It is the physician's job, not the patient's, to know which treatments are most likely to be effective in curing or at least bringing some relief from an affliction. It is the physician's job, not an advertising company's, to inform a patient about what the possible treatments are. Costly television commercials serve to do little but add unnecessary expense to pharmaceutical products.

If legislators are serious about finding ways to make medical care more affordable and less likely to drive patients into bankruptcy, one of the many legislative tools to consider is a ban on the advertising of medications.

Are nations obsolete?

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Sat, 23 Jun 2018 17:34:00 +0000

“A nation without borders is not a nation at all.”
— Donald Trump (September 16, 2016)

People who are in favor of building a physical barrier, such as a wall, along the border between Mexico and the United States sometimes echo the claim that without borders there is no nation, and without strictly enforced immigration policies there is no border. The purpose of this posting is to examine both of those claims and then to examine a presupposition on which both of those claims depend.

Can there nations without borders?

The question of whether there can be a nation without any borders can probably be answered in the negative. A nation is, among other things, a clearly demarcated territory with boundaries that differentiate it from a neighboring territory. The more interesting question is whether there can be a nation without strong borders, a strong border being one that keeps people from neighboring nations or territories out. The answer to that question is clearly affirmative. One need look only at the many nations within the European Union, all of which have borders, but none of which have tight restrictions on who may cross those borders. One can bord a train in the Netherlands and travel to France, passing through Belgium, without passing through a checkpoint. I recall taking a train from Leiden, Netherlands to Gent, Belgium, and the only way I knew I had crossed the border was that my cell phone received a text message from my Dutch carrier informing me that I was now in Belgium and that the rates for a mobile telephone call in Belgium were different from the rates for a call in the Netherlands. (I found it a little spooky that my mobile phone was tracking my whereabouts so precisely that it informed me of all this within seconds of the train crossing the border, but that is another matter.) Passing between two countries in the European Union is now easier than passing from the state of New Mexico into the state of Arizona; sometimes, but not always, I have had to stop at a checkpoint in Arizona to insure the authorities that I have no fruit in the car that might carry diseases that could endanger Arizona fruit orchards. Despite the ease with which anyone can pass between one European nation and another, each nation maintains its own distinctive government, passes its own legislation and enforces that legislation with its own agencies. France is still unmistakably France, and Spain is Spain and Belgium is Belgium. Whatever factors go into making them nations are still intact, and strongly defended borders is not one of those factors.

It is not at all obvious that the United States would cease to be a nation if it belonged to an American Union similar to the European Union, a union in which people could freely cross from Canada into the United States or from the United States into Canada, or from either of those countries into Mexico, either for a short visit or to take up residence and take up gainful employment. Indeed, if there were a union including every nation in North America, Central America and South America, a union in which people and goods could cross borders with a minimum of difficulty, it is difficult to make the case that the situation would have any more of a negative impact on any of the American nations than the open-border policies in the European Union has on the nations of Europe.

Can there be borders without strictly enforced immigration policies?

Once gain, the European Union provides a hint as to how this question can be answered. The members of the European Union do have immigration polices, and they are enforced. A key to the successful enforcement of any law or policy is that the law or policy be enforceable. It should be obvious to most lawmakers that the current numbers of immigrants who have entered the United States to live and work illegally proves that the current laws are not enforceable. If millions of people do not follow a law, the law is probably not enforceable.

The most reasonable response to this situation is not to have a “zero tolerance” policy whereby every person who crosses the border is detained, charged with a crime and deported, but rather to have laws that are a better reflection of the social and economic realities behind the migration of peoples from one place to another. Current immigration laws and policies in the United States fail to take into full consideration why people migrate. Most people do not move from one place to another simply because they like to be in motion. Rather, they go to live in another place because life where they have been living has become untenable or unsustainable. Policymakers in the United States would do far better to look into ways that they might help improve the living circumstances of neighboring countries than to look into ways to keep people from neighboring countries out. Trying to keep desperate people out of an an area that has better opportunities for a fulfilling life that the area where they have been living is a task that only a fool would undertake. The task is not only foolish but heartless.

The question to ask is not “Can there be borders without strictly enforced immigration policies?”, but rather “Can there be enforcement of unrealistically strict laws?” and the answer to that question is obviously No. The United States does not need a wall along its borders. What the United States does need is to wake up the the complex economic and social realities that have led to its borders being crossed by millions of people.

Is there really a need for nations any more?

All of this discussion of whether there can be a nation without strong borders presupposes that nations are desirable in the first place. Are they? The answer to that question requires having a clear idea of what a nation is in the first place. An online dictionary defines a nation as “a large aggregate of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.” Given that understanding, one might ask in what sense the United States has ever been a nation. It has never been the case that the inhabitants of the country have had a common descent, history, culture or language, although there have been attempts at various times either to impose a common culture and language on everyone or to marginalize those who do not speak the same language or share cultural values with those who happen to be in power. Given the ease of travel on the planet, and the networks of communication in most parts of the planet, especially where economic power is concentrated, it is increasingly unlikely that there will ever be a place in the modernized world where all the people in that region have a common descent, history, culture or language. The nation, if it ever had a place in the world, certainly no longer has a place or a function. It is at most an abstract fiction. The human race may well have come to the point where it no longer needs to think in terms of people living in nations. It is arguably the time to begin thinking in terms of people simply living in the world, a world without artificial boundaries, a world in which there are thousands of living languages and cultures and particular histories, a world in which anyone can live and work wherever life and work are possible.

Maintaining the fiction of the artificial construct of a nation entails a waste of resources that the planet can ill afford. The defense of borders (against whom, aside from fellow human beings?) has come to involve the maintenance of armies and navies (and in the fantasy world in which some politicians live, even military units designed to dominate outer space) and immigrations and customs enforcement agencies and departments of homeland security and countless other entities that have no clear function other than to maintain an illusion that everyone on one side of an imaginary line has a common culture and history that differentiates them from those living on the other side of that imaginary line. The very idea of a nation has become a costly and wasteful fiction, one that is entirely out of line with the realities of human life on this planet.

I would suggest that rather than laboring under such pointless nationalistic slogans as “Make [plug in the name of an artificial construct here of your choice] Great Again,” we should consider a far more meaningful and easily achieved slogan such as “Make Humanity Nationless Again.”

Memories of being alarmed

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 22:35:00 +0000

“The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert’s seventh symphony. And I’ve rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face.” ― Stephen Fry

When I was a child, I was rudely awaked every morning by a device that was aptly named an alarm clock, so-called, I suppose, because it was alarming to be awakened by the raucous sound of a clapper feverishly striking two little bells on top of the clock.

By the time I was an adolescent and unable to go for more than a few minutes at a time without listening to what I, but not my parents, called music, I had a clock radio, which could be set to turn itself off after a given number of minutes at bedtime and then turn back on at a specified time in the morning. The clock radio made it possible to go to sleep listening to music and to wake up listening to music. For those who needed to be alarmed, an obnoxious buzzer could be set to go off a few minutes after the music began to play, just in case the music was insufficiently jarring to bring sleep to an end. For those who were prone to fall back to sleep after the alarm went off, there was a feature called a snooze alarm, which sounded at intervals until the alarm was deactivated. When I was living with my parents and had a bedroom to myself, I relied on my clock radio to help me achieve the transitions between wakefulness and sleep. When I went to college and had to be considerate of roommates, I tried without much success to learn to go to sleep and wake up without external aids; I slept through many morning classes. (Much later, I atoned for that sin by teaching early morning classes that many of my students slept through.)

In early adulthood I completely outgrew my need for alarm clocks, having replaced them with babies who woke up crying just before the sun came up. From that point in my life onwards, I have nearly always awakened at just about the time the sun comes up and have had to set an alarm only on days when circumstances called for getting an early start. As a result of having a fairly reliable internal clock, my relationship with external wake-up mechanisms has deteriorated somewhat. While that is generally true, there have been a few memorable devices along the way that have yanked me out of slumber when the need arose.

When I was living in Japan in the late 1970s I was introduced to a number of electronic gadgets that did not become commonplace in North America until several years later. One of them was a slab of plastic small enough to fit into a shirt pocket that kept track of time and had an alarm that emitted high-pitched beeping noises. When I returned to North America, I bought one for my father, who loved new gadgetry. For a few years he enjoyed being on the cutting edge of chronometric technology, but it was not long before small battery-powered clocks and timers were available everywhere at much lower prices than the cost of a round-trip ticket to Japan.

A few years before I retired from teaching, I was with a student and had occasion to look at my wristwatch to see what the date was; even though wristwatches that showed the date had been around for decades, I still marveled at the clever convenience of a machine that could indicate both time of day and calendrical date. My student, seeing me glance at my timepiece and datepiece, remarked that people of his generation would never settle for a device that did only one thing. I asked him what he consulted when he wanted to know the time, and he pulled out a cellphone—not even a smartphone, but a flip phone of the sort that hardly anyone but old fogeys like me still carry. He demonstrated that his cellphone told the time and date, could be used to make telephone calls, had a calculator and several kinds of timer and alarm clock and a digital agenda book and a few simple games. He then pointed out, unkindly I thought, that his multifunction device cost less than half what my cumbersome two-function wristwatch cost. I realized then and there that I had outlived my usefulness.

Even though I still have a cellphone that is more simple and minimalistic than the mobile telephones that people were carrying ten or fifteen years ago (which, incidentally, I use mostly as a clock, since I hate both making and receiving telephone calls and am much too old to learn how to send or receive SMS), I do now have a multifunction device that fits on my wrist. It serves as a pedometer, heart-rate monitor, clock, calendar and stopwatch. It calculates an estimate of how many kilocalories of energy my body has consumed. If I wear it to bed, it logs an estimate of how many hours of deep sleep I have had, and if I set the alarm, it gently and noiselessly vibrates on my wrist to wake me up (although in performing the task of waking me up, it usually loses a race with my bladder). While I confess to finding it a bit silly to have a device that monitors my life as thoroughly as that wristband, I do find it an improvement on the clanging of the windup alarm clocks that woke me up as a child.

Pushing drugs, American style

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:13:00 +0000

Watching the news makes people sick

At the outset I must confess to being addicted to watching the news on television. Although my favorite televised news sources are on PBS, on most nights I supplement the PBS News Hour with the news on one of the traditional network stations or a cable news channel. Something that has repeatedly struck me in watching the evening news on traditional network stations is that advertisers have obviously learned that the vast majority of people who watch the evening news are suffering from indigestion, irritable bowel syndrome, erectile dysfunction, atrial fibrillation not caused by a heart-valve problem, moderate to severe psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis, depression, insomnia, restless leg syndrome or dry eye disease. If not afflicted by one of those conditions, they are being assaulted by meatballs or chicken wings.

Not all the commercials are pushing drugs, of course. Interspersed with all the pharmaceutical products are commercials featuring lawyers who are prepared to sue pharmaceutical companies for offering products that have life-changing side effects, and health insurance plans that complement Medicare to provide coverage to pay for all those pharmaceuticals that TV viewers are urged to ask their doctors about. Given the evidence of television commercials, remarkably few of the people who watch the televised news are under the age of sixty-five and have sound minds in sound bodies.

An often-heard claim of those who are convinced that the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act has all but destroyed the health-care system in the United States is that the ACA (which they persist in calling Obamacare) has driven insurance premiums through the ceiling, thus bringing financial ruin to small businesses and confronting hard-working Americans with having to choose between health insurance and sending their children to overpriced universities. What is missed in this analysis, of course, is that health insurance is expensive because medical care and pharmaceuticals are expensive. Also left out of consideration is that almost every pharmaceutical product sold in the United States is available in Canada for a fraction of the cost.

Why don’t Canadians pay their share of the cost of drugs?

A claim I have heard many Americans make, clearly a claim that they have learned from the pharmaceutical companies themselves, is that the prices of pharmaceutical products are so high in the United States because it costs pharmaceutical companies a great deal of money to do the research necessary to develop new products. Some American friends have even shown indignation that Americans are subsidizing Canadians, who derive all the benefits of expensive medical research but pay none of the cost. Once, when I was still living in Canada, I received an email from a (former) friend in the United States who accused me, in language unsuitable for anyone not in either the navy or a motorcycle gang, of being a freeloader who was enjoying good health at the expense of poor Americans. That claim was false for two reasons. First, I have almost never been prescribed a pharmaceutical product and tend to avoid over-the-counter medical products. Second, there are better explanations for why pharmaceutical prices are outrageously high in the United States. So the answer to the question “Why don’t Canadians pay their share of the cost of drugs?” is that they in fact do pay their fair share. Americans pay more, not because they are subsidizing freeloading Canadians, but because Americans pay far more for products than it costs to develop and manufacture those products.

Why do Americans pay for overpriced pharmaceuticals?

The pharmaceutical companies typically claim that they must charge high prices for their products because of the high cost of developing them. It cannot be denied that running controlled tests on new products and making sure the products meet safety standards is costly. It should also be pointed out, however, that advertising the products once they are developed is also costly. To that can be added that pharmaceutical companies also tend to pay shareholders rather high dividends. When health care products are manufactured by for-profit corporations that have investors to reward with high dividends, then costs naturally rise. While the claim of many advocates of free-market capitalism is that competition keeps costs down, the opposite is often the case. If two companies are competing for a share of the market, the cost of the competition—the advertising of products to potential consumers of the products and to potential prescribers of those products—can be quite high.

Neither of those kinds of advertising is necessary. There is no justification whatsoever for running expensive advertisements on television that end with the line “Ask your doctor whether…is right for you.” There is no need to make the patient into a sales representative for a product that the patient may end up buying. If someone has, say, osteoporosis, then it should be sufficient for the physician to suggest a range of possible treatments, and to tell the patient the desired effects and the likely side effects of each of the possible treatments. And that information should be given directly to the physician in the form of the results of clinical trials, not in the form of slick presentations delivered in the context of work-vacations at expensive resorts. The cost of disseminating objective information is relatively low, whereas the cost of trying to persuade a physician to prescribe product A rather than the almost-identical product B is much higher.

One way to bring medical costs down is to make advertising of medical products illegal, as it is in some countries that have lower costs for pharmaceuticals and hands-on medical care. Another way is to have government-imposed limits on the amount of profit a company can make on a product, as is also the case in some countries that have reasonable consumer-costs for health-related products. A third way is to have a government-run insurance plan that negotiates prices with pharmaceutical companies and imposes a cap on how much a pharmaceutical company can receive for its products. There is no need for a government-run plan to be managed by the central government. In Canada each province has its own plan, and no two provinces have exactly the same setup.

Health care is far too important to be left to the vagaries of markets in a for-profit corporate scheme. The good health of the entire citizenry is far more important than the bank accounts of capitalist shareholders. There are plenty of other markets in which investors can make or lose their money. Pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers of medical devices, clinics, hospitals and retirement homes for the elderly should not be in the private investment sector of the economy. (Neither should correctional facilities, but that is a matter for another day.)

Americans desiring affordable health insurance should first advocate for more affordable treatments, and that is best achieved by a not-for-profit health-care system. They should be asking for, in fact demanding, more government involvement and less private-sector investment in products designed for health. Such a change in outlook would, however, require that Americans first seek a cure for their addiction to free-market capitalism and the delusion that the best way to keep costs down is to let the market determine prices. That strategy has been tried again and again, and it has failed again and again. It is time for Americans to considered an alternative system (not to be confused with “alternative facts”).

Next time you see a television commercial for an expensive treatment that you have seen a hundred times before, instead of simply reaching for the mute button on the remote control, ask your doctor whether socialized medicine is right for you. If you doctor says No, then consider seeking a second opinion.

Eve of Destruction

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 23:35:00 +0000

Yeah, my blood’s so mad, feels like coagulatin‘,
I’m sittin’ here, just contemplatin‘,
I can’t twist the truth, it knows no regulation,
Handful of Senators don’t pass legislation,
And marches alone can’t bring integration,
When human respect is disintegratin’,
This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’,
And you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.
—P. F. Sloan. “Eve of Destruction” (1964)

On Tuesday, November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican to be elected President of the United States. His running mate was Senator Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, an active opponent of slavery who had begun his political life as a Democrat but switched to the Republican Party in 1856, convinced that party was more in line with his staunch anti-slavery views.

Reaction to the election of Lincoln and Hamlin was swift. On Thursday, December 20, 1860, the State of South Carolina seceded from the union. A document entitled South Carolina Declaration of Causes of Secession began with this paragraph:

The People of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D. 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union; but in deference to the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding States, she forbore at that time to exercise this right. Since that time, these encroachments have continued to increase, and further forbearance ceases to be a virtue.

Among the specific articles of the Constitution of the United States that the Convention of South Carolina stated was Article 4, Clause 3:

No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.

One of the stated causes for South Carolina’s leaving the union was that there were Northern states that were not honoring this clause but were harboring fugitive slaves. The constitutional obligation of states to return fugitive slaves to their rightful owners was, the document goes on to say, “so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made.” The States that allowed slavery would never have agreed to sign the Constitution of the United States or to be part of the Union unless their rights to own slaves, and to have that ownership honored by all the other States, was ensured.

The document drawn up by the Convention of South Carolina served as a model for similar documents in other slaveholding states. By the time Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin were sworn into office on March 4, 1861, six more states (Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas) had already declared themselves to be sovereign nations no longer part of the United States of America. During the first four months of Lincoln’s presidency, four more states (Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee) seceded from the Union. When the Lincoln-Hamlin ticket was elected in November 1860, there were thirty-three states. By the time they had been in office for ninety-five days, eleven states had declared independence from the United States, and one state (Kansas) had been added. Elected to be President of thirty-three United States, by June 1861 Lincoln was President of twenty-three United States, a nation that had been at war with the Confederate States of America since April 12, 1861. By the time the war—generally called “The War of the Rebellion” in the United States and “The War for Southern Independence” in the Confederate States of America—came to an end, there were an estimated 750,000 American military deaths (in contrast to 405,399 in World War I; 116,516 in World War II; and 58,209 in the war in Vietnam), or nearly 2.4% of the total American population at that time. About a month before the war was declared fully ended in May 1865, President Lincoln had been assassinated and succeeded by his second Vice President, Andrew Johnson, formerly a Democrat from the State of Tennessee, who had run with Lincoln in 1864 on the National Union ticket. President Johnson favored a quick restoration to the Union of all the states that had seceded, but his plans made no provision for the protection of former slaves. The failure to provide this protection enraged the Congress, dominated by Republicans, and the House of Representatives impeached him. The Senate, however, voted by a margin of a single vote to acquit him, allowing him to finish his single term as seventeenth President of the United States.

Although the thirty-six states—West Virginia had been admitted to the Union in 1863 and Nevada in 1864—of the United States were officially united again, it could be argued that the deep conflicts that had divided them have never been resolved. Nearly every politically charged issue in the politics of the early twenty-first century has some dimension of the unresolved controversy of whether there should be national policy or fifty different state policies. Should there be a national Environmental Protection Agency, or should each state have its own policies, or lack thereof, on protecting the environment from human enterprises? Should there be a national Department of Education, or should each state fund its own schools, set its own curriculum, and have its own criteria of whether the educational system is meeting its goals? Should there be a national Bureau of Land Management, or should each state determine how the lands within its borders are used and by whom? Should it be decided by the Supreme Court of the United States that all women in the nation have access to birth control and abortion, or should each state have its own policies? Should there be a national policy on who can have access to which kinds of firearms, or should each state be left to decide its own policies? Should there be a national schedule of which substances people can use for medicinal or recreational purposes, or should each state have its own food and drug policies? Generally speaking, should the central government be subordinate to regional governments, or vice versa? These issues were hotly debated as the United States Constitution was being drawn up, they came to a boiling point during the American Civil War, and they have been simmering ever since. Ever since the Constitution of the United States was written in 1787, there have been heated disputes about the balance of jurisdictions between the central government and state governments, and in many states disputes about the balance of jurisdictions between state and county and municipal governments.

One could be forgiven for thinking that 230 years of failure to arrive at a smoothly working federalism—that is, a mixture of central and regional governments—may stem from the fact that the very idea of federalism is fundamentally flawed. Two possible remedies to this failure are both such a radical departure from what has been in place for twenty-three decades that neither is likely to be adopted, for either one would mean an end to the States of America that are United in name only. One remedy would be to abolish the states altogether and simply have a national government with a unicameral legislature, a single House of Representatives with no Senate (and no electoral college). The other remedy would be to abolish the central government altogether and to have a number of sovereign nations—ideally, far fewer than fifty, since many of the current states have arbitrary borders that were drawn with a straightedge and a compass in Washington, D.C. without any regard to the geographical, economic and cultural integrity of the regions enclosed in those borders.

I personally would be more inclined to favor the first of those two radical solutions; indeed, I would be in favor of abolishing every sovereign nation and replacing them all with a single planetary government with jurisdiction over the entire planet Earth. I do not expect to live long enough to see that solution put into place. It seems more likely that I may live long enough to see at least the beginnings of the opposite radical solution, a dramatically weakened central government with correspondingly strengthened state governments, the result being a very weak union of nearly sovereign states held together only by the glue of the vested interests of major corporations that have no regard for anything but material profits and the foolish pride and dangerous over-confidence of a delusional figurehead with autocratic pretensions.

SOTU address 2017

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Wed, 23 Nov 2016 20:52:00 +0000

My fellow Americans. By the way, that is the cue for all you illegal aliens, immigrants with green cards, visitors from foreign countries and descendants of former slaves to turn off your televisions and stop using electricity provided by your nearest coal-fired power generating facilities. And how about those coal miners, folks? Aren’t they terrific? They love me. They voted for me. Let’s give those terrific coal miners a round of applause. [Wait two seconds for applause] OK, my fellow Americans, that’s enough for the coal miners. Save your applause for me. I don’t want for your hands to get sore, because believe me, you’re going to be clapping your hands a lot when you hear what I have to say in this, the first State of the Union Address of my amazing presidency. And by the way, your knees will get sore rising up every time you give me a standing ovation, so you might as well just remain standing for the rest of this speech. See how I’m always thinking of your knees? I want you to keep them in good shape for the genuflections you’ll be doing later as I make my spectacular and dramatic presidential exit.

My fellow Americans, this has been an amazing presidency, following an amazing election in which I won by an amazing landslide victory in which my opponent was able to get only two million more votes than I did, despite all the lies the nasty media were paid by my opponent and the Canadian government to tell about me. But that’s alright. Nobody watches CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC or ABC anyway, and nobody reads those third-rate newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, because everyone knows all they tell is lies told by losers paid for by my opponent. Folks, I think that’s the longest sentence I have ever spoken. It was almost forty words long, several of them two or three syllables long. It was an amazing sentence, spoken in this, my first State of the Union speech, three days after my amazing inauguration, which by the way, more people attended than were at the inauguration of President Franklin Pierce on March 4, 1853. And how about that terrific son-in-law of mine, Jared Kushner? He’s an amazing scholar. He looked up President Pierce’s inauguration date on Google for me. He’s an incredible scholar. He’s Jewish, you know. The people of Israel love me, and nobody loves Israel more than I do. Jared is also a terrific son-in-law, because he let my daughter Ivanka keep her maiden name. He agreed with me that Ivanka Kushner sounds horrible. It doesn’t sound daughter-of-the-presidential. And speaking of Ivanka, how about that beautiful necklace she is wearing tonight just above her breathtakingly beautiful cleavage? Replicas of that necklace will be on sale for a staggeringly high price through her incredible website immediately after tonight’s show. Also available on Ivanka’s amazing website are replicas of the tiara that our beautiful First Lady, Queen Melania, is wearing tonight. I don’t mind calling her Queen. Members of the LGBTQ community love me, and nobody loves them more than I do—in a wholesome and proper way that Mike Pence would approve of, of course.

But that’s enough about other people for now. Let me say a few words about how great I have made this country again. Take a look at the Members of Congress sitting in the box seats here at Yankee Stadium—the Capitol Building was much too small to hold all the people who wanted tickets to see this, my first State of the Union address. By the way, I heard that scalpers are selling tickets for up to ten scalps. That’s how much people want to be here on this amazing occasion. Unfortunately, the previous owners of those scalps were unable to be here tonight, but I have sent their families red baseball caps as mementos, just like the red baseball caps you see on the heads of all the Senators, Representatives and Supreme Court Justices who are here tonight. This I can tell you, every one of them is so proud to be wearing the new national uniform. Stand up, all you Members of Congress and Supreme Court Justices. Let the people see your red baseball caps and the almost matching yellow jerseys that say “Make the Washington Redskins Great Again.” Let’s give the members of the Legislative Branch and the Judicial Branch a big round of applause. [Wait two seconds for applause] OK, folks, let’s not overdo it. Save your applause for me.

One of the things that makes this amazing nation so great, especially since I became President, is the spirit of forgiveness. That’s why I have pardoned Crooked Hillary for all her hideous war crimes and for selling state secrets to those who wish to destroy us. I have also pardoned former director of the FBI, James Comey, for his criminal negligence in failing to charge Hillary with all the horrible crimes she committed. He has sent word to me that he is very happy in his new home in Tierra del Fuego, where he moved after discovering that he just didn’t fit in in this country. And because Hillary is a terrific person, and because she appreciates my magnanimous forgiveness so much, she has taught me how to set up my own private email server. It’s very secure. I have been assured that it is by far the most secure server in Moscow. Eat your heart out, Julian Assange.

One of the vicious lies the crooked media told about me before I repealed the First Amendment by executive order on my first day in office was that I was insensitive to the feelings of people of color in this country. That was such an unfair thing to say. Colored people love me, and nobody loves darkies more than I do. And that is why I have changed the name of my residence in Washington, DC. What kind of message was it sending the American people to have the President of the greatest country in the history of the world living in a place called The White House? What an insult to all those people who made this nation great by coming all the way from Africa to pick our cotton, and to all those folks who kindly moved to Oklahoma so the rest of us could build shopping malls and Interstates and oil pipelines on their former hunting grounds. So on day one, I changed the name of the President’s residence. People in central Virginia can read their newspapers by the light of the big sign at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that says Trump House. And how about those terrific people in rural Pennsylvania? They love me in the great state of Pennsylvania, and nobody loves Pennsylvannikers more than I do. That’s why I have signed an executive order to change the name of their state to Trumpsylvania. What kind of a message was it sending the rest of the world when the country with the most powerful military in the history of the galaxy had a state named after William Penn, a Quaker pacifist?

There are so many things to say about my amazing first three days in office, and we only have four or five hours to say them, but one of the amazing things that needs to be mentioned is that next week I will be announcing the winners of the new Medal of Fairness award, which replaces the Medal of Freedom award that former Presidents handed out like candy. The Medal of Fairness will be awarded to patriotic Americans who have heaped the most fulsome praise upon their President. I’m going to keep you in suspense about who the first recipient will be, but I’m going to tease you by giving you a hint. It’s going to be Kellyanne Conway. What a terrific lady. She just can’t find enough positive things to say about me. And what a beautiful smile she has. And so sincere. Let’s give her a big round of applause. [Waits one second for applause] OK, folks, let’s not cut into my time too much. I have so much more to say.

I would like to conclude this, my first State of the Union address, by talking about what a terrific job I have done streamlining legislation. The old way of drafting new bills was a total disaster. Legislators would draft laws that were billions and billions of pages long. Nobody could possibly read all those words. Members of Congress were voting on laws that were so verbose and full of adjectives that no one could possibly know what was in them. Besides, they had so much legal gobbledegook in them that the average unemployed ranch hand in Wyoming couldn’t understand them. So one of the first seventy-five executive orders that I signed during my first hour in the Ovaltine Office in the Trump House was an order saying that no bill in Congress can be more than 140 characters long. I figure if a bill is any longer than my attention span, I don’t even have to look at it. Send me a bill with 141 characters and I get out my veto pen. It’s that simple. Just think of how much money that will save all the taxpayers, not to mention paper. Tree-huggers love me, and nobody loves trees more than I do.

There is just one more thing to say before I conclude this, my first State of the Union address. A lot of people have been worried about how they will get affordable health care now that I signed an executive order repealing every word of the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act. There is absolutely nothing to worry about, my fellow Americans. Before repealing Obamacare, which by the way was a total disaster, by far the worst law in the history of the universe (which my terrific Vice President Mike Pence tells me is five thousand years old)—before repealing Obamacare, I signed an executive order banning all diseases and injuries from this great land of ours. What kind of nation allows diseases and injuries inside its borders? A nation of sick people, cripples and losers, that’s what kind. But America is a nation of winners. So there will be no more disease or injury in this nation. And I have also banned tooth decay, myopia and deafness. And therefore we do not need hospitals, clinics, dentist offices, opticians or veterinarians, which is why no one will need health insurance—unless they travel to some socialist country such as Canada or Norway. Medicare also been consigned to the ash heap of history. We are now a country of healthy, able-bodied winners.

And that concludes this, my first State of the Union address. There is just one more amazing accomplishment I want to tell you about before we leave the stadium. For years I have been deeply concerned about our catastrophic national debt, and I was determined to do something to remedy that disastrous situation. When I looked into the matter, I learned that the cause of the national debt was the huge budget of the Library of Congress, which was costing every man, woman and child in this country trillions and trillions of dollars every hour. So I signed an executive order turning the money-losing library into the biggest used bookstore in the nation. When all the books, magazines, newspapers and archived documents have been sold, the building will be renamed The Trump Library, which will house the book I read in college, all the books ghost writers have written in my name, and terrific dioramas that will inform the American people about my amazing presidency.

And that is all I have time to say, my fallow Americans. But just before we go gentle into this good night, I think it would be good to explain why I signed an executive order to invade Saudi Arabia. Thanks to the lies being circulated by the nasty media, which nobody pays attention to, because they are all a bunch of losers with worthless degrees in journalism from third-rate universities, there has been some confusion about why I ordered our military to make Saudi Arabia a colony of the United States of America. And some people are reportedly worried that I might order a nuclear strike. Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, my reason for taking over the Arabian Peninsula has nothing to do with oil. It’s not about the oil at all. It’s about the sand. I need that terrific Arabian sand for the traps in all the golf courses I am planning to build in Russia, Kazakhstan, North Korea and Burkina Faso. And that’s why there’s absolutely no worry that I will order nuclear strikes in the Middle East. Nuclear explosions would wreck the sand. That would be a stupid thing to do, and I don’t do stupid things, because I am the smartest President in the history of the Milky Way.

My fellow Americans, I am going to stop now so I can spend some quality time with my comb and mirror. If I have more to say, I’ll send out a few hundred tweets. And this concludes my first State of the Union address. God bless us, every one—by which I mean all the members of the amazing Trump family and even our Jewish son-in-law, Jared Whosit. God bless you all. And God help the United States of America.

To see or not to see

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Sun, 20 Nov 2016 00:23:00 +0000

During the 2015–2016 election cycle, it was not unusual to see Donald J. Trump characterized as a fascist or as a Nazi. Such labels rarely help clarify what is happening, because in stressing similarities they overlook important differences. One important difference between Trump and the Fascists, to give just one example, is that the Fascists had a clearly worked out ideology and an agenda for carrying it out, which they did with brutal efficiency, whereas Trump does not. People who have worked with him say that he has a remarkable ability to “read” people and to know what to say to persuade them or intimidate them or play to their basest instincts, but having the ability to spot people’s vulnerabilities and to take advantage of them is not quite the same thing as having policies for a nation and a plan for how to implement them. Donald Trump is no Nazi. He is much too capricious and unstable for that epithet.

While the candidate who became the president-elect cannot accurately be described as a Nazi, he can be described as being one who does not see. This squib will outline a few of the ways in which Donald Trump and the Trumpistas do not see.

Trump apparently does not see that his broad-brush negative characterization of some sectors of the population sets an example that others feel justified to follow. All over the country since the November 8 election there have been reports of Muslims, Hispanics and Asians being singled out and heckled, humiliated and told to leave the country. When this was pointed out to him by Lesley Stahl in an interview broadcast on the program 60 Minutes, Trump said he had no idea that such things were going on and was very sorry to hear it. One cannot help wondering how he could not see that his inflammatory rhetoric, repeated loud and often for more than a year of campaigning, would enflame people and encourage some of them to act out on the implications of what he said.
Trump apparently does not see that by kindling the fiery passions of his followers, he has made a substantial segment of the population feel less safe, less welcome, less included, more fearful, more unwanted and more vulnerable.
Trump evidently does not see how his frequent remarks on the appearances of women, his characterizing them as either “hot” enough to be ranked as a “10” or as not being capable of satisfying the sexual needs of their lovers or as “not looking presidential” has the effect of trivializing women, making them feel their only value is in their most superficial characteristics and overlooking their real accomplishments.
Trump clearly does not see that the underemployment or unemployment and the consequent precariousness of thousands of industrial workers has less to do with “disastrous” trade deals and an influx of immigrants “taking jobs” away from citizens than with increasing mechanization and reliance on robotics. He does not see that even if tearing up NAFTA and imposing high tariffs on American corporations that manufacture goods abroad resulted in those corporations returning to Ohio and Michigan and Indiana, only a fraction of the people who used to work on assembly lines and in mills would regain employment. If one observes a modern automobile assembly plant and compares it with films of assembly lines in the 1950s, one sees that a process that used to take hundreds of human workers now takes hundreds of robots programmed and maintained by a handful of highly specialized technicians. Trump does not see that he cannot possibly fulfill his promise to bring jobs back to the rust belt.
Similarly, Trump does not see that the former workers in the extraction industries have not lost their jobs because of burdensome governmental regulations aimed at protecting the environment, but because of a variety of other factors. As long ago as 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy was meeting with coal miners in West Virginia about increasing unemployment following in the wake of increased mechanization. Slowdowns in the fossil fuel industry have far less to do with environmental regulations than with increased technological efficiency that has resulted in overproduction; when supply exceeds demand, prices fall, and when prices fall, production slows down.
Trump does not see that abandoning, or refusing to enforce, the many environmental regulations that have been in place for the past few decades will surely result in the further degradation of a planet, the consequences of which will be both immediate and enduring for generations to come. He apparently does not see that a healthy biosphere is of inestimable value and surely far more important than the short-term financial superabundance of a handful of shareholders.
Trump apparently does not see that the focus on “Law and Order” (which is usually a euphemism for “Surveil and Punish”) has rarely produced the desired results. Prisons are already overcrowded and woefully inept at providing inmates with the resources needed to prepare them for being reincorporated into society on the outside. When the emphasis is on being tough on criminals and punishment and isolation rather than training and reintegration, it is no wonder that the recidivism rate in most American prison systems is unacceptably high when compared to prison systems in Europe. Very little in the American prison environment is either physically, emotionally or psychological healthy. (I will never forget one prisoner writing to me, “I cannot imagine hating anyone so much that I would make him eat the food we are served in this prison.”)
There is not yet reason not to believe that Trump does not see that being President of the United States is nothing at all like being a king, that a presidential cabinet is not a collection of loyal courtiers, that cabinet posts are not sinecures for one’s friends and relatives and that firing off angry tweets is no substitute for fielding questions from seasoned political reporters in a press conference. He also apparently does not see that newspaper and television editorials can provide valuable feedback that can help the captain of the ship stay a good course. Unless the future president can escape the gravitational field of his own ego, he will not see how much he, and the country he governs, stands to benefit from the humble act of listening to others.

In many ways it is not surprising that the United States is about to find itself being governed by a Not-See executive branch and a Not-See Congress, for all those people in office have been chosen by a Not-See electorate. The privileged too often do not see how life is for the poor, the marginalized, the different. Americans as a whole society as a rule do not see how people in other nations and the indigenous people of their own nation experience the world, and far too many Americans do not see that there is much to learn from the way that the overlooked peoples in their own country, and neighbors in the rest of the Americas, and Europeans, and Asians, and Africans and Antipodeans have found to make life sustainable and fulfilling for their populations. There are far too many Americans who do not see that the United States of America is not the greatest country in the history of the world, or even the greatest country in the present world, or even that the very idea of any country being the greatest country is an absurdity, a bankrupt conceit that precludes the possibility of being great, good or even adequate.

The time is still here—it has been here for my entire life—for the United States to stop being a Not-See empire and to open its eyes and minds and hearts and to join the rest of the human race.

Confession of a Libertarian Socialist

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 15:53:00 +0000

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.
—John Woolman (October 19, 1720 – October 7, 1772)

William James observed that most of us human beings preserve and defend the same framework of beliefs and views we learned as children and that we change them only when, in his famous phrase, “experience boils over.” That is certainly true of me, at least in the area of political views and social attitudes. In those areas, my beliefs have not changed much at all, and like reasonable creatures, I have managed to find reasons for maintaining the prejudices I acquired from my parents and grandparents. I do not expect my reasons to persuade anyone whose inheritance of bias was different from my own, but it is an interesting exercise to spell those reasons out from time to time.

Up for rationalization today are two convictions, namely, 1) that government interference in the lives of private citizens should be kept to a minimum and 2) that government regulation of corporate entities is necessary. This constellation of issues is what the On the issues website calls a Hard-core Liberal position. The view that individuals should tolerate everyone’s freedom, since different people make different choices on moral matters, deserves to be called Liberal, since the word “liberal,” after all, comes from the Latin word meaning “free.” But what On the Issues website calls Hard-core Conservative, the view that markets should be free and unrestrained by governmental interference, has historically also been called Liberalism. When Ronald Reagan was President, Americans tended to call him a conservative, while European (and French Canadian) newspapers labeled him an ultra-liberal. While such labels are interesting, at least until they become confusing and cumbersome, what I find more interesting is the reasoning that leads to one of these positions. Allow me, therefore, to make a case for Hard-core Liberalism, or what I prefer to call Libertarian Socialism.

The defense of Hard-core Liberalism or Libertarian Socialism requires defense on two fronts. The first thing to defend is belief in government-managed economy. Second, since this political stance rejects the totalitarian authority that state communism holds over individuals and thus rejects attempts to legislate personal morality, it requires a defense of the policy of keeping governmental intrusion into the lives of individual citizens at a minimum.

The principal reason for having some regulation of corporate enterprises designed to make a profit is that corporations are not persons and do not have as part of their nature a tendency to consider a full range of consequences of their decisions. Corporations, of course, do not make decisions at all. The people who manage them make the decisions, but when people who manage for-profit corporations make decisions, the only consequences they are charged to take into consideration are those that have an impact on the profitability of the corporation. They are not charged with taking into account the effect that their decisions may have on employees, on members of the community in which they are situated, on animals, or on the environment. Given that decision-makers for corporations are not expected to take consequences other than profits into consideration, someone other than the decision-makers for corporations need to be appointed to consider the consequences that the corporation’s pursuit of profits has on employees, the community and the environment. In most nations, governmental agencies are assigned the task of monitoring the engines of the economy, and that system usually works out rather well, especially when the governmental agencies are not corrupted by the vested interests of the corporations they are charged to monitor.

In the United States, as in most other countries, corporations have resisted being monitored. They have tried to weaken or even to eliminate regulatory agencies that are designed to make sure that the drive for profits does not have an overly negative impact on the community and on the earth itself. In the United States, perhaps more than in most other industrialized nations, this effort to evade effective monitoring has been successful. The results for the environment and for the human beings who must share the world with corporations have been, predictably, largely negative. The drive for profits that has been the raison d’être of the corporations has been a significant factor in the degradation of habitats for both wildlife and human life. That drive has also been a factor in the creation of an economy in which a handful of families have accumulated far more wealth than they can possibly use, while far too many families (and individuals who no longer have families in any real sense of the word) struggle to find adequate nutrition, shelter, healthcare, safety and education.

There is a deep and abiding injustice in the American economy, and no one—even those who are apparently doing well in this system—is served well by injustice. Injustice is unsustainable, and when the imbalance of resources reaches a tipping point, the result is often violent revolution and its ensuing chaos. It is really in the interest of the wealthy to live in a society in which no one lives in grinding poverty of resources and amenities. So long as the wealthy do not take the responsibility of looking after their own interests, there is a place for governmental agencies to look after the welfare of both the very wealthy and the very poor, and of everyone in between those two extremes. The so-called Hard-core Liberals tend to realize that, while the so-called Hard-core Conservatives tend not to.

Having made a case for government serving as the conscience of essentially amoral for-profit corporations, let me now try to make a case for government not serving as a conscience of essentially moral individual human beings. When I say that human beings are essentially moral, what I mean is that human beings are strongly inclined to form opinions about what kinds of deliberate actions are acceptable and what kinds are not. About many kinds of conduct—taking or damaging property that belongs to others, embezzlement, extortion, various forms of physical violence, taking the life of a human being who clearly wishes to stay alive— there is a broad consensus, and those proscribed behaviors become the basis of criminal law. There are many other kinds of behavior, however, that some people disapprove, while others do not, and about which no amount of argument is likely to change the minds of those who have an opinion. It is folly for laws to be passed making behavior in that category criminal, as was made abundantly clear soon after Congress passed the 18th amendment to the Constitution in 1919, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within the United States and its territories and the importation of intoxicating liquors into and their exportation from the country. That amendment was finally repealed by the 21st amendment in 1933, after the experiment in prohibition led to the thriving of organized crime, which supplied the goods that many people desired and found inoffensive. Attempts to prohibit or severely limit access to firearms, abortion and recreational drugs have had, or would have, similar results. Trying to legislate the prohibition of disapproved substances, services and items is rarely successful, as is legislation against sexual behavior that only some people strongly condemn.

During the administration of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau in Canada (in office 1968—1979 and 1980—1984), a phrase that one often heard was that government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation; during those years the Canadian government largely got out of the business of regulating the sexual conduct of individuals and of saying who could and who could not marry whom. It also greatly simplified divorce laws. Any couple who lived together for a year and wished to declare themselves as a married couple were considered married in the eyes of the law. Any couple that separated for a year and declared their marriage over was considered to have met all the requirements for a no-fault divorce, and whatever assets they had accumulated as a couple during the time of marriage was divided evenly between them, as was responsibility for supporting any children born into the marriage. Trudeau was leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and his attitudes in such matters were liberal and indeed libertarian. I lived in Canada during Trudeau’s years in office and came to appreciate the non-invasive nature of his policies.

In Canada, unlike the United States, marriage and divorce fall within the purview of the federal government, whereas the United States Constitution explicitly states that matters not made federal matters by the Constitution fall within the jurisdiction of the individual states; marriage and divorce are not made a federal matter, so they are left to the individual states to legislate. The jurisdiction, however, is immaterial to my position. The liberal position is that no government at any level should be in the position of imposing on all its citizens a particular decree in matters of marriage and divorce, consensual sexuality, abortion or recreational use of intoxicating substances. Those are all matters of individual taste, and taste cannot be successfully legislated any more than it can be settled by an appeal to reason or evidence. De gustibus non est disputandum.

As Jane Mayer has chronicled in her book Dark Money, a number of extremely wealthy families in the United States—families with the surnames Koch, Bradley, Olin, Mellon, Scaife—have for many decades sought popular support for their resistance to taxation and to environmental and safety regulations and to laws stipulating minimum wages for workers by suggesting, without evidence, that governmental regulation of the economy is necessarily linked to the limitations of individual freedoms. Any government that limits where an oil company can drill or what safety conditions a company must provide for its workers, they have argued, is also necessarily dedicated to enslaving its citizens and dictating every possible detail of their personal lives. In the view of these billionaires, there are exactly two kinds of society: laissez-fair capitalist economies in which individuals have maximal personal freedom, and regulated communist societies in which individuals labor under the burden of oppressive authoritarian governments. The very idea of a libertarian socialism, they have insisted, is a contradiction in terms. And despite the fact that a good many nations in Europe, Asia and the Americas have managed to cultivate successful libertarian socialist societies, a good many Americans remain convinced that such societies are logically impossible.

Some eighty years of billionaire-supported propaganda has been very effective in limiting the imaginations and perceptions of the American public. There are, however, signs that perceptions are beginning to change and that the Libertian Socialist or Hard-core Liberal view is being distinguished from the policies of authoritarian state communism and is being perceived by many as a viable form of government for the United States.

The US political landscape in 2016

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 23:46:00 +0000

Historical preamble

The people of the United States tend to decide that after eight years of one political party being in the White House, it is time for a change. Since George Washington took the office in 1789, it has happened only eight times that one party has headed the executive branch for more than eight consecutive years. Washington’s Federalist Party was in power for a total of twelve years, but after John Adams was defeated after one term by Thomas Jefferson, the Federalist Party never again occupied the presidency. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans held the presidency for the next twenty-eight years, as Jefferson, Madison and Monroe served two terms each, followed by John Quincy Adams serving a single term. Since Adams left office in 1829, no political party has retained the presidency that long, and no Democratic-Republican was ever elected again. After that, the Democratic Party has occupied the White House more than eight years just twice. Andrew Jackson and his successor, Martin Van Buren, led the executive branch for a total of twelve years (1829–1841), and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman held the office for a total of twenty years (1933–1953). The Republican Party has done somewhat better. They were in power for sixteen years from 1869 until 1885 with the presidencies of Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield and Chester A. Arthur, and for another sixteen years from 1897 until 1913 with the presidencies of William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. The Republicans had two further twelve-year runs through the presidencies of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover (1921–1933) and the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush (1981–1993). Since the 22nd Amendment was ratified in 1951, limiting a President’s tenure to a maximum of two terms, the election of Bush after Reagan is the only time a non-incumbent has been elected from the same party as his predecessor.

Applying the Pattern

If the 2016 election follows the pattern that has predominated since 1951, the Democratic Party will most likely lose to the Republican Party. If any one of the three candidates still actively vying for the nomination of the Republican Party as of March 18, 2016 manages to become the next President of the United States, the country’s change in direction will be noticeable. All three Republican candidates are promising to reduce or even eliminate most environmental regulations, measures that protect consumers from unscrupulous banking practices, and federal social programs aimed at providing aid to the poor and opportunity to marginalized. One candidate, Ted Cruz, has promised to eliminate the Internal Revenue Service altogether. These promises to “reduce the size of government,” if carried out, would fulfill the dreams of such anti-government billionaires as the descendants of Andrew Mellon, Fred Koch, John M. Olin and Lynde and Harry Bradley, who for decades have been generously funding lobbying campaigns against taxation, social security, welfare programs, and the regulation of the business sector, and pouring money into education programs that emphasize the values of a free-market economy. These lobbying and “educational” efforts have managed to convince numerous politicians, and the voters who vote for them, that taxation is a form of theft (or of punishment of the industrious and successful) and that welfare is immoral because it weakens those who avail themselves of it by making them dependent on handouts rather than industrious and self-reliant.

Although the incessantly repeated mantra of this year’s Republican candidates is reducing the size of government, there are some areas of life in which increased government is being called for. All of the candidates, for example, want to make the military significantly stronger and to deploy personnel and materiel to politically unstable parts of the world. The military is part of the government. Moreover, there is a shared will to expand the size and the powers of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and to “secure our borders,” and to enhance the ability of various other agencies to surveil and detain known or suspected “bad guys,” all in the name of making America safe. Some, but not all, of the current Republican candidates seem to be in favor of increased governmental regulations against same-sex marriage, although this effort is now being marketed as an effort to reduce government-imposed restrictions on the freedoms of religious people to manifest their biases against people whom they deem to be offensive in the eyes of God. There also seems to be a consensus that restricting the use of marijuana, even for medical purposes, is a desideratum; doing so everywhere in the nation, including states in which marijuana use is now legal by state law, would require increased power at the federal level. At the risk of oversimplification, the Republican theme appears to be less governmental control of non-human entities such as corporations and more governmental control of human citizens in almost all areas except their absolute and untrammeled right to bear arms.

Political plotting

Some time ago I wrote a post about an alternative to the outdated characterization of political views as left or right, and liberal or conservative. The so-called Political Compass plots political views along a horizontal and a vertical axis. The visitor to that site can take a quiz that then plots the visitor’s overall political philosophy on a Cartesian graph. The horizontal x-axis shows the degree to which one favors governmental regulation of the economy, with heavy regulation to the left and no regulation to the right. The vertical y-axis shows the degree to which one favors an authoritarian government, with heavy authoritarianism at the top and libertarianism at the bottom. On that way of plotting political views, a libertarian socialist (such as Noam Chomsky, Nelson Mandela or Dennis Kucinich) would fall in the southwest quadrant, while a more authoritarian laissez-faire free-market capitalist (such as all the Republican candidates and Hillary Clinton) would fall in the northeast quadrant. The Political Compass provides a graph of the 2016 Presidential candidates still in the race. On that graph, Hillary Clinton is almost as far to the right on the economic scale as the Republican candidates but significantly less authoritarian. (Not surprisingly, Donald Trump is near the top of the authoritarian scale; he is, however, somewhat to the left of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio on economic matters.) It is noteworthy that only two US presidential candidates (Kucinich and Bernie Sanders) who have run as Republicans or Democrats in the 21st century fall outside the northeast quadrant.

There is another way of characterizing political views on a website called On the Issues. The visitor to that site can take a quiz of twenty questions, the responses to which will show the visitor’s overall philosophical views on a diamond-shaped grid. It will also show the degree to which the visitor agrees with each of the political candidates from the two major parties, including those who have dropped out of the race or suspended their campaigns, and of other parties such as the Green Party and the Peace and Freedom Party. When I took the quiz, for example, the website calculated that I am 98% in agreement with Jill Stein of the Green Party, 90% with Bernie Sanders, 78% with Elizabeth Warren, 75% with Hillary Clinton, 63% with President Obama, and 3% with Donald Trump, Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz.

Like the Political Compass website, the On the Issues website scores the visitor’s quiz answers in two categories, which they call the Personal or Social Score and the Economic Score. A high Personal Score indicates a strong belief in personal and social freedoms, which manifests as a belief in tolerance for different people and different lifestyles, while a low score indicates a belief that one’s standards of morality and safety should be enforced by government. (My score was 100%.) A high Economic Score, on the other hand, indicates a strong belief in markets free of regulations, tariffs and other factors that limit free enterprise. A high Economic Score indicates a belief in personal responsibility for financial matters and a conviction that free-market competition is better for society than a planned and regulated economy, while a low score indicates a belief that a good society is best achieved by government redistributing wealth and making decisions about which programs are good for society. (My score was 0%.)

By taking both scores into account on a graph, a political label is generated. At the limits, a score of 0% on both the personal and economic scale—minimum personal and economic freedom—indicates what the authors of the website puzzlingly called a Populist view. Both National Socialism and Fascism are sometimes characterized as populist movements, so it might be more accurate to call the zero-freedom stance Fascism. The website’s authors call high score of 100% on both scales—maximum personal and market freedom—a Libertarian view. 100% personal/social and 0% economic is called a Hard-core Liberal position, while 0% personal/social and 100% economic is called a Hard-core Conservative position.

Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, both of whom scored 100% personal/social and 0% economic are labelled Hard-core Liberals. Hillary Clinton, with a score of 80% personal/social 10% economic, is also labelled Hard-core Liberal, as is Barack Obama (80%, 20%). In fact, every Democratic politician at the actual or aspiring presidential level discussed on the website is called a Hard-core Liberal, the differences in their scores being relatively minor.

There is somewhat more variety among the thirteen Republican candidates. Among Republican presidential candidates who have suspended their campaigns, Chris Christie is labeled a Moderate Libertarian Conservative (50%, 70%), while Rand Paul (60%, 90%) is called a Libertarian Conservative; Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson (both 30%, 80%) are Libertarian-leaning Conservatives; and Marco Rubio (10%, 80%), Rick Santorum (10%, 90%), Bobby Jindal (20%, 90%), Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham and Mike Huckabee (all at 20%, 80%) are all Hard-core Conservatives. Of the Republicans still actively contending for their party’s nomination as of March 18, John Kasich (40%, 90%) and Donald Trump (30%, 80%) are labeled Libertarian-leaning Conservatives, while Ted Cruz (20%, 100%) is the only remaining Hard-core Conservative.

That only two candidates from either party, Republicans Chris Christie and George Pataki, fall in the sector that the website labels Moderate is an indication of how polarized this year’s presidential campaign has been.

In a future post I will make an effort not only to describe but to defend the position that the On the Issues website designates Hard-core Liberalism.

Burn all the flags everywhere

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Wed, 24 Jun 2015 19:59:00 +0000

Ever since the tragic shootings in Charleston, SC on June 17, 2015 of nine African Americans at a historically important black church, there has been an animated discussion of whether it is appropriate to fly what is commonly known as the Confederate flag. Although it was never the flag of the Confederate States of America, the flag known as the Confederate flag has long been popular among white people in the states that seceded from the United States in 1860 and 1861, namely, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia. Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. To many African Americans, however, the flag is a painful reminder of centuries of slavery, followed by generations of racial segregation and systematic humiliation and marginalization at the hands of white people. In the wake of the racially motivated murders in Charleston, people all over the United States are arguing that the symbols of the Confederate States of America are divisive and racist and therefore no longer acceptable in a country trying to heal the deep wounds of a disgraceful past.

In following this debate, I have been struck by the fact that most of the claims made about the Confederate flag in the South could also be said of the star-spangled banner that waves over the state of New Mexico. The flag of the United States of America symbolizes the most recent in a series of conquests that this piece of land has experienced during the past five hundred years. The flag of the USA began to fly over New Mexico shortly after the the war of aggression that President James K. Polk initiated against Mexico in 1846. As a result of that war, in 1848 the United States of Mexico ceded Alta California (which included parts of the modern states of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming) and Santa Fe de Nuevo México (which included most of the modern state of New Mexico, and western Texas, the Oklahoma panhandle, and parts of Kansas and Colorado) to the United States. In 1848, the flag of the United States of America replaced the flag of the United States of Mexico, which in turn had replaced the flag of Spain when Mexico gained its independence on September 28, 1821. To many of the native Americans whose ancestors had lived in what the Spanish had called Alta California and Nuevo México, none of these flags planted by the descendants of Europeans was especially welcome.

During the sixty-four years between the time that New Mexico became a territory of the United States of America until it became a state in 1912, there was constant discussion in Washington, D.C. over whether New Mexico was fit to be admitted as one of the United States. Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana argued strenuously that the Spanish-speaking and Indian population of New Mexico were incapable of self-rule and must be ruled without their consent by Anglo Americans. It was the responsibility of Anglo Americans, said Beveridge, to educate and civilize the peoples of New Mexico, which of course meant teaching them English. Senator Beveridge’s opinion was shared by a succession of American presidents. President Zachary Taylor favored statehood for New Mexico, but his premature death in 1850 brought an end to presidential enthusiam for that prospect. The next twelve presidents, preoccupied with other issues, were at the best indifferent to New Mexico. President McKinley (1897–1901) was concerned that New Mexico would not be ready for statehood until the various “savages” in the territory were outnumbered by English-speaking Americans. His successor, President Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909), made no attempt to disguise his contempt for the Spanish, and he feared the Spanish influence in New Mexico had made the men of the territory far too effeminate to rule an independent state, while the Comanches and Apaches were considered untamed and recalcitrant obstacles to the advance of civilization. For a good many of the residents of the territory of New Mexico, the flag of the United States of America betokened a condescending paternalism that was used to justify the exploitation and colonization of the territory and its inhabitants, and statehood came as an indication that the territory had been fully conquered by English-speaking Euro-Americans. It is impossible to see the American flag flying in the state of New Mexico without being reminded of the racist and anti-Catholic attitudes behind the domination of the territory on the way to statehood.

Thinking about the matter even further, what is true of the Confederate flag in the South and the United States flag in the Southwest can probably be extended to every flag planted everywhere in the world (and on the surface of the moon). Flags are to human beings as urine is to canines. They claim territory and mark boundaries. They are by their customary usage symbols of domination, exclusion and exceptionalism. They indicate a willingness to fight to preserve the marked territory. While it can hardly be said that flags are themselves the cause of wars, they are certainly manifestations of all the underlying conditions of war. A flag says “Those who salute this piece of cloth belong here; those who do not should go elsewhere.” Flags—whether they be those of nations, states, counties, municipalities, corporations, educational institutions, religious institutions, rebel organizations, criminal syndicates or yacht clubs—are manifestations of the most animalistic and savage side of the human race. It is time to consider taking every flag ever designed off the flagpole and consigning it either to a bonfire or to a museum of horrors. And it is certainly time to evolve out of all the territorialism and competition for which flags stand.

Seventeen years after New Mexico became a state, President Herbert Hoover signed a Congressional resolution making “The Star-Spangled Banner” the national anthem of the United States of America. The song had been composed in 1814 after a crucial battle in the the Anglo-American War of 1812, the first war declared by the United States after it gained independence from Great Britain on September 3, 1783 . The anthem is a song about the nation’s flag and about American militarism. I first became uncomfortable singing it (and not only because it is a fiendishly difficult tune for anyone but a trained singer to carry) while I was an adolescent, and I have never been willing to sing it as an adult. The same is true of the pledge of allegiance to the flag. I simply will not say those words. It is my conviction that the age of nations must come to an end so that the human race can evolve beyond itself and leave itself behind—something it must do for its own survival.

Our War Against the Past

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 20:18:00 +0000

The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.—Edward Abbey

In 1966 construction was completed on the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. The beautiful Glen Canyon was flooded with waters that eventually formed Lake Powell, now the second largest artificial lake in the United States. The purpose of the dam was to generate hydroelectric power, a large percentage of which went to Las Vegas, Nevada to help keep that city’s bright lights illuminated all night and its fountains flowing around the clock. One of Edward Abbey’s best-known novels was a dark comedy called The Monkey Wrench Gang, which featured the antics of a team of environmentalists and anarchists determined to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam.

Throughout the time of the dam’s planning and construction, opposition was mounted by people concerned with the impact the dam would have on the delicate ecological system of the Colorado River, while advocates of the dam heralded the recreational revenue that the reservoir would provide, not to mention the electricity the facilty would generate. The argument was made that in its wilderness state, Glen Canyon was accessible only to a handful of outdoors enthusiasts capable of navigating the often-difficult Colorado River by boat or to a few hikers capable of the arduous walk into the remote area, whereas Lake Powell would be accessible to everyone via paved roads. To favor a handful of physically fit individuals who could visit the Glen Canyon wilderness over the thousands of vacationers who would visit Lake Powell, said the advocates of the dam, was elitism, perhaps even anti-democratic.

I remember the arguments well, for the effort to prevent the construction of the Glen Canyon dam was the first environmental campaign in which I participated, to the limited extent that I was in a position to act as a student in high school. My father, one of those hardy few who had gone through Glen Canyon by rowboat, was much more involved than I in the opposition campaign. The completion of the dam was felt as a bitter defeat within our family. (Little did I know then that many more would follow.)

Despite my taking sides against the construction of the dam, no doubt heavily influenced by my environmentalist father and all the literature of the Sierra Club that lay on coffee tables around our house, I did experience a conflict over the issue mentioned above. It did make sense to me that Lake Powell would bring pleasure to a large number of people, and I had just enough of a Hedonic Utilitarian streak in me that I was then not quite able to find a good response to the charge that wanting to preserve the wilderness for a few was a form of elitism. I knew that I personally strongly desired for the geological record of the canyon’s wilderness to remain intact, and I knew that I thought that leaving the flora and fauna of that region intact was more important than the opportunity for hundreds of vacationers to race around an artifical lake in speedboats. But why should preference be given to what I personally desired when so many other people clearly had different desires?

Five decades after the completion of the Glen Canyon dam, I find myself once again wrestling with the same issues and taking the same side in the seemingly endless war against the past being waged by denizens of the present. And although I have taken sides, I still experience an intellectual conflict lurking beneath my unambiguous emotional clarity. The war is being waged on many fronts. I will mention only one.

I was born and spent my youth in New Mexico, a land that has been populated for at least ten thousand years by various peoples. Europeans began coming relatively recently, around 1540, and they promptly claimed the land for Spain. As a New Mexican of European (mostly English) descent, I have always felt it important to learn as much as possible about all the peoples who have been in this land before my own ancestors came in the 1930s. No doubt this feeling was reinforced by the strong influence of an uncle who spent most of his adult life studying the archaeology of the ancestral Puebloan people of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona. It has always been axiomatic to me that the Euro-Americans have a moral responsibility not to obliterate the traces of those who first settled this land and learned how to survive the challenges of an arid region that only begrudgingly tolerates human occupation. Like most things that are axiomatic to a person, that conviction of moral responsibility is not something I have questioned very deeply. My instinct is, whenever possible, to leave traces of the past intact, whether it is the relatively recent human past or the billions of years of geological past. Even my decades of Buddhist indoctrination in the principle that everything is impermanent have not made much of a dent in my instinct not to let the past slip entirely into oblivion.

Always encroaching on the past is the present and the future (or at least present fantasies about the future). People in the present desire petroleum, natural gas, uranium, copper and various other resources found in the lands that were once occupied by the ancestors of the Pueblos, then by Athabascans migrating from the north and Numic migrating from the Great Plains. Extracting these resources requires building roads, digging and drilling the earth and leaving large waste deposits and scars, all of which degrade or destroy the archaeological evidence of past settlements and, to a lesser extent, the geological record.

One part of the Southwestern United States in which this conflict is strongly felt is southeastern Utah. Elected Senators from the state have said that the the stark landscape of the region has no use other than to provide raw materials for manufacturing and the fuels needed to provide the energy for manufacturing. Preserving the history of the area—especially the history before Europeans settled the region—is not a high priority for those who wish to stimulate the industrial economy. Preserving wilderness is, in their view, a job-killing enterprise and a power grab on the part of bungling bureaucrats in Washington.

There are thousands of recorded archaeological sites in southeastern Utah, and it is estimated that those recorded sites represent about 10% of the sites that are still in the area waiting to be catalogued. Obviously not all of them can be preserved. In fact, archaeological resources are so strained that only a tiny fraction of the recorded sites will ever be studied. Archaeological study is limited not only by a lack of adequate funding and a paucity of qualified archaeologists, but also by the fact that the most probable descendants of the Basketmaker and early Pueblo people who lived in the Four Corners area from 2000 to 800 years ago do not necessarily want their ancestors studied by outsiders. Many tribes, for example, forbid DNA analysis of human remains, probably because such DNA studies as have been done have shown that the Pueblos probably came from Asia rather than being created in North America. Further DNA studies could (but probably would not) show that the ancient peoples in the Four Corners area are not really the ancestors of the modern Zuñi and Hopi and Keres people after all, and a finding like that that would conflict with the oral histories those people have carefully preserved for centuries. Moreover, some tribal elders say their ancestors abandoned their former settlement sites for a reason, and they want those abandoned sites to return to nature. Perhaps, some may say, the past is really none of our business. It should just be allowed to slip away while we pursue those things that really are our business.

Although I have had several decades to find ways of convincing people who do not share my views on the importance of preserving evidence of how those who came before us lived their lives (and how the earth was before much of anything was alive on it), I still have nothing to offer but what many would probably deem feeble sentimentality. But supposing some good reasons could be found not to lay waste to traces of the past, the question arises as to who should do the preserving. Since the time of Theodore Roosevelt, preserving wilderness and historical monuments has been the responsibility of federal and state governments. Those who follow Edward Abbey’s anarchist sentiments might find it alarming that governments involved themselves in such business. After all, Abbey wrote

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

And

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

Such sentiments as these could easily come from the mouths of today’s Tea Party Republicans and Libertarians.

The most obvious response to such anarchist convictions is the observation that if governments do not take measures to conserve wilderness and historical sites, it is unlikely that anyone will. As Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, government should do only those things that only government can (and is willing) to do. Protecting wilderness and historical sites is a perfect example of something that only government can do.

Private enterprise is unlikely to find any economic incentive to pursue archaeological or historical research or preservation of wilderness, and in the absence of economic incentive, private enterprise is unlikely to find any incentive at all. People with a strong ideological bias might sponsor research that finds evidence to support their particular dogmas—one thinks, for example of the wing of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History sponsored by David H. Koch, the message of which is that every time there has been climate change in the past, the human race has evolved to a higher level (leaving the viewer to conclude that climate change, and anything that brings it about, is therefore good).

Leaving the interpretation of the past only to those with vested commercial or ideological interests is not much of an improvement to leaving archaeological evidence of Buddhist Afghanistan in the sole custody of the Taliban or leaving the physical remains of Akkadian and Assyrian civilization in the care of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). If wilderness and artifacts of early human settlements are to be kept intact for the present and future generations to study and contemplate, no one is better suited to carry out that mission than the National Park Service, the National Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. That said, what remains to be seen is whether we who live here now will have the collective will to give our government the power it needs to preserve the past for the future.

Are you listening, Mr Boehner?

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 00:04:00 +0000

Americans have entrusted Republicans with control of both the House and Senate. We are humbled by this opportunity to help struggling middle-class Americans who are clearly frustrated by an increasing lack of opportunity, the stagnation of wages, and a government that seems incapable of performing even basic tasks. — John Boehner and Mitch McConnell

Speaker of the House John Boehner and current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell often state the importance of listening to the American people. When they emphasize the importance of listening, I am assuming they are stressing the importance of carefully considering all the many points of view expressed by Americans, and not only the opinions of those who make substantial contributions to the triumphant political party and those who can be counted on to vote for candidates who have been captured in the gravitational field of Messrs. Boehner and McConnell. Taking them at their word that they listen to American people, I am taking the liberty of writing this as an American person. I shall express my perspective on the state of our nation by offering a commentary to an opinion piece published in the November 5, 2014 Wall Street Journal by Mr. Boehner (R., Ohio) and Mr. McConnell (R., Kentucky).

Looking ahead to the next Congress, we will honor the voters’ trust by focusing, first, on jobs and the economy. Among other things, that means a renewed effort to debate and vote on the many bills that passed the Republican-led House in recent years with bipartisan support, but were never even brought to a vote by the Democratic Senate majority. It also means renewing our commitment to repeal ObamaCare, which is hurting the job market along with Americans’ health care.

First, it may be worth taking into consideration that many Americans find other issues every bit as pressing as the economy, especially given that when politicians talk about the economy, they are nearly always talking about that aspect of the economy that is measured in returns for investors in the stock market. A broader view of the economy also takes into account the level of wages for people who must sell their labor to make a living, the kinds of employment benefits available to workers, and the environmental sustainability of producing goods and services. It is disappointing, therefore, to see Messrs. Boehner and McConnell draw attention to their commitment to repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (which they choose to call ObamaCare). This is a matter on which the American people do not speak univocally. Many have been able to afford health insurance for the first time in their lives, thanks to that Act; those people may like to see the Act strengthened in various ways rather than repealed. Not everyone is in favor of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and those who are not contented with it are troubled by it for very different reasons. Some of us were hoping for a single-payer government-managed health insurance plan similar to what the citizens of Quebec enjoy; others would prefer to take their chances on remaining uninsured. Surely, when American opinion is so diversified, a more cautious promise to the American people would be to examine the PPACA carefully, rather than to repeal it altogether.

Secondly, it is worth mentioning that there were many factors involved in the undeniable dysfunction of the Senate. No small factor in the paralysis of the Congress was the tactic, repeatedly used by Republicans, of using filibuster to make debate impossible. The lack of a cooperative spirit in the Congress has by no means been one-sided. It takes at least two parties to participate in the condition commonly called gridlock. A common perception among American people of all political persuasions is that hardly anyone in the Congress is willing to put partisanship and ideological posturing aside. It is fundamentally dishonest for anyone in Congress to lay all the blame on those who sit on the opposite side of the aisle from themselves. It is the childish name-calling and sloganeering that many of the American people find distasteful about Congress. It is encouraging to hear a promise to remedy that infantile behavior, but the promise is unlikely to be fulfilled if all the newly empowered members of Congress can say are such things as “For years, the House did its job and produced a steady stream of bills that would remove barriers to job creation and lower energy costs for families. Many passed with bipartisan support—only to gather dust in a Democratic-controlled Senate that kept them from ever reaching the president’s desk.” The American people deserve better political analysis than that sort of one-sided finger-pointing.

We’ll also consider legislation to help protect and expand America’s emerging energy boom and to support innovative charter schools around the country.These bills include measures authorizing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which will mean lower energy costs for families and more jobs for American workers…

Given that estimates for the number of permanent jobs that the Keystone XL pipeline will create vary between 35 and 50, it may be worth giving priority to developing solar and wind power. The pipeline is designed to transport crude from the oil sands of Canada, an operation that has had devastating consequences for the environment in Canada. Moreover, importing fossil fuels only encourages continuing their use at a time when climate scientists around the world are warning that irreversible damage is likely to ensue if alternatives to fossil fuels are not developed around the word immediately. The continued use of coal, natural gas and petroleum for energy production may have very short-term advantages, but their use is an example of ways in which the current generation is living at the expense of our children and grandchildren and further generations to come. The Republican caucus has repeatedly shown sensitivity to the moral bankruptcy involved in this generation’s prospering at the expense of generations to come; the call for a review of entitlement programs demonstrates Republican concern for generations to come. While a review of entitlements is indeed overdue and will no doubt require making difficult and unpopular decisions, it is to be hoped that concern for the future will not be limited to that issue but will also include environmental issues.

More good ideas aimed at helping the American middle class will follow. And as we work to persuade others of their merit, we won’t repeat the mistakes made when a different majority ran Congress in the first years of Barack Obama’s presidency, attempting to reshape large chunks of the nation’s economy with massive bills that few Americans have read and fewer understand.

Helping the American middle class is an excellent idea. During recent decades, wealth and opportunities have been diminishing for the middle class, and even more so for those at the bottom of the economic ladder, while the wealthiest have been prospering at unprecedented levels. The playing field of the American dream has been dramatically tilted in favor of the millionaires and billionaires, and everyone else is suffering. Changing that situation is urgently required. It is encouraging to know that the new Congress will make reform of the plutocratic system that has evolved in America since the Reagan years a priority.

Also encouraging is the promise—if it is kept—to design shorter bills that deal with only one issue and that Members of Congress can read and understand (for it is far more important for the lawmakers to be able to read and understand bills than it is for the general public). The practice of attaching irrelevant amendments and earmarks to bills as a tactic may be politically advantageous in the short term, but the long-term economic and political consequences can be catastrophic. The time for refraining from such practices and returning to more streamlined, straightforward and honest legislation is long overdue.

Messrs. Boehner and McConnell list several other priorities, some of which deserve careful consideration.

The insanely complex tax code that is driving American jobs overseas;

Presidential candidates have been promising since at least the mid-1970s to simplify the tax code. Attempts to do so have been constantly thwarted, largely by successful lobbying campaigns aimed at preserving provisions that individuals and corporations with vested interests find to their advantage. One can only wish the newly elected Congress luck in reducing the insane complexity of the code. It may also be worth exploring what other factors are driving international corporations to base their operations overseas rather than in America. Laying all the blame on the current tax code smacks of oversimplification.

Simplifying the tax code may be one of those tasks best accomplished not by trying to please the American people but by laying aside ideology and working in a bipartisan way. What is needed is for the Congress to figure out what is necessary and what is possible, to draft legislation and then, with the help of the Executive branch of government, to explain the solution to the American people and explain why the solution reached is to everyone’s long-term advantage.

Health costs that continue to rise under a hopelessly flawed law that Americans have never supported;

Health costs are bound to rise in a for-profit system. Opportunistic pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers of medical appliances, clinics and other healthcare providers have learned that people who are desperately in need of care are willing to pay handsomely to have their health restored. Rather than viewing healthcare as a potentially profitable business, it is time to view it as it is viewed in most other industrialized nations—a government-provided service that should be universally available to all legal residents of a country.

It is false to say without qualification that Americans have never supported the current law known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Many Americans did, and still do, support it. Many of those who did not support it were disappointed that it did not include a single-payer option. Public opinion on this matter has been truly divided, and that must be acknowledged if any progress is to be made. Simply claiming that Americans are united in their opposition to the current law is a misrepresentation of the facts and does not manifest the kind of bipartisanship and integrity that everyone hopes will characterize the newly elected Congress.

A savage global terrorist threat that seeks to wage war on every American;

This is an issue that must be examined honestly and in some depth. It must be asked why some people are so displeased with America that they are prepared to visit violence on Americans and on people from countries that cooperate with America. Simply characterizing other people as savage is not a good beginning at finding a way to bring their anger to an end.

The United States of America is the largest military presence on the planet, and the leaders of the United States have not always used military power well. US military operations in foreign countries have not always been altruistic, and have not always been welcome. It is not at all surprising that the US is perceived as a colonial power and as a bully. Our collective response to threats has nearly always been to use force, and the constant use of force is a significant factor in alienating people in other countries. It is not that the United States has enemies so much as that the United States has policies that turn friends into enemies. Bringing an end to the global terrorist threat can only begin by honest and careful reflection on what kinds of policies have turned other people hostile and made them resort to measures that terrify us. No enemy can ever be pacified until we have collectively made an attempt to understood what we have done to make them hostile towards us.

An education system that denies choice to parents and denies a good education to too many children;

This is so vague as to be nearly meaningless. While it always seems pleasant and benign to offer people choices, it must be asked what kinds of choices are being talked about here. Are we talking about giving people a choice to have their children taught in Spanish or Arabic instead of English? Are we talking about giving people a choice to have their children taught a particular religious mythology instead of the findings of science? Are we talking about giving parents the option to have their children taught the speculations of conspiracy theorists instead of the historical perspectives of mainstream society?

It may well be that it is not so much a lack of choice in curriculum that is depriving children of a good education, but other facts such as poverty and its attendant problems of malnutrition and homelessness. There are more children living below the poverty level in the United States than in any other industrialized country. For far too many children in this country, poverty stands as an insurmountable obstacle to getting any kind of education other than what they learn on the streets. For them, offering choices in curriculum and pedagogical style is meaningless, since all choices are equally out of reach to too many citizens and legal residents of the United States.

Excessive regulations and frivolous lawsuits that are driving up costs for families and preventing the economy from growing;

This is another example of an oversimplification. Surely there is far more to rising costs than excessive regulations and lawsuits, and surely regulations and lawsuits have consequences other than simply driving up costs. Some costs go up because of a scarcity of resources; others go up because of greed and opportunism on the part of those who provide goods and services; others go up because of the lack of real competition in the marketplace. Most of the regulations that exist nowadays were designed to prevent abuses to consumers, abuses of workers, and abuses to the environment. While it is no doubt true that many regulations fail to offer the full protections they were originally designed to produce, the remedy to a poorly designed regulation is to replace it with a better-designed regulation, not simply to jettison regulation altogether.

As for lawsuits, it is really the Judicial branch of government that has the task of deciding which lawsuits are frivolous and which are legitimate. That sort of thing is not for Congress to decide. Just as it is not in anyone’s interest to have judges legislating from the bench, it is also not in anyone’s interest to have legislators passing judgment on matters of law. Lawsuits are, and should be, legal. Leave it to the courts to decide when a legal lawsuit has merit and when it does not. That is the Judicial branch’s job.

A national debt that has Americans stealing from their children and grandchildren, robbing them of benefits that they will never see and leaving them with burdens that will be nearly impossible to repay.

Early Americans such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine stated that government is for the living and not for the dead, by which they meant that no generation has a right to live in such a way that subsequent generations will not be able to live at approximately the same level of flourishing. Very few people today would argue against the claim that the decisions that the current generation of Americans are making will saddle the future generations with almost unbearable burdens. The impact of our collective lifestyle on the environment has already been mentioned. Current fiscal behavior is also in urgent need of addressing carefully and honestly.

By far the greatest amount of wasteful expenditure in the world today, and especially in the United States of America, is money put into the military. Finding a way to trim the swollen budgets of the military is the most urgent economic task before the nation today. Finding a way to bring the military budget down to a more modest and reasonable size would reduce the debt and make money available for education, healthcare, providing shelter for the homeless and taking care of the physically and mentally disabled. Spending money for those constructive endeavors instead of for the essentially destructive endeavor of preparing for military campaigns on foreign soil may well be the single best way to improve the American economy.

In closing, let me point out that the turnout in the 2014 election was only 36.4% of all eligible voters, which is the lowest voter turnout since 1942. Those who voted in 2014 have collectively expressed their preferences in local elections, but an aggressive attempt should be made to research what the priorities are of the 63.6% of eligible American voters who chose not to cast votes in the 2014 elections. It may be worth trying to learn why nearly two-thirds of voters chose not to make their voices heard. It is no doubt true that the American political system has become dysfunctional in many ways, and one of the manifestations of the malaise is the apparent indifference, and perhaps even despair, of the American people. Many of them seem to have given up hope. It is time to give all Americans, and not just those who write large checks to support their favorite political party, a truly good reason to hope. A first step in offering that reason to hope is for those in power to listen.

Aging gracefully

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Mon, 04 Aug 2014 22:11:00 +0000

“At 15, I set my heart on learning. At 30 I knew where I stand. At 40, I had no more doubts, at 50, I knew the will of Heaven. At 60 my ears were attuned. At 70, I follow my heart’s desire without crossing the line.”—Confucius

Although I am increasingly reluctant to watch news programs on television—one can stand to see only so much bloodshed and tragedy—, I still have the habit of watching the evening news on PBS or one of the three networks I knew as a child: ABC, CBS or NBC. Watching the network news stations entails seeing a good deal of advertising. Watching which products are advertised with the evening news makes it clear that the networks have learned what kinds of people watch their news programs. Almost all of the products advertised are aimed at the so-called Baby Boomer generation, the folks who are most likely in the market for Viagra or Cialis, or products that ease the pain of post-menopausal sexual intercourse or arthritis or that relieve the symptoms of enlarged prostate or leaky bladders or indigestion, or products that minimize the effects of osteoporosis, or products that hide or eliminate or prevents wrinkles or double chins or bags under the eyes. The advertising one sees on the network news suggest two social trends that are separate from one another but collectively somewhat troubling. One of the issues is troubling to many older people, and the other is (or ought to be) troubling to everyone.

To begin with the social trend that is troubling to many people over the age of 60 or so, there is a perception that young adults do not know what is going on in the world. Some years ago I taught a course in reasoning and critical thinking, one of the required core courses for all undergraduates at my university, and one election year I decided to focus on the quality of argumentation found in political campaigning and in the official platforms of the various political parties (Republicans, Democrats, Green and Libertarian). In one of the first classes of the semester, I asked the class how many of them read the New York Times. None. Los Angeles Times? Wall Street Journal? Christian Science Monitor? USA Today? The local newspaper? None. Well, I thought, perhaps newspapers are not as popular as periodical news magazines, so I asked how many students in the class read Time Magazine. None. Newsweek? The Economist? Foreign Affairs? Mother Jones? The National Review? The New Republic? None. Well, I thought, perhaps students prefer watching television—although I had seen a Pew Research Center report that young adults were far less interested in television than their parents and grandparents were. So I asked how many students watched news on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC or C-SPAN. None. Finally, not having named a single news source that any of my students would admit to using, I asked where they went to get information about what is going on in the world. Students began calling out their favorite sources of news, almost all of them sites on the Internet. Of the sources they named, I had heard of only two: Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and The Colbert Report (both of which I had watched for a few minutes before flipping the channel to something that seemed a little more promising).

As the semester progressed, it was apparent to me that most of the students had a pretty good idea of what was going on in the world, combined with a fairly poor idea of where anything in the world is located and an even worse idea of what happened in the world before last Tuesday. With a few exceptions, their general knowledge of history and geography seemed to range from mediocre to abysmal, but they did seem to be acquiring fairly good information about current affairs. It’s just that their sources were mostly unfamiliar to me, just as my sources were unfamiliar to them. While somewhat discouraged by the general lack of knowledge about history and geography, I could at least feel encouraged that they were not consuming the deeply biased reportage that one finds on Fox News and MSNBC, although they were consuming the strange blend of reportage and entertainment that one gets on the Comedy Central programs. All things considered, I think I came away from the experience somewhat less alarmed by the younger generation than many people my age—I was born in 1945. On the other hand, I did not manage to convince many of my age peers that there is no reason to be alarmed by how uninformed today’s college freshmen are. (I learned it did not help at all to remind people of how ignorant and uninformed we all were when we were eighteen and nineteen, way back in the early 1960s. I can still recall, albeit with acute embarrassment, that when I, at the age of 18, picked up Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, I thought the story was unfolding in Africa. Perhaps I thought that because the novel is about, among other people, Sikhs, and the only Sikh I had ever met came from Uganda. It is now almost beyond belief to me that I ever could have been so abysmally ignorant of geography that I thought Pakistan might be in Africa, but I am guessing I was not alone in my generation in my general level of geographical ignorance. It is easy to forget at the age of 60 that one knew considerably less at the age of 20.)

While I am not particularly worried about the quality of information that the younger generation in particular is consuming, I continue to be alarmed at the very poor quality of information readily available to Americans of all ages. It is increasingly difficult for anyone of any age to sort information from spin, fact from prejudice, news from entertainment, and programming content from commercial advertising. American culture, not to mention the many cultures influenced by Americanism, has long been venal and consumerist. It is difficult to assess whether it is becoming more so than it was in the nineteenth century, but it certainly is not becoming less so. There has been considerable advancement in technology, but very little if any advancement in sophistication, culture or civilization. Collectively we remain imbeciles with ever smarter toys.

The second social trend that I’d like to comment upon, the one that is (or ought to be) troubling to everyone is the increasing refusal of Americans to age gracefully. Physical conditions that have always been associated with aging—lower libido and decreased fertility, slower metabolism, a general decline in the efficiency of all body parts, including all the internal and external organs—are increasingly being seen as diseases. They are given names such as Low Testosterone, Erectile Dysfunction, benign prostatic hyperplasia, and the names are abbreviated to easily pronounced phrases such as Low T, ED and BPH, and for every one of these conditions there is a raft of pharmaceutical products (most of which, as noted above, are advertised on the evening news), all of which have side effects that are arguably more serious than the “diseases" they are designed to cure, side effects that are written in print so tiny that no one over the age of 40 can read them, or spoken of so rapidly and in such soft tones that no one with any degree of hearing loss can understand them. American has produced a generation of elders that have replaced wisdom, perspective, experience and sagacity with a neurotic phobia of gray hair, white whiskers, baldness, wrinkled skin, sagging chins, baggy eyes, flaccid penises and dry vaginas.

People get old (except for those who die young). That is what happens when they stay alive for several decades. And as they get old, their bodies change. Instead of accepting and even celebrating those changes as an intrinsic part of life, American culture has chosen to revile those changes and turn them into opportunities to sell yet more unnecessary products. And then we complain that the younger generation does not respect us. Why should the young respect the elderly, when the elderly do not gracefully accept the natural occurrences of old age? As Confucius said, “If you would be respected by others, you must first respect yourself.”

We saw above what Confucius said about the course of his life. That was how old men in China saw things twenty-five centuries ago. The modern American septuagenarian says, “At 15, I was prescribed Ritalin. At 30 I was given Prozac. At 40 I began using Grecian Formula. At 50 I began Botox treatments. At 60 I required Enbril. At 70 I followed my heart’s desire with a little help from Viagra.”

Life in the southwest quadrant

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Sun, 16 Feb 2014 22:23:00 +0000

There's abundant evidence for the need of it. The old one-dimensional categories of 'right' and 'left', established for the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly of 1789, are overly simplistic for today's complex political landscape. For example, who are the 'conservatives' in today's Russia? Are they the unreconstructed Stalinists, or the reformers who have adopted the right-wing views of conservatives like Margaret Thatcher? (The Political Compass)

The designers of The Political Compass website make the case that rather than a linear political spectrum along which views, and the people who hold them, can be identified as left-wing or right-wing, what is needed is a more sophisticated tool that allows for distinguishing between managed-economy leftists such as Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (better known by his assumed name Joseph Stalin) and leftists such as Nelson Mandela and Mohandas K. Gandhi. What distinguishes these two styles of leftist, argue the authors of the website, is their differing attitudes of authoritarianism. While the Marxists who ruled the Soviet Union, China and North Korea were highly authoritarian and ran states in which individual citizens had little personal freedom, Gandhi and Mandela were communitarians of a different kind altogether who were strongly in favor of personal freedoms held in societies filled with ideological and demographic diversity. For the authoritarian leftists it is important not only to control industry, agriculture and the markets but also to control the access that citizens have to information and to impose a uniformity on thinking and opinion. For the more libertarian leftists, it is important to regulate corporations in order to protect citizens from the excesses of corporate greed but to protect the freedoms of individuals from governmental excess.

The authors of The Political Compass have devised a test, which enables visitors to the website to determine their own location on the political and social map. The horizontal axis of the map indicates one’s attitudes about how much governments should be involved in the economy and in markets; the left favors more involvement, the right less. The vertical access indicates one’s attitudes about how much governments should be involved in the personal lives of individuals. The higher one is placed on the vertical axis, the more one feels comfortable with governmental efforts to control the behavior of citizens, the more authoritarian one is; the lower on the axis one is, the more libertarian one is.

The Political Compass situates various political figures from world history on the map. Stalin and Castro occupy the northwestern quadrant, occupied by those who favor strong governmental regulation of both the economy and the behavior of individuals. The northeastern quadrant is populated by every Democratic and Republican presidential candidate since 1980, for all have been relatively laissez faire about the economy but relatively willing to manage ordinary human behavior. The differences between the politicians that Americans consider conservative and those they deem liberal are minuscule; American politicians collectively occupy a remarkably small amount of territory on the map as a whole. About this more will be said below. The southeastern quadrant is home to Ayn Rand and her followers, people convinced that government has no business regulating corporations and markets and also no business regulating such personal matters as marriage, sexuality, the use of drugs, access to abortion and other issues. The southwestern quadrant is occupied by those who favor some degree of regulation of the economy but relatively light regulation of personal behavior; this is where one finds names such as Gandhi, Mandela, and the Dalai Lama, along with such American politicians as Dennis Kucinich of the Democratic Party, and Jill Stein of the Green Party.

Looking at where nearly all the influential American politicians are clustered together, with hardly any room between the dots representing Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and very little room between them and Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill, makes it clear that in American politics most ideological differences are more imagined that real. The media do their best to make it appear as though there is an unbridged gulf between liberals and conservatives, but in fact they are all pretty much on the same page. That page is paid for by corporate special interest groups who spend billions convincing both consumers and politicians that the ideal society is one in which markets are unencumbered by regulations and people all have the same tastes and the same cravings for barely distinguishable products, most of them unnecessary.

American society is—perhaps always has been—essentially delusional. No delusion is more persistent than the conviction that Americans love freedom and have more of it than the citizens of any other country on earth and are eager to bring their beloved liberty to every region of the world. For at least a century and a half those who have controlled the wealth of the nation have tirelessly worked to convince the rest of us that there cannot be governmental regulation of agricultural and industrial production and distribution without governmental interference in the lives of people. Abridging the freedom of a corporation to pollute the environment and pay substandard wages and minimal benefits to workers is carefully presented as leading inevitably to limiting the rights of families to worship as they choose, live where they want to live, and own the weapons they need to keep criminals out of their homes. The attitude being fostered was summed up by Ronald Reagan in his often-quoted pithy mantra, “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem” and in his more verbose (for him) claim that “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government—lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.”

When it comes to limiting personal freedoms, poverty is far more effective at achieving that condition than governmental regulations. According to Jacob S. Hacker, a professor of political science at Yale University, “Most Americans (58.5%) will spend at least one year below the poverty line at some point between ages 25 and 75.” At any given time, 16% of Americans live in poverty, which is operationally defined as a condition of not being able to afford to buy goods and services commonly taken for granted by mainstream society. (Mainstream society arguably takes far too much for granted, but that is a subject for another essay). Poverty is a complex phenomenon that cannot possibly be reduced to a single cause, but there is little doubt that a significant factor in the rise in American poverty is the dramatic maldistribution of wealth in a society that has, since President Reagan’s administration, whittled away at laws and regulations designed to curb the insatiable greed and the feeble social conscience of most international corporations and the people who run them and invest in them. And yet many of the very people whose lives are pinched back by poverty are the most avid supporters of spurious claim that all governmental regulation of anything results in diminished freedom for everyone.

My score on the political compass test was -9.38 on economic matters; that is 93.8% as far to the economic left as the compass measures. On the vertical axis my score was -7.44; that is 74.4% as far to the libertarian side as the compass measures. That makes me an anti-authoritarian communist, pretty deep into the southwestern quadrant. So what would life be like if we south-westerners were to get the upper hand in this country? That may be the subject matter of future blog posts, but a quick sketch would look something like this:

Wages earned in exchange for labor would be taxed lightly if at all, and income gained through investments would be taxed rather heavily. Inheritance taxes would be higher than they now are, perhaps as high as 100%.
Education at all levels would be provided at no cost to the individual, and students would receive stipends to enable them to meet living expenses.
Health care would be provided to everyone at no cost to the patient, through revenues raised in taxes. Pharmaceutical companies and other health-product providers would not be allowed to realize more than a modest profit on their products. (Both these measures have been successful in keeping health costs low in the province of Québec and the Dominion of Canada).
Neither the federal government nor any of the states or municipalities would be empowered to pass laws concerning marriage that limit the gender or number of spouses that any one person can have. Any group of people living together for one year and deeming itself to be a marriage would receive all the rights now extended to a legally married couple. Divorce would be granted automatically to any married partners who ceased to live together and who wished their separation to be construed as a termination of their commitment to be married to one another. Marriage and divorce would both be purely de facto rather than de jure matters.
The criminal justice system would be oriented entirely toward reforming miscreants rather than punishing them. Sentences, therefore, would be dramatically reduced for all crimes.
Recreational drug use would be decriminalized, as would prostitution. Governmental agencies would be established to provide help to tobacco, drug and alcohol addicts who desired help in overcoming their addictions and to provide quality-controlled substances to those who chose to remain addicted.
All organized religious institutions would lose all tax exemptions and would be taxed at the same rate as all other commercial enterprises.

The utopian southwest-quadrant nation would be open to anyone who wished to live here, and those who did not wish to live here would be free to leave at any time. The institution of citizenship would for all practical purposes cease to exist. Many of the most expensive governmental agencies, such as the military, the FBI, the CIA, the TSA and the NSA would be significantly curtailed, as would such agencies as ICE. (A nation with open borders has no need of costly and wasteful immigration and customs enforcement). The elimination, or at least significant reduction, of all such agencies would reduce the amount of money the government needs to spend and thus make the tax burden on everyone less onerous.

I take the unofficial motto of my village—“Just South West of Normal”—quite seriously, although I have serious misgivings about the concept of “normal”.

The greatest obstacle to capitalism

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 18:30:00 +0000

Amazon.com is testing delivering packages using drones, CEO Jeff Bezos said on the CBS TV news show 60 Minutes Sunday.

The idea would be to deliver packages as quickly as possible using the small, unmanned aircraft, through a service the company is calling Prime Air, the CEO said. USA Today

Ever since the eighteenth century, capitalists have been charging full steam ahead to reduce the expenses of production by reducing the need for costly human labor. Human workers must be paid, and they are prone to organizing to demand higher wages, fewer working hours and employer contributions to retirement plans and health insurance. Replacing human workers with uncomplaining machines has always been seen as a good strategy for maximizing profits, and when total mechanization has not be feasible, the next best strategy has been to seek the least demanding human labor—newly arrived immigrants from poorer countries, workers who have entered the country without proper documentation and workers so desperate for a day's wages that they are willing to be paid a substandard wage “under the table.”

Ever since the early decades of the 19th century in America, capitalists, who have always had a far greater influence on lawmakers than citizens with limited financial resources, have fought against laws and regulations that provide for safer working conditions, better wages and limited working hours. Such statutes are traditionally characterized as socialist measures that somehow abridge the rights and freedoms of Americans and are therefore anti-American. Such rhetoric has been a standard part of capitalist culture since well before the American civil war and the abolition of slavery.

In today's culture, those who oppose such institutions as social security, medicare, the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act, minimum wage laws and laws requiring the payment of overtime never miss an opportunity to describe such measures as “job-killing”; the implication is that anything that adds to the expenses of providing goods and services will reduce the profits of a commercial entity, which will displease shareholders and ultimately result in the loss of employment opportunities for those who do not have enough capital to be shareholders and who must therefore sell their labor on the open market.

Strangely, when the CEO of Amazon proposes to deliver packages by robotic drones, the proposed scheme is not decried in the media as job-killing, just as it is not described as job-killing (or-people-killing) when 95% of the products a retailer sells are manufactured in unhealthy and dangerous working conditions overseas by workers who are paid scarcely enough to sustain life. Do not expect consistency in the rhetoric of capitalists, for they, like Walt Whitman, are large and contain multitudes.

If capitalists thought things through, they would quickly realize that human labor is not the only obstacle to maximum profits. Corporate executives demand compensations that severely drain a corporation's resources. For example, the CEO of Amazon is currently Jeff Bezos, whose net worth is estimated between $28,000,000,000 and $33,000,000,000. If his annual recompense could be eliminated, Amazon's profits could soar, and that measure would kill only one job.

Another enormous drain on a company's coffers is the body of shareholders, who expect dividends and ever higher values for the stocks they invest in. Eliminating all those expensive capitalist investors could lead to major savings and would not eliminate any jobs whatsoever, since investors typically do not do a lick of work for the corporations in which they invest.

Finally, a great deal of money could be saved by eliminating human consumers of goods and services, for those human consumers are prone to demanding satisfaction and are liable to demand their money back for unsatisfactory products and service, and, in extreme circumstances may even sue a company for real or imagined damages.

Clearly, the human being is the greatest obstacle to capitalism. Eliminating human beings as workers is only the first step in a perfect capitalist economy. The next step is to replace corporate executives and boards of directors and all those pesky shareholders with computer programs, and to replace consumers with purchasing robots. Money could simply be transferred electronically from one bank account to another without any human intervention. Moreover, if human beings were eliminated altogether at both ends of the business transaction, there would be no need for any goods or services. It is only human beings who demand such things. If a corporation did not have to make products or provide service, it could realize a 100% profit. Nothing is more profitable than charging a price and giving absolutely nothing in return.

Meanwhile, in the perfect capitalist economy all the human beings could live like traditional Buddhist monks, covering their nakedness by sewing together rags salvaged from rubbish heaps and burial grounds, eating fruit that had fallen from trees and animals that had died from falling off cliffs, owning nothing whatsoever and traveling everywhere on bare feet. If the Buddha was right, that lifestyle would make everyone maximally happy, once they stopped imagining they needed more. The world of capital could keep on transferring funds from one account to another indefinitely with no interference from human beings, and human beings could live simple and contented lives on the earth without the burden of worrying about economy, and they would leave few scars on the environment.

There, I have solved nearly all the world's problems in this squib, and it has cost no one a single penny. I'm glad to have been of service.

Freedom

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 03:53:00 +0000

I love walking in the mountains, because it reminds me what an illusion freedom is. Walking along a mountain path, I feel free, but when I reflect on how much choice I actually have to go this way or that, my choices are severely restricted. The contour of the land will allow only a few limited options, and the vegetation on the land restricts those options even further. My age and physical condition furnish more restrictions. When all that is taken into account, I find I have the freedom to continue going forward where progress is possible or to turn around and go back pretty much the way I came. There is no real alternative to following the path I am on, a path that has been worn into the landscape by countless human beings traipsing over the land for the past four thousand years or so, those human beings having followed the paths worn by animals, who followed the route of water, which went where it went because of the declivity and the placement or rocks strewn along the escarpment some forty thousand years ago by a volcano. The feeling of freedom is undeniably joyful, but it is almost entirely a figment of my imagination. And realizing that, I can't help wondering whether it is a vain imagining, one that could be discarded without much effect. And I can't help wondering to what extent the illusion of freedom while walking in the mountains is an example of freedom being largely an illusion in most other areas of life.

People go where animals have gone, and animals go where water has gone, and water goes where it can go. This metaphor has been used for years by moral philosophers. Every action makes a path, like water running down a hill, and once the path is made or deepened, it increases the likelihood that future actions will follow a similar course. The deeper an arroyo becomes, the less likely it is that water will flow anywhere else but in that arroyo, and the more deeply entrenched a habit becomes, the less likely it is that the owner of the habit will act otherwise. If one becomes a saint (or an arhant in Buddhism), the good habits are said to be so deeply entrenched than acting sinfully (or in Buddhism unhealthily) becomes impossible. It is also said that people can become so deeply habituated to unhealthy actions that they can no longer even aspire to act wholesomely. The very idea of freedom in such cases becomes meaningless, or at least inapplicable.

Even in the vast area between the extremes of the perfect saint or the complete sinner, freedom may well be either an illusion or an excuse. None of us wants to think of our actions being motivated by factors largely out of our control, so we prefer to think of ourselves as free. When others act in ways we find annoying, the itch to retaliate arises, but we feel it would be unjust to retaliate against someone whose actions were motivated by factors beyond his control, so we invent his freedom to justify our treating him in ways we would not want to be treated. The invention of freedom makes it possible to regard others as criminals, as evil-doers who have chosen to act in ways that land them in prison or, in extreme cases, in the hands of an executioner. Rather than thinking of those whom we label as criminals as people who have fallen victim to circumstances beyond their control, the tendency is to see ourselves as the victims of deliberately bad people who have chosen to torment us with their behavior. Seeing others as beings who have a very limited range of choices and who are pushed into conduct by forces they poorly understand and over which they have no control would frustrate our longing to seek revenge on those whose conduct is annoying. And so we imagine their freedom and then insist the imagined is real.

Selling people the illusion of freedom is highly profitable. Manufacturers of products spend vast sums of money convincing the public that their lives would be better if they owned a product or partook of a service, and then they say “We are simply providing people what they want to have.” Manufacturers of environmentally destructive automobiles say they are merely providing people with the kinds of automobiles they want to have. Makers of health-destroying processed foods claim they are providing people with the what they like to eat and drink. Providers of tobacco and other addictive drugs say they sell the products that people want to buy. All these providers of bads (which they misleadingly call goods) claim that to interfere with the process of selling people products and services that worsens them would be limiting people's freedom. The idea of freedom has become an absolute. Limiting freedom (of anyone except those whose behavior we label as criminal) must be seen as an evil. The economy depends on seeing freedom as an absolute and the abridgment of freedom as an evil.

How free is any of us? How much do we really want to be free? How many of us would like to be free of the prisons we build for ourselves by owning property and dwellings and modes of transportation? How many of us would like to free ourselves from the slavery that takes the form of selling our labor to people who use it to provide unnecessary products and services to others? Who would like to be free of the social obligations they create by accepting help from others? How many people are living exactly the life they have always dreamed of living? One person in ten? One in a hundred? One in a million? And of those who are living the life they have dreamed of living, how many would still want to live it if they knew the consequences their way of living has on others? How much knowledge of reality could they endure before their fantasies of freedom became unsustainable?

People who speak of freedom frighten me. People who imagine that the countries in which they live offer the most freedoms alarm me as much as any delusional person alarms me. Delusional people are unpredictable. Unpredictable people act in ways that I find annoying. But logic gives me no choice but to accept their unpredictable behavior. They are not free to think of themselves as anything but free, and I am not free to condemn them for being deluded.

Perhaps there are a few trivial and meaningless ways in which people are free. I don't know for sure. I suspect, however, that hardly anyone has more than one percent of the freedom she would like to think she has.

Feel free to disregard everything I have said. I had no choice but to say it.

Rethinking America

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 03:46:00 +0000

Listening to the debates among the candidates contending for the nomination as the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, I have been struck by how many references there have been to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. There seems to be a feeling, among some candidates at least, that these documents are unambiguous and that one can simply read them and understand immediately what the law is without any further interpretation. One gets the feeling that some candidates feel that much of the history of the Supreme Court has involved replacing the constitution with new laws rather than arriving at legitimate interpretations of the guidelines provided in the document. One candidate, Newton Leroy Gingrich, has even suggested he would, as president, feel free to ignore court decisions he disagreed with and perhaps even impeach judges whose decisions he found objectionable.

All this talk of the constitution has made me wonder whether the problem of current American politics has been properly identified. It could well be that the source of the deep divisions that have paralyzed America's legislators is the Constitution itself, since that document was the product of legislators who were incapable of seeing eye to eye on how the nation could be governed. Although it would admittedly be a big task, it might be time to put the Constitution of September 17, 1787 into the nearest shredder and start all over again trying to provide a more workable set of guidelines in order “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” If a new American constitution is written, I would recommend making a few minor changes in the structure of the country. A few of the suggestions I would make are the following:

Abolish the states. The very idea of trying to unite states was wrong-headed in 1787, when the only states were Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, all of which are clustered together on or near the Atlantic coast. Now that the nation that grew out of those twelve states whose representatives signed the constitution in 1787 has fifty states that cover many times as much territory and have over one hundred times as many people as in 1787, the prospect of uniting them all is incalculably more difficult than it was as the nation was just getting started. The task of running the country as a country is hampered at every step by the existence of states with artificial boundaries, many of them so large that there is very little common ground within those boundaries. If one looks at a state such as Colorado, just to give one example, it is obvious all four of its borders were drawn on a map with a straight-edge rather than following natural geographical features. The eastern third of the state is prairie, the middle third is mountainous terrain, and the western third is a mostly arid terrain of mesas, canyons and hills. All three of these regions have different ecosystems, different economies and different demographics. What is now called the State of Colorado is an absurd monstrosity, an outrage to both reason and emotion. And Colorado is but an example of a kind of absurdity that is multiplied across the expanse of land between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.

Once the monstrous fiction of a state is removed, dozens of now-untractable problems will immediately disappear. Gone will be the conflict that now exists between federal laws and state laws. In the absence of state laws, there could be (as in Canada) a single set of federal criminal and civic laws. People who favor reducing the size of government should welcome the total elimination of fifty state legislative bodies, and people who favor the reduction of the tax burden should welcome the complete elimination of all state taxes. Much of the waste and redundancy that cripples the United States of America would be eliminated immediately by the elimination of states. (Of course, if there were no states to unite, the name of the country would no longer make sense, but it should not be difficult to find a new name for the more streamlined and much-improved country. It could be called Atlanto-Pacifica.)
Abolish the Senate.The Senate exists only because the founding parents could not agree on whether each state would be represented in the federal government by a number of representatives proportionate to its population or each state would have equal weight just by virtue of being a state. (This whole issue was made even more complicated by the fact that some states that had a large number of human beings living in them, most of whom were slaves, wanted slaves to count as represented population, even though they could not vote to choose their representatives.) If there were no longer any states, there would be no need for equal representation among them, and hence no need for a Senate. Again, people who feel that government has grown much too large should be overjoyed at the prospects of eliminating one of the two bodies that make up the current Congress.
Abolish the office of President. The office of President of the United States (POTUS) is surely the second most ridiculous political idea in the history of governance, the first prize going to the office of Vice President of the United States. No country needs a president elected separately by the people, let alone a president elected by an electoral college. A country does need some kind of leadership (unless it is a country run on Quaker principles), but a prime minister will suffice. If the House of Representatives were structured more like a House of Parliament, then the leader of the party with the most elected representatives would automatically be the Prime Minister. A Prime Minister appoints a cabinet of elected members of parliament, who may be, but are not required to be, of the same political party as the Prime Minister. The cabinet is both an executive branch and a legislative branch.
Abolish an electoral cycle with fixed periodicity. Rather than having elections every fourth year, elections should be called as they are in all countries that have a parliamentary system. It should be the law that a government in power must dissolve parliament after five years of rule, but there would be provisions for the ruling party to call elections more frequently than that, and there should be mechanisms in place for the opposition parties to have motions of non-confidence that would force an election if governance is going badly. In order to reduce the amount of time and money wasted on political campaigns. elections should be held no more than thirty days after parliament is dissolved. In an age of rapid communications, thirty days is ample time for a political party to inform the voters of its platform and for the voters to evaluate the platforms they are asked to consider.
Reconstitute the Supreme Court. If judges continue to be appointed by the party in power, they should be appointed for a limited amount of time, say, a non-extendable term of eight years. If judges are elected by the people, as perhaps they should be, then they should have to stand for election every time there is a parliamentary election.

These are a few of the structural changes that could be made to enable a more efficient and streamlined and much less costly form of government to emerge in the country now called the United States of America. If the Constitution of 1787 is retired and replaced with an improved document, many of the amendments to the current constitution, including the Bill of Rights, would also be retired. Many of the ideas now rather poorly and ambiguously expressed in the Bill of Rights that came to be attached to the original constitution of 1787 could be expressed more clearly. The ambiguous amendment calling for the separation of church and state, for example, could be replaced by a provision declaring that there be absolutely no reference to any sectarian religious dogmas within the Parliament or Supreme Court or in federally funded educational facilities or health care providers, but guaranteeing that no individual ever be limited in his or her choice of religious views and practices, so long as those practices do not violate the criminal laws of the nation.

There are other reforms that I personally would recommend, but some of them are controversial, and I do not wish to enter into controversial issues here. They can wait for another communication. Suffice it to say for now that it seems perfectly obvious that the Constitution that has been in place since 1787 is no longer a fit instrument for effective government. It was never particularly good, but as times have evolved its few good points have ceased to be as good as they once were. It's time to bring an end to the United States and to replace it with a constitutional democracy more like those in most European countries and in such countries as India, Korea and Japan—or our next-door neighbor, Canada.

Gaps

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 21:12:00 +0000

A sign that always caught my eye in the Toronto subway system was a warning that said “Mind the gap.” I think it may have been a warning to people that there was a space between the train platform and the floor of the subway car. But to me that gap was never much of a menace. I was more concerned about other gaps.

Everyone seems to be talking these days about the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. In November 2010, The Consumerist reported that between 1995 and 2005, the average CEO pay went up 298% while the average worker's pay went up 4.3%. Notes published by Prof. G. William Domhoff, entitled "Who Rules America: Wealth, Income and Power" claim that in 2007, 42.7% of America's financial wealth was controlled by the wealthiest 1% of the American population, 50.3% by the next 19%, and only 7.0% of the nation's financial wealth was controlled by the remaining 80% of the American population. This distribution of wealth has held steadily since the time of President Reagan. An article on economic inequality claims that the Forbes list of billionaires shows that the three wealthiest people in the world (Bill Gates and Warren Buffett of the United States and Carlos Slim Helú of Mexico) together have more wealth than the combined wealth of the 48 poorest nations in the world. The economic gap has deservedly attracted quite a lot of attention. But that is not the gap that I wish to talk about in this squib.

There is another gap that has become increasingly evident to me during the past several months, largely thanks to the debates among aspiring candidates for the Republican nomination for president of the United States. This gap is more difficult to characterize and therefore to quantify than the inequality between the financially richest and the poorest people. For lack of a better term, let me call this yawning inequality the civilization gap. By civilization I mean a whole range of human virtues beginning with a basic knowledge of science and the humanities (history, geography, economics, literature, the arts and so on). I also take civilization to include skills in critical thinking and what people commonly call wisdom—the ability to discern realty from fancy and to make good practical decisions grounded in fact and arrived at by weighing evidence carefully. And of course I take civilization to include compassion, generosity of spirit and empathy. In short, civilization includes the four traditional cardinal virtues of wisdom, justice, self-restraint and courage and at least the theological virtue of love. The opposite of virtue, of course, is vice, and a commonly referenced list of vices in Western literature is the list of the seven deadly vices of pride, anger, greed, gluttony, envy, lust and sloth. My observation, then, has been that so far the Republican candidates have displayed a remarkable deficiency of civilized virtue, and what I suspect is that the candidates display that deficiency largely because they are supported by a substantial sector of the American public that is also lacking in wisdom, a sense of justice, self-restraint, courage and compassion but is driven instead by pride, anger and greed.

The Republican debates have had a number of chilling moments. Chris Matthews recalled several in the October 21 episode of Hardball. There was the cheer that came up from the crowd when it was announced that while Governor Rick Perry of Texas has governed, there have been 234 executions of prisoners, more than any other governor in modern times. Governor Perry also earned hoots of approval when he stated that there is no compelling evidence that global warming is taking place as a consequence of gas house gases being introduced into the atmosphere as a result of human use of fossil fuels. There were the shouts of “Yes!” when Senator Ron Paul was asked whether he would let someone who could not afford private health insurance die rather than be given treatment at the taxpayers' expense. Then Ron Paul was jeered when he said, rightly, that Muslim terrorists had attacked the United States because the United States had established military bases around the world and interfered in the politics of other countries, and not because terrorists hate American freedom. There was a cheer from the audience when Herman Cain said that anyone who is unemployed has no one to blame but himself. All those outbursts of cheering and jeering from the audience exhibited a lack of civilization that can be found in every region of the country. While the Republican debates are what have helped me be more aware of the civilization gap, I do not at all think the gap is an especially Republican phenomenon.

There are two dimensions of the civilization gap that I would like to reflect on here. The first dimension is what might be called an education gap, and the second is what I'll call the decency gap. As an educator, I am confronted on a daily basis with evidence of how poorly informed most Americans are about international events, geography, history, mathematics and basic science. One obvious educational gap is between those who have a post-secondary education and those who have stopped their formal education at or before graduation from high school. The cost of college education has become prohibitively high for most people, with the result that many low-income people in the United States have no opportunity at all for higher education, and many others graduate with debts that will follow them around for most of their lives. There is, however, a less obvious education gap. Even among people with advanced degrees, there is a gap between those who have a good grasp of both the humanities and the sciences. Specialization in most fields has resulted in an increase in people who are highly trained in a narrow field but poorly informed in others. It is not unusual to find teachers and scholars in the humanities who know next to nothing about science, and scientists who have a poor command of topics in the humanities. In a complex world in which many decisions are made democratically, it is alarming when most people are called upon to cast their votes on issues about which they have little or no basis on which to make an informed decision. The alarm registers even higher when one considers how vulnerable most people, thanks to their ignorance, are to being manipulated through misinformation. In a democracy of dunces, most of the power ends up in the hands of liars.

What I have called the decency gap is a manifestation of a pandemic lack of sensitivity that goes mostly unobserved because people have become so, well, insensitive. (Insensitivity by its very nature is one of those maladies, like ignorance, a main symptom of which is that those who have the disease are unaware of having it.) A few recent examples may help clarify what kind of thing I am thinking about here.

On the PBS News Hour of October 21, 2011, footage was shown of the last few moments in the life of Colonel Mu'ammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Qaḏḏāfī. The images, taken by a cell-phone camera, showed the terrified colonel being beaten, humiliated, cursed and pushed by an angry mob. As part of the same news story, the colonel's bloody corpse was shown lying on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by Libyans taking photographs of it with the mobile telephones. Apparently, producers of the News Hour found it sufficient to warn viewers that the images they were about to see were graphic and violent. What is astonishing is that such images have become entirely unremarkable.

Television viewers were well prepared for al-Qaḏḏāfī's demise as a result of having seen similar photos of the hanging of Saddam Hussein and the assassination of Usama bin-Ladin. Indeed, people all over the world are routinely subjected on a daily basis to pictures of dead and often decaying bodies of war casualties, traffic accidents, political assassinations, homicides, and victims of earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricane, tornadoes and floods.

What is gained by showing such images? In what way do they aid the understanding of the world in which we live? What purpose do they serve, aside from satisfying the morbid curiosities of viewers? What is the effect of satisfying people's morbid curiosities on a daily, even hourly, basis? Do the producers of visual news and entertainment productions consider such questions? Do they give a second thought to the cultural climate they are helping to promote? I am not sure whether it would be more disheartening to learn that television producers give these matters no thought at all or to to learn that they have thought about it and find their policies warranted. Denying that regularly subjecting viewers, even at the safe distances provided by a television, to the effects of violence has the effect of creating a more coarse and insensitive cultural milieu seems as reprehensibly ignorant as denying that burning fossil fuels creates the conditions of accelerating degradation of the air, the land and the waters of our planet. In both cases, it is a matter of a cultivated ignorance that is willfully maintained in the interest of making money at all costs.

These are dangerous and unpredictable times. Part of what makes them so dangerous is that there are too few people minding the gaps.

Green Tea Party policy on national holidays

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 22:46:00 +0000

The Green Tea Party of the United States of The Milky Way recommends that all national holidays be abolished on the grounds that patriotism is unseemly, undignified and irrational, and because the celebration of nationhood serves to divide the human race into artificial and unnatural divisions that too often lead to warfare, closed borders and other forms of inhumanity.

It seems fitting for the Green Tea Party to add this plank to its platform on July 4. For some reason, Americans have gotten into the habit of celebrating July 4, 1776 as the date when America was born. It is celebrated by those who don't know any better as the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, nothing important concerning the Declaration of Independence happened on July 4, 1776. The document was approved on July 2 by the Second Continental Congress, which John Adams predicted would be the date on which the birth of the new nation would be celebrated. It was not signed by anyone until August, and people dribbled in to add their signatures until November. So the document that Americans worship—the one with all the signatures—did not yet exist on July 4, 1776. ~~(For more on common misconceptions and erroneous beliefs about the declaration of independence see the National Geographic website.)~~

Surely it makes no difference whether anything important happened on July 4, 1776. Patriotic sentimentality has little to do with historical accuracy. July 4 came to be the date for celebrating Independence Day in the United States, and to insist on any other date would be as pointless as insisting that Jesus of Nazareth was probably born in the spring rather than in December (if one is a Western European) or January (if one is an Eastern European). What's in a date? It's really the content of the Declaration of Independence that matters, not the date when it was voted on, or the date on which the first signature was affixed, or the date on which the final signature was affixed.

It is really with the contents of the Declaration of Independence that we of the Green Tea Party of the Milky Way have the strongest misgivings. The Declaration gets off to a very bad start in the opening paragraph.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

An axiom of the Green Tea Party it that it is never necessary for one people to dissolve its political ties with another. It is not only never necessary, it is rarely even advisable. While it is generally speaking a rash and foolish move for one people to dissolve its political association with another, it was certainly an unnecessary and imprudent move for the Second Continental Congress to make. That it was foolish is evidenced by the fact that it led to a war that was financially ruinous and that resulted in pointless deaths and injuries and loss of agricultural and industrial productivity. So while political separation from England was frivolous, the resultant war was a calamity from which it took the new nation decades to recover. Moreover, the entire sordid affair set a dangerous precedent of hot-headed recklessness rather than cool reflection and careful deliberation. The sooner the whole sorry mistake of the American revolution is forgotten, the better the United States, and indeed the entire world, will be.

After getting off to a most questionable and rocky start, the Declaration of Independence then ventures into unwarranted theological speculation with the following dubious claim:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This statement is so riddled with unsupportable assumptions that no rational man or woman could affirm it. First of all, no truths anywhere are self-evident. The very idea of truth is highly controversial. At best one can say that people concoct narratives to support their irrational desires, and the more improbable the narrative, the greater the temptation to call it self-evident or to attribute its authorship to a superhuman agency such as God. There is no evidence of any kind that men were created, so in the absence of such evidence, the authors declared it self-evident that men were created.

Not only were all men created, says the Declaration, but all men were created equal. That claim sounds appealing, but it can hardly be called a truth. It is at best a pious wish, a pathetic whimpering articulation of a desire that social realities could be other than they are. Nowhere in any society have all human beings had equal access to the resources of nature and human civilization. This sentence in the Declaration of Independence was penned by males, many of them slave-owners, hardly any of whom had any intention of including women in the political process, most of whom believed that only property owners should be allowed to vote. These were men who knew that not all human beings are in fact created equal, and most of whom would have staunchly resisted a society in which all members of the human race would be given equal access to nature's and human society's resources. The line was utter hypocrisy when it was written and remains so now by most people who recite it. It is a mantra falsely supposed to have magical powers.

If there is no evidence that all men were created, then there is surely no evidence that they had a Creator, let alone a Creator who endowed them with inalienable rights. There is no such thing as an inalienable right. Rights are dispensed by powerful human beings to those whom the powerful favor, and since the favor of the powerful is subject to change without notice, every right can be revoked with a simple act of pernicious will. The very idea of absolute rights is a farce, for all rights are contingent on the will of those who deign to tolerate some of the behavior of their fellow human beings. Rights are dispensed to those who pay tribute to those human beings who wield power over them. There is no justification for bringing the Creator into the picture, and nothing but unrealizable expectations can come from the mischievous claim that the Creator has endowed his creatures with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (Earlier drafts of the Declaration had spoken of the pursuit of property, but fortunately a more felicitous piety was inserted in the final draft, even though it is probable that most of the men present really did believe that God had given them the right to take whatever property they could from the Indians.)

Life is clearly not inalienable. Every being that is born eventually dies, and death is alienation from life. Even if it could be granted that there was a Creator, and that She granted rights to her creatures, surely it would have to be conceded that the only inalienable right of anyone who is born is Death. So the claim that the Creator endowed every creature with the inalienable right to life is plainly false. It is another example of a wish that reality could be other than it is.

Liberty is also quite obviously not inalienable. Every human society has some mechanisms available for depriving those who do not act to commonly accepted norms of proper conduct of their liberty to continue acting. Human beings are being alienated from their liberty all the time through incarceration, banishment, exile, shunning, and ostracism. Some alienation from liberty is rationalized by an appeal to questionable claims of justice, but nearly all such claims are barely disguised exercises of the capricious use of power. Liberty is always alienable, and it can be seen as a right only when availing to it does not disturb the selfish pursuits of human beings who are in power.

This brings us to the pursuit of happiness. That phrase is, at the very best, a platitude. Of course anyone can try to be happy. Nothing exists to prevent a person from trying to be happy. But the obstacles that stand in the way of anyone actually attaining happiness in anything but short and infrequent bursts are, for the vast majority of human and other kinds of sentient beings, insurmountable. Given the sheer misery of most of human existence throughout all of recorded history, it would be a cruel joke to say that people have an inalienable right to happiness, and it is a meaningless verbal flourish to say that people have the right to pursue that which they have almost no chance of attaining.

The first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence are based entirely on either unverifiable assertions or demonstrably false claims. After saying that the Creator endowed all people with inalienable rights, the Declaration goes on to declare that it is the purpose of government to secure these rights. (But surely, if the rights were truly inalienable, there would be no need to devise human governments to secure them. Wasn't the Creator supposed to take care of that? Didn't the authors see that the call for human government was an obvious contradiction to what they had just said about inalienable rights?)

Next the claim is made that whenever any government is destructive of the allegedly inalienable rights, then people have a right to overthrow that government. This is a very Confucian idea, of course. The early Confucians claimed that when the Son of Heaven fails to carry out the will of Heaven, then the people have not only the right but the obligation to overthrow the failed Son and replace him with a Son who is more reverential toward the will of Heaven. But whether such an idea is articulated by a Confucian or a Deist like Thomas Jefferson, it is little more than a rationalization on the part of those whose anger has boiled over to such an extent that they have taken it upon themselves to seize power from those who have it and to wield it over a different set of unwilling victims.

The Declaration of Independence was a triumph of rhetoric over reason that led eventually to a rupture in the bonds of love that ideally bind all human beings together and that bind human beings to all other forms of life and to all non-living forms in the universe. It was a bad document when it was written. It was voted on and passed precipitantly, and it led to a disastrous war. Why anyone would want to celebrate such a series of failures is beyond all comprehension.

For this reason, the Green Tea Party of America, on this July 4, 2011, hereby declares the celebration of July 4 an act of folly that serves no useful purpose. And with the abolition of this national holiday, the Green Tea Party also abolishes Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. If people wish to take the day off to barbecue dead animals, drink insipid American beer and start wildfires with fireworks, then let them do so in the name of the pursuit of mindless and transient pleasures, but not on the pretense of honoring noble principles.

Green Tea Party educational policy

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 19:56:00 +0000

Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill. (Marcus Aurelius)

Public education in the United States has always been fraught with political complexity. Consider the following facts about the history of public education in the United States.

There was no system of public education until the late 1820s.
The decision to provide public education was motivated by the thought that citizens in a democracy should be sufficiently literate to become informed about political and social issues so that they could make informed choices when voting. Since women did not have the right to vote in many states until the 19th amendment was added (passed by Congress June 4, 1919 and ratified August 18, 1920), public education was offered only to males at first.
Because it was widely believed that without a solid moral education, a person would not be capable of making good decisions in voting, moral education was seen as of the greatest importance in public education.
Because it was widely believed that there can be no morality in the absence of religion, it was decided that the Bible should be at the center of a boy's public education. But since the first amendment prohibits the establishment of a religion by Congress, it was decided that children would be taught no particular religious doctrines; each child would be allowed to interpret the Bible in his own way and to arrive at his own understanding of its moral teachings.
Almost immediately, there were major protests against the newly formed system of public education based on what was called non-sectarianism.

Conservative Christians claimed that the educational system showed a strong liberal permissive bias (because it gave freedom to students to interpret the Bible in their own way) and a Unitarian bias (since the doctrine of the Trinity was not allowed to be taught). Many leading evangelical Christians therefore threatened to refuse to pay taxes that would support schools that they could not in good conscience send their own children to.
Catholics claimed that the educational system showed a strong Protestant bias, since all students would be taught from an English translation of the Bible that was not approved by the Vatican. Moreover, a document from the Vatican declared that allowing people to read the Bible without the guidance of properly trained priests is deliramentum (folly, nonsense, madness). Many leading Catholics therefore refused to pay taxes that would support schools that they could not in good conscience send their own children to. (This issue became so heated at times that riots broke out. In the worst of the so-called Bible Riots, nineteen Roman Catholics were killed, and several Catholic churches were burned to the ground.)

The issue of public education has become even more complex now than it was in the nineteenth century. The demographics of the country have changed significantly with the result that a religious text associated with Christianity is no longer suitable as a basis for public education. Although 76% of the US population are people who identify themselves as Christian (51% Protestant and 25% Roman Catholic), 15% consider themselves as having no religious beliefs and another 5% say they do not know what their religious beliefs are. 4–5% of the US population identify themselves as following a religion other than Christianity. ~~(See source of these data.)~~ Taking societal and demographic factors into consideration, the Green Tea Party recommends the following policies for public education.

Given the importance of moral education, but taking into consideration the need to maintain a non-sectarian (and preferably non-religious) basis for morality, all students in public school should be exposed to a broad spectrum of the moral thinkers who have influenced human beings throughout recorded history. At the minimum these thinkers should include Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Mengzi (Mencius), Zhuangzi, Zhuxi and Wang Yangming.
Given the importance of historical context for any public policies, all students in public school should have a thorough grounding in the histories of ancient Mesopotamia and of all the continents on the earth.
Given the importance of religion in human history, every public school student should receive an education in the histories, beliefs and practices of all the major religions of the world. Given the breadth and depth of this topic, comparative religions should be taught every year of a student's educational career.
Given the importance of reasoning and critical thinking, every student should receive training every year in informal logic, formal logic and mathematics. This should be supplemented with a grounding in the theory and practice of scientific method.
Given the importance of knowing a human being's place in the natural world, every public school student should have a grounding in astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and geology, with an emphasis on the canons of reasoning and assessment of evidence practiced in each of these scientific disciplines.
Given the importance of understanding how laws are made and interpreted, every student in a public school should study some aspect of constitutional law, how bills are formulated and approved by the Congress, the functions of the executive branch and a history of Supreme Court decisions. Such education should be a part of every year of his or her educational career. Every student should also receive an education in state and municipal government.
Given the importance of languages as an access to cultures, and given the fundamental importance of multiculturalism in today's world, and given the ease with with young children learn languages, every student in an American public school should be taught, from the Kindergarten level to the completion of secondary education, at least the following languages: English, Spanish, and French, plus one Asian language, one African language and one native American language. (Given that Kindergarten is a German word, and given the importance of both the Germans and the Dutch in early America, every child should also learn German or Dutch, or at least Norwegian.)
Every child who is a resident of the United States should receive the basic education described above, and this education, and all educational materials necessary to carry it out, should be completely funded by federal monies. All students should receive allowances for transportation to and from school and for healthy food consumed during school hours. (Students caught eating Oreo cookies provided by Red Tea Party mavericks during school hours should lose their food allowance privileges for a week.)
The core curriculum should be determined by the federal government; no state or municipality should have the right to determine its own curriculum for any subject other than state and municipal history or civics.
No educational institution funded by public monies should have a sports team that competes with other institutions of learning. Monies now wasted on inter varsity sports should be diverted to exercise and fitness programs and courses in basic nutrition, which should be available to all students but required of all students whose BMI index places them in the overweight or obese range.
No person who has not successfully gone through the curriculum designed by the federal ministry of education should have the right to vote in any elections at any level of government unless he or she has passed an examination equivalent to that required of all naturalized citizens. (This is in keeping with one of the Green Tea Party's principles, namely, that unearned citizenship is a contradiction in terms.

Some Americans, especially those given to extraordinary levels of ignorance, may object to what they see as too large a role played by the federal government under a Green Tea regime. The official Green Tea Party response to such people is “Tough carrots!” Let people who have no interest in responsible democracy move to a plutocracy, where all their thinking is manipulated by greedy capitalists and where hardly anything is available but misinformation carefully doled out by people with vested commercial interests. As for America, may it become a democracy in which political decisions are made by representatives chosen by informed voters who have demonstrated their abilities to think critically and for themselves. That is, after all, what the Founding Fathers and Mothers had in mind.

Green Tea Economics

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Sun, 29 May 2011 22:27:00 +0000

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. Adam Smith (1723—1790)

A perfectly obvious observation that served as a point of departure in a previous post was that the desideratum of a balanced budget can be achieved only when expenditures do not exceed income. No serious economist believes the government's budget can be balanced by attending only to cutting expenditures or attending only to increasing income. What is needed is a combination of decreased spending and increased acquisition of public funds.

It is remarkable that hardly any figures in the American political arena have had the combination of wisdom and courage needed to point out that the most costly item in the American budget is not Medicare and Social Security (as Tim Pawlenty, John Boehner, Michelle Bachmann and hordes of Black Tea Party enthusiasts incessantly but inaccurately aver), but rather the military. The wastefulness of military spending has already been discussed on this blog site (and will be discussed again in the future). In this squib, the focus will be on how to increase governmental income.

So far, the public discussion of how to increase revenues has been focussed on raising tax rates for the wealthiest 2% of taxpayers, putting into place a national tax on purchases of goods and services, increasing the rates of taxation on inherited assets, and closing loopholes that enable corporations to write off business expenses so that they do not pay taxes on substantial portions of their profits. The Green Tea Party favors all those measures but notes that even if all of them were put into place, the increase in revenues would still be modest. What will be discussed here are other measures needed to increase revenues.

An axiom of economics so basic that even I have heard of it is that the wealth of any nation depends on three factors: population, productivity and ingenuity. The greater the number of people actively participating in a nation's economy, the higher their level of efficiency, and the more skilled a society is in delivering goods and services to their intended markets, the more overall income there is in that nation; the more income there is, the broader the base that can be taxed.

A major weakness in the United States economy is that the country wastes human resources. The country fails to increase its population of workers, and it fails to make good use of the population it has. To rectify these two types of waste, the Green Tea Party proposes two policies: increasing legal immigration and decreasing the prison population.

Increasing legal immigration

There are millions of people around the world, many of them in the Americas, who are ready and able to come to the United States to work and to start up small business enterprises. What prevents them from entering the US workforce are unrealistically strict quotas on immigration. Perhaps the ideal solution would be to establish a pan-American economic union similar to the European union that would have a single currency like the Euro (called, perhaps, the Americano) and porous borders that would allow any citizen of any country in South, Central or North America to take up residency and work legally in any other country on the American continents. The ideal would be an economic zone in which anyone from Ellesmere Island to Tierra del Fuego could move freely. Under present free-trade agreements, only goods can move freely across borders. This policy serves corporations seeking markets, but it hamstrings laborers seeking employment.

While an American economic union would be by far the rational most solution, it is, precisely because it is rational, unlikely to succeed immediately. It may take time to implement, since some people will no doubt perceive that economic justice would erode their unfair advantages, and maintaining the unjust status quo will become a major preoccupation to them. So while North, Central and South America work slowly toward an economic union with a single currency, the United States can unilaterally increase its own labor force by making dramatic increases to immigration quotas. It makes no sense at all to build walls and fences and electronic surveillance systems across the border between the United States and Mexico to keep people out of the country who are eager to find honest employment and to provide labor that the United States desperately needs. The American economy would take a nosedive overnight if it were not for the millions of migrants who have come to this country to work illegally. It is time to recognize the American economy's indebtedness to those people and to make their presence in the country perfectly legal. There is absolutely nothing that eliminates crime more effectively than abolishing laws that make some behavior criminal. It is time to stop making seeking honest work, and doing honest work when it has been found, a crime.

Decreasing the prison population

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. 743 out of every 100,000 American people are in prison. In second place is Russia, with 577. In the United Kingdom 141, and in the Netherlands only 94, out of every 100,000 are in prison. According to an article published in 2008 in the New York Times, 25% of all the prisoners in the world are in the United States.

There are many factors leading to the fact that the percentage of prisons in the USA is eight times the percentage in the Netherlands. Two that deserve special attention are the lengths of sentences given for crimes, and the kinds of behavior deemed criminal. Both of those factors are linked to the fact that in many states, the running of prisons is done by for-profit private companies whose profits depend on a steady flow of customers for their beds. Accordingly the Green Tea Party recommends taking criminal law out of the jurisdiction of states and replacing it with a federal criminal code (similar to the one in Canada) with much shorter sentences for most crimes. It further recommends that all prisons be managed by the federal government and that no correctional facilities anywhere in the country be within the domain of private enterprise. Justice (like health care) is far too important to be entrusted to the hands of profit-seekers.

Reducing the lengths of sentences would only partly reduce the number of people in prisons. A larger factor would be to make significant reductions in the kinds of behavior that is considered criminal. It was mentioned above that seeking and doing honest work should never be made into a crime. (For that matter, it should never be a crime to cross a border and to take up residence in a country.) In 2009, the number of people arrested for drug-related crimes was 13,687,241. Nearly 20% of all inmates in American prisons are serving terms for felonious drug possession or trafficking, and the average length of sentences for drug felonies are only slightly shorter than the average length of sentences for violent crimes. Moreover, 17% of all those convicted for property crimes report that their crimes were committed as a direct result of seeking to find money to pay for drugs. Making drugs illegal makes them expensive, and making them expensive gives drug-users an incentive to commit crimes. People with drug addictions need treatment, not punishment.

Another source of human waste in the American prison system, aside from the unreasonably high number of people imprisoned for behavior that should never have been deemed criminal in the first place, is the scarcity of educational programs made available to prisoners. As a result of serving unreasonably long sentences for minor crimes, people coming out of prisons usually lack marketable work experience. Scarcity of financial resources has led in almost every state to a decrease in programs designed to educate inmates and give them marketable skills. As a result, the recidivism rate all over the United States is remarkably high. The Green Tea Party recommends that money (most of it saved by reducing the overcrowding of prisons by reducing the number of behaviors deemed criminal and by reducing sentences) be put into improving education and job training both inside and outside of prisons.

Decriminalizing international migration, decriminalizing drug use and trafficking, and shortening sentences are three measures that would result in a significantly larger workforce, which would in turn increase the tax base. The government's income could thus be increased significantly without any taxpayers (except for the wealthiest 2% of the population) paying higher rates than they pay now.

Generally improving the quality and availability of education would result in an increase in the productivity of the workforce. Educational reform will therefore be a topic for a future plank in the platform of the Green Tea Party.

Green Tea Party

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Fri, 27 May 2011 23:35:00 +0000

Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. (Henry David Thoreau)

Preamble

There is no political party in American politics that represents my interests. In saying that, I realize I am joining a queue that grows longer each day. Some disgruntled Americans have identified themselves with a movement called The Tea Party, so called because its policies are as loose and random as raw tea leaves. There may be some affinity between the twenty-first century Tea Party and the Boston Tea Party of 1773. The eighteenth century protest action that came to be called the Boston Tea Party was a protest against the Tea Act, which lowered the taxes on tea imported from Britain, thereby driving down the price of tea to consumers. Lower British tea prices endangered the business of smugglers who had been making a handsome profit by smuggling Dutch tea into the colonies and selling it at lower prices than British tea fetched. Rowdies paid by the smugglers threw a shipload of British tea into the harbor, and greedy criminals have been rousing the rabble ever since against any governmental policy that threatens their interests by passing laws and regulations that benefit ordinary people. The twentieth century Tea Party movement follows that original model much too closely for my tastes. I have little use for it.

The twenty-first century Tea Party movement, insofar as it has any focus, seems to be interested primarily in wringing its hands over governmental spending that would benefit ordinary people rather than a handful of billionaires. The allegation of some of its followers is that such programs as Medicare and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have the potential to bankrupt America and that they represent a governmental takeover of the healthcare system; apparently what the Tea Party Movers prefer is a continued takeover of the healthcare system by rapacious corporations that make fat profits by keeping the costs of poor-quality medical interventions artificially high. Be that as it may, one can have a certain amount of sympathy with the concern that the American government spends far more than it makes and is therefore running up a debt that could bring considerable inconvenience to future generations. If a concern with unsustainable levels of public debt is what makes one a Tea Party sympathizer, then I propose a new branch of the Tea Party that takes the interests of ordinary people and some of the better policies of the Green Party into account. Let's call this new movement The Green Tea Party.

The Platform

If a new political party hopes to sweep the nation in the next election cycle it needs a platform, which is a list of policies and promises that will be forgotten or ignored once the party gains power and finds itself besieged by highly paid and ruthlessly efficient lobbyists representing the major corporate interests that actually determine how the country will be run. The Green Tea Party's platform is still under construction, or it will be as soon as the planks and nails arrive. So far only one plank has come, but that's a start. As other planks and shims (and, of course, wedges) arrive, they will be announced in future posts to this blog site.

Balancing the budget

There is no hope of balancing any budget unless expenditures are equal to or less than income. A government's income is made up largely of various kinds of taxes and tariffs. Most reasonable people can be persuaded that it is to their advantage to pay taxes if the money raised is spent on programs that support the well-being of the population. For at least a century in the United States, governmental policies have resulted in spending that not only does not foster the well-being of the population but actually undermines it. The greatest single source of counterproductive spending is the military budget. Therefore, the most important bundle of expenditures to examine is the bundle resulting from the policies that result in the United States spending nearly half of all the money spent in the entire world on military enterprises.

The military is a twig on the executive branch of government. Its stated purpose is to defend the country. Arriving at a reasonable military budget requires coming to a clear understanding of what the United States needs to be defended against. Aside from natural events such as floods, hurricanes, tornados and earthquakes, the people of the United States are endangered by very little. No other nations are poised to invade the country and colonize it. (That has already been done by the Europeans, with quite a bit of involuntary help by African slaves.) The only human enemies that threaten to disturb the peace of Americans are those created by the unwelcome presence of the US military itself. The US has military bases in more than 130 countries. It also has a stockpile of expensive weaponry, some of it kept in the United States and some of it stored elsewhere, that could destroy most human life and that still costs a great deal of money to maintain. The Green Tea Party therefore recommends saving money by closing all military bases overseas, bringing all military personnel in foreign countries back to the United States, dismantling the entire arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, and reducing the army to a few thousand people trained to help victims of natural disasters. That would result in a reduction of government expenditures by about 35% of its current levels. If Wikipedia is anywhere near correct,

The U.S. Department of Defense budget accounted in fiscal year 2010 for about 19% of the United States federal budgeted expenditures and 28% of estimated tax revenues. Including non-DOD expenditures, defense spending was approximately 28–38% of budgeted expenditures and 42–57% of estimated tax revenues.

In addition to cuts in the military budget, The Green Tea Party recommends cutting all military aid to foreign countries and replacing it with non-military humanitarian aid to promote health and education in developing countries. This change would surely result in good will toward the United States, thereby reducing the resentment and hostility toward the country that has arisen through decades of interference in and exploitation of developing countries around the world.

It is impossible to take seriously any political party in the United States that does not make a dramatic reduction in the influence of the military a top priority. Some members of the other branch of the Tea Party (which, to distinguish it from the Green Tea Party shall henceforth be called the Black Tea Party or perhaps the Red Tea Party) agree that the current level of military expenditures are destroying the United States. In future postings, an attempt will be made to persuade them that the Green Tea Party has policies that make more sense than those of the Koch Brothers and other enthusiastic corporate sponsors of the Black Tea Party that have grown wealthy through entrepreneurship like that of the pirates in the eighteenth century who used to trade in stolen Dutch tea.

Taking stock of American progress

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 19:06:00 +0000

Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

— Henry David Thoreau

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. What might he think of the progress his country has made toward the vision he dedicated his life to realizing?

The way of looking at the root causes of human misery that has made the most sense to me is the Buddhist claim that all misery arises from some combination of greed, hatred and delusion. Although Dr. King did not speak in those terms, his vision can be seen as one of striving to bring about a society in which fewer of our actions are motivated by greed, hatred and delusion and more are motivated by generosity, love and wisdom.

Greed is alive and well in America, and since the time of Dr. King it has gone from being a motivation that people were ashamed of and tried to disguise to a motivation that they actively and openly pursue. American culture has become much more dominated than ever before in my lifetime by an ethic of making as much money as possible, acquiring as many possessions as possible and avoiding as much as possible sharing what one has with others. No politician dares to declare openly that he or she favors raising taxes for anyone in any form at all. Money that people acquire through selling their labor, through investments, through gambling, and through inheritance tends to be seen as money that they have earned and that is therefore theirs to do with as they please.

In conversations I have had with people who are opposed to taxation, an argument I have heard several times is that when people are taxed heavily by their governments, then they are less likely to give to charities. That observation is not borne out very well by statistics. In the United States, for example, a recent study published in The Guardian indicates that 60% of people in the United States make charitable donations, which qualifies the American people to rank 18th in the world, behind Malta (84%), the Netherlands (77%), the United Kingdom (78%) and such countries as New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, Switzerland and Denmark. According to the Worldwide Tax website, the tax rates for individuals in Malta, whose population ranked first in percentage of its population that gives to charity, are the same as those in the United States; in both countries, the maximum tax rate is 35%. In the second-ranking Netherlands, on the other hand, the maximum tax rate is 52%. In both Malta and the Netherlands, there is a high VAT or sales tax. The Dutch pay 19% VAT. Americans pay none; even in states and municipalities with relatively high sales taxes, Americans rarely pay more than 10% sale tax. The Dutch and the Belgians have very similar income tax rates and VAT rates, but only 40% of Belgians donate to charities. Japan has individual tax rates similar to the Dutch and Belgians, but only 17% of Japanese people donate to charities. South Africans, like Americans, have some of the lowest individual income tax rates in the world, but only 15% of South Africans make charitable donations. Clearly, there is no correlation between the amount of taxation in a country and a culture of charity. The reason why Americans rank no higher than 18th place in the world in charitable donations cannot be attributed to taxation rates.

Americans as individuals may not compare all that well with the citizens of other countries in their generosity, but how does the United States do as a nation? How generous is the United States government in giving foreign aid in comparison with other national governments? According to the Bill Gates Foundation, in percentage of its Gross Domestic Product given as foreign aid, the United States government ranks 22nd in the world, just behind Italy, Greece and Japan. Top-ranking Sweden gives nearly 1% of its GDP to poorer nations. The United States gives 0.19%, about one-fifth as much as Sweden, less than half the international average of 0.45% and well less than one-third the United Nations target of 0.7%. (Only five nations meet that UN target: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands and Luxembourg.)

Remarkably, Americans perceive themselves as being far more generous than they are. According to the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting website, in an article published in October 2005

Americans think about 20 percent of the federal budget goes toward foreign aid. When told the actual figure for U.S. foreign aid giving (about 1.6 percent of the discretionary budget), most respondents said they did not believe the number was the full amount….

It appears that generosity is not doing well in America, but delusion is still robust.

Something has been said about greed and delusion in America, but what about hatred? I am old enough to remember a time when some well-educated and well-respected Americans openly and without embarrassment expressed racist views. The sort of racism I saw on an almost daily basis in the 1950s is difficult for many young people today to imagine. Thanks in no small measure to Martin Luther King, Jr and other people who were involved in working for social justice, it is no longer the case that capable and intelligent people are kept out of universities, high-quality housing, corporate boardrooms, public office, and the voting booth because of differences in appearance and culture as a matter of public laws and policies. Overt racism, against African Americans at any rate, has given way to much more subtle forms of racism. Now, people who may be uncomfortable with the fact that an African-American family is living in the White House do not dare declare the reasons for their discomfort openly; instead, they make factually incorrect insinuations that the president was not really born in the United States and is thereby violating the US Constitution. Or they make the ridiculously inaccurate claim that he is a socialist.

The target of fear-driven exclusion has become more diversified than it used to be. A high wall is constructed across the Mexican-US border to keep out Mexicans and Central Americans, who are undesirable not because they speak Spanish and may have native-American ancestors, but ostensibly because they are willing to work for low wages and because they pay into a social security program from which they will never draw a penny. The animosity and fear and suspicion and ignorant stereotyping that used to be reserved for African Americans, Chinese Americans, Italian Americans and Irish Americans is now shared generously with Muslims. All things considered, America is not much less of a breeding ground for hatred than it was the day when Rev. King was assassinated.

Given that Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. dedicated his life to raising the awareness of Americans on issues of economic and social justice, and on the terrible consequences the war in Vietnam was having on all Americans and on the Vietnamese people, it is not at all difficult to guess how he might have felt about the directions in which the current Congress is headed. He would not be pleased to see Congress proposing that, in the name of fiscal responsibility, all funding to NPR and PBS be cut, and that more than one billion dollars be withdrawn from health centers and food assistance programs for low-income Americans, and that there be dramatic reductions in funding for education—both for the amount of money available to pay teachers and their aides and the amount of money made available to provide tuition aid for low-income students. He would especially not be pleased to see all those reductions in discretionary spending be made while the budget of the military remains bloated far beyond any kind of necessity. He would not be happy that the United States still has stockpiles of nuclear weapons, and military bases in more than 130 countries, and wars being conducted for the better part of a decade in two countries, and more than 110 Tomahawk cruise missiles being fired into Libya at the cost of $1.6 million apiece. These were not the policies and values for which Martin Luther King Jr lived and died.

On the 43rd anniversary of his assassination what might Dr King think of the progress his country has made toward the vision he dedicated his life to realizing? Realize the answer, America, and be ashamed.

Speaking as a foreigner

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 01:50:00 +0000

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
(L.P. Hartley, The Go-between)

L.P. Hartley's novel, The Go-Between, is written from the perspective of a man in his 60s who is looking back at one summer during his childhood. Looking at his own past from the vantage point of several decades of maturity, his past seems like a foreign country, a slightly alien setting populated by people whose actions and values are not quite like those of people of the present. This sense of foreignness is compounded by the fact that the main character is recalling a time when he visited a boarding school friend whose family came from a higher social class and much wealthier conditions than the protagonist himself came from. All the awkwardness of crossing the class boundaries of England at the end of the Victorian era—the incidents narrated in the novel took place in 1900—are explored in a narrative style that brilliantly captures the nostalgia of a man in his 60s looking back on the dawn of his adolescence, and the confusion that goes with having lived through events that are not thoroughly understood.

The melancholia of the The Go-between, published in 1953, anticipates the mood that comes over me as I think back on a past that has become something of a foreign country from the perspective of my current age and that was something of a foreign country to me even then. A time that combines that dual foreignness for me is Wisconsin in the 1960s, when I was a college student. Having lived most of my life in New Mexico and Colorado, I found Wisconsin more strange than I would have guessed. Although I had already had the experience of living for a year in a foreign country—Virginia—as an elementary-school pupil, I was unprepared for how strange some of the ways of the American midwest would feel to a young man from southwest. For much of the time I was there, I felt a longing to be closer to a place I could think of as home.

One day while I was in Wisconsin during the 1964 presidential campaign, a political campaigner came through town who had some connection with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). I made a decision to join a small group of other students in a minor demonstration outside the venue where this campaigner was speaking. I carried a placard saying “The House Un-American Activities Committee is un-American”—a slogan that admittedly lacked originality and imagination but one that adequately expressed my convictions.

Wisconsin had been the home state of the notorious communist hunter, Senator Joe McCarthy, a man whose name conjured up feelings of deep loathing in my parents' household; he was the very antithesis of everything my family most loved about America. While Senator McCarthy had no formal connection with HUAC, both McCarthy and HUAC had an obsession with the dangers of communism, many of them imagined. Many of the Wisconsinites who had admired McCarthy in the 1950s approved of HUAC and were passionately devoted to Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate in 1964. Like McCarthy, and like many members of HUAC, Goldwater was determined to dismantle the social programs that had been put in place by Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Goldwater campaigned against the so-called welfare state, an umbrella term that included social security, Medicare and most other government-managed programs designed to help people through hard times. Not surprisingly, Goldwater also opposed labor unions. He was a vehement opponent of the Soviet Union and was quick to point out similarities between Communism and any and all governmental programs designed to promote social and economic well-being. Goldwater carried only a few counties in Wisconsin in 1964, but the outnumbered Goldwater supporters made their presence, and the depth of their passions, felt.

As I marched around in a tight little circle carrying my anti-HUAC placard, a grandmotherly woman about half my height walked up to me and asked me my name and address. I told her. She wrote it down and then turned around in jubilation to a group of her companions and said triumphantly, “ I got one! We'll turn his name into the FBI!” Never had I felt more as though I had wandered into a foreign country. It was beyond my imagination, and certainly beyond my experience, that anyone would think that someone protesting against a governmental organization would be deemed in any way worthy of being reported to the FBI. While living in the foreign country of Virginia I had taken a tour of the FBI building and was assured that no criminal had ever escaped the grasp of the FBI, an agency that worked around the clock to protect innocent Americans from gangsters and hardened criminals. They said nothing on that tour of the FBI investigating Quakers and other peace makers, so how was I to know that granny might have meant what she said? The idea that a college student carrying a placard could be seen as a danger to the American way of life was so ridiculous that I could not helping bursting out laughing—even though I had been raised well and knew that it is rude to laugh at my elders. My laughter was returned with a scowl of unmistakable disapproval on grandma's face. I was, after all, an unwelcome foreigner, a stranger in her land.

That was 1964. From the perspective of 2011, 1964 is a foreign country. Thank God it is far way from here. They do things so differently there. In 1963 I went with an African friend to a dining room in a hotel to celebrate American Thanksgiving and was turned away by the maitre d'hôtel, who explained that my friend's presence would make the other diners uncomfortable. That happened in Wisconsin, not Alabama or Mississippi—lands as foreign to me then as North Korea. It is difficult to imagine such a humiliating event taking place in 2011. People are not turned away from public dining facilities for the color of their skin in 2011. That sort of thing happened only in such foreign countries as 1964, a foreign country in which it could not even be imagined that an African American could be elected president.

Until recently, I would have thought that many other of the ways of 1964 were quite foreign to the culture of 2011. I had assumed that the virulent anti-union and anti-Communist sentiments that motivated the Republican presidential candidate of 1964, who lost by one of the largest landslides in American presidential history and whose defeat was accompanied by the defeats of numerous conservative Republicans around the country, were as safely tucked away in the past as slavery, dungeons and inquisitions.

The Inquisition

I was eight years old in 1953, another foreign land in which people did things differently. One day I came into our small apartment and found my parents and several other adults lying on the floor, huddled up near the speaker of our radio. In those days, a radio was a large piece of furniture that dominated the living room; it was filled with vacuum tubes that kept burning out. Our radio console also housed a phonograph. All these adults were huddled on the floor straining to hear the sounds of a scratchy phonograph record, sounds that they could barely hear because the volume was turned very low. They were listening to a recording called The Inquisition, a satirical skit that had been made in Canada in which the McCarthy trials were being compared to the Spanish Inquisition. The adults laughed so hard that tears ran down their cheeks. I asked why they did not turn up the volume and sit in chairs like other adults I knew. My mother explained that it could be dangerous if the neighbors overheard what they were listening to. I did not know then about the concept of paranoia, but I thought she was being overly cautious. It was not until later that I learned that several of her friends had been actors and playwrights whose work had gotten them blacklisted. One friend had been involved in making a movie called Salt of the Earth, based on a true story about New Mexican minors who had fought to form a labor union and who had been beaten by thugs hired by the management of the mining company for which they worked. Writing such a play was sufficient cause for getting classified as an anti-American Communist sympathizer in the foreign country known as 1954.

The past is indeed a foreign country. No doubt the same can be said of the future. I am finding, however, that the present is no less foreign. Congressional representatives seeking to dismantle the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (known informally in some circles as “Obamacare”) come from a country whose ways are completely alien to me. The inquiry conducted by Rep. Peter T. King (R, NY) into radicalization in Islām is an act taking place in a country that can best be described as barbarian. The wall being built across the Mexican-US border, punctuated by the unconscionable failure of Congress to grant citizenship to the children of undocumented workers from Mexico and points south is a structure that, like the great wall of China, is a silent witness to a xenophobia that is entirely outside the moral parameters of my country. The land in which Glenn Beck reportedly had 3 million listeners, more than the 2.7 million who watch The News Hour on PBS, feels nothing to me like home; I am only slightly encouraged by Beck's rapid decline to 2.5 million viewers since last summer. The systematic assault on unionized labor in the public sector feels like an invasion of aliens. Many of the decisions of the Supreme Court have taken place in a country I barely recognize. A country in which a soldier in the US Army can be kept without trial in solitary confinement for three-quarters of a year for being suspected of having leaked documents that were mildly embarrassing to the US government is a land so exotic that even with my love of adventure I cannot imagine wanting to visit.

The past is a foreign country. The future is a foreign country. The present is a foreign country. They do things differently here than they do in civilized lands. In 1956 I read Edward Everett Hale's short story, “The Man Without a Country.” Being but a child in 1956, I had no way of knowing that that story would be the story of millions, and probably tens of millions, of Americans who had hoped that America would stop being a foreign country where they do things strangely.

Gluttony for Punishment

noreply@blogger.com (Dayamati) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 00:28:00 +0000

On the last day of 2010, I finally finished a task I had set out many times to do before: I finished reading the Christian Bible (the Protestant version) straight through. As I read it, I kept some notes and marked some cross-references and grouped passages together according to themes. On the first day of 2011 I decided to repeat the task, this time reading the King James version to savor the poetry of 17th century English, and this time following a traditional lectionary that selects for each day a mixture of Old Testament and New Testament passages. Yesterday, January 9, one of the selected readings was Psalm 21, and I was reminded by that text of a disturbing theme than runs throughout the Hebrew and the Greek texts of the Bible—a theme that I always try to ignore, and one that I certainly never try to incorporate into my approach to life. The theme I find so distasteful is the identification of others as enemies and the prayers that one's enemies will be destroyed, and that all who are unrighteous will be punished. The lines of the twenty-first Psalm that brought a sickening taste to my mouth were these:

Thine hand shall find out all thine enemies: thy right hand shall find out those that hate thee.Thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of thine anger: the LORD shall swallow them up in his wrath, and the fire shall devour them. Their fruit shalt thou destroy from the earth, and their seed from among the children of men. (Ps. 21:8–10)

Now I may very well find such words as the very opposite of anything I would regard as inspirational or spiritual, but it is educational to encounter such passages (again and again) in the Bible, because they help me understand a great deal about both the European and Semitic traditions, and of the Judeo-Christian threads that are woven into the fabric of American culture. So much of what has always distressed me about America's European heritage has been the role that American men (and sometimes, but more rarely, women) of European extraction have taken as those who must be obeyed, and those who must mete out punishment to those who fail to obey. There is a significant sector of the American population who can be described as gluttons for punishment, for they seem to have an insatiable appetite for punishment—so long as they are not on the receiving end of it.

And a great deal of this gluttony for seeing the unrighteous suffer and be exterminated comes directly from the culture of the Bible. Whether it is Joshua marching into the land of Canaan and killing all the men, women, children and even animals on the grounds that the ways of the Canaanites were offensive to the sight of God, or the Christians longing for the downfall and humiliation and devastation of the Roman empire, there are few books of either the Jewish or the Christian scriptures that do not celebrate the suffering and death of those who think and act differently and whose difference is deemed offensive in the eyes of God.

This week I received a letter from someone serving a very long sentence in a California prison. He told me of a conversation he had recently had with a fellow inmate. My correspondent told how he had begun the discussion by saying that he was disturbed by American foreign policy, which is so often a policy of forcing others to accept mainstream American values and economic policies and regarding those who do not readily comply as savages and evil-doers who deserve no better than to be dominated and, if necessary, destroyed. This opening led to a spirited discussion. The other inmate reportedly made no attempt to deny that America's behavior in the world has been aggressive and domineering. Rather, he defended America's culture of bullying as being essentially human. This is a dog-eat-dog world, he said, and those who do not bully get bullied. If America were not dominating others, others would be quick to dominate America. The only way for a country to survive is to look around and see who is poised to try to be aggressively dominant and to beat them to the punch.

It does not surprising that an inmate in an American prison would think that striving for dominance is the very essence of being human. From everything I have heard about American prisons, they are, as a friend of mine—a former prison guard—recently put it, “just like everything you have ever heard about hell, but in many ways worse.” It is not easy for those who live in hellish realms to see that there might be some alternative to being dominated by both the legal system and other prisoners and gaining respite from being bullied only by finding a few weaker people and dominating them.

The culture of domination thrives outside the walls of our prisons almost as much as it thrives on the inside. The very fact that there is such a thing as prison walls betokens a culture of domination, and of justifying domination on the grounds that those being dominated are evil-doers or reprobates whose behavior has alienated them from the allegedly inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That Americans are so fond of punishment—or at least so convinced that there is no alternative to it—is distressing enough. The distress is compounded when one thinks of the people who are deemed worthy of punishment: drug addicts, the poor, the disadvantaged, the mentally ill. With the exception of a few so-called white-collar criminals such as Bernie Madoff, who seem to be driven mostly by greed, most of the people in American prisons are there because of drug-related behavior or from actions arising from the desperation of poverty.

I have some study questions for America. Why is drug addiction seen as a crime to be punished rather than as a disease to be cured? Why is vagrancy and homelessness seen as a miscreance rather than as a condition that no one chooses? Why is begging seen as a manifestation of laziness rather than as the consequence of desperation? Why are those who cannot afford health care because their skills do not enable them to earn high wages perceived as a drain on the economy and a factor in a nation's national debt? Why are those who need help regarded as parasites? And to what extent do these attitudes reflect religious teachings stemming from three thousand years ago and elevated to the status of divinely inspired wisdom? And here is a question for extra credit: how many people like John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords have to be shot by people who feel a need to punish them for offering help to those who need it before America dares to meditate on its addiction to punishment?