Justice, Equality, and Poverty According To Jesus

I was having a discussion with friends the other night about a book we had read, and a quote from the Bible came up that troubled me greatly - I wanted to share my thoughts on this.

The quote was one that is used often, where Jesus is depicted as saying "The poor will be with you always", usually used in the context of defending the notion of inequality with regard to distribution of resources. As if to say, "Hey, Jesus said it himself - the poor will always be with us - so it is OK to maintain policies that allow inequity between rich and poor."

There are many quotes from Scripture that are taken out of context (in my opinion) and used to justify the actions that we want to continue to take. In my opinion, this is one that is most offensive.

The story appears in 3 of the Gospels. They are as follows: (NIV)

Mathew: Ch26: v11

⁶While Jesus was in Bethany in the home of a man known as Simon the Leper, ⁷a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as he was reclining at the table.

⁸When the disciples saw this, they were indignant. "Why this waste?" they asked. ⁹"This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor."

¹⁰Aware of this, Jesus said to them, "Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. ¹¹The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. ¹²When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. ¹³I tell you the truth, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her."

John: Ch12, v5

¹Six days before the Passover, Jesus arrived at Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. ²Here a dinner was given in Jesus' honor. Martha served, while Lazarus was among those reclining at the table with him. ³Then Mary took about a pint^[a] of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus' feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.

⁴But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, ⁵"Why wasn't this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year's wages.^[b]" ⁶He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it.

⁷"Leave her alone," Jesus replied. " It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. ⁸You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me."

Mark: Ch14: v7

³While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of a man known as Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head.

⁴Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, "Why this waste of perfume? ⁵It could have been sold for more than a year's wages^[a] and the money given to the poor." And they rebuked her harshly.

⁶"Leave her alone," said Jesus. "Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. ⁷The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me. ⁸She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial. ⁹I tell you the truth, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her."

The Greek interlinear that I have for the verse in Mark translates exactly as follows for the verse in question. “For always the poor you have with yourselves and when you wish you are able for them to do good, but me not always do you have”

The essence of the story is that a woman does something nice for Jesus, and she is criticized by the disciples for using funds unwisely. Jesus’ rebuke is consistently aimed at the criticism of this woman, and within that criticism is the implication that this woman’s kindness should not be reduced because there are other kindnesses not yet given. Jesus even says of the poor in one of the versions that “you can help them any time you want”. Note that he is not suggesting in any way that the poor should not be helped.

Every action within the ministry of Jesus seemed aimed at trying to reduce inequity, and find ways to “bring the poor to the table”. In this passage, I see a Jesus who is trying to help his disciples see a potential pitfall of the ministry of bringing greater justice that he has put them on. He is, after all, only a couple of days away from his execution at this point in his ministry, and he needs to put the finishing touches on what he has taught to those closest to him. In modern, western style bullets, here is how I read the message:

• Of course we are here to help the poor, and bring those who are outcast into the fold of the Kingdom of God – we should be doing this every day.
• In your zeal to “do good”, be careful that you don’t end up at each other’s throats in criticism over the best way to do good – this is the easiest way for evil to enter into your midst.
• Apply your goodness and kindness to the problem right in front of you, and apply it with zeal and gusto.
• Do not allow your attention to be taken from the problem that has been given to you and is right in front of you. This is hard to avoid, as our natural tendency is to be anxious about a distant problem, as this is sometimes easier than applying ourselves to the problem at hand. This is also an easy way for evil to make your hands idle.
• God will supply the problems and challenges that you need in your life to move forward – do not question this by trying to focus on other problems – solve what you have in front of you.

Now I don’t know how closely my reading of this message is to what Jesus meant when this event took place. We are just guessing and accepting really that the event even took place like this. However, this message is easy to read from the event, it is consistent with the rest of the teaching of Jesus, and it is consistent with what you would expect within the time-plane that the event was to have taken within, (days before his execution).

This message is dramatically different than a message that even begins to imply that Jesus was “OK” with the notion that there should be large discrepancies between the poor and the rich in the world, and that we should not try to make the world more just and equitable place.

Don’t fret and be anxious over the problems that are enduring and complex. Try to solve them, of course, but don’t think that there is a quick fix. Focus each day on the problems that are on your plate, and work to make the world a more just and equitable place. Actions are much more effective than anxieties.

Who Dishonors Our Vets - Sheehan or Bush?

I read a piece slamming Cindy Sheehan for what she is doing. I am always glad to hear from those who agree or disagree with me, provided there is some degree of sense of logic to what they write. In this case, I wasn’t sure that I could understand the logic, and could not see much sense in what was written.

The essence of the piece seemed to be that women (mothers especially) should be rooting for those women who live in parts of the world where their sons are brainwashed into doing horrible things like suicide bombings, and the women had to stand by powerlessly as this happened. The piece, (of course) attacked this woman by stating that he husband (and others in her family) did not agree with her.

Unless I am mistaken, this is exactly what Ms. Sheehan is doing. And by stating that her husband doesn’t agree with her, the author is displaying exactly the sort of misogynistic arrogance that makes Ms. Sheehan’s stance so noteworthy.

This woman raised a fine young man. An Eagle Scout as I understand, with many other honors to his name. She is proud of her son, as well as her family’s long history of distinguished service to this country. Her son was apparently proud to sign up, and who knows – she may have been proud to see him carry on a family tradition. At any rate, he believed that he was honorably serving the society and culture that raised him.

Now that he is dead, she simply wants to know if he was. The web of lies that took us to war is what dishonors the men and women who are dying there, not those who question those lies. She has the courage to question those lies, and President Bush obviously doesn’t have the courage to answer her question.

Our enemies today use lies and coercion to enroll impressionable young men into their ranks, and they strap suicide bombs on these young men and tell them of the great honor that it will be to die for their country. And the mothers have to sit by and watch – powerless to say anything – powerless to do anything. We are right to criticize this effort. We are right to see the disgrace and evil in this.

And in our country, when we have leaders who lie to us and deceive us to take us to war, are not their lies as disgraceful as those of our enemies? The only difference is that in our country, the mothers of those young men still have the right to stand up and question these leaders. We may not have the right to go to a “town hall” meeting that we pay for as taxpayers unless we are Republican supporters of the President, we may be losing our civil rights at an alarming rate, but for now, a mother still has the right to question leaders who she thinks may have lied to her.

If these leaders were men of courage and honor, they would sit with her and answer her questions – and the questions of the country. If they are cowards and scoundrels, they will attack this woman, and try to paint her as unpatriotic, and say that her opinion doesn’t really count, since her husband doesn’t agree with her.

Thanks G-d for those millions of true American patriots who have given their life and blood to assure this woman’s right to question openly. Thank G-d for the hundreds of thousands who serve today to protect that right. Shame on this President and this administration for dishonoring their sacrifice with their lies and deceit, their cowardly attacking of the woman who raised a soldier who died for their cause, their shameful profiteering from the lives of Americans.

More about "facts"

There really isn’t much disagreement about the facts surrrounding the Katrina response, though some in the media would like us to believe that there is. By creating the myth that we can’t agree on the facts, the media is able to allow whatever side that they support to hide from the facts.

On this Katrina discussion, the issue (I believe) that many people are raising can be boiled down to a couple of key points. These, by the way, are perspectives not facts.

1. The response of the federal government to the disaster was not adequate – perhaps even shameful – especially in light of the fact that we have been spending billions on “homeland security” since 9/11, and one would hope that this would have allowed us to be better prepared for disasters.
2. The response of the President, in particular, is shameful. He continued to vacation and politic for days after the hurricane hit, rather than show a sense of urgency to provide aid to the region.
3. Especially in light of the response of the President and the federal government to the hurricane in Florida that resulted in much less damage and loss of life, this appears to be a case of doling out the federal help to those who the President likes.
4. The political appointees that the President has put in charge of important entities like FEMA show him to be far more concerned with rewarding political friends than with serving the people of this nation – especially when compared to previous administrations.

The timeline that MoveOn.org sent out seems to be pretty factual, according to the research that I am able to do. Nothing that I see in this timetable conflicts with anything that Betty also reported that she had heard on cable news.

Regarding the Red Cross reference that Betty saw on the news, it appears that the Red Cross is working directly with local authorities and the National Guard to set up in the most effective place and manner. The Red Cross “applauds” and is full agreement with the decisions that have been made. For the facts, here is the link to the Red Cross site:

http://www.redcross.org/faq/0,1096,0_682_4524,00.html#4524

Regarding the “refused to let FEMA in” report that Betty sited, I can find only opinion and conjecture, no fact on this issue. But I do have what I think is a good “theory” based on what I have read. That is, when the Bush administration took over from the Clinton administration, they set about to change everything that they could. One of the changes that they made at FEMA was that rather than a collaborative response to disasters with state and local authorities, they created clear separation between state response and federal response. Whether this is good or bad, in this case it may have created a communication void that both sides are now trying to use to their political advantage. In any case, this appears to be exactly the sort of red herring that the administration has become so adept and providing the media as a way of diverting attention – exactly what got me fuming in the first place.

So here we sit, really in agreement on the facts, yet the media has us convinced that “we don’t know enough”, or that there are “conflicting facts”. There are a great many places where the facts as pretty clear, and I have seen little disagreement:

• It was known as Katrina was coming to land that this would be catastrophic.
• Bush took a few days to personally react. Good or bad?
• His FEMA director had virtually no EM experience, seems to have been politely fired from his last job of 12 years or so as a commissioner of some Arabian horse foundation or some such thing, and his 2 top deputies were PR people from the Bush campaign with no EM experience. Good or bad?
• The Louisiana National Guard is largely not at home, they are in Iraq, along with the specialized amphibious equipment that apparently only they have. This equipment is designed and built to help with exactly this sort of flooding catastrophe. What are they doing in Iraq? Should they be there? How much more effective and immediate would our response have been if they were home with their equipment where they belong?

Again, the play by the administration through the media to shift focus away from the response of the federal government is exactly what has me so upset.

So, how do I react to the media? Depending on where I fall on the perspective line, do I simply look to sources who will give me support for my perspective, or do I evaluate the information that I receive from conflicting sources, and see how it changes my perspective? If the media that I listen to sees that “their guy” is in trouble on this issue, they have repeatedly created confusion and the myth that there are conflicting “facts”.

Clearly, MoveOn.org leans far to the left, as Betty says. When I receive information from them, I must take into consideration the high likelihood that they are giving me only the facts that support their position. I have found that while they support one side clearly, they provide very well-vetted and well supported information, or facts. By the same token, if I receive information from the Heritage Foundation, or Focus on the Family, it has the same clear lean far to the right, and they will only provide information that will support their position. I could use the term “hysterical” with any of these organizations, provided the position that they support is different from the position that I support, and if they support the same position that I support, then I will probably call them “justifiably passionate” or something like that.

There is a difference between presenting one side of a story – which is what I expect from partisan organizations – and presenting information that is meant to mislead. I have to be smart enough to see the difference – to divorce myself from my position long enough to discern the nature of the information that I am looking at.

Rather than allow ourselves to be manipulated by the media, (which appears to run the state), what if we were willing to truly look at the facts, and debate our perspectives with one another. We can agree to disagree over perspectives, but this should not be the case with facts. Rather than dismiss the issue as “confused”, what if we honestly reviewed the facts together, then debated our perspectives on those facts?

Fact or Perspective?

My friend Betty wrote the following:

“I think we simply don't know enough unbiased "facts" about almost everything/anything to have an informed opinion, only "interpretations of facts." Given that we all have different life experiences and therefore have different filters, of course we are going to have different opinions.”

In addition to this comment, last winter, my brother and sister and I were having political discussion, (which we commonly do), and were discussing a particular issue about which we disagreed, and my sister made the comment that, “It just depends on your perspective”. While I agree that perspective drives everything, the issue that we were discussing was not one of perspective, but of fact.

When my sister made this comment, it really set me back and made me think. When Betty added her comment above, it brought this back to the top of my mind.

I think that we have a crisis going on right now, and that crisis is our difficulty in discerning the difference between fact and interpretation (or perspective). It is just now striking me how big a crisis this is. There is a big difference between fact and perspective, but we seem to be struggling with that difference today.

Below, I have some examples to review, but before I get to those, I want to discuss this problem. You see, when the media creates this confusion by mixing opinion with news, as they have been doing for the past few years, they create an environment where we don’t seem to see the difference. There is not a gray area here – facts are facts. What you do with those facts, and what they represent to you, that is where opinion comes in.

I don’t think that there is such a thing as a “biased fact”, there are only facts. The bias occurs when only some of the facts are shared, and the reporting of those facts is overlaid with opinion. If the media is actually reporting news, it is difficult for it to be biased – only the listener can add bias based on their “life experiences and filters”, as Betty says.

But there is very little actual “reporting” in the media today, and quite a bit of overlay. This is a change from years past, when there was a clear delineation between news and commentary. In addition, the “news” that you see or hear depends entirely on which outlet you watch or listen to or read – I am often astounded at the difference in coverage that the same story receives depending on the source.

Then there is the laziness issue. People don’t want to be challenged. We don’t want to have to think and be open to change. We have been taught that all that matters is that we be on a “winning team”. We listen to the sports talking heads to be indoctrinated on what we should be saying regarding sports. We listen to the political talking heads to find out what we should think and say about politics.

This is not football, this is life. If we want to be lazy about sports, fine. But when it comes to politics, we need to turn off the talking heads. We need to hear all sides of the story, and form our own opinion, and have that open to change as the information that we get changes. Since the news sources will only tell their half of the story, we have to be willing to listen to all sides – even the ones that we don’t agree with. And most of all, when we listen, we need to filter out the nuggets of “fact” that are hidden within the commentary, and clearly see the difference.

I think that it “is only a matter of perspective” if I am only listening to one side of the story. If that is the case, then it appears that my “facts” are different than your “facts”. I need to be willing to hear you and “take your side” long enough to sift through what you say and vet the facts out of it, and find where those facts disturb my universe. Because clearly, no matter how hard I try, my presentation of the facts will sometimes (not always) reflect how I am interpreting those facts.

Let me use a few examples that will hopefully stir everyone up.

• FACT: Our federal budget has been running deficits for many years. The deficits are masked to some degree and larger than they initially appear because we have been using Social Security trust fund money to fund the operating fund of the budget. This money will have to be repaid to the trust fund for it to remain solvent. These deficits add up year after year and become the “national debt”. One can view the debt in terms of actual dollars, in which case you will see the graph spike a bit during WW1 and WW2, then steadily decline until around 1981, when it begins to explode. One can also view the debt in relationship to the GDP (Gross Domestic Product, or how big our economy is). Viewed in relationship to our GDP, you will see the graph spike up during WW1, then steadily decline until the Great Depression, when it begins to climb again, then it spikes to its highest level during WW2. It steadily declines following the war as we pay down our war debt. It begins to rise again in 1981, and rises steadily until about 1993 or 1994, when it reverses and begins to decline. This decline continues until 2000 or 2001, at which point we have reduced the debt to about the level that it was in 1956 or 1957. In 2001, the debt begins a sharp rise, and continues to rise today so that it is now higher than the previous high point in 1992 – 1993, headed toward the 1945 -1946 wartime high unless the trends are reversed. In fact, current projections show a continued rise, and a crisis in 2017 or 2018 when the trust funds need to be re-funded with the dollars that we have been using to subsidize general operating funds since about 1980. Right now, the federal debt equates to over $100,000 per American family.

REFERENCES:

http://www.aier.org/2004pubs/RR20.pdf

http://www.eh.net/encyclopedia/?article=noll.publicdebt

http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/bp153

http://www.concordcoalition.org/issues/feddebt/debt-facts.html

The above is fact – it is not perspective. Google these subjects on your own to research the subjects.

· Perspective A: Federal debt is not a bad thing, and the current rise in debt is a result of our war on terrorism. Like all wars, this debt will be repaid as the economy continues to grow. The rise in debt during the Reagan and Bush senior years was acceptable as it resulted in economic growth, just like the rise in debt during the 30s was OK as it resulted in saving the economy and the country.

· Perspective B: Debt should not be increasing EXCEPT to fund a war effort or to fund extraordinary rescue efforts, (such as the Great Depression or Hurricane Katrina.)

• FACT: During the period 1959 – 2004, tax rates for individuals have risen (combined federal and payroll taxes) from about 10% to about 13%, while tax rates for corporations have fallen from about 4% to about 1.3%. When you add the fact that an increasing tax burden has been placed on state and local governments, this disparity is sharper. In addition, all of the individual tax increase comes in payroll taxes, which are slanted heavily toward redistributing the tax load onto low and middle wage workers.

REFERENCES:

http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/bp153

Again, the above is fact.

· Perspective A: Private enterprise and wealthy individuals power the economy, and should not be penalized with high tax rates. The early part of the 20^th century was marked by a lean toward socialism, and the resulting penalizing of private enterprise, and in recent years we have simply reversed that trend and put the tax burden back where it belongs – on all of the people.

· Perspective B: The Progressive movement in the early part of the 20^th century moved us toward a more just and progressive world, with progressive tax rates that asked the wealthy to share their wealth with others at a higher rate than the poor were asked to share. This is reasonable in a just world, and resulted in an unprecedented economic boom that placed the US firmly on top of the world economy. By regressing back to regressive tax rates, we are simply redistributing wealth into the hands of the wealthy, and putting the brakes on the economic engine of the last century, dooming millions to essential servitude and inescapable poverty.

• FACT: While in office, Bill Clinton engaged in sexual activity with an intern. He tried to cover-up the activity. He lied to the American people and to Congress about the activity. (I don’t think I need to put any references in here at all…)

· Perspective A: This is shameful activity by the leader of our nation, and we should all be embarrassed. We need to restore dignity and honor to the office. This is probably just the tip of the iceberg – if you can’t trust the man, what else has he lied about?

· Perspective B: Not only did he engage in the activity, but he probably enjoyed it, and frankly, why should I care? Hillary should be good and pissed-off, but I don’t hire Presidents based upon their marital arrangements or sexual habits. The big crime here was the fact that we spent $50 million investigating the man’s sexual habits, and that is just the formal investigation – who knows how much more we spent on the impeachment process etal? The fact that the press produced, published, and distributed pornography by their continued coverage of this silly ordeal is probably the worst offense of all. He did the deed, he lied about it, and who cares? I would probably lie about it too. The rest of the world was laughing at us, not with us on this one.

• FACT: The Bush administration used 9/11 as a tool to carry out a pre-existing desire to invade Iraq. I could spend pages documenting sources, but I will refer you generally to insiders such as Richard Clark and Paul O’Neil, as well as the 9/11 report itself, and the now public official British documents – the Downing Street Memos. In addition, as recently as today, those close to Bush such as Trent Lott admit that this was the case. It is clear from insiders and pre-existing documentation that there was a desire to invade Iraq, and that within days of the 9/11 attacks, Bush and those in his administration began an effort to tie Iraq to terrorism to justify attacking and occupying the country. This effort included citing evidence of WMD that they knew to be false, (the yellow-cake, Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame story, well-documented in many sources). It also included the “fixing” of intelligence to meet their requirements, (the now public Downing Street memos). We went to war to rid Iraq of the WMD that we “knew” were there. (Again, many public sources of Bush, Cheney, and other senior officials stating that they “knew” the weapons were there, and in some cases, knew where they were.) But in fact, the basis of this knowledge was weak or fabricated in many cases. According to the CIA before the war, there was no link at all between bin Laden and the terrorists on one hand, and Saddam and Iraq on the other. President Bush and his administration repeatedly tied the two issues together, suggesting that we needed to “fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here”. According to polls, a high percentage of Americans came to believe that there was a link, (in the teens to over 50% depending on the poll and the time) even though CIA intelligence and common sense suggested otherwise. (Saddam and Osama hated each other, and each represented exactly the thing the other was trying to get rid of.) It cannot be established as fact that the campaign of the administration resulted in the American people being misled, it can only be established that the administration engaged in a campaign to mislead, and that the American people became misled. President Bush lied to both Congress and the American people on this issue. Since our invasion, the CIA reports that Iraq has now become a major training ground and recruiting ground for our terrorist enemy.

REFERENCES:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Liberation_Act

http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,1240541,00.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7460-2005Jan13.html

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/NIM501A.html

http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/congress/2004_rpt/iraq-wmd-intell_chapter12-h.htm

http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/blog.html

http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/memos.html

· Perspective A: Regardless of what happened in the lead-up to the war, Saddam was an evil man, and the world is better off without him. Period. If we had it to do over, we should do the same thing. The ends justify the means.

· Perspective B: This is an honesty and integrity issue. It is not alright to lie to the American people in order to carry-out your agenda, and certainly not within the moral fiber of our nation to invade another on false pretense. If we wanted to have a national debate about whether we should invade other countries in order to rid them of evil dictators, then we should have done that, and Iraq probably would not be high on the list – there are other nations where we could have greater impact at less cost. In terms of national security, the action that we have taken has made us far less secure by providing an excellent recruiting tool for the terrorists. Our deception leading up to the war has reduced our credibility in the world, and thus our ability to lobby and pursue diplomatic solutions to problems. The diverting of resources from our “homeland” has made us less secure here. The actions of our President are shameful, and he should be impeached. We need to restore dignity and honor to the office. This is probably just the tip of the iceberg – if you can’t trust the man, what else has he lied about?

And here’s a fun one…

• FACT: The Christian church, as we know it today, was formed in the 4^th century CE. Prior to that point, there was a movement that began with Jews who were devoted to a man named Jesus, and grew into a fairly broad movement of both Jews and non-Jews. This movement had many factions, with sometimes broadly divergent theology, as well as widely differing beliefs about who Jesus was, and how they should live their lives. In the 4^th century, when Constantine decreed Christianity the official Roman religion, he essentially “endorsed” one of the “factions” within the movement. This faction became “Orthodox Christianity”, or Roman Christianity, while all other forms became heresy. From that point forward, there have been multiple instances where this Roman Church has used violence and destruction to wipe out competing beliefs and “theology”, most especially competing Christian beliefs and “theology”.

· Perspective A: Orthodoxy is the “true” Christianity, and there is evidence that links the orthodox beliefs back to the earliest believers. Other beliefs are, indeed, heresy, and are evil influences within true Christianity.

· Perspective B: There is evidence linking “orthodoxy” back to the earliest believers, just as there is evidence linking gnosticism back to the earliest believers, and many other “forms” of the emerging Christianity. There is great wisdom to be found in these different forms, most of it tied back to Jesus, and it is this wisdom and the seeking of it that ties us together as Christians.

Tell Us Again, Teddy, Where the Buck Stops

It is becoming clear that the New Orleans catastrophe resulting from hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst natural disasters in our country’s history. As such, I think that it is understandable that the authorities who we hire (through elections and taxes) to manage and respond to problems and disasters were overwhelmed and not able to respond as well as they would have liked.

There. Simple statement – how can you argue with that? Local authorities were overwhelmed. State authorities were overwhelmed. Federal authorities were overwhelmed. And that is the right order, is it not? Don’t we expect local authorities to call on state and federal assistance only when they are overwhelmed? And don’t we expect state authorities to call on federal assistance only when they are overwhelmed? Bottom-up management in action.

And from a top down perspective, we certainly expect the federal government – with its vast resources – to proactively seek to provide assistance to “lesser” entities when it is clear that they are going to be overwhelmed. That is how it has worked for quite a number of years, through quite a number of catastrophes.

Thus far in this post, I can’t imagine that there is very much controversial in what I have written. But this is the point that this probably changes, because I have to say that I am sick and tired of the refusal of this administration to be accountable for anything that it does or does not do. Those who lean right and tend to support President Bush will now (most likely) find controversy in what I have to say.

I assume that mistakes have been made in this effort as are made in every effort. I assume that these mistakes have been made by governments and bureaucracies at all levels – local, state, and federal. Voters at each level will have to hold those people accountable for their performance

It will be up to the local authorities to identify and fix the mistakes that they have made, and they should be held accountable for their performance by local voters. The people of the local parishes in the South will have to hold them up to scrutiny when the time comes.

It will be up to state authorities to identify and fix the mistakes that they have made, and they should be held accountable for their performance by state voters. The people of Louisiana (and other states) will have to hold them up to scrutiny when the time comes.

As for the national media, and the vast majority of the people in this country, the only entity accountable to us is the federal government. It is upon the federal government, and their response to this disaster, that our focus should be maintained. Not that we should spend much energy on it now – right now we should be focused on providing aid to those in need.

Once we have provided the aid required, and have FUNDED THIS AID, then we should focus on the rebuilding effort, decide who should be paying for this effort, and FUND THE REBUILDING EFFORT. We have many precedents to follow regarding how much the federal government should be funding the rebuilding of “at-risk” infrastructure and private property, and we should be following those precedents, or we should be publicly debating and changing the role of the federal government in this regard.

Then, we should be holding our federal government accountable for their performance during this disaster. We should do this in the media and at the voting booth. The fact that this administration is spending its time and effort trying to “spin” things is such a way to re-focus the national media on state and local efforts rather than federal efforts has the top of my head coming off. These people have refused to accept accountability for any action that they have taken in the past 5 years, and now with Americans dead by the thousands, they continue to shirk accountability.

Note that I say “they” here, as it is hard to really focus on President Bush alone. For the past 5 years, we have seen him pointing his finger everywhere else whenever bad things happen, so we have grown accustomed to this new “shared accountability” style. Let me tell you how I feel about shared accountability.

I had a boss for several years with whom I disagreed about many things. Although we had disagreements that were often loud, table-pounding affairs, we also had an abiding respect for one another. He demanded of his top people that when you were wrong and had made a mistake, you admitted it – hat in hand – and you filed it away as a lesson that you had invested yourself in, and a mistake that you would not make again. He used to say that so long as you defended your mistake, you could not learn from it. And if you were going to be a leader, he used to say, your shoulders must be broad enough to carry not only your own mistakes, but also the mistakes of those who report to you. That was the essence of leadership – the courage and strength to be fully accountable for your actions and the actions of those who worked for you. Regarding “shared accountability”, he had a very simple response: When everybody is accountable, then nobody is accountable.

And that seems to be how this president runs his administration. Let’s have an investigation – let’s investigate ourselves. Let’s study it – by the time the study is done, the press will have moved on to something else, and the American people will have forgotten the issue, and we won’t have to be accountable.

I’m sick of it frankly. Have the guts to stand up and say, “The buck stops here – I am accountable.”

• The fact is that we have used our National Guard as a foreign occupying force – a job that they were NOT designed to do – and we have stretched our armed forces very thinly. This is not an interpretation of fact, this is a fact. This fact certainly had some impact on the ability of our government to respond rapidly to a disaster that they knew was coming. Accept this and be accountable for it.
• The FEMA director lies to the people (a way of defending the slow response) by saying that nobody could anticipate the break in the levies as. Note that clearly at this stage, they knew that they had a response problem, and were trying to justify the reasons for the slow response. Yet, he had apparently been briefed just days before on the fact that these levy breaks were a likely result of this hurricane – before the hurricane had hit. Accept the fact that you knew it was likely, and that you failed to respond quickly with anything approaching adequate aid. Perhaps adequate assistance would have been impossible anyway?
• Our national focus regarding taxation during the last 5 years has been on cutting taxes. We cut taxes even as we wage war – unprecedented in American history. Part of this effort to cut taxes means that we must find ways to continue to cut funding to programs, in order to try and reduce the huge deficits that this tax-cutting frenzy creates in our national budget. Among the programs that the administration cuts are programs aimed at fixing the very levies that broke. For the first time in 30 years, construction and upgrading of these levies was stopped during this administration. This is a fact, not an interpretation of fact. If you are on the left, you will interpret this fact and say that they did this to fund the tax cuts for the wealthy. If you are on the right, you will interpret this and say that these programs were not effective, and were wasteful. In either case, be accountable.
• In fact, it appears that since about 2002, there has been a fairly loud cry from those in that area that they are sitting ducks for exactly this disaster. They have loudly protested the funding cuts that they have seen stop the sorts of contingency preparedness that was clearly required, and mitigation efforts that had been underway. Again, if I believe in the policies of this administration, then I need to be accountable for the fact that it appears that I may have been wrong on this one – perhaps it was a mistake to stop these programs – perhaps a few more lives could have been saved? Or perhaps not – perhaps the programs were so useless that they would have made no difference at all? I don’t know, but I should be accountable enough to at least ask the question rather than trying to blame someone else.
• And what about the bigger picture here. We have invested so much of our grandchildren’s money in this effort to “fight the terrorists over there instead of over here”, without ever talking about what it costs to do this. Is it possible that in this process, we have taken our eye off of the ball here at home, and have allowed our ability to respond to homeland disasters erode significantly? Is it possible?

I could go on about this, but the bottom line is that I am sick of the lack of courageous leadership within this administration. Courageous leadership would stand up and say something like, “We have a disaster to deal with right now, so I don’t have time for spin. When we are done with triage within this disaster, then I expect the American people to review the performance of me and my administration in this disaster, and I stand singly and solely accountable for the mistakes that we have made, and I share accountability for the things that have gone well with those in my administration.” Wow, now that would be leadership!

But instead of real leadership, we have the president and all of his spin patrol trying to divert attention from themselves, and on to state and local officials.

Shame, shame, shame.

Where is my hero Teddy?

Pat Robertson - Extremist Fundamentalist Christian

Islamic Extremist Fundamentalism – Calls for drastic measures to institute their own form of Islam, including the assassination and death of those who disagree with them. In general, opposed to the notion of democracy, (though they will claim otherwise), as they want to institute their interpretation of God’s law.

Christian Extremist Fundamentalism – Calls for drastic measures to institute their own form of Christianity, including the assassination and death of those who disagree with them. In general, opposed to democracy, (though they will claim otherwise), as they want to institute their interpretation of God’s law.

We ask the majority of Muslims, who are moderate and opposed to the sort of measures that the Fundamentalist are willing to kill for, to stand up against that minority who appears to have hijacked Islam for their own political purposes. It is clear to us that this must be done, in order to make it clear that these Fundamentalists are not following the more widely-held viewpoint of Islam as a faith and tradition that stands up for and preaches not only peace and brotherhood, but also calls for continued movement toward God’s justice, primarily the equality of people and fair distribution of the gifts of God.

In the same way, we as Christians who are opposed to the measures that Fundamentalist Christians are calling for and trying to implement. We must do this in order to make it clear that these Fundamentalists are not following the widely-held viewpoint of Christianity as a faith and tradition that stands up for and preaches not only peace and brotherhood, but also calls for continued movement toward God’s justice here on earth, primarily the equality of people and fair distribution of the gifts of God.

Pat Robertson prayed publicly for more vacancies on the Supreme Court, and since these are lifetime appointments, this generally would be construed as praying for either the death or serious illness of sitting judges. (I can only assume that he was praying for the ill-health of only the 2 judges who were appointed by Democrats…) There was no public outcry. There was no demand for apology. Nobody made it clear that this man is a nut-case, and does not represent Christianity as most people practice it.

Now he calls for the assassination of the DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED LEADER OF A NATION. While there is some press, much of the press is focused on the victim – the democratically elected leader of Venezuela– rather than on demanding a public apology and an FCC investigation. My guess is that this will die down after a day or two - at least in the American press.

And most pointedly, our President and all of our elected leaders should loudly denounce this hate-speech. If we believe that it is a good idea to spread democracy in the world, then we should hold those within our own country who oppose democracy and advocate the assassination of democratically elected officials to the highest public scrutiny. Mr. Robertson has the right in this country to say whatever he wants, (though we should scrutinize whether we are willing to allow this sort of pornography on the public airwaves), and we should make sure that the rest of the world knows that when he does so, he does not have the support of our leaders or of the Christian community.

We as Christians must stand up against this sort of hate-mongering by extreme Christian Fundamentalists.

Public Education - WWJD

The debate over public education in general is one that has gotten little attention recently.

I have very dear friends who are fundamentalist Christians, who are disgusted that we don't teach Biblical history and morality in our public schools. They believe that the world is 5700 years old, and that "macro" evolution, (or Darwinism as many groups have taken to calling it), should not be taught. These people are loud critics of, and I would say enemies of, the notion of public education - unless it is taught their way.

This movement has been working its way through our culture for several years now, painting a generally dim view of the public education systems in our country. I can tell you that in our family, back in the 80's, we went through a brief period where we put our kids in a private Christian school with an outstanding academic reputation. After just a couple of years, it became plain that the quality of instruction that they were receiving was very plainly less than that they had received in the public system. We switched back.

I tell that story so that you know my bias from experience. From that experience, I have come to understand that generally, private schools pay their teachers less than public schools. It should come as no surprise, then, that the public schools have better teachers.

So why private schools? I see it as broken into 3 main groups:

1. The folks with more money than sense who just can't stand the thought of their child with the common folk.

2. Folks who live in areas with poor public schools, and with the means to send them to private schools, which in their case means an improvement in both quality of education and safety for their child.

3. Folks with strong idealogical (religious) convictions who don't want their children to learn the mainstream knowledge taught in public schools.

Of these 3 groups, the first one will never go away. There will always be an "elite" class, who will not want to mingle with the common folk. Nothing wrong with that.

The second group of folks use private schools as an escape from poor public schools. Fixing the public schools in their area would fix this problem, and eliminate the need for private education. Better models for distribution of funding for public education is at the heart of that discussion.

The third group is the one that I want to focus on.

Should education be a "right" of citizens? If so, to what level? 8th grade? High School? College?

If the answer to that question is no, then we should focus our discussion on the direction our culture takes as we define ever widening "classes" of people. As ignorance increases among the masses, and the resulting "want" that lower employment will likely bring increases, what will be the result?

If the answer is yes, that some level of education is a "right", then we are left with public funding for education. Let’s start with where we are now.

So far, we have taken an approach that says that local public school districts should exist, and with varying degrees of oversight from the state, these school boards should decide what gets taught and how to teach it.

Of course, the national government has some very high-level authority, in that they want to assure that the rights of citizens are not compromised. This is why the national authority has asserted that it is not constitutional for “creationism”, for example, to be taught in school, as it violates the constitutional prohibition of establishing religion. (The thought being that by teaching the Creation Myth of just one religion, you are essentially “establishing” this as the accepted religion.)

The movement among the public school opponents asserts both explicitly and implicitly that they don’t like this. They assert that the founding fathers were Christian, and that what they really meant to do was establish a Christian country. (While it is true that most of the fathers were Christian to varying degrees, this new movement ignores that fact that NOTWITHSTANDING their Christianity, they explicitly forbade the establishment of religion. In other words, the fact that they were Christian actually makes a stronger case for their intent to keep religion out of government.)

The solution of the public school opponents is clear. Change education so that it is private rather than public, then you don’t have to deal with that pesky constitution. This fits very nicely with an anti-tax agenda, which doesn’t like the fact that the public has to pay for any of this stuff anyway.

And this is exactly what has happened. Those with an anti-public-school agenda that is driven by a religious ideology are aligned with those with an anti-tax ideology. They have been successful in redefining to varying degrees the way that school funding money is distributed, resulting in the increase in “vouchers” which essentially take public funding and funnel it to private schools. (The idea being that the public should fund the education of a student, but that the student and the student’s family should be allowed to learn whatever they want.)

So we only got to this point by saying that we did believe that it was a right of citizens to receive an education, which means public funding. I think that this means that we agree that we have a “moral obligation” to offer education to all citizens.

Should there be any limits on what the public funds in terms of education? What if the local Islamic Mullah wanted to set up a local school that taught Islamic Fundamentalism and Extremism? What if a local Christian group wanted to set up a local school that taught Christian Fundamentalism and Extremism?

If it is not “anything goes”, then who sets limits? The US constitution? Other national authority? State authority? Local school districts as it is now?

What constitutional principles should apply to publicly funded education?

And here is the real reason why I put this post together. Beyond the agreement on a moral obligation to educate citizens, are there other moral obligations that we have in educating ourselves? Are there common morals that we can teach that don’t take steps down the road of establishment of religion in our country? Can these be taught outside the context of a specific religion? How about teaching morals that are common among many religions?

My own bias is that I have a problem with public funds being used to finance private schools. I do believe that we have an “education obligation”, but am undecided on how far that obligation reaches. I do believe that we have a common moral compass in our culture, and that reinforcing that compass can be achieved outside of the context of a specific religion, and that school curriculum should do this. How…

Ms. Sheehan and Mr. Bush

Over the past couple of years, war has been waged in the name of you and me over in a country that in recent history was cobbled together and called Iraq. During those couple of years, the best estimates that I have seen are that over 100,000 people have lost their lives. Most of those people have lost their lives at the hands of you and I, through the hands of our government. Most of those people are civilians – women and children in large part.

This translates to 100,000+ grieving mothers around the world. The vast majority of these mothers grieve over the loss of a child who wanted nothing to do with war, who played no role at all in the ideological battle that seems to be raging over how people choose to hire and fire forms of government.

A very small percentage of those grieving mothers lost sons and daughters who were part of our armed forces. To be more specific, under 2000 of those grieving mothers are Americans grieving the loss of their soldier-child.

And of those, only one has captured the attention of the American media and public. Cindy Sheehan sits by the roadside in Texas, and expresses her grief and her rage in a very public fashion. What is it, she wants to know, that her son died for in Iraq? She wants this answer to come from the man who sent her son there, George W. Bush. Mr. Bush, for his part, says that he understands that pain of Ms. Sheehan, but must get on with his life. And right now, his life consists of his annual 5 week vacation in Crawford, which comes after his last vacation in April…

And the right-wing media, for their part, have taken to attacking this woman, using the unfortunately now familiar right-wing tactic of mucking personal information about their “target” out and shifting the focus away from the issue and on to some voyeuristic personal item in the “target’s” life.

Whether we were or weren’t misled into this war is not the issue.

Whether we did or did not “cook” the intelligence to support our pre-existing desire to invade Iraq is not the issue.

Whether we have listened to our military planners and planned for and executed a wise war is not the issue.

Whether we will or won’t ever face the music and begin paying the financial cost of this war is not the issue.

How on earth we will defend ourselves in the face of an attack with our military stretched as it is today is not the issue.

Cindy Sheehan’s personal life, personal troubles, and human frailties are not the issue.

The issue is an emotional one first, and an intellectual one second.

As a nation, we have been asked to pay nothing for this war, so we feel no emotional pain. Rather than institute a draft – which we should have done as soon as we began gearing up for this war in 2003 – we have misused the Guard and Reserves. Rather than asking the American people to sacrifice financially to pay the huge cost of this war – certainly significant taxes are required to wage war – we continue to sweep the costs under the rug, keeping them off of the budget, conveniently hidden from today’s voters.

But for mothers who have paid the ultimate price, who have lost their son or their daughter in this war, there is no rug under which the cost can be swept. They bear the emotional pain of a nation on their shoulders, and they want to know who is willing to bear it with them. They want to know that we all will still believe in this was if we see it through the lens of their loss.

And will we? The President of the United States – the one who ordered her son into the war that killed him – is apparently not willing to put those glasses on. He is too busy with fund raisers for his Party, and bike riding, and napping. He says he “grieves”, and I believe that he does in his own way. But Cindy is asking him to grieve beyond the intellectual. She is asking him to descend with her into the depth of her emotional grief and rage. To see the cost of the war through a grieving mother’s eyes, and then to tell her again what the war is about, and that he believes in it, and believes the cost is worth it.

With children of draft age, am I willing to descend into that hell of grief with Cindy? I am not sure – tears are in my eyes just considering it. The selfish me is only glad that my children of draft age do not believe in this war, so unless a draft is instituted, I will not be asked to risk that price.

The patriotic me is sick to my stomach that this president is not willing to take this woman into his home and his heart, and to grieve with her. The patriotic me is sick to my stomach at the right-wing media machine who is out to destroy yet another patriot – to eliminate for political purpose one of the few in this country who have actually sacrificed, who have actually paid for this war.

How Bad Is The Bush Problem?

How big is the “Bush Problem”?

As follow-up to my last post about lying presidents, I wanted to elaborate on where we need to go.

Here we sit, in 2005. We should all agree that presidents have lied throughout history. Some have lied for good things, some have lied for not-so-good things. When Bush senior lied about taxes, he did the right thing by going back on his pledge, and being fiscally conservative. When Reagan lied about things like Iran-Contra, he was probably both wrong and criminal, and we should be ashamed of him. When Clinton lied about when his zipper was up and when it was down, we should frankly be ashamed of a media that covered such a personal (if shameful) act, and do our best to judge the man on what he did for the country rather than what he did to shame his marriage. And when Bush junior continues to lie about things of such great importance as why our children are dying in Iraq, and what our real objectives in being there are, we should be shocked and ashamed. He continues to lie by failing to pay for the war – hiding the financial cost by keeping if off of the budget and refusing to ask us to pay for it, and continues to lie by failing to ask us to make the sacrifices that are a NECESSARY part of waging war, (things like a draft in order to maintain a sufficient army).

These lies he commits in order to avoid a dip in his support by the American public, and in order to maintain public support for the war. This is some of the worst sort of lying! He knows that if the American people were asked to sacrifice and pay for the war – the same way that every president in our history has done UNTIL Bush – that people would quickly begin to question why it was that we went there, and what is it that we hope to accomplish by staying. And when we ask these questions, he knows that we aren’t going to like the answers.

So he continues to lie by hiding the cost of the war, and misusing Guard and Reserve troops in order to hide the need for an army to fight a war – an army that would come from the ranks of your children and mine.

I’m no lawyer – I don’t know if these terrible lies are “criminal” or not – whether they measure up to “high crimes and misdemeanors” as defined in the constitution. If we compare his lies and omissions to the bar that we put in place by impeaching the last president because he lied about who he slept with, then impeachment for this guy would not go nearly far enough.

What I do know as an American Citizen with strong moral convictions is that what he has done and is doing is immoral, unethical, and shameful.

Without a doubt, we should fire him and anyone who has supported him. We should not fire him because he lied – they all lie. We should fire him because he is running our country into the ground!

But what would impeachment do? Do we want Cheney in the chair? I would expect him to be worse by a long shot.

No, the thing to do is to shake this mess up next year. We need to cut this bunch of liars off at the knees by removing their supporters in congress at the next election. We need to send a message to the Republican party that we are not willing to put up with liars and thieves running for office. If this means that we end up giving control of congress back to the Dems for a while until the Republican party gets the message, so be it. They can’t do a worse job than this bunch is doing.

Most of all, those of us who are truly conservative should demand that one party or the other begin running candidates that will actually run this country in a conservative manner – balancing the budget, being honest with us, maintaining a better future for our children than we have had, and keeping us out of the business of trying to run the rest of the world!

Who Lied, When, About What?

Who Lied?

I have been considering lately this whole “He Lied!” thing that has going on with Bush. Those on the left have been crying about the lies of George W Bush for a couple of years now, (there is even a fairly decent book about the subject out there), and those on the right have been trying to dismiss these claims as rubbish fabricated by disgruntled former staffers or just political posturing.

Until recently, I thought I had a good grasp of this game. In my mind, the whole “He Lied” game seemed to me to be payback from the left toward the right for the big deal that they made about Bill Clinton lying. I could identify with this very easily.

You see, while I am a Republican according to my voter registration, I could never see what it was that Real Conservatives didn’t like about Bill Clinton. Sure, you expect the Republican Party to not like him, because he is a Democrat, but as for real people like you and me, who happen to be conservative politically, Bill Clinton did a pretty decent job. He managed the finances of the country in a fiscally conservative fashion – coming close to balancing the budget which 12 years of previous Republican administration had failed to even come close to. While he did get us involved in some forms of “nation building” and “nation rescuing” activities, he also managed to work closely with the international community to assure that we weren’t committed alone in countries for the long-term. Sure there were some things that I disagreed with, but overall, he really administered the country in a pretty conservative fashion. He had a problem with his zipper, and while I did not approve of this, I found the media coverage of this problem more disgusting than the problem itself. His private intimate life is between him, his wife, and his personal ethical and spiritual framework – it is not the business of the public. Those on the right were able to convince the media and many in America that it was our business, and they cried disgust at the fact that he would cheat on his wife and then lie about it. I mean, really, most people who cheat on their spouse will then lie about it – what do you expect? And why do I care?

At the time, I had many arguments with those who called themselves conservative, but who don’t seem to understand the difference between conservative values and principles on the one hand, and partisan republicanism on the other hand. They bought into this media-hype hook, line, and sinker. Each time I would have the arguments with people, they would come back to the single fact that he lied about his personal sex life as the thing that made them disgusted. It didn’t seem to bother them that we had spent $50 million investigating the man, and this is all we could come up with – the waste of our tax dollars didn’t bother them. They were convinced by the media that what they really wanted was a “righteous” man in the office. I pointed out to them that the last time we had a relatively “righteous” man in the office was prior to Reagan – when Jimmy Carter held the office. They didn’t want to talk about that. The lies and crimes of the Reagan administration didn’t seem to bother them – ancient history. (Remember Iran-Contra, the convictions, the pardons? Remember the S&L debacle and the quiet “sweeping under the rug”? Remember the October Surprise evidence?) It boiled down to the fact that Clinton had lied – it didn’t matter to them whether the lie was relevant or important – he lied! They wanted to raise the bar they thought – get someone in the office who would always tell the truth!

Well, OK, I thought. That’s a pretty tall order. They all lie – they are politicians – it’s what politicians do – they lie.

So, Bush was elected, and while I didn’t vote for him because I was concerned about his ties to organizations such as Project for the New American Century, his ties to Big Oil and Big Business, and the general impression that I had that he was somewhat of a buffoon, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt – maybe he would do a good job. I think that many people felt as I did – give the guy a chance.

So here we sit, 5 years later, and those on the left say he lied. Of course he lied – it is what these people do! The question is, what did he lie about? Was it important stuff? If you don’t see the lies that the man has told, then you are either completely ignorant of the facts as a result of ignoring the evidence available but generally ignored by the media, or you are deluded by the powerful right-wing media, led by Fox “news”. Of course he lied – about many things. The one that is most important is the series of lies that he has woven to take us to war and keep us in war, and the collateral lies that he has used to try and maintain support for the war. Here is a quick “off-the-cuff” list of the big ones, as seen through the eyes of a true conservative:
He convinced us that we needed to take the drastic action of going to war against a sovereign nation without the support of most of the developed world because there was an immanent threat of Iraq attacking us with WMD – specifically nukes. He lied by “fixing” and bending the intelligence on Iraq so that it would say what he wanted it to say. He lied by saying later that the intelligence was bad, when in fact the evidence today suggests that the intelligence was the same as it had been in the past, but he ignored it or fixed it to meet his wishes and expectations.
He lied when he told us that he listened to his top military brass to plan and execute the war, when in fact he fired or moved aside the brass who told him that he needed more troops than he had. They were right, and he was wrong. He continues to lie when he says that he listened to them.
He lied when he said that war was his last resort. There is a mountain of strong evidence that he and his staff began planning for a war within days of 9/11, if not before, and that he did everything that he could to assure that war would be the ultimate outcome.
He lied when he called those who were making these accusations liars – starting with Joe Wilson, and moving through respected folks like Richard Clark. Worse among the actions around these lies were the disgusting attacks that he made on the wives of some of these people.
He lied on the deck of the aircraft carrier when he declared “Mission Accomplished”, when he was being advised that the struggle was only beginning.
He lied when he said that if anyone in his administration was involved with leaking the name of a CIA operative would be fired, and now that it is clear that people very high up in his administration did reveal the name of a covert CIA operative, he is lowering the bar to try and protect them. This is treason of the worst sort – people who do this should be treated as traitors, not rewarded with continued employment!

We could make long lists, but these are simply some of the major ones about issues that do matter. These are all factual, objective, history – they are not a matter of “perspective” as one of my closest Republican friends has tried to assert.

So why do those on the right continue to try and deny that Bush lies? Simply because they made such a big deal about “telling the truth” back in 2000, and they want to like “their guy” Bush, so they have no choice but to deny.

This was the picture of the world that I saw, and that I believed. It is, I believe, true. But it leaves something important out. That is, the “he lied” game goes back to 1992, when the Dems assailed Bush senior for the fact that “he lied” when he said “read my lips – no new taxes”. Of course, the R’s were wounded by the fact that this had been such an effective tactic against them, and one could see the Lewinski game as continuation of something that the Dems started.

And of course, they are correct. So what?

More later…

TABOR

A friend recently asked for comments on the Colorado "Taxpayer Bill Of Rights", or TABOR amendment. This was passed by voters a few years back, and has been seen by many as a major contributor to a fiscal crisis in Colorado today.

In general, what TABOR does is limit revenue as much as anything else as I understand it, preventing the state from collecting and keeping taxes in flush years, then requiring the state to live within means during lean years. In business, if you have an off year, you hope to make up for it next year with profits to offset the losses, and conversely you invest during flush times in ways that allow you to ride out the lean years that you might run into. You don't sent refunds to your customers during the up years - telling them, "no thanks, we really don't need the money this year." We all do that in our personal budgets too. As I understand it, TABOR really prevents the state from doing this.

The bigger issue to me is how our collective (government) finances are managed. It seems that prior to Reagan, (at least during my adult lifetime), voters elected officials with the expectation that they would manage the affairs and finances of the government responsibly, assuring future solvency for future generations as the foundation, and then we can all argue and bicker over the ways that we spend the money that we put into the pot. Then, starting with Reagan, the focus seemed to shift away from solvency for the future, and we seemed to convince ourselves that if we just shut off the revenue stream, (spelled taxes), that the spending side of the equation would take care of itself. In fact, I remember arguments from Reagan supporting talking heads at the time that said that nearly verbatim.

To me, this seemed nonsense at the time, and I am sorry to say that every evidence points to my being right for a change on this one. The analogy to me is that my wife (or husband, as the case might be), has a spending problem, and keeps running up credit card bills and spending over our means. So, to solve the problem, I go to my boss at work and ask him to cut my salary, so that my wife will quit spending so much… It is not only doomed to failure, it is doomed to throw us into bankruptcy, and I believe that this is exactly what these economic policies of the past 25 years have done to this country – brought us to the brink of bankruptcy.

And by the way, did cutting the revenue stream have any impact on spending? None whatsoever. Reagan, along with both Democratic and Republican congresses, went on a spending binge that is second only to the one that the current Republican administration and Congress are on.

Of course, the American people are complacent in this crime, as we have continued to vote into office people who will promise to cut our taxes – kind of like the employer who continues to hire the folks who promise to ask for less pay. In the end, we are getting what we pay for – irresponsibility. Look at the first Bush, whose broken “read my lips” promise certainly helped him lose the election. While I was no fan of Bush senior, he clearly saw a fiscal crisis, and choose to act with responsibility and courage to enact revenue to solve the fiscal crisis. I applauded him for his courage, but the Dems crucified him over his broken pledge. Why did he feel compelled to utter those fateful “read my lips” words? He was coached that this is what would get him elected – and his coaches were right. Shame on us…

The real issue is spending, not revenue. Any path that addresses only the revenue stream in a negative way is doomed to failure. So long as we are a nation, we should be having constant battles over our spending priorities and where the money goes – this is part of Democracy In Action. The politicians have found a cowards way out by selling us on the notion that revenue fixes, (like TABOR), are what we should be thinking about. What we SHOULD REALLY be thinking about is how the politicians are spending our money. This should be the primary issue in every single election.

But when was the last time that you saw any spending issue debated among candidates? They want to tell you about how much they are cutting your taxes, though the truth is that they are simply deferring your current taxes – with interest – to your children. Who among us even knows how our government budgets are broken down? When we pay a dollar of tax to the federal government, how is it divided up, and does this division reflect what we believe our values to be as a nation? And how about our state government budget?

I would love to see the debate on these issues shift there – maybe I’ll do a little research and put another post up here with some of that information on a historical basis…

Free Trade? Free Aid?

RE: an email that I received from a friend that references a Charles Krauthammer editorial from 6/24.

While I generally find Mr. Krauthammer to fall into the category of a political hack, and this article doesn't dissapoint me in that respect, I think that the issue that he puts on the table with his clearly one-sided view is one that I would like to understand better.

First, as to the Dems being bankrupt of ideas, I don't know that they can claim that title with any more validity than can the R's. Both parties seem pretty beholding to the interests and masters that they serve, and the ideas that both push seem pretty clearly to come from those masters.

As for the obstructionist cry, this is nothing new - whenever one party controls everything - as the Dems have occasionally in the past as well - one of the few tools that the minority party has is to pull any trick they can out of their hat in order to try and slow the tide of idealistic landslide that is going against them. Again, neither party seems worse than the other at this historically.

The real good issue to me here is CAFTA, and free trade in general. Ignoring CK's partisan ranting, there seem to be those on both sides of the aisle who support it, as well as those on both sides who reject it. Generally though, it does seem that while NAFTA under Clinton had pretty broad support from both sides, CAFTA under Bush appears to get the majority of its support from the R side of the aisle.

I have been trying to understand more about free trade and foreign aid in recent months, and am not sure that I am any less confused now... While on the one hand, most people generally support the notion of free trade, the truth is that we have in our country a standard of living that is higher than the standard of living in the rest of the world. If we clear the boards completely, and implement trade that is truly free across all borders, then it is only a matter of time until we have a universal standard of living in the world - that is that all workers will receive essentially the same wage for the work that they do. I know that this is an oversimplification, but generally, it seems to me that this is what free trade means - that we buy from the cheapest (most efficient) producer regardless of where they live, meaning that at the end of the day, all workers in the world compete with one another to produce a product most efficiently.

I suppose that this is a very "Christian" notion - the idea of equality for all - but are we really willing to pursue this as a nation? This means that we are going to give up a lot, and I really haven't seen any evidence that Americans today are willing to sacrifice much, and certainly no evidence that American leaders have the courage to ask for sacrifice.

So on the one hand we have the very egalitarian notion of equality that true free trade seems to represent, but what about the other hand? How could anyone oppose this? What I think I understand is that opposition to many things labeled as "free trade" proposals are opposed on the basis that what they are really doing is moving production jobs from our country and economy into the economy of other nations, and that in those nations the goods are produced in ways that are often (though not always I would suppose) less than humane by our standards in this country.

Regarding the first objection, (moving jobs away from out country), I think that this is something that is clearly happening in our country, and I think that there is good and bad in this. The good is that we are, in fact, providing jobs to people in other countries who need these jobs, (for those who are interested in the human and "fair" side of the issue - usually known as liberals), and we are finding a way to deliver these goods to consumers in this country who are interested in the financial side of the equation - producing more for less - generally known as capitalists). This is good. The other good side is that when you provide jobs to people overseas, you are creating more consumers. (While this seems to be logical, the question is whether or not these new consumers will purchase anything that is produced in this country - will it benefit anyone but shareholders of the corporation who exported the jobs and the goods?) The down side of the equation is that there are, in fact, those in the country who are losing jobs as a result. In the end, I tend to feel personally that this balance between the two sides of the equation is a difficult one to resolve into a clear "right or wrong" answer. I believe that the world as a whole is better off with more open trade, but I have to realize as well that it is not a panacaea.

Regarding the second objection - that human rights are often abused - I think that I feel more committed to one side of the argument than the other. At its base, capitalism is a predatory economic system. It is based on "survival of the fittest". Unfettered, it leads to a distribution of wealth equation that moves more and more of the wealth within an economy into the hands of fewer and fewer people. One of the beauties of this great country is that along with a capitalistic economic system, we have a Bill of Rights that recognizes the role of government in protecting Human Rights from the inevitable abuses of government itself as well as from the inevitable abuses of entities such as corporations (though certainly not JUST corporations). The job of the corporation is to move as much wealth as it can into the hands of the shareholders - pretty simple really. If unfettered, it is unlikely that many corporations will be influenced to act in the interest in society or human rights - except when those interests coincide with their interest of moving wealth into the hands of shareholders. In our country, the government, (especially under the progressive influence of leaders within the 20th century), has used its power to fetter the ability of the corporation to act in its own interest when the interest of individuals or society is harmed as a result. Some say that this power has been used too much. This may be, though I suspect that most Americans would side with the individual before they would side with the corporation. Some also say that the laws (or fetters) that have been enacted have been abused by some, for example via unreasonable lawsuits. This seems clearly to be the case. These cases are widely discussed, and become part of folklore, (remember the McDonald's coffee that went for $12 million?), and they often seem quite unfair. The "other hand" to this argument is that these silly judgements cause corporations to be extremely vigilant with regard to protecting workers and customers. Again the balance - where would most Americans want the scale to lean?

The bottom line is that workers in this country are pretty darn well protected. In addition to making generally good wages (by world standards), workers here do not have to worry about inhumane working conditions, (unless they don't speak English and/or are illegal aliens, in which case they are certainly less well-protected in most cases). When we export capitalism in a generally unfettered fashion, as with free trade proposals that do not guarantee human rights and dignity, then we will certainly get human rights abuses - just as we would (and did) in this country without the progressive legislation of the 20th century. Is this something that we want to support? I think that most Americans are not quite that selfish. I trust that most Americans would rather spend more rather than support human rights abuses. Though we are certainly not saints. If we have leadership that does not recognize both sides of the equation here, and is not willing to assure "fairness" in free-trade agreements that guarantee that corporations must use standards of human rights and dignity in the overseas production of goods, and "hides" this side of the equation from us, I think that we are often too lazy to look for ourselves to see the true "costs" of decisions that we make.

Regarding NAFTA, I hear both sides of that equation. I hear that it was a bad agreement, and has resulted in the loss of many American jobs. People who make this argument seem to back it up with pretty good statistics. I hear that it was a good argument, and has resulted in better prices for American consumers, and additional markets overseas. These people seem to back back up their argument with strong statistics as well. Could both be true? Maybe we did lose jobs here, create more jobs and consumers overseas, and generate a good result for shareholders of those corporations?

It is unclear to me. I would love to hear the opinions of others who have given this thought.

An interesting thing that I learned recently involves the notion of free trade as it is tied up in the notion of foreign aid and foreign policy. We have been taught to give with an open hand and a sheltered eye. Not a blind eye, being a bad steward, but an eye that ignores whether or not the recipent will give back to us in some way. But in the real world, that is not how foreign aid works. Most of the foreign aid that we "give" is tied very tightly with our policy objectives - giving to people who do what we want them to do. The cold-hearted side of me says this is OK in many respects, and the warm-hearted side of me tends to pretend I don't understand. However, there is a more insidous side of the equation at work that I have just come to understand recently. That is the idea of "tied aid". Specifically, most of the aid that the US provides to other countries has the stipulation that the money must be spent to buy products from US companies. On the surface, this seems reasonable - it would be nice if we received some benefit back from the dollars, thought this is hardly a "sheltered eye". The last time the government released statistics regarding how widespread this practice is was in 1996 under Clinton, when about 72% of the dollars that we gave in aid was tied to the requirement to spend the money with American companies. Bush won't release these numbers, but most estimates have the number much higher today than it was 10 years ago.

So what's wrong with this practice? Three things as I see it.

First, the value of the aid is greatly reduced, as the products and services could usually be purchased from local companies or companies in other countries for less than it could from American companies. Remember the notion of free trade? If we are really for free trade, why would we tether our aid to the requirement to purchase from the highest priced provider (in most cases)? So I question just how much "free trade" really has to do with the free trade arguments.

Second, fewer people benefit from the aid. If a sub-saharan African country requires drinking water, and a Kenyan company can provide the water for $1 a barrel, but our aid to that country is tied to the requirement that they spend it with an American company, and the American company charges $10 a barrel, then 9 out of 10 people are left thirsty.

Third, in the example above, the American company has no incentive to be efficient - they know that the money must be spent with them. This makes this form of foreign aid nothing less than corporate welfare. While I might support "welfare" and "aid" to those truly in need, I have a problem with my government calling something "humanitarian aid" on the one hand, while violating free trade principles, human rights by aiding fewer people, and essentially handing corporations donations cloaked in this half-truth.

These things are all tied together as I see it. Both R's and Dems have been struggling with these issues for quite some time. Both free trade and aid to the needy are issues that I think people of all stripes support, and they are tied together in ways that defy simplistic descriptions.

So, I can't figure out whether CAFTA is something that I support or not...

I do know that I am angry about the way that we tie our humanitarian support to American companies.