The Politics of Selfishness

In the aftermath of the tornado in Moore, Oklahoma on Tuesday afternoon, President Obama immediately signed a disaster declaration for that state. The Office of the Press Secretary stated that "The President today declared a major disaster exists in the State of Oklahoma and ordered Federal aid to supplement state and local recovery efforts in the area affected by severe storms and tornadoes beginning on May 18, 2013, and continuing" and  that "The President's action makes federal funding available to affected individuals in the counties of Cleveland, Lincoln, McClain, Oklahoma, and Pottawatomie."

    The President announced that he was instructing his disaster response team to get tornado victims in Oklahoma everything they need "right away." The President described the devastation that destroyed the Oklahoma City suburbs as, "one of the most destructive tornados in history. The president also offered his prayers and emphasized that there was a long road of recovery ahead. But he said the victims wouldn't travel alone and they would have all the resources that they needed.

     The President's concern for the victims of Oklahoma's tornados stands in stark contrast to the appalling lack of concern shown by Oklahoma's two U.S. Senators toward the victims of Hurricane Sandy. Senators James Inhofe and Tom Coburn, both Republicans, claim to be fiscal conservatives who have repeatedly voted against funding disaster aid for other parts of the country. They also have opposed increased funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which administers federal disaster relief.   

    Inhofe, the former chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, has publicly stated that he does not believe that human activities cause climate change. Inhofe regularly repeats his denial that human activity contributes to climate change and he describes that claim as a hoax. Inhofe insists that the possibility that humans are influencing climate change is impossible because "God's still up there" and that it is "outrageous" and arrogant for people to believe human beings are "able to change what He is doing in the climate."

    In 2011, Inhofe and Coburn opposed legislation that would have granted necessary funding for FEMA when the agency was set to run out of money. Sending the funds to FEMA would have been "unconscionable," Coburn said at the time.

     At the end of last year, Inhofe and Coburn both supported an effort to dramatically reduce the amount of disaster relief to victims of Hurricane Sandy. In a December, 2012 press release, Coburn complained that the Sandy Relief bill contained "wasteful spending," and he identified a series of items he objected to, including "$12.9 billion for future disaster mitigation activities and studies."

    In Tuesday's edition of The New York Daily News, reporters Dan Friedman and Joseph Straw ("Oklahoma Senator Who Voted 'No' on Sandy Aid Calls Home-State Tornado 'totally different'") regaled their readers with the supreme irony and unabashed hypocrisy of  the abrupt volte-face by Inhofe and Coburn when it came to disaster relief for Oklahoma. These two senators - who represent a state would be even poorer without the "welfare" that it consistently receives in the form of federal tax transfers through government spending paid for by taxpayers in wealthier blue states such has New York - obstructed federal disaster aide to the  Northeast states for months on the pretense that much of the spending was wasteful, but now unabashedly demand immediate federal aide to their state, irrespective of the cost.

     The Daily News' story quoted Senator Inhofe to the effect that "everybody" was "exploiting" the Sandy tragedy and "that won't happen in Oklahoma." Without a scintilla of shame or a glimmer of embarrassment, Inhofe confirmed that he would support aid for victims of the Oklahoma tornado because the two situations are "totally different" and that the Hurricane Sandy bill was loaded with pork.

     The Daily News did note that the Sandy relief bill initially contained money for projects outside of areas damaged by Sandy (in the hopes of attracting enough votes from resistant GOP legislators to get the bill through Congress), but that the spending represented a small portion of the massive bill, and that most of the proposed spending was eventually dropped from the legislation as a majority of House Republicans voted against the legislation. Friedman and Straw concluded their article with the comment that "The Sandy relief legislation did not contain money to put roofs on homes in Washington, but there were funds to repair museum roofs damaged by the hurricane."

     For his part,  Senator Coburn claims that he wants any federal aid for victims of Monday's tornado to be offset by cuts elsewhere in the federal budget, his spokesman said Tuesday."He believes we should help disaster victims by directing aid from less vital areas of the budget," John Hart, an aide to the Republican senator, said in an e-mail reported by the Bloomberg News.

     Tuesday evening, Hart said that the senator will seek to ensure that any additional funding for tornado disaster relief in Oklahoma will be offset by cuts to federal spending elsewhere in the budget."That's always been his position," Hart said as he indignantly claimed that Senator Coburn had "never made parochial calculations" about Oklahoma's disproportionate share of disaster funds, "as his voting record and campaign against earmarks demonstrates." Hart piously concluded that Senator Coburn, "makes no apologies for voting against disaster aid bills that are often poorly conceived and used to finance priorities that have little to do with disasters"

    According to Christina Wilkie of The Huffington Post ("Oklahoma Senators, Jim Inhofe, Tom Coburn, Face Difficult Options On Disaster Relief"), Oklahoma currently ranks third in the nation after Texas and California with respect to total federal disaster and fire declarations, which are required to trigger the federal emergency relief funding process and that last month, President Barack Obama signed a disaster declaration for the state of Oklahoma following severe snowstorms.

    Wilkie also reports that, in January of 2007, Coburn urged federal officials to speed disaster relief aid after the state faced a major ice storm. One year later, in 2008, Senator Inhofe pointed with pride to the fact that emergency relief from the Department of Housing and Urban Development would be given to 24 Oklahoma counties. He stated that "The impact of severe weather has been truly devastating to many Oklahoma communities across the state. I am pleased that the people whose lives have been affected by disastrous weather are getting much-needed federal assistance."

    Today, Oklahoma is a hard-scrabble state. According to the 2010 U.S. Census and the American Community Survey's 5-Year estimates, the state ranks 41st in median income and 43rd in per capita income. Reports compiled by the state's Department of Human Services, the U.S. Census Bureau, the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy, and the Oklahoma Policy Institute show that Oklahoma's poverty rate as of 2011 was 15.7 percent - which was above the national average of 13.2 percent. The poverty rate for children in the state was 22 percent; about 63 percent its impoverished citizens were identified by the 2009 to census data as white. More than 30 percent of Oklahoma's African-Americans fell below the federal poverty line as of 2009, as did almost 22 percent of its Indian population, and 29 percent of the Hispanics who lived there.

    Oklahoma gained statehood in November 1907. Ironically, Howard Zinn reminds us that,  as late as 1914, the Socialist Party in the newly admitted state of Oklahoma had 12,000 members - more than New York state - and it elected over 100 socialists to office including six members of the Oklahoma state legislature. Many of these socialists were the children of the German emigrees who had settled in the vicinity of the Oklahoma territory after the European "Revolutions" of 1848. Today, by contrast, Oklahoma, is a solidly "red state" where even the most tepid reform Democrats are often excoriated as dangerous radicals.

    Over time, the descendants of these immigrants have eschewed their ancestors' radicalism and Oklahoma has now become profoundly reactionary state. Although the state voted Democratic in all but two presidential elections through 1948, it has not voted for a Democrat since, with the sole exception of Lyndon Johnson's lopsided victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964. 

    The lore of its frontier beginnings and the "rugged individualism" that this mythology of the Wild West perpetuates has instilled among Oklahomans the same kind of false consciousness that Thomas Frank describes in What's The Matter With Kansas? Jonathan Schwartz in today's edition of The New York Times ("Why No Safe Room to Run To? Cost and Culture of the Plains"), describes the uniform lack of requirements across the state for below-ground storm shelters in houses, schools and businesses, despite the increasing prevalence of deadly tornados.

     Schwartz quotes Curtis McCarty, a member of the Oklahoma Uniform Building Code Commission who is also a builder. McCarty, speaking to a group of Oklahoma legislators about a year and half ago who were considering a bill to mandate the construction of storm shelters for new home construction, stated that "mandating another three or four thousand dollars on every new home can really add up when you're trying to keep houses affordable."

    Senators Inhofe and Coburn have successfully built their political careers upon their shameless but uncanny ability to recognize that a majority of Oklahomans are focused only on short-term, immediate needs and will, as a result, regularly ignore their long-term best interests, including the need for sensible public regulation. Their voting records show that, while they have ill-served the real needs of their constituents, neither Inhofe nor Coburn have ever met a special interest that they can't support. At the same time, they have enthusiastically pandered to the anti-government hysteria that now enthralls the GOP.      

    Petulance and bad bile are never prescriptions for courageous or successful leaders; rather are they are hallmarks of demagogues who threaten the very foundations of democracy. If President Obama were as petty and small-minded as Senators Inhofe and Coburn, he could have chosen to delay the declaration of a disaster that he promptly issued or,  in giving the state and its elected leadership a dose their own red state rhetoric, he could have declared that Oklahoma was officially "on its own."

    President Obama, because he owes a responsibility to all Americans, acted with dignity, compassion and empathy. For that action, he will be applauded by everyone who understands that America will never fulfill its promise until every elected official recognizes and acknowledges that government is not the enemy and that, in a vibrant democracy, it must serve as the agent to promote the public interest on behalf of all citizens. This duty is especially imperative because the political voices of so many have been muted as a result of the increasing volume of noise generated by special, monied interests with their armies of well-paid lobbyists and their enormous, tax deductible advertising budgets.

Related articles

• Oklahoma senator: Tornado aid "totally different" from Sandy aid (salon.com)
• Inhofe and Coburn: Red state hypocrites (salon.com)
• Why We Can't Forget That Oklahoma's Senators Voted Against Sandy Relief (theatlanticwire.com)
• 6 Ways Oklahoma's GOP Senators Have Fought to Undermine Relief Funding (alternet.org)
• NY/NJ/CT Congressional Delegation Should Demand Apology from Oklahoma Senators Inhofe and Coburn (ritholtz.com)
• Senator Inhofe and disaster funding (mojoey.blogspot.com)
• Should Oklahoma politicians who voted against Sandy aid get expedited disaster funds for tornado victims?: Editorial (nj.com)
• Oklahoma's Republican Senators Opposed Money For FEMA, Assistance To Victims Of Hurricane Sandy (madamenoire.com)
• Red State Hypocrites: Inhofe and Coburn (alternet.org)

       In a recent news story in The New York Times, ("Suicide Rates in Middle Age Soared in U.S.," May 3, 2013), Tara Parker-Hope reported that suicide rates among middle-aged Americans have risen sharply in the past decade an that this trend has prompted a concern that a  baby boomers, because they have faced years of economic worry and have easy access to prescription painkillers, may be particularly at risk. The journalist cited a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, contained in the May 2, 2012 issue of its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which found that more people now die by suicides than are killed in car accidents. The Center's findings showed that 2010 there were 33,687 deaths from motor vehicle crashes and 38,364 suicides.

 

  The Centers' findings documented that from 1999 to 2010, while the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, the most significant increase were seen among men in their 50s. The suicide rates for men increased by nearly 50 percent, to about 30 per 100,000 per 100,000 population. Among women, the largest increase was seen in those aged 60 to 64. Their suicide rates increased by nearly 60 percent to 7.0 per 100,000 .

    Ms. Parker-Hope notes that, although the categorization of reported causes of death by local authorities is far from uniform, " C.D.C. and academic researchers said they were confident that the data documented an actual increase in deaths by suicide and not a statistical anomaly."  She quoted Julie Phillips, an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University who has published research on suicide rates to the effect, "It's vastly under-reported. We know we're not counting all suicides." Professor Philips further noted, "The boomers had great expectations for what their life might look like, but I think perhaps it hasn't panned out that way. All these conditions the boomers are facing, future cohorts are going to be facing many of these conditions as well."

    Ms. Parker-Hope also interviewed the C.D.C.'s deputy director, Ileana Arias, who observed. "It is the baby boomer group where we see the highest rates of suicide. There may be something about that group, and how they think about life issues and their life choices that may make a difference" and "The increase does coincide with a decrease in financial standing for a lot of families over the same time period.

    The C.D.C.'s findings and Ms. Parker- Hope's article describe a trend that is extremely worrisome, but not surprising. The empirical evidence, as her article notes, shows a correlation between the economic travail of men and women in that age group and their resulting despair. Anecdotally, as a plaintiff's employment lawyer for more than thirty years, since the onset of this continuing Great Recession, I have received an increasing number of desperate calls from middle-aged men and woman who have been discharged by their employers and who, despite impressive resumes, often extraordinary educational credentials and lots of experience, have descended into the ranks of the permanently unemployable and the underclass.

     Ironically, a day before the C.D.C.'s report was released, Thomas Friedman, in an op ed column in The Times  ("It's a 401(k) World," May 1, 2013), chronicled his schizophrenia about this brave new world that he claims will benefit the  self-motivated but burden those with less aggressive (and perhaps more reflective?) personalities. Friedman waxed positively ecstatic about the prospects for young, well-educated adults in this global, hyper-connected world, "If you 're self-motivated, wow, this world is tailored for you." 

     As to how precisely will this new economy will address the needs of those men and women between age 40 and 65who are now among the long- term unemployed, however,  Friedman clearly hasn't got a clue: "Government will do less for you. Companies will do less for you. Unions can do less for you. There will be fewer limits, but also fewer guarantees. Your specific contribution will define your specific benefits much more. Just showing up will not cut it."      

    Friedman's ringing endorsement of the myth of Horatio Alger is more disturbing because it was published on a day that elsewhere in the world celebrated the importance of unions and the rights of workers. Millions of workers took to the streets to demand better working conditions and wages, and an economic system that promoted the interests of everyone, not just the wealthy elite. The May Day demonstrations in Spain, Italy and Greece were particularly vocal, prompted by the widespread and growing misery that the austerity measures imposed by the E.U., the I.M.F. and their cabal of German bankers have inflicted upon those countries.  

    By way of contrast, Pope Francis in Rome on May Day denounced the  recycled Social Darwinism that Friedman blithely accepts as inevitable "...I think of the difficulties that, in various countries, today afflict the world of work and businesses. I think of how many, and not just young people, are unemployed, many times due to a purely economic conception of society, which seeks selfish profit, beyond the parameters of social justice. I wish to extend an invitation to solidarity to everyone, and I would like to encourage those in public office to make every effort to give new impetus to employment."

    In the United States, the 401(k) world that Friedmm  ruminates about was ushered in with the enactment of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act ( ERISA) during Ronald Reagan's administration. Traditional defined benefit plans - pensions - were gutted as employees were increasingly required to investment their future retirements in Wall Street ponzi schemes to their detriment.

    Today, the United States continues to have the most restrictive labor laws in Western world, the effect of which is to make it infinitely more difficult for employees to organize, to join unions and to bargain collectively for better wages, benefits and working conditions. In addition, 49 of the 50 states still subscribe to the doctrine of  "employment at will," a legal fiction that no other modern democracy has ever embraced.  

    Lastly, there is little evidence that the notion of "free trade" - as exemplified by the open movement of goods, services and financial instruments across nation-state borders - has benefitted ordinary Americans - including highly educated ones - whose jobs have been out-sourced. As entrepreneurs scour the world over for ever cheaper labor costs, the masters of the universe in financial world that now dominates the U.S. economy seek short-term profits from stock trading, but refuse to invest in companies that create jobs in the U.S. or invest in critical infrastructure and research and development, notwithstanding the Federal Reserve's policies that permit these institutions to borrow money from the American tax-payers at zero interest.

    Friedman's question "can you pass the bar?" ignores the importance and relevance of collective action. Ultimately, we are all in this together and it's well past the time to begin a serious national conversation about ways to make this economy work for everyone. An economy that works well for everyone - one which provides hope for the future and a job - is the best antidote to despair and suicide.     

    

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    This past Wednesday, the United States Senate refused to support any legislation that would ban the sale of automatic weapons and large ammunition clips. 45 craven U.S. Senators, 41 Republicans and  4 Democrats, voted against an even more modest compromise bill, co-sponsored by Senator Joe Manchin (D -W.Va.) And Pat Toomey (R-Pa), that would have closed some loopholes on gun purchases at trade shows and from some third party sellers; and that required slightly more expanded background checks, particularly before felons and mentally ill persons, could purchase firearms.  This legislation was defeated despite the fact that  90% of the population of the country supports reasonable gun controls. Collectively, the 45 Senators who voted "nay" represent states with less than a quarter of the U.S. population.
       
    During the days prior to the Senate vote, the Newtown parents and many of those who were affected by the carnage at Virginia Tech, Aurora, Tucson and Columbine had actively lobbied reluctant, undecided and wavering Senators. In person-to-person meetings, they begged them to support the proposed gun legislation on behalf of their loved ones and the still grieving families and the more than one million Americans who have had died from fire arms' violence in the past thirty-three years.

    As reported by Jennifer Steinhauer in the New York Times ("Tangled Birth, and Death of a Gun Control Bill," April 19, 2013), the encounter of former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was severely injured by gun violence in Tucson, with her one-time colleague and now Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican, from her home state of Arizona was especially poignant. Unable to speak clearly because of the gun shot wounds to her head that she had sustained, Giffords "grabbed his arm and tried -  furiously and with difficulty - to say she had needed is vote. The best she could get out was the word,'need.'" Senator Flake who voted against the proposed  legislation, told The Times' reporter, "I said I was sorry. I didn't know what else to say. It's very hard."  

      On Wednesday afternoon, after the Senate vote, President Obama, appeared on the steps of the White House with Vice President Biden and a number of the parents whose children were killed in the Newtown, Connecticut massacre. Former Congresswoman Giffords and her husband stood alongside them. President Obama remarked that the Senate vote was a " pretty shameful day for Washington." The President noted that there were no coherent reasons why a majority of Republicans voted  against the Manchin-Toomey bill and he stated his belief that it all "came down to politics" and a fear on the part of GOP Senators  that "the vocal minority of gun owners would come after them in future elections" and "that the gun lobby would spend a lot of money and paint them as anti-Second Amendment."

    The following day, U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-Tx) took to the Senate floor in to defend his Senate votes on gun legislation and to take issue with the President's remarks. In a prepared speech, Senator Cornyn stated,"[I] say this more with sadness than anger -- I watched the President of the United States say it was a pretty shameful day for Washington on the national news. That was yesterday. And I agree but for different reasons than the President himself articulated. When good and honest people have honest differences of opinion about what policies our country should pursue when it comes to the Second Amendment and gun rights and mass gun violence, the President of the United States should not accuse them of having no coherent arguments or caving to the pressure.

    "The President could have taken the high road, could have said, 'Ok now that we have been unsuccessful in these measures, let's move on to area where we know there is consensus, and that has to do with the mental health element in so many of these mass gun tragedies.' But instead, he chose to take the low road. And I agree with him, it was a truly shameful day.

    "I, and many of my colleagues, are not worried, as some of the press like to portray it, about the gun lobby who would spend a lot of money and paint us as anti-Second Amendment. I don't work for them. I don't listen to them. I work for 26 million Texans, and I'm proud to represent them. And the views I represented on the floor of the United States Senate are their views. And if I don't represent their views, then I am accountable to them, and no one else.

    "And no, those of us who did not agree with the President's proposals are not being intimidated, as he said yesterday. And it's false -- it's absolutely false to say it comes down to politics, as he said.

    "For me, it comes down to a meeting I had with the families who lost loved ones at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I told them that I was not interested in symbolism, in things we might be able to do that would have had no impact on the terrible tragedy that day or at Tucson, or Virginia Tech, or at Aurora, Colorado. I'm interested in trying to come up with a solution.

    "I told them that day, the family members who came to visit with me, as we grieved with them for their terrible loss, I told them that, as I understood what they were telling me, they weren't coming to sell a particular political point of view or an agenda or a legislative laundry list of things they wanted to see passed.

    "It really boiled down to this: These families who lost both children and parents and spouses want to make sure that their loved one did not die in vain. They want to make sure that something good comes out of this terrible tragedy. And why wouldn't we want to work together to try to help them achieve their goals?

    "Instead of calling the President names and taking the low road, like he did yesterday, and chastising my fellow senators for their good-faith disagreement and the best policies to pursue in order to make sure these families' loss was not in vain, I'm here to ask for his help. I'm here to ask for every Members' help, to try to make sure that we actually continue to look for measures that we might be able to get behind to actually make things better, that would have offered up a solution to some of these problems."

    "So I believe that there is actually a way forward for us, and I hope that Senator Reid, the Majority Leader, who controls the agenda on the Senate floor, will not choose to quit in our effort to try to find solutions, indeed something we need to pursue, instead of just symbolic gestures which would have had no impact on these mass gun tragedies."

    Senator Cornyn's pious platitudes in defense of his own vote and those of his nay-saying colleagues could not obscure the fact that the U.S. Senate is a undeniably dysfunctional institution because of its disproportionately rural and unequal representation, compounded by its arcane and anti-majoritarian voting rules that protect and maximize the influence of the smallest minorities of influence groups. Its very existence raises a question as to how any serious student of government could possibly describe the United States as a functioning, transparent democracy that even remotely serves the public interest.  

    Aside from these profoundly troubling institutional concerns, Senator Cornyn's comments reek of hypocrisy. Throughout his senate career, Cornyn has been, most charitably put, a political australopithecine. In the 2004, for example, in a debate over the Federal Marriage Amendment, he released an advance copy of a speech he was to give at the Heritage Foundation. In that speech, he wrote, "It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right.... Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife."  Equally telling, on the critical issue of gun control legislation, Cornyn has consistently received an "A" rating from the National Rifle Association because of his unyielding opposition.

    Senator Cornyn's comments are also preposterous on their face. Good and honest people do not have honest differences of opinion about what policies this country should pursue "when it comes to the Second Amendment and gun rights and mass gun violence." Scalia and his four  linguistically- challenged colleagues in District of Columbia, et al v. Heller, 128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008) notwithstanding, the text and syntax of the Second Amendment is unambiguous and defines a collective, as opposed to an individual, right subordinate to a requirement of formal military training: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a fee State, the right of people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." In addition, all of the evidence compiled from Canada, Europe and Australia shows that rational gun control measures and uniform regulations, including licensing, training, and registration requirements, and limits on  kinds and quantities of forearms have had dramatic and measurable effects in preventing gun violence.

    Last week's debate over gun control legislation occurred in the immediate aftermath of the terror attack at the Boston Marathon. A few days before these almost parallel unfolding events, CNN and other news outlets reported on an Al Queda video from 2011 that had resurfaced. The video shows Adam Gadahn, who was born in California and who became an al Qaeda spokesman. In the video, Gadahn describes how easy it is to buy guns in the United States and he urges his fellow jidhadists to buy guns here. "America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms," Gadahn states, "You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?"

    We now know from the execution of the MIT police officer, the shooting of an MBTA police officer, the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston terror suspects, after a ferocious firefight with police, and the apprehension of his brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, as the second terror suspect, that the two were heavily armed with automatic weapons and with a number of explosive devices that utilized gun powder as an agent. What will happen if, as is likely, the government's investigation shows that these two suspects obtained their firearms and gun powder here in the United States, whether through third parties or because of existing loop- holes that permit the unregulated sales of firearms, including semi-automatic weapons and assault-style rifles, at gun shows and through private sales?

    In December of 2005, the good and honest Senator from Texas justified his support for the re-authorization of the Patriot Act with the statement "None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead," and he implied that those who opposed the measure were soft on terror. As he declared in a homeland security statement released by his office, "Defending against threats to America's security will always be one of my highest priorities in the U.S. Senate. I'm committed to ensuring that our first responders have the training and equipment they need to protect our families, our homes, and our nation against any and all terrorist threats."

    How will Senator Cornyn square those remarks with his unwavering opposition to any form of reasonable gun control once the evidence becomes incontrovertible that the lack of uniform gun control legislation does, in fact, pose a threat to America's security?

    Over years, Senator Cornyn and his right-wing GOP colleagues have intimated that the  concerns raised by many about the increasing abridgment of civil liberties since September 11, 2001 and fears about the possible rise of a surveillance or garrison state are naive and misplaced. Isn't their unwavering support for the unrestricted ability of zealots and terrorists to purchase guns for commit acts of violence here in the United States now sauce for the gander?     
    
    If it is discovered that innocent Americans have been murdered by terrorists who have taken Adam Gadahn's advice to heart, how will Senator Cornyn respond? Wouldn't his continued refusal to support reasonable gun control legislation be tantamount to aiding and abetting terrorism?

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    On a nearly perfect spring afternoon in Boston, the city's civic celebration of Patriot's Day and the 117th Boston Marathon were marred by a violent terrorist attack. In addition to identifying and bringing to justice the anonymous perpetrator(s) of this carnage that has killed three people so far and maimed hundreds of other innocent and defenseless citizens, the attack again raises the troubling question of how we should respond collectively, as a democracy, to this violence.

 
    In 1945, Karl, Popper, a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics, published a two volume work entitled The Open Society and Its Enemies. In his work, Popper criticized the writings of Plato, Hegel and Marx. Popper argued that their political philosophies were based upon a teleological historicism which falsely asserted that the movement of history was governed by universal laws. Popper also claimed to detect in the writings of Hegel and Marx, in particular contained the seeds of 20th century fascist and communist ideology.

    However mistaken Popper was in his understanding of the writings of Plato, Hegel and Marx, his work was an emphatic endorsement of liberal democracy. Popper insisted that liberal democracy was the only form of government that permits continued political evolution without revolution  or violence.

     Although Popper's choice of the phrase "the open society" has sometimes been narrowly interpreted by right-wing admirers of his writing to apply only to liberal democracies such as the United States and Switzerland, there is no doubt that the non-Western world clearly understands that the social democracies of Western Europe are equally open and tolerate wide ranges of dissent and argument within the context of robust, secular democratic institutions.

      Unfortunately,  Popper himself did not fully recognize that sometimes the most ardent advocates of liberal democracy might simultaneously be among its enemies. Within the liberal democratic project, there exists a profound sense of insecurity that liberalism has fostered,  predicated as it is upon individualism. Liberalism's emergence from the Protestant Reformation seems to have instilled within it a permanent sense of anxiety and apprehension.

    Although Luther's insistence that personal salvation could be gained by one's one receptivity to the Word alone released the self from the bonds of obedience to the universal church and its magisterium, the penalties for personal emancipation have continued to exacted a severe psychological toll. As Hobbes observed, the severance of man from nature - the natural order, natural law - estranged man and left him alone and afraid. Fear and a sense of personal isolation, and therefore personal vulnerability, in turn, can lead to panic and hysteria.

    So, too, Locke's emphasis upon the self was the obverse of his fear of the exercise of traditional political authority. With the gradual demise of the Great Chain of Being came also the demise of the imperium - the traditional authority of the magistrate to bind his subjects and his power to command. Even the ascension of the Protestant William of Orange to the throne of England was effectuated not by the right of succession, but by an invitation from the Parliament.  

     Thereafter, the power to command would depend upon the need to receive formal, legislative consent which, while a significant advance for democracy, was not without its downside. Since political institutions were, in Locke's view, of dubious legitimacy and should exercise only limited, arbitral, transitory authority, there has always dwelt within the corpus of the liberal consensus  of thos country a sense of the fragility of social and public institutions because they were created in the American Republic by an act of covenanting.

    This toxic brew of fear, anxiety, vulnerability, and concern about the fragility, and hence, stability, of political and social institutions, has contributed to the periodic eruptions of extremely ugly incidents in American politics. Harvard historian Louis Hartz in his justly famous study of The Liberal Tradition In America characterized this phenomenon as "irrational Lockianism."

     The Salem Witch trials and the frequent preemptive forays into Indian territories by colonial settlers who feared Indian insurrections (which, in turn, lead to the extermination of countless numbers of the aborigines) were precursors to the kind of hysteria that gripped the newly-independent United States after the French Revolution. The XYZ and Citizen Genet affairs were the precipitants for the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in the administration of John Adams.

    Later, recurrent fears of slave insurrections in the first half of the nineteenth century prompted the enactment of ever-more punitive laws in the slave-holding states to punish "run-aways," abolitionists, and anyone who tried to educate a slave. In the 1840s, the Native American Party -the Know-Nothings -emerged in the Northeastern United States in response to a climate of intolerance and fear that had been preceded by the burning and sacking of an Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1834, and by frequent attacks upon Irish and other Catholic immigrants.

    In the twentieth century, the imprisonment of war critics, such as the socialist Eugene Debbs during World War I, and the aggressive acts of Attorney General Palmer's "Red Raids" after the Bolshevik Revolution exemplified the kind of war frenzy and jingoism to which Americans have so often succumbed. Two decades hence, after the isolationism espoused by Father Coughlin and the America First Committee proved to be delusional, the attack on Pearl Harbor made palatable the confinement of thousands of American citizens--citizens of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast of the United States were forced into internment camps, without trial or any evidence of personal guilt, for the duration of World War II.

    Justice Black's infamous decision in Korematsu v. United States, 321 U.S. 760 (1944) excused this mass imprisonment. His decsion is stark evidence - which has been confirmed on countless other occasions throughout American history - of the timidity of the federal judiciary within this putatively liberal democracy to defend the most basic civil liberties whenever the courage to decry public hysteria is required.  Instead, the courts have, with few precious exceptions, routinely deferred to the executive branch's claims of a national emergency even where the evidence has showed that the alleged emergency - such as the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 - did not threaten or imperil the continued existence of the United States.

    An exaggerated fear of vulnerability and danger was continually fueled by politicians during the Cold War after World War II. Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and a cabal of professional fear-mongers and political opportunists successfully inflamed the worries and concerns of ordinary citizens about the evils of socialism and the purported Communist infiltration of American institutions and now the threats of terrorism.

    Later, this lamentable penchant to induce and to pander to the most base fears and anxieties of ordinary Americans for purely partisan political purposes was honed and perfected by the administration of Bush-Cheney and by their Svengali, Karl Rove. Equally appalling was the unsuccessful attempt by Rudolph Guliani to win the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination by running, as then-Delaware-Senator Joseph Biden remarked, "on a noun, a verb, and 9/11."

     Sadly, even President Obama has acquiesced to the emergence of the "Homeland Security" state with his continued endorsement of extra-judicial imprisonments in Guantanamo , wiretaps and other forms of extensive surveillance that strike at the very heart of all notions of legitimate privacy.

    The root of this exaggerated fear on the part of the courts and our elected political leadership can be directly traced to the liberal ethos of our politics: Because we have accepted the proposition that our institutions and even government itself are fragile because they are mere creatures of contract, we fear that all of our institutions are vulnerable to dissolution and disruption, particularly when subjected to outside stresses.    

    This country's legacy of individualism has contributed to the sense of social isolation, fear, and vulnerability that so many Americans harbor. It poses a danger and a challenge to the American body politic, our sense of who we are, and how confident we are in our ability to confront the challenges of the future. The attendant fear - that forces more powerful than the self pose a threat to personal autonomy - may, in large part, explain the anger, frustration, and vitriol exemplified by the Tea Party movement which first came to prominence in the summer of 2009.

    As Erich Fromm observed in The Escape From Freedom, "The individual became more alone, isolated, became an instrument in the hands of overwhelmingly strong forces outside of himself; he became an 'individual' but a bewildered and insecure individual." Hence, as Fromm notes, "Once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are severed, once the individual faces the world outside of himself as a completely separate entity, two courses are open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable stage of powerlessness and aloneness. By one course he can progress to 'positive freedom'; he can relate himself spontaneously to the world in love and work...he can thus become one again with man, nature and himself, without giving up the independence and integrity of his individual self. The other course is to fall back, to give up his freedom, to try to overcome his aloneness by trying to eliminate the gap which has arisen between his individual self and the world."

    If we heed Fromm's sage advice, in the midst of our adversity, we will discover an opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to remain an open society in which all of us accept our obligations to look out for one another. We will also not to be cowed by the forces of evil or the advocates of repression, but rather will choose to respond rationally and proportionately to every single incident of terrorism. As Franklin Roosevelt reminded us, as Americans we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
 

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     Most Americans are at least vaguely familiar with the data that shows that, at almost every level, school children in the United States are out-performed academically by their peers throughout Western Europe and in Southeast Asia. This data is equally compelling whether the  subject-matter tested for measures knowledge of mathematics and science or the  ability to read, use and understand language properly, or the ability to draw proper inferences from the materials presented and to think logically.

   
    An article appeared in The New York Times ("Students Told to Take Viewpoint of the Nazis," by Jesse McKinley, April 12, 2013) that provides a focus and a context for these continuing concerns. McKinley reports that students at Albany High School were given what he described as " an alarming thought puzzle":  A Tenth Grade English teacher assigned about 75 students  a "persuasive writing" exercise. The students were instructed to imagine that their teacher was a Nazi and they were told to construct an argument that Jews were "the source of our problems." In support of their argument, they were told to use historical propaganda and the traditional essay format: "Your essay must be five paragraphs long, with an introduction, three body paragraphs containing your strongest arguments, and a conclusion," the assignment read. "You do not have a choice in your position: you must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!"

    The assignment - which was first reported by The Times Union of Albany - elicited a tsunami of criticism from school district administrators, rabbis and "concerned"  parents.

     "Obviously, we have a severe lack of judgment and a horrible level of insensitivity," Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard, the superintendent of Albany schools, observed, "That's not the assignment that any school district, and certainly not mine, is going to tolerate." Dr. Wyngaard later met with Jewish leaders in Albany and was reported to have offered a public apology on Friday. She opined that the assignment was apparently an attempt to link the English class with a history lesson on the Holocaust. Although Dr. Wyngaard insisted that,"No one here believes that malice was the intent," the teacher has been suspended and faces disciplinary action that the superintendent said could include termination. 

     Rabbi David M. Eligberg of Temple Israel, a Conservative synagogue in Albany, told McKinley that the lesson was "incendiary, inappropriate and academically unsound." "The assignment is flawed in its essence," Rabbi Eligberg was also quoted as saying. "It asks students to take the product for a propaganda machine and treat it as legitimate fodder for a rational argument. And that's just wrong." Rabbi Eligberg even criticized a part of the assignment which instructed students to use one of three classic Greek ideals -ethos, pathos or logos - to support their anti-Semitic argument. ("Choose which argument style will be most effective in making your point. Please remember that your life here in Nazi Germany in the '30s may depend on it!" the assignment read.)

    Rabbi Donald P. Cashman of the B'nai Sholom Reform Congregation, whom McKinley's article identified as the father of three Albany High School graduates, was described as  more forgiving. "Hypothetical situations are often effective teaching tools," he stated, and debating positions one may not believe in can also be valuable. "We know it's important for kids to get out of their comfort zones," Rabbi Cashman remarked and added that the assignment seemed to correspond with Holocaust Remembrance Day, known as Yom Hashoah, which was commemorated on April 7th and 8th of last week.

    Nick Brino, a 10th grade student, heard about the assignment secondhand from a classmate. "I thought it was wrong," he said, "But she was flipping out, saying if anyone was going to do it, she wasn't going to be their friend."

    A ninth-grader, Jyasi Nagel, stated that he thought the teacher was not anti-Semitic, but was just trying to teach different points of view. His father, Moses Nagel, did not advocate a harsh punishment for the teacher, but still said that he thought  another topic might have   provided a more suitable lesson. "It just seems like there's a million other examples to use rather than going there," he noted.

      In the United Kingdom, for generations, universities and secondary schools have sponsored and endowed debating societies. Perhaps Oxford University's is the most famous. A primary goal of these debating societies has always been to train young men - and now women - to stand for public office and to prepare them to become Members of Parliament. As a consequence, the ability to think quickly on one's feet, to rapidly dispose of hostile questions from the audience, and to argue from different perspectives (even if not believed) and to debate seemingly inane or vile topics have become the standard repertoire of successful debaters.
 
    In the U.S., since the late 19th century, colleges and universities - and increasingly now many high schools - have also sponsored debating clubs and societies, albeit for more prosaic purposes. Unlike their British counterparts who explicitly acknowledge a nexus between reasoned discussion and the kind of informed civic discourse that is the lifeblood of democracy, many American debaters would also suggest that the art of debating is good preparation for entering into the rough and tumble of the world of commerce. In the U.S., too, while university debating topics are more formal, and the debate format more restrained (audience participation is prohibited), it is not unusual in special, non-competition tournaments for the debate judges to ring a bell in the middle of an argument and require the debater, without prior notice, to immediately begin to argue against the very proposition that the debater had only moments before been advancing.

    The purpose of debating is to develop the intellectual agility that will enable future citizens and public office holders to quickly understand opposing arguments and the evidence upon which they rest in order to be able dissect the strengths and weaknesses of each asserted proposition.

    Most serious debaters, as part of their formal training, have also studied Aristotle's Rhetoric and can immediately recognize and challenge faulty logic - non-sequiturs ( it does not follow), non causa pro causa ( noncause for the cause), reductio ad absurdum,  post hoc ergo propter hoc, (after this, because of this) and the classic fallacies - argumentum ad populum, ad baculum, ad verecundiam, ad hominem, etc.        
 
    The Times' article raises profoundly disturbing issues, especially in view of the fact that so few young American adolescents will ever be exposed to a formal course in logic or join a debating team. It also raises serious questions about academic freedom and the extent to which the First Amendment's guarantee of fee speech protects the rights of teachers, the extent to which school districts are truly committed to development of critical thinking skills among pupils, and the extent to which teachers should be invested with autonomy and wide latitude - as licensed and qualified professionals and consistent with the curriculum  - to raise controversial issues and to utilize controversial strategies without censorship by non-teachers, whether superintendents, school administrators, clergy or parents.

    The suspension of this tenth grade English teacher is inimical to the open exchange of ideas between teachers and learners in a democratic society. If disturbing, unseemly, and unsettling questions are the Rubicon beyond which teachers in U.S. school districts may not cross, the moral development model of inquiry, for example, that was created by Lawrence Kohlberg will also become another outlier: Kohlberg's work, based upon Piaget's developmental psychology and Kant's ethical precepts, could never again never be used in a classroom because debate and the open discussion of each moral dilemma presented are essential and indispensable parts of the process by which the quality of empathy and a broader understanding of one's obligations as a moral agent are cultivated.

     How can young people learn to apply the lessons of logic and develop the ability to distinguish between propaganda and good evidence, truth and falsity, if they have never been required to try to defend the indefensible?

    Isn't this teacher being punished because, in our politically correct culture, we would rather not think about unsettling ideas, but simply declare them to be out of bounds?
   
    Didn't the Germans in the 1930s think that they, too, were ordinary people?

    Weren't the Western democracies, including the United States, morally complicit when they refused to allow safe-havens for Jewish emigres who were attempting to escape the Nazi genocide?

    Didn't Pope Pius XII remain silent and decline to excommunicate Adolph Hitler, despite his crimes against humanity and violations of fundamental Catholic teaching?
       
    Didn't most Southern whites before the Civil War believe that they, too, not unlike the Germans of the 1930s, were virtuous, misunderstood and support slavery as that "peculiar institution?"

    Didn't most Southern whites, with the acquiescence and tacit acceptance of the rest of the American population, support Jim Crow and the persistent violence and degradation of Southern blacks until the 1960s?

      Although not of the same magnitude of evil as the pogroms against European Jews, didn't most "decent" white Southerners abandon the Democratic Party because the party of their historic allegiance finally divorced itself from Jim Crow and became the party of civil rights?

    Weren't the appeals to the "silent majority" and the "Southern strategy" of Nixon and Reagan, the latter's criticisms of "welfare queens," the elder Bush's Willie Horton ads, and the GOP's continued blatant appeals to the resentments and grievances of hard-scrabble working-class white citizens akin to the Nazi's strategy of blaming the Jews for most of that country's ills?

    Isn't the ability to analogize and to draw parallels and deduce inferences an essential part of the learning process?
   
    Doesn't the very survival of democracy depend upon the ability of citizens to make informed decisions based upon actual evidence and the reasoned analysis of that evidence, no matter how disconcerting it may be to our own cherished worldviews?

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For Christians throughout the Christian world, Easter is the apex of the liturgical calendar. In the iconography of the Christian Church, the Risen Christ symbolizes the redemption of mankind; its new hope and its new possibilities. The words of the Gospel of  Matthew continue to resonate two millennia later: "He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay."

  
 ^{Devastation on Sackville Street, Dublin, where it crosses the River Liffey, due to the Easter Rising of 1916. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis}

       The hope for redemption that is epitomized by Easter is the common legacy of all men and women, whether believers or non-believers, no matter their stations in life or their geographic locations. In our own way, each of us yearns to build a better life for ourselves, our children, our grandchildren. But each of us also knows that the quest will too often exact a very personal toll, as witnessed by the crucifixion. William Butler Yeats, perhaps better than most, grasped  the secular implications the Easter message: the possibility alongside the peril and uncertainty:      

Easter, 1916

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

         The Eastern Rebellion, chronicled by Yeats, was, at the time, ridiculed as amateurish and folly, but within a short time, owing to the brutality of the oppressors, a new Ireland was born. So today, throughout Middle East, amidst the suffering countries of Southern Europe, and elsewhere in the world, the hopes of a multitude are often met with derision and violent oppression, but their dreams too will be vindicated if they persevere.

      In his inaugural address, John Kennedy reminded Americans  that "here on earth God's work must truly be our own." The creation of a better, more just world will not be achieved by solitary acts alone for the power of the status quo is always too great. Meaningful, substantial change will only be achieved when each of us of recognizes our shared potential as part of a broader public effort to insist that the voices of all of us - including the poor, the bedraggled, the dispossessed, the ill - be heard and addressed by those whom we have entrusted to govern us.

    The Catholic philosopher Jacques Martian, inspired by the teachings of Thomas Aquinas, reminds us, "...the primary reason for which men, united in political society, need the State, is the order of justice...social justice is the crucial need of modern societies. As a result, the primary duty of the modern state is the enforcement of social justice."
      
            There can and must be a place at the table for all of God's children. In the quest to achieve that goal, we redeem and fulfill ourselves as human beings. This is the message of Easter that all of us - believer and non-believer alike - should embrace.

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    Radio commentator and writer Thom Hartmann, among other progressives, has correctly observed on a number of occasions that there is no evidence whatsoever that austerity measures have ever helped to bring a market economy out of a recession or a depression. Because the U.S. is a consumer driven economy, "We cannot cut our way to growth," he has noted.

 

 

      In this lingering Great Recession, high unemployment in the private sector and the loss of nearly one million jobs in the public sector have enfeebled consumer demand and significantly stalled a robust economic recovery. It is a basic axiom of modern macro-economics that, when  consumer demand has collapsed because of high unemployment (and tax revenues have declined at the federal, state and  local levels) the federal government - through fiscal policy (pump-priming) - then becomes the only remaining, viable agent that can stimulate the economy since the wealthy  have already hunkered down to await better days.

     Anyone who doubts that validity of this basic proposition as originally put forth by John Maynard Keynes in his General Theory  - and which has been reconfirmed by three generations of mainstream orthodox economists including John Kenneth Galbraith, Gardner Ackley, Paul Samuelson, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz - need only consider the present examples of Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Italy and Cyprus. The austerity demands of the German bankers and their equally myopic surrogates have exacerbated the economic travail and misery of ordinary citizens in those E.U. countries.

     In the United Kingdom, which still maintains its own currency and does not belong to the E.U.'s monetary union, the Tory Party's austerity measures are having an equally devastating effect. John Cassidy, in a February 7, 2013 post for the New Yorker ("U.K. Lesson: Austerity Leads to More Debt"), describes a new study from the Institute of Fiscal Studies, a London-based think tank.  In its annual report on of the U.K.'s finances, the I.F.S. observed that out that the budget deficit, because of the austerity measures in place, would still be so large that next year the Chancellor, George Osborne, will be required to borrow about sixty-five billion pounds more than he had anticipated - or about four per cent of the U.K.'s G.D.P.)

     Cassidy quotes the Jeremy Warner of the British Daily Telegraph to the effect "This is a truly desperate state of affairs that demands swift and decisive action. We seem to have the worst of all possible worlds, with nil growth, some very obvious cuts in the quantity and quality of public services, but pretty much zero progress in getting on top of the country's debts."

     Cassidy further notes that when Prime Minister, David Cameron and the Tory Party assumed office in May, 2010, and chose to implement an extensive program of austerity measures, the U.K. economy was slowly recovering from the Great Recession. By the final quarter of 2011, the U.K.'s economy had fallen back into a recession, from which it has yet to emerge.

     Here in the United States, the insistence upon austerity measures has continued to choke off an economic recovery. More than a quarter of the population has descended into poverty; and long-term joblessness, particularly among older workers, has become intractable. At the same time recent college graduates, burdened by massive debts, are condemned to menial jobs as waiters and independent contractors. The pernicious policies of the balance-budget advocates and the sequester have begun to further chill the economic climate. Simultaneously, the 1% - those employed in the financial and technology sectors and in the multi-national corporations that have de-industrialized the economy and shipped middle class jobs overseas - have continued to amass unparalleled wealth. 

     As the gap between the many and the very few has continued to widen, those who have been been to emulate the lifestyle of Nick Carraway in this country's Second Golden Age would be wise to heed Yeats' prophetic warning in the Second Coming.:  

      Those politicians and pundits who urge austerity measures fail to understand the long-term consequences: The middle class will continue to erode as the safety net contracts. That trend, if not reversed, could, in a worst-case scenario, precipitate the collapse of this country's consumer-driven, market economy. An increasingly impoverished population will, at some point, become too poor to shop even at Wall-Mart.    

     The philosopher George Santayana reminds us that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The lessons from those countries struggling in Europe today and the lesson of 1937 when Franklin Roosevelt prematurely sought to reign in the stimulus of the New Deal and to address budget deficits (which thereby deepened the Great Depression) are proof positive that austerity measures are counter-productive. They are prescriptions for prolonged misery and suffering.

     President Obama and Democrats in the House and the Senate need to stand firm and to challenge the economic Neanderthals in their midst. The kind of know-nothing-trickle-down-tax -incentives-for-the-wealthy-no-increase-in-the-minimum-wage-free trade-and-out-sourcing-good-and unions-for- workers-bad economics that the1% and their elected GOP surrogates are now trying to foist upon a gullible public represent the kind of policy proposals that a more economically literate public would immediately recognize for what they are: The nutty mutterings of individuals who in decades past would have been committed to asylums instead of having been elected to United Sates Congress.

 

 

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   From all accounts, Pope Francis is a humble man. Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, he is the son of Italian immigrants to Argentina, and his father was a railway worker. He has lived for more than 50 years with one functioning lung; the other was other removed in his youth because of an infection. Educated as a chemist, he is a man of science. As the first Jesuit elevated to the papacy, he is broadly educated. In addition to Spanish, he speaks German and Italian fluently.

      Until this past week, the new pope lived in a small apartment, rather than in the opulent archbishop's residence in Buenos Aires and he often commuted by bus and train mingling with fellow Argentines.

     At a Holy Thursday service in 2001, he washed and kissed the feet of AIDS patients. He also uged Argentinians not to travel to Rome to celebrate if  he were chosen to become the pope, but to give their money to the poor instead.  

    In a press conference on Saturday, March 16, as reported by CNN, Pope Francis remarked that he hoped for a church that was both poor and "for the poor." He explained that a fellow cardinal from Brazil told him "don't forget the poor" as it became clear that he had received a majority of the votes in the conclave. Pope Francis explained to the reporters present that this thought remained in his mind after he realized he had been chosen as the new pope.

    "Right away, with regard to the poor, I thought of St. Francis of Assisi, then I thought of war," he told the reporters. "Francis loved peace and that is how the name came to me." He said he also thought of St. Francis of Assisi's concern for the natural environment, and how St. Francis was a "poor man, a simple man, as we would like a poor church, for the poor."

      The career of Congressman Paul Ryan, who also claims to be a Catholic steeped in the church's social teaching, stands in stark contrast to the new pope. Now a very wealthy man, Ryan, as the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, has waged incessant war against the poor and the middle class.

    Ryan, who was born in Janesville, Wisconsin, attended a Catholic High School there. After his father's untimely death at age 55, Ryan received Social Security survivors benefits which enabled him  to pay for his college education. At Miami University in Ohio, Ryan majored in economics and political science and he became interested in the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. He has described his friendship with libertarian professor Richard Hart with whom he often met to discuss the theories of these economists and of Ayn Rand. As a result of Hart's recommendation, Ryan received an internship in the D.C. office of Wisconsin GOP Senator Robert Kasten, where he began his career as a GOP apologist and sycophant.

    At a 2005 Washington, D.C. gathering that celebrated the 100th anniversary of Ayn Rand's birth, Ryan praised Ayn Rand and said that she inspired him to become involved in public service. In a speech that same year to the Atlas Society, he said he grew up reading Rand, and that her books taught him about his value system and beliefs. Ryan required staffers and interns in his congressional office to read Rand and gave copies of her novel Atlas Shrugged as gifts to his staff for Christmas. In that Atlas Society speech, Ryan described Social Security as a "socialist-based system"

       In an article in the New Yorker ("Ayn Rand Joins the Ticket," August 11, 2012), Jane Mayer quotes Ryan as having said "What's unique about what's happening today in government, in the world, in America, is that it's as if we're living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault."

     As Ryan rose to national prominence in the GOP, he began to dissemble. In an interview on the Christian Broadcasting Network in 2012, he stated that, as a Catholic, the Church's "social magisterium" was the inspiration for his most recent House budget proposal. Ryan claimed that one essential goal of that teaching was to prevent the poor from staying poor and not becoming lifelong dependents of the government. Ryan further stated that, "A person's faith is central to how they conduct themselves in public and in private."

    In April 2012, after he was excoriated by Georgetown University faculty members and Catholic theologians from across the country because of his budget plan, Ryan repudiated Ayn Rand's philosophy because she was an atheist, and argued that it "reduces human interactions down to mere contracts." He also insisted that  the reports of his adherence to Rand's views an "urban legend" and stated that he was deeply influenced by his Roman Catholic faith and by Thomas Aquinas. But the kind of anti-government rhetoric advanced by Congressman Ryan is antithetical to Catholic social teaching.

     Thomas Aquinas argued that, with respect to relations among one another, human beings are obliged to seek justice as the summum bonum - the highest good. As the primary object of all human aspiration, true justice is something that can be achieved only through the law acting as an instrument of the social order. Aquinas quotes Isodore, "Laws are enacted for no private profit, but for the common benefit of citizens." Further, "A law properly speaking, regards first and foremost the order of the common good..."

    Aquinas insisted that justice is based upon a notion of proportionality. "Justice is a habit whereby a man renders to each one his due by a constant and perpetual will" and "Just as love of God includes love of one's neighbor,...so is the service of God rendering to each one his due." Finally, Aquinas invokes Cicero to the effect that "...'the object of justice is to keep men together in society and mutual intercourse.' Now this implies relationship of one man to another. Therefore justice is concerned only about our dealings with others."

    Thomas Aquinas taught that, because God endowed each man in his own image and likeness, man has become the steward for the earth, and for all of its creatures and its bounty. It is for that reason that Catholic social philosophy to the present remains deeply skeptical about arguments for an unregulated market economy dominated by the profit motive and the accumulation of wealth. As Aquinas observed, "It is lawful for a man to hold private property" but "Man should not consider his outward possessions as his own, but as common to all, so as to share them without hesitation when others are in need ..." Historically , Catholic social doctrine has condemned, in theory if not in practice, aggrandizement and selfishness. Avaritia (greed) and luxuria (extravagance) are counted as two of the Seven Deadly Sins.

       The Catholic conservative political tradition, harkening back to the Greeks and Romans, continues to insist that individuals realize their full potential and humanity to the extent to which they participate as full members of a political society - as citizens. That notion of citizenship, based upon mutual obligations and reciprocal rights, remains central to that political philosophy.

        Catholic social thought is essentially communitarian in contrast to the political philosophy of Ryan and other eighteenth century liberals who contend that society and the state are abstractions and that only the individual is real.

     The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, echoing the tradition of Catholic social thought and epistemology, countered that the self is the abstraction. He rejected the argument that one's ability to reason and the quality of that reasoning are unique attributes that belong to the solitary self as opposed to the social self. Because of the self's ephemeral nature, the knowledge, customs and habits contained within a given political culture are essential guideposts to properly orient the self to its social self and to other social selves. Which then is the abstraction: the self or society?

     It was Edmund Burke, a Catholic sympathizer and an alleged favorite of William Buckley, who observed that political society exists as an historical project into which individuals enter and depart while sharing a common destiny: "...society is indeed, a contract....It is to be looked on with reverence; because it is not a partnership in things...It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born..."
                             
    Catholic social thought emphasizes that the state exists to serve the needs of civil society; not as libertarians and classical liberals would have it, to serve only the needs of the individual. As such, the state should not be viewed as a passive instrument, designed merely to protect private property or to protect rights,  but imposes reciprocal obligations upon each citizen as a member of a political community. Consistent with the teaching of St. Thomas of Aquinas, the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain reminds us that "...the primary reason for which men, united in political society, need the State, is the order of justice. On the other hand, social justice is the crucial need of modern societies. As a result, the primary duty of the modern state is the enforcement of social justice."

       Unlike the new pope, Paul Ryan has never expressed a commitment to the idea of social justice, nor is he able to comprehend the notion that the public interest is something different and distinct from a mere aggregation of selfish interests. Faced with a growing specter of poverty and extreme economic inequality today, Congressman Ryan remains blithely oblivious to the suffering all around him. How can this insensitivity and indifference be reconciled with the message of the gospels and the social thought of Thomas Aquinas?

     Pope Francis gets the essential  message of the gospels; while Congressman Ryan and his fellow Catholic GOP Congressman, Speaker Boehner, haven't got a clue.

 

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  A study released on March 3, 2013 by the journal Health Affairs reported a decline in life expectancy for women in about 43 percent of the nation's counties. The research showed that women age 75 and younger are dying at higher rates than in previous years in nearly half of this country's counties. Most of these counties are located in rural areas throughout the South and the West.

    Historically, on average, the life expectancy for women has exceeded that of males in the United States by six years, but the disparity has been narrowing according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The reduction in life expectancy for some women appears to have begun in the late 1980s, although studies have begun to report upon it only during the past few years.

    The researchers, David Kindig and Erika Cheng of the University of Wisconsin, analyzed federal death data and other information for about 3,141 U.S. counties over the past 10 years. They calculated mortality rates for women aged 75 and younger. They found that nationwide, the rate of women who died younger than would be expected fell overall from 324 to 318 per 100,000 women. However, in 1,344 of the counties studied, the average premature death rate rose from 317 per 100,000 deaths to about 333 per 100,000.

    Two years ago, a similar study led by the University of Washington's Dr. Christopher Murray surveyed county-level death rates. It also found that women were dying earlier than life, especially in the South.

    The two studies by Murray and Kindig underscore important regional differences. The Southern states have the highest numbers of people who still smoke. In addition, the proportion of women who did not graduate from high school is also highest in the South.

     Since the 1980s, the percentage of people living in poverty and those who also lack access to basic medical and dental care in the United States has soared exponentially. This increase is directly attributable to the policies of Ronald Reagan and the "trickle-down" economics that he espoused.   

    Wheaton College economist John Miller in a 2004 article in Dollars and Sense Magazine ("Ronald Reagan's Legacy: His destructive economic policies do not deserve the press's praise," July/August 2004) observed that the economy grew much more slowly in the 1980s than during the 1960s, and that Reagan's tax policies especially harmed low income families. Many of these families, especially white voters in the South and West, were among Reagan's most ardent supporters.

    By the end of Regan's administration in1988, the bottom 40% of households paid a larger share of their income in federal taxes in 1988 than they did in 1980.  Miller noted that the increases in the payroll taxes that financed Social Security and Medicare were greater than the minuscule benefit these taxpayers received from lowered income tax rates.

 
    Not surprisingly, the richest 1% were the lottery winners as their effective federal tax rate was reduced from 34.6% to 29.7%, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Simultaneously, as Reagan increased the military budget, he slashed social spending. By 1988, domestic discretionary spending had declined  from4 .7% of GDP in 1980 to 3.1%. Miller reported that the most adversely affected were programs for vulnerable low-income Americans that experienced an extraordinary 54% reduction in federal spending from 1981 to 1988. After correcting for inflation, subsidized housing l had lost 80.7% of its budget, training and employment services wre cut by 68.3%, and housing assistance for the elderly suffered a 47.1% decrease.

    These programs, Miller concluded, never returned to their pre-Reagan spending levels. In the meantime, as taxes on corporations have declined precipitously since the 1950s, the growth of corporate welfare and tax loopholes has deprived the government of vital sources of additional revenue that could be used to expand essential public services for ordinary Americans.

    Mary Williams Walsh and Louise Storey, in an March 4, 2013 article in The New York Times ("Stealth Tax Subsidy for Business Faces New Scrutiny") report that corporations now enjoy billions of dollars in tax-free financing because of a 1986 change in the tax code supported by Ronald Reagan.

    They report: "In all, more than $65 billion of these bonds have been issued by state and local governments on behalf of corporations since 2003, according to an analysis of Bloomberg bond data by The New York Times. During that period, the single biggest beneficiary of such securities was the Chevron Corporation, which issued bonds with a total face value of $2.6 billion, the analysis showed. Last year it reported a profit of $26 billion.

    "At a time when Washington is rent by the politics of taxes and deficits, select companies are enjoying a tax break normally reserved for public works. This style of financing, called 'qualified private activity bonds,' saves businesses money, because they can borrow at relatively low interest rates. But those savings come at the expense of American taxpayers, because the interest paid to bondholders is exempt from taxes."                

     The American Dream is being plundered before our open eyes while politicians and pundits ominously warn that "entitlements" must be severely reduced. But the only programs they propose to gut are the ones that have provided a measure of dignity and social justice for ordinary Americans since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. These are the 99% of the population who owe their misfortune to the poor political choices that we have collectively made as a Americans.

     Politics has consequences. Those who choose not to become informed or involved do so at their peril .   

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       The Boston Globe reported this past Saturday that Maine Governor Paul LePage has announced that his administration intends to reject the expansion of Medicaid provided for under the Affordable Health Care Act, and that existing coverage provided to more than 40,000 residents of Maine will be eliminated commencing at the end of this month. Among those affected will be the elderly poor, persons with disabilities, parents, and childless adults who have incomes well below the poverty line.

     In a remarkable and important headline story ("A Message To Maine: No To Heath Billions"), the Globe's Jan Tracy reported that approximately 13% of the state's Medicaid population will lose coverage despite the fact that they are a part of the same group that the Obama administration sought to insure through the Medicaid extension that was a part of the Affordable Health Care Act.

      In a January 28, 2013 letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, LePage stated that Maine's previous Medicaid expansion prompted people "to drop their private insurance in favor of fee coverage at the expense of Mane taxpayers" and created "an addictive-like dependence on federal dollars."

     LePage's comments ignored that fact that Medicaid is a means-tested government benefit program. Eligibility depends upon whether a person's income falls within a certain percentage of the federal poverty guidelines. In other words, only those people whom the state defines as "poor" can receive Medicaid benefits. By definition, those who are "poor" cannot afford to purchase private health insurance. Thus, LePage's rhetoric unfairly demonizes the working poor, the children of the working poor, and the disabled by likening them to addicts.

     Maine is also the poorest state in New England. It has a low-wage economy - with a median income of $48,000 per annum - that Jan reports is dominated by tourism, fishing and lumber.

     The Globe's reporter chronicled the plight of Louis Bourgoin, a sixty-nine year old retired shipyard worker who is currently undergoing treatment for cancer of the liver. Mr. Bourgoin told the reporter that he and his wife were about to lose thousands of dollars in Medicaid benefits beginning in March.

     Tracy Jan quotes Bourgoin as saying, "The government doesn't care. It means we're just not going to eat very much." Katherine Bourgoin, his wife who is also 69 and a retired paper mill worker, said that she intended to forego cortisone shots and physical therapy for chronic back pain so that her husband might continue to receive chemotherapy to try to extend his life beyond the eighteen month period that a his physicians predict.

     Jan also described the plight of Jennifer Webb, a 35 year old mother of three and her husband, a former Army sergeant. Mrs. Webb had just completed ankle surgery that will require physical therapy after she is able to walk again in a month's time. Her husband suffers from a traumatic brain injury and a post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his having served two tours in Iraq. He had found a job installing metal roofs, but he was laid off one week before.

     Ms. Webb said that she understood why the Tea Party's emphasized self-reliance. "My husband's one of those people," she is quoted as saying. "He's an extremely conservative Republican who comes from a hard-working family. We were raised to stand up on our own and do what you have to do to survive, which we're trying to do."

     Jan also reported that earlier last week a telemarketer for a private insurance company called the Webbs. However, the sales person hung up after Mrs. Webb explained her family's financial plight and inquired about the costs of various plans.

     In response to LePage's decision, Jan's quotes Sara Gagné-Holmes, the executive director of Maine Equal Justice Partners, "We're using stereotypes, rhetoric, and ideology to create public policy and that's always easier and resonates more than looking at the facts."

     Governor LePage himself seems to have drawn the wrong lessons from his own hard-scrabble life. He grew up in a French-speaking family. At age eleven, after his father beat him and broke his nose, he ran away from home. Thereafter, he begged on the streets of Lewiston, and sought shelter wherever he could find it, including in horse stables and at a "strip joint" He survived by shining shoes, washing dishes at a café and by hauling boxes for a truck driver. He later worked at a rubber company, a meat-packing plant, and was a short order cook, and bartender.

     As a young man, LePage applied to Husson College in Bangor, but was initially denied admission. He scored poorly on the verbal section of the SAT because English was his second language. LePage has acknowledged that Peter Snowe - the first husband of U.S. Senator Olympia Snowe - gave him a critical leg up after Snowe persuaded Husson to give LePage a written exam in French. The results of that examination allowed LePage to demonstrate his comprehension and he was subsequently admitted. He graduated from Husson College with a Bachelor's Degree, later earned a Master's Degree in Business Administration from the University of Maine (a public, tax-payer supported institution), and became a successful businessman.

     LePage's politics and those of his Tea Party supporters epitomize an austere and insensitive version that Gunnar Myrdal described as the "American Creed" - a paradoxical set of beliefs in which those who describe themselves as "conservatives" seek to protect and defend a radical form of individualism that first emerged in 17th century England. 

     The central tenets of that ideology to which most Americans still subscribe, albeit in less extreme versions, evolved out of liberal political philosophy of John Locke. Locke believed that human beings were by nature motivated by the singular concerns of the self, that utilitarian calculations formed the true basis of moral decision-making, and that the desire to possess things - the acquisition of   property - was the sine qua non of human aspirations. Locke also argued that the individual is the only concrete reality, that society is merely an aggregation of individuals, and that government is an artificial construct created solely by a contract among consenting parties.

     David Hume, through his essays about the importance of money and trade, Adam Smith, with his emphasis upon the role of markets as self-regulating entities, and David Ricardo, with his concept of comparative advantage, completed the edifice of what has now become this country's political and economic orthodoxy.

     The problem is that here in the United States, Locke's political philosophy -  in stark contrast to the English experience - has been constructed upon a foundation that recognizes and envisions only solitary selves. Hence, a concept of the whole - the public interest - what we owe to one another as citizens - is largely missing from American public discourse.

     Whether the issue today is universal medical coverage, poverty, antiquated labor laws that harm workers and benefit employers, access to education, the need to rebuild our economy or the need to repair decaying infrastructure and to invest in research and development, the impediments- which are the legacy of Locke's politics --remain: parochialism, special interests, and, all too often, an inability to see beyond the refrain of "What's in it for me?"

     Among true believers today, this extreme version of anti-social individualism has been given free reign, unencumbered by the restraints, modifications and caveats to which it was subjected in England and in other European political systems. There the ties of the traditional society and medieval ideas that place an emphasis upon cooperation and the importance of community have not unraveled and they continue to inform and bind the political discourse.

     As a result, in Europe, Locke's individualism was given nuance and context; whereas in America, in the context of the political tabula rasa of the New World and the seemingly limitless expanse of "free land" that could be claimed by hard work, the self  has become the avatar.

     Although the frontier was declared closed by the end of the 19th century and a new industrial economy emerged, the mythology of self-reliance still lingers. As Christopher Hitchens once observed, "I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough."

     Why then do so many Americans still subscribe to an ideology that no longer provide answers - or any meaningful policy prescriptions-  that can possibly begin to address this country's real political and economic problems?

     Thomas Kuhn, in his epic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has provided a possible answer. Kuhn, a former historian of science at MIT, has described how the paradigms in which individuals live and work - what phenomenologists refer to as a "shared field of meaning" - continue to control the beliefs and behaviors of individuals long after the anomalies have overwhelmed the paradigm and long after the paradigms have ceased to explain what is actually happening in the real world. This holds true whether the issue at hand involves a scientific hypothesis or an economic theorem.

     As individuals and societies hold fast to beliefs that no longer explain or inform social reality, fear, anxiety and anger often mount. The death- throes of these ideas is resisted with a ferocity that overwhelms civility and rational political discourse. This, at least in part, explains the rise of the Tea Party and the emergence of truculent ideologues such as Governor LePage. 

     The Governor of Maine and the countless millions of Americans who share his political philosophy refuse to live in an evidence-based world. Their refusal to extend the same helping hand to their neighbors that they once received is inexcusably mean-spirited, profoundly short-sighted, and antithetical to any concept of social justice.

     Political cultures are governed by what the French often refer to as the "flux and reflux" - the ebb and flow of culture's life cycle as it is nurtured by competing ideas. When cultures exhaust their collective ideas and fail to find new explanations for their politics, they stagnate and ultimately cease to exist. That is the fate that befell the Soviet Union as its population no longer accepted the tenets of a Marxist-Leninist ideology that excluded large segments of the population from meaningful participation in the civic life of their society and did little to improve their standard of living.

     In a similar vein, continued reliance upon the myths that the Tea Party endorses - and that are more broadly held by supporters of the GOP -- will provide little guidance for life in an ever more interrelated and interdependent world of the 21st century. Unless a new and more inclusive paradigm emerges, the American experiment will increasingly flounder. We will all be the poorer as a result.

 

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