Would someone please tell Chris Matthews what American exceptionalism means?

By Richard K. Barry

We hear a lot from the right about American exceptionalism, which they seem to think means that America is and Americans are simply better by virtue of identity. Failing to comprehend the genesis of the term they seem to understand it as a matter of common language as in, "Hey, America sure is exceptional."

I don't really care to get into a long treatise on why that is a facile understanding of the term. But in short, it's really an idea used by social and political philosophers to explain aspects of America's development as a nation that are different than, say, aspects of the development of European states. It doesn't mean better, it mean different.

Professor Louis Hartz, for example, emphasized the lack of a feudal tradition in America. He argued that this helped to explain the lack of significant left/socialist tendencies on the one hand and aristocratic tendencies on the other, which, it's been suggested, helps to explain the origins of a sort of centrist, liberal consensus in America.

Like I said, I'm not trying to get into it, only to say that it's a theory, or a set of theories, that explains difference. I'm not denying, however, that some writers have interpreted the term to suggest superiority, only that it would be giving too much credit to the current mis-users of "American exceptionalism" to believe that this is the origin of their interpretation.

The problem for me is when progressives start throwing the idea around. It's like they feel they have to do conservatives one better by agreeing that great things are only possible in the USA and other countries are second best by the simple fact of not being America.

You may have seen Chris Matthews on MSNBC doing a little segment about how Obama once commented that his story would not be possible in any other country and that America was exceptional in this way.

I can only say that for anyone who believes this, you really should get out more.

America has had more than its fair share of challenges as a leader in securing racial equality for its people and Obama's rise to the presidency should be seen as the extraordinary event we all know it to be, not an opportunity for blind self-congratulations. Obama was and is swimming against the current, not with it.

Anyway, if you haven't seen the clip to which I refer, here it is:

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost.)

Hardwired

By Capt. Fogg

As I've suspected, there's an increasing amount of evidence that one is born on one side of the fence or another, predestined to be what they call these days conservative or liberal. Yes, I'm very wary of these terms, since they mean what their enemies say they mean and have little to do with conserving anything real, or with the concept of reform, but still, there seem to be two kinds of minds and it's hard to account for it as merely the product of experience or study or intelligence.

Yes, I've joked about the far right not having a sense of humor that differs from meanness and I can think of all kinds of nominally liberal reformers who would crumble if they ever smiled, but that impression isn't unique to me and I find it compelling. Some people find their view of reality far too serious, too dangerous, and threatening to find much to laugh about, unless it's to laugh about the discomfiture and humiliation of an enemy.

That there are indeed two kinds of minds, two predispositions toward political, religious, and sociological poles, is compelling, not that I would suggest using any evidence for it to dismiss arguments from either side. Sometimes, conservative is actually conservative and liberal is just liberal and the truth may be neutral.

There may be important evidence for physical differences between those who feel threatened, respond to perceived threats with more aggression, more disgust and less tolerance for uncertainty. A taste for strongly held credos about morality and politics almost defines such people and we usually call them conservatives. A distaste for absolute moral judgments, for saying something is "just wrong" without considering the results, defines those we want to call liberals.

"Liberal Brains" seem more tolerant of uncertainty than conservatives according to a study of brain scans of 90 volunteers at University College London. Brain scans revealed, or so it's claimed, physical differences: 

Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual's political orientation... Our study now links such personality traits with specific brain structure,

says researcher Ryota Kanai. 

People with a large amygdala are "more sensitive to disgust" and tend to "respond to threatening situations with more aggression than do liberals and are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions," the study said.

Liberals are linked to larger anterior cingulate cortexes, a region that "monitor(s) uncertainty and conflicts," it said.

So is this cause or effect? Are these findings real? Maybe it's too soon to tell and I can certainly identify some traits that would make me more conservative than the stereotypical liberal. What I am is for others to say, but I certainly find fault in many standard liberal shibboleths, even if I'm intolerant of certainty, and that includes being certain that the study means anything. 

Our findings are consistent with the proposal that political orientation is associated with psychological processes for managing fear and uncertainty,

says the report, and that feels right, even if many wrong things feel right. I'm just not afraid of the conservative bogeymen like net neutrality, graduated income tax, single-payer health programs or Social Security. I am, however, concerned about the danger of inflexible creeds that seem to need a great deal of misplaced faith to follow and a government that follows such things without regard to the will of the electorate, the lessons of history, or even the demands of common decency. I believe in uncertainty.

So is my anterior cingulate cortex bigger or smaller and does size matter? It's not as though I'm free of fear, I just fear the fearful and the things they do.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Is John Kerry right that Republicans benefit from an ignorant electorate? Yes. And Democrats, and American democracy, suffer.

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Speaking in Boston on Friday, Sen. John Kerry blamed Democratic fortunes, which currently appear to be extremely low, on public ignorance:

We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what's happening.

Conservatives jumped all over this, and predictably so, attacking Kerry for being just the sort of coastal elitist Beck and Palin and their self-styled populist ilk like to vilify as anti-American, but, of course, Kerry was right. Much of the American electorate is dominated by apathy and ignorance, if not outright stupidity. Such apathy, such ignorance, and such stupidity are what allow so many voters to vote against their own self-interest, to be manipulated by right-wing propaganda, and to believe things that just aren't true.

-- Obama is a fascist/socialist/Muslim who wasn't even born in the U.S.? Check.

-- The Democrats health-care reform package that was pretty much the same as what Republicans proposed back in the '90s is a totalitarian attempt to subvert freedom? Check.

-- Government is evil and can do nothing to help the economy, but America is in the middle of a civilizational war and so there must be a Big Brother-like national security state that tortures, wiretaps, and kills? Check.

And so on... and so on...

Just why do you think it is that Republicans have been so successful? Because they have the right policies for America and because Americans are more Republican than Democratic? Please. Republicans thrive because low-information voters constitute a huge chunk of the electorate and because they can easily manipulate those voters, often through feeding their fears and prejudices. Why do you think Republicans work so hard to keep as much information out of the electorate as possible?

Take health-care reform. The elements of Obamacare are actually extremely popular -- more choice for consumers (i.e., patients), power taken away from the insurance industry (e.g., with respect to barring those with pre-existing conditions from acquiring adequate coverage), the extension of coverage to millions. On the merits, the Democrats should win this issue, and this is why the Republicans don't want to debate the merits and for voters to judge the two parties on the merits. Rather, Republicans prefer to keep voters uninformed and to seek to control the issue, and benefit from it at the polls, by trying to dominate the narratives through which the issue is presented to voters. With the media playing along, simply regurgitating their talking points, they spin their dishonest smears, lying to the public about Obamacare and scaring the many uninformed into opposing it. Democrats don't do nearly enough to counter this Republican strategy, but the unfortunate reality is that in today's America it is much easier to keep people uninformed than to educate them towards the truth.

An electorate of the educated would, I suspect, produce large majorities for the Democrats. But this isn't the utopia that was dreamed of during the Enlightenment. The educational system isn't great and, even if it were, a free and democratic society just tends to produce an electorate full of people who don't pay much attention to politics. In a way, that's a measure of success. People have other things to do, and it's not always a good thing when politics is front and center. But it also means that "simple slogans" can prevail and that those parties that know how best to manipulate the uninformed and uneducated into voting their way can do very well, forming governments that depend for their survival on keeping people largely uninformed and uneducated.

Jefferson and America's other philosophic founders, Enlightenment thinkers who understood that democracies need educated electorates if they are not to succumb to demagoguery, would not be amused, but this is, alas, what America has become. John Kerry just had the courage to tell it like it is.

Heads I win, tails you lose

By Carl

I had a curious discussion with a friend of mine the other evening, and I'm stunned to think that someone as intelligent as he held such a ludicrous opinion.

I proposed that life is a zero sum game: I win, you lose, that's the end of it.

See, life itself is the ultimate zero sum game. A body dies, and is reabsorbed into the collective resources of the world, to create other life. But that body doesn't reanimate...except in zombie movies and maybe the Republican party's Reagan wing. That creature loses. Full stop. It's done.

The entire system is closed, so ultimately there are no win-win scenarios. That can only happen in open systems, where the totality of resources available can increase. If you and I agree to team up and improve our lot, by definition we improve our lot at the expense of someone (or something) else. Symbiosis only works at a tiny micro level, and then only at the expense of something outside the combination.

Take the shark and the pilot fish. The pilot fish never gets eaten by the shark because it cleans the shark of parasites and scraps from its teeth, which benefits the shark. The pilot fish gets protection from predators, because who'd be dumb enough to get that close to a shark? Pretty symbiotic. They're protecting each other's life. The shark even gets free dental care.

Note, tho, that this supports the shark in his feeding on other fish.

Life is quantitative. Life holds no emotion. Life is chaotic and random.

"No, no," my friend says, and puts forth the following scenario.

A man gets home from work. He has a choice to make: spend time with his family or go bike riding. He can choose to postpone his quality time and go bike riding, since the kids will be there when he returns and there's limited amounts of daylight. Too, the bike ride will make him healthier and give him more time to spend with his kids as the years pass.

I had to admit, this wasn't a bad example of a win-win...until I thought about it.

This is a qualitative decision, not quantitative. I'll get back to that, but first let me analyze this from a quantitative position.

First, the bike: unless it's built of bamboo and the tires are hemp, we're talking about something that was manufactured out of some natural resource, which means that natural resource was now unavailable for other uses.

This friend (he had a specific person in mind) happens to be an avid biker, so I can guess at the bike and what is was made of. It was not bamboo and hemp.

A factory made it, a factory which had to spew an incremental amount of waste into the environment, the same environment that my friend is riding his bike to have less of an impact on.

A factory that had to use an incremental amount of energy, which was probably (altho I can't be certain of this) not renewable.

The tires are petroleum based, so there's the oil extracted from the ground to make that. And what is oil? Dead dinosaurs. One could jokingly make the claim that a dinosaur had to die for my friend to ride his bike (but that would be extremist), and that's before we get to the necessary lubricants to keep the bike moving smoothly.

Now, none of this is to judge bike riding or my friends' value judgements. I applaud and support those. Indeed, I have a pretty hot ride myself and enjoy pedaling around. It's healthy, makes me feel better and gets me off my ass.

The decision to postpone family time for the bike ride is a zero-sum equation too, altho of a far more subtle and benign nature: until someone can clone me, I can't be in two places at once. If I'm not at home with my kids, I'm riding. Full stop. It doesn't matter if I can do one later, this is an either/or choice right now.

Life is quantitative. It is humans who make it qualitative. And there rises a dilemma.

Imposing a new layer on top of life is going to impose conflict as well. By placing value judgements on things we do and things others do is denying life its essential randomness.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing. I, for one, applaud that someone else is legally prohibited from killing me, so long as they abide to our laws, even if physically they can and that there might indeed be some value to them in doing so.

Here's the oddity, tho. By layering our values on top of this quantitative system, we insist that we are doing it out of some motivation of making things "fair," that we are maintaining order.

Order on chaos. I suppose there's something to that when you deal with sentient beings. After all, I may want to take (not steal) your food and eat it for myself, but if I do that often enough, you die and then I have to find some other food source. And your dead. Neither of us really wins, but if we work together, growing and preparing the food, we can survive. Neither of us really loses in the short term.

But in the background, there's life and as we all know, life is not fair. Both of us will die.

Life is unfair. Bollocks. In fact, life is the ONLY fair game in town. The events that happen in life, earthquakes, fires, floods, weather, disease, and so on, can hit you, they can hit me, they can hit Donald Trump, and there's no logic or order to them. Life levels the playing field that man's "order" works so hard to preserve.

If you look superficially at the positions of the two major political parties in this country, you'd be tempted to think that conservatives recognize this subtlety, while liberals do not. After all, life is hard and the conservatives want to acknowledge that in their positions: those who have, get more, those who don't, lose. The liberals attempt to impose a sort of "fairness" to the world, to shift resources around, ignoring the basic fairness of life.

In truth, it's just the opposite. The more conservative Republican party tries to impose order and discipline on an essentially chaotic system, while the more liberal Democratic party acknowledges that life is fair, and that each of us has to live it, so why make your life more miserable in order to make my life incrementally better?

Liberals live in a world where we recognize that to prevent chaos is not going to work all the time, so the best we can hope to do is to mitigate its effects. Conservatives want to try to keep the wolf from the door, while forgetting there are no walls.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

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Defending community organizing

By Carol Gee

Hearing the Republicans' sneer at the noble cause of community organizing during the recent campaign has been personally hurtful to me as a retired social worker. I have done my share of anti poverty work in my time, and there is no area of activism that is more personally satisfying. My current activist writing focus is on the preservation of civil liberties. One of the references to whom I often turn is Tom Head who writes Civil Liberties at About.com. I quote from his recent post, which makes my point, "Political Nihilism":

For activists, 2008 has been the Year of Shut Up. Numerous Republican talking heads -- at the convention, on television, and in the blogosphere -- dedicated considerable energy to mocking the Roman Catholic poverty relief coalition to which Obama dedicated three years of his life after law school. Hillary Clinton, during the Democratic primaries, argued that Lyndon B. Johnson be seen as the primary hero of the civil rights movement, not the community organizers who risked and in some cases gave their lives to make his reforms inevitable. Even Obama himself, by far the most activism-friendly of the major-party candidates, has boasted of "taking on the special interests" (a category that includes activist groups) and refusing to accept PAC money (which comes from activist groups)--but to his credit, that's about as far as he's taken it.

If we don't bother with community organizing, then we leave the issues important to us to the politicians--politicians who, if they ignore community organizers, can't possibly have our best interests at heart because they have no way of knowing what our best interests are.

Activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Al Gore has organized almost the entire world community. Peaceful people around the globe are working together to making a difference with climate change. Using both science and psychology, Gore is among the best. I am on his We Have a Choice (9/9/08) mailing list, which urges citizen involvement with Congress to do something on energy. To quote his call to action:

We face a stark choice: subsidize old, dirty energy or invest in new, clean energy. This should be easy, but the influence of the oil lobby is deep -- they've already spent more than $100 million in lobbying and advertising this year. Please call your members of Congress now and tell them to pass legislation that will Repower America. Click here to find out how to call.

Strong words and deeds are the stuff of community organizing. Those who do it well inspire in spiritual ways, or with passion. Their listeners and readers become galvanized to work towards change. I recommend this wordsmith's high quality piece of writing via Memeorandum in The New York Times, September 9, 2008: "The Rantings of a P.T.A. Mom," by Sandra Tsing Loh. I do not necessarily agree with her criticism, because I think it is over-simplified, however. But I loved her last paragraph about being an activist. Bio material first: "Sandra Tsing Loh, a writer and a performer, is the author most recently of “Mother on Fire,” a comic memoir of her struggle to find a school in Los Angeles for her child to attend." To quote from the author's piece:

As usual, Bruce Fuller and Lance Izumi , my fellow Education Watch contributors, make some fascinating points, none more startling to me than Lance’s casual throw-away that Barack Obama sends his children to private school. As a rabid public school Democrat, I crumpled in despair at the news.

Look, I am not in politics, I get no money from foundations, I do not get invited to lecture on third world eco-sustainability on luxury cruises. I have no highly placed blue-state friends and I will soon be a divorced woman because my die-hard Democratic husband will not brook any dissent, public or private, about our party.

Another mother spoke out so powerfully that her essays morphed into an opera. Fine art is often the stuff of activists. It inspires using the mind-spirit-body connection. This little blurb is from CQ Behind the Linesfrom which I quote (author's links):

Her experience as a mother living near Ground Zero became the guiding theme of Wickham Boyle’s late-2001 collection of essays, which she has turned into an opera opening next week, The New York Times’ Susan Dominus profiles.

And last, you can be sure that activists first had this idea. And they no doubt organized their community to make it happen. I am not sure what to make of it at all, because I do not know whether it is effective. It is a very big cause to take on. To succeed as civil liberties cause, it would need to highlight the need for preserving civil liberties while also fighting terrorists. This, too, is from my recent CQ Behind the Lines newsletter (author's links):

Debuting during the Democratic Convention, Denver’s Center for Empowered Living and Learning “is a high-tech, multimedia, Technicolor exhibit devoted to educating the American public about the realities — and root causes — of terrorism,” Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball spotlight.

Democrats need to fight back with a spirited defense of community organizing. One of the most important people to the field was Saul D. Alinsky, who got his start in Chicago and inspired both Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton. The Alinsky model eventually found its way to San Antonio. During my early years in community work that model guided me and some of my fellow activists here in North Texas. It is sort of a small world thing, I guess. But making the connection makes me remember once again that ours is a village.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

Paradigms Found

By Carl

The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. (emphasis added)

What is "freedom"?

Much has been made on the right wing of this body politic of the word freedom.

Conservatives claim to be the protectors of our freedom, but in reality, theirs is not a protection as much as it is a raping, for they honor the first part of this clause, the part that reads "pursuing our own good in our own way," while ignoring the balance of the equation, the "tyranny of the majority."

If you contemplate this dynamic, of almost libertine allowance of the plundering of our national resources, natural and human, you understand the great flaw of the right wing. One must give back to the community, because the community is what is being plundered for the self. The sheer act of plunder creates a situation where you "deprive others" of their freedom.

As a liberal and libertarian, to me, government is the balance for the equation. Good government guarantees individual freedom. Bad government steals it. For the past eight years, we've seen horrific government. We've allowed our freedoms to be eroded, and in return have seen nothing but heartache and misery.

The underlying flaw of any political or economic system -- democracy, capitalism, socialism, communism, even dictatorship -- is the human element: people cannot be easily predicted or controlled. In the right wing interpretation of a capitalist democracy, there is simply no accounting for the greed, avarice and rapaciousness of individuals.

Even Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, warns of this and suggests the only power great enough to deflect these basic human impulses is government.

The Republicans would ignore this, in the mode of Gordon Gecko of the movie Wall Street: Greed is good.

How much is enough? The world is not a win-win game, we've learned that hard lesson over the millenia.

How many billions must one billionaire have, and why? Those billions are earned on the backs of, well, billions of other people. It not only takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to raise a millionaire and a planet to raise a billionaire.

The essence of humanity is to compete with each other, unless you've subsumed the Buddhist philosophy of not wanting. To want is to fight, to fight is to either win or lose.

It is the losers that government should protect. Government's sole responsibility should be to provide protection and opportunity for the people who need the most help, and not grease the wheels for those who are already on their way to success, such as it is defined in the current vernacular.

In point of fact, protecting the "losers", providing opportunity, promoting the general welfare, provides us all with a richer and yes more competitive atmosphere.

Smith's contention that individual self-interest benefits us all through innovation and efficiency's is not wrong and it is not lost in an economy that is governed by oversight, refereed with justice and judgement. It is enhanced. It lowers barriers to entry, deflects predatory practices (could you imagine the subprime mortgage market if there had been someone to say "Stop!" three or four years ago?), and makes rational choices, choices that humans in large numbers are incapable of, precisely because competition forces their hands to make irrational choices.

To cheat. To lie. To steal. These are "rational" only in terms of the game of capitalism, which honors fairness and honesty only when these are breached.

As liberals, we need to stress that we espouse "fair enterprise," to riff off the "fair trade" movement, capitalism with the human element recognized and protected.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Election bits from the experts

By Carol Gee

It is just a bit over three months until the 2008 elections. We will begin to get more involved and excited as we watch the conventions and the opinion polls. But right now, we have passed into the predictable -- negative campaigning, which often works, according to the experts.

The presidential campaign is getting really nasty reports one of my favorites, The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson. In my opinion the tactical change is the result of the Republicans' realizations that they stand a good chance of losing, not only the presidency, but a significant number of congressional elections.

An "Analysis: GOP Poised for Huge Losses,"(7/29/08) by Josh Kraushaar and Reid Wilson, can be read in full at Politico.com. As examples here are 10 of their predictions about races for the U.S. Senate seat.

1. Democrat Mark Warner could become Virginia's new senator.


2. Democrat Tom Udall might win New Mexico's senate seat.


3. Ted Stevens' indictment leaves Alaska's Republicans very vulnerable.


4. Former Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen might beat Republican Senator John Sununu.


5. Colorado hosts another Udall contest (in this case Mark U. leads in the polls) against Republican, Bob Schaffer.


6. The authors believe that Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu "is the most, and perhaps the only, vulnerable Democrat this year."


7. Oregon Republican Senator Gordon Smith sometimes votes with the Democrats and thus might be vulnerable to defeat by his Republican constituents, is the thought.


8. Republican North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole is a fixture in the Senate but the DSCC has reserved nearly $6 million in ad time in the state, believing that state Senator Kay Hagan will run a good race.


9. Mississippi's Republican appointed senator may not be able to take his election to a full term. He is running against a former governor.


10. Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) also votes with the Democrats at times, but "polls show this race may be a blowout for Collins."

"The Party Registration Gap"(7/17/08) by Ed Kilgore at The Democratic Strategist, is a story that adds interesting information to the above analysis. To quote:

Keep in mind that only 29 states (plus DC) register voters by party. So [Cook's] national numbers--a total increase in Dem registration of about 700,000, and a decline in GOP registration by about a million--just show part of the picture.

But far more significant are the trends in some of the battleground states. Combining D and R numbers, the net shift towards Democratic as opposed to Republican registrations since November of 2004 has been 124,000 in Oregon, 94,000 in Iowa, 60,000 in both Colorado and Nevada, 33,000 in New Hampshire, and 30,000 in Arizona.

"The Ethics of picking a Vice-President", (7/15/08) was written by Bruce Weinstein, PhD. (he calls himself "the ethics guy") in Business Week. He makes these thoughtful points, which I quote:

. . . for ethical reasons, the question of how a Vice-Presidential pick would help Obama's or McCain's electability cannot be the sole concern.

. . . it might be easier to have a yes-man or yes-woman as Veep, but with so much at stake for the country and the world, such a person might allow a troublesome decision to go unchallenged.

. . . If McCain or Obama believes a person is not going to be the best Vice-President and best potential successor, that candidate should simply not be considered, no matter how appealing on the ticket.

. . . It's not just McCain and Obama but all of us in leadership roles who should keep in mind that what it's all about is making a positive difference in the lives of others. This is why ethics must be a central concern—not an afterthought—when the time comes to find the best person to succeed us.

Voters exercise expertise and leadership as they fact-check, talk to people they know about politics, or get involved in working for a campaign, either local or national. If you do it well, you are the best expert I can think of to safeguard this republic.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

Taxation without presentation

By Carl

Let's talk about money for a moment.

A government is reliant on money. This generally comes in the form of taxes of some sort.

So taxes are a necessity, a necessary evil.

There's a fairly comprehensive, if anecdotal, body of evidence that suggests our current income tax system is not only ineffective, but possibly illegal.

As your NotPresident, I have a simple yet elegant solution, one that will lower taxes for most of us, yet re0jigger the tax liability so that it is more equitably distributed amongst the people who most benefit from our nation's freedoms.

After all, they have more freedoms than you or I. Look at how OJ Simpson got off!

Income is easy to tax and even easier to account for: you get a check, it gets deducted ahead of time, if you earn a salary. But that's not the problem. The problem comes from all those non-wage earnings: dividends, sales proceeds, and so on.

The disincentive of an income tax is to avoid spending money until after you've settled your debt to society. Withholdings make this bit easy, but the first time you get a lump sum from, say, the sale of a stock, you are clueless as to what to do regarding your taxes.

My tax system would avoid all this. Rather than focus on income, I would focus on wealth.

You are free to earn as much money as you can, legally, illegally, I don't care. What I DO care about is how much you keep out of the economy. And there's the difference.

Simply put, I would tax any investment that, in turn, did not create more income. No more tax shelters. No more idle rich sitting on their arses, collecting dividend checks. No more squirreling away money that you earned on the backs of the working and middle classes so that your kids can go to Choate and Harvard.

It's really very simple: the incentive in this tax system is to spend money, actual cash money, and the more you can afford, the more you should spend.

Naturally, there will be some baseline "minimum wealth" figure under which no one would be taxed. It's not fair, for example, to tax someone who owns a $100,000 home for four people, struggling by on an income of $30,000. I'd have to run the numbers a bit, but my suspicion is I would exempt anyone who owns less than $500,000 in assets.

Net of a home mortgage, to boot.

Eveerything else above that is fair game, and yes, I would tax your retirement savings. But notice something: every dollar you draw down after retirement is 100% tax free.

The tax rates would be graduated. It's not fair to ask someone who owns, say, $500,001 to pay the same rate of tax as someone who owns 500,000,001. If your hogging your wealth, you're going to get hit with a penalty, a big penalty.

Admittedly, this plan would need a lot of fleshing out (actually, it's already been fleshed out, but after Senator McCain stole my idea for a cash prize for alternative energy, I'm laying just enough cards on the table to show my hand without putting my chips in completely.

You want it, Barack? John? Come buy it off me!

I even promise to spend the check!

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Our chief weapon is Fear

By Carl

Alike were they free from Fear that reigns with the tyrant, and envy the vice of republics. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Evangeline, Part i. 1)

What calls itself fear of error reveals itself rather as fear of the truth. -- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit, introduction)

Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt (speech: July 2, 1932)

It concerns me that this nation is a nation afraid.

Nevermind the terrorists. That's a legitimate concern, but not a fear, when you come right down to it. More people died on September 11 of heart attacks than in the terror attacks, but no one is raising the heart attack warning color to orange during barbecue season.

Nevermind the economy. That's a clear problem and that has its legitimate basis for fear; fear of losing your job, your house, your life savings.

No, I mean, when did Americans become afraid of each other and of our government? A clear motivation of a quasi-dictatorial government to divide people is to conquer them. It's clear the government has intended, at least since the seventies, to divide the American people up into parcels that can be easily labelled: red state, blue state, liberal, conservative.

In so doing, it becomes easy to paint "the other guy" as what's wrong with this country. We've swallowed this whole, to be fair, on both sides, altho it seems more prevalent among conservatives. FOX News and Rush Limbaugh lead a charge of fire-breathing blowhards whose only purpose in life appears to be stoking the flames of hatred towards their fellow man.

In Rush's case, it's pretty easy to see why: poor pathetic lonely little creature who's only hope for redemption is to tear the other people around him down, and stand on the rubble of his destruction.

In FOX's case, too, the motives are easy to see: for every "BHO" reference on their network, another FCC rule falls by the wayside.

In this respect, assuming he's sincere about it, Barack Obama and I see eye-to-eye, but for different reasons. Obama wants to unite us to fix what he perceives is wrong with the country.

I want to unite us to fix the entire fucking system, from top to bottom.

It's no longer enough that we tinker and Twitter each other about this program or that program. It's clear that the system itself, like a leaky, moldy house, is creaking and in danger of collapse.

And like a leaky, moldy house, it's foundation is, however, strong. Mold can be cleaned up, creaks patched, or perhaps even the entire structure cna be torn down, but if we can keep the foundation from cracking open, we can rebuild as good as new.

The problem is, fear. I am not afraid, but I am only one man. I can take fears away from others, but even that's only a handful of people.

To enact and effect the changes necessary, as the lessons of the French and American Revolutions show, will take more. Much more.

We are a complacent people. It is said the reason the French government has to capitulate to its people is that it fears those people.

That's not a bad thing, in my eyes. A government SHOULD fear its people and not the other way around! Right now, the only thing this government fears is losing the next election, and right now, those elections are so tight that there's no point in fearing the people: the other half is easily mined for votes.

Which is why John McCain is able to shift and meld so easily between moderate-left and moderate-right voters, while clinging to a conservative base that has no other choice.

But let the government learn fear of its people, as it started to during the 1960s, and watch the power of the people rise from the ground and swell up indignantly against those crimes that politicians of both parties commit regularly.

People will have a voice once more in the governance of their day to day lives. People will suddenly care about what is going on around them, rather than trust the whims of men who are unduly influenced by powers your average man in the street cannot even begin to comprehend.

"We, the People," will suddenly mean something...

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Vive la revolution!

By Carl

On this date back in 1789, a nation of people, yearning to be free, stormed the symbol of their oppression, the Bastille.

These people were tired of being dictated to, not by a monarchy, but by an plutocracy that was headed by a monarch: told what to think, told what to eat, told what to do, told what to accept.

The people paid heavily taxes while the aristocracy and cronies thereof paid next to nothing towards the upkeep of the nation.

The nation had spent its way into bankruptcy on the backs of wars declared unilaterally by the ruling class, supporting "revolution" by people in countries that had nothing to do with their daily lives.

The people were ganged up on by the two largest economic forces of their day: the government, and the church.

The church imposed faith above science.

The people were hurt badly by climatic change that created famine, pestilence and widespread poverty.

The upper classes engaged in conspicuous consumption even as the people starved and worked harder than ever paying more in tithes and taxes than they had ever before.

The middle class resented the relative poverty in which even they lived as compared to their peers in other nations who *gasp* had national health care!

The people resented the oppression and limitation of even responsible opposing viewpoints, which were deemed anti-patriotic.

Toujours les memes choses, eh?

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

A paradigm is more than two bits

By Carl

When considering the state of the American political and governing system, it is probably a good idea to think about the flip side of the coin: the governed.

I've always believed that it is important to stress to Americans that there is no free lunch. For too long, politicians on both sides of the fence have strived hard to come up with painless solutions to thorny problems, not trusting the American people to be a rational, intelligent and reasonable community of people.

That's probably an accurate impulse. I can't really blame Republicans for offering tax cuts to ignore or Democrats for offering grandiose schemes to solve intractable problems. The sense I get is that Americans of all stripes would prefer someone else handle the problem.

We're spoiled, in other words. This sense of "it's somebody else's responsibility" plays out in so many facets of life, it's not even funny.

You get hit by a car. You sue the other driver. He hires a lawyer and sues you back to try to prove that, indeed, it was your fault for stepping in front of his car.

Voter turnout in elections has been abysmal, even in 2004 when people took up voting arms against a sea of trouble and likely again this year, despite Barack Obama's encouraging and energizing candidacy.

You see a woman in an emergency room collapse. She lays there for 24 hours and dies. No one does a thing. Why? Because someone else should have handled it.

You walk down a street and a piece of newspaper blows across and wraps around your ankle. You stand next to a garbage can, yet rather than reach down, pluck the paper and toss it in the bin, you shake your foot and off it flies to litter again. Serial litter, I like to call this.

We fight a war in a far-off land, and the only sacrifice we're asked to make is to load up on debt and shop some more. Arguably, given what has happened, this might turn into the ultimate sacrifice for many of us, but that's a different story.

We ask so much of our country. We give so little in return. Perhaps in addition to a Bill of Rights, we should look into establishing a Bill of Responsibilities.

A Google search turns up roughly 300,000 hits on that term. Some of these "bills" are simply outrageously idiotic: really, the best someone could come up with was "you have the responsibility to be a loyal citizen of the United States of America"?

Memo to the Roses: WE ARE! (I won't embarrass them with a link)

I did find a rather intriguing Bill, and I wanted to share it with you:

Freedom and responsibility are mutual and inseparable; we can ensure enjoyment of the one only by exercising the other. Freedom for all of us depends on responsibility by each of us.

To secure and expand our liberties, therefore, we accept these responsibilities as individual members of a free society:

1. To be fully responsible for our own actions and for the consequences of those actions. Freedom to choose carries with it the responsibility for our choices.

2. To respect the rights and beliefs of others. In a free society, diversity flourishes. Courtesy and consideration toward others are measures of a civilized society.

3. To give sympathy, understanding and help to others. As we hope others will help us when we are in need, we should help others when they are in need.

4. To do our best to meet our own and our families' needs. There is no personal freedom without economic freedom. By helping ourselves and those closest to us to become productive members of society, we contribute to the strength of the nation.

5. To respect and obey the laws. Laws are mutually accepted rules by which, together, we maintain a free society. Liberty itself is built on a foundation of law. That foundation provides an orderly process for changing laws. It also depends on our obeying laws once they have been freely adopted.

6. To respect the property of others, both private and public. No one has a right to what is not his or hers. The right to enjoy what is ours depends on our respecting the right of others to enjoy what is theirs.

7. To share with others our appreciation of the benefits and obligations of freedom. Freedom shared is freedom strengthened.

8. To participate constructively in the nation's political life. Democracy depends on an active citizenry. It depends equally on an informed citizenry.

9. To help freedom survive by assuming personal responsibility for its defense. Our nation cannot survive unless we defend it. Its security rests on the individual determination of each of us to help preserve it.

10. To respect the rights and to meet the responsibilities on which our liberty rests and our democracy depends. This is the essence of freedom. Maintaining it requires our common effort, all together and each individually.

Freedom is a balance of rights and responsibilities. If one only assumes the rights of freedom without taking responsibility to see those rights are secured and maintained, one loses the rights.

If one only secures the rights of freedom for oneself, without ensuring those rights for everyone, one loses freedoms.

If one abuses, distorts, or otherwise diminishes the rights of freedom, abrogating one's responsibilities for that freedom, then one loses one's freedom anyway. Karma's a bitch.

If only enjoys the freedom to enjoy one's property, one's life, one's liberty, one's pursuit of happiness while even one other person is unjustly deprived of his or hers, then one loses his freedom too.

We've seen that. We've seen that in this administration and in administrations throughout at least my lifetime. And one could make the argument, indeed, that because Americans have never had the responsibilities inherent in freedom, Americans were never truly free.

Oh, we could fake it, to be sure. When this land was wilderness and a man or woman could ride an entire day without seeing another person, you have the illusion of freedom.

Oddly enough, those same people took it upon themselves to ensure their own freedom by standing up for themselves when that freedom was threatened.

A community, you see, is a balance between the rights of the individual and the needs of the population. We are the most important unit in our own lives, but we are not the most important individual in anyone else's life. We can't be. As I like to say, I don't care what anyone else thinks because no one else is going to climb into my coffin with me when I die.

That statement, however, implies that I can live with myself well enough that even I get into my coffin when I die!

Vigilance, involvement, activism: community.

I would quibble with some of these statements from the Freedoms Foundation. I'm drawn to article 9 as one that could use some fleshing out and tuning up, because it allows for all sorts of bizarre interpretations ("Why, I own this Abrams tank because you never can tell when Osama and his minions will come strolling down Cherry Lane, bent on taking out the Gas-N-Gulp!")

We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.

Right there in the Preamble to the Constitution is our mandate: to create community. A nation. A secure foundation to build our hopes and dreams on. To prevent tyranny and injustice, in whatever form it may take. To raise our families. To be free, all of us, not only those of us with money who can buy a home in a gated community (an oxymoron, that... "gated community"), but you, me, your children, my children, her children, his children.

As we ponder how to fix the things that are broken in America, we might want to pause a moment and see if as we point fingers, we aren't pointing many more back at ourselves.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

I hate to say I told you so, but...

By Carl

The contract between a government and its people is understood to be one where the government has to not exercise its power entirely.

Parental, in other words.

A government which fully exerts its power over its people is a tyranny, a totalitarian regime, fascism.

A people who do not exert their responsibilities can be viewed as child-like, refusing to accept their position as necessary to the functioning of the nation as a whole. This is the paradox of the one versus the many: how much difference can one man/woman/vote/dollar make?

The Dalai Lama and other Buddhists will tell you, quite a bit. See, it's not ultimately about the exertion of influence but about the exercise of freedoms. The pursuit, if you will, of happiness.

To digress for a moment, one reason I agreed to blog after katrina urged me time and again was the opportunity I saw to influence even just one person to think differently, to let one other person know he or she was not alone in what they perceived around themselves. To understand that we are connected.

I see the struggle for the political will of this country coming down to three factions:

-- First, the right, with its individualistic, opportunistic, capitalistic thinking that by each of us pursuing our own self-interests, we can lift the nation as a whole, on average, higher. This work, believe it or not, but it's not enough, clearly. For the first hundred and fifty years, this nation operated in precisely this fashion and for one hundred and fifty years, we left people behind.

-- Second, the left with its notions that every problem is so intractable that it demands we gather in as many resources as possible to allow the government to dictate solutions to us. This works in some instances, particularly in emergency situations when consensii must be reached quickly. Indeed, we've seen the failure of underactive oversight of government in the Hurricane Katrina debacle.

-- Third is the middle, the vast majority of Americans, some 60-80% of us, who sit there and see the failures of both sides as well as the successes and wonder why there cannot be a better way that combines the two.

I wish there was an easy answer for them but there simply is not. The political tides of this nation ebb and flow on the backs of these people: the philosophy that can capture more of public opinion will be the philosophy that prevails at that particular moment in time. When the left can exert influence, like during the 60s, progressive philosophies are tried, and while their strengths are revealed, their weaknesses are immediately exposed as well.

Similarly, as in the 80s, when a right-wing philosophy is experimented with, whatever strengths it exhibits is coupled immediately with its weaknesses.

This opens the door to communication and marketing, of course. This is why we no longer talk about policies when comparing two candidates, but about the effectiveness of the "message" and the messenger. This is why politics is now covered like a horse race rather than a debate. The right had seized on this secret during the Reagan years and managed to massage it for decades. Indeed, if Bill Clinton hadn't won in 1992 by stealing this technique from Republicans, it is likely that President Gore would now be talked about for a third term. It's not so much that Reagan did anything remarkable during his two terms that had people talking about his image on Mt. Rushmore, but that he followed nearly twenty years of malfeasance, corruption and perceived incompetence. All you needed was a trained chimp at that point, and twenty five percent of the country would rejoice for the Second Coming.

Sort of like Dumbya, now.

We are on the cusp of a moment which cannot be denied. People have grown weary with right-wing bromides of privatization and laissez-faire economics and benefits for the rich. So long as these were not perceived as hurting the hundreds of millions in the middle, the middle was content. While it is conceivable that John McCain could steal away this election, it would be only a temporary delay. The age of progressivism seems to be upon us, yet again.The pendulum has swung once more and to the left.

The question is, what to do about this? The 2006 elections showed us an interesting mandate: while Americans are tired of the right-wing "lower taxes will solve everything" mantra, they clearly have become indoctrinated to the right wing message of "left=anti-America." This is one reason the Obama flag pin trope worked so strongly during the primary campaign, both as an influence on leftists who had to abandon Edwards and Kucinich ("See? He ain't buckling under to no flag pin wearing fascists!") and on rightists ("See? He ain't American!").

The 2006 elections saw the rise of the middle left: people like Jon Tester and Claire McCaskill, rookie senators who won in traditionally red states by running not as Democrats but as disaffected Republican-could-bes. Yet, they support many progressive ideals-- some are pro-choice, some are pro-healthcare, some are pro-safety (antigun, the right would call them).

This has created a gulf in the Democratic party, as the puffed-up chests of MoveOn.org and dKos over the sensible and calculated moves by Obama to move to the center in time for the general election are rolled out. Democrats.com, in fact, has asked its supporters to escrow their donations to Obama by banking them with truly progressive Congressional and Senate candidates, thus indirectly supporting him while not allowing him to take advantage of their support.

Madness, but they have every right to be infuriated. Obama set himself up as a candidate of the left, and did nothing during the primary campaign to dissuade the Obombers from believing he was anything but in sync with them.

Well, see, that's not entirely true. He did flip-flop on the NAFTA and on a few other issues, taking first a strongly progressive view and then whittling it back and effectively kneecapping his original position.

In point of fact, it is the Obombers who have to suck it up and understand they got bamboozled. Anyone with a lick of sense, yours truly among them, realized this would happen.

Friends have asked me if I had painted myself into a corner with my strong support for Hillary and my strong denunciations of Obama. Possibly, but you'll notice something: I'm not the one who's disliking Obama more and more each day now!

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Grounds of hope

By MSS

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man... those are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

-- Thomas Jefferson, in his last known letter, acknowledging but declining, for ill health, an invitation to the 50th anniversary celebrations of American Independence. Ten days after writing these words, Jefferson would die, on 4th July, 1826.

**********

May our celebrations on this 232d anniversary, and our collective and individual actions in the coming year, be worthy of Jefferson's last words.

No body haf afk'd me, verily...

By Carl

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

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

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the nunited States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

Paradigms for sale!

By Carl

The Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract. It speaks of liberty and prohibits the deprivation of liberty without due process of law. In prohibiting that deprivation, the Constitution does not recognize an absolute and uncontrollable liberty. Liberty in each of its phases has its history and connotation. But the liberty safeguarded is liberty in a social organization which requires the protection of law against the evils which menace the health, safety, morals, and welfare of the people. Liberty under the Constitution is thus necessarily subject to the restraints of due process, and regulation which is reasonable in relation to its subject and is adopted in the interests of the community is due process. -- Chief Justice of the Unitedt States Supreme Court Charles Evans Hughes, WEST COAST HOTEL CO. V. PARRISH , 300 U.S. 379 (1937)

There, in a nutshell, is what a liberal, progressive platform should be.

"We will protect your freedoms." Ok, the wording needs to be cleaned up, but the image we need to leave in voters' minds is one of a knight or a hired gun, taking on the bad guys and beating them back.

True freedom, true liberty, can come only when the individual in a nation is free from worry, from inequality (not talking about prejudice, altho that is part of it) and from power of any kind.

The best society is one where people have banded together to watch out for each other without interfering in each other's lives. That is freedom.

Government, by extension, works best when it provides opportunity and protection from the inequities of power as represented by influence and wealth. When wealth can avail itself of the advantages of power and the advantages of governmental protection, an inequitable system has been created where working people, whose income is wholly dependent on the monied classes, can and likely will bear the brunt of protecting society as a whole.

Meanwhile, the working classes will receive the least benefit from this society. After all, freedom is just a word for nothing left to lose, and the less you have, the less you need physical protection. You can be free, because who would want to take anything from someone who has nothing?

Conversely, the more you have, the more you need physical protection.

This is in large part the rationale behind a progressive tax system: those who have and continue to benefit the most from the bounty of this nation are required to fund a larger proportion of its needs.

The nifty trick the right wing has accomplished is in equating the rich and powerful, and in particular, corporations, with "the people", thus populising that which by definition is elitist. When conservatives talk about "the people," or "compassion," or "economic freedom," you can bet this involves giving more booty to the richest among us.

Leaving the check for the rest of us to pick up.

The revolution starts by taking the weakest link in the chain back out: government. Government is the only entity with both the resources and the force of law behind it to protect people like you, and me, and him, and her, from the predations of rampant abuse by those who should know better and moreover, should be more grateful to us.

We, the people, deserve universal health care.

We, the people, deserve universal public education through college.

We, the people, deserve universal child care for working parents.

We, the people, deserve a voice to speak up for us, collectively, against those who collect against us.

We, the people, deserve guarantees that no longer will government and corporations conspire against us to deprive us of our God-given freedom.

We, the people, deserve the opportunity this nation has promised us from the cradle onward.

We, the people, deserve our nation back!

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

The conquest of nature and the destruction of Papua New Guinea's rainforests

By Michael J.W. Stickings

From the BBC:

High-resolution satellite images have revealed the "rapid deforestation" of Papua New Guinea's biodiversity rich rainforests over the past 30 years.

An international team of researchers estimates that the current rate of loss could result in more than half of the
nation's tree cover being lost by 2021.

They added that the main threats came from commercial logging and burning.

Existing conservation measures were failing to protect the world's third largest rainforest, the team concluded.

Commercial logging and burning. In other words, human beings and their seemingly bottomless reservoir of greed.

As much as individual liberty, the conquest of nature -- the effort to impose our will on it, not (as the ancients prescribed) to live harmoniously with it (and within its limits) -- very much defines the modern project as set in motion by the likes of Machiavelli (see his famous discussion of fortune/nature, and how to oppose it, in Chap. 25 of The Prince), and, however postmodern we have become, we are still very much the heirs to that tradition.

But this conquest -- so powerfully articulated by Locke in Chap. 5 of his Second Treatise, "Of Property" -- was meant to serve the development of civilization, both individual and social progress, and, to that end, it has been enormously successful. (Who among us genuinely wants to return to pre-modern "nature"?)

The conquest continues, and much of it is conducted more responsibly than ever before (consider the rise of "green" politics in recent years, as well as much greater environmental stewardship in the private sector), but, obviously, some of it is continues to be both destructive (of the natural environment) and self-destructive (of our planet and ourselves).

The willful and irresponsible human conquest of the world's third-largest rainforest is both destructive and self-destructive. It is bad enough, in and of itself, that such a significant and intrinsically valuable component of our biosphere is being destroyed. What makes it worse is that rainforests -- and there aren't that many of them -- are incredibly valuable both to our planet and to ourselves. Consider what plants and animals have yet to be discovered. Consider what we can still learn from rainforests, what contributions they can still make to what we would like to call civilization. And yet we are destroying at a rapid pace, and all for short-term financial profit.

What ignorant beasts we truly are.

**********

Machiavelli: "And I liken her [fortune] to one of those violent rivers which, then they become enraged, flood the plains, ruin the trees and the buildings, lift earth from this part, drop in another; each person flees before them, everyone yields to their impetus without being able to hinder them in any regard. And although they are like this, it is not as if men, when times are quiet, could not provide for them with dikes and dams so that when they rise later, either they go by a canal or their impetus is neither so wanton nor so damaging. It happens similarly with fortune, which demonstrates her power where virtue has not been put in order to resist her and therefore turns her impetus where she knows the dams and dikes have not been made to contain her."

Locke: "From all which it is evident, that though the things of Nature are given in common, man (by being master of himself, and proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labour of it) had still in himself the great foundation of property; and that which made up the great part of what he applied to the support or comfort of his being, when invention and arts had improved the conveniences of life, was perfectly his own, and did not belong in common to others... And thus, I think, it is very easy to conceive, without any difficulty, how labour could at first begin a title of property in the common things of Nature, and how the spending it upon our uses bounded it."

Note that, for Machiavelli, the conquest of nature is virtue. For Locke, it is what defines civilization.

What we know now is that it may also destroy both civilization and nature itself.

Totalitarian religion, abusive polygamy, and illiberal Texas

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As you may have heard:

A Texas appeals court ruled Thursday that state authorities and a lower court judge abused their authority by illegally seizing up to 468 children from their homes at a polygamist ranch in West Texas last month.

*****

According to the court, the state did not establish proper grounds to remove the children from their families, who belong to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or F.L.D.S.

*****

The unanimous ruling by three judges of the Third Court of Appeals in Austin revoked the state’s custody over a large group of the children and by extension almost certainly the rest, for what it called a lack of evidence that they were in immediate danger of sexual or physical abuse.

The appeals court said the record “does not reflect any reasonable effort on the part of the department to ascertain if some measure short of removal and/or separation would have eliminated the risk.” It also said the evidence of danger to the children “was legally and factually insufficient” to justify their removal and it said the lower court “abused its discretion” in failing to return seized children to their families.

It could very well be that the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services could have done better in making its case. And, for all I know, there may not have been any "immediate" risk according to the law. Perhaps the evidence was "legally and factually insufficient" according to the law, and perhaps the department did "[abuse] its discretion" according to the law. But, then, the problem is with the law -- or, at least, the law is part of the problem, and, in this case, it seems that the law is at odds with justice.

On this, I agree with Echidne: "I disagree with the way abuse is defined as only physical one, and with the idea that it's perfectly acceptable to groom young girls to accept abuse until the moment of the abuse comes. I also wonder whether it really is true that the sect appeared to have an unusually small number of teenage boys, and if it is true, what happened to the missing boys. I would think abandoning them somewhere would constitute abuse... In general, I'm worried about any children who are brought up in isolation from the rest of the society. They may 'stay safe' that way or 'stay religious' or whatever, but their isolation also means that they cannot learn alternative ways of living and cannot get help if they indeed are abused."

If "immediate" and "abuse" are defined narrowly, as they were by the court, then, yes, the ruling may be the correct one -- the correct legal one, that is.

But from a liberal perspective, one that recognizes the preeminence of the individual, of his or her sovereign and inalienable rights, how is such a ruling in any way correct? Yes, liberalism is related to the rule of law, and, indeed, is inseparable from it. But when the law is wrong? Or when it defines, say, abuse too narrowly?

And we all know -- do we not? -- that this sort of lifestyle, the polygamy of a totalitarian religious cult, is inherently abusive. Indeed, it would not exist without abuse. Abuse is what keeps it going, what enables and supports it.

The women -- that is, the wives -- may defend it, and may say that they are there freely, that it is a choice, but there is a little something called false consciousness. How are these women in any way free? How are they in a position to choose freely? They have lived lives of totalitarian abuse. Their minds have been shaped by that abuse. Everything they say is a reflection of that abuse. They may think they are free and that what they are saying is a reflection of free will, but there is nothing free about them or their lives.

Similarly, the men -- that is, the husbands, including the totalitarian leaders of the cult -- may defend it along lines of religious freedom, but should one or a community ever be free to abuse? Is that what our "liberalism" has become?

Now, I admit, it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish the line between free will and false consciousness. And, obviously, questions persist: Is is possible to enter freely into an abusive relationship? From a legal perspective, should it be allowed to give up one's freedom? In a liberal society, how much liberty is permissible? What "alternative" lifestyles are permitted? What of "alternative" lifestyles or communities that are, in essence, illiberal?

To me, liberalism has lost much of its ability to stand up for itself. It has decayed into libertarianism, into permissiveness of the sort that leads to the inability to combat the forces of illiberalism both internal and external.

But let me be clear: This is not to say that liberalism requires a narrow moral code, a narrow definition of liberty. Rather, it is to say that liberalism must be able to stand up to and against those forces of illiberalism in the name of liberty itself. If it is unable to do so, it is no longer liberalism.

Just as there is illiberalism abroad, so is there illiberalism at home. And much of the illiberalism at home -- and, in this case, I'm talking about the United States -- is religious in nature. The christian fascists of the evangelical right are illiberal, for example -- the most obvious and pernicious example. And so is the totalitarian cult known as the FLDS, an isolated community of abuse.

Texas's Third Court of Appeals may have issued a ruling based on its interpretation of the law, but the law, in this case, allows for the perpetuation of abuse and for the persistence of noxious illiberalism.

Toleration of difference is one of the key aspects of a liberal society, including the United States, but no liberal society worth its name should tolerate the FLDS or anything like it.