Mark W Tiedemann

Category: current affairs

  • Brief Comment About Debt and Taxes

    This won’t take long.  I do not intend to put up links or post graphs and charts or cite stats (at least, not much).  This is just a short post to make what ought to be an obvious observation but seems to get no traction in the political discourse.

    Washington is once more gearing up for a Debt Ceiling Showdown.  According to the president, we’re going to have to borrow some more money before year’s end, which will require raising the limit on what we may borrow—again.  Speaker of the House Boehner has once more drawn a line in the check register and declared “No further!”  What will follow we have seen before.

    Yawn.

    Just a couple of points:  both sides in this are correct.  The president and his financial advisers are right, we cannot afford to stop spending or the economy will stall out and things will get worse.  This is a true statement.

    As far as it goes.

    Boehner and the deficit hawks are also right: whether we like it or not, there does come a point at which it is absolutely true to say “We can’t afford it anymore!”  In recent years, that point has been taken as some large percentage of GDP.

    The United States is in some ways like a homeowner who has mortgaged close to 100% of the equity in his house and has suddenly been told he has to take a pay cut.  Depending on the good will of friends, neighbors, and lenders, he may well keep his house and at some point start paying down on the debts, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s gotten himself into a very fragile situation.

    Now, the comparison is not precise, but we’re simplifying here.  After all, the homeowner usually doesn’t have a factory in his basement (or a contractor doing the same thing) making things the homeowner can sell—like military hardware and the like—but for our purposes, the similarity will do.

    National debate over this issue has been centered on two aspects.  Spending and taxes.

    One side says we’re spending too much and need to cut back.  The other says we really need to do something about all those rich people who aren’t paying their fair share of taxes.

    Again, both of these points are true—and both are more or less irrelevant.

    (Time out for a side comment on this tax thing.  National dialogue is a clumsy beast and the reality of situations often gets buried in the bluster.  Taxes are worse than other subjects, but not by much.  Here is a little fact: when people talk about taxes, no matter which side they’re coming from, they don’t talk about all of them.  On the one hand, the accusation that the wealthy do not pay their fair share is by and large aimed at federal taxes.  And in this the accusation is accurate—no, really, wealthy people and corporations pay very expensive tax lawyers to find loopholes and they do, or they would lose their cushy jobs.  But also, at a certain level, there is no longer such a thing as an American Corporation anymore.  They are multinationals, which means they disperse their holdings across borders, and by shifting things around they avoid taxes.  A lot of taxes, not just American taxes.  But for a lot of people who are well off but not in the 8 and 9 figure club, when they hear that they aren’t paying their “fair share” they quite correctly go ballistic because such accusations almost never take into account state and local taxes, which can in some instances add up to well over 50% of income.  But nationally we’re focused on federal taxes, not ALL taxes. )

    (Oh, and the point about corporations being multinationals?  That’s not a tax problem as such.  That’s a problem of jurisdiction.  But never mind that for now.)

    I say irrelevant, because, as noted before, to stop spending would be to throw a sequoia in the road to recovery.  Like it or not, federal spending is keeping a lot of business going and a lot of people employed.  When you cut spending, you fire people.  Unless there are private sector jobs that are not tied to government contracts available to rehire them, they turn into the Unemployed (which is becoming like Zombie status these days—once bitten, you’re dead but you still need to eat).  We keep forgetting that roughly half (or more) of government “spending” is payroll and related benefits.

    As for taxing the rich, the simple fact is that we could tax them dry and not make up the shortfall.  Focusing on the rich, while in some ways pertinent to our sense of national betrayal and certainly a symptom of the problem, is simply a way of ducking the real problem.

    The real problem?

    Okay, I said I wasn’t going to cite stats, at least not much, so I beg your pardon for a moment of numbers.  We are also focused like lasers on the Unemployment Rate.

    How many of you believe this reflects anything valid?

    I said valid, not real.  It certainly does reflect something real, but not what most people seem to think it does, and certainly not what the government pretends it does.

    All it reflects is the number of people drawing unemployment compensation as a percentage of the number of people still employed.  It says nothing at all about the people who have exhausted their benefits, fallen off the rolls, and still aren’t employed.

    Which number do you think is more relevant?

    Here’s where it gets sticky.  If they are no longer drawing public benefits, technically they aren’t a burden, so who cares?  We assume they have found a way to get by.  (Never mind those homeless folks over there.)  Households have increased their residents, adult children have moved back in with parents, parents have moved in with adult children, friends take in friends, etc etc.  So they cost us nothing.  Right?

    No, wrong.  They cost us taxes.  If you want to know where the revenue shortfall has come from over the last three decades, it is there, in that growing number of more or less permanently un- and under-employed Americans who lost their jobs, many of them at one time good paying, and have not paid taxes since, because, well, they have no income.

    The last time I checked the number was hovering just under sixty million.*

    I don’t see anyone talking about that, not directly.  Everyone wants to get the unemployment rate down, as if that means anything to the problem at hand.

    Reagan slashed taxes and increased spending.  Except for a brief few years under Clinton, the imbalance created by that has accumulated into the problem we now have.  It’s a thirty-year accrual of debt and hence when I say we can’t tax rich people enough to make up for it, that’s what I mean.

    Cutting spending, however, will only increase the unemployment numbers and eventually add to the growing population of permanently unemployed, whose inability to pay normal tax rates has resulted in this current shortfall.  Which shortfall will remain a problem until we can do something about all those unemployed.

    Now, the canard that these are lazy people who don’t want to work just won’t wash.  These are people who did work, many of them in well-paying jobs.  Why would they want to lose everything?  It’s absurd.  This is a myth.  To put it bluntly, it’s bullshit.  Have you ever considered how much work it is for someone to take a grocery cart around and fish aluminum out of trash, all day, every day, for pocket money?  But these are the people we don’t see and work we don’t credit.  As the saying goes, a ditch digger works his ass off, burns more calories, goes home worn out, and gets paid a damn sight less than someone pushing paper around a desk for other people.

    So why aren’t they working?

    Well, that is one of the reasons the rich are getting richer.  It’s systemic.  Jobs have gone overseas, industries have collapsed, communities have been sucked dry to make bottomlines for shareholders without regard to the people doing the actual work.  No one intends anything bad, no one purposefully plans to impoverish their fellows, but this is the way money works in this country, and any attempt to change it is met with ferocious opposition even as we see the inevitable consequences.  It is the worst sort of moral inertia.

    But no one in Washington is talking about it that way.  Both sides have valid points—we cannot afford to cut spending and we cannot afford to keep going as we are—and both sides are ignoring the real issue.

    You may return now to your regular illusions.

    __________________________________________________________

    * Lets do some quick and sloppy arithmetic over this, shall we?  Sixty million people earning on average, say, $30,000 a year.  That’s 1.8 trillion dollars.  Now, at, say, 25% taxes, that’s 162 billion a year, over 3 decades?  That’s 48.6 trillion dollars, which is six times the national debt.  Now, I grant you, these calculations are way too loose, but not so loose as to not be in the ball park and show where the “real problem” is.

  • Devaluing Fame In Missouri

    ”Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society. ”

    ”They oughta change Black History Month to Black Progress Month and start measuring it.”

    ”We’re not sexists, we’re chauvinists — we’re male chauvinist pigs, and we’re happy to be because we think that’s what men were destined to be. We think that’s what women want. ”

    ”The only way to reduce the number of nuclear weapons is to use them. ”

    Anyone care to guess who said all of the above?

    Yes, I’m cherry-picking, I admit it.  Still, it’s not that difficult a question.  Who said all that?

    You in the middle there, yes ma’am?  Absolutely.

    Rush Limbaugh.

    Our most recent addition to the Missouri Hall of Fame.  In a move that ought to garner rage from any fair-minded person, Steven Tilley, the speaker of the house of the Missouri Legislature, has shoehorned the talk show host into the pantheon of famous Missourians.  Here is a fairly benign article on the ceremony.

    At an event I attended last night (Sticks’n’Stones: Sluts Talk Back) Representative Stacy Newman explained to a packed audience at Left Bank Book’s downtown store how this was done in the absence of debate and in the face of an avalanche of petitions in opposition.  A cadre of state police was called in to make sure the public—as well as Democratic members of the legislature—were kept out of the ceremony.

    Now, I don’t care what you think of Rush.  The way this was handled violated any definition of fair play.  I know, I know, fair play is for sissies.  “Lib’rals” bitch about fair play.  Pansy-assed social progressives worry over fairness.

    Maybe.  But, minor though this may be in the greater scheme of things, this is an example of abuse of power.  Speaker Tilley is a political bully.

    Just to be completely up front about this, personally, I think Rush Limbaugh is a bloviating gasbag of unparalleled bad taste and hypocrisy.  Mr. “we should imprison all drug addicts, except me, of course, because I am a staunch advocate of stricter law enforcement even if I am addicted to pain killers” Limbaugh has been given a megaphone with which to hold forth on anything he finds despicable.  The above quotes are a sample.

    Back in the late 80s and early 90s, I worked for a man who practically worshiped the ground upon which Rush trod and I was required to listen to this man day after day—my boss, yes, but his deity as well, Rush—and after a few years I could not understand what there was to respect.  Rush’s entire schtick is based on derision and hate.  Logic for him is a category on Jeopardy, not something to practice, and truth is coincidental to ideology.  He wanted it both ways—he was a “tireless champion of truth” until he was caught flatfooted in misrepresentations, at which time he was “just an entertainer, folks.”  I mention this to establish that I’ve done my time listening to the mouth that roared (yeah, I know, that was supposed to be Morton Downey, Jr. but he’s gone and Rush has usurped his place) and was on hand when even G. Gordon Liddy called him on his obsession over the White House suicide of Vince Foster.

    I have zero respect for Rush Limbaugh.  He made one good joke in his career, and that was on his short-lived television show where he had installed an “environmentally responsible fireplace”—a tv monitor with a video of a blazing hearth.  That was cute.  All that followed has been hateful jeremiads against people of compassion, of thoughtfulness, of moral principle, of character, and of competence.  He’s a shill for those who want nothing more than to tear things down so they can sell the scrap and buy a new chateau somewhere.

    He now has a bust in our state capitol.  I am infuriated.  Yeah, I suppose technically he’s famous.  But so is Sterling Price and I don’t see him in that line-up.

    I would like to see Mr. Tilley lose his seat over this—among other things.  Limbaugh is no kind of role model for anyone and to see his divisive attacks validated in this way is insulting, at least to me.  However, I won’t hold my breath.  I am very well aware that there are many who think I’m some kind of unAmerican ingrate for opinions like this.  So be it.  This is America and they are absolutely entitled to their view.  It may even be that in their view Limbaugh legitimately belongs in the Hall of Famous Missourians, along with Samuel Clemens, Josephine Baker, Harry Truman, Omar Bradley, and many others.

    But if so, then his admission ought to have been done the way all the rest were, openly and with debate and the consent of the full House, not by gim-crack autocratic procedural maneuvers and then in a close-door ceremony as if Limbaugh were someone to be ashamed of.

  • Enough Is E #$%*& Nuff

    Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona has apparently signed a bill into law that allows employers to interrogate their female employees about their sex lives.

    Details, as far as I’m concerned, are not as important as one overriding principle:

    When I work for someone, they pay me for the work I do and THAT IS ALL. This should not be controversial in the least. If health insurance is part of my compensation for the work I do while I am engaged in work for said employer, it is none of that employer’s business what I do with it. The employer does not own any other part of my life or my time.

    As an employer (and I have been in a manager position in the past, responsible for hiring and firing) I don’t care if someone goes to a Black Mass on weekends and participates in Crisco-soaked orgies, as long as when they show up on Monday to do the job I hired them to do they look presentable and do their job competently. It would be none of my business.

    Just as it would be none of my business if they attended some little whacked out fringe church that preached the End Times and that Obama is the antichrist and on their own time handed out petitions to shut down Planned Parenthood. That is none of my business.

    So if on Friday an employee went home, dressed in leather, and went to an S & M club, whipped people black-and-blue while masturbating with an oversized dildo, as long as she (or he) came in Monday ready to do the job for which they have been hired, IT IS NONE OF MY FUCKING BUSINESS WHAT THEY DID ON THE WEEKEND!

    An employer does not own any part of his or her employees’ life and they are only leasing the 40 or so hours a week during which they are working.

    WHY IS THIS SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND? WHY DOES GOVERNOR BREWER OR ANYBODY ELSE THINK THIS IS ACCEPTABLE POLICY? THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, BECAUSE THIS IS A BUSINESS TRANSACTION BETWEEN EMPLOYER AND EMPLOYEE, NOTHING MORE, AND THE PRIVATE LIFE OF BOTH THE EMPLOYER AND THE EMPLOYEE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH IT UNLESS IS DIRECTLY IMPACTS THE WORK BEING DONE!

    Sorry for the shouting.

    But the next time some pinhead rightwing do-gooder disingenuously questions you as to “what war on women? I don’t know what you’re talking about” point to this. Among others. This is directed at women, since men, as far as I know, represent no significant part of health insurance expenditure for contraception.

    And ask that man how he might feel if his boss asks him, “So, Dick, I see you only have two kids. You’ve been married 12 years, though. Aren’t you fucking your wife? I only ask because we’re a family values organization…”

  • Bill Donahue and Lawful Bigotry

    I don’t care much for Bill Donahue of the Catholic League. I find him a throwback, a kneejerk bigot who opens his mouth and everything I find insupportable about politicized religion comes out. That said, I also find him refreshing, in that he usually always says exactly what he means and does not equivocate in order make political points with tepid constituencies. For instance:

    That last bit is what I find useful. He wants the law to discriminate against lifestyles with which he disagrees. He has a list. He tells it out with no frills, no conditional language, no soft-pedaling. Bravo, Mr. Donahue, and thank you. It is always best to know where you stand with your opponents.

    He wants the law to discriminate not only against gay marriage, but against cohabitation, probably line marriage, multi-partner marriage, any variation on the good ol’ fashion way grandma and grandpa did that he thinks is disgusting.

    To which I can only say, with deep sincerity: fuck you, Mr. Donahue. It’s not your call. These are not your lives to dictate to. This is not your choice to impose. We went through a cultural revolution—it was messy, a lot of it was stupid and ill-conceived, some of it was hurtful—to get out from under exactly that kind of puritanical myopia and take away the ability of the state or anyone else to exercise legal prejudice against people for being together in ways you look at and go “Ewww!” Fuck you. This is my life, my choice, not yours, not the state’s, no one’s. Mine. Ours.

    He talks about the “gold standard” and starts citing the sociological data to back up the claim that children thrive with a traditional marriage. Here he is being a bit disingenuous. Children thrive in families predicated on such standards when several other conditions are also met, and which now social science is beginning to understand that it is those conditions that are more important than the particular arrangement of component parts. Children do not thrive in “broken” marriages, but neither do they thrive in dysfunctional marriages. It’s a simple question—which is better for a child, a “traditional” marriage in which daddy beats the shit out of mommy on a regular basis or that same child in a single parent home where it is loved, protected, and nurtured? And of course, it doesn’t even have to be that dramatic—indifference is destructive, though less measurable. Even if the preferred format is met and adhered to, if the love and nurture are withheld, is that not detrimental? It’s not one man one woman and voila the child grows up happy and well-adjusted!

    He forgets that one of the most powerful mitigating factors in such equations is the community in which a marriage exists. If the community approves and grants its support, all may be well. If the community, for whatever reason, turns on that couple, they will suffer, their marriage will suffer, and the children will suffer. Intolerance is one of the strongest countervailing elements in the potential destruction of a family unit, and it doesn’t even have to be an “alternative” family to suffer it, just different.

    No one should have to be reminded that it was not so long ago that it was illegal in this country for members of different races, specifically blacks and whites, to get married, even if they were of the requisite genders. Many such marriages that took place after it became legal failed because of external pressures—disapproval. There is no magic formula for a marriage.

    One major ingredient, though—love. And it never ceases to amaze me how many self-professed christians seem to have no use for love that does not conform to their prejudices.

    (Nor does it cease to amuse me how often I will hear apologists claim that “those aren’t real christians.” I know what they mean, but let us be honest here—real or not, the bigotry is taught in the name of the same faith. Where do they get it from? They will proudly tell you—the Bible. The tactics of exclusion fail to inoculate those who think themselves “true” christians from the taint of those who aren’t when both draw their lessons from the same well. Perhaps some interpret the lessons incorrectly, but the lesson is nevertheless there to be misinterpreted.)

    But I am glad of Bill Donahue, because he does speak his mind. He is clear and unequivocal and I can point to his words and say “That is what I do not want in this country.” I don’t want to live that way. I do not live that way. We forget that America is supposed to be where you can live as you choose without fear at our peril.

    But, yeah, Bill, the president did have to wriggle about this. Because there are a lot of people who think like you and lot more who sit the fence. Because people are concerned with how they might appear to their friends if they speak their hearts and a lot of people who will bully them into submission for “outrageous” opinions. Because public opinion is a fickle bitch and any politician who blithely ignores it does so at risk of career. The pragmatics of politics make liars of all of them, left or right, depending on the issue. But he’s done a bold and gutsy thing now and he may go down in flames for it. That and other things.

    Marriage is two distinct things these days, in the West. It is a codification of a relationship based on traditions and community feelings. For many, it is a sacred act, between themselves and their god.

    But it is also an economic arrangement, a complex comingling of estates and responsibilities made simple through the expedient conjoining of ritual and contract law. Whether people wish to admit it or not, these are separate things, and this second aspect is by far the more impactful because it determines how you will shape your future together within this community. There are combined over 1500 laws, both state and federal, defining rights, responsibilities, and benefits that accrue to marriage. It is very much a contract.

    And while two people don’t have to indulge a “traditional” religious marriage in order to be legally married, churches do have to adhere to the law in order for their ceremonies to be legally binding. So let’s not kid ourselves about what’s going on here. Getting married is a gamble. Love is not always forever (nor, actually, do I think it ever was or should be in all instances) and yet we have to make our homes within a community of laws. Barring people from the protections of the law because they don’t meet a religious qualification is supposed to be wrong in this country.

    Anyway, kudos to Mr. Obama. And again, thank you, Mr. Donahue—I like to know who I’m disagreeing with and exactly why.

  • All Or Nothing

    I don’t do many posts about evolution here. It is a topic of interest to me and many years ago I went through a spate of reading everything I could find by Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and a few others to try to wrap my head around it. What I came away with—and this is very important for a point I intend to make later on—is that I am persuaded that evolution is real, that this is a pretty accurate description of how life operates, and that our future understanding of biology will be based solidly on these principles.

    I do not have to be an expert on it to accept it.

    But this is usually what is required by those who oppose evolution, especially on religious grounds—if you can’t answer their questions with definitive, rigorous fact and keep it all straight, then you are totally wrong and their definition of how life operates is automatically true.

    As a technique for debate, this is maddeningly stupid and often effective in the short term. But before I go on, I’d like to present this video, which shows a rather remarkable process going on within the creationist community even as we ponder this difficulty:

    For those of you who may not know, Kent Hovind is an apologist for creationism and has been conducting seminars and giving talks for years as to why evolution is categorically wrong. Yet when you look at what’s happening in his own models, it’s obvious he’s accepting certain elements of evolution, just renaming them so as not to evoke the offensive label which is seen now as a counterargument to Genesis. Hypocrisy? Maybe not. After all, every major shift in knowledge occurred, individually and collectively, in opposition to an accepted position. It was a usually a gradual change. It evolved.

    Now, the one thing that is not addressed, except very briefly toward the end and rather cheekily, is the main bugbear of all creationists. Human evolution. Maybe creationists don’t get quite so strident about it anymore, realizing that a categorical argument for special treatment doesn’t play as well as it once did, but this can be traced back to Darwin’s day and possibly the best encapsulation of it came from William Jennings Bryan, he of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial.

    The man in the 20th Century who came to exemplify the fundamentalist response to evolution said in his famous Menace of Darwinism speech: “…our chief concern is in protecting man from the demoralization involved in accepting a brute ancestry…evolution in plant and animal life up to the highest form of animal might, if there were proof of it, be admitted without raising a presumption that would compel us to give a brute origin to man.”

    There you have it. The hangup is Man. It says in Genesis that Adam was hand-crafted by the Almighty and anything suggesting otherwise is simply unacceptable.

    Well, the problem is everything we’ve learned since the Enlightenment and Cuvier and then Darwin. That homo sapiens sapiens is a mammal, an animal, and in every respect but our self-delusion we obey the same genetic and environmental laws as every other critter. Furthermore, if we try to pretend otherwise when it comes to medical care, the results are spectacularly ineffective.

    But the thing I really wanted to talk about here is this debate tactic that requires us—someone like me—to know everything about the position I defend in order to have even a chance at making an impact while my opponents don’t have to know anything, either about my position or theirs. Argument by default, basically. If I am in error in any detail, if I misremember a fact, or don’t know the proper answer to a particular question, then I am instantly wrong and the Default Position is automatically—and inarguably—right.

    Recently, in Waco, TX, Bill Nye—yes, the Science Guy—caused a controversy by saying that the moon reflects the sun. It was a minor point, but it was a contradiction of a poetic line from Genesis in which Yahweh is said to have made “two lights” in the sky. Nye was explaining that the moon does not radiate its own light but reflects the light of the sun and a group of people stormed out on him, loudly claiming that “We believe in God!” Well, you may say that this is simply an example of local stupidity, and you’d be right. Not only didn’t these folks understand astronomy and how the solar system works, they didn’t realize that a good deal of the Bible is metaphor and poetry—you know, not literal. If asked “Okay, if it didn’t happen as science has shown us it did, then how did it happen?” they would probably come back with a pat “God did it!” Well, sure, but how? What’s the process? And how come what is described contradicts what we actually see? They wouldn’t have any answers, not only because they don’t know anything about science but they know just as little about their own holy book or theology. All they “know” is that they don’t like questions that seem to undermine that special feeling they’ve always had when it comes to the “fact” that they were “hand-made” by god.

    Which they weren’t.

    But it’s that debate technique that interests me here. Because it crosses all disciplinary lines. Politics, economics, history—if I offer a perspective that runs counter to common prejudice, I am required to know every bit of the fact involved in my position and not one iota of it can be in error, otherwise I am completely wrong. Contrariwise, though, my detractors aren’t required to know a damn thing factually.

    Carl Sagan once stated that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But lately it seems it is the extraordinary claim that seems to require no evidence and the claims of reason are under siege by a requirement that its supporters know ALL. Of course, many if not all “extraordinary” claims along the lines of creationism have no evidence behind them, so requiring it is a bit disingenuous, but really, shouldn’t people even know a little something about what it is they’re defending?

    The problem with fact, though, is it doesn’t go away at the behest of ideology. Hence the contortions of the Kent Hovinds, who are trying to find ways to address what is undeniable that don’t contradict their beliefs. Eventually, they may even find out that what they’ve been defending all along has been, well, a misinterpretation. Their positions will evolve.

    Meantime, for the record, let me state that I am not an expert on evolution. Nor am I an expert in history, political science, physics, or any philosophical school. I don’t have to be. Because I can look it up.

    It’s called using your brains.

  • Missouri Has A New Poet Laureate

    From the Governor’s Office we have the announcement of Missouri’s third state poet laureate:

    Gov. names university professor poet laureate

    Jefferson City – Gov. Jay Nixon announced the appointment of William Trowbridge, Lee’s Summit, as Missouri’s new Poet Laureate.

    Trowbridge is a distinguished university professor emeritus at Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, Mo., and the author of more than 340 published or forthcoming poems. His appointment will run for two years, and during his term, he will present and lecture on poetry to school, community and civic groups throughout the state.

    “Professor Trowbridge is one of the country’s outstanding poets, and we are honored to have him as Missouri’s poet laureate,” Nixon said. “With a number of outstanding candidates from our state, the decision is never easy. I appreciate the work of the Missouri Center for the Book and of the advisory committee in making its recommendation to me.”

    Trowbridge has published eight collections of poems, including Ship of Fool in 2011, and his work has been reprinted in more than 30 anthologies and textbooks. He was co-editor of The Laurel Review from 1986 to 2000, and his poetry has earned several awards.

    Trowbridge is Missouri’s third poet laureate; he succeeds David Clewell, of Webster Groves.

    http://governor.mo.gov/newsroom/2012/Gov_Nixon_appoints_William_Trowbridge_as_Missouri_s_new_Poet_Laureate

  • Melinda Gates on Contraception

    As she says, this ought to be utterly noncontroversial. Yet it is, because a toxic meme has been released into the public discourse.

    She’s more polite—more “politic”—than I might be, so I’ll just leave this to stand on its own for now.

  • Work and Mothers

    I don’t have a lot to say about this kerfluffle over the remarks of someone who, as it turns out, is not actually working for Obama regarding Ann Romney never having worked a day in her life. This kind of hyperbole ought to be treated as it deserves—ignored.

    But we live in an age when the least thing can become a huge political Thing, so ignoring idiocy is not an option.

    I remember back in the 1990s a brief flap over Robert Reich. I’m not certain but I believe it was Rush Limbaugh who started it by lampooning the Clinton Administration’s Secretary of Labor for “never having had a real job in his life.” Meaning that he had gone from graduation into politics with no intervening time served as, at a guess, a fast-food cook or carwasher or checker at a WalMart. Whatever might qualify as “real” or as a “job” in this formulation. In any event, it was an absurd criticism that overlooked what had been a long career in law and as a teacher before Clinton appointed him. It’s intent was to discredit him, of course, which was the intent of the comments aimed at Mrs. Romney by asserting that she has no idea what a working mother has to go through.

    A different formulation of the charge might carry more weight, but would garner less attention. It is true being a mother has little to do with what we regard as “gainful employment” in this country: employees have laws which would prevent the kinds of hours worked (all of them, on call, every day including weekends and holidays) for the level of wages paid (none to speak of) mothers endure.

    Hilary Rosen raised a storm over remarks aimed at making Mrs. Romney appear out of touch with working mothers. A more pointed criticism might be that Mrs. Romney does not have any experience like that of many women who must enter employment in order to support themselves and their families, that a woman who can afford nannies (whether she actually made use of any is beside the point—the fact is she had that option, which most women do not) can’t know what working mothers must go through.

    But that’s a nuanced critique and we aren’t used to that, apparently. Soundbite, twitter tweets, that’s what people are used to, encapsulate your charge in a 144 characters or less, if we have to think about it more than thirty seconds, boredom takes over and the audience is lost.

    Unfortunately, the chief victims then are truth and reality.

    So the president gets dragged into it for damage control and the issue becomes a campaign issue.

    Which might not be such a bad thing. We could stand to have a renewed conversation about all this, what with so many related issues being on the table, given the last year of legislation aimed at “modifying” women’s services and rights. Whether they intended it this way or not, the GOP has become saddled with the appearance of waging culture wars against women, the most recent act being Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin’s repeal of that state’s equal pay law. Romney is the presumptive nominee for head of that party and one of the things he’s going to have to do if figure out where he stands on these matters and then try to convince the country that he and his party are not anti-woman.

    Yes, that’s hyperbolic, but not by much. This is where the culture wars have brought us—one part of society trying to tell the other part what it ought to be doing and apparently prepared to enact legislation to force the issue. Ms. Rosen’s remarks, ill-aimed as they were, point up a major policy problem facing the GOP and the country as a whole, which is the matter of inequality.

    That’s become a catch-all phrase these days, but that doesn’t mean it lacks importance. The fact is that money and position pertain directly to questions of relevance in matters of representation. Ann Romney becomes in this a symbol, which is an unfortunate but inevitable by-product of our politics, and it is legitimate to ask if she can speak to women’s concerns among those well below her level of available resource and degree of life experience.

    The problem with all politics, left, right, or center, is that in general it’s all too general. Which is why Ms. Rosen’s remarks, no matter how well-intentioned or even statistically based on economic disparities, fail to hit the mark. She can’t know Ann Romney’s life experience and how it has equipped her to empathize with other women. Just as Ann Romney, viewing life through the lens of party politics, may be unable to empathize with women the GOP has been trying very hard to pretend are irrelevant.

    Like with Robert Reich’s critics, it all comes down to what you mean by “real” and “work.” And that’s both personal and relative. Isn’t it?

  • A Good Idea To Check Facts First

    Back in the 90s, I had an argument with my father about taxes. My dad is pretty much a consistent Republican voter, and at the time he was vociferously displeased with President Clinton. In the wake of Clinton’s tax cuts to the middle class, my dad was railing about how that was a lie, that, in fact, taxes had gone up.

    “I got a tax cut,” I said.

    He stopped. “Huh?”

    “I said ‘I got a tax cut.’ My taxes went down.”

    He had a few moments of complete cognitive dissonance. I confess I do not track politics and policy on a daily basis, and often things slip past me that I do not catch, but the fact of the matter was, at that time, my federal taxes went down. I was taking more money home weekly than before Clinton’s “nonexistent” tax cuts. My dad was startled. He couldn’t figure that one out. His taxes had gone up.

    “You make a hell of a lot more than I do, dad,” I said. “You are not in the demographic those cuts were aimed at.”

    Now, to be fair, we went over it later, and a majority of his tax increases were state and local and one on capital gains, which took a point or two upward tick at the time. His income from investments about equaled his paycheck income, so, yeah, his taxes went up.

    I don’t now and did not then have any “investments.” When I hear the term “middle class” I think of my income bracket, which is people who rely almost entirely on their salaries for their income, might own a house, and there may possibly be a 401K somewhere. I have never made more than 28 thousand dollars a year, usually considerably less than that. That’s my income bracket, which I charitably claim as middle class. (It’s not, it’s working class, but in America we view the class divides according to what we own, not what we make—so a nice car, a home in a good neighborhood, new clothes, the ability to eat at a nice restaurant once a week or so, these things make us feel middle class, even if most of it is purchased on credit we may have trouble paying back.)

    The disconnect, however, between my father and me had to do with a common American assumption that we are all the same, even when we know we are not. If you’re in my family or one of my circle of friends, the default assumption is that we are living the same level of life. So if good things happen to me, they must also happen to you; if I get what I consider an unfair deal, you must be suffering as well.

    Reality is never so neat.

    And the assumption blinds us to other realities that drive partisan politics into rabbit holes and blind alleys or vitriolic resentment, hyperbolic castigation, and outright untruth in the name of beating our opponent.

    Check this out:

    Now, I readily admit this is a collection of clips that is aimed at showing Romney in a bad light (hell, it’s a campaign video). However, Mr. Romney indulges some fairly blatant misrepresentation. You can go to recordings of his stump speeches and find it all, largely unmitigated by any “context” which might moderate the inaccuracies. And embarrassing, since it is so easy to check the facts today.

    The main reason Romney can get away with this with his supporters is that people—on both sides—don’t seem to listen to anything other than their preferred sources, which usually do nothing but reinforce the misrepresentation. Repugnant as it may be, if you are going to be politically responsible, YOU HAVE TO CHECK, YOU HAVE TO GO TO YOUR OPPONENTS’ SOURCES AND HEAR WHAT THEY HAVE TO SAY, YOU HAVE TO KNOW WHAT HAS REALLY HAPPENED.

    Which many of us are no longer doing. I don’t know how many of us ever did, at least willingly. The fact is, though, that there was a time you had to make a huge effort to avoid the other side of the argument. Both views were often on news shows, certainly many papers used to have pro and con columns in their editorial sections, the kind of micro-selection of redacted rhetoric than happens today so easily was possible only with effort and by going to near hermit-level lengths to avoid hearing the Other Side.

    Today, we can tailor our newsfeeds to suit our prejudices.

    Which is why nonsense like the Birthers can cling to our political discourse like barnacles to a ship long after it should have died its well-deserved and ignominious death. Why allegations that Obama is a Muslim refuse to go away despite the complete lack of evidence and utter illogic of the charge—because the people clinging to those allegations won’t listen to any other point of view. And they don’t have to, because they can filter it out.

    (Illogic? Certainly, on both charges. Consider: if Obama were not a citizen, does anyone honestly believe Hillary would not have mopped the stage up with him in the 2008 campaign? She wanted the presidency in the worst way and such a fact, if it were indeed a fact, would have driven him out of the race well before he was an obvious threat. Likewise with the Muslim charge: if he were, then why has every one of this year’s GOP candidates gone on record saying he is a Christian? Again, there isn’t a shred of evidence to support the charge. Some may claim conspiracy, but to what end? And how many people would have to be involved, even among those who are working ardently to unseat him this year? You would have to believe that every single politician in both parties had somewhere agreed to go along with these allegations. Which means no one is trustworthy, so who does that leave to get your vote?)

    But, even as we seem to suffer from a surfeit of tunnel vision, the same resources that allow for selective reinforcement of a priori conclusions can also be used to expand our view and make the kinds of fact-checking comparisons that used to be very difficult for the average citizen. Hence, the above series of clips.

    Look, I don’t care if you dislike the president. I loathed Bush. But I can find it in my conscience to credit him with things I thought he did well. I don’t need to call him names, impugn his character, or make up lies about him to find fault with his policies. And it’s the policies that matter. All this nonsense over Obama’s citizenship or religion or anything else like that are worse than libels—they’re distractions.

    While some people were getting all exercised about his supposed disregard for White House staffers by spending Christmas in Hawaii, did any of them notice Attorney General Eric Holder’s calm assertion of executive authority to target and kill Americans deemed “terrorists” without judicial review? Hmm? A nasty overturning of due process, but the folks bitching about Obama’s vacation schedule didn’t seem to notice.

    The fact that Obama has reauthorized the Patriot Act, including its domestic wiretapping powers, doesn’t seem to trouble very many in the “Obama’s not a real American” camp.

    There are a number of campaign promises he made that have yet to be acted upon and some it would seem he has simply chosen to ignore. Now, there’s nothing unusual about that—every president is guilty of that charge, primarily because there is a difference between running for the office and actually holding it, and certainly there are things an elected president becomes privy to that a mere candidate does not know—but it would be nice if the people casting stones did so based on legitimate discrepancies and unfulfilled policy promises instead of on made-up nonsense.

    But this won’t matter. Candidate Romney will continue to claim all of the above allegations and his base probably won’t care—because they won’t know. As far as they’re concerned, he’s relaying the truth, because they won’t bother to check it.

    And this is one of the chief problems underlying politics. Not just today, but always. “Preaching to the choir,” “playing to his base,” “towing the party line”…nothing new.

    But there was a time it was very difficult to find out the truth. That excuse doesn’t work so well anymore.

    But then, it’s not about reality. Is it?

  • Marriage, Politics, and Dogs

    I must at the outset state that I personally don’t, as the good ol’ boys like to say, have a dog in this hunt. There was a time I might have, but at this stage of my life—our lives, my partner’s and mine—there is no personal blowback. At least not yet, but I’ll make a point about that later. I say this in order to assure people, some of whom will assume what they will no matter what, that I’m grinding no axes here other than my usual intolerance for duplicity, hypocrisy, and related misapplications of do-goodism.

    First, watch this video:

    https://www.c-span.org/video/?311757-1/national-organization-marriage-nom-rally-national-mall

     

    Okay, the aspects of that report I wish to draw your attention to are primarily the shenanigans to which the NOM finds all manner of, surprisingly honest, excuses to indulge. Some borderline, some blatant, many violations of legal and ethical standards. They don’t like playing by the rules—rules, by the way, they would be the first to accuse their opponents of violating should the tables be turned—so they have written a playbook for evading, avoiding, or just ignoring them in order to accomplish their higher purpose.

    Which is…

    I’m still not entirely clear on this. The one aspect of religious intrusion into public and private life that has never made sense to me—sense in terms of what rational people might do or consider appropriate—is the insistence that even those who don’t accept their premises should nevertheless live according to their ideas. I mean, what is so hard about “live and let live” that they find it impossible to tolerate…differences.

    Yes, you caught me, I’m being rhetorical. Satiric. Perhaps ironic.

    We all do what we can to advance our agendas when compelled. I don’t deny it. I have no doubt that there are many underhanded, backdoor actions taken in behalf of things I approve in order to break down social and political resistance to them. Sometimes I shake my head at them, thinking “we didn’t need to do that, did we?” Other times, I look at the iron wall put up in opposition to things which I believe would be a net positive and I think “there’s only one way to get through that” and tacitly give my blessing to the party or organization that gets it done. I do have a moral metric about these things (and, of course, if you’re on the other side from me, ideologically, you will refuse to accept that I base anything on any kind of moral principle) and I take pains to adhere to my own set of restrictions, lines I would not cross.

    Here’s where I get a little frosted over this kind of stuff, though, in this instance. Religion presents a facade of divine moral adherence. As such, it is supposed to stick to a code of conduct, regardless of what it faces. That is, after all, what it’s selling—doing right regardless, being moral no matter the cost, representing Truth. So when it stoops to dirty politics, social shit-disturbing, and underhanded tactics, not to mention lying outright, I have to wonder just what it is they think they have to offer that is any different from those they oppose. Sure, if they pull this kind of thing off and keep the details quiet so most people never find out about the dirty tricks, they can claim to have won a moral victory. But the claim, whether believed or not, is based on a false representation. So by their own set of values, what have they gained? After all, won’t God know they lied and cheated, fomented bad feelings, misrepresented people, caused hurt and harm? Isn’t this a species of the end justifying the means?

    Which we’ve come to accept from many quarters. Some millionaire wants to step up and advocate on behalf of his or her personal beliefs, just because, we are free to disagree or agree as suits our temperament. We might question his character over certain practices, but it remains an open issue as to whether or not he or she is right or wrong in what gets done in the course of advocacy.

    We expect, however, a certain degree of consistency of principle, and the more entangled that principle is with the activist, the less we tolerate deviation.

    Religions are supposedly the final arbiters of moral consistency. So when we find them institutionally engaged in unethical or outright illegal actions, whether in the name of a stated good or not, there is, or should be, a commensurate destruction of confidence.

    Basically, if a church stands up and declares “This is wrong” and takes that stand publicly, fine. If it lends support to groups that also advocate in behalf of that stated principle, fine.

    But if it colludes in essentially caustic moral actions in order to undermine a position and by so doing violates other principles for which it is a strong advocate, then at the most basic level, what value does it retain as a moral arbiter? If, in other words, it has to foment hatred in order to destroy a social policy, what makes it any different than any other group with an agenda?

    Now, to be clear, I realize NOM is not itself a religion. But “close working relationship with the Catholic Church” kind of makes that a questionable claim. Whatever NOM wants to do, that’s their business, more power to ’em. But just from this (not to mentioned other things that have drawn considerable media attention) NOM is working hand-in-glove with Catholic hierarchy and given the Church’s position, they are ideologically on the same page. My questions here are about tactics and moral choices.

    (I should say here that a couple of things puzzle me even more. I’m not sure why NOM is advocating keeping Guantanamo open. What does that have to do with gay marriage? Unless they expect some day to be able to send gays there? Ridiculous. Still, it’s in their playbook, so…)

    I said I don’t have a dog in this hunt. My partner and I never “got married” in the traditional sense. I’m an atheist and both of us, back when it may have mattered, resented the “marriage penalty” in the tax code, so we let it slide. We’ve been together for 32 years. Obviously, we didn’t need a ceremony. We have our love.

    But I have to consider the possibilities of activists like NOM. If they have their way, what we have would be in some form or other, illegal. There was, in fact, a time in this country when we could have done jail time for simply living together.

    Here’s my sentiment. No one, especially not institutions to which I have no regard, has the right to tell people how to be together. Life is short, bliss is hard to find, and there has been enough ugliness in the world from one set of people trying to force another set to conform to standards that ultimately make no difference—unless we insist they do. Such insistence comes in many forms, mostly economic, but also social. Ostracization is harsh enough for nonconformity, but it rarely stops there, and we’ve had recent very public examples of how far it can go, with gays beaten and killed simply for being different.

    So when our political institutions take steps in the direction of alleviating some of that, to make a space for people to live as they choose as long as they harm no one else, to strip away the pall of obfuscatory excuse-making that masks bigotry, and we see such steps opposed by the institutions that have always laid claim to being the source of moral activism by seeding suspicion and disaffection and causing rifts and advocating the dissolution of bonds of affection in order to achieve an ideological conformity that quite frankly no longer maintains, it ought to give people pause over just how far we’ve drifted down the road away from other ideals of community that held that religion and politics ought not mingle.

    Lately there have been many things which have brought this to the surface in our politics. We’re brushing up against raw skin with sandpaper too often recently over what amounts to an attempt to inject into our politics an overt religious sensibility that appears to care nothing for people’s needs and everything for conformity to a set of practices only to mollify the prickly intolerances of people who, to put it bluntly, hate. Most of them probably don’t even realize that it’s hate, but when you put someone you don’t know, whose life experiences you are ignorant of, in a box constructed of saidisms, platitudes, and archaic phobias, you are indulging a kind of sterile hate. “Those People” becomes an anthem leading a charge to disenfranchise, with no regard for where they’ve been or what might happen to them should you get your way. Using your religion to justify intolerance is a slap in the face to everything most religions claim loudly to represent.

    Hm. Maybe I do have a dog in this hunt.