http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/myth-of-the-hero-gunslinger/?ref=opinion&nl=opinion&emc=tya1
JANUARY 20, 2011, 9:00 PM
Myth of the Hero Gunslinger
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.
Tags:
Gun Control, Tucson shooting
PHOENIX — To many gun owners, the question of whether to arm even more people in a country that already has upwards of 300 million guns is as calcified as a Sonoran Desert petroglyph. It’s written in stone, among the fiercest of firearms advocates, that more guns equals fewer deaths.
But before the Tucson tragedy fades into tired talking points, it’s worth dissecting the crime scene once more to see how this idea fared in actual battle.
First, one bit of throat-clearing: I’m a third-generation Westerner, and grew up around guns, hunters of all possible fauna, and Second Amendment enthusiasts who wore camouflage nine months out of the year. Generally, I don’t have a problem with any of that.
Back to Tucson. On the day of the shooting, a young man named Joseph Zamudio was leaving a drugstore when he saw the chaos at the Safeway parking lot. Zamudio was armed, carrying his 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. Heroically, he rushed to the scene, fingering his weapon, ready to fire.
Suppose, in the few seconds of confusion during the shootings, an armed bystander had fired at the wrong man.
Now, in the view of the more-guns proponents, Zamudio might have been able to prevent any carnage, or maybe even gotten off a shot before someone was killed.
“When everyone is carrying a firearm, nobody is going to be a victim,” said Arizona state representative Jack Harper, after a gunman had claimed 19 victims.
“I wish there had been one more gun in Tucson,” said an Arizona Congressman, Rep. Trent Franks, implying like Harper that if only someone had been armed at the scene, Jared Lee Loughner would not have been able to unload his rapid-fire Glock on innocent people.
In fact, several people were armed. So, what actually happened? As Zamudio said in numerous interviews, he never got a shot off at the gunman, but he nearly harmed the wrong person — one of those trying to control Loughner.
He saw people wrestling, including one man with the gun. “I kind of assumed he was the shooter,” said Zamudio in an interview with MSNBC. Then, “everyone said, ‘no, no — it’s this guy,’” said Zamudio.
To his credit, he ultimately helped subdue Loughner. But suppose, in those few seconds of confusion, he had fired at the wrong man and killed a hero? “I was very lucky,” Zamudio said.
It defies logic, as this case shows once again, that an average citizen with a gun is going to disarm a crazed killer. For one thing, these kinds of shootings happen far too suddenly for even the quickest marksman to get a draw. For another, your typical gun hobbyist lacks training in how to react in a violent scrum.
I don’t think these are reasons to disarm the citizenry. That’s never going to happen, nor should it. But the Tucson shootings should discredit the canard that we need more guns at school, in the workplace, even in Congress. Yes, Congress. The Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert has proposed a bill to allow fellow members to carry firearms into the Capitol Building.
Gohmert has enough trouble carrying a coherent thought onto the House floor. God forbid he would try to bring a Glock to work. By his reasoning, the Middle East would be better off if every nation in the region had nuclear weapons.
At least two recent studies show that more guns equals more carnage to innocents. One survey by the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that guns did not protect those who had them from being shot in an assault — just the opposite. Epidemiologists at Penn looked at hundreds of muggings and assaults. What they found was that those with guns were four times more likely to be shot when confronted by an armed assailant than those without guns. The unarmed person, in other words, is safer.
Other studies have found that states with the highest rates of gun ownership have much greater gun death rates than those where only a small percentage of the population is armed. So, Hawaii, where only 9.7 percent of residents own guns, has the lowest gun death rate in the country, while Louisiana, where 45 percent of the public is armed, has the highest.
Arizona, where people can carry guns into bars and almost anyone can get a concealed weapons permit, is one of the top 10 states for gun ownership and death rates by firearms. And in the wake of the shootings, some lawmakers want to flood public areas with even more lethal weapons.
Tuesday of this week was the first day of classes at Arizona State University, and William Jenkins, who teaches photography at the school, did not bring his weapon to campus. For the moment, it’s still illegal for professors to pack heat while they talk Dante and quantum physics.
But that may soon change. Arizona legislators have been pushing a plan to allow college faculty and students to carry concealed weapons at school.
“That’s insane,” Jenkins told me. “On Mondays I give a lecture to 120 people. I can’t imagine students coming into class with firearms. If something happened, it would be mayhem.”
He’s right. Jenkins is a lifelong gun owner and he carries a concealed weapon, by permit. He also carries a modicum of common sense. The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Showing posts with label Culture of Death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Culture of Death. Show all posts
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
More Examples of Republicans Encouraging Bodily Harm to Democrats
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/matt-taibbi-the-crying-shame-of-john-boehner-20110105?page=4
Another Ohio Democrat, Steve Driehaus, clashed repeatedly with Boehner before losing his seat in the midterm elections. After Boehner suggested that by voting for Obamacare, Driehaus "may be a dead man" and "can't go home to the west side of Cincinnati" because "the Catholics will run him out of town," Driehaus began receiving death threats, and a right-wing website published directions to his house. Driehaus says he approached Boehner on the floor and confronted him.
"I didn't think it was funny at all," Driehaus says. "I've got three little kids and a wife. I said to him, 'John, this is bullshit, and way out of bounds. For you to say something like that is wildly irresponsible.'"
Driehaus is quick to point out that he doesn't think Boehner meant to urge anyone to violence. "But it's not about what he intended — it's about how the least rational person in my district takes it. We run into some crazy people in this line of work."
Driehaus says Boehner was "taken aback" when confronted on the floor, but never actually said he was sorry: "He said something along the lines of, 'You know that's not what I meant.' But he didn't apologize."
Another Ohio Democrat, Steve Driehaus, clashed repeatedly with Boehner before losing his seat in the midterm elections. After Boehner suggested that by voting for Obamacare, Driehaus "may be a dead man" and "can't go home to the west side of Cincinnati" because "the Catholics will run him out of town," Driehaus began receiving death threats, and a right-wing website published directions to his house. Driehaus says he approached Boehner on the floor and confronted him.
"I didn't think it was funny at all," Driehaus says. "I've got three little kids and a wife. I said to him, 'John, this is bullshit, and way out of bounds. For you to say something like that is wildly irresponsible.'"
Driehaus is quick to point out that he doesn't think Boehner meant to urge anyone to violence. "But it's not about what he intended — it's about how the least rational person in my district takes it. We run into some crazy people in this line of work."
Driehaus says Boehner was "taken aback" when confronted on the floor, but never actually said he was sorry: "He said something along the lines of, 'You know that's not what I meant.' But he didn't apologize."
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Biotech could manipulate human behavior and life processes
http://research.lifeboat.com/mit2.htm
The Knowledge
Biotechnology's advance could give malefactors the ability to manipulate life processes--and even affect human behavior.
By Mark Williams
Editor's note: Conscious of the controversial nature of this article, Technology Review asked Allison Macfarlane, a research associate in the Science, Technology, and Global Security Working Group in MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society, to rebut its argument: see "Assessing the Threat." We were also careful to elide any recipes for developing a biological weapon. Such details as do appear have been published before, mainly in scientific journals.
Last year, a likable and accomplished scientist named Serguei Popov, who for nearly two decades developed genetically engineered biological weapons for the Soviet Union, crossed the Potomac River to speak at a conference on bioterrorism in Washington, DC.
Popov, now a professor at the National Center for Biodefense and Infectious Diseases at George Mason University, is tallish, with peaked eyebrows and Slavic cheekbones, and, at 55, has hair somewhere between sandy and faded ginger. He has an open, lucid gaze, and he is courteously soft-spoken. His career has been unusual by any standards. As a student in his native city of Novosibirsk, Siberia's capital, preparing his thesis on DNA synthesis, he read the latest English-language publications on the new molecular biology. After submitting his doctorate in 1976, he joined Biopreparat, the Soviet pharmaceutical agency that secretly developed biological weapons. There, he rose to become a department head in a comprehensive program to genetically engineer biological weapons. When the program was founded in the 1970s, its goal was to enhance classical agents of biological warfare for heightened pathogenicity and resistance to antibiotics; by the 1980s, it was creating new species of designer pathogens that would induce entirely novel symptoms in their victims.
Read on...
The Knowledge
Biotechnology's advance could give malefactors the ability to manipulate life processes--and even affect human behavior.
By Mark Williams
Editor's note: Conscious of the controversial nature of this article, Technology Review asked Allison Macfarlane, a research associate in the Science, Technology, and Global Security Working Group in MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society, to rebut its argument: see "Assessing the Threat." We were also careful to elide any recipes for developing a biological weapon. Such details as do appear have been published before, mainly in scientific journals.
Last year, a likable and accomplished scientist named Serguei Popov, who for nearly two decades developed genetically engineered biological weapons for the Soviet Union, crossed the Potomac River to speak at a conference on bioterrorism in Washington, DC.
Popov, now a professor at the National Center for Biodefense and Infectious Diseases at George Mason University, is tallish, with peaked eyebrows and Slavic cheekbones, and, at 55, has hair somewhere between sandy and faded ginger. He has an open, lucid gaze, and he is courteously soft-spoken. His career has been unusual by any standards. As a student in his native city of Novosibirsk, Siberia's capital, preparing his thesis on DNA synthesis, he read the latest English-language publications on the new molecular biology. After submitting his doctorate in 1976, he joined Biopreparat, the Soviet pharmaceutical agency that secretly developed biological weapons. There, he rose to become a department head in a comprehensive program to genetically engineer biological weapons. When the program was founded in the 1970s, its goal was to enhance classical agents of biological warfare for heightened pathogenicity and resistance to antibiotics; by the 1980s, it was creating new species of designer pathogens that would induce entirely novel symptoms in their victims.
Read on...
Monday, December 12, 2005
Nooooo doubt about it-Goebbels and us
By Deb
The nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court ought to be the Gunfight at the OK Corral. The nuclear option should be used. The Democrats will either have to show some backbone or watch, for the next 40 years or so, as the now-creeping fascism smartly picks up its pace.
Our grandchildren will wonder why we just went along with the takeover. They will read German history before WWII and say, look. You knew what happened then. It wasn't so long ago. Why didn't you heed the warnings?
Think I'm kidding? Go take a look at the speeches of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of (Love) Propaganda. This choice comment hit me right between the eyes.
The positive national discipline of the German press would never have been possible without the complete elimination of the influence of the liberal-Jewish press. That happened only because of the years-long work of our propaganda.
Joseph Goebbels, 1934
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/goeb59.htm
The nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court ought to be the Gunfight at the OK Corral. The nuclear option should be used. The Democrats will either have to show some backbone or watch, for the next 40 years or so, as the now-creeping fascism smartly picks up its pace.
Our grandchildren will wonder why we just went along with the takeover. They will read German history before WWII and say, look. You knew what happened then. It wasn't so long ago. Why didn't you heed the warnings?
Think I'm kidding? Go take a look at the speeches of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of (Love) Propaganda. This choice comment hit me right between the eyes.
The positive national discipline of the German press would never have been possible without the complete elimination of the influence of the liberal-Jewish press. That happened only because of the years-long work of our propaganda.
Joseph Goebbels, 1934
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/goeb59.htm
Better Off Without Religious Fundamentalism
ZNet Commentary
Better Off Without Him October 23, 2005
By George Monbiot
Are religious societies better than secular ones? It should be an easy question for athiests to answer. Most of those now seeking to blow people up - whether with tanks and missiles or rucksacks and passenger planes - do so in the name of God. In India, we see men whose religion forbids them to harm insects setting light to human beings.
A 14th-century Pope with a 21st-century communications network sustains his church's mission of persecuting gays and denying women ownership of their bodies. Bishops and rabbis in Britain have just united in the cause of prolonging human suffering, by opposing the legalisation of assisted suicide. We know that the most dangerous human trait is an absence of self-doubt, and that self-doubt is more likely to be absent from the mind of the believer than the infidel.
But we also know that few religious governments have committed atrocities on the scale of Hitler's, Mao's or Stalin's (though, given their more limited means, the Spanish and British in the Americas, the British, Germans and Belgians in Africa and the British in Australia and India could be said to have done their best).
It is hard to dismiss Dostoyevsky's suspicion that "if God does not exist, then everything is permissible."(1) Nor can we wholly disagree with the new Pope when he warns that "we are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which ... has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."(2)
(We must trust, of course, that a man who has spent his life campaigning to become God's go-between, and who now believes he is infallible, is immune to such impulses).
The creationists in the United States might be as mad as a box of ferrets, but what they claim to fear is the question which troubles almost everyone who has stopped to think about it: if our lives have no purpose, why should we care about other people's?
We know too, as Roy Hattersley argued in the Guardian last month, that "good works ... are most likely to be performed by people who believe that heaven exists. The correlation is so clear that it is impossible to doubt that faith and charity go hand in hand."(3)
The only two heroes I have met are both Catholic missionaries. Joe Haas, an Austrian I stayed with in the swamp forests of West Papua, had spent his life acting as a human shield for the indigenous people of Indonesia: every few months soldiers threatened to kill him when he prevented them from murdering his parishioners and grabbing their land.(4)
Frei Adolfo, the German I met in the savannahs of north-eastern Brazil, thought, when I first knocked on his door, that I was a gunman the ranchers had sent for him. Yet still he opened it. With the other liberation theologists in the Catholic church, he offered the only consistent support to the peasants being attacked by landowners and the government.(5) If they did not believe in God, these men would never have taken such risks for other people.
Remarkably, no one, until now, has attempted systematically to answer the question with which this column began. But in the current edition of the Journal of Religion and Society, a researcher called Gregory Paul tests the hypothesis propounded by evangelists in the Bush administration, that religion is associated with lower rates of "lethal violence, suicide, non-monogamous sexual activity and abortion". He compared data from 18 developed democracies, and discovered that the Christian fundamentalists couldn't have got it more wrong.(6)
"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion ... None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction."
Within the United States "the strongly theistic, anti-evolution South and Midwest" have "markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the Northeast where ... secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms".
Three sets of findings stand out: the associations between religion - especially absolute belief - and juvenile mortality, venereal disease and adolescent abortion.
Paul's graphs show far higher rates of death among the under-5s in Portugal, the US and Ireland and put the US - the most religious country in his survey - in a league of its own for gonorrhea and syphilis. Strangest of all for those who believe that Christian societies are "pro-life" is the finding that "increasing adolescent abortion rates show positive correlation with increasing belief and worship of a creator ... Claims that secular cultures aggravate abortion rates (John Paul II) are therefore contradicted by the quantitative data."(7)
These findings appear to match the studies of teenage pregnancy I've read. The rich countries in which sexual abstinence campaigns, generally inspired by religious belief, are strongest have the highest early pregnancy rates(8). The US is the only rich nation with teenage pregnancy levels comparable to those of developing nations: it has a worse record than India, the Philippines and Rwanda(9). Because they're poorly educated about sex and in denial about what they're doing (and so less likely to use contraceptives), boys who participate in abstinence programmes are more likely to get their partners pregnant than those who don't(10).
Is it fair to blame all this on religion? While the rankings cannot reflect national poverty - the US has the world's 4th highest GDP per head, Ireland the 8th - the nations which do well in Paul's study also have higher levels of social spending and distribution than those which do badly. Is this a cause or an association? In other words, are religious societies less likely to distribute wealth than secular ones?
In the US, where governments are still guided by the Puritan notions that money is a sign that you've been chosen by God and poverty is a mark of moral weakness, Christian belief seems to be at odds with the dispersal of wealth. But the UK - one of the most secular societies in Paul's study - is also one of the least inclusive, and does rather worse in his charts than countries with similar levels of religion. The broad trend, however, looks clear: "the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have ... come closest to achieving practical "cultures of life"."(11)
I don't know whether these findings can be extrapolated to other countries and other issues: the study doesn't look, for example, at whether religious belief is associated with a nation's preparedness to go to war (though I think we could hazard a pretty good guess) or whether religious countries in the poor world are more violent and have weaker cultures of life than secular ones. Nor - because, with the exception of Japan, the countries in his study are predominantly Christian or post-Christian - is it clear whether there's an association between social dysfunction and religion in general or simply between social dysfunction and Christianity.
But if we are to accept the findings of this one - and so far only - wide survey of belief and human welfare, the message to those who claim in any sense to be pro-life is unequivocal. If you want people to behave as Christians advocate, you should tell them that God does not exist.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1879. The Brothers Karamazov.
2. Joseph Ratzinger, 18th April 2005. Homily. Vatican Radio.
http://www.oecumene.radiovaticana.org/en1/Articolo.asp?id=33987.
3. Roy Hattersley, 12th September 2005. Faith does breed charity. The Guardian.
4. See George Monbiot 1989, Poisoned Arrows: an investigative journey through Indonesia. Republished 2004 by Green Books.
5. George Monbiot, 1991. Amazon Watershed. Michael Joseph, London.
6. Gregory S. Paul, 2005. Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look. The Journal of Religion and Society, Volume 7.
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html
7. ibid.
8. Figures from the UNFPA's State of World Population report 2003 for births per 1000 women between 15 and 19 years old are presented in graph and graphic form at:
http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator.cfm?IndicatorID=127&country=GB#rowGB
9. ibid.
10. Alba DiCenso et al, 15th June 2002. Interventions To Reduce Unintended Pregnancies Among Adolescents: Systematic Review Of Randomised Controlled Trials. British Medical Journal 324:1426.
11. Gregory S. Paul, ibid.
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Democracy in the Balance, Sojourners Magazine/August 2004
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0408&article=040810
by Bill Moyers
How do we nurture the healing side of religion over the killing side? How do we protect the soul of democracy against bad theology in service of an imperial state?
I trace my spiritual lineage back to a radical Baptist in England named Thomas Helwys who believed that God, and not the King, was Lord of conscience. In 1612 Roman Catholics were the embattled target of the Crown and Thomas Helwys, the Baptist, came to their defense with the first tract in English demanding full religious liberty. Here's what he said "Our Lord the King has no more power over their [Catholic] consciences than ours, and that is none at all. …For men's religion is betwixt God and themselves; the King shall not answer it; neither may the King be judge betwixt God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatever. It appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure."
The king was the good King James I - yes, that King James, as in the King James Bible. Challenges to his authority did not cause his head to rest easily on his pillow, so James had Thomas Helwys thrown into prison, where he died.
Thomas Helwys was not the first or last dissenter to pay the supreme price for conscience. While we are not called upon in America today to make a similar sacrifice, we are in need of his generous vision of religious freedom. We are heading into a new religious landscape. For most of our history our religious discourse was dominated by white male Protestants of a culturally conservative European heritage, people like me. Dissenting voices of America, alternative visions of faith, race, and gender, rarely reached the mainstream. It's different now. Immigration has added more than 30 million people to our population since the late 1960s. The American gene pool is mutating into one in which people like me will be a minority within half a century.
America is being re-created right before our eyes. The world keeps moving to America, bringing new stories from the four corners of the globe. Gerard Bruns calls it a "contest of narratives" competing to shape a new American drama.
The old story had a paradox at its core. In no small part because of Baptists like Thomas Helwys and other "freethinkers," the men who framed our Constitution believed in religious tolerance in a secular republic. The state was not to choose sides among competing claims of faith. So they embodied freedom of religion in the First Amendment. Another person's belief, said Thomas Jefferson, "neither picks my pocket not breaks my bones." It was a noble sentiment often breached in practice. The Indians who lived here first had more than their pockets picked; the Africans brought here forcibly against their will had more than their bones broken. Even when most Americans claimed a Protestant heritage and practically everyone looked alike, we often failed the tolerance test; Catholics, Jews, and Mormons had to struggle to resist being absorbed without distinction into the giant mix-master of American assimilation.
So our troubled past with tolerance requires us to ask how, in this new era when we are looking even less and less alike, are we to avoid the intolerance, the chauvinism, the fanaticism, the bitter fruits that mark the long history of world religions when they jostle each other in busy, crowded streets?
It is no rhetorical question. My friend Elaine Pagels, the noted scholar of religion, says "There's practically no religion I know of that sees other people in a way that affirms the other's choice." You only have to glance at the daily news to see how passions are stirred by claims of exclusive loyalty to one's own kin, one's own clan, one's own country, and one's own church.
These ties that bind are vital to our communities and our lives, but they can also be twisted into a noose.
Religion has a healing side, but it also has a killing side. In the opening chapter of Genesis - the founding document of three great faiths - the first murder rises from a religious act. You know the story: Adam and Eve become the first parents to discover what it means to raise Cain. God plays favorites and chooses Abel's offering over Cain. Cain is so jealous he strikes out at his brother and kills him. Sibling rivalry for God's favor leads to violence and ends in death.
Once this pattern is established, it's played out in the story of Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, and down through the centuries in generation after generation of conflict between Muslims and Jews, Jews and Christians, Christians and Muslims, so that the red thread of religiously spilled blood runs directly from East of Eden to Bosnia, Beirut, Belfast, and Baghdad.
In our time alone the litany is horrendous. I keep a file marked "Holy War."
It bulges with stories of Shias and Sunnis in fratricidal conflict. Of teenage girls in Algeria shot in the face for not wearing a veil. Of professors whose throats are cut for teaching male and female students in the same classroom.
Of the fanatical Jewish doctor with a machine gun mowing down 30 praying Muslims in a mosque. Of Muslim suicide bombers bent on the obliteration of Jews. Of the young Orthodox Jew who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and then announced to the world that "Everything I did, I did for the glory of God." Of Hindus and Muslims slaughtering each other in India, of Christians and Muslims perpetuating gruesome vengeance on each another in Nigeria.
Meanwhile, groups calling themselves the Christian Identity Movement and the Christian Patriot League arm themselves, and Christians intoxicated with the delusional doctrine of two 19th-century preachers not only await the rapture but believe they have an obligation to get involved politically to hasten the divine scenario for the Apocalypse that will bring an end to the world.
Sadly, Christians, too, can invoke God for the purpose of waging religious war.
"Onward Christian Soldiers" is back in vogue and the 2lst century version of the Crusades has taken on aspects of the righteous ferocity that marked its predecessors. "To be furious in religion," said the Quaker William Penn, "is to be furiously irreligious."
THIS IS A TIME of testing - for people of faith and for people who believe in democracy. How do we nurture the healing side of religion over the killing side? How do we protect the soul of democracy against the contagion of a triumphalist theology in the service of an imperial state? At stake is America's role in the world. At stake is the very character of the American Experiment - whether "we, the people" is the political incarnation of a spiritual truth - one nation, indivisible - or a stupendous fraud.
There are two Americas today. You could see this division in a little-noticed action this spring in the House of Representatives. Republicans in the House approved new tax credits for the children of families earning as much as $309,000 a year - families that already enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts - while doing next to nothing for those at the low end of the income scale. This, said The Washington Post in an editorial called "Leave No Rich Child Behind," is "bad social policy, bad tax policy, and bad fiscal policy.
You'd think they'd be embarrassed but they're not."
Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington today. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation; not the fact that millions of workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did 20 years ago; not the fact that working people are putting in longer and longer hours just to stay in place; not the fact that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans - eight out of 10 of them in working families -
are uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.
Nor is the political class embarrassed by the fact that the gap between rich and poor is greater than it's been in 50 years - the worst inequality among all Western nations. They don't seem to have noticed that we have been experiencing a shift in poverty. For years it was said that single jobless mothers are down there at the bottom. For years it was said that work, education, and marriage is how they move up the economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we didn't expect it - among families that include two parents, a worker, and a head of the household with more than a high school education. These are the newly poor. These are the people our political and business class expects to climb out of poverty on an escalator moving downward.
For years now a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was 30-fold. Four decades later it is more than 75-fold. Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society was benefiting proportionately and equality was growing.
That's not the case. As an organization called The Commonwealth Foundation Center for the Renewal of American Democracy sets forth in well-documented research, working families and the poor "are losing ground under economic pressures that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life."
And household economics "is not the only area where inequality is growing in America." We are also losing the historic balance between wealth and commonwealth. The report goes on to describe "a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power." That drive is succeeding, with drastic consequences for an equitable access to and control of public resources, the lifeblood of any democracy. From land, water, and other natural resources to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and even to politics itself, a broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift in the direction of private control.
And what is driving this shift? Contrary to what you learned in civics class in high school, it is not the so-called "democratic debate." That is merely a cynical charade behind which the real business goes on - the none-too-scrupulous business of getting and keeping power so that you can divide up the spoils.
If you want to know what's changing America, follow the money.
Veteran Washington reporter Elizabeth Drew says "the greatest change in Washington over the past 25 years - in its culture, in the way it does business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on here - has been in the preoccupation with money." Jeffrey Birnbaum, who covered Washington for nearly 20 years for the Wall Street Journal, put it even more strongly "[Campaign cash] has flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and threatens to sink the entire vessel. Political donations determine the course and speed of many government actions that deeply affect our daily lives."
It is widely accepted in Washington today that there is nothing wrong with a democracy dominated by the people with money. But of course there is. Money has democracy in a stranglehold and is suffocating it. During his brief campaign in 2000, before he was ambushed by the dirty tricks of the Religious Right in South Carolina and big money from George W. Bush's wealthy elites, John McCain said elections today are nothing less than an "influence peddling scheme in which both parties compete to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder."
THAT'S THE SHAME of politics today. The consequences: "When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it is ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price, and most of them never see it coming," according to Time magazine. Time concludes that America now has "government for the few at the expense of the many."
That's why so many people are turned off by politics. It's why we can't put things right. And it's wrong. Hear the great Justice Learned Hand on this "If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: ‘Thou shalt not ration justice.'" He got it right: The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They have the right to buy more cars, more clothes, or more vacations than anyone else. But they don't have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.
I know: This sounds very much like a call for class war. But the class war was declared a generation ago, in a powerful polemic by a wealthy right-winger, William Simon, who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. By the end of the '70s, corporate America had begun a stealthy assault on the rest of our society and the principles of our democracy. Looking backward, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time.
What has been happening to the middle and working classes is not the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual collusion, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that has made an idol of wealth and power, and a host of political decisions favoring the powerful monied interests who were determined to get back the privileges they had lost with the Depression and the New Deal. They set out to trash the social contract; to cut workforces and their wages; to scour the globe in search of cheap labor; and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do with less….It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."
To create the intellectual framework for this revolution in public policy, they funded conservative think tanks - the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute - that churned out study after study advocating their agenda.
To put political muscle behind these ideas, they created a formidable political machine. Thomas Edsall of The Washington Post, one of the few journalists to cover the issues of class, wrote: "During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperative action in the legislative area." Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they built alliances with the Religious Right - Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition - who happily contrived a cultural war as a smokescreen to hide the economic plunder of the very people who were enlisted as foot soldiers in the war.
And they won. Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in America and the savviest investor of them all, put it this way: "If there was a class war, my class won." Well, there was, Mr. Buffett, and as a recent headline in The Washington Post proclaimed: ‘Business Wins With Bush."
Look at the spoils of victory: Over the past three years, they've pushed through $2 trillion dollars in tax cuts. More than half of the benefits are going to the wealthiest 1 percent. You could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down was a sea of red ink in our state and local governments, forcing them to cut services and raise taxes on middle class working America.
Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits totaling $2.75 trillion over the next 10 years. These deficits have been part of their strategy. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn us, when he predicted that President Reagan's real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions.
President Reagan's own budget director, David Stockman, admitted as much. Now the leading right-wing political strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal is to "starve the beast" - with trillions of dollars in deficits resulting from trillions of dollars in tax cuts, until the U.S. government is so anemic and anorexic it can be drowned in the bathtub.
Take note: The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and Religious Right are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready for retirement; and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.
And, yes, they are proud of what they have done to our economy and our society. If instead of producing a news magazine I was writing for Saturday Night Live, I couldn't have made up the things that this crew in Washington have been saying. The president's chief economic adviser says shipping technical and professional jobs overseas is good for the economy. The president's Council of Economic Advisers reports that hamburger chefs in fast food restaurants can be considered manufacturing workers. The president's labor secretary says it doesn't matter if job growth has stalled because "the stock market is the ultimate arbiter." And the president's Federal Reserve chair says that the tax cuts may force cutbacks in Social Security - but hey, we should make the tax cuts permanent anyway.
You just can't make this stuff up. You have to hear it to believe it. This may be the first class war in history where the victims will die laughing.
But what they are doing to middle class and working Americans and the poor - and to the workings of American democracy - is no laughing matter. It calls for righteous indignation and action. Otherwise our democracy will degenerate into a shell of itself in which the privileged and the powerful sustain their own way of life at the expense of others and the United States becomes another Latin America with a small crust of the rich at the top governing a nation of serfs.
OVER THE PAST few years, as the poor got poorer, the health care crisis worsened, wealth and media became more and more concentrated, and our political system was bought out from under us, prophetic Christianity lost its voice.
The Religious Right drowned everyone else out.
And they hijacked Jesus. The very Jesus who stood in Nazareth and proclaimed, "The Lord has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor." The very Jesus who told 5,000 hungry people that all of you will be fed, not just some of you. The very Jesus who challenged the religious orthodoxy of the day by feeding the hungry on the Sabbath, who offered kindness to the prostitute and hospitality to the outcast, who raised the status of women and treated even the tax collector like a child of God. The very Jesus who drove the money changers from the temple. This Jesus has been hijacked and turned into a guardian of privilege instead of a champion of the dispossessed. Hijacked, he was made over into a militarist, hedonist, and lobbyist, sent prowling the halls of Congress in Guccis, seeking tax breaks and loopholes for the powerful, costly new weapon systems that don't work, and punitive public policies.
Let's get Jesus back. The Jesus who inspired a Methodist ship-caulker named Edward Rogers to crusade across New England for an eight-hour work day.
Let's get back the Jesus who caused Frances William to rise up against the sweatshop.
The Jesus who called a young priest named John Ryan to champion child labor laws, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and decent housing for the poor - 10 years before the New Deal. The Jesus in whose name Dorothy Day challenged the church to march alongside auto workers in Michigan, fishermen and textile workers in Massachusetts, brewery workers in New York, and marble cutters in Vermont. The Jesus who led Martin Luther King to Memphis to join sanitation workers in their struggle for a decent wage.
That Jesus has been scourged by his own followers, dragged through the streets by pious crowds, and crucified on a cross of privilege. Mel Gibson missed that. He missed the resurrection - the spiritual awakening that followed the death of Jesus. He missed Pentecost.
Our times cry out for a new politics of justice. This is no partisan issue.
It doesn't matter if you're a liberal or a conservative, Jesus is both and neither. It doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or Republican, Jesus is both and neither. We need a faith that takes on the corruption of both parties. We need a faith that challenges complacency of all power. If you're a Democrat, shake them up. If you're a Republican, shame them. Jesus drove the money changers from the temple. We must drive them from the temples of democracy. Let's get Jesus back.
But let's do it in love. I know it can sound banal and facile to say this.
The word "love" gets thrown around too casually these days. And brute reality can mock the whole idea of loving one another. We're still living in the shadow of Dachau and Buchenwald. The smoke still rises above Kosovo and Rwanda, Chechnya and East Timor. The walls of Abu Ghraib still shriek of pain. What has love done? Where is there any real milk of human kindness?
But the love I mean is the love described by Reinhold Niebuhr in his book of essays Justice and Mercy, where he writes: "When we talk about love we have to become mature or we will become sentimental. Basically love means...being responsible, responsibility to our family, toward our civilization, and now by the pressures of history, toward the universe of humankind."
What I'm talking about will be hard, devoid of sentiment and practical as nails. But love is action, not sentiment. When the church was young and fair, and people passed by her doors, they did not comment on the difference or the doctrines. Those stern and taciturn pagans said of the Christians: "How they love one another!" It started that way soon after the death of Jesus. His disciple Peter said to the first churches, "Above all things, have unfailing love toward one another." I looked in my old Greek concordance the other day.
That word "unfailing" would be more accurately rendered "intense."
Glenn Tinder reminds us that none are good but all are sacred. I want to think this is what the founders meant when they included the not-so-self-evident assertion that "all men are created equal." Truly life is not fair and it is never equal. But I believe the founders were speaking a powerful spiritual truth that is the heart of our hope for this country. They saw America as a great promise - and it is.
But America is a broken promise, and we are called to do what we can to fix it - to get America back on the track. St. Augustine shows us how: "One loving soul sets another on fire." But to move beyond sentimentality, what begins in love must lead on to justice. We are called to the fight of our lives.
Bill Moyers, host of PBS' Now with Bill Moyers, has received more than 30 Emmy Awards for excellence in broadcast journalism. Moyers was senior news analyst for the CBS Evening News and Special Assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. This article is adapted from Moyers' keynote address ( available by clicking here) at Call to Renewal's Pentecost 2004 conference this May in Washington, D.C.
Better Off Without Him October 23, 2005
By George Monbiot
Are religious societies better than secular ones? It should be an easy question for athiests to answer. Most of those now seeking to blow people up - whether with tanks and missiles or rucksacks and passenger planes - do so in the name of God. In India, we see men whose religion forbids them to harm insects setting light to human beings.
A 14th-century Pope with a 21st-century communications network sustains his church's mission of persecuting gays and denying women ownership of their bodies. Bishops and rabbis in Britain have just united in the cause of prolonging human suffering, by opposing the legalisation of assisted suicide. We know that the most dangerous human trait is an absence of self-doubt, and that self-doubt is more likely to be absent from the mind of the believer than the infidel.
But we also know that few religious governments have committed atrocities on the scale of Hitler's, Mao's or Stalin's (though, given their more limited means, the Spanish and British in the Americas, the British, Germans and Belgians in Africa and the British in Australia and India could be said to have done their best).
It is hard to dismiss Dostoyevsky's suspicion that "if God does not exist, then everything is permissible."(1) Nor can we wholly disagree with the new Pope when he warns that "we are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which ... has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."(2)
(We must trust, of course, that a man who has spent his life campaigning to become God's go-between, and who now believes he is infallible, is immune to such impulses).
The creationists in the United States might be as mad as a box of ferrets, but what they claim to fear is the question which troubles almost everyone who has stopped to think about it: if our lives have no purpose, why should we care about other people's?
We know too, as Roy Hattersley argued in the Guardian last month, that "good works ... are most likely to be performed by people who believe that heaven exists. The correlation is so clear that it is impossible to doubt that faith and charity go hand in hand."(3)
The only two heroes I have met are both Catholic missionaries. Joe Haas, an Austrian I stayed with in the swamp forests of West Papua, had spent his life acting as a human shield for the indigenous people of Indonesia: every few months soldiers threatened to kill him when he prevented them from murdering his parishioners and grabbing their land.(4)
Frei Adolfo, the German I met in the savannahs of north-eastern Brazil, thought, when I first knocked on his door, that I was a gunman the ranchers had sent for him. Yet still he opened it. With the other liberation theologists in the Catholic church, he offered the only consistent support to the peasants being attacked by landowners and the government.(5) If they did not believe in God, these men would never have taken such risks for other people.
Remarkably, no one, until now, has attempted systematically to answer the question with which this column began. But in the current edition of the Journal of Religion and Society, a researcher called Gregory Paul tests the hypothesis propounded by evangelists in the Bush administration, that religion is associated with lower rates of "lethal violence, suicide, non-monogamous sexual activity and abortion". He compared data from 18 developed democracies, and discovered that the Christian fundamentalists couldn't have got it more wrong.(6)
"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion ... None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction."
Within the United States "the strongly theistic, anti-evolution South and Midwest" have "markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the Northeast where ... secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms".
Three sets of findings stand out: the associations between religion - especially absolute belief - and juvenile mortality, venereal disease and adolescent abortion.
Paul's graphs show far higher rates of death among the under-5s in Portugal, the US and Ireland and put the US - the most religious country in his survey - in a league of its own for gonorrhea and syphilis. Strangest of all for those who believe that Christian societies are "pro-life" is the finding that "increasing adolescent abortion rates show positive correlation with increasing belief and worship of a creator ... Claims that secular cultures aggravate abortion rates (John Paul II) are therefore contradicted by the quantitative data."(7)
These findings appear to match the studies of teenage pregnancy I've read. The rich countries in which sexual abstinence campaigns, generally inspired by religious belief, are strongest have the highest early pregnancy rates(8). The US is the only rich nation with teenage pregnancy levels comparable to those of developing nations: it has a worse record than India, the Philippines and Rwanda(9). Because they're poorly educated about sex and in denial about what they're doing (and so less likely to use contraceptives), boys who participate in abstinence programmes are more likely to get their partners pregnant than those who don't(10).
Is it fair to blame all this on religion? While the rankings cannot reflect national poverty - the US has the world's 4th highest GDP per head, Ireland the 8th - the nations which do well in Paul's study also have higher levels of social spending and distribution than those which do badly. Is this a cause or an association? In other words, are religious societies less likely to distribute wealth than secular ones?
In the US, where governments are still guided by the Puritan notions that money is a sign that you've been chosen by God and poverty is a mark of moral weakness, Christian belief seems to be at odds with the dispersal of wealth. But the UK - one of the most secular societies in Paul's study - is also one of the least inclusive, and does rather worse in his charts than countries with similar levels of religion. The broad trend, however, looks clear: "the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have ... come closest to achieving practical "cultures of life"."(11)
I don't know whether these findings can be extrapolated to other countries and other issues: the study doesn't look, for example, at whether religious belief is associated with a nation's preparedness to go to war (though I think we could hazard a pretty good guess) or whether religious countries in the poor world are more violent and have weaker cultures of life than secular ones. Nor - because, with the exception of Japan, the countries in his study are predominantly Christian or post-Christian - is it clear whether there's an association between social dysfunction and religion in general or simply between social dysfunction and Christianity.
But if we are to accept the findings of this one - and so far only - wide survey of belief and human welfare, the message to those who claim in any sense to be pro-life is unequivocal. If you want people to behave as Christians advocate, you should tell them that God does not exist.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1879. The Brothers Karamazov.
2. Joseph Ratzinger, 18th April 2005. Homily. Vatican Radio.
http://www.oecumene.radiovaticana.org/en1/Articolo.asp?id=33987.
3. Roy Hattersley, 12th September 2005. Faith does breed charity. The Guardian.
4. See George Monbiot 1989, Poisoned Arrows: an investigative journey through Indonesia. Republished 2004 by Green Books.
5. George Monbiot, 1991. Amazon Watershed. Michael Joseph, London.
6. Gregory S. Paul, 2005. Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look. The Journal of Religion and Society, Volume 7.
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html
7. ibid.
8. Figures from the UNFPA's State of World Population report 2003 for births per 1000 women between 15 and 19 years old are presented in graph and graphic form at:
http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator.cfm?IndicatorID=127&country=GB#rowGB
9. ibid.
10. Alba DiCenso et al, 15th June 2002. Interventions To Reduce Unintended Pregnancies Among Adolescents: Systematic Review Of Randomised Controlled Trials. British Medical Journal 324:1426.
11. Gregory S. Paul, ibid.
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Democracy in the Balance, Sojourners Magazine/August 2004
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0408&article=040810
by Bill Moyers
How do we nurture the healing side of religion over the killing side? How do we protect the soul of democracy against bad theology in service of an imperial state?
I trace my spiritual lineage back to a radical Baptist in England named Thomas Helwys who believed that God, and not the King, was Lord of conscience. In 1612 Roman Catholics were the embattled target of the Crown and Thomas Helwys, the Baptist, came to their defense with the first tract in English demanding full religious liberty. Here's what he said "Our Lord the King has no more power over their [Catholic] consciences than ours, and that is none at all. …For men's religion is betwixt God and themselves; the King shall not answer it; neither may the King be judge betwixt God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatever. It appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure."
The king was the good King James I - yes, that King James, as in the King James Bible. Challenges to his authority did not cause his head to rest easily on his pillow, so James had Thomas Helwys thrown into prison, where he died.
Thomas Helwys was not the first or last dissenter to pay the supreme price for conscience. While we are not called upon in America today to make a similar sacrifice, we are in need of his generous vision of religious freedom. We are heading into a new religious landscape. For most of our history our religious discourse was dominated by white male Protestants of a culturally conservative European heritage, people like me. Dissenting voices of America, alternative visions of faith, race, and gender, rarely reached the mainstream. It's different now. Immigration has added more than 30 million people to our population since the late 1960s. The American gene pool is mutating into one in which people like me will be a minority within half a century.
America is being re-created right before our eyes. The world keeps moving to America, bringing new stories from the four corners of the globe. Gerard Bruns calls it a "contest of narratives" competing to shape a new American drama.
The old story had a paradox at its core. In no small part because of Baptists like Thomas Helwys and other "freethinkers," the men who framed our Constitution believed in religious tolerance in a secular republic. The state was not to choose sides among competing claims of faith. So they embodied freedom of religion in the First Amendment. Another person's belief, said Thomas Jefferson, "neither picks my pocket not breaks my bones." It was a noble sentiment often breached in practice. The Indians who lived here first had more than their pockets picked; the Africans brought here forcibly against their will had more than their bones broken. Even when most Americans claimed a Protestant heritage and practically everyone looked alike, we often failed the tolerance test; Catholics, Jews, and Mormons had to struggle to resist being absorbed without distinction into the giant mix-master of American assimilation.
So our troubled past with tolerance requires us to ask how, in this new era when we are looking even less and less alike, are we to avoid the intolerance, the chauvinism, the fanaticism, the bitter fruits that mark the long history of world religions when they jostle each other in busy, crowded streets?
It is no rhetorical question. My friend Elaine Pagels, the noted scholar of religion, says "There's practically no religion I know of that sees other people in a way that affirms the other's choice." You only have to glance at the daily news to see how passions are stirred by claims of exclusive loyalty to one's own kin, one's own clan, one's own country, and one's own church.
These ties that bind are vital to our communities and our lives, but they can also be twisted into a noose.
Religion has a healing side, but it also has a killing side. In the opening chapter of Genesis - the founding document of three great faiths - the first murder rises from a religious act. You know the story: Adam and Eve become the first parents to discover what it means to raise Cain. God plays favorites and chooses Abel's offering over Cain. Cain is so jealous he strikes out at his brother and kills him. Sibling rivalry for God's favor leads to violence and ends in death.
Once this pattern is established, it's played out in the story of Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, and down through the centuries in generation after generation of conflict between Muslims and Jews, Jews and Christians, Christians and Muslims, so that the red thread of religiously spilled blood runs directly from East of Eden to Bosnia, Beirut, Belfast, and Baghdad.
In our time alone the litany is horrendous. I keep a file marked "Holy War."
It bulges with stories of Shias and Sunnis in fratricidal conflict. Of teenage girls in Algeria shot in the face for not wearing a veil. Of professors whose throats are cut for teaching male and female students in the same classroom.
Of the fanatical Jewish doctor with a machine gun mowing down 30 praying Muslims in a mosque. Of Muslim suicide bombers bent on the obliteration of Jews. Of the young Orthodox Jew who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and then announced to the world that "Everything I did, I did for the glory of God." Of Hindus and Muslims slaughtering each other in India, of Christians and Muslims perpetuating gruesome vengeance on each another in Nigeria.
Meanwhile, groups calling themselves the Christian Identity Movement and the Christian Patriot League arm themselves, and Christians intoxicated with the delusional doctrine of two 19th-century preachers not only await the rapture but believe they have an obligation to get involved politically to hasten the divine scenario for the Apocalypse that will bring an end to the world.
Sadly, Christians, too, can invoke God for the purpose of waging religious war.
"Onward Christian Soldiers" is back in vogue and the 2lst century version of the Crusades has taken on aspects of the righteous ferocity that marked its predecessors. "To be furious in religion," said the Quaker William Penn, "is to be furiously irreligious."
THIS IS A TIME of testing - for people of faith and for people who believe in democracy. How do we nurture the healing side of religion over the killing side? How do we protect the soul of democracy against the contagion of a triumphalist theology in the service of an imperial state? At stake is America's role in the world. At stake is the very character of the American Experiment - whether "we, the people" is the political incarnation of a spiritual truth - one nation, indivisible - or a stupendous fraud.
There are two Americas today. You could see this division in a little-noticed action this spring in the House of Representatives. Republicans in the House approved new tax credits for the children of families earning as much as $309,000 a year - families that already enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts - while doing next to nothing for those at the low end of the income scale. This, said The Washington Post in an editorial called "Leave No Rich Child Behind," is "bad social policy, bad tax policy, and bad fiscal policy.
You'd think they'd be embarrassed but they're not."
Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington today. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation; not the fact that millions of workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did 20 years ago; not the fact that working people are putting in longer and longer hours just to stay in place; not the fact that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans - eight out of 10 of them in working families -
are uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.
Nor is the political class embarrassed by the fact that the gap between rich and poor is greater than it's been in 50 years - the worst inequality among all Western nations. They don't seem to have noticed that we have been experiencing a shift in poverty. For years it was said that single jobless mothers are down there at the bottom. For years it was said that work, education, and marriage is how they move up the economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we didn't expect it - among families that include two parents, a worker, and a head of the household with more than a high school education. These are the newly poor. These are the people our political and business class expects to climb out of poverty on an escalator moving downward.
For years now a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was 30-fold. Four decades later it is more than 75-fold. Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society was benefiting proportionately and equality was growing.
That's not the case. As an organization called The Commonwealth Foundation Center for the Renewal of American Democracy sets forth in well-documented research, working families and the poor "are losing ground under economic pressures that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life."
And household economics "is not the only area where inequality is growing in America." We are also losing the historic balance between wealth and commonwealth. The report goes on to describe "a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power." That drive is succeeding, with drastic consequences for an equitable access to and control of public resources, the lifeblood of any democracy. From land, water, and other natural resources to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and even to politics itself, a broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift in the direction of private control.
And what is driving this shift? Contrary to what you learned in civics class in high school, it is not the so-called "democratic debate." That is merely a cynical charade behind which the real business goes on - the none-too-scrupulous business of getting and keeping power so that you can divide up the spoils.
If you want to know what's changing America, follow the money.
Veteran Washington reporter Elizabeth Drew says "the greatest change in Washington over the past 25 years - in its culture, in the way it does business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on here - has been in the preoccupation with money." Jeffrey Birnbaum, who covered Washington for nearly 20 years for the Wall Street Journal, put it even more strongly "[Campaign cash] has flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and threatens to sink the entire vessel. Political donations determine the course and speed of many government actions that deeply affect our daily lives."
It is widely accepted in Washington today that there is nothing wrong with a democracy dominated by the people with money. But of course there is. Money has democracy in a stranglehold and is suffocating it. During his brief campaign in 2000, before he was ambushed by the dirty tricks of the Religious Right in South Carolina and big money from George W. Bush's wealthy elites, John McCain said elections today are nothing less than an "influence peddling scheme in which both parties compete to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder."
THAT'S THE SHAME of politics today. The consequences: "When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it is ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price, and most of them never see it coming," according to Time magazine. Time concludes that America now has "government for the few at the expense of the many."
That's why so many people are turned off by politics. It's why we can't put things right. And it's wrong. Hear the great Justice Learned Hand on this "If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: ‘Thou shalt not ration justice.'" He got it right: The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They have the right to buy more cars, more clothes, or more vacations than anyone else. But they don't have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.
I know: This sounds very much like a call for class war. But the class war was declared a generation ago, in a powerful polemic by a wealthy right-winger, William Simon, who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. By the end of the '70s, corporate America had begun a stealthy assault on the rest of our society and the principles of our democracy. Looking backward, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time.
What has been happening to the middle and working classes is not the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual collusion, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that has made an idol of wealth and power, and a host of political decisions favoring the powerful monied interests who were determined to get back the privileges they had lost with the Depression and the New Deal. They set out to trash the social contract; to cut workforces and their wages; to scour the globe in search of cheap labor; and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do with less….It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."
To create the intellectual framework for this revolution in public policy, they funded conservative think tanks - the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute - that churned out study after study advocating their agenda.
To put political muscle behind these ideas, they created a formidable political machine. Thomas Edsall of The Washington Post, one of the few journalists to cover the issues of class, wrote: "During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperative action in the legislative area." Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they built alliances with the Religious Right - Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition - who happily contrived a cultural war as a smokescreen to hide the economic plunder of the very people who were enlisted as foot soldiers in the war.
And they won. Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in America and the savviest investor of them all, put it this way: "If there was a class war, my class won." Well, there was, Mr. Buffett, and as a recent headline in The Washington Post proclaimed: ‘Business Wins With Bush."
Look at the spoils of victory: Over the past three years, they've pushed through $2 trillion dollars in tax cuts. More than half of the benefits are going to the wealthiest 1 percent. You could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down was a sea of red ink in our state and local governments, forcing them to cut services and raise taxes on middle class working America.
Now the Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits totaling $2.75 trillion over the next 10 years. These deficits have been part of their strategy. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn us, when he predicted that President Reagan's real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions.
President Reagan's own budget director, David Stockman, admitted as much. Now the leading right-wing political strategist, Grover Norquist, says the goal is to "starve the beast" - with trillions of dollars in deficits resulting from trillions of dollars in tax cuts, until the U.S. government is so anemic and anorexic it can be drowned in the bathtub.
Take note: The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and Religious Right are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready for retirement; and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.
And, yes, they are proud of what they have done to our economy and our society. If instead of producing a news magazine I was writing for Saturday Night Live, I couldn't have made up the things that this crew in Washington have been saying. The president's chief economic adviser says shipping technical and professional jobs overseas is good for the economy. The president's Council of Economic Advisers reports that hamburger chefs in fast food restaurants can be considered manufacturing workers. The president's labor secretary says it doesn't matter if job growth has stalled because "the stock market is the ultimate arbiter." And the president's Federal Reserve chair says that the tax cuts may force cutbacks in Social Security - but hey, we should make the tax cuts permanent anyway.
You just can't make this stuff up. You have to hear it to believe it. This may be the first class war in history where the victims will die laughing.
But what they are doing to middle class and working Americans and the poor - and to the workings of American democracy - is no laughing matter. It calls for righteous indignation and action. Otherwise our democracy will degenerate into a shell of itself in which the privileged and the powerful sustain their own way of life at the expense of others and the United States becomes another Latin America with a small crust of the rich at the top governing a nation of serfs.
OVER THE PAST few years, as the poor got poorer, the health care crisis worsened, wealth and media became more and more concentrated, and our political system was bought out from under us, prophetic Christianity lost its voice.
The Religious Right drowned everyone else out.
And they hijacked Jesus. The very Jesus who stood in Nazareth and proclaimed, "The Lord has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor." The very Jesus who told 5,000 hungry people that all of you will be fed, not just some of you. The very Jesus who challenged the religious orthodoxy of the day by feeding the hungry on the Sabbath, who offered kindness to the prostitute and hospitality to the outcast, who raised the status of women and treated even the tax collector like a child of God. The very Jesus who drove the money changers from the temple. This Jesus has been hijacked and turned into a guardian of privilege instead of a champion of the dispossessed. Hijacked, he was made over into a militarist, hedonist, and lobbyist, sent prowling the halls of Congress in Guccis, seeking tax breaks and loopholes for the powerful, costly new weapon systems that don't work, and punitive public policies.
Let's get Jesus back. The Jesus who inspired a Methodist ship-caulker named Edward Rogers to crusade across New England for an eight-hour work day.
Let's get back the Jesus who caused Frances William to rise up against the sweatshop.
The Jesus who called a young priest named John Ryan to champion child labor laws, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and decent housing for the poor - 10 years before the New Deal. The Jesus in whose name Dorothy Day challenged the church to march alongside auto workers in Michigan, fishermen and textile workers in Massachusetts, brewery workers in New York, and marble cutters in Vermont. The Jesus who led Martin Luther King to Memphis to join sanitation workers in their struggle for a decent wage.
That Jesus has been scourged by his own followers, dragged through the streets by pious crowds, and crucified on a cross of privilege. Mel Gibson missed that. He missed the resurrection - the spiritual awakening that followed the death of Jesus. He missed Pentecost.
Our times cry out for a new politics of justice. This is no partisan issue.
It doesn't matter if you're a liberal or a conservative, Jesus is both and neither. It doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or Republican, Jesus is both and neither. We need a faith that takes on the corruption of both parties. We need a faith that challenges complacency of all power. If you're a Democrat, shake them up. If you're a Republican, shame them. Jesus drove the money changers from the temple. We must drive them from the temples of democracy. Let's get Jesus back.
But let's do it in love. I know it can sound banal and facile to say this.
The word "love" gets thrown around too casually these days. And brute reality can mock the whole idea of loving one another. We're still living in the shadow of Dachau and Buchenwald. The smoke still rises above Kosovo and Rwanda, Chechnya and East Timor. The walls of Abu Ghraib still shriek of pain. What has love done? Where is there any real milk of human kindness?
But the love I mean is the love described by Reinhold Niebuhr in his book of essays Justice and Mercy, where he writes: "When we talk about love we have to become mature or we will become sentimental. Basically love means...being responsible, responsibility to our family, toward our civilization, and now by the pressures of history, toward the universe of humankind."
What I'm talking about will be hard, devoid of sentiment and practical as nails. But love is action, not sentiment. When the church was young and fair, and people passed by her doors, they did not comment on the difference or the doctrines. Those stern and taciturn pagans said of the Christians: "How they love one another!" It started that way soon after the death of Jesus. His disciple Peter said to the first churches, "Above all things, have unfailing love toward one another." I looked in my old Greek concordance the other day.
That word "unfailing" would be more accurately rendered "intense."
Glenn Tinder reminds us that none are good but all are sacred. I want to think this is what the founders meant when they included the not-so-self-evident assertion that "all men are created equal." Truly life is not fair and it is never equal. But I believe the founders were speaking a powerful spiritual truth that is the heart of our hope for this country. They saw America as a great promise - and it is.
But America is a broken promise, and we are called to do what we can to fix it - to get America back on the track. St. Augustine shows us how: "One loving soul sets another on fire." But to move beyond sentimentality, what begins in love must lead on to justice. We are called to the fight of our lives.
Bill Moyers, host of PBS' Now with Bill Moyers, has received more than 30 Emmy Awards for excellence in broadcast journalism. Moyers was senior news analyst for the CBS Evening News and Special Assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. This article is adapted from Moyers' keynote address ( available by clicking here) at Call to Renewal's Pentecost 2004 conference this May in Washington, D.C.
Friday, December 9, 2005
Extreme bias: a mental disorder?
Damn straight.
Psychiatry ponders whether extreme bias can be an illness. Of course it is. Have you ever driven anywhere with a peace sign affixed to your car? I have. As a result of my simple exercise in self-expression, I have been closely followed, boxed in, and suffered various other forms of vehicular intimidation while traveling at 70 miles an hour.
A few months ago, after two young people were RUN OVER BY A TRUCK at a rally in Garden Grove, CA, I wrote an article titled Driving While Peaceful. In it, I described several incidents I personally witnessed wherein some crazy rightwingnut threatened perfectly innocent people with suffering and death.
Here ya go:
I was driving into the city the other day. I was in the fast lane in preparation to transition to another freeway. I glanced in my rearview mirror, and saw a large vehicle close on my tail. I speeded up thinking that I could open space between us.
No good. The vehicle stayed right on my bumper. I considered tapping the brake pedal, but feared that would lead to a traffic hazard. Next I knew, the vehicle was only about three feet back. My adrenalin surged in anticipation of a collision. Rather, he changed lanes in the narrowest space imaginable, and pressed ahead of me in the lane to my right, nearly sideswiping me.
Now, what could explain such dangerous behavior? The vehicle was a Ford Expedition, the hugest piece of polluting iron that Ford makes. The Expedition averages 13 mpg on premium fuel. I had a peace sign on my rear window. He had an American Flag on his. Oh, you could try to explain this by surmising that he was in a terrible hurry to get somewhere. But it seemed not. He simply pulled a carlength ahead and stayed there for four miles, until his offramp appeared.
This is not the first time that I have been vehicularly intimidated due to my plea for peace. I travel down a major interstate several times a year to visit family. Seldom do more than a hundred miles go by without some jerk in a big car or pickup truck either sitting on my bumper or pacing me so they can stare at me.
Here's my question. Now what on earth would make people so angry that they would risk a traffic collision? The idea of peace? The idea that I want it? The idea that I say that I want it publicly?
Why are those who are most anxious to declare their patriotism the angriest at me? At least 75% of the time, these angry drivers have American Flags on their windows, bumpers, or on their antennas. And I look about as american as anyone else.
If I could hear what they were saying it bet it would sound something like this: I bet she's oneathem America-haters. I would like to dispute that contention. I am an American who seeks peace. How can I be an America-hater when I am American? Next, someone will call me a self-hating American. Giggle.
This is not the first time I have noted this bad behavior. After the 2000 election debacle, I was standing in front of my local courthouse with other concerned Americans talking about what happened. Community leaders had called a meeting. Some of the people were standing near the curb. I watched in horror as an gray-haired white man in a Jeep Wrangler aimed his vehicle along the curbline and accelerated to 60 miles an hour. Many people had to fling themselves out of his path.
Now, I bet he thinks he is just a regular American patriot. But I wonder what his defense would have been in the Court Room had he injured or killed someone in his fit of rage.
Unfortunately, injuries occurred in the last public incident, near Los Angeles. A supporter of the Minutemen struck two young people with his vehicle, then ran. What a hero!
As I was driving home from school one afternoon in 2003, I sat behind a Mercedes Benz. We were stopped at a light. An elderly homeless woman's shopping cart projected slightly into the crosswalk. When the light turned green, the Mercedes driver aimed his car directly at her cart as he accelerated, then swerved at the last minute.
Now, after he did that, I wonder if he thought to himself...I must be crazy.
Psychiatry ponders whether extreme bias can be an illness. Of course it is. Have you ever driven anywhere with a peace sign affixed to your car? I have. As a result of my simple exercise in self-expression, I have been closely followed, boxed in, and suffered various other forms of vehicular intimidation while traveling at 70 miles an hour.
A few months ago, after two young people were RUN OVER BY A TRUCK at a rally in Garden Grove, CA, I wrote an article titled Driving While Peaceful. In it, I described several incidents I personally witnessed wherein some crazy rightwingnut threatened perfectly innocent people with suffering and death.
Here ya go:
I was driving into the city the other day. I was in the fast lane in preparation to transition to another freeway. I glanced in my rearview mirror, and saw a large vehicle close on my tail. I speeded up thinking that I could open space between us.
No good. The vehicle stayed right on my bumper. I considered tapping the brake pedal, but feared that would lead to a traffic hazard. Next I knew, the vehicle was only about three feet back. My adrenalin surged in anticipation of a collision. Rather, he changed lanes in the narrowest space imaginable, and pressed ahead of me in the lane to my right, nearly sideswiping me.
Now, what could explain such dangerous behavior? The vehicle was a Ford Expedition, the hugest piece of polluting iron that Ford makes. The Expedition averages 13 mpg on premium fuel. I had a peace sign on my rear window. He had an American Flag on his. Oh, you could try to explain this by surmising that he was in a terrible hurry to get somewhere. But it seemed not. He simply pulled a carlength ahead and stayed there for four miles, until his offramp appeared.
This is not the first time that I have been vehicularly intimidated due to my plea for peace. I travel down a major interstate several times a year to visit family. Seldom do more than a hundred miles go by without some jerk in a big car or pickup truck either sitting on my bumper or pacing me so they can stare at me.
Here's my question. Now what on earth would make people so angry that they would risk a traffic collision? The idea of peace? The idea that I want it? The idea that I say that I want it publicly?
Why are those who are most anxious to declare their patriotism the angriest at me? At least 75% of the time, these angry drivers have American Flags on their windows, bumpers, or on their antennas. And I look about as american as anyone else.
If I could hear what they were saying it bet it would sound something like this: I bet she's oneathem America-haters. I would like to dispute that contention. I am an American who seeks peace. How can I be an America-hater when I am American? Next, someone will call me a self-hating American. Giggle.
This is not the first time I have noted this bad behavior. After the 2000 election debacle, I was standing in front of my local courthouse with other concerned Americans talking about what happened. Community leaders had called a meeting. Some of the people were standing near the curb. I watched in horror as an gray-haired white man in a Jeep Wrangler aimed his vehicle along the curbline and accelerated to 60 miles an hour. Many people had to fling themselves out of his path.
Now, I bet he thinks he is just a regular American patriot. But I wonder what his defense would have been in the Court Room had he injured or killed someone in his fit of rage.
Unfortunately, injuries occurred in the last public incident, near Los Angeles. A supporter of the Minutemen struck two young people with his vehicle, then ran. What a hero!
As I was driving home from school one afternoon in 2003, I sat behind a Mercedes Benz. We were stopped at a light. An elderly homeless woman's shopping cart projected slightly into the crosswalk. When the light turned green, the Mercedes driver aimed his car directly at her cart as he accelerated, then swerved at the last minute.
Now, after he did that, I wonder if he thought to himself...I must be crazy.
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