Category Archives: History

My Country, ‘Tis of Thee

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Sweet land of liberty?

The older I get, the less patriotic I feel. It was easier to love America when I knew less about it.

Take, for instance, those brave Texans, joined by Davy Crockett of all people, standing up to the evil General Santa Anna at the Alamo. I didn’t know until recently that Mexico had invited the Americans to settle in Texas, with the understanding that the American immigrants would become Catholics, learn Spanish, obey Mexican law and presumably become Mexicans. For the most part, the American settlers ignored Mexican law, including the law against slavery. In little more than a decade, the Americans were fighting to take Texas from Mexico and, of course, make slavery legal. (Walt Disney and John Wayne didn’t tell that part of the story.)

Despite their defeat at the Alamo, the Texans prevailed and, after some controversy, joined the United States as a slave state. President James K. Polk immediately tried to expand Texas by purchasing land from Mexico. When Mexico refused to sell, Polk sent American troops into Mexico, igniting the Mexican-American War. Ulysses S. Grant, who fought in the war, later referred to it as “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation”. The Mexicans call it “the United States’ Invasion of Mexico”.

It’s clear that we haven’t lived up to our ideals as a nation. Obviously, nations never live up to their ideals completely, but our ideals are relatively high and our behavior is relatively low in too many cases.

So it isn’t surprising that there are lots of people with doubts about America these days. The person who wrote the article at the link below brings up Vietnam and Cambodia, Bush and Cheney, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Manning and Snowden, the NSA and our frequent outbreaks of paranoia.

He might have mentioned a whole bunch of other things. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world. We are the largest arms exporter in the world. Our leading politicians are for sale. People sometimes wait for hours to vote in poor neighborhoods, but not in rich ones. We’re the only developed country that doesn’t require paid vacations or maternity leave. And one of my favorites: our drug companies send drugs banned in America to other countries:

Dr. Maria Guadalupe Rodriguez tries vainly to convince parents that the costly American drugs they buy to fight their babies’ diarrhea are useless and often deadly.

Some of the drugs can paralyze a child’s intestines. Others can destroy a child’s ability to fight other infections. All fail to treat the worst enemy of a child with diarrhea: the dehydration that kills about 4 million children under 5 in underdeveloped countries every year, the World Health Organization says. All these infants need, WHO says, is an inexpensive mixture of sugar, salt and water.

Of thee I sing.

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One citizen’s angry appraisal of America: 

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2013/08/bin-laden-won-no-man-has-changed-america-more-for-the-worse.html#more

How drug companies profit by selling dangerous drugs overseas:

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19910611&slug=1288354

Six Men with Something to Say about Israel and the Palestinians

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If you’re interested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you should consider watching The Gatekeepers. It’s an Israeli documentary from 2012 that features interviews with six men, each of whom has been in charge of Shin Bet, Israeli’s internal security service. Apparently, none of these men had ever been interviewed on camera before.

They talk about the history of Shin Bet, including the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, but more importantly they express their opinions regarding the conflict with the Palestinians. The impression I got was that they would all prefer fewer Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, in addition to more cooperation and negotiation with the Palestinian authorities. 

These are all men who spent years working for Shin Bet protecting their fellow Israelis from terrorist attacks. It’s highly significant that they support a less confrontational approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of them says he’s in favor of talking to everyone, including Israel’s enemies. Another observes that Israel is winning battles but losing the war.

Surely, You Must Pay Your Debts!

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Not necessarily, and don’t call me Shirley!

Below is a link to a fairly long review by journalist Robert Kuttner of a book called Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I’ll summarize:

People, especially poor people, have been borrowing from other people, especially rich people, for thousands of years.

As long as people have borrowed, lenders (not all of them, but some of them) have accepted partial payment, especially in difficult economic times. Sometimes it makes economic sense for lenders to suffer a loss, if that’s what’s required to make the economy as a whole (and possibly the lenders themselves) more prosperous. It isn’t mentioned in the review, but Babylonian kinds periodically canceled debts so their wealthy subjects didn’t end up owning all the land. 

The modern form of bankruptcy was invented 300 years ago in England. The idea was that both creditors and debtors would be better off if debtors were allowed to start over, repaying what they could instead of wasting away in debtor’s prison.

Our current laws are tilted in favor of banks and the people who run corporations. Corporations are allowed to declare bankruptcy, sometimes more than once. Corporate officers generally remain in control of their bankrupt companies. On the other hand, countries like Greece can’t declare bankruptcy, although this has been proposed. Homeowners can’t use bankruptcy to deal with their mortgages. Students can’t even refinance their student loans at lower rates. In Kuttner’s words: “The obligations of a student loan follow a borrower to the grave”.

The Germans use the same word for “debt” and “guilt” (Schuld). They’re strongly in favor of other countries paying everything they owe, but seem to have forgotten that, after World War II, the Allies forgave almost all of Germany’s debts and allowed the Germans to postpone their remaining payments for 50 years, helping Germany rebuild and eventually become a creditor to other nations: “Germany, whose debt-to-GDP ratio in 1939 was [a whopping] 675 percent, had a debt load of about 12 percent in the early 1950s—far less than that of the victorious Allies”.

Most of us believe there is a moral aspect to paying our debts, but that’s not the way it’s generally thought of in the business world:

The double standard in debt relief that favored large merchants, present at the creation of bankruptcy law in 1706, persists today in many different forms. It gets surprisingly little attention in the debt debates. Despite the tacit assumption that “surely one has to pay one’s debts,” the evasion of repayment is both widespread and selective. Corporate executives routinely walk away from their debts via Chapter 11 of the national bankruptcy law when that seems expedient. Morality scarcely enters the conversation—this is strictly business.

It’s an excellent, eye-opening article. It even includes some recommendations for changing how various kinds of debt are handled today.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/may/09/debt-we-shouldnt-pay/?page=1

How to Fix Congress

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Congress is under the control of Republicans who are terribly afraid of primary challenges from right-wing nuts. So Congressional Republicans behave as if they are right-wing nuts themselves, even if they aren’t (some of them aren’t).

In a column devoted to reactions to President Obama’s recent economic speech, Alex Pareene responds to the idea that Obama needs “bold, new proposals” in order to get the Republicans to cooperate:

I dunno, the only bold new proposal I can think of that will meaningfully break down Republican resistance would be to massively expand the size of the House and institute nationwide nonpartisan redistricting, and somehow do this before the 2014 elections, and then get rid of the filibuster? That would be pretty bold.

The House doesn’t represent the will of the people, because small states are over-represented (some congressional districts are nearly twice as large as others) and recent gerrymandering results in more Republicans being elected than Democrats, even though Democrats get more votes. (This rightward tilt is made even stronger by the Republicans’ adherence to the so-called “Hastert Rule”: bills don’t get a vote unless they’re supported by a majority of Republicans, i.e. a majority of the majority).

The Senate, of course, was designed to give extra power to small states and the filibuster gives extra power to the minority. It’s a little-known fact that the original rules of both the House and Senate allowed debate to be ended by a majority vote. In 1806, however, Vice President Aaron Burr convinced senators that they didn’t need such a rule; the rule hadn’t been invoked recently so it was just cluttering up the rule book. That change created the possibility of a filibuster, the requirement that a super-majority be required to end debate. The first filibuster occurred 31 years later. Now ordinary business often requires the approval of 60 Senators. So much for majority rule.

Unfortunately, the likelihood that Mr. Parene’s “bold, new ideas” will soon be adopted is approximately zero. It’s true that the Senate might change its rules; that could happen now if some Democratic senators weren’t afraid of the consequences. But it’s highly unlikely that the House will be expanded (although someone is arguing for that to happen: http://www.thirty-thousand.org/). The most we can hope for is that Congressional districts will one day be drawn with little or no political influence — or that whoever carries out the next round of gerrymandering does a better job.

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/25/post_pundits_obama_economy_speech_boring_not_grand_bargain_y_enough/

The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought by Susan Jacoby

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According to The Great Agnostic, there were two great opponents of religion and proponents of naturalism in American history: Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll. Strangely, hardly anyone today has heard of Ingersoll. (For that matter, few Americans today know that Tom Paine had anything to say about religion.)

Robert Ingersoll was a world-famous lawyer and lecturer who lived from 1833 to 1899. He was considered perhaps the greatest orator of his day. He had an extremely successful career traveling all across the country, lecturing to large, appreciative crowds, among whom were many ordinary, religious Americans. He was a member of the social and political establishment, but his public statements opposing religion insured that he never held political office.

In Susan Jacoby’s words, Ingersoll “explained the true meaning and value of science … in a more understandable fashion than any scientist, even the brilliant popularizer Thomas Henry Huxley … Second, Ingersoll made the connection between repressive religion and everyday burdens and injustices as no one had before him.” 

Among the targets of Ingersoll’s scorn were slavery, capital punishment, the subjugation of women, debtor’s prisons, the mistreatment of animal and Social Darwinism. He believed that “there were no social injustices in which religion did not play a major role” — for example, in the belief that the existence of the poor was God’s will, and the idea that men should exert authority over women. 

Jacoby suggests that Ingersoll’s primary purpose was to remind his countrymen that the United States was founded by men who rejected the idea of theocracy: “the glory of the founding generation was that it did not establish a Christian nation”. Ingersoll rejected all supernatural explanations for human behavior and the world around us, while hoping that science and reason would eventually lead us to a world of peace, justice and prosperity. Quoting him: “Man through his intelligence must protect himself. He gets no help from any other world…. Let the ghosts go. We will worship them no more”.

Ingersoll came to be known as the “Great Agnostic”, even though he saw no significant difference between agnosticism and atheism. It isn’t clear why his fame diminished over the years. Although his collected works comprise 12 volumes, perhaps his written words weren’t as powerful as his oratory. Maybe if he had written a good summary of his views, he would be as famous today as Thomas Paine is for writing “The Age of Reason” (which, unfortunately, isn’t very famous at all).

One of the virtues of The Great Agnostic is how it shows that our current cultural battles over religion are hardly new. The 19th century featured the same kinds of conflict, on topics like evolution, birth control and government support for religious education. We haven’t made as much progress as we should have. If there had been someone with Ingersoll’s convictions and abilities speaking out during the 20th century, and now in the 21st, we might be a better country today.