Category Archives: Politics

Selected Thoughts on Recent Events

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Once upon a time, it was common to see billboards and bumper stickers calling for Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, to be impeached. Right-wing organizations like the John Birch Society had two principal complaints against him, as set forth in a “wanted” poster from 1958:

Warren is a rabid agitator for compulsory racial mongrelization and has handed down various decisions compelling whites to mix with Negroes in the schools, public housing, in restaurants and in public bathing facilities. He is known to work closely with the N.A.A.C.P. [the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] and favors the use of force and coercian [sic] to compel white school children to mingle intimately with Negroes.

Warren has been accused of giving aid and comfort to the Communist Party on frequent occasions. He is guilty of inciting riot, disorder and anarchy in Little Rock and elsewhere in his attempts to impose judicial tyranny upon white Southerners. He has illegally transformed the Supreme Court into a Soviet-type politburo with power over the Congress and over the various state governments.

Fortunately, Chief Justice Warren was never in danger of being impeached (although he may have been in danger of being shot). In fact, only one Supreme Court Justice has ever been impeached. That was Samuel Chase back in 1804. The Wikipedia summary says he was impeached for “political bias and arbitrary rulings, promoting a partisan political agenda on the bench”. Sound familiar? The Senate acquitted Justice Chase and since then making ridiculous decisions based on one’s political ideology hasn’t been considered grounds for impeachment. Federal officials generally need to be accused of criminal activity before the House of Representatives will impeach them.

Nevertheless, if “political bias and arbitrary rulings” and “promoting a partisan political on the bench” were ever grounds for impeachment, Justices Scalia, Alito and Thomas would be prime candidates. The three of them were willing to cripple the Affordable Care Act in 34 states because of a single poorly-written phrase, even though it’s standard procedure for the Court to interpret the language in complex laws based on context and legislative intent. Sensible people understood all along that Congress meant to offer subsidies to low-income people in all fifty states. It was only right-wing ideologues like Scalia, Alito and Thomas who thought or claimed to think otherwise.They saw a way to weaken the law and were willing to disgrace themselves in order to purposefully misinterpret it.

If you want to understand the Court’s decision in the Affordable Care Act case, there is a helpful summary on the Court’s website. They call it a “syllabus” and it’s only five pages long. The majority opinion begins at page 6 of the same PDF document and Scalia’s bizarre dissent begins at page 27.

If Scalia were really as angry as his overheated language implies, he would have dropped dead a few pages into his opinion. Maybe next time.

Moving on to other recent events, I’m trying to understand why some people are opposed to gay marriage because they think it will infringe on their own religious liberties. That may be a future topic. Meanwhile, here are two excellent paragraphs from an article by Andrew O’Hehir called “America Is Changing, and Marriage Equality Is a Huge Victory — But We Need To Go So Much Further”:

An entire strain of right-wing commentators, exemplified by Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly, have built careers on casting the left as treasonous America-haters who piss on the flag at every opportunity. This is a moment for people who believe in social justice to accentuate the positive, for damn sure. Beyond that, it’s also a moment that makes clear who really hates America – who hates the democratic and egalitarian potential of America, the America that does not quite exist but is struggling to become real. The America that the Coulter-O’Reilly caste claims to love does not exist either, but it never did and never will; it’s not just 1954 but a thoroughly fictional version of 1954, in which women and African-Americans were content to live in subjugation and Latinos, Muslims and LGBT people were invisible….

It’s essentially tragic that so many people feel themselves under attack from the expanded application of basic principles of fairness and justice. It cannot be a good thing that millions of Americans are so imprisoned by toxic ideology that they are unable to share in this collective celebration of hope and happiness, that they seem so determined to wall themselves up in mental ghettoes of intolerance, and that they seem devoted to waging endless rearguard combat in defense of “traditional values” rooted in a constricted understanding of God and the Christian faith and America. As the congregants of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church told us a week ago in such moving and memorable fashion, love is stronger than hate. Many people in our country who call themselves Christians would do well to reflect on that.

More, but not a lot more, here.

Who Knew the Pope Would Turn Out To Be a Christian?

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And a Christian who believes in science!

Pope Francis is upsetting a lot of people, including the fools and knaves seeking the Republican nomination (you know, the make-believe Christians who won’t admit nine people were murdered by a racist in Charleston because that would imply racism is still a problem in America).

The Pope issued a message to the world this week. From The Guardian:

Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si’, is the most astonishing and perhaps the most ambitious papal document of the past 100 years, since it is addressed not just to Catholics, or Christians, but to everyone on earth….

We need nature, he says, and we need each other….The care of nature and the care of the poor are aspects of the same ethical commandment, and if we neglect either one we cannot find peace….

Starting from that premise, he launches a ferocious attack on what he sees as the false and treacherous appetites of capitalism and on the consumerist view of human nature. For Francis, there is a vital distinction between human needs, which are limited but non-negotiable, and appetites, which are potentially unlimited, and which can always be traded for other satisfactions without ever quite giving us what we most deeply want. The poor, he says, have their needs denied, while the rich have their appetites indulged. The environmental crisis links these two aspects of the problem.

… The document is absolutely unequivocal in backing the overwhelming scientific consensus that anthropogenic global warming is a clear and present danger. It blasts the use of fossil fuels and demands that these be phased out in favour of renewable energy. But it is also explicitly opposed to the idea that we can rely on purely technological solutions to ecological problems….There will never be a technological fix for the problem of unrestrained appetite, the pope claims, because this is a moral problem, which demands a moral solution, a turn towards sobriety and self-restraint and away from the intoxications of consumerism.

The New York Times offers this summary (followed by selected paragraphs from the encyclical with explanatory comments):

Pope Francis has written the first papal encyclical focused solely on the environment, attempting to reframe care of the earth as a moral and spiritual concern, and not just a matter of politics, science and economics. In the document, “Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home,” he argues that the environment is in crisis … He emphasizes that the poor are most affected by damage from what he describes as economic systems that favor the wealthy, and political systems that lack the courage to look beyond short-term rewards….Its 184 pages are an urgent, accessible call to action, making a case that all is interconnected, including the solutions to the grave environmental crisis.

Perhaps we will do nothing about climate change until it’s too late. Last year was the warmest since records have been kept. This year is on track to be even warmer. But the climate isn’t changing fast enough to generate concerted global action. Short of a message from on high (from much higher than the sky), there may be nothing that will act as a sufficient catalyst. For now, however, Pope Francis has done his part.

Here are the first paragraphs of Laudato Si’:

1. “LAUDATO SI’, mi’ Signore” – “Praise be to you, my Lord”. In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs”.

2. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.

Nothing in this world is indifferent to us.

The entire text is here.

Woody Guthrie Didn’t Have a Home in This World Anymore

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The story goes that when Woody Guthrie was on the road in the 1930s, he heard people in the migrant camps singing an old Baptist hymn called “This World Is Not My Home” (sometimes also called “I Can’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore”). It’s a song about the better world to come. Here’s how it begins:

This world is not my home, I’m just passing through
My treasures and my hopes are all beyond the blue
Where many many friends and kindred have gone on before
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore

Over in Glory land, there is no dying there
The saints are shouting victory and singing everywhere
I hear the voice of them that I have heard before
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore

Guthrie didn’t like the other-worldly message at all, so he wrote new lyrics, turning it into a protest song, “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore”:

I ain’t got no home, I’m just a-roamin’ ’round,
Just a wandrin’ worker, I go from town to town.
And the police make it hard wherever I may go
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.

My brothers and my sisters are stranded on this road,
A hot and dusty road that a million feet have trod;
Rich man took my home and drove me from my door
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.

Was a-farmin’ on the shares, and always I was poor;
My crops I lay into the banker’s store.
My wife took down and died upon the cabin floor,
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.

I mined in your mines and I gathered in your corn
I been working, mister, since the day I was born
Now I worry all the time like I never did before
‘Cause I ain’t got no home in this world anymore

Now as I look around, it’s mighty plain to see
This world is such a great and a funny place to be;
Oh, the gamblin’ man is rich an’ the workin’ man is poor,
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.

He could have written that last verse yesterday.

We Can All Ignore the Next 18 Months

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Thousands of articles will be written. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent. There will be interviews and debates. There will be speeches and rallies. There will be polls and predictions. Strategies and personalities will be analyzed. Policies will even be discussed.

We can safely ignore it all.

The only question regarding the presidential election in November 2016 is whether we should elect a Republican or Democrat. If you’ve been paying attention at all, you already know how to vote.

Paul Krugman explained why last month:

As we head into 2016, each party is quite unified on major policy issues — and these unified positions are very far from each other. The huge, substantive gulf between the parties will be reflected in the policy positions of whomever they nominate, and will almost surely be reflected in the actual policies adopted by whoever wins.

To paraphrase the differences Krugman points out:

Any Democrat elected will try to maintain or strengthen Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. Any Republican will try to do the opposite.

Any Democrat will seek to maintain or increase taxes on the wealthy. Any Republican will do the opposite.

Any Democrat will try to preserve regulations on Wall Street and the big banks (she or he might even try to break up banks that are “too big to fail”). Any Republican won’t.

Any Democrat will try to limit global warming and make it easier for immigrants to become citizens. It’s pretty clear that any Republican won’t.

I’ll add that any Democrat will try to stimulate the economy and create jobs by increasing infrastructure spending. You can count on any Republican to protect the wealthy at all costs.

And any Democrat will nominate reasonable people to the Supreme Court. On the other hand, well, how do you feel about Scalia, Alito, Roberts and Thomas? 

Professor Krugman continues:

Now, some people won’t want to acknowledge that the choices in the 2016 election are as stark as I’ve asserted. Political commentators who specialize in covering personalities rather than issues will balk at the assertion that their alleged area of expertise matters not at all. Self-proclaimed centrists will look for a middle ground that doesn’t actually exist. And as a result, we’ll hear many assertions that the candidates don’t really mean what they say. There will, however, be an asymmetry in the way this supposed gap between rhetoric and real views is presented.

On one side, suppose that Ms. Clinton is indeed the Democratic nominee. If so, you can be sure that she’ll be accused, early and often, of insincerity, of not being the populist progressive she claims to be.

On the other side, suppose that the Republican nominee is a supposed moderate like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. In either case we’d be sure to hear many assertions from political pundits that the candidate doesn’t believe a lot of what he says. But in their cases this alleged insincerity would be presented as a virtue, not a vice — sure, Mr. Bush is saying crazy things about health care and climate change, but he doesn’t really mean it, and he’d be reasonable once in office. Just like his brother.

There are a lot of big books around the house I’ve been meaning to get to. If you have any time-consuming projects you’ve been putting off, the next 18 months will be a great time to get going.

Krugman’s whole column is here.

The Second Bill of Rights

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If Franklin Roosevelt had lived longer, the United States might have a Second Bill of Rights. We might have had more amendments to the Constitution, or simply a collection of new laws, but in either form we would have established a set of economic rights to go along with the political rights already stated in the Constitution.

This was news to me until recently. Here’s what President Roosevelt said in his State of the Union address on January 11, 1944, as the war continued in Europe and the Pacific:

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth- is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being….

I ask the Congress to explore the means for implementing this economic bill of rights… Many of these problems are already before committees of the Congress in the form of proposed legislation. I shall from time to time communicate with the Congress with respect to these and further proposals. In the event that no adequate program of progress is evolved, I am certain that the Nation will be conscious of the fact.

The President began his fourth term one year later, on January 20, 1945, but he didn’t live past April. President Truman took over and didn’t pursue the idea of an economic Bill of Rights.

There’s more about the speech, including the full text, here. Roosevelt would have delivered the State of the Union to Congress, but he didn’t feel well that night. Instead, he gave the speech over the radio from the White House (Congress received a printed copy). But he also had parts of the speech filmed by newsreel companies so it could be shown in movie theaters. Here’s some of that footage:

Roosevelt said a lot else that night. For example, he criticized what we now call “special interests”, calling attention to the millions of people with “few or no high pressure representatives at the Capitol”:

The overwhelming majority of our people have met the demands of this war with magnificent courage and understanding…. However, while the majority goes on about its great work without complaint, a noisy minority maintains an uproar of demands for special favors for special groups. There are pests who swarm through the lobbies of the Congress and the cocktail bars of Washington, representing these special groups as opposed to the basic interests of the Nation as a whole. They have come to look upon the war primarily as a chance to make profits for themselves at the expense of their neighbors – profits in money or in terms of political or social preferment.

Well, that situation has only gotten worse since 1944.

Roosevelt also warned against right-wing reactionaries trying to turn back the clock:

One of the great American industrialists of our day … recently emphasized the grave dangers of “rightist reaction” in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop — if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called “normalcy” of the 1920’s — then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.

Even if Roosevelt wasn’t feeling well that night, I bet he would have had a good laugh if someone had suggested that a certain 32-year old actor, then making Army Air Force training films in California, would one day lead just such a right-wing reaction.