Category Archives: Politics

Five Bad Men Screw Us Again

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I didn’t want to write about the Supreme Court decision in Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby Stores. That’s the recent case in which the Republican majority ruled that a corporation can refuse to provide health insurance for certain kinds of contraception on religious grounds. However, one way to stop thinking about something is to write about it, and this is not a subject that’s fun to think about:

1) It’s no coincidence that the five Republicans on the Supreme Court are prone to rule against and ignore the rights of women to end or prevent pregnancies. Those five Republicans are all Roman Catholics.

2) Having previously declared that corporations should be allowed to spend on political campaigns because they have the same right to free speech that people do, the Republican majority has ruled again that corporations are no different from people. The law at issue in Burwell vs. Hobby states that the government should not “substantially burden a person’s religious beliefs”. Although corporations are treated as persons in some legal contexts, and it’s proper for the government to respect people’s religion up to a point, it makes no sense to ascribe religious beliefs to a corporation.

In addition, people’s right to practice their religion as they wish does not give them the right to harm other people. According to the majority opinion, however, a corporation can not only have religious beliefs, those beliefs should be honored even though acting on those beliefs negatively affects the corporation’s employees, their families and the rest of society (one of the majority’s suggestions is that taxpayers pay for contraception if corporations won’t – as if the Republicans in Congress would agree to that). 

3) Religion can be a wonderfully flexible way to justify all kinds of behavior. In this case, the corporations claimed that dropping all health insurance coverage for their employees, so that their employees could instead get insurance through the government-run exchanges, would also infringe on their (the corporations’) religious beliefs, even though allowing their employees to use the government exchanges would save the corporations money and benefit their employees. “It is our firmly-held, specific religious belief that you should get your health insurance through our company instead of a government website, but it shouldn’t cover certain kinds of care.” Right.

4) Allowing employers to dictate which health insurance their employees have, on religious or any other grounds, is yet another reason the United States should join the rest of the industrialized world and adopt taxpayer-supported, government-regulated, single-payer health insurance.

5) The idea that the owners of a business shouldn’t be forced to spend money for something they don’t like assumes that the money in question is theirs, just like the money in your checking account is yours. However, economists have found that the money a company spends on health insurance would otherwise generally be paid to employees as wages. After all, health insurance is a form of compensation and businesses tend to offer as little compensation as possible (except for senior management, of course). As Uwe Reinhardt writes:

Evidently the majority of Supreme Court justices … believe that the owners of “closely held” business firms buy health insurance for their employees out of the kindness of their hearts and with the owners’ money. On that belief, they accord these owners the right to impose some of their personal preferences – in this case their religious beliefs — on their employee’s health insurance…. [But research shows that] the premiums ostensibly paid by employers to buy health insurance coverage for their employees are actually part of the employee’s total pay package — the price of labor, in economic parlance – and that the cost of that fringe benefit is recovered from employees through commensurate reductions in take-home pay.

6) This is a case in which religion is being allowed to trump science. These corporations object to particular kinds of contraception on the grounds that they are equivalent to having an abortion. But medical researchers have shown that the methods in question (certain intrauterine devices and the “morning after” pill) don’t actually work that way, as discussed here:

The owners of Hobby Lobby told the Court that they were willing to cover some forms of contraception but believed that the so-called morning-after pills and two kinds of IUDs can cause what they believe to be a type of abortion, by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall or causing an already implanted egg to fail to thrive… The scientific consensus is against this idea…Most scientists believe that [these methods] interfere with the ability of sperm to get to an egg in time to fertilize it before they die….Research does not support the idea that they prevent fertilized eggs to implant.

If a religious belief is based on faulty science, that belief should be given less respect by the rest of us. It’s safe to assume, for example, that even this Supreme Court would have ruled differently if the religious belief in question had been that certain kinds of contraception cause droughts.

7) There have been a lot of dumb arguments in favor of this decision or suggesting that it’s not a big deal. The truth is that this decision could set a very bad precedent, opening the door to other claims for special treatment, especially given the Republican majority on the Court. In addition, trying to find a job with another company isn’t a great option for many people; getting pregnant is a very big deal; IUD’s are among the most effective form of birth control; it can cost some women a month’s pay to get one; the morning after pill is an important option for women; and choosing to have sex shouldn’t disqualify people from getting appropriate medical care (people also choose to smoke, spend a lot of time on their couches and eat at McDonald’s). As the saying goes, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

8) It’s been clear since their decision in Bush vs. Gore, when the Republican justices decided that we didn’t need an accurate vote count in a Presidential election, that lacking proper legal justification for their decisions won’t stop them from advancing their political agenda. All Supreme Court justices issue rulings consistent with their political perspectives, but these particular justices are extremists. They may have some shame, but it’s hardly worth mentioning.

Political Polarization and Us

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The Pew Research Center has issued a study on America’s increasing political polarization. There’s been the usual disagreement about what the study really means, but it’s clear that Democrats and Republicans have moved further apart in recent years. And it shouldn’t be a surprise that 82% of “consistent liberals” say they believe in compromise, compared to 32% of “consistent [so-called] conservatives”.

Norman Ornstein discusses the Pew findings at The Atlantic. He’s absolutely right that Republican politicians and their media colleagues are most to blame for the increasing polarization of recent years, and that Democratic voters moving further to the left has mainly been a reaction to the increasingly insane behavior of the right.

He also responds to the notion that both sides are equally to blame:

Does it matter whether the polarization, and the deep dysfunction that follows from it, is equal or not, including to the average voter? The answer is a resounding yes. If bad behavior—using the nation’s full faith and credit as a hostage to political demands, shutting down the government, attempting to undermine policies that have been lawfully enacted, blocking nominees not on the basis of their qualifications but to nullify the policies they would pursue, using filibusters as weapons of mass obstruction—is to be discouraged or abandoned, those who engage in it have to be held accountable.

Saying both sides are equally responsible, insisting on equivalence as the mantra of mainstream journalism, leaves the average voter at sea, unable to identify and vote against those perpetrating the problem. The public is left with a deeper disdain for all politics and all politicians, and voters become more receptive to demagogues and those whose main qualification for office is that they have never served, won’t compromise, and see everything in stark black-and-white terms.

One solution to this problem might be to elect Democratic demagogues who won’t compromise, if we could find enough of them to make a difference. But a government composed of politicians on the left and right who won’t compromise would be even more dysfunctional than the government we already have.

That seems to leave electing more reasonable people as the best solution, so many reasonable people that the nuts can’t gum up the works. Until we have a Democratic President, a Democratic majority in the House and a Democratic supermajority in the Senate, we’re probably screwed. And even then we’ll have to worry about the damn Supreme Court.

(PS — So it was a hiatus after all.)

Two Brechtian Commentaries on the Way of the World

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Although they’ve been attributed to him, there is no evidence that the German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote the following words (in German or English):

The worst illiterate is the political illiterate. He doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know [that] the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.

On the other hand, he did write the words below (in German). They’re from the Threepenny Opera‘s “Second Threepenny Finale”, also known as “Wovon lebt der Mensch” or “What Keeps Mankind Alive”:

You gentlemen who think you have a mission
to purge us of the seven deadly sins,
should first sort out the basic food position,
then start your preaching! That’s where it begins.
You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well,
should learn, for once, the way the world is run:

However much you twist, whatever lies you tell,
food is the first thing, morals follow on.
So first make sure that those who now are starving
get proper helpings when we all start carving.

What keeps mankind alive? The fact that millions
are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced, oppressed.
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
in keeping its humanity repressed.

It’s not as catchy as “Mack the Knife” or “Alabama Song”, but it’s still pretty good.

Enough Said, American Politics Edition

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Today’s New York Times “Sunday Review” cartoon by Brian McFadden. More of his work is available here. (Click to enlarge.)

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Dreaming About Democracy

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In a speech to the House of Commons in 1947, Winston Churchill uttered one of the best-known and most profound witticisms on the subject of democracy, although he was apparently quoting someone else:

Many forms of Gov­ern­ment have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pre­tends that democ­racy is per­fect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democ­racy is the worst form of Gov­ern­ment except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…

Benjamin Franklin was responsible for the other best-known and profound remark on the subject. One of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 recorded the following exchange in his diary:

A lady asked Dr. Franklin, Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy? A republic, replied the Doctor, if you can keep it.

Churchill and Franklin summed up the situation quite nicely. Few people these days (at least around here) question whether some kind of democracy is the best form of government. Most of the discussion now regards whether we’re losing our democracy or have already lost it.

In that vein, one of Salon’s writers, Andrew O’Hehir, published an article a few days ago called “This Is Not What Democracy Looks Like”. O’Hehir argues that our democracy is hardly a democracy at all and, furthermore, it’s unlikely to get any better (more democratic) than it already is:

We have to consider the possibility that the current state of American politics, with its bizarre combination of poisoned, polarized and artificially overheated debate along with total paralysis on every substantive issue and widespread apathy and discontent, is what we get after 200-odd years. It’s not a detour in the history of Jeffersonian democracy but something closer to a natural outcome. We also must consider that our version of a democratic system is not, in fact, designed to reflect the will of the people … but to manipulate and channel it in acceptable directions.  

On O’hehir’s view, those who believe our dysfunctional democracy might one day evolve toward a more democratic ideal are as misguided as the defenders of the Soviet Union who thought the state would eventually wither away and be replaced by a truly egalitarian form of communism. Given the influence of money in our political system and the increasingly bizarre politics of the Republican Party, it may in fact be too late for America to become less oligarchic and plutocratic. O’hehir may be right about that.

Still, he doesn’t suggest anywhere in the article that Churchill was wrong and we should prefer aristocracy or anarchy instead. He only argues that democracy is a fantasy, which seems to imply that we should all relax and accept our politics for what it is, a tool of the rich and powerful meant to keep the rest of us in line. Why try to elect better politicians or advocate particular reforms if nothing is going to improve? At this point, our best strategy might be looking for refugee status in Scandinavia.

Assuming that Sweden and Denmark aren’t realistic options for most of us, it seems to me that we might as well do what we can to make America more democratic, even if we can’t do very much. It isn’t out of the question that there will be a reaction in coming years to the right-wing onslaught of the past several decades. It certainly seems possible that we could one day institute real campaign finance reform, for example. We could make it easier for everyone to vote. The Fairness Doctrine that once called for broadcasters to present opposing viewpoints on important public issues could conceivably be resuscitated and even strengthened. We might make the tax code more progressive again. Regulations that interfere with the most rapacious forms of capitalism might be adopted. It isn’t impossible that labor unions will reverse their recent decline.

It seems unnecessarily pessimistic to conclude from the past 30 or 40 years that we might never have another New Deal. Or too assume that corporate capitalism can never be replaced by democratic socialism, even in the United States. Human institutions do evolve. Maybe it will take a crisis of some sort. Or maybe we just need to help. 

Meanwhile, it doesn’t hurt to occasionally remind ourselves why democracy is worth fighting for. To quote the great American philosopher John Dewey:

Democracy is much broader than a special political form, a method of conducting government, of making laws and carrying on governmental administration by means of popular suffrage and elected officers. It is that, of course. But it is something broader and deeper than that. The political and governmental phase of democracy is a means, the best means so far found, for realizing ends that lie in the wide domain of human relationships and the development of human personality. It is … a way of life, social and individual. The key-note of democracy as a way of life may be expressed, it seems to me, as the necessity for the participation of every mature human being in formation of the values that regulate the living of men together, [which] is necessary from the standpoint of both the general social welfare and the full development of human beings as individuals.

Universal suffrage, recurring elections, responsibility of those who are in political power to the voters, and the other factors of democratic government are means that have been found expedient for realizing democracy as the truly human way of living…. Democratic political forms are simply the best means that human wit has devised up to a special time in history. But they rest upon the idea that no man or limited set of men is wise enough or good enough to rule others without their consent; the positive meaning of this statement is that all those who are affected by social institutions must have a share in producing and managing them.  [“Democracy and Educational Adminstration”, 1937]