Tag Archives: Inequality

Garry Wills on Who’s Afraid of the Pope

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Garry Wills is one of America’s leading intellectuals. He’s now 80 years old and has had a brilliant career, but he’s still going strong. From the New York Review of Books blog:

Now, as the pope prepares a major encyclical on climate change, to be released this summer, the billionaires are spending a great deal of their money in a direct assault on him. They are calling in their chits, their kept scientists, their rigged conferences, their sycophantic beneficiaries, their bought publicists to discredit words of the pope that have not even been issued: “He would do his flock and the world a disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations’ unscientific agenda on the climate,” they say. They do not know exactly what the pope is going to say in his forthcoming encyclical on preserving God’s creation, but they know what he will not say. He will not deny that the poor suffer from actions that despoil the earth. Everything he has said and done so far shows that Francis always stands for the poor.

Those who profit from what harms the earth have to keep the poor out of sight. They have trouble enough fighting off the scientific, economic, and political arguments against bastioned privilege. Bringing basic morality to the fore could be fatal to them. That is why they are mounting such a public pre-emptive strike against the encyclical before it even appears…..

The real issue here is not science vs. ignorance, or the UN vs. xenophobia, or my 97 percent of experts against your 3 percent. It is a case of the immensely rich few against the many deprived poor. The few are getting much of their wealth from interlocking interests that despoil the earth. The fact that the poor get poorer in this process is easily dismissed, denied, or derided. The poor have no voice. Till now. If the pope were not a plausible voice for the poor, his opponents would not be running so scared. Their fear is a testimony to him.

More here.

Money and Politicians, Plus Judges

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ThinkProgress reports that the Supreme Court sensibly ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that a state can restrict lawyers’ campaign contributions to judges. Chief Justice Roberts explained why:

States may regulate judicial elections differently than they regulate political elections, because the role of judges differs from the role of politicians. Politicians are expected to be appropriately responsive to the preferences of their supporters. Indeed, such “responsiveness is key to the very concept of self-governance through elected officials.” The same is not true of judges. In deciding cases, a judge is not to follow the preferences of his supporters, or provide any special consideration to his campaign donors. A judge instead must “observe the utmost fairness,” striving to be “perfectly and completely independent, with nothing to influence or control him but God and his conscience.” As in White, therefore, our precedents applying the First Amendment to political elections have little bearing on the issues here.

So a majority of the Court agreed that it’s important for judges not to be influenced by campaign contributions, because judges are expected to serve the public good. Does that mean it’s acceptable for politicians to be influenced by campaign contributions, since they’re expected to serve the interests of whoever gives them money?

The obvious problem with Roberts’s explanation is that politicians should serve the public good as much as judges. A President is supposed to serve the national interest. Senators are supposed to serve the national interest and the interests of their particular states. Politicians are only supposed to do little favors for people who give them money. Otherwise, we’d say the politicians were for sale!

After all, we vote anonymously so that nobody, not even the candidates, know who we voted for. That makes sense, because how a particular person voted shouldn’t matter to a politician who represents “the people”.

But doesn’t that suggest that campaign contributions (assuming they’re legal at all) should be anonymous too? Politicians shouldn’t know who gave them money or spent money on their behalf, because they’re not supposed to be influenced by such things. They’re supposed to make their decisions on the merits, not reward the rich people or groups who paid for their campaigns. Nor should politicians be able to extort contributions by threatening anyone.

Anonymous campaign funding was the subject of a 2004 book called “Voting With Dollars” written by two law professors. They argued that all voters should be given government-financed “gift cards” that could only be used to finance presidential campaigns. Last year, two political scientists called for making all campaign contributions anonymous, even those made by major donors:

Indeed, if we think about all the ways transparency helps contributors and candidates put pressure upon each other, it is clear that reporting contributions can make matters worse. Suppose, then, that we turned out the lights? What if we let Adelson and Shaun McCutcheon spend their money on politics but not take credit for their “generosity”? What if we made all campaign contributions and independent expenditures anonymous — and made sure they stayed anonymous?

I don’t know if it’s possible to design a system that would guarantee anonymity. If people contributed to a general fund from which payments were made to their candidates of choice, it would be difficult for the contributors to see that they’d made a specific contribution to a particular candidate without their having the ability to share that information with the candidate in question. Maybe it would be enough to make it illegal to communicate the source of donations or “independent” spending, as the political science professors suggest.  

In addition to reducing the number of favors politicians did for their major contributors, anonymity would theoretically reduce the amount of money in politics too. Presumably, some of the wealthy would limit their spending if they couldn’t expect something in return. Of course, even anonymous contributions won’t solve the Big Money problem. Fixing that will require a majority on the Supreme Court that doesn’t equate unlimited political spending with free speech.

Justice Ginsburg Shoots Down a Dumb Conservative Argument

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Our era’s radical Republicans are willing to take a conservative position when it suits them. Thus, during the recent Supreme Court argument regarding same-sex marriage, the right-wingers on the Court pointed out that marriage has involved a man and a woman for thousands of years. From ThinkProgress:

The Court’s conservatives [sic] fixated upon their belief that same-sex marriages are a very new institution. “Every definition [of marriage] I looked up prior to about a dozen years ago,” Chief Justice John Roberts claimed, limited marriages to opposite-sex couples. Advocates for equality, Roberts continued, are “seeking to change what the institution is.” Meanwhile, Justice Samuel Alito argued that even “ancient Greece,” a society he perceived as welcoming to same-sex relationships, did not permit same-sex marriage. Justice Antonin Scalia insisted that “for millennia, not a single society” supported marriage equality.

A natural response would have been: “Of course, and now we’re changing that. Sometimes we make progress”. Justice Ginsburg, however, pointed out that for thousands of years marriage was legally defined as a relationship between a dominant man and a subordinate woman. A further ThinkProgress article on the subject quotes the 18th century legal authority Sir William Blackstone:

…the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything.

Traditionally, wives were subservient to their husbands. Being married wasn’t a relationship that two men or two women would ordinarily enter into. Today, however, the law considers marriage to be a relationship between equals. Since marriage is now egalitarian from a legal perspective, it makes sense for anyone who wants an equal partner, whether that partner is of the opposite or same sex, to want to be married. Since there are benefits to being married, and since being able to procreate isn’t a requirement, justice dictates that any two adults who want to get married should be allowed to.

How to Survive an Encounter with a Bear or a Police Officer

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Here’s a helpful guide for hikers and outdoor enthusiasts updated for black Americans.

A Month of Unwritten Posts Condensed Into One

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It’s not as if there’s a shortage of reading material on the Internet. Nevertheless, since I haven’t done my part lately:

You might hear of a new Quinnipiac University poll, according to which Fox News is the most trusted network news in America. The poll found that 29% of American voters trust the news on Fox more than any other network. However, the poll also found that 57% of American voters trust either CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC or MSNBC more than Fox. In other words, 29% of us trust the right-wing propaganda “news” delivered by Rupert Murdoch, and twice as many of us trust the other kind, the “mainstream media” news that Rupert doesn’t own. So it’s bad enough, but not as bad as it sounds.

Meanwhile, a Pew Research Center poll found that 53% of Americans disapprove of the Affordable Care Act, even though the ACA has resulted in more people getting health insurance than the Obama administration predicted, while contributing to slower growth in overall healthcare spending. A Bloomberg article helps explain this discrepancy. First, many people think they can do without the comprehensive health insurance the law mandates and resent paying for services they’ll never need (like maternity care) or don’t think they’ll ever need (like rehabilitation). Second, more than half of the big companies in America have told their employees that the ACA is forcing them to pay even more for health insurance.

The Bloomberg article says that the coverage mandates aren’t making health insurance more expensive. The mandates are merely “pooling the cost of that coverage across more people”, which is why fewer people are having trouble paying for healthcare. Furthermore, employers are blaming an ACA provision (the so-called “Cadillac” tax) for immediate cuts in benefits and higher insurance payments, even though it’s unlikely that these employers will ever be subject to that provision.

But does it matter what the facts are? According to a very interesting article by Heather Cox Richardson, Professor of History at Boston College, America’s right-wing doesn’t accept the importance of empirical evidence or rational argument. She traces this amazing attitude back to William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1950s book God and Man at Yale. Richardson says that:

Buckley rejected the principles that had enabled social progress for centuries and laid out a mind-boggling premise: The Enlightenment, the intellectual basis of Western Civilization, was wrong.

Rational argument supported by facts did not lead to sound societal decisions, Buckley claimed; it led people astray. Christianity and an economy based on untrammeled individualism were truths that should not be questioned. Impartial debate based in empirical facts was dangerous because it led people toward secularism and collectivism—both bad by definition, according to Buckley. Instead of engaging in rational argument, Buckley insisted, thinkers must stand firm on what he called a new “value orthodoxy” that indoctrinated people to understand that Christianity and economic individualism were absolute truths.

If we accept the premise that Christianity and economic individualism (the idolatry of the “free market”) are absolute truths, it makes sense to reject any contradictory ideas, however well-founded those ideas are given the empirical evidence.

For example, the governor of Minnesota, Mark Dayton, inherited a $6 billion deficit from his predecessor, a self-styled “fiscal conservative” who wouldn’t raise taxes. Dayton convinced the legislature to raise taxes on the rich and increase the minimum wage. Republicans predicted, as always, that businesses would leave the state and unemployment would rise. What actually happened was that the deficit turned into a surplus, unemployment went down and Minnesota now has one of the best economies of any state. Forbes Magazine (a bastion of capitalism) recently ranked Minnesota as having the 7th best “economic climate” and the 2nd best “quality of life” in the nation.

But if you believe that higher taxes on the rich and a higher minimum wage are absolutely wrong, since they conflict with your “understanding” of morality and economics, it’s understandable that you’ll reject the evidence. Nothing that conflicts with absolute truth can possibly be true.

To end on a positive note, however, consider that Larry Summers, a leading economist and Wall Street-friendly Democrat, is now arguing for a relatively progressive set of policies. According to an encouraging article by Thomas Edsall of the New York Times, Summers has concluded that “free market capitalism, as now structured, is producing major distortions”:

In order to stem the disproportionate share of income flowing to corporate managers and owners of capital, and to address the declining share going to workers, the report calls for tax and regulatory policies to encourage employee ownership, the strengthening of collective bargaining rights, regulations requiring corporations to provide fringe benefits to employees working for subcontractors, a substantial increase in the minimum wage, sharper overtime pay enforcement, and a huge increase in infrastructure appropriations – for roads, bridges, ports, schools – to spur job creation and tighten the labor market…. Summers also calls for significant increases in the progressivity of the United States tax system.

Summers has advised both President Obama and Hillary Clinton on economic matters, so it’s a positive sign that he now advocates more worker-friendly policies.

Finally, with our harsh winter finally winding down, I want to express my sincere appreciation for everyone who has to work outside or travel to their jobs during terrible winter weather. Many such people aren’t able to take a day off or “work at home”, because you can’t drive a snowplow or staff your boss’s restaurant from your living room. I also want to express my profound appreciation for whoever devised the snow shovel with a bent handle. I’ve used one for years and there’s nothing better for shoveling snow while avoiding back pain!

backsaver-shovel2