The Melting Pot

The idea of America as a melting pot is a fairly old one and has become, in the opinion of some, the lost ideal of America.  For the three people left on the earth who have not heard of this concept, I will give my interpretation of what the melting pot means.  America is a nation of immigrants, each with their own cultures and languages and practices, but in America we all learn to become American and blend into the larger society and contribute to the depth of what is American.  It is the ideal of integration from what we were to what we can be.  The difference here being against European assimilation, where you completely abandon your old culture and accept what it means to be, for instance, French.  Now lately the discussion has come to focus on new generations of immigrants who seem less willing to melt along with the rest of us, and create what some have called the great American salad: lots of components in the same bowl but each fairly independent and separate.  This idea of America seems to be borne out by the realities of conservative areas and liberal areas, black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods, hispanic communities and chinatowns.  But I feel that there is something severely lacking in this characterization of what America has been and is becoming.

First of all, like so many thing, we need to talk about context before we can get to questions about how much things may have changed.  It used to be that the American melting pot included, almost exclusively, white men and women from the British Isles.  Even then the idea of an Irishman becoming American was a stretch.  But over time even the descendants of the Irish and the Scottish and the English immigrants managed to blend together.  At this point I must say, big whoop.  I understand that there are big religious and cultural divisions between the English and the Irish, but bridging the gap between two very white, Christian, boiled food eating cultures seems a small task.  However at the same time as all this, there were other groups vying to become American and contribute their own parts to that melting pot.  Italian, Jewish, Polish, Scandinavian, and German immigrants came to these shores and contribute their own culture.  They too integrated with society to the point that brats, lasagna, and deli meats are as American as apple pie.

But it is the Germans that I want to touch on momentarily, because at the time “real Americans” were skeptical about whether they would really integrate in society.  So many of them insisted on teaching their children to speak German and some even made their own private communities.  Not for nothing but the Pennsylvania Dutch should really be called the Pennsylvania Deutsch, which goes part of the way to explaining why they refer to Americans as English.  There were countless skeptics to the idea of German integration in particular and in many cities there are still the vestigial remnants of a time before integration.  In Chicago, for example, the city was said to be split into five parts: North, Northwest, West, Southwest, and South Sides.  Each of these area had a particular ethnicity that defined it starting with the whitest of the white in the North, through the not quite so white Polish in the West, down to the South Side which was as it is now predominantly black.  Over the years these neighborhoods have changed some, including more Hispanic and Asian immigrants for example, but there was then as there remains now, a certain skepticism about the limits of integration.

The next big change that came to the American melting pot came with the growth of California and the West.  As more and more Americans began to settle out West, so too did numbers of immigrants from all over the world seek their own American Dreams out West.  The nearly cliched example of this comes with the growth of Chinese communities in California and their role in the construction of the American Transcontinental Railroad.  But as America grew, both in size and influence, the demographics of immigration became even more nuanced and diverse.  Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Filipinos, etc all came to the United States, each bringing with them their own traditions.  And each time they did there was the same skepticism about whether or not they would be able to integrate.  The proxy question to this being, would they learn English?  For nearly every community the answer is yes, but now we are seeing something a little different.  In past generations the children might speak their parents’ native language at home, but over the generations they would all simply learn English and perhaps eventually abandon their old native languages.  And although it is too soon to tell if this will be the case for Latino Americans as well, there is a growing speculation that the nature of immigration has changed such that it may no longer be necessary.

More and more, Spanish can be seen as an American language in its own right.  The Latino populations are eager to find their own place in the American fabric, but are not so willing to see their language and culture die, particularly when they are able to keep in contact with those who didn’t come to America with them.  The fact that the globe becomes smaller and smaller, and we all become more and more globally interconnected, means that immigrants are not so isolated from the lands they left.  This, in my mind, is a wonderful new adaptation to the American experiment, and it certainly changes the idea of the melting pot.  What after all is the point of a melting pot if not the creation of homogeny?  How terrible would it be that even though we chose integration over assimilation that in the end all we get is yet another country with one culture, one language, one religion, one race?

America is no longer a melting pot, if we ever truly were is another discussion, but neither are we the salad that others point out.  Spanish is becoming a part of the American lexicon, and even though there are separate communities in America, none of them are distinctly “un-American.”  What we have now is a delicious American stew, and I do apologize for the continual references to food, as I’m a little hungry right now.  There is enough blending to make sure that our community comes together, but individual bits and pieces can retain their own integrity.  We can enjoy our arroz con frijoles alongside our red beans and rice.  We can see signs written in Spanish and English and feel pride in hearing, “Para Español oprima numero dos.”  In fifty years, I expect, this conversation about the integration of Hispanic Americans will seem antiquated, as there will be a whole new demographic shift that causes the pants of conservatives to smell an awful lot like mierda.

The Draft

“There never was a good war or a bad peace.”  Every so often I get a little fed up with the way our society seems so comfortable with war.  I understand how exciting wars can seem in movies, which I tend to think is both a symptom and a cause of some of the problems.  I get that people like the idea of fighting evil in the world and being on the right side of a conflict.  I sympathize with how people find it difficult to see the horrors of war when those wars happen so far away in places most citizens couldn’t find on a map.  But I mean really, there needs to be a frank conversation about war in this country, something that has been severely lacking from national discourse since WWII.

If we’re going to actually get anywhere we first need to distinguish between militarism and national security.  There are many out there who want to pretend that they are generalissimos and not the warhawks that they are.  I won’t pretend that I don’t have at least some partisanship behind this issue, as the hefty majority of those overcompensating on the military front tend to be conservatives, but I think that we need to acknowledge that these people don’t know what the heck they’re talking about.  Of course, painting with a broad brush like this can be dangerous, as there are also some people who actually have experienced warfare and favor large militaries.  But at the end of the day we need to be able to call out the people who pretend to care about keeping this country safe and simply seek to make everyone think that they are much tougher than they actually are.  

Having appropriately insulted conservatives we can get to the real issue.  There is a balance that needs to be struck between military strength and peace keeping efforts.  There is, almost inevitably, going to be a limit to the efficacy of peaceful measures.  A strong military can indeed be an effective deterrent to full scale warfare, but it is a dangerous game to play.  The problem with a big military is that it comes with an overwhelming urge to use it.  It becomes a beautiful sports car sitting in the garage, just begging to be taken out on the highway.  The public becomes enthralled with the visuals of the brave soldier and begins to believe in the hype of the propaganda that comes with funding such an army.  More to the point, at this stage in international politics, the size of the US military has made it possible for many of our allies to accept smaller militaries than they might otherwise accept, and we react by spending even more.  But this does not make us any safer.

Despite the fact that we don’t really have a need for a Cold War sized military we’ve kept it large and in charge.  This was supposed to be a deterrent to any rising powers like Russia and China, but all it has done has increased the level of unease in these countries.  Their militaries have grown and become more ambitious in their designs to expand their influence.  Undoubtedly a certain amount of this expansion would happen regardless, but it really only became this bad because they felt the need to get their own sports cars in the garage.  And just like the only way we were able to scale back the MADness of the Cold War was for the biggest players to man up and back down, we need to step back on the military as well.

Now one of the suggestions I’ve heard to confront this issue of the over-inflated military and the urge to go to war is a little over the top, but may just be the best way to solve the problem.  Back in the Vietnam War there was a huge movement against the war that had taken so many of our fellow Americans off to die.  Campuses across the United States say protests and demonstrations, but the same thing didn’t happen with either the Iraq or Afghanistan wars.  Sure there was the occasional pundit or small group that called for an end to warfare, and more than a few bumpers had anti-war stickers but there was nothing compared to what had once been the anti-war movement.  The biggest difference between then and now was the draft.

Back in the day, the US didn’t have a standing army and there was little faith that a volunteer army would be enough to fill the ranks.  Of course when WWII came around there was a huge movement that stood up to serve, but even then the draft proved to be necessary.  Conscription continued throughout the Vietnam War, and the visual of the lottery taking another group of citizens away from home and off to fight.  The pain of seeing your family and friends being taken off to war convinced people that not only was the war a bad idea, but so was the whole idea of conscription in the first place.  But the strange thing is that we still needed a military, a military of volunteers now.  The new strategy was to target portions of society that had few opportunities.  I mean when you have few options the solid employment of the military and the promise of higher education and the opportunity for advancement can be incredibly persuasive.  But you’ll notice that this means that the rich don’t have the same incentive to fight.

Those at the top of society become even more detached from the poorest meaning that their decisions rarely take into account the cost of sending them to war.  This was one of the few truly insightful points made by the documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11.”  Those who are sending our brothers and sisters off to die, generally, have no relatives in the military, and so have no idea what it will cost the other families.  There is nothing that inherently keeps them from making the decision to declare war, as if we still declared war.  The principle then is that by reinstating the draft and the same demographics that existed during the Vietnam War, including equal representation of races and classes, we would see the same unfavorable opinion of people to send their friends and family off to die.

With this kind of truly all American military, the only time we would ever go to war would be when it is absolutely necessary.  There is the counter argument that a conscript army is less effective than a volunteer army, and the stats do indeed bear this out.  People who are forced to fight and are sent off to fight before they complete in depth training do indeed make worse soldiers than those who do it willingly and with adequate training.  When it comes to war there is clearly no right answer, just a series of wrong answers, and a draft is a terrible thing.  I don’t think that a draft is the best way to stop wars, but it may be just what the doctor ordered.  Something to mull over, before some crazy person in Congress says it’s time to fight the Russians.

Remember Your Baptism

So one of the things that popped up on my news feed today was a comment made by a woman who at one point had a decent shot of being the Vice-President of the United States, and god forbid ascend to the presidency.  Yes Sarah Palin has decided that the world, which was indeed beginning to forget her and the heal the wounds she brought to the national discourse, needed to have those scabs ripped up once again.  This time she was able to cobble up a series of words that made an intelligible sentence, which for her would normally be a commendable achievement, but in doing so she reminded so many of us why we would much rather hear her blathering on, in the worst kind of babbling.  The words she has put forward are so shockingly hateful that they could only have come from someone so irrationally self justified as to claim that it was a religious duty to do so.  In a speech to a crowd of NRA members she proudly declared exactly the kind of thing that makes a moral person shake in their boots, “If I was in charge they would know, water-boarding is how we baptize terrorists.”

Now, I don’t claim to be a religious person, it’s been several years since I would consider myself to be a Christian, but I remember quite a bit of my old faith.  I was raised in the Episcopalian Church, which has reinvented itself from the conservative religion it once was to a beacon of what a loving church can be.  Although there are ongoing conflicts within the Anglican church about just how far that progressive inclusion of all people should go, the church has been a great ally of equality for the LGBT community and devotion to the poor and destitute, particularly in Africa.  It is perhaps because of my experience with this religious community growing up that I understand the allure to many people of religion in general, and why I am more than comfortable to accept those who have devoted their lives and who take their religious convictions seriously.  I have read the Bible several times and in very different contexts, and so I know a thing or two about what it does and does not say.  My experiences have left me with a further understanding that there is beautiful faith and there is ugly “religion.”  Sarah Palin’s comments come from the latter.

I, like many Christians, was baptized shortly after my birth.  I know that there are some sects of Christianity that wait, but I believe that most follow the Catholic practice of infant baptism with a godparent and then a later confirmation.  It is at confirmation, which for many Christians is the time that they are able to affirm that the decision made shortly after their birth, declare that it is indeed their own choice now.  I’ll set aside the fact that these confirmations usually occur during adolescence and therefore still too early for the confirmed to really grasp the decision, in my opinion at least.  This whole sacrament is supposed to be a conscious decision to enter into the body of Christ, done out of one’s own free will.  It is at this time that one accepts their Christian family for themselves, and embraces a life devoted to the moral teachings of their lord and savior.  Of course this is an incredibly personal process, and can have some fairly profound differences between sects, but this is generally a happy occasion of a new person joining the many who are one body, as they share one bread, one cup.

Water-boarding is not that.  Water-boarding is many things: torture, enhanced interrogation, wicked, abusive, despicable, shameful, illegal: but it is not a happy occasion of joining a religious community.  Of course only a person as dimwitted as Sarah Palin might think that she literally meant that water-boarding was actually baptism, I mean heck they’re not even using holy water.  What she is trying to say is that Christians spread that old time religion by beating down those heathens who pray to a similar but different god.  She is trying to act like she has some real tough-guy credentials in proudly stating that she enjoys the fact that we as a “Christian nation” treat Islamic terrorists as inhuman scum.  In so doing she not only invalidates her “patriotism” but her “Christianity” as well.

As much as I did enjoy Christopher Hitchens’s writings and speeches when he was alive, and still do for that matter, it always kind of hit me the wrong way when he talked about Jesus.  He always had a way of saying that it wasn’t until Jesus, meek and mild, came about did the idea of eternal damnation emerge.  He is technically correct that Jesus mentions once that such a punishment exists, but it was not given to unbelievers, it was reserved specifically for those, like Sarah Palin, who delight in the suffering and imprisonment of their neighbor.

“Depart from me, you who are accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, for I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.” Matthew 25:41-43

Actually, I take it back that this refers to Sarah Palin, because at least those whom he named merely did nothing to aid the injured and imprisoned.  No, she is much worse and much lower, because she called for it, she delighted in it, and she sullied her own god’s name in condoning it.  If I believed there were a hell waiting the wicked of this world, I would certainly have to conclude that those who cheered her would be joining her there as well.

This is the kind of “Christianity” that I cannot stand, the kind that makes me physically ill.  I understand that the Bible is a long and contradictory series of books, and that the only way to really make it applicable is to believe what you do and search for the best bits that resound with your understanding of the world.  In this way there is no orthodoxy, no right way to read the Bible, but it is always those who seem to have never read the words in the first place that so proudly claim it as their own and proclaim to have the correct interpretation.  They, in their hubris, mark themselves as beasts and act like beasts, even though they call themselves holy.  I know that people are imperfect and we all make mistakes.  For most of us, we will never know the level of crimes we committed through ignorance and it is something we must live with.  But this, this takes imperfection and ignorance to an extreme that can only be matched by the terrorists she delights in “baptizing.”  I don’t care if you are religious or irreligious, I don’t care if you are spiritual or not, I don’t care what sect you claim as your own.  In all these ways of life there is at least some truth and peace and happiness.  But if you take what should be a declaration of love and anoint it with hate and ignorance, then I care deeply, but it is not for you.  Rather it is for the ones whom you have hurt and hated and ignored.

Meteorologists and Opthamologists

It was once surprising to me that people of the same profession would tend to have the same political beliefs.  I once believed that, unless your profession was directly involved with a political motive, the same regional and social splits that characterize political demographics in this country would be mirrored within occupations as well.  I stress the fact that I used to believe this, but have since looked at the world and seen that it is not the case, because I notice that it is essentially the Republican theology.  That a person or persons might not come to the “truth” because of the world they inhabit is completely at odds with the Republican interpretation of what equality means.  They tend to believe that the reason Black people, for example, don’t tend to vote for them is because they’ve been tricked into voting Democratic, and not because their experience gives them a very clear reason to vote liberal.  Professions too give people very different experiences of the world, and those in the same professions, more often than not, share the same political beliefs.  So today I’m going to be talking about two sets of parallel professions that each have one liberal and one conservative, in general of course.  The cases are between general practitioners, who tend to favor national healthcare systems, and opthamologists, who tend to favor private healthcare; and the other is between climatologists, who tend to acknowledge climate change, and meteorologists, who don’t.

We’ll begin with the latter, but before that we need to discuss the fundamental principle of why people within professions are more likely to share political opinions.  Surprisingly it is not necessarily the economy… stupid.  I mean if general practitioners were only interested in making mad money they may indeed favor the existing system, but they tend to care more about their patients.  The real reason, in my opinion, why people within professions share political beliefs, is because they share data.  If there is a grand unifying truth out there, it is not accessible to human beings.  To be able to understand it, we would have to be able to know everything, but alas we only know the things we know, to borrow a Rumsfeld style play on words. At this point I’m tempted to mention the Eastern parable of the blind men who encounter an elephant.  They have wildly different accounts of what they encountered based on what part of it they felt, and without the full context are in complete disagreement over what it was.  We each are only able to experience parts of the world and so we come to different understandings of that world, but people who share jobs tend to share many experiences and thus ideas.  So now let’s get to these real world examples and talk about what they experience and what that tells us about what the larger truth is.

Climatologists look at very large scale records of global climates and micro-climates.  They look at past trends and use them in an effort to predict climate changes in the future.  This is the very definition of the scientific process, gathering intelligence to give a broader understanding of a topic, then use that understanding to make testable predictions.  The vast scope of the data they work with have yielded a few important claims.  First of all, global climate temperatures and carbon levels are correlated, even if it can be difficult to say which one causes the other.  In the past it is generally understood that increase in temperatures comes first, this yields some carbon that had not been in the atmosphere before, but once there causes a feedback loop that increases temperatures further.  They have also observed that the earth is currently heating up, in terms of global climate temperatures which accounts for why we still have cold winters.  Earth at this time is already releasing more carbon into the atmosphere than at nearly any other time in history, and when the earth is heating that means that still more will be released.  The result is dramatic climate change, and comes with testable predictions, like the “Superstorm” Sandy.  Their further prediction is that without any intervention to decrease carbon levels in the atmosphere that we will see such a dramatic change in our global climate that it would threaten our ability to remain on this planet.  These findings and the conclusions are widely accepted, to the tune of a near complete consensus on the subject among climatologists specifically, and scientists more generally.

Climatologists, however, are not meteorologists.  A fairly recent poll of meteorologists showed that a slight majority of them do not believe in man made climate change.  They are not looking at climate patterns, but weather patterns, hence “weatherman.”  Meteorology is to science as economics is to science, there are some similarities, but there’s also a fair bit of guess work and inaccuracy.  Meteorologists are able to notice patterns and are decent at making very short term predictions, but as anyone who has tried to use the weather channel to plan a vacation can tell you, they get things wrong.  They are able to see repeating patterns year after year, but without a much longer scale they have no way of really telling if any changes are more than just incidental.  This is why they tend to be much more willing to accept discounted proofs against climate change like the “Medieval Warm Period.”  This of course only related to Europe, not the whole world, and happened on a much more limited scale.  But without the same day to day confrontation with the appropriate facts, meteorologists will remain more likely to be climate “skeptics.”  This is particularly unfortunate as the average person has far more interaction with meteorologists than climatologists.

A similar phenomenon happens between that we normally think of as doctors and another group that gets to put the letters Dr before their name.  Doctors who work in hospitals, particularly the ER, are much more likely to favor dramatic reforms to the healthcare system, aiming toward a national healthcare system.  In their experience they see large groups of people end up in the ER for conditions that could have been treated much earlier, safer, and more effectively if the patients had healthcare.  That not being the case they are forced to seek the most expensive type of healthcare, emergency care, which passes the brunt of the bill on the rest of society anyway.  This flooding of the ER results in long waits and puts people in urgent need in prolonged contact with many potentially contagious people.  Of course they would be in favor of changes that would allow people to address health problems early and relatively cheaply, because at the very least this would cause the worst problems that face people working in the ER.  But this is not the opinion of opthamologists, because they have a much different set of experiences.

Opthamologists don’t deal with the same level of urgency that real doctors face, not to discount the extreme skill it takes to do the work they do.  In the clinics they set up they encounter patients with problems that don’t need to be settled right then and there.  The patients have the privilege of time to make the right decision and shop around for the best procedures at the best price.  This creates healthy competition and drives down prices and makes procedures that were once at the forefront of technology and only accessible to the very rich, open to the masses now.  For a doctor in this kind of setting, of course they would be in favor of a system that puts more responsibility in the hands of the patient.  After all few if any basic healthcare plans include vision, so the money they spend is generally out of pocket, meaning the opthamologists have to be efficient with their work to give the most attractive prices.  Without the frame of reference that the ER doctors have, opthamologists are much more likely to favor the libertarian view of healthcare espoused by Rand Paul, who just so happens to be an opthamologist.

All this was a very long winded way of saying that people who favor more conservative policies like these are not exactly wrong, they’re just coming at things with a different set of data.  The problem here is that the data they do have is ill equipped to deal with the issues at hand.  I trust a climatologist with theories about the climate much more so than a meteorologist.  I trust a general practitioner with matters of general medicine much more than an opthamologist.  We can’t choose the specific world we inhabit, but we can try to ensure that the people who are closest to topic are heard more than those who live on the outskirts of the issue.  The problem is that we’re conflating experts with “experts.”  That is to say, people who are indeed experts in their own field, but that field is just not entirely relevant to the topic at hand.

The Infamy of the Bundy Name

No, as much as it may be fun to stroll down memory lane with stories of serial killers, I am not talking about Ted Bundy today.  For those who haven’t heard about the goings on in Nevada these days, there’s a new Bundy in town.  And again no, the main character of “Married with Children,” did not move out West, because there’s an even dimmer witted Bundy in town.  His name is Cliven Bundy and he has, over the matter of a few weeks he has risen from complete obscurity to marginal notoriety as a hero for the conservative wing in the United States.  And how, you may ask, was he able to accomplish such a feat?  Tax evasion.

If nothing else this story has given a few first year political science and economics students an absolute hard on to see a literal interpretation of the tragedy of the commons playing out before our very own eyes.  And because I get to say where this blog goes, that’s where I’ll start.  For those not living in a part of the United States with a large influence of English tradition, the commons here refers less to the space also known as the quad on a college campus and more the public land made available for agricultural use.  More specifically, of course, grazing land for cattle.  Ranchers need land and grasses to let their herds grow fat enough for market and as public land they should be free to use those lands, but what happens when there are too many cows for that public space?  Well either no one gets enough or someone gets an unfair advantage over the public land.  Therefore in the long run to ensure that everyone can have free access to the commons there needs to be an outside force, say the government, to dictate the limits of the use of that land.  The most common way we see this force applied is by taxes to make sure that people are paying the public back for the use of those lands and so that the government has some money to work with when trying to maintain it.

That’s where the man of the day, Cliven Bundy, takes the stage.  See, he is of the opinion that public land is his land because his family has been using it for a while.  At this point someone might pop in and say, but he didn’t buy that land from anyone, doesn’t that land then fall under the jurisdiction of the government?  Well that’s the beauty of the thing, because apparently the United States doesn’t exist.  “What?” I hear the reader say, but what of all those crowds chanting “USA” repeatedly at sporting events?  It just so happens that we’ve all been living under something of a delusion, at least that’s according to the “patriot” Cliven Bundy.  And yes, there are plenty of photos of Mr Bundy draped in an American flag.  And yes, Mr Bundy has been fighting, and losing to, the United States government since the 90’s along such lines as this dispute, but clearly the United States doesn’t exist.  This of course came as a shock to me as I have also written about the Civil War to maintain the United States, but there you have it.

Anyway, Mr Bundy is a rancher from Nevada, who uses public lands to graze his cattle, something not terribly novel in and of itself.  But he takes obstinence to a whole new level when it comes to participating in his civic duties.  Because let’s just assume for a second that he had paid his grazing fees for using public lands, which he hasn’t but we’ll come back to that later.  If he had he would still be breaking the law by using lands that are not available for public grazing use.  We are in the business of, from time to time, standing up for biodiversity.  Sometimes this is done for the noble intentions of protecting the diversity of life full stop.  Personally I like to think of it more as a maintenance of the environment that we depend on for our own survival, but that’s aside the point.  The US government was trying to protect some endangered species by partitioning a certain amount of land as a natural habitat, not to be disturbed by ranching and grazing.  Mr Bundy decided, nuts to the environment my cows need feeding and damned if I’m going to public lands designated for those purposes.  Oh yeah and nuts to paying back the public for the use of our land.

Anyway, in spite of continued legal attempts to get Mr Bundy to play by the same rules that we all play by, he would not be oppressed.  He declared this by amassing weapons and friends to operate them.  He threatened federal agents who were simply trying to get Mr Bundy to act as if he were beholden to the same set of laws as the rest of us.  And for being a moocher, a violent moocher, a violent moocher who denies the country he claims to be a patriot of, the Right has decided to beatify this man.  I mean honestly you’d be hard pressed to find someone with less moral scruples, well at least he’s not a bigot.  Oh wait, he is?

Yes, it has recently come to light what his opinions on black people are.  It may not be surprising to find out that the same guy that doesn’t acknowledge the existence of the side that won the Civil War.  Apparently the biggest problem facing the “Negro” is that they got off the plantation and stopped picking cotton.  I’ll grant him the absolute benefit of the doubt that he was trying to evoke the somewhat famous work “Cannibals All,” that the market has enslaved the poor just as effectively as chains, but even then it’s a stupid argument.  But let’s face it, although evocative of the lack of effective machinations in this man’s brain, his feelings on racial matters are not the most relevant.

What is important is that this cowboy has made headlines news not simply for being a tax evading, violent kook, but as a hero of the conservative wing in this country.  Mr Bundy is pro gun, pro Christianity, and pro individualism.  Mr Bundy is anti abortion, anti United States, and anti taxes.  Mr Bundy is everything the Right has wanted in a hero, but after the initial surge in popularity even they are becoming a little disgusted by him.  This last bit gives me some measure of hope for the future, but honestly the fact that it takes this long and that there are still very public supporter of this man is a little distasteful.  But you know, whatever, he’s just a real American hero.

You Can’t Be the Victim

Today I want to plead with a special sect of society that has been victimized; to give voice to a population that has long been kept silent.  No, I’m not talking to the LGBT community that can still legally be fired simply for not being straight in the majority of states.  Neither am I talking to the Muslim community that is made to feel as if they can never be American.  Nor am I talking to the Jewish community that still feels the echoes of anti-semitism, particularly in the wake of the attack in Kansa.  And I am not talking about the Latino community that is routinely forced out of communities across this nation, regardless of their documentation status.  Also I am not talking to the Native American community, that is still plagued with the effects of centuries long discrimination by the American government and society.  And No, I’m not talking to the black community that is still unfairly targeted by the police and the economy for the crime of not being white.  Today, I speak for the most disenfranchised group in the United States, conservative Christians.

Yes, it has come to my attention that this marginalized community is no longer going to simply sit around and be told what to do.  Their fight won’t stop until they get 44 straight presidencies of Christians.  Their struggle continues until they are allowed to impose, sorry, “express” their beliefs on all schoolchildren.  They must march on until that day when a straight, white, male, conservative, Christian can truly feel comfortable to walk the streets without fear of being limited to how much they can persecute others.

Ok, irony over for the moment, today the discussion is about how a growing number on the Right feel that they are being persecuted because they are finally being treated as equals to everyone else.  And heck, I’ll grant you that if you have been raised for generations with the expectation that you can do and say pretty much whatever you want without any backlash, it can seem a little jarring when the communities you actively target stand up for themselves.  And yes I know that I’m not the first person to make this point, but jeez it would seem like we need to go over it again, because the false cries of victimhood are just entirely too loud for my taste.

Let’s begin with that basics, yes everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, even those that a more rational person might call kooky.  This is the brilliance of a society based on personal liberties, that we can all coexist even if we disagree with each other.  But if you think that the First Amendment of the Constitution says that you get to say whatever you want without other people calling you out on it, you are sorely mistaken.  In fact let’s look at that First Amendment just so we all know exactly where we are coming from. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Notice how it says that “Congress” shall make no law, that means the government can’t curtail your right to free speech by decree or legislation; however, it does not say that when you offend other people they need to simply take it.  When I hear conservative Christians say they would like to return to a society based on biblical principles, and among those is that homosexuals shall surely be put to death, well damned if I’m going to just sit around and take it.  That is an offensive and hateful belief, but if you truly believe it then fine, but that doesn’t mean you get to make policy based on those insanely antiquated beliefs.  There is a debate to be had about what role the government should take in maintaining traditional institutions and whether or not tolerance really means that religions should have to include people that their scriptures don’t like.  When it comes to questions like this I maintain that what goes on behind a church’s doors are none of my business, but so long as marriage is a civil commitment it must be made available to all people.  But if you come to a discussion completely ignoring the dignity of a group of people and denouncing their very humanity, well then I’m sorry, but you’ve recused yourself from the debate.

In the same way, there is a discussion in the scientific community about why exactly we are seeing such abnormal changes in climate.  It could be that it is a cyclical change, or overly active sunspot activity, or most likely the influence of a more than seven billion person population has on the ecosystem.  But if you are going to stick your head in the sand and claim that the average global temperature has not increased, that CO2 emissions are at their highest in recorded history, that humans have 0 influence on our surrounding environment and climate, etc then you have given up your ability to participate in the important debate in a meaningful way.  You have the freedom to believe what you want, but that should not be confused as making it so.  Frankly I think that you are also corrupting the minds of your own children, but as parents you do have the right to raise your kids as you see fit, so long as that does not include child abuse.  But your right to influence children ends with your own kids, you do not have the right to dictate school curriculum based on those beliefs.

And finally we’re getting to the real point here, if you are going to act like a bigot, talk like a bigot, etc you better believe that other people are going to call you a bigot.  Tolerance does not mean we all get to abuse each other, it means we act with a little civility and sometimes bite our tongues, or else deal with the backlash that comes from saying hurtful things.  Conservative Christians have, for too long, had a position of dominance in America and it shows up in really odd ways.  Our national motto is no longer “E Pluribus Unum,” but “in god we trust.”  The Pledge of Allegiance didn’t originally contain the phrase “under god.”  But when these proposals were made, there was no opposition group strong enough to be able to say, “now wait just one minute.”  Anyone who didn’t go along with such things risked being labeled a communist and being deported, or worse.  Now we live in a different time and conservative Christians are going to have to learn to play nice.

So enough of the coddling, enough appeasement, and enough with this pseudo-religious bullshit.  We don’t accept racist ideologies as a valid opinion in national discourse, though we know it continues behind closed doors, and we are beginning to see people say, “wait a minute, gays are people too.”  We don’t accept flat earth societies to teach science to our students, nor do we allow Nazis to teach history.  These things are done to avoid bias, not to impose it.  But enough is enough, get over it, and learn to live on the same planet that all the rest of us have been living on this whole time.

Gold in Them Hills

One of the many things that bugs be in discussions of economic policy comes from a small but vocal contingent led by former Congressman Ron Paul.  Aside from the various other kooky things that I tend to laugh off are the claims that we need to return to the gold standard or at least back the US dollar with precious metals.  There are so very many things wrong with this opinion, and believe me I will get to some of them, but before that I want to address the one thing about this argument that drives me crazy every time it is uttered.  “Gold has intrinsic value.”  No, no, no, a thousand times no.  There may be some good reasons to want to revert to a gold standard, even though I would disagree, but for the love of god, this is not one of them.

Gold, like silver, oil, and of course paper currency, does not have any intrinsic value.  Gold is not some magic mana that was delivered from on high to be used as the standard by which all things are given value.  Gold is number 79 on the periodic table, which would make it a metal like many others.  It has the same property of many metals in that it is shiny, but just because of this glittering fact, it is not endowed with any value other than what we put on it.  Gold is useful in doing things that other metals might not be able to do, and it does have a history of association with money and wealth in the West, but that by no means gives it some sacred ability to be worth anything.  Gold, like all commodities sees its value increase and decrease with demand.  We’ve seen in the past what happens when new sources of gold are discovered, and shockingly enough it is the exact same thing that happens when any new source of any new commodity is found.  Gold may seem like a good defense against inflation because there seems to be a limit to its quantity, but so long as the stars keep fusing elements, it will never be a scarce resource.  Gold is not special.

Gold, like every other material in the universe, is worth only what people are willing to pay for it.  So long as we believe that it has value it will continue to have value, which makes it indistinguishable from any other currency including fiat currencies.  But gold is not intrinsically valuable.  Perhaps to primitive primate brains, the glimmer of that yellow metal holds some mystery and allure, but I assure you that it is not a safeguard against inflation in the way you might like.  I’m sorry to go, perhaps, a little overboard here, but whenever I see a pundit or a politician make this remark and no one stops them I feel the need to yell at my screen.  But you know what gold does do?  It has the ability to give those who hold it even more power, so long as they can convince the foolish masses that it is in fact worth something, just because.

Gold is, as ever, the commodity of the wealthy and that is only partly to do with the fact that we think it is so pretty.  If your economy is dependent on the backing of gold, then it’s pretty easy to game the system, but only if you’re rich.  If you can afford to hold large masses of gold then you are set, your wealth is indeed protected by the fluctuations of the market, but if for some reason you find yourself not holding onto large amounts of gold you might wonder, well heck where’s my wealth coming from?  Obviously the market responds by having currencies that bear the promise that they are backed in their full value by the government issuing them with the equivalent value of gold.  But what happens if you need to borrow more money to start a new venture?  You go to a bank, or some lender, and draw up an agreement to pay back the amount you borrow with interest.  However, the fact that currency is forced to be linked to the value of gold means that not only will you be paying the full amount of that loan back with interest, but the real value that you pay back will be even higher than the original agreement.

See, having gold as the backing for currency does indeed fight inflation, unfortunately it does this too well.  If people continue to buy gold to secure their wealth they take more and more gold out of the public market, causing the value of that commodity to rise.  The increased price of gold means that the dollars in your pocket do in fact increase as well, which sounds fantastic, but deflation comes with a terrible side effect.  If you were supposed to pay back an additional $100 in interest on your loan and each year the value of the dollar has increased by 2%, over ten years you pay another $20 of the original dollar value just in what you pay back in interest, not even including the payback of the principle.  This is just a complicated way of saying, it screws the people who need to take out loans, which would be most people.  Unless you are a bank or a person with reserves of personal gold, you get screwed over by a gold standard system.

This is of course why the only people fighting for the maintenance of the gold standard, when we still had it, were the wealthiest people in the country.  The farmers and factory workers first called for the influx of silver into the precious metals backing the dollar to try and ease ourselves off, but ultimately came to the realization that we need to move to a fiat currency to level the playing field.  I’ll admit, it may seem like a bad thing that a penny can’t buy what it bought back in 1900, but the tradeoff we got was a loan system that benefits the people taking out the loan.  By shifting the burden of the person taking out a lone, you take away some of the costs that scare people away from innovating, from flourishing, from making the developments that make a modern economy and society possible.

Of course, like just about everything, moderation is the key to keeping a healthy body and state.  The trouble with inflation is that it can get out of hand, and when it does people really do suffer.  We should never accept a state of affairs like what occurred under the Weimar Republic in Germany, but to abolish inflation completely only favors those who already hold all the wealth.  And golden cow of this outdated system of finances and economics is indeed gold, the great and powerful.  Gold is a powerful facade to protect the wealthiest from an evolving economy, but like all facades it lacks any real depth.  Which is what leads me to believe that the people who really advocate such a system only do so because they own gold themselves and would like to see their wealth increase even more.  This is of course evidenced by all the advertisements, on the networks that advocate for the gold standard, to buy gold and “protect your money.”  I can only hope that the advocates of such a system will remain the people who pretend to be philosophically minded and vote for Ron Paul, in which case they may be vocal but are an extreme minority.

We Shall Overcome Today

There are few things more horrible than a scene of community and humanity being turned into a scene of pain, loss, fear, death, desperation, and hate.  Today was the first Boston Marathon since that terrible bombing, but I can think of no better proof of the failure of that cowardly attack than this peaceful act of defiance.  In this country it can seem that there may be too much that divides us or perhaps too much distance between one another to truly become a greater community, but today was proof that not only shall we overcome the ills of the world but that we are already beginning to do it now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aor6-DkzBJ0 This song defined the struggle to ensure that all Americans are entitled to the same human dignity, regardless of race or ethnicity.  The first verse defined the commitment to that goal, that it is a forgone conclusion that we shall undoubtedly overcome, regardless of how long it takes.  The second verse states how we must accomplish this task, by walking hand in hand with each other.  And then in the third verse we get to the part that resounds in me most today, that we are not afraid.  We are not afraid of the terrorists and hate-mongers of the world.  Fear is no barrier to this community working together, and above all there is no terrifying act that can be committed which will ever cause our community to stop its constant race toward peace, freedom, and justice.  We are not afraid today.

And who we are is a beautifully diverse portrait.  Boston Strong, that was the mantra of the marathon this year.  In spite of all the pain that was committed there was no damage that was done, which could not be bourn by the Boston community.  The Marathon saw its most famous team running again, for one final time.  Dick and Rick Hoyt have come to be a staple of the Boston Marathon.  Team Hoyt is famous as the father and son team that proved even physical disease is not a barrier so terrifying that it cannot be beaten down.  The son, Rick, suffers from cerebral palsy, but when he was 12 years old he asked his father to help him participate in a local 5 mile race in support of another kid in the community who had become paralyzed after an accident.  The show of solidarity inspired his father, Dick, who set up a rig to push his son through that race.  And they did not stop there, along with the Boston Marathons they’ve participated all over and even completed triathlons together.  But last year Dick, then 72, realized he couldn’t keep doing this.  Team Hoyt decided it would be their last marathon together, but after the attack there was no question that there was still one more left to accomplish.  And today Team Hoyt carried along all of Boston in a display of what Boston Strong truly means… even if they’re technically from Westfield, MA.

But Boston, and Massachusetts, are just one part of the larger American community.  The winner of today’s marathon, for the first time in a long time, was an American.  Meb Keflezighi, although born in Eritrea, is a true American, as much as any of us.  He has shown the world that America remains the home of any and all fleeing hardship and persecution.  America remains the place of redemption for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.  This Californian is an Olympic medalist and a deserving winner of the Boston Marathon, as he carries the best of what the American Dream tells us awaits anyone in the world who comes to these borders.  His father brought him here as a refugee to escape what is now Ethiopia and now Meb has recreated himself as an American athlete who can compete with any of the world’s best.  And even though there have been calls to kill the surviving perpetrator of last year’s bombing, this is surely a greater symbol of justice in the face of oppression.  Truly he is America Strong.

And still even America is but a part of the still larger global community.  The Boston Marathon, much like the city that gave it the name, is an international city of many languages and peoples.  The marathon itself enjoys that participation of so many runners from all over the world, including the winning female runner, Rita Jeptoo.  Rita is a Kenyan and along with the next two spots behind her, is a new record breaker for the woman’s time for the Boston Marathon.  This is how we should react when people try to bring discord within and without borders, open them up to the world.  Everyone who can run, can run in Boston.  And although, there was the obviously needed presence of security at the marathon, perhaps this too is just a symbol of what measures we must take to ensure that our borders remain open and welcoming to the whole world.  And one can only hope that this message of openness, togetherness, community can spread like a light in the darkness to every war-torn area and ravaged county.  We are, as we always were, Earth Strong.

Days like this are what give hope in spite of so many troubles in the world.  It can be so easy to lose yourself in all the pain that continues throughout the world.  The bullets still fly in Syria, the noose still awaits homosexuals in Nigeria, the people of Venezuela still face a crumbling state, the citizens of Malaysia and China and now Korea still mourn the loss of sons and daughters as the hunt for them remains ongoing, the prison population in America is still the largest in the world.  Amid all these ongoing travesties it can seem impossible that one person could possibly do anything to help.  But the hands of one person in the hands of another in the hands of another and so forth can yet do as much as they ever have.  We still are able to change the world, just as the world has changed endlessly in the past.

So let’s drink up from this fountain of hope today and get back to the work that was set before us.  The runners ran, even if there was trepidation in their hearts from seeing the landmarks of what happened a year before, they ran as if they had no fear today.  If we continue down this path and do not give in to hate, greed, and despair; and above all if we walk hand in hand today then we’ve already won.  And deep in my heart, I do believe, even in the hardest of times when there seems to be no point in going on, I will always believe that we shall overcome someday.

The Best Terrible Option?

I felt a need to take at least a short break from writing about taxes and tax policy, and because I get to choose what I write about guess what we’ll be discussing today.  If you guessed the tribal warfare on Alpha Centauri I’d suggest checking your medications, because today is about affirmative action.  Like so many policies in the political ether this is a less than settled issue, and more to the point, not entirely something that I’ve come to terms with.  On the one hand it would seem obvious that the basic tenet of a meritocracy is that everyone should be able to get ahead or fall on their own merits, on the other hand this assumes a mystical fairy land where things are fair.  The basic premise of affirmative action and mandates about hiring ratios makes good sense to me, that all things being equal we should see the basic proportions of the general population in nearly every field.  The fact that we don’t see this kind of equal representation for certain minorities implies that there is something wrong with how people get selected for their jobs.  But at this point who hasn’t heard an anecdote about a friend or relative that didn’t get a position because a less talented person was favored by affirmative action, to momentarily pretend that the plural of anecdote is data.  Well today, I’ll do my best to tackle the realities of affirmative action as well as the morality behind it and see if there might be a better way of doing things.

Let’s start from the beginning, the lottery of birth.  People tend to forget that so much of their life depends on what family you are born into.  In part this is because we like to imagine that one’s origins shouldn’t matter when you grow up, but perhaps it’s because for so many of us we don’t encounter people who are drastically different from ourselves and thus assume that everyone has a similar experience.  But the sad fact is that one’s birth can be the biggest division between the richest and poorest in society.  If you are lucky you might be born into a loving, comfortably wealthy family with the genes to make you acceptable to the larger society.  If you are less than lucky you may be born to a parent who is neglectful or not prepared to raise a child and of course possibly in one of the many groups that have less than an easy time getting ahead in society we call minorities.  This is not to say that birth is the end all be all deciding factor of life, as many people have come from truly difficult backgrounds and made it in the world, but these people tend to be truly exceptional.

Affirmative action exists as a means of leveling the playing field such that a normal person who was born with less than the average luck of a people in the United States might be able to get a leg up in society and with that opportunity begin to flourish.  The most obvious examples of this come in college acceptance where kids from worse off areas, poorer school districts, and otherwise a less than ideal resume are given a certain amount of precedence over kids who may have done well but came from a background where that is to be expected.  To those kids who had better grades but were denied acceptance to see others with worse grades get in the system seems unfair, in a bizarre mirror image of the real world.  And I must say that I sympathize, but I’ll get back to that later.  For the kids who get a leg up in this system college can be method of escaping their less than ideal background and serve to disrupt the status quo.  After all, affirmative action was only ever supposed to be a stop gap until the point where society becomes fair enough that this is no longer necessary.

This is not entirely a free ride for the students that benefit from affirmative action programs, however.  Statistics show that a large number of students who were selected because of their background and not their student resumes, do struggle and more often than average drop out of the prestigious colleges that accepted them.  They may have been better served by attending less rigorous colleges, at the very least until they get a foothold on the collegial path and can pull themselves the rest of the way, but I think this is missing the greater issue.  Affirmative action is degrading to the person who fits the model of a person who would be served by it, regardless of whether or not they actually did benefit from these programs in the first place.  Affirmative action affirms to society that minorities are a lesser people who need to be given cheat codes to just come out even with the rest of society.  Affirmative action stays over the heads of those same minorities with the implicit  sign around the neck that makes people wonder if they really deserve everything they have.  It allows less than caring people to say, “Well you only got where you are because…”

To the other side of the spectrum, if you don’t understand the advantages that come with being a white, straight, male, Christian in America then it seems entirely unfair that you have to work even harder just to come out even.  I mean this is skipping over the part where we really should acknowledge the privilege held by those in the majority, even as demographics shift, but that is not really the focus for today.  Affirmative action programs to these people serves as a further barrier between races, sexes, ethnicities, religions, etc.  It instills a sense of us versus them tribalism that keeps us from getting beyond this supposedly temporary program.

And don’t get me wrong, I am in favor of affirmative action in as much as it helps people who grew up in the old flawed system, but implicit in these programs was the understanding that we would work to make it redundant, something that we have yet to accomplish.  The real answer to this problem of unfair differences among groups in the US is education and social pressure.  We have failed blacks and latinos, particularly those living in the inner city.  As a country we have allowed social, as opposed to institutionalized, segregation to allow us to be divided and callous to those not living in our local neighborhoods.  The schools of the city are undoubtedly better than even twenty years ago, but they remain worse than those in the suburbs.  Worse still, once school is out, kids return to the unsafe conditions of the city, with gangs and poverty making real education all the more difficult.  The only way to rid ourselves from the need of giving people a leg up in later life is to ensure that everyone has a fair shot from birth, and that is sadly not the case.

Corporations and Taxes

Here we get to the really meaty part of the tax debates, because we’re talking about the true sources of wealth in the world.  And although it is true that there are individuals out there that hold massive quantities of personal wealth, it remains true that the bulk of the money in the world is corporate money.  Let me start off by saying that I am not opposed to this in principle.  Corporations, limited liability companies, etc are incredibly effective ways to amass large amounts of capital and direct them with laser-like focus at the goal of wealth creation.  As I have mentioned before in essays like “Capitalism’s Gun,” I don’t necessarily believe that a strict pursuit of creating wealth is always a healthy or productive thing, though.  Rupert Murdoch has made a fortune through his corporate enterprises and employed many people with severe mental issues, the Fox News staff.  However, this has also meant the destruction of competition in many markets, and the abuse of personal freedoms in the pursuit of spectacular stories and thus greater profits.

Corporations, in my mind, should be simple a vehicle for a group of people to pool assets and thus limit the risk of making new investments and enterprises.  This limitation of risk emboldens people to make the decisions that may have been too scary otherwise, but which result in many people be employed and new products being produced.  Corporations are not in and of themselves humans, but a tool by which real people conduct business.  They are the Holy See of economics, a symbol of the people who use it that can be put into documents in lieu of each and every name on the payroll.  This has its problems though, not least of which comes when a corporation commits some act of malfeasance.  Who was really the person in charge or was it done by committee, who knew what and when, etc?  Problems like these have been solved in that past by treating a corporation as if it were a person.  In many other languages people, real people, are careful to clarify exactly what kind of person a corporation is, and not confuse a corporation for a person who is thus endowed with rights.

Quite frankly, in a perfect world, I would like the corporate tax rate to be nonexistent, in a way to incentivize reinvestment into the company and thus create even more wealth and jobs; however, this causes a different problem all together.  If personal income is taxable and corporate income is not, then why would any executives draw a personal salary?  I mean forget off shore accounts and murky bank dealings, simply take a salary that falls into the lowest tax bracket and have the company pay for everything else as a function of its operations.  Corporations would then be nothing more than a front operation, unless somehow legislators put into action some tangible regulations and the regulators actually got off their asses and enforced them, but no one  is naive enough to believe that is happening any time soon.

But still the goal should be to create a system where the smart move for stockholders and stakeholders of businesses is to keep their money going back into their companies and make them better, more profitable, and employ more people.  This, after all, is how many of these companies began when they were small businesses and start-ups.  The secondary goal is to keep corporate taxes low to promote foreign investment in American companies.  I am not exactly a fan of this strategy for a number of reasons.  First it assumes that Americans are uniquely in need of jobs and corporate money, when that is the whole world’s goal.  We should not make it our goal to employ people by ripping the food out of even poorer people’s mouths.  Second it gives those governing a further incentive to give in to the desires of those who already hold economic power.  Third if you lower the corporate tax to get foreign money you run the risk of becoming a tax haven where foreign businesses bring their money but don’t actually spend it in businesses.  Fourth, in a race to the bottom there are very few winners, and the end result means that we pay foreign investors to give us money.  Fifth and most important, there are better ways to promote foreign investment.

The lower corporate taxes that should exist, should be directed at infrastructure developments that make the United States a desirable place to invest because of how rich we can make this land, not how poor.  I mean, if we really wanted to get full employment overnight we could abolish the minimum wage, then everyone would have a job, just not necessarily a wage that keeps them fed.  Corporate taxes should be used to fund road construction and maintenance projects, but more importantly a transformation of our rail system, so that we can move products quickly and cheaply.  They should be used to fund new developments in green technologies that will be able to reuse waste products for other goods or energy creation.  In other words, we want to turn our country into a massive Singapore and not a new China.  And last I checked Singapore’s corporate tax rate was about 18%, which I’ll grant you is lower than the maximum rate in the US, but considering no corporation actually pays that rate may very well be an increase if actually implemented.

At any rate, what matters here is that we should be concerned with making the creation of new jobs and wealth the smart decision, but we can’t do so at the direct expense of the common man.  Corporations have gotten a bad rap, not because they are unfairly maligned by the people, but because the people who run them really are the powerhouses in this country.  It’s not for nothing that recent studies qualify the United States as an oligarchy with corporate players at the top.  We were meant to be a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people, real people and not corporate persons.  We need to simplify the tex code, yes, but not gut it.  We need to empower the rich into investing in this nation and not uniquely themselves.  We need above all to return this country to a state where no person would ever mistake it for anything other than a democratic republic, and that task cannot be accomplished by freeing corporations of any tax burden.  But at the same time, we must temper our ill feelings of the overreach of some at the top of the heap, and use that fervor to make a system that not only empowers them to invest, but creates enough wealth so that all people can invest, be fruitful, and multiply.