Joseph Michaud writes (in “Runaway Debt threatens American Dream,” July 12th) that “fiscal conservatism, that is, paying one’s own debts, was an integral part of the founding of this nation.” This is not altogether true, since slavery kept generation after generation in debt to slave owners like Jefferson, whom he selectively quotes, and created enduring income inequality.

Poorhouses may have given way to austerity programs but, if we look closely, Republicans like Mr. Michaud are eternally fond of punishing the poor and minorities – even if the strategy doesn’t work. Rather than improving health, housing and education – things that would help the most – the Republican approach is to keep the poor in their place and accuse them of profligacy. This goes for people and nations, a connection Mr. Michaud draws himself.

Michaud cites Greece and Puerto Rico as poster-children for the sins of debt. However, from the beginnings of their associations with the European economic union, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and other Southern European nations were hobbled by an uneven playing field. Greece has actually cut its budget by more than 30 percent yet its economy has also shrunk by a third and unemployment has risen to 27 percent. Austerity has been a failure.

By law, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese companies must pay higher interest on credits than German counterparts. Consequently northern Europeans have more flexibility in pricing and financing than their Southern rivals and can be more competitive. These are some of the built-in inequities in the EU that no amount of “fiscal responsibility” can cure.

A century ago Congress passed the Jones-Shafroth Act which exempted interest payments on bonds in Puerto Rico from federal, state, and local income taxes. These triple tax exemptions created a Ponzi scheme that worked for a time because it was easy to refinance . Financial and banking deals were imposed on Puerto Ricans by American-appointed governors and corporations, the colony is still subject to whatever trade agreements the U.S. imposes, and trade with the rest of Latin America is limited by the Jones Act. Puerto Rico is also limited in its bankruptcy and refinancing options by U.S. law. But, by all means, let’s blame the victim.

Mr. Michaud bemoans the high number of people not paying into the system and the large number taking from it. However, he does not mention that among those paying no taxes are huge corporations like: Bank of America; Boeing; Chevron; Citigroup; ConocoPhillips; Corning; Exxon Mobil; General Electric; Goldman Sachs; and PG&E. Fiscal responsibility also means raising revenue to pay bills. But paying taxes is just not in the Republican vocabulary.

Michaud maintains that there are millions of healthy, young people drawing SSDI. Painting an image of a Welfare Queen sitting around munching on donuts, he writes that “the generous entitlement programs we have established to assist the needy are now serving as an enticement to avoid employment.” Mr. Michaud should get out of his office sometime and try living on the patchwork of assistance that troubled families have to. Reality experienced personally might change his outlook.

At least half of food stamp recipients live – and work – in poverty. With average hourly wages of $9 an hour, each Walmart employee costs taxpayers at least $1,000 per year in public assistance. Walmart alone costs the United States $6.2 billion a year. Walmart employees constitute the largest block of Medicaid and food stamp recipients in most states. One in six of Walmart”s 48,000 Pennsylvania employees are enrolled in Medicaid. Walmart is America’s REAL Welfare Queen.

Apart from the working poor, Medicaid enrollment has also risen due to the greying of America. Younger immigrants, rather than drawing on the social safety net, actually pay into it. Again, something Republicans might want to consider.

Michaud notes that three times as much money is spent on “entitlements” as on defense. Sadly, for decades we have had a defense budget – and then we have had a separate war budget, the Homeland Security and spy agency budgets, and the costs of caring for veterans from all our combined wars of choice. These costs combined – our war addiction – approaches the “entitlements” – which wage earners actually contribute to in addition to paying their taxes. Fiscal conservatives preaching “responsibility” never worry about programs like the F-35, which is a $1.5 TRILLION boondoggle. Or the projected $2 TRILLION dollars that care of Iraq and Afghanistan vets, now still in their twenties and thirties, will cost over their lifetimes.

It’s strange that Mr. Michaud’s piece included the phrase, “the American Dream.” Because of income inequality caused by Free Market fundamentalism, greed, and corruption, the American Dream is more distant than ever from the reach of our children and grandchildren. I only hope that we will restore some of that Dream to everyone – not just for the pampered and the privileged.

This was published in the Standard Times on July 28, 2015
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20150728/opinion/150729577

The Supreme Court has ruled. Obamacare stands. But Steve DiMarzo isn’t happy and feels that only champions of insanity and inanity like Ted Cruz and Antonin Scalia can save us from decline.

Ted Cruz is an amusing sideshow, but Scalia serves on the bench, so let’s take a look at the ruling that DiMarzo mentions in his letter.

In summarizing “King et al. versus Burwell” for the majority, Justice Roberts wrote:

“The Act gives each State the opportunity to establish its own Exchange, but provides that the Federal Government will establish ‘such Exchange’ if the State does not. (42 U.S.C. §§180 31, 18041).”

Under the Act, states were to get the first shot at establishing their own exchanges but in their absence a federal exchange would provide similar services. Despite quibbling over some wording, the Supreme Court majority upheld Congress:

“Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter. Section 36B can fairly be read consistent with what we see as Congress’s plan, and that is the reading we adopt.”

Writing for the minority dissent, however, Justice Antonin Scalia could barely contain his anger and demonstrated that he is a man with seriously disordered thought.

Scalia excoriates the majority, calling its ruling “absurd,” that “words no longer have meaning,” that the majority’s ruling exhibits “no semblance of shame.” He argues hotly that the Secretary of Health and Human Services is not a state. (But of course neither are the governmental officials running our Massachusetts exchange.) Scalia also completely ignores the legitimacy of the federal exchange and only recognizes state exchanges. Ultimately all he can do is sputter and call the majority’s opinion “pure applesauce.”

Scalia then slams the tax credits by which the federal-state partnership works as the majority’s “interpretive jiggery-pokery,” proving that for Scalia himself words truly have no meaning. What does his bizarre expression even mean? And why are the Affordable Care Act’s complex tax provisions any more objectionable than the rest of a tax code that privileges corporations and the extremely wealthy?

And if Scalia is such a keen and literal reader of the Constitution, why are corporations now considered to be people? Why does he not scrupulously support Fourth Amendment rights regarding personal “effects” and the unequivocal requirements for warrants? Why doesn’t Scalia read the Second Amendment as referring not to individual rights to bear arms but the collective right to establish militias?

Or could it be that the Justice has applesauce between his ears?

Speaking recently at his granddaughter’s graduation, Scalia remarked, “Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so.” Actually humanity has been around for at least a hundred thousand – and longer if we include our close human relatives.

Here is a man divorced from reality, ignorant or antipathetic to science, an angry, inconsistent, ideologue given to incoherent argument and babbling. Scalia is a walking example of precisely WHY the Court is in decline and an argument for the need to have term limits on Supreme Court justices – or at least to be able to recall those unfit for service.

So if Steve DiMarzo wants to recommend someone to save the country – he’d better keep looking.

This was published in the Standard Times on July 3, 2015
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20150703/opinion/150709802

Recent letters in these pages have attributed the Charlie Hebdo attack to inchoate hatred of Jews. It is inconceivable or insignificant to the writers that American foreign policy or Israeli domestic policy had anything to do with it.

Similarly, writers Left and Right have reframed the story as one in which democracy and freedom of speech are under attack. “They” hate us for what we have, for who we are, for the freedoms we exercise. From Lindsay Graham to Bill Maher, the only conclusions Americans seem able to draw are (1) Western civilization is at war with people who want to live in the Neolithic Age, and (2) Islam is totally incompatible with democracy. No other narratives are ever used to rationally explain Al Qaeda’s and ISIS’s successes. And we won’t hear of it.

Bin Laden’s November 2002 “Letter to America” in the Guardian addresses two issues: why al Qaeda opposes the West and what it wants from it. The first answer to the first question addressed Palestine. He wrote: “Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple: (1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us. a) You attacked us in Palestine…” To Bin Laden Israel in Palestine was just another example of Western imperialism.

But we know better.

Bin Laden’s other talking points concerned Western involvement in the Middle East and the exploitation of the world’s resources to satisfy a consumer culture he regarded as immoral. He took the West to task for coddling Israel, nuclear hypocrisy, and for U.S. foreign policy and military bases throughout the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia.

But we know better.

History tells us: that the West carved up the Middle East; that it unleashed Wahhabism against the Ottomans; that the U.S. built Al Qaeda as a proxy to fight Russia in Afghanistan; that “Western” Israel formed Hamas to challenge the PLO; that the U.S. left Shias to die in the first Gulf War and disenfranchised Sunnis in the next; that it inadvertently armed ISIL; that the West’s “coalition of the willing” destroyed and destabilized Iraq, Syria and Libya through regime change masquerading as defense of civilians suffering state terror; that the new GOP Congress wants to add Iran to our national catalog of military disasters.

But we know better.

Didier Francois, a French journalist who was held almost a year by ISIS, was interviewed recently by CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour. When asked about the Western-educated converts to ISIS, Francois responded, “There was never really discussion about texts or — it was not a religious discussion. It was a political discussion. It was more hammering what they were believing than teaching us about the Quran.”

But we know better.

Analysts in the intelligence agencies know that ISIS and Al Qaeda ranks are swollen with ex-Baathists and anti-Assad Syrians. They also contain a sobering number of Western-born and Western-educated Muslims who are radicalized by domestic racism, growing surveillance states, unemployment and consumer culture. They and their lone-wolf brethren are radicalized in part by the realization that their own countries are not quite the democracies they claim to be, and their heritage permits them to see Colonialism with a clear eye. But ultimately they are radicalized by being told to “go home,” that they don’t belong in England or France or Germany. Or the U.S. And by joining ISIS they think they’re going home.

As Didier Francois tells us, though, it’s not the Quran. It’s politics.

And yet we only see a military solution. Americans all-too-quickly resort to war. War is not our last resort. It is pretty much our only resort. As long as we consistently choose to fight without thinking of the political dimensions, the war against ISIS and any future mutations will have only one casualty: our own civil liberties and democracy.

Only after we finally admit our foreign and domestic policies have been a failure and actually encourage recruitment to ISIS and Al Qaeda — and we alter them — will we be able to have any kind of peace.

Until then, we know better.

Good grief. Who says that low-information voters are undecided? Bernard P. Giroux (October 15th) ticks off a number of reasons voters should reject Elizabeth Warren. Most of them rest on hysterical fact-twisting.

Giroux states that Warren’s political principles will require a “re-write of the Constitution.” As he should know, the last change to the Constitution was in 1971, to give 18-year-olds the right to vote. Almost all 27 amendments improved upon our civil liberties or closed electoral loopholes. The usual method of amending the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in each house of congress and approval by three-fourths of all states. So what’s the point of his nonsense? Hysterical fear-mongering.

Mr. Giroux questions why an accomplished, tenured professor would give up a five-digit salary in academe for a five-digit salary as a Senator. He seizes on the first notion that pops into his head: “One reason comes to mind: power,” he writes. I seem to recall, from the same citizenship class Mr. Giroux apparently skipped, that our political system is based on a consensus-conflict model, in which political parties are in perpetual political arm-wrestling matches with one another. So – yes – power is the reason both candidates are competing, vying, running, fighting – all power verbs, you’ll notice.

I don’t know what Giroux has been reading, but he uses the word “statism” too broadly and as if it were a filthy word. Statism, in its simplest and most obvious meaning, indicates that a country is not left to anarchy or mob rule but its day-to-day functions are managed by – a state. The current crop of Republicans may prefer that we all live in the unpaved boonies, home-schooling our kids, and receiving faith-based services. But the “Somalian option” – letting states fail their own people – is still fortunately not very popular.

There were criticisms from both the Right and Left on how the TARP program was implemented. But Giroux chooses to ignore the millions of jobs and homes preserved by government interventions and modest US economic growth in the face of serious economic downturns in the EU, Japan, and even softening of the Chinese economy. Many believe more domestic progress would have been made if the Republicans had not made demonizing a Black, Muslim, Kenyan, Indonesian, Communist president their only priority.

Giroux writes, “living under statist rules means that you are not free to be an American. The statist will control everything you do in life and make you subservient.” As Joe Biden would say, “Stuff!”. Mr. Giroux’s political buddies are more than happy to tell women what they may or may not do with their bodies. These buddies are not averse to increasing the size of the Department of Defense by a couple trillion dollars here or rolling out more domestic Homeland Security surveillance programs there – or starting unfunded wars of choice. Republicans love Big Government – especially when energy, defense and aerospace contractors are doing so well.

But the fact is: the choice Massachusetts voters have between Elizabeth Warren and her Indjun-bashing opponent is not about the size of the state, but about priorities.

And here Mr. Giroux and I agree. He asks “Would it not be better to be in a country where the government flows from the people?” Absolutely. That’s precisely what Senatorial elections are for – voters weighing in on national priorities. And early polls show that the priorities Elizabeth Warren is campaigning for are the ones voters like.

This was published in the Standard Times on October 17, 2012
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20121017/opinion/210170312

Joseph E. Stiglitz writes in his new book, and in a recent article: the US is first in income inequality in the world, and it’s getting even worse. Social mobility is greater even in “old Europe” than here. The six Wal-Mart heirs own as much as the bottom 30% of the entire United States! So much for the “American Dream.” Kids, go to grad school abroad, then stay there.

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Stuart Forman (“Moral obligation must underpin Occupy movement“) looks at the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and sees in its reflection a society beset by existential worries, alienated by not having the opportunity to contribute, by consumerism, and by the loss of meaning. His is largely a psychological analysis with a moral solution. The poorly-titled letter suggests Stuart’s prescription is for the OWS movement itself to find or promote morality, but we should actually let his arguments speak for themselves: society should be based on the common good and not dedicated to greed. This in fact is what OWS is saying as well. And isn’t this moral enough?

Stuart somewhat unfairly charges that the OWS movement has failed to articulate its goals, although its demands have been clear and unambiguous: among others, re-regulating the financial industry, single-payer health care, affordable student loans, commitment to a national energy program, rolling back the Patriot act, election reform, immigration reform, ceasing to be the world’s policeman, and ensuring that everyone pays their fair share of taxes. While there is no progressive equivalent of Grover Norquist or Glen Beck to hammer away on private media outlets at its dearest issues, OWS is not a top-down movement, so let’s not confuse a diversity of demands and people for a failure to articulate. As Stuart acknowledges, the “system” is in trouble, and lots of things need to be fixed. The OWS people have articulated enough specific reforms for anyone who really wants to listen. Now all that is needed is a political party which represents average Americans and not corporate lobbyists.

There may be a few within the OWS movement who question the entire economic system, but most are looking for a return to a Social Contract that applies to all citizens, not just a small percent. What are our responsibilities toward society and government, and what are its responsibilities toward us? Why is it we live with each other? These questions may have a psychological or a moral dimension, but they are essentially political questions. The moral philosophy of a John Rawls, whom Stuart mentions, is only one approach toward understanding or defining a Social Contract. Ensuring that all of society’s stakeholders are adequately represented by principled political parties and laws which do not privilege one group over another is another. Ultimately, fighting for reforms politically, rather than making appeals to morality, is more likely to produce the real change Americans are still looking for. In the marketplace of ideas and politics, this requires punishing politicians who fail to represent us and demanding that those we have elected do represent us. It is not the lack of morality so much as apathy and ignorance which have created this sick system.

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Barney Frank has proposed cutting European allies’ military aid in order to reduce the total military budget by 25%. Frank has mentioned numerous European nations by name.

However, the U.S. actually provides very little military aid to Europe, as it turns out. According to U.S. Government statistics for 2009 which can be found at http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1299.pdf, all European nations combined received a total of $210 million (with a little “m” and not a “b”). The following nations were included in this calculation: Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. Congressman Frank will be relieved that Denmark and Italy are not among them.

However, if we look at the 2009 recipients of more than $100 million in aid, the top eight were: Afghanistan (5.7 billion), Israel (2.38 billion), Egypt (1.3), Pakistan (429 million), Jordan (238 million), all of Europe combined (201 million), and Somalia (102 million).

The United States maintains a network of over a thousand military bases in 150 countries. This is where the costs rack up. For example, Germany receives nothing besides rent for permitting the U.S. to maintain the Landstuhl military hospital and base. However, the U.S. is unlikely to shut down Landstuhl because this is where KIA and injured service members from the Middle East are sent before returning to the U.S. It serves no purpose to Germans. And as several years of wrangling with Iraq attests, the military does not willingly shut down bases and a “patriotic” Congress does not have the guts to force it to.

Some of the money allocated to Europe also goes toward the U.S. commitment to NATO. Long after the Cold War has ended and the Soviet Union was dismantled, we are still unwilling to give up those bases and dismantle our own Cold War club.

So it seems to hold true that whenever the U.S. goes to war, which is often, military infrastructure grows but is subsequently never permitted to be reduced.

Afghanistan represents 53% of all American military foreign aid. Israel gets 22%. The rest of U.S. allies get the remaining 25%. Congressman Frank has steadfastly refused to look at cuts for Israel, but clearly it’s a notable, politically-motivated exception. And the Obama Administration has asked the Congressional Research Service to prepare estimates of spending in Afghanistan until 2021, and we haven’t heard enough Democrats complaining about these plans.

If we are serious about reducing frivolous foreign military expenditures, we need to close useless bases, cut aid to countries inflated to excess by special interests, and get out of Afghanistan now and not in another decade. The rest of Congressman Frank’s ideas may have some merit, but it seems to me he’s no different from the rest of Congress: he only wants to go on a low-armaments diet if all he has to do is throw the maraschino cherry on the sundae away.

Besides all the other pledges the Religious Right takes nowadays — Anti-Abortion, Balanced Budget Amendments, No New Taxes for the Super-Rich, Defense of Marriage for Straight People, Repudiation of Global Warming, Fighting Evolution, or Promoting the Return of Christian Shariah — I sometimes wonder if they simply take a basic pledge to waste their time on social issues that are of interest only to a narrow group of narrow people.

Today’s Time Waster is Michelle Bachman’s new pledge to the National Organization for Marriage to defend straight people from harassment by gays and their straight enablers of the sinful gay lifestyle.

I am truly grateful that hordes of rowdy homosexuals and angry lesbians have never come to my street to harass me while I’m trying to have a nice quiet evening with my wife or tried to recruit me to the other team. So far, I’m working on my 3rd decade of marriage without ever receiving a single threat or so much as a peep from this apparently scary constituency.

On the other hand, I am more than a little disturbed that NOM and its supporters aren’t as tolerant when it come to letting gay people have their own quiet evenings without being demonized or asked to attend re-education camps. If anything, the defense of loving relationships is under attack by NOM.

And doesn’t Michelle Bachmann have anything better to do?

The Standard Times editorial this morning (“Public Employees, Private Freedoms”) is a long piece defending the dismissal of Bourne firefighter Richard Doherty for griping that he had to work on the Fourth of July. To me, Doherty’s firing seemed to be just vindictiveness on the part of the town. After a somewhat tedious case law review (so that we fully appreciated all the “nuance” involved), the op-ed took the town’s side, offering the weakest of arguments:

“As a newspaper, we aggressively defend First Amendment rights, but Doherty’s behavior undermined public confidence in the town’s ability to provide emergency services. Public servants have a right to express their opinion, but there is no right to a job funded at taxpayer expense for conduct that breaches the public trust.”

First, does any sane person truly believe that Doherty’s gripes “undermined public confidence?” If undermining public confidence in government infrastructure is such a horrific betrayal of the public, please, let’s dismiss every Republican who has ever disparaged “Big Government” or actually undermined its effectiveness by slashing necessary services. But going after a guy because he whined about working on a holiday? Give me a break. I could see firing Mr. Doherty if he had refused to show up for work instead of merely griping.

Second, it seems to me, for all the nuanced case law review, the Standard Times misses the point that Constitutional freedoms are not abrogated the moment a person becomes a public employee. The First Amendment does not have a clause exempting prickly firemen from its protections.

The Standard Times editorial asks the question, whether a gay person could confidently receive services from a firefighter who had gone on record making homophobic remarks. Valid point, but once again, let’s ask this question about half of the Republican Party, including five candidates who want to roll back gay rights. Would a gay person accept help from a homophobe? Sure, if their house were burning down or they were going into shock. Being civil to those whose opinions we despise or who despise us is all part of living a society. We don’t have to like everyone who serves us. But they have to do their job.

The foregoing arguments also apply to the recent case of Anthony Weiner, whose antics have brought disgrace on him and his family. New York voters will have a chance to weigh in on Mr. Weiner’s effectiveness in a 2012 election. At that time they can decide if his personal actions warrant revoking the public’s trust in him. Frankly, Weiner’s wronged wife is the one who should be firing him, not the public which merely has a prurient fascination with sex scandals.

Far worse betrayals of the public trust go unchallenged and unmentioned daily in your pages. The president’s recent violation of the War Power Act, the fact we are now ensnared in combat in five Middle Eastern countries, our shameful foreign policy, and recklessly giving half the TARP money to the nation’s richest people. These are the real betrayals of public trust! Consider for a moment how many years the Democrats in the House Ethics Committee avoided any serious investigation of Charles Rangel and you understand how betrayal of the public is not a serious issue, to Republicans or Democrats.

Which brings me to the Standard Times.

As long as the press has colorful sex scandals to report or whining firemen to vilify in the op-ed page, it can continue to half-heartedly fulfill its duty to expose the truth of larger, more important issues. We have plenty of wars, employment, infrastructure, and budget crises a properly informed public needs to know about. Of course, in the age of embedded journalism, this requires going head to head with government, not simply being an echo chamber for it.

When the editor writes, “As a newspaper we aggressively defend First Amendment rights,” I want to shout something unprintable here. The hell you are! Why not simply give the vindictive town bureaucrat who just didn’t like Mr. Doherty space to vent in your own column?

The editor seems to have no grasp of what, truly, betrayal of the public consists.

This was published in the Standard Times on June 24, 2011
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20110624/opinion/106240309

Here’s an example of the lack of transparency and dishonesty from the State Department that led to the most recent Wikileaks disclosures.

I have written previously about the case of Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a non-violent Palestinian activist who was jailed for making a peace sculpture out of the many tear gas canisters and spent concussion grenades shot by Israel Defense Forces at people in the occupied village of Bi’lin. Recently Abdallah’s prison sentence was completed but Israel still keeps him locked away in Ofer Prison.

The case has been in the news for more than a year. Thousands of people around the world have written to their politicians and diplomats about Abu Rahmah. Former President Carter, Desmond Tutu, and a number of European diplomats have all spoken out about his case. It is inconceivable that people in the State Department are as clueless as they pretend to be.

Matthew Lee of the AP wire service has been trying unsuccessfully for weeks to get a straight answer from State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley about Abu Rahmah’s political imprisonment. The following clip shows the lengths that the State Department has gone to in deep-sixing any real concern for political prisoners and in deferring to Israel about human rights abuses.

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Yesterday, with a second Depression afflicting the nation, two wars, Wikileaks, and the Tea Party rebellion, I discovered that TIME had decided to make Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, its new Person of the Year for “connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives.” TIME’s Richard Stengel sees Facebook as not just a new social mechanism; it’s “the connective tissue for nearly a tenth of the planet.”

Accepting the honor (on Facebook), Zuckerberg wrote:

“Being named as TIME Person of the Year is a real honor and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected. I’m happy to be a part of that.”

The Wall Street Journal quickly put its seal of approval on TIME’s choice with an essay by a philosopher-ethicist, no less, on why Facebook is so important to us. Humans, it appears, were apparently built to “breathe, eat, drink, sleep, defecate, and check Facebook.”

Thus, to the visionaries at TIME and the WSJ, Facebook is not only a new social function but a new bodily function and has been elevated to a replacement for normal human relationships. NPR showed a bit more skepticism, though, wondering if perhaps better choices might have been available to TIME’s editors. NPR’s poll showed 75% of NPR listeners thought someone else should have been chosen. ComputerWorld saw the choice of Zuckerberg as a snub to Julian Assange, who was also the leader in the NPR poll. Many journalists wondered what was going on in Richard Stengel’s mind.

Like the Nobel Prize award to Obama last year, Zuckerberg’s award does not come as a surprise in our new Snookified world. We do live in a society in which basketball players earn a thousand times more than teachers and ex-cons like Martha Stewart and Buddy Cianci have their own TV and radio shows. And maybe it’s simply to avoid predictability that undeserved awards are given in the first place.

But undeserved? Is this really too harsh? How can one say that Zuckerberg, a white, privileged son of both a dentist and a psychiatrist, who came to Harvard via Philips Exeter academy and whose social networking creation may well be the result of theft or plagiarism, does not deserve the award?

After all, who doesn’t love self-indulgent narcissism? This is the true product of our collective use of Facebook — billions of digital pork sausages oozing from the grinder. If talking to one’s friends on a cell phone while visiting a rest room isn’t enough, Facebook lets people disclose even more about their one-night stands, drunken binges, the games they play on company time, or the fragile state of their mental health. You can post thousands of photos of yourself on Facebook. If you’re deranged, you can even post your suicide note, as Clay Duke did. How can something like this not be vital to the functioning of a society? We can get our 15 minutes of fame every day on Facebook.

Stengel tries to apply lipstick to the pig by describing how Facebook and Wikileaks are “two sides of the same coin”:

“Both express a desire for openness and transparency. While Assange attacks big institutions and governments through involuntary transparency with the goal of disempowering them, Zuckerberg enables individuals to voluntarily share information with the idea of empowering them. Assange sees the world as filled with real and imagined enemies; Zuckerberg sees the world as filled with potential friends.”

Apparently TIME’s editors, one would have supposed champions of the Fourth Estate’s responsibilities, don’t see transparency in government as something which empowers citizens in any way. For TIME, narcissism is true empowerment. Taking flak for his choice, Stengel said that “I do think something is going on deep down in the human character that’s changing and evolving. […] Is there a bigger story than that? I don’t think so.”

Stengel also justified passing over Julian Assange: “There is no Julian Assange without Bradley Manning,” he wrote, referring to the presumed source of many of the leaked classified documents.

He was right about that.

Today’s Standard Times editorial (“Don’t weaken airport security”) is the result of good homework but bad analysis.

Acknowledging sperm mutations and an increased risk of cancer from the new “porno” scanners, the editors nevertheless advocate submitting to an imaging procedure which displays prostheses, colostomy bags, tampons, and the outline of genitals.

The editors warn that opting out of the virtual strip search and instead requesting an “enhanced pat-down” may not make them any happier. This second option, as it has sometimes been implemented, is neither enhanced nor a pat-down. It is simply sexual molestation by another name.

As terrorists get more sophis ticated, we will be called on to give up more and more of our privacy and our liberties. The Standard Times pooh-poohs the notion that these new procedures are indicative of a Big Brother society – but what’s next from the TSA when terrorists regularly start carrying explosives embedded in their bodies? Full strip and cavity searches?

Throwing away our right to privacy in the most intimate of ways is not the answer. Neither is privatizing air traffic safety. TSA agents, for all the outrageous things they are asked to do by the changing dictates of security agencies, are much more professional than their private sector predecessors. And neither is the answer to implement racial or ethnic profiling. Not only is it statistically useless, as a recent study by Professor William Press from the University of Texas at Austin shows, it leaves the door open to simple harassment. Just ask Donna Shalala, former US Secretary of Health and an Arab American, about her treatment at Ben Gurion airport last July. Apparently her profile as an American VIP and supporter of Israel were not as important as her profile as a suspicious 69-year-old Arab woman.

Until the root causes of terrorism have been addressed, attempts to bring down planes will continue. If Americans have no interest in discovering the real reasons our country has so many enemies, then we’d better get our scientists busy working on improving those million dollar bomb sniffers.

If my only choices are to have my genitals filmed or groped – or to be prohibited from traveling – these are not really choices at all. And this is indeed symptomatic of a Big Brother society with its rapidly multiplying security apparatus. I’m surprised the editors don’t find any of this as appalling as the average citizen does.

This was published in the Standard Times on November 27, 2010
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20101127/opinion/11270344

No, not you bean counters in Boston and in local town governments. I’m referring to every citizen of this fine state.

Boston just announced a cut of 900 jobs, including over 400 teaching positions. This is a 5.5% cut, or $107 million out of $833 million in Boston’s school budget, and a 6.2% reduction of the city’s 6500 teaching positions.

This all sounds reasonable until you hear that the city budget shortfall is estimated to be $140 million next year. As usual, schools are going to assume 75% of the burden.

In 1980 some cheap bastards – actually, we Massachusetts voters – voted for a referendum which capped property taxes at 2.5%. Proposition 2 1/2 thus became Massachusetts General Law Chapter 59 Section 21. For 28 years this law has guided the downward spiral of town and city services. In these hard times Proposition 2 1/2 will ensure that the downward spiral will end in death. Cynical banalities like “the schools just couldn’t compete” or “it’s time to privatize” will be uttered over the grave. And we will then look to casinos and corporations to come up with the money.

Wait a minute! Aren’t we currently bailing out the corporations?

Never mind. We’ll talk excitedly about how the new Duncan Donuts Academy, the Harrah’s Charter Schools, the McDonald’s pre-schools, and the Marvel Comics and National Enquirer libraries are providing services we used to pay for ourselves.

And all because we continue to be the same kind of cheap bastards the people on our block were 28 years ago. People who expect someone else to do it, someone else to pay for it, someone else to step up to do the right thing.

If there’s anything we can agree on in this consumer culture, it’s this: you get what you pay for. By paying for nothing, we get nothing. No future for our children, no future for young people, no stability for the elderly, no common dreams that bind our society. Proposition 2 1/2 has done enough damage. Repeal Massachusetts General Law 59 Section 21.

In Wednesday’s editorial section Henry Nichols argues that an American president needs a military background. Our current president sort of has one, mainly confined to avoiding as much reserve duty as possible and strutting in costume aboard an aircraft carrier. But look at the damage he’s done to the country.

I would argue that a military background might be nice to have, but so would a previous career in some other, non-martial, area of public service. Most importantly, however, I would prefer his ability to seek advice, be open to talking to friends and enemies alike, to re-engage with the rest of the world, and to have sound judgment and high intelligence – all of which the current president lacks.

Mr. Nichols argues that a president should follow the advice of the generals, citing Patton and MacArthur as paragons of great advice. Patton was famously a racist and anti-Semite, notorious for slapping a hospitalized soldier, and insubordinate to President Eisenhower, who fired him. MacArthur, another strong force of nature, was similarly sacked for insubordination by Truman. I would agree with those who say that sometimes those who have seen war are most loath to enter into one. This seems to have applied to Eisenhower, but neither Patton nor MacArthur were cut from this cloth. MacArthur, for example, had advocated widespread atomic bombing of Korea and attacking China. This is why we entrust government to calm, sane people directly accountable to the public, who should be agonizing over decisions that may have horrendous consequences.

I will agree with Mr. Nichols that a president must seek advice from the military, but surely he knows that the president has the last word once a war is authorized by Congress. The president also must have a bigger picture in mind than simply managing military campaigns. The president is also responsible for shepherding our economic, health, education, energy, and environmental concerns – all of which have been severely neglected during this administration. With the biggest deficit in history, perhaps the next president should be a former economist.

Several of the other points Mr. Nichols makes in his letter simply make no sense. Bombing Hanoi may have gotten North Vietnam’s attention, but it certainly did not shake their resolve. Losing 2 million civilians to carpet and napalm bombing actually strengthened it. And his picture of Iraq as a beach head against hordes of violent Islamic extremists just waiting to overrun our shores is as ill-informed as it is comical. This costly U.S. invasion of the wrong country just inflamed people who think of themselves as patriots fighting foreign invaders.

No, whether economist, lawyer, or former soldier, the number one job qualification of our next president must be sound judgment. And a better knowledge of geography.

This was published in the Standard Times on August 2, 2008
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/20080802/opinion/808020308

I was disappointed with Steve DeCosta’s article (“Big Government”) in Sunday’s paper. His article was framed in the language of conservative tax activists, such as the Tax Foundation, whom he quoted, and it placed the spotlight on local government.

But the real issue is not whether local governments are wasting taxpayers’ money. It is why local governments are not getting the revenue they require to provide essential services.

It is also about our economic priorities at the national level. Mr. DeCosta’s article offered vague statistics and could have dug deeper to contribute to an informed debate over how we as a society choose to live together and determine and fund our social priorities.

Some of his statistics were not helpful. For example, “The Tax Foundation reports that about 30 percent of all American income is turned over to one government or another in the form of taxes.” Unfortunately, this says nothing about how or where the money is spent, or by whom.

So let’s check.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau, federal taxes consume approximately 20.27 percent of average American incomes, state taxes 7.12 percent and local taxes 3.56 percent.

The article goes on to quote: “Between the feds, the state, and our cities and towns, 19.7 million people work for us,” the size of Madagascar, it points out. Or that one out of seven Americans is a government employee. But wouldn’t it be more useful to actually know what services these people are rendering and which type of government they come from?

Using figures drawn from the same government sources, we learn that 1.88 percent of all Massachusetts workers are employed by the federal government, 3.24 percent work for the state, and 6.53 percent work for local government. Of these local government employees, half are teachers; the rest dogcatchers, snow plow operators, police, fire, sanitation and medical workers.

What we see here is that local governments employ the most workers, who deliver the most direct services to taxpayers, yet they receive the least amount of tax revenue, even adjusting for state and federal transfers.

So why is the focus of Mr. DeCosta’s article on local government? Perhaps recent tax override referenda have inspired the theme. But if we really want to deal with the costs of government, we have to acknowledge that the federal government is getting most of our money.

Rather than giving local librarians pink slips and arguing with our neighbors, we should be paying more attention to how our federal taxes are spent and where the government jobs really are. This is where the article missed the boat.

So let’s take a look.

Of the nation’s 2.7 million federal employees, 770,000 are postal workers. After this, many of the remainder either carry guns or provide service to people who once carried guns. The VA runs a vast parallel medical care system that employs more than 250,000 people. Combined, the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and the spy agencies employ more than a million people.

In contrast, the Department of Labor employs 15,000 and Housing and Urban Development 10,000. These figures reflect our national priorities.

So, rather than standing out in the rain, waving picket signs urging the lowest possible local taxes at the local level, it might make sense to pony up for higher local and state taxes, lower federal taxes and exercise restraint on unnecessary expenditures — military spending and servicing the national debt come to mind.

It might make sense to ensure every American has medical insurance and to gradually shut down the parallel VA hospital system.

It might make sense to spend more on education to make Americans more competitive in the global economy, and less in creating defense bureaucracies or building electronic fences to keep out the poor.

It might make sense to spend more on developing mass transit infrastructure and less on automotive research or expanding the highway system.

These are topics we can all argue about, but at least our discussion will have turned to what kind of society we want to live in.

The debate over how we spend tax money is already highly politicized. Mr. DeCosta’s article suggests that local governments are doing their best with what they’ve got, and I agree.

But I would have preferred a more substantive article, particularly addressing use of our federal taxes, to fuel a public discussion of why it is we live together in a society, and what we should expect to both contribute and gain from doing so.

That’s a bigger and more important question.

This was published in the Standard Times on May 21, 2008
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/20080521/opinion/805210318

Dear America:

The 2004 Presidential election is over, and a majority of you has chosen George Bush.

In an era of sound bytes, spin, and dog-wagging – and with the lies and unchecked statistics of today’s political campaigns – it is all too easy to conclude that you were deceived. But I believe the reality is far worse. You cast a vote yesterday for a peace-of-mind no one can honestly deliver to you and decisively condemned secular liberalism by embracing fundamentalist “moral values.” In so doing you have repudiated our Founders’ vision of America and our children’s’ futures.

This country, which now seems defined by SUV’s and cocooning in dens with 90-inch entertainment systems, now finds itself increasingly unemployed or underemployed, with a downsized space program that can’t even keep its budget Martian rovers running. Our social nets have failed. Almost half of Americans have no health insurance, a matching figure has no life insurance, and the Social Security system is in danger of being looted or privatized. Your answer to all of this is to build a new heavily-armed Roman Empire. And you thank your Evangelical gods that you have no responsibilities toward that other half of this nation.

Now, when those Chinese-manufactured entertainment systems of yours have a glitch, you phone in for support and reach a customer service person in Bangalore. Meanwhile, our schools are in crisis and privatization and “standards” have replaced any real funding. As long as you have a slogan like “No Child Left Behind,” you can safely ignore the reality. Much of the world is angry at America for its belligerence, self-interest, and meddling. You see the loss of our former educational, technological, and economic greatness as equivalent to the terrorist’s taunt, so little do you care for distinctions. More telling, your half cares little for what the rest of the world thinks. We own all the nukes and your half is developing increasingly itchy trigger fingers.

For many Americans, the future is a dark and uncertain place and national fears are tangible and multiply with every presidential speech or Homeland Security alert. You want mommy to make it better and you’ll believe anyone who promises that force equals security. Despite your seeming lack of interest in taking rational steps to ensure economic, energy and political success in the future, you cling to irrational views that you can buy or build this physical security. Even dogcatchers in this last election ran on platforms of “Keeping America Safe.” Soon it will be the mandate of house painters.

This new aversion to risk and uncertainty (except for your total disregard of the economy, foreign policy, education, technology, social security and medical care) has led to a country with zero-tolerance for dissent or unrest. Let’s forget for one moment that you have cheered while the Patriot Act has shredded our Constitution. Your expectations of security have led you to even worse excesses. Recently, the Boston Police shot a Red Sox fan to death in a massive show of force to protect – what? – the streets from a few drunken celebrants. Similarly, a University of Massachusetts student was burned severely by flash grenades deployed by the State Police breaking up similar Red Sox hooliganism. Your patriotic Homeland has now become one that now values its security – whatever that is – more than its children. So much for your moral values.

So, to all of you who have bought the fear and the false promises of security: you were not duped, but succumbed to your weaker nature, like victims of get-rich-quick schemes. You were motivated by ignorance and a lack of perspective of what is truly important in a society and in our national history. Led by your “moral values” to reject freedoms for gays, immigrants and dissenters. Led by your own self-absorption to deny the economic, medical and energy security we actually do have some control over. Led by blind animal fear and the false promise of security you will find is a mirage. You have chosen a leader as weak and as bereft of compassion and vision as you.

So, to you, the other half: you deserve the next four years of George Bush.

Your children do not.