Falling Into History

It's a day too late in the sense that a 9/11 essay should have been printed on 9/11, but on 9/12 it still resonates.  I found it on "Mock, Paper, Scissors," the delicious blog of my friend, Tengrain.  It is powerful and very moving and sad.  But it puts the event into perspective and rightly castigates those who joined the jingoist bandwagon even before the smoke cleared.


Tengrain's Introduction:

This is from the SF Chronicle from 2006, which seems like a lifetime ago; It was written by Neva Chonin, who has long since gone from there. I still think this essay remains the best writing about September 11 that I have encountered. This essay has fallen into the void and is no longer on their servers. I want to ensure that it remains on the web, so I am including it verbatim. Oh, we're keeping it on top today!


He’s one of those average men you pass without noticing. A little tubby, wearing beige Dockers and a pink polo shirt. Not much to look at, were it not for the fact that this particular guy is flying. No, flying is the wrong word — he’s falling, falling through the blue sky, a lifetime of memories clutched in his outstretched hands and nothing we know about below.

He’s falling into history.

I can’t remember when or why I started Googling the words “Sept. 11″ and “falling.” I was looking for … something. Chills? Answers? What I found were pictures of the jumpers — the people trapped on the upper floors of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, who chose to breathe free one last time before dying. Some leaped from their offices holding hands, lines of them, clinging to one another until gravity and wind tore them apart. A solo jumper, dubbed “The Falling Man” by media, went on to become emblematic of that day’s unanswered questions.

But it’s the guy in the Dockers, my own private falling man, who haunts me. He’s helped me, too, because five years later I think I finally know why the day of his death owns a horror all its own. It’s got nothing to do with flags and national security and God bless America. It’s basic and internal. It’s this: the disorientation of witnessing the average turn surreal, like a Magritte painting that has escaped its frame and invaded the world to upset the equilibrium of what we earnestly call “reality.”

This, too: It’s the shock of seeing an arrogant and seemingly untouchable superpower sucker-punched on its own turf for the first time, not by another superpower but by humans as puny as we are, whose only weapon is their confounding will to die. It’s the eeriness of watching two iconic towers taken out by passenger planes turned passenger missiles. It felt, then as now, like a conspiracy against reason. Jets do not fly into buildings. Except when they do. A guy in Dockers doesn’t fall from the sky. Except when he does. The whole day defied logic, because it couldn’t have happened. Except it did.

I can grasp the horror of civilians in war zones, living under daily bombardment and burying neighbors and family after every air raid. That was my mother’s life, and her stories are programmed into my brain. What I can’t imagine are the feelings of those trapped in either missiles or targets on Sept. 11. I can’t, for instance, fathom seeing office cubicles disintegrate around me, or watching from a coach-class window seat while my plane descends toward the World Trade Center or the wretched Pentagon or, in the case of United 93, a rolling rural blankness. 

These experiences remain so defiantly strange and outside the repertoire of war that I’m left without context, and without context I’m bewildered. Their singularity defies description. Maybe it was like walking on the moon or surviving a death camp; you had to have been there to know what it was like.

That’s the revelation my falling man gave me: That I will never understand. For me, the tragedy of Sept. 11 has always been measured in political fallout. I remember a friend commenting, two days after the planes hit, “Well, that’s it for Iraq.” He saw the future closing in even then, and he wasn’t the only one.

But the rest of the country — liberal, conservative, atheist, evangelical, gay, straight, black, white — was too busy waving flags to hear reason. Polls continue to show that at least half of the American public believes Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks. Yes, they are just that stupid. Don’t make excuses for them. Don’t blame Fox News for telling them what they want to hear.

Let’s talk about liberal responsibility, instead. Let’s talk about why Democrats of all stripes felt free to put our civil rights into our president’s neoconservative hands. Do you remember what you were doing in the weeks following Sept. 11, 2001? Do you remember your cowardice? I do.

I remember Sandra Bernhard, daring to tell an anti-Bush joke at the Warfield that fall, being booed by a “liberal” San Francisco audience. I also remember writing a column at about the same time questioning where all the flag-waving and jingoism would lead us, and receiving hundreds — yeah, hundreds — of hate letters. That’s not counting the death threats. And I remember getting a few pathetic messages from self-identified Bay Area “progressives” saying they shared my misgivings, but “would never say so in public, of course, ha ha” (actual quote).

Ha ha. See you at the next protest picnic, heroes. If you still think the White House cared about anything more than its own agenda and the cost of real estate when it watched the twin towers go down, if you still believe Bush and company shed one tear for the people trapped in those buildings, well. Wherever your mind’s at must be a sweet, peaceful place. I hope I never go there.

Five years after reality went boom, taking our Constitution, civil rights and common sense with it, I can finally cry for the people who died that day, those whose deaths have been so ruthlessly exploited and memories abused. This, thanks to the image of a guy in Dockers falling through the warm September air. I cry for the unique terror of his death, and I cry because he reminds me of how far we’ve all sunk. His descent lasted less than a minute; we’ve been in a free fall ever since.

Report on Ken Cuccinelli by People For the American Way

Ken Cuccinelli: The Attorney General of the Tea Party

Table of Contents:

• Intro
• Health Care
• Abortion Rights
• Immigration
• Gay Rights
• Voting Rights
• Education & Church-State Separation
• Hostility to Science
• Conspiracy Theories
• Conclusion

Introduction

In the first test for a Republican Party that is still reeling from the disastrous 2012 election, Virginia’s gubernatorial race could have provided the GOP an opportunity to temper its ultraconservative platform or restrain its partnership with the Tea Party. But the choice of state attorney general Ken Cuccinelli to be the party’s presumptive nominee for governor indicates that the GOP is moving even further to the right and letting go of any pretense of moderation or bipartisanship.

Throughout his career, Cuccinelli has been something of a bellwether for the course of the Republican Party. He won his first political office in 2002, when he deposed a moderate, pro-choice Republican incumbent in Virginia’s state senate, leading the incumbent to lament, “The GOP picked someone whose thinking is so ancient, he would be an embarrassment to Northern Virginia.” In 2009, he was on the front lines of the Tea Party movement, winning election to the state attorney general’s office on a wave of anti-Obama rhetoric and renewed culture-war spirit.

As Virginia’s attorney general, Cuccinelli has become a right-wing rock star. He’s picked fights with the Obama administration, scientists, colleges and universities, and supporters of gay, immigrant and reproductive rights, and strategically allied himself with birthers, climate change deniers, Religious Right activists, Tea Party members and the NRA.

Now, Cuccinelli’s gubernatorial candidacy may be a test of how far the GOP is willing and able to take its recent lurch to the right. If the choice of Cuccinelli to head the party’s ticket in Virginia is any clue, the GOP has abandoned any pretense of reflection and soul-searching and decided to go all in on its embrace of the Radical Right’s policies and rhetoric. Whether he succeeds, and whether the national Republican Party will continue to embrace Cuccinelli and the extremism he represents, may tell us quite a lot about the future of our politics.

Health Care

Cuccinelli emerged as a hero of the Tea Party movement when he filed suit against the Affordable Care Act five minutes after it was signed into law. While the Supreme Court ultimately determined the law to be constitutional, Cuccinelli used the legal battle to gain national attention and publicity, especially after he won an initial challenge to the individual mandate in a federal district court. In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network about his challenge to the health law, Cuccinelli suggested that God made him attorney general to save the Constitution from President Barack Obama. He told the conservative website CNSNews that by signing the law, Obama proved himself to be a greater tyrant than King George III.

Not one for subtlety, Cuccinelli told Patrick Henry College students that the health care reform law was “one of the greatest erosions of liberty in your lifetime or mine.” In a column for the far-right American Spectator, he called the law an “onslaught on our liberty” that would lead to an “enormous loss of liberty [that] is antithetical to America’s founding principles.”

He bizarrely asserted that the Affordable Care Act could give the government the ability to “order you to buy a Chevy Equinox.” At a 2010 rally, he went even further, saying that the law might put people in jail: “If the federal government can order you to buy anything with the penalty of going to jail, then you are not a free man or woman in the United States.” There is, of course, no provision in the law regarding jail time for people who do not purchase health insurance.

When the Obama administration ruled that under the ACA, health insurers must provide contraception coverage free of copay, Cuccinelli urged opponents to prepare to “go to jail” rather than comply with the mandate.

He has even implicitly compared his fight against universal health care and opposition to marriage equality to the civil rights movement, citing Martin Luther King, Jr. in a speech to Virginia clergy.
Cuccinelli is an outspoken critic not only of the health care reform law but also of social safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. In his 2013 book, The Last Line of Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty, he claims that people receiving such benefits are “dependent” on the government and “feel they can’t afford to have the programs taken away, no matter how inefficient, poorly run, or costly to the rest of society.” He writes that such programs were created by “bad politicians [who] set out to grow government in order to increase their own power and influence” by winning the support of the people who are “getting the goodies.”

Abortion Rights

In his 2012 commencement speech at Patrick Henry College, Cuccinelli recalled that he “first got into politics” a decade earlier because he objected to his Republican state senator’s support for abortion rights. Cuccinelli went on to defeat that state senator, Warren Barry, in the 2002 Republican primary in his Northern Virginia district. Barry, displaying some prescience about the future of the Republican Party, endorsed Cuccinelli’s Democratic opponent, saying, “I don’t want to make a habit of endorsing Democrats but, in this case, the GOP picked someone whose thinking is so ancient, he would be an embarrassment to Northern Virginia.”

Cuccinelli’s views on reproductive rights are indeed “ancient.” He has argued that the anti-choice movement is similar to the fight to abolish slavery. “Over time, the truth demonstrates its own rightness, and its own righteousness,” he said. “Our experience as a country has demonstrated that on one issue after another. Start right at the beginning: slavery. Today, abortion.”

He is a proponent of radical “personhood” legislation, which would classify zygotes as “persons,” thereby criminalizing all abortions, several common forms of contraception, stem-cell research and in-vitro fertilization. Such “personhood” laws could even prohibit doctors from treating life-threatening ectopic pregnancies.

As a state senator, Cuccinelli proposed a bill that would require doctors to anesthetize the fetus before an abortion, a procedure that could jeopardize the life of the pregnant woman. He also sought to require any doctor performing abortions on a minor to “preserve fetal tissue extracted” during the procedure and send it to the state Department of Forensic Science “for the purpose of identifying the father of the fetus and determining if a crime was committed.” [PDF]

As attorney general, Cuccinelli successfully pressured Virginia’s Board of Health to overrule a previous judgment and approve “TRAP” (targeted regulation of abortion providers) laws that will likely result in the closure of the majority of the state’s abortion clinics.

According to The Virginian-Pilot, Cuccinelli “threatened Board of Health members that they could be denied state legal counsel and have to pay for their own defense if they again disregard his advice about relaxing controversial abortion clinic rules and litigation ensues.”

Cuccinelli has tried to defund Planned Parenthood in Virginia and has made the outrageous claims that the organization is involved in sex trafficking and targets the black community. He has also praised and raised money for the radical anti-choice website LifeSiteNews and spoken in favor of abstinence-only programs, warning that sex education promotes “destructive” activities and is part of an “anything goes agenda.”

Immigration

In 2010, Cuccinelli signed on to an amicus brief defending Arizona’s draconian anti-immigrant SB 1070 and said that he was “stunned that the government has sued Arizona.” He even issued a legal opinion in Virginia that mirrors one of SB 1070’s most controversial provisions, authorizing local police officers to check the immigration status of people they stop, detain or arrest for any reason.

While in the state senate, Cuccinelli introduced a resolution [PDF] urging Congress to call a constitutional convention to rescind the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. In addition, Cuccinelli tried to amend labor laws [PDF] to allow employers to fire employees because of the “inability or refusal to speak English at the workplace” and to disqualify such workers from receiving unemployment benefits. He twice opposed bills that would allow undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition rates at Virginia public colleges and universities.  He even opposed the immigration reform plan proposed by the Bush administration, arguing that the bill was “something like amnesty” and represented “something of a ‘last straw’ for ordinary Republicans.”

Not only has Cuccinelli embraced the extremist policies of the anti-immigrant Right, he’s adopted their dehumanizing rhetoric as well. For instance, in a 2012 radio interview, Cuccinelli compared the deportation of undocumented immigrants to pest control.

Gay Rights

Cuccinelli, who voted in favor of a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and civil unions, used part of his commencement speech at the ultraconservative Patrick Henry College to chastise President Obama for his endorsement of gay marriage, claiming Obama thinks he knows “better than God”:

One [issue] I deal with is when the government and the media want to assault our faith and try to convince the world that their way is better than God’s way, like the president of the United States is doing this week. Where are we going to stand? We’ve got to fight to protect Christian values in a world that often tries to bury them, to say the least.

He also commended the Virginia Christian Alliance for distributing a “Real Men Marry Women” bumper sticker and warned that the “homosexual agenda” was a threat to the family:

One of the things that I faced in the Senate when I would be defending the continual assault, and it’s always going on, the homosexual agenda is there every year and it’s carried forward every year and there is this discussion of the word ‘family.’ I would tell you there are elements of our society that aren’t real well-connected with the dictionary; it’s a real problem for them.

He has argued that same-sex unions “harm children” and defended sodomy laws after the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas found them to be unconstitutional.
In March 2010, Cuccinelli sent a letter [PDF] to Virginia’s public colleges and universities directing them to drop job protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity and expression:

It is my advice that the law and public policy of the Commonwealth of Virginia prohibit a college or university from including “sexual orientation, “gender identity,” “gender expression,” or like classification, as a protected class within its non-discrimination policy, absent specific authorization from the General Assembly.

He defended his position by arguing that LGBT persons are not protected under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause because categories like “sexual orientation” would “never have been contemplated by the people who wrote and voted for and passed the 14th Amendment.” Of course, in 1996 the Supreme Court found in Romer v. Evansthat laws promoting anti-gay discrimination do indeed violate the Equal Protection Clause.

A year later, Cuccinelli reversed the legal opinion of his predecessor and barred the State Board of Social Services from implementing a proposal to allow same-sex couples to adopt children. He also ended a contract between the attorney general’s office and a law firm after the firm refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act on behalf of the House Republican leadership.

As a member of the state senate, Cuccinelli opposed legislation that permitted companies to voluntarily extend health benefits to employees’ domestic partners and condemned homosexuality as “intrinsically wrong” and “not healthy to society”:

My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong. They’re intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law-based country, it’s appropriate to have policies that reflect that. ... They don’t comport with natural law. I happen to think that it represents (to put it politely; I need my thesaurus to be polite) behavior that is not healthy to an individual and in aggregate is not healthy to society.

Cuccinelli routinely works with anti-gay groups, including Concerned Women for America, Faith and Freedom Coalition and Liberty Counsel, and with far-right activists such as Del. Bob Marshall and Virginia Christian Alliance board member Joe Ellison. His Religious Right bona fides were further confirmed when he tried to censor Virginia’s Great Seal by covering up the goddess Virtus’ bosom, a move for which he offered shifting explanations.

Voting Rights

Cuccinelli has spoken out against Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires the Department of Justice to review changes in voting practices in states that have a history of state-sanctioned racial discrimination, claiming that Virginia has “outgrown” Justice Department oversight. As a state senator, he voted against efforts to make it easier to cast an absentee ballot and twice opposed efforts to restore voting rights to nonviolent felons before he switched his position to follow Governor Bob McDonnell.

Education and Church-State Separation

Cuccinelli wants to abolish the U.S. Department of Education and has endorsed tax credits that are a back door for private and parochial school vouchers. He is also a proponent of the conservative homeschooling movement, which seeks to reject public schools and raise a generation of Christian Right activists. (His own five children are homeschooled.) In his 2012 commencement address to the homeschooling movement’s flagship Patrick Henry College, Cuccinelli offered up classic culture-war rhetoric, telling graduates, “The fight is against the tide of political correctness, the intelligentsia and the media.”

Cuccinelli, a Roman Catholic, has lamented that the Catholic Church’s emphasis on social justice and service to marginalized groups has “helped create a culture of dependency on government, not God” and made Church leadership appear “soft and weak.”

He also worked with the right-wing Virginia Christian Alliance in 2011 to give advice to pastors on how to get involved in politics without risking their churches’ tax-exempt status and fondly recalled a time when candidates for public office “couldn’t of run for office in most parts of this country if you weren’t known in your community to be a man of faith.”

“The secular humanist attack is very real, very alive,” he warned the VCA, telling members to “Google up the Humanist Manifesto” of 1933 to “read the game plan for the other side, as if there is a vast left-wing conspiracy, and you will find out there is. They had a plan eighty years ago and if you read it now it reads like unfolded history, including the attack on God himself.”

Cuccinelli told the group that it “drives me a little bit nutty” that the voter guide of the Catholic Herald, the newspaper of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, lacks “discrimination between issues,” meaning that it doesn’t emphasize stances on topics like abortion rights over those like combating poverty and immigration reform.

Hostility to Science

Cuccinelli has created a hostile climate for the scientific community – which he criticized, along with the media, for being “viciously secularized” – and has used the attorney general’s office to go on a witch hunt against climate scientists.

As attorney general, Cuccinelli attempted to compel the University of Virginia to hand over the emails and research documents of Environmental Sciences professor Michael Mann for review under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act.

Both a county court and the state supreme court blocked Cuccinelli’s request for what the Washington Post described as “five grant applications prepared by former professor Michael Mann and all e-mails between Mann and his research assistants, secretaries and 39 other scientists from across the country.”

Dr. Mann said in response to the lawsuit that Cuccinelli and other climate change deniers have tried to make “targets out of individual scientists whose work has played a prominent role in the discourse on climate change.” Mann added that Cuccinelli was trying to “intimidate climate scientists” and “chill the scientific discourse surrounding a topic that he obviously feels uncomfortable about, human-caused climate change.”

Cuccinelli also unsuccessfully sued the Environmental Protection Agency for seeking to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, arguing that the EPA based its decision on the “unreliable, unverifiable and doctored” findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He pointed to the so-called “Climategate” scandal to claim that scientists are manipulating data to make the case for climate change. The scientists implicated in the manufactured right-wing scandal have been exonerated.

Conspiracy Theories

In a campaign town hall meeting, Cuccinelli said that his family is considering not registering his son for a Social Security number “because it is being used to track you.”

Shortly after being sworn in as attorney general, Cuccinelli gave credence to birther conspiracy theories when he said that President Obama’s birth certificate “will get tested” once “someone is convicted of violating [a federal law] and one of their defenses will be it is not a law because someone qualified to be president didn’t sign it.” He even said that it was “possible” that the attorney general’s office would look into birther claims, maintaining that it “doesn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility” that Obama was born in Kenya. In a statement after his comments leaked, Cuccinelli backed down, saying he was merely offering a “hypothetical legal response” to a question and that he doesn’t believe in the birther conspiracy theory himself.

Cuccinelli also backed the claims of two radio talk show hosts who doubted the validity of President Obama’s reelection because Obama lost the four states — Georgia, Tennessee, Kansas and Indiana — that have the country’s strictest voter ID laws, telling them: “You’re preaching to the choir.I’m with you, completely with you.”

He even falsely claimed that the government of Washington, D.C., was working to deliberately displace rats to Virginia.

Gun Activism

A close ally of the National Rifle Association, Cuccinelli has championed the concealed carrying of weapons in bars, restaurants, public parks and churches. He called officials at George Mason University “idiots” and “crazy” because the school prohibits guns in campus buildings, and he issued a legal opinion that “people with concealed carry permits are not subject to a University of Virginia policy prohibiting individuals from bringing guns into school facilities without permission.” As a state senator, he helped defeat a bill that would have closed the gun show loophole on background checks.

Conclusion

Far from an aberration, Cuccinelli’s candidacy shows how far to the right the GOP has moved in recent years. Many predictions about a time of Republican self-reflection and moderation after the party’s 2012 defeats have failed to materialize. Instead, the GOP seems all the more determined to elevate right-wing candidates like Cuccinelli, embracing his attacks on everything from Social Security to the “homosexual agenda,” and confirming that Tea Party extremism is now an entrenched part of the Republican platform.

Note:  More info is available at People For the American Way.  Photo credit:  Gage Skidmore

Christian Radio Host Says Gays Who Marry Should Die

The so-called "Christian" radio host has a name. It's a rather common name. Kevin Swanson. Mr. Swanson "believes" the Bible and if the Bible says something is a sin, and the person who commits that sin should be killed, well, that's God's word and Mr. Swanson wants to get God's word out to all people.

 In the Hebrew Bible, book of Leviticus, there are at least a couple of passages which indicate God would be displeased if a man lay with a man as with a woman. Oh, and a woman should not lay with a beast. That would make God very angry.

Mr. Swanson, having read at least one verse in the book of Leviticus (20:13), is insistent that gay people should be put to death for that is God's command. He doesn't seem to want to kill them himself but he is willing to tell them that God wants them to die so he's trying to be invited to as many gay weddings as possible so he can lay before those involved God's holy word and tell them they "have done an abhorrent thing; [that] they shall be put to death." [Mr. Swanson's version of Leviticus is a bit different than mine because he's not been reading the Jewish Bible but a Christian version of the Hebrew Bible]. In Mr. Swanson's version, gays have "committed an abomination." It's still deserving of death, though, any way you look at it.

Part of the problem comes in pronoun form. The Bible refers specifically to males. So far, at least, lesbians are off the hook.

But one must wonder why that particular verse sticks in Mr. Swanson's craw. Really. God has much more to say in that very chapter. Let's list them:

1. If you offer your child to the god, Molech, you should be stoned to death.
2. If you turn "to ghosts and familiar spirits and ... [go] ... astray after them" God will cut you off from his people.
3. If you insult your father and mother you shall be put to death.
4. If you commit adultery with a married woman both you and the woman shall be put to death.
5. If you commit incest, both involved shall be put to death.
6. If you marry a woman and her mother, the whole bunch of you will be put to death.
7. If either a man or woman has intercourse with a beast, the people and the beasts shall be put to death.


Let's go back to chapter 19 of the book of Leviticus and see what God says there.

1. You shall keep God's sabbaths. Now Sabbath refers to the 7th day which we call Saturday. I wonder if Mr. Swanson keeps God's sabbaths?
2. There are a series of commands which follow similar to the so-called 10 Commands, such as prohibitions against stealing and lying and defrauding others.
3. "You shall not insult the deaf, or place a stumbling block before the blind."
4. You shall not favor the rich and you should judge your kinsmen fairly.
5. Don't hate. "Love your fellow as yourself." (Wait, didn't Jesus say that?) Don't seek revenge.
6. Don't wear clothing which mixes two different kinds of materials. Oops!
7. Do not eat any animal with its blood. No more rare filet mignon, Mr. Swanson!
8. Do not engage in divination or soothsaying. That means most media folks are in a heap of trouble!
9. Do not, Mr. Swanson, "round off the side-growth on your head, or destroy the side-growth of your beard."
10. Do not "incise any marks on yourselves."  No tattoos!
11. You shall rise before the aged and show deference to the old. I don't think you do that very well, Mr. Swanson!
12. And speaking of immigration: "The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself..."


Now we're almost done, for this is not meant to be a comprehensive list of God's laws, but simply some representative samples. There are a few yet to be added. In Leviticus, Chapter 23, we read:

1. You may not do any work at all on the Sabbath! None. Nada. Saturday is a holy day to the Lord!
2. This is followed by a long list of necessary observances of "sacred occasions," and the rules are quite strict. For example, "In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, at twilight, there shall be a passover offering to the Lord, and on the fifteenth day of that month the Lord's Feast of Unleavened Bread. You shall eat unleavened bread for seven days. On the first day you shall celebrate a sacred occasion: you shall not work at your occupations. Seven days you shall make offerings by fire to the Lord..."


Chapter 24 says something about blasphemy.

1. "Anyone who blasphemes his God shall bear his guilt; if he also pronounces the name Lord, he shall be put to death." Uh oh! I know lots of people in serious trouble. Anyone cursing his God and pronouncing the name of YHVH is doomed!
2. If you kill a human being you shall be put to death.
3. If you maim someone, you shall be so maimed, "fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth."


Okay, that's enough. The point should be obvious but I have known literally many hundreds of Christians who miss it. The point is this: If you are going to pick one passage from the Bible, whether it's the book of Leviticus or another, and claim that has validity for us today, then you must say the same thing about all the commands that God gives in the Bible.

You cannot pick and choose. You cannot say, "Well, that was valid then but times have changed and so we must interpret things differently today."

 Mr. Swanson is my foil and I don't give a wit about him as he is an ignorant and vicious person who defames the name of his Lord. But there are too many ignorant souls who believe as he does. You cannot claim that homosexuality is an "abomination" or an "abhorrence" while at the same time neglect to honor the Sabbath or fail to follow the rules for God's "sacred occasions."

And you cannot say that the latter apply to the ancient Hebrews but not to us today and especially not to Christians today because we are no longer bound by the "old" Law. For if that were true then the passage relative to homosexuality must be thrown out along with the rest of the commands that God gave in the book of Leviticus and elsewhere. You can't grill a hamburger on your patio and claim homosexuals deserve to die. You cannot get a tattoo and shave your beard and treat illegal immigrants poorly! It comes down to this: If homosexuality is wrong, so is wearing a piece of clothing which contains a mix of materials.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Swanson! 


Notes:  The photo comes from Raw Story.  There is an article dealing with this topic at Raw Story here.  

Biblical quotations are from "The Jewish Study Bible - Tanakh Translation."

Some pithy thoughts on U.S. wars and Syrian intervention by Art Woodstone

I am less interested in determining whether one war of another we engage in is legal than I am in whether they are logical or just.  As far as I'm concerned, none of our wars--none!--since World War II has made any sense.

With Korea and Vietnam we were motivated in great measure by our irrational fear that if we didn't get involved the dominoes would fall to the ineluctable spread of evil communism.

In retrospect, while the idea of the entire Korean peninsula dominated by fascists from the north is anathema to me, it is, in the last analysis, a big so-what; try imagining how much success a North Korean tyrant would have invading Japan or how little he'd have invading [chuckle here] China.

As to Vietnam falling to communism, the fall has been virtually invisible; last time I looked, the defeated south was a flourishing example of small but unrestrained free enterprise.

Please tell me there was a logical of ethical reason to invade Iraq or any logical or ethical reason to stay in Afghanistan as long as we have.

Whether Congress gives Obama permission to strike surgically [more chuckles] at the Syrian government is irrelevant; our potential involvement remains illogical and unethical if not technically illegal.  Syrians have been murdering each other for two years with guns, cannons, planes, even knives.  All of a sudden we are horrified because the bastard Assad has decided to inflict death by gas.  If there is any logic to our intervening, we should have intervened the moment the bullets started flying.

Our national impulse to get involved in foreign wars stems, I insist, from a disgraceful macho passion to express ourselves violently on the lamest excuses handy.  Our President promises to keep America ground troops out of Syria but he is obviously willing to inflict death by air.

Of course, he claims it is our moral responsibility to involve ourselves and kill some Syrians in order to stop them from killing other Syrians.  [My emphasis.]

For once idiots like Rand Paul actually have a good idea--stay away from Syria and let the savages on both sides fight it out among themselves.

Our leaders always tell us the truth

 

 That was then.

 This is now.

Not a hill of beans of difference.

U.S. use of chemical weapons

  

CounterPunch / By Jeffrey St. Clair

America Has Deployed Chemical and Biological Weapons on the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and More

Laying bare the total hypocrisy of a 'principled' attack on Syria.
September 3, 2013  |

  

This essay is excerpted from Jeffrey St. Clair’s book Grand Theft Pentagon. As Washington deliberates about a 'principled' response to an alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government, the history of the US's own use of chemical and biological weapons should be read widely.

The United States, which has deployed its CBW arsenal against the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Haitian boat people and Canada, plus exposure of hundreds of thousands of unwitting US citizens to an astonishing array of germ agents and toxic chemicals, killing dozens of people.

The US experimentation with bio-weapons goes back to the distribution of cholera-infect blankets to American Indian tribes in the 1860s. In 1900, US Army doctors in the Philippines infected five prisoners with a variety of plague and 29 prisoners with Beriberi. At least four of the subjects died. In 1915, a doctor working with government grants exposed 12 prisoners in Mississippi to pellagra, an incapacitating disease that attacks the central nervous system.

After World War I, the United States went on a chemical weapons binge, producing millions of barrels of mustard gas and Lewisite. Thousands of US troops were exposed to these chemical agents in order to “test the efficacy of gas masks and protective clothing”. The Veterans Administration refused to honor disability claims from victims of such experiments. The Army also deployed mustard gas against anti-US protesters in Puerto Rico and the Philippines in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1931, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, then under contract with the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations, initiated his horrific Puerto Rico Cancer Experiments, infecting dozens of unwitting subjects with cancer cells.At least thirteen of his victims died as a result. Rhoads went on to headof the US Army Biological Weapons division and to serve on the Atomic Energy Commission, where he oversaw radiation experiments on thousands of US citizens. In memos to the Department of Defense, Rhoads expressed his opinion that Puerto Rican dissidents could be “eradicated” with the judicious use of germ bombs.

In 1942, US Army and Navy doctors infected 400 prisoners in Chicago withmalaria in experiments designed to get “a profile of the disease and develop a treatment for it.” Most of the inmates were black and none was informed of the risks of the experiment. Nazi doctors on trial at Nuremberg cited the Chicago malaria experiments as part of their defense.

At the close of World War II, the US Army put on its payroll, Dr. Shiro Ishii, the head of the Imperial Army of Japan’s bio-warfare unit. Dr. Ishii had deployed a wide range of biological and chemical agents against Chinese and Allied troops. He also operated a large research center in Manchuria,where he conducted bio-weapons experiments on Chinese, Russian and American prisoners of war. Ishii infected prisoners with tetanus; gave them typhoid-laced tomatoes; developed plague-infected fleas; infected women with syphilis; performed dissections on live prisoners; and exploded germ bombs over dozens of men tied to stakes. In a deal hatched by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Ishii turned over more than 10,000 pages of his “research findings”to the US Army, avoided prosecution for war crimes and was invited to lecture at Ft. Detrick, the US Army bio-weapons center in Frederick, Maryland.

In 1950 the US Navy sprayed large quantities of serratia marcescens, a bacteriological agent, over San Francisco, promoting an outbreak of pneumonia-like illnesses and causing the death of at least one man, Ed Nevins.

A year later, Chinese Premier Chou En-lai charged that the US military and the CIA had used bio-agents against North Korea and China. Chou produced statements from 25 US prisoners of war backing him his claims that the US had dropped anthrax contaminated feathers, mosquitoes and fleas carrying Yellow Fever and propaganda leaflets spiked with cholera over Manchuria and North Korea.

From 1950 through 1953, the US Army released chemical clouds over six US and Canadian cities. The tests were designed to test dispersal patterns of chemical weapons. Army records noted that the compounds used over Winnipeg, Canada, where there were numerous reports of respiratory illnesses, involved cadmium, a highly toxic chemical.

In 1951 the US Army secretly contaminated the Norfolk Naval Supply Centerin Virginia with infectious bacteria. One type was chosen because blackswere believed to be more susceptible than whites. A similar experiment was undertaken later that year at Washington, DC’s National Airport. The bacteria was later linked to food and blood poisoning and respiratory problems.

Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida were the targets of repeatedArmy bio-weapons experiments in 1956 and 1957. Army CBW researchers released millions of mosquitoes on the two towns in order to test the ability of insects to carry and deliver yellow fever and dengue fever. Hundreds of residents fell ill, suffering from fevers, respiratory distress, stillbirths, encephalitis and typhoid. Army researchers disguised themselves as public health workers in order photograph and test the victims. Several deaths were reported.

In 1965 the US Army and the Dow Chemical Company injected dioxin into 70 prisoners (most of them black) at the Holmesburg State Prison in Pennsylvania. The prisoners developed severe lesions which went untreated for seven months. A year later, the US Army set about the most ambitious chemical warfare operation in history.

From 1966 to 1972, the United States dumped more than 12 million gallonsof Agent Orange (a dioxin-powered herbicide) over about 4.5 million acresof South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The government of Vietnam estimate the civilian casualties from Agent Orange at more than 500,000. The legacy continues with high levels of birth defects in areas that were saturated with the chemical. Tens of thousands of US soldiers were also the victims of Agent Orange.

In a still classified experiment, the US Army sprayed an unknown bacterial agent in the New York Subway system in 1966. It is not known if the test caused any illnesses.

A year later, the CIA placed a chemical substance in the drinking water supply of the Food and Drug Administration headquarters in Washington, DC. The test was designed to see if it was possible to poison drinking water with LSD or other incapacitating agents.

In 1969, Dr. D.M. McArtor, the deputy director for Research and Technologyfor the Department of Defense, asked Congress to appropriate $10 millionfor the development of a synthetic biological agent that would be resistant” to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease”.

In 1971 the first documented cases of swine fever in the western hemisphere showed up in Cuba. A CIA agent later admitted that he had been instructed to deliver the virus to Cuban exiles in Panama, who carried the virus into Cuba in March of 1991. This astounding admission received scant attention in the US press.

In 1980, hundreds of Haitian men, who had been locked up in detention camps in Miami and Puerto Rico, developed gynecomasia after receiving “hormone” shots from US doctors. Gynecomasia is a condition causing males to developfull-sized female breasts.

In 1981, Fidel Castro blamed an outbreak of dengue fever in Cuba on the CIA. The fever killed 188 people, including 88 children. In 1988, a Cuban exile leader named Eduardo Arocena admitted “bringing some germs” into Cuba in 1980.

Four years later an epidemic of dengue fever struck Managua, Nicaragua.Nearly 50,000 people came down with the fever and dozens died. This was the first outbreak of the disease in Nicaragua. It occurred at the height of the CIA’s war against the Sandinista government and followed a series of low-level “reconnaissance” flights over the capital city.

In 1996, the Cuba government again accused the US of engaging in “biological aggression”. This time it involved an outbreak of thrips palmi, an insect that kills potato crops, palm trees and other vegetation. Thrips first showed up in Cuba on December 12, 1996, following low-level flights over the island by US government spray planes. The US was able to quash a United Nations investigation of the incident.

At the close of the Gulf War, the US Army exploded an Iraqi chemical weapons depot at Kamashiya. In 1996, the Department of Defense finally admitted that more than 20,000 US troops were exposed to VX and sarin nerve agentsas a result of the US operation at Kamashiya. This may be one cause of Gulf War Illness, another cause is certainly the experimental vaccines unwittingly given to more than 100,000 US troops.


This article appeared at Alternet and is used with permission.

Mr. Colbert's Smile File + Suicide by Eric Bolling

Good News from Moveon.org

Sometimes there is good news which needs to be shared.  Moveon.org is dedicated to making this country live up to its promise, to righting the wrongs and the unjustices that are pervasive and detrimental to so many of our fellow citizens.

One of the ways the Moveon organization does this is by helping people start petitions to bring something that is wrong into public view.  This video explains, in dramatic fashion, what can happen when one person decides to take a stand.  Enjoy!

Islamic Society files grievance in Tampa Bay

Down Tampa Bay way in Florida, the Islamic Society of the Tampa Bay Area has filed a grievance with school administrators to allow children of Muslim parents to leave school early once a week for religious services.

We've heard before that this is the kind of thing we can expect to happen when an area's Muslim population increases beyond a certain level.  The larger the number of Muslims the greater the demands.

In England, Muslims have demanded a variety of special privileges for their children in public schools; indeed they've insisted that taxpayers fund Muslim schools.  In Sweden, Muslims have gone so far as to demand that the Islamic faith be taught in public schools.  France has experienced similar problems.

And now it's happening here.

According to Hemant Mehta of the Friendly Atheist blog, the Islamic Society, referencing Florida laws regarding respecting the religious beliefs of students, are demanding that Muslim students be allowed to leave school at 12:30 every Friday to attend "mandatory Khutbah (sermon) and prayers."  According to Islamic teaching, such attendance is required and failing to attend is a sin.

It is true that other religions receive recognition at different times during the year for religious observance.  But not once a week.  As Mr. Mehta notes, the time involved in this request means Muslim students would miss about 20% of their educational requirement.


Let us hope that the school officials in the Tampa Bay Area gracefully but firmly deny this request!  Unfortunately, I'll bet this is just the beginning.  It won't be long before there will be other demands, perhaps even the demand, on the grounds of "fairness," that Islam in all its glory, be presented to public school students by local Imams.


Final comment:  I see no reason why public schools need to "accommodate" any student's religious beliefs.  And it is probably unconstitutional to shut down public schools so that students may observe religious celebrations.  If not, it should be.  Religion is about indoctrination.   Education is about inculcating a desire to know what is real and true as opposed to what is unreal and merely pious rubbish. 


Read Mr. Mehta's complete post here.

The GOP Clinging to God and Guns in Caldwell County, Texas.

Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea if at least parts of Texas seceded from the Union.  Those good ol' boys could redo the U.S. Constitution so it's more to their liking, and they could fix the Bible with an 11th Commandment:  "Thou shalt cling to both your God and your guns lest you git shot in the ass by a Democrat." 

Thanks to Christian Nightmares.

For Mr. Kerry, the right war just came along!

From Kapshen.nethttp://kapshen.net/september-4-2013/

Shanah Tovah - Happy New Year

Rosh Hashana being celebrated in Berlin, 1945.

Rosh Hashana began at sundown, September 4.

Rosh Hashanah (Hebrew: ראש השנה‎, literally "head [of] the year"), is the Jewish New Year. It is the first of the High Holy Days or Yamim Nora'im ("Days of Awe") which usually occur in the early autumn of the Northern Hemisphere. Rosh Hashanah is a two-day celebration, which begins on the first day of Tishrei. The day is believed to be the anniversary of the creation of Adam and Eve or Adam and Lilith, the first man and woman, and their first actions toward the realization of mankind's role in God's world. Rosh Hashanah customs include sounding the shofar (a hollowed-out ram's horn) and eating symbolic foods such as apples dipped in honey to evoke a "sweet new year".

-- Wikipedia

An alternative way to deal with the Syrian crisis

"A grassroots progressive in Oklahoma, Tom Guild, is an independent thinker and is going to have an open mind. 'Syria is a basket case,' he told us, 'with heartbreaking tragedies piled one on another. The [Assad] government is evil and much of the opposition is affiliated with enemies of the United States. We should tread carefully and make sure we are not drawn into another war without end. American cannot be the world’s policeman, and we have paid a heavy price trying to do so.'

"Nick Ruiz, a professor who once ran as a Green, is the progressive Democratic candidate in the Orlando area running against GOP warmonger John Mica, also gave us a position just before Obama announced he would ask for a congressional vote before attacking.

'Why not conference and engage the Syrian leadership and factions-- and Iran, along with Russia and China for good measure? Before drones and Tomahawks, bombs and killing; as an alternative to the stereotypical language of violence that the world is so tired of hearing. Let's talk about it; not naively, but intensely; let's argue about what's happening in Syria, with the Syrian leadership and rebellion, their neighboring ally Iran, and advocates of sovereignty: Russia and China. We get it. We understand boundaries and sovereignty. And we ought to thoroughly understand rebellion, having been borne of it... The world's interests are better served with an eye toward de-escalation, rather than aggravation and aggrandizement... My vote would be NO on assaulting Syria.

'As Democrats we know better than to fight unjust wars; we do not leave the poor defenseless, nor erode civil rights or ignore social injustice. We helped to define these vital, democratic concepts in the modern era. When our leaders change for the worse, and seek to lead us toward the lowest common denominator, then we should thank them for whatever good they've done in the past-- but must tell them 'No, we will not follow you there, and further, you will not lead us any longer.' It is a crucial time when one must have the good sense to choose new leaders. But it's now true: that time is upon us.'"

From Crooks & Liars here.

Stupid people in large groups

Could it be...

   there is a correlation...

      between the message on this sign...

         the U.S. Congress...

            and the need to punish

               Bashar al-Assad of Syria?

The Ten Commandments - by NonStampCollector

One wonders if the wingnuts who want to post this nonsense on the halls of our judicial palaces have even read them!

Here's more of these delicious satires on YouTube - the NonStampCollector's creations.

The Arab world ignores Syrian pleas for help.

From:  Today's News.  Captioned.

Jon Stewart - Obama, Syria and The Red Line

Jon Stewart was back from his summer vacation with a vengeance this Tuesday and he let the Obama administration have it for the push for military intervention in Syria. Stewart, like a lot of us, wanted to know why the push now to go in there when we've already seen a hundred thousand Syrians slaughtered by other means than chemical weapons, and thinks he found his explanation.
After pointing out the sheer hypocrisy of the United States making an issue of another country using chemical weapons, Stewart showed several clips of pundits and Sen. Ted Cruz saying we're going to look weak, and "that bullies and tyrants don't respect weakness," Stewart responded:

STEWART: Oh right! We have to bomb Syria because we're in seventh grade! And the red line... the red line that they crossed is actually a dick-measuring ribbon.

Why does holding back look like weakness? Isn't it maturity? It's like when a guy's picking on Clark Kent and he doesn't do anything, even though he knows he could throw that guy into the sun.

I'll tell you what would be real weakness, Clark Kent laying waste to a town because someone called him a pussy.

You know what else is weakness? Asking the advice of a plague of idiots who got the same issue completely wrong in Iraq -- or as those people are known on cable... experts.

Cue Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld and Bloody Bill Kristol doing just that.

STEWART: Hey everybody! The idiot parade is in town! Shut the f**k up! Shut the f**k up!....

And on he went. My thoughts exactly any time I see one of them on the television. Welcome back Jon.

Thanks to Crooks & Liars.  The above commentary by Heather.

So what's changed?

Nine years ago, Uncle Rummy spoke of the need to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.

So, what's changed?

The names.  Today it's Syria that needs our intervention to rid Syria of Bashar al-Assad and his chemical weapons and it's Uncle Kerry preaching the same old crap.

Let's be damned for not blowing up the world!

One of the surest signs we ought to step back and reconsider Obama's desire to send the American military to blow Syria apart is the fact that Boehner and Cantor and McCain approve.  There's something seriously wrong with this picture!

The picture got even more dismal when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed her support for Obama's plan of military action.  It darkened some more when Ms. Pelosi also climbed aboard the military juggernaut! 

When I read of these things a creepy realization dawned:  there's no hope.  When push comes to shove, there's not much difference between the Democrats and Republicans.  They both follow the path of least resistance -- morality or goodness or just plain common sense be damned.

We are told by Democrats in whom we have believed that if we do not send rockets into Syria the consequences will be horrific!  Shades of Iraq.  Again, we're not told what those consequences will be--just that they will be bad, very bad.  We must start shooting now!  Fire up those missiles!


We've heard all these rationales before.  Kerry says it's not like Iraq.  Why not?  How not?  It's not like Afghanistan, he said.  Again, he didn't, so far as I know, explain the difference.  We're not going to war he said.  Well, when the hell did bombing another country not constitute a state of war?

And then later today, he hemmed and hawed about putting boots on the ground.

This is the way it always begins.  And it always ends with our young American men and women dying in the trenches while the rich and the powerful and the mighty sit home sipping martinis, getting deferments for their kids, collecting bonus checks from the companies that provide the resources to fight the war.

[Here's a thought:  Follow the money!  Who or whom will benefit from military action in Syria.  It won't be the American taxpayer!!!!]

Well, where the hell is the money coming from?  We've got a sequester going.  All kinds of necessary things, like education, are suffering from that particular bit of stupidity which was the "gift" of Boehner, Cantor, McCain and other nogoodniks in our Congress.  We haven't begun to pay China for the Iraq war!  Isn't it strange that all these folks in our government who have been weeping and whining about our debt, claiming it is strangling us and will be the death of us, can somehow find the money to go off on military misadventures but never can find a cent rebuild a few bridges that are falling down, or hire more teachers or put more cops on the beat?


Norm Chomsky says that if we do what Obama wants we will be guilty of committing war crimes.  Of course, that fact doesn't get a lot of traction seeing as how there isn't anyone or any country powerful enough or stupid enough to try to stop us.  And we remember too clearly how the Bush-Cheney gang got off scot-free even though there was no question under the law that our militaristic adventures in Iraq were illegal and based upon a series of lies and evasions which means that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al., are clearly war criminals. 


But let's turn this around.  Let's say our treatment of "illegal" immigrants and our treatment of minorities was thought to be horrendous by another country, Mexico, for example.  So, Mexico, in its sovereignty, decided to shoot a few rockets into Border Patrol stations along the Rio Grande to teach us a lesson

We would scream bloody murder and bomb Mexico into little bitty tacos. 

Now perhaps our treatment of minorities and "illegals" does not measure up to the same standard of dastardlyness that Assad's chemical weapons do, but that really isn't the point.  The point is encompassed this way: 

By what right does an American president and an American Congress, against the majority will of the people of these United States, shoot rockets or missiles or whatever the hell they've got planned into another country to "punish" the leader? 

There is no such right, even though George W. Bush attempted to create one. 


But there's more.  Why did we not intervene when 100,000 people were killed by Assad's forces?  Is it OK to kill by automatic weapons, bombs, grenades, etc., but not by using other weapons we find particularly distasteful?  A few hundred Syrians killed by "chemical" weapons justifies American intervention?  What nonsense! 

And more.  We don't even know who the "good" guy rebels are and who the "bad" guy rebels are?  We do know, however, the al Qaeda wants Assad gone and other terrorist groups are actively present in Syria!  So, will our military might assist them in reaching their goals, whatever such goals might be?

And more.  If we really cared about the Syrian people, we should find some creative ways to assist the thousands upon thousands of refugees who have fled the country and are now living in despair and misery.

And finally:  It's a no-win situation for the United States.  We are hated in the Middle East for our interventions and not one Arab anywhere gives a damn about our good intentions.  Whatever we do or don't do we will be damned. 

So let's be damned for not blowing up the world for a change!

After The Rapture

Is the US working with al Qaeda against Assad?

 [World War I gas masks]

According to an article appearing in the Daily Beast "Cheat Sheet," U.S. spies intercepted various phone calls and other communications in Syria immediately following the attacks which killed so many people and these communications gave indication that the Assad regime had used chemical weapons.  Our spies were unable, however, to accumulate any physical evidence of such use.

Furthermore, there is some indication that the one responsible for using the chemical weapons was Assad's brother and not Assad himself.

This use of chemical weapons has angered al Qaeda and the terrorist group has vowed to hit the Syrian government with a "volcano of revenge".

What an interesting scenario.  In this instance, we are now on the same side as Al Qaeda and if we attack Syria with rockets or other weapons, we have become al Qaeda's accomplice and partner in "crime" as that organization instigates it's revenge volcano!

Read the entire article here.

Climate Name Change

A good friend in France brought this video to my attention.  It is a perfect retaliatory response to those dunderheads in the U.S. who continue to deny the facts of Global Warming.

Chemical Weapons Used In Syria

Knowing the value our government puts on "truth," I'm not ready to accept Secretary of State John Kerry's assertion that chemical weapons were used in Syria.

But giving Senator Kerry the benefit of the doubt - so what?

Why does this become our problem?  Chemical weapons may kill in a different way, but are we mostly concerned with the mode of murder or with the fact of murder?  People have been dying in horrendous ways for many weeks in Syria.  If their dying is the concern of the United States, then it makes no difference how they died. 

If we believe that killing civilians is cause for American intervention, we should have intervened a long time ago.

But if the method of killing civilians, e.g., chemical weapons, is the determining factor, then the United States once again becomes a miserable model of hypocrisy! 

Recently disclosed CIA files have exposed another of "The Gipper's" moral failures.  During the Iraq/Iran war, we supported Iraq!  How ironic is that?  Not only so, but Reagan knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iran and approved such use, or, at the least, did nothing to discourage it!

Fast-forward to 2001.  G. W. Bush, appointed president by the U.S. Supreme Court, led our country to war against our former ally based upon the big LIE that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, i.e., chemical weapons. 

It all stinks.  Our hands are dripping blood.  Let's not add to the flow by military action in Syria. 

Enough of our young men and women have died for no good cause by our leaders' dalliance with stupidity in the Middle East.  Enough of our country's treasure has been destroyed by the American war machine's misadventures around the world.  

Enough, already!
 

Plutocrats' New Pitch: Let Us Rob You Now So You Can Plan Ahead for Poverty

(Note:  This article is reprinted from Alternet and is used with permission.)

Pete Peterson & Co. kindly want to take your Social Security away to prevent you from imagining a dignified future.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

August 22, 2013  |

Somehow, I’ve wound up on the mailing list for a group of oligarchs campaigning to swindle Americans out of their hard-earned retirement insurance. Hedge fund billionaire Pete Peterson, the budget buffoons Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, and the rest of their merry band of hustlers over at the hilariously named Committee for a Responsible Budget have asked me to consider their latest proposal.

So I thought I’d oblige them, what the heck.

Judging from the shrill headline in their mailing [full text here], these men (and a token woman or two) wish to sell me on the idea of “Social Security Reform and the Cost of Delay.”

The cost of delay? Boys, I hear you on that. Any delay in ripping me off must be very costly — for you.

Social Security, the most prudently managed and economically sound retirement program the country has ever seen, and with the very lowest costs, is preventing you from piling up even more money in your bank accounts. Trust me, I really do understand how you feel:  Financiers desperately wish to get their mitts on American retirements so they can charge all sorts of outrageous fees. And you hate the prospect of having to pay higher taxes in the future if you don’t “fix” Social Security.

I know how diligently you've tried to privatize America's best-loved program in order to get this show going. You must be bone tired! And I also fully get that as rich people interested far more in the size of your bank accounts than anything so trifling as, say, the strength and health of your country, you hate paying taxes of any kind. You deeply resent such citizen responsibilities, and so you want to cut Social Security as quickly as possible (calling your cutting “reform,” you clever marketing devils!) because doing so will lessen your already minuscule tax burden. Your aim is to hurt America’s retirement program to the point where you can bring up your privatization hustle again.]

Does that about sum it up?

The thing is, though, cutting Social Security does not make any economic sense for the other 99 percent of the country. The program is in very good shape, hard-working Americans have paid into it, and if (and that’s a big if) any adjustments need to be made a decade or two down the road, we can talk about it then. For now, the only real justification for cutting seems to be the prospect of fattening your bank accounts. Sorry, not sold. I know that's one less yacht for you but I think you can live with it.

Your fear-mongering pitch to me is filled with all sorts of extraordinary economic predictions, which are all the more amazing as none of you had so much as the ghost of an idea that the financial crisis was coming. But never mind, you in your infinite wisdom know that based on your calculations, if you don’t rob me by cutting Social Security now, I will lose benefits in the future. You may not realize I actually read economic projections written by legitimate economists, who inform me that your predictions are worth about as much as those of a carnival fortune-teller. Probably less.

In their paper, “Deficit Fantasies in the Great Recession,” Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson, both of the Institute of New Economic Thinking, write:

“Current discussions of Social Security [fall] into two groups: One rails on about how ‘runaway entitlements’ are leading to a deficit explosion; while the other advises patronizingly that Social Security can be saved in the long run by timely changes, typically involving a mix of taxes and benefit cuts, including, notably, yet another rise in the age of eligibility for the program. Neither point of view is persuasive.”

The authors explain how the “deficit explosion” story can be immediately dismissed, but you’re probably aware that that particular line isn’t really working anymore, since more Americans have figured out that 1) Social Security has nearly nothing to do with the deficit; and 2) the deficit is rapidly shrinking. Bummer for you!

So you’ve turned to the old lie about Social Security solvency. Unfortunately for you, economists who have looked closely at the issue do not buy it. Ferguson and Johnson write:

"It is true that Social Security tax receipts declined during the Great Recession, so that for the first time since 1983, the program’s outlays exceeded revenues by a small amount. But this in no way threatens the program’s basic solvency. In 1983, Congress enacted into law recommendations of the Greenspan Commission to raise Social Security taxes to cover the retirement bulge coming from baby boomers. Since then, the program has piled up enormous surpluses. These have been invested in government bonds, thus helping to finance the rest of the government.

As the baby boomers mature, the surplus funds will be drawn down. The 2010 Report of the Trustees of the Social Security Trust Fund projects that the Trust Fund and interest earnings from it will suffice to cover all benefit payments until 2037. Even then, the Fund will not be empty – the Trustees Report projects that the Trust Fund would still cover 75% of all benefits due.” [The latest report from 2012 says more or less the same thing].

So listen up, fellas, if we do need to make a little tweak down the road, let’s make a deal. Since taxpayers like me funded the bank bailouts, how about raising the cap on earnings subject to the Social Security tax, which is currently just a little over $100,000? Wait, what’s that you say? You don’t like that because it means that you would pay your share and I would not get screwed. Well, that's not very sporting of you, is it? Seems like the 1 percent has done pretty well over the last few decades.

Overall, though, I must say I am impressed by the consistency of your crystal-ball reading, because your predictions always point miraculously to the same conclusion: “We’ve got to take your money now, because the future is going to be very bad!”

I appreciate your concern. Mugging me now allows me to better plan ahead for a bleak and ill-funded future. Thanks to your consideration, I could go ahead and start purchasing cat food now and perhaps develop a taste for it. But I think I’d rather just hold on to my Social Security if it’s all the same to you. I kind of think that robbing me of a dignified retirement (which, frankly, looks pretty paltry compared to the rest of the civilized world) is not going to do much for the health of the economy or the cohesion of society.

I have this funny feeling that young people forced to take time away from their jobs to care for poverty-stricken parents and more strain on disability rosters (which you are always complaining about, remember?!?) and less money in the pockets of elderly consumers to pay for healthcare and food doesn’t really sound like a good idea.

Let’s be real, boys. You already got away with murder with your swindles leading up to the Great Recession, and you’ve sucked a lot more money out of the pockets of regular folks in the years since then, spreading your embarrassingly discredited austerity messages (how funny was that Stephen Colbert bit on your favorite debunked economists, Reinhart and Rogoff!). You've triumphed in getting teachers laid off and pensions stripped and whatnot. You have been very successful, and you can raise a glass of bubbly to the financial coup you’ve pulled off. There’s not really much more left to rob, in case you haven’t noticed.

But there are limits. A look at history might suggest to you that pillaging too many people of too much for too long may actually result in said people deciding they have had enough of you. Occupy was a hint.

Yet despite the fact that survey after survey reveals Americans do not want to see cuts to Social Security, and in the face of studies by political scientists who prove that such policy views as yours only reflect the designs of the wealthy, you are undeterred. Time, you warn me, is running out if I don’t start playing your tune and ask policy makers to enact these “changes” you insist upon to make you richer.

Here’s a warning from me: With profits for the wealthy at Gilded Age levels, the population looks to be waking up. Time may be running out for you.

Lynn Parramore is an AlterNet senior editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of 'Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.' She received her Ph.d in English and Cultural Theory from NYU, where she has taught essay writing and semiotics. She is the Director of AlterNet's New Economic Dialogue Project. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.