Category: General

From the words of a professor of history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, writing in the Israeli press, we can still hold onto our hopes for the triumph of basic good sense among Israelis in the midst of terror.

If indeed there is no difference between the territories that were conquered by the end of the War of Independence and those that came into our hands in the Six-Day War, it is possible that Zionism really never was, as its opponents have always said, either national liberation movement or a movement to save Jews from physical and cultural extinction, but rather an imperialist movement that aims at constant expansion.

The Supreme’s ruling yesterday on school vouchers obviously reflects the increasing integration of religion and public life in America. [The Pledge’s “under god” is symbolically very important to this impulse, and symbols are important—look at the fuss we make over the flag!]
The wall of separation between church and state is being dismantled. A NYTimes news article observes that “Recent [court] rulings have held that religion is entitled to equal treatment in public life.” In an otherwise estimable editorial on vouchers in the same edition, the paper observes that in parochial schools “…for a variety of reasons [the writers do not elaborate], tuition is far lower [than other private schools],” thereby eliminating even this court rulings’s premise that parents must have “genuine choice.”
What’s missing here? Just the observation that to get “equal treatment in public life” and incidently to give parents an equal “genuine choice” between schools competing for the voucher money collected from all taxpayers, religious institutions should lose their tax-exempt status, since this is the key to their attraction as a bargain alternative to all kinds of public programs we should be looking to instead.
If we excuse religion its tax obligation, we are already heavily subsidizing it before we hand over additional money in the form of the vouchers we offer it, at least partly, as a reward for the fiction of its good money management.
If we can no longer be protected from religion, religion can no longer be protected from taxes. The two principles must stand or fall together.
P.S. The Declaration of Independence mentions “god,” but that excellent text was essentially a letter of resignation, and was composed for the purpose of public relations. The deist misstep was corrected in the document which became the law of the land, the U.S. Constituion with its Bill of Rights.

Finally, one for the handful of Americans who do not believe in invisible friends and who are not part of a cult!

A federal appeals court found the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional on Wednesday….
“A profession that we are a nation ‘under God’ is identical … to a profession that we are a nation ‘under Jesus,’ a nation ‘under Vishnu,’ a nation ‘under Zeus,’ or a nation ‘under no god,”‘ it said.

The words, “under God,” were first added in 1954 in the midst of our last big right-wing witch-hunting god-fearing jingoistic fake-war boom time, in a year dominated by Senator Joseph McCarthy. I should be amazed it’s still there, but I’m not, and I have no illusions the Supreme Court would agree with this Federal Appeals Court decision.

The NYTimes issued a correction on its editorial page today.

An editorial last Friday supporting a Supreme Court decision that bans execution of the retarded stated incorrectly that apart from the United States, only Kyrgyzstan and Japan permit the death penalty for retarded convicts. The law in Kyrgyzstan prohibits the execution of the retarded.

That makes me feel so much better; I was so embarassed for Kyrgyzstan.

I thought this piece might be too simplistic to pass muster with someone more familiar with economics than m’self, but B says he thinks it’s probably too abstruse for the casual browser, too much attempted too minimally. Must be just right then. I dunno. It does it for me, but you judge for yourself.
The argument is that it was basically a crisis of overproduction which drove the U.S. stock market boom, but it was a singleminded concentration on the needs of investors which created the disaster we visited on the third world but which has now landed in our own lap.

Industry after industry had made more products—autos to computer chips—than could be sold for a profit on the market. Market saturation of a particular product didn’t happen by itself. The “why” of the story is that the working majority hasn’t been able to buy what it has made.
Accordingly, overproduction reduced profitability for those who buy labor-power. No profits, no investment in more productive capacity. The result was lots of money with no place to go.
What to do? The response from the titans of the global market economy was twofold. One was that investment migrated from industrial production to financial speculation.
The other was the destruction of productive capacity. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank in part enforced policies that purposely plunged Third World and newly industrialized nations into depressions that devastated people’s living standards.
In the meantime, investment seeking profits flowed into the U.S. stock market.
….
[While] the flow of foreign funds into the U.S. [helped] consumers and corporations live beyond their means….[the] unsustainable trend of U.S. spending based on lending was given a boost by the nation’s high-flying stock market.

In any case, the boom is now bust, and investors around the world know it. Is there a lesson going forward? Of course there is. The question is only whether we can get rid of enough of the fools and villains at the top to do something about it.

… describing the end of what some have called the speculative boom of all time by sidestepping what led to its creation covers up what needs to be covered. Namely, that a market economy system based on production to meet the needs of investors instead of human needs is the problem for the vast majority of humanity.

WorldCom Finds $3.8 Billion Error, Fires CFO [Reuters lead headline]
Yes, but I want to know what the severence package looks like.

WorldCom, which is already under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, said it would restate its financial results for 2001 and the first quarter of 2002 to show net losses.
It also plans to cut 17,000 jobs, or more than 20 percent of its work force, starting on Friday, in a bid to save $900 million a year. It also will pare its capital spending budget to $2.1 billion.

Seventeen thousand workers are now going to be put out onto the street because the stockholders had to be fed, at all costs to the people.

Does the world simply envy us, or is there something else going on as well?

Americans are the world’s luckiest teenagers, with the best car, the fattest allowance and the biggest line of brag, yet like all teenagers we’re secretly afraid that someone is laughing at us. Here’s a news flash. They are. Our cowboy Puritanism dumbfounds the rest of the world. We execute teenagers, we impeach a president over a sex act, we want to ban pop from schools to protect children at the same time we practically sell guns in vending machines.
….
Instead, the United States practices Pops Americana, a soft-sell virtual empire of culture, burgers, movies, jeans and slang. Ronald Reagan genuinely believed that if the rest of the world was safe for big-screen TVs and gold MasterCards, everyone would be just like us, and thrilled to be so.
….
Pops Americana is one reason “they” hate us, in all those sinister and unpronounceable places on the world’s map, and one reason why we now find ourselves on the crash-course terrorism tour of the world, learning about places like Kabul and Kandahar, and, like our other tours of places with names like Normandy and Saigon, we risk once again making the mistake of coming home from “over there” convinced that the great world is full not of intriguingly different places, but only perilous ones.

Do we really think anything involving force will make us feel safe? We have more of that stuff than anyone in the world, even the Israelis.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Air National Guard fighter jets were scrambled into the air too late from nearby Andrews Air Force Base on Wednesday night to protect the White House from a small plane that wandered into restricted airspace over Washington, U.S. officials said on Thursday.
….
“This illustrates just how hard it is to do this kind of thing, especially in a busy air traffic area,” said one of the officials.

Maybe it would make more sense to think about how we can dissuade people from wanting to blow us up in the first place. Duh.

Why is U.S. foreign policy so fundamentally irreconcilable with that of our European friends? Our differences are still being ignored or minimized by just about all parties, but real differences there are.

…the fact is Europeans and Americans no longer share a common view of the world. On the all-important question of power — the utility of power, the morality of power — they have parted ways. Europeans believe they are moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. Europe itself has entered a post-historical paradise, the realization of Immanuel Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international rules are unreliable and where security and the promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.

I’ve admired Richard Goldstein for years, largely through his pieces in the Village Voice. This week his essay in The Nation really did it for me.
I’m linking it here because Goldstein has done an excellent job of describing my own social and political posture and my position as a member of a pariah community.

The queer community is the spawn of a marriage between socialism and bohemianism more than a century ago. This heady union, which begat gay liberation, has been all but ignored by the culture.

Some of my friends and relatives will be surprised to know that I am not a “retreating liberal” and I am not a “good gay.” I blame over sixty years of a certain amount of dissembling in order to survive in a frightened and frightening world for any appearances which may have encouraged that misunderstanding. I am grateful however to chance, and for the good graces of friends and strangers, that I have become more and more radical over the years. I intend to keep heading in that direction.
What I am now is a leftist and a queer, and for me the two are inseparable.