buddenblog

Teaching US History, Right Wing Christian Style

A selection from America's Providential History  by Mark A.  Beliles  and Stephen K.  McDowell appeared in February's Harper's Magazine.  This is apparently a very popular textbook for Christian educators of a certain persuasion and among home schoolers.  Here is an additional selection from Chapter 1 plus selections from two  "editorial reviews" on Amazon.com.  The book is published by Providence Foundation.  It is followed by a link to Theocracy Watch in which ideas in the book are compared with the Texas State Republican Party Platform of 2004 (and you really oughta check that  out if you want to worry yourselves) and Bush's policies. 

America's Providential History
by Mark A. Beliles, Stephen K. McDowell
Published by Providence Foundation, December 1, 1989

From Chapter 1, God's Plan for the Nations

The chapter is prefaced by a quote from Benjamin Franklin:
"He who shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world."

"The goal of America's Providential History is to equip Christians to be able to introduce Biblical principles into the public affairs of America, and every nation in the world, and in so doing bring Godly change throughout the world.  We will be learning how to establish a Biblical form (and power) of government in America and we will see how our present government structures must be changed....As we learn to operate nations on  Biblical principles, we will be bringing liberty to the nations of the world and hence fulfilling part of God's plan for the nations....

"The truth of the Bible (John 8:32) provides mankind with a Theology of Liberty that brings real freedom to those individuals and nations who are oppressed....When man rejected God's Law, and lost the ability to not only govern himself, but also to govern society, public tyranny and oppression reigned through sinful men.

"Through the ministry and death of Jesus Christ, however, the power for both self- and civil govenment was restored to mankind.  Though internal liberty was a primary focus of Jesus Christ, it must not be overlooked that His inaugural and farewell sermons both emphasized external civil liberty.  In Luke 4:18, Christ's first public message focused on "liberty" for "the poor...the captives...[and]those who are oppressed..."  It is safe to assume that poverty, slavery, tyranny and injustice were on the Lord's mind when, in his final sermon, He commissioned His followers to "Go forth and make disciples of all the nations...."  The great Bible commentator studies by our Founding Fathers, Matthew Henry, explains that "the principle intention of this commission" is clear.  It is to "...do your utmost to make the nations Chritian nations."  This is God's plan for the nations.

"....Providential history is true history.  Many modern educators deny the Providential view of history and would have us believe that their promotion of one of several 'secular' views of history is simply the recounting of brute facts.  They fail to tell their students that their own humanistic presuppositions and religious doctrines determine their choice of people, places, principles and events.  They fail to communicate that neutrality is not possible in the teaching of history, for the historians word-view will dictate his perspective.  Even as there are not many interpretations of Scripture (2Pet.1:20,21), neither are there of history ... there is really only one correct view; that which is the Author's [i.e. God´s] interpretation and perspective.  God is the Author of Scripture and History. 

"The Founders of the United States of America believed in the PRovidential View of History.

Webster's 1828 Dictionary defines "Providence as "the care and superintendence which God exercises over His creatures.  By 'Divine Providence' is understood 'God Himself.'"  This definition, written in the times in which our Founders lived, is significant for it helps us to see what they meant when they used this term in their writings.  They also used many other names for God....George Washington's writings reveal 54 different titles, Abraham Lincoln used 49 and Robert E. Lee [!] used 45.  This reflects the depth of understanding our Founding Fathers had of God and His involvement in human affairs."

Editorial Reviews
Conservative Book Club
"This volume seems destined to become one of the best selling Christian books of our time."

Product Description:
Even "Newsweek" now admits: "Historians are discovering that the Bible, perhaps even more than the Constitution, is our founding document." In this enlightening book, you'll discover the remarkable evidence for this truth. Based on the assumption that all history is Providential (i.e., it reflects God's purposes) you'll learn how God's presence was evident at our nation's founding in the hearts and minds of the men who fought for independence and shaped the Constitution. Numerous illustrations, portraits, and visual aids make this book a valuable resource.

This selection and other information can be found at:
http://www.amazon.com

As mentioned above, the following link  "compares the teachings of an influential Christian textbook, America's Providential History by Mark Beliles and Stephen McDowell, with the Texas 2004 Republican Party Platform and Bush Adminsistration poicies.  It suggests a relationship between the "dominion mandate" as described in the textbook, and Bush's economic, social and environmental programs."  Looks at Bush tax cuts, social security proposals, moving education and welfare to churches, attitudes towards the environment, government regulation and economics. 

http://www.theocracywatch.org/rr_economics.htm

Kind of makes me sick.  On CNN (I think) on Inauguration Day, one of their reporters sat with a roundtable of Ohio voters to find out their responses to Bush, his policies, etc.  One of the participants was a young college student, intense and articulate, who supported Bush down the line and did so, it seemed, because of deeply held beliefs that mirrored those taught in textbooks such as this.  No one questioned what she thought.  This is where I think we get in trouble with trying to be tolerant of everything.  We need to challenge this stuff in public, and do it from the perspective of people seeking truth.

Economic ideology in Health Care

From QOTD

The New England Journal of Medicine
January 20, 2005
Health Care in the 21st Century
By William H. Frist, M.D.

Consumer-Driven Health Care

The new system also must be responsive primarily to individual consumers, rather than to third-party payers. Most health care today is paid for and controlled by third parties, such as the government, insurers, and employers. A consumer-driven system will empower all people - if they so choose - to make decisions that will directly affect the most fundamental and intimate aspect of their life - their own health. This empowerment gives people a greater stake in, and more responsibility for, their own health care. Health care will not improve in a sustained and substantial way until consumers drive it.

Affordable Health Coverage for All Americans

Tax-free health savings accounts (HSAs), adopted in 2003 as part of the Medicare Modernization Act (Public Law 108-173), will help speed the movement to a more consumer-driven health care market. It is estimated that half of all employers will offer HSAs to their employees within the next two to five years. HSAs, coupled with affordable high-deductible insurance policies, give individual consumers more control over their health care choices and hard-earned dollars. HSAs give people a greater stake in their own health care.

Conclusions

American health care is at a crossroads. Rapidly advancing forms of technology are dramatically improving lives. Simultaneously, U.S. citizens face enormous inefficiencies, escalating costs, uneven quality, disparities in health care, and rising numbers of uninsured people. For decades, policymakers have debated and rejected a variety of solutions. What we have never done in the health care economy, however, is foster the kind of competition that has made other industries the most successful, prosperous, and advanced in the world.

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/352/3/267

Comment:  Sen. Frist uses rhetoric that makes every free market enthusiast's heart pound with sheer joy. But those who understand the current policies that have resulted in our extravagantly expensive but perilously underperforming health care system, also understand the policies behind Sen. Frist's rhetoric. Not only is he implicitly supporting financial hardship and personal bankruptcy, but, worse, he is supporting policies that can only increase suffering and death.

Tragically, Dr. Frist is allowing political ideology to trump beneficial health policy. It is difficult to reconcile this with his role as a colleague in the healing arts.

(There will be a two week break in the Quote of the Day messages.)

_______________________________________________
Quote-of-the-day mailing list
Quote-of-the-day@mccanne.org
http://two.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/quote-of-the-day

What is capitalism? A first look with explanations of scarcity and supply and demand

Capitalism is not a fixed system with well-defined, unchanging  rules of operation.  Rather, it covers a lot of different  economic practices over history in a lot of different places.  Capitalism as a term describing a system, if you will,  came into use  in the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment.  Today we use it to  describe not just economic forms, but to name  a particularly European-U.S. kind of thinking about human economic activity.  Capitalism as an economic system plays a pivotal role in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment western societies, especially in the United States.

As a mere descriptive word, generally connoting mercantilism capitalism applies to societies that existed  long before and outside of Europe and the United States.   In that context, it connotes trade for some kind of profit, or to the traders' advantage, and it existed, before the Enlightenment, at one time or another,  in many parts of  the world.    In West Africa,  in what were still the Middle Ages in Europe, there was a large trade network which enriched the Empire of Ghana and the Empire of Mali.    Ultimately, this trade reached Europe and Arab countries. The great Silk Road, the trading route of Asia along which Buddhism traveled, carried a mercantilist, or capitalist, trade.   More familiar is the fact that the Mediterranean area was a focal point for trade long before the Enlightenment, for, among others, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs.  These market systems were not just means for families to survive, but essential to the acquisition of wealth and the survival of entire societies. Among these societies were empires in India, Asia, the Middle East  and the Americas which far surpassed western European societies in learning, technology, agriculture, architecture, art, and in over all grandeur in addition to  commerce.

Early capitalism, or mercantilism, however, was not universal, nor did all societies evolve in the direction of capitalism.

But we are here interested in the U.S. of A., so I will try not to go too far afield.   Be warned, however,  we need a historical perspective to refine our understanding and our arguments for confronting today's issues, so it will be incorporated.

Capitalism, as conceived by whom we might call the  earliest "official" philosopher/describer of capitalism, Adam Smith, was a system which, in a sense, provided a stage on which actors played their predetermined roles  and acted in certain more or less predetermined ways.  It, thus, was  a system theorized to work no matter what individual humans did,  a system  which existed independent of human direction: mechanical, predictive and descriptive.  When economists get together today in the U.S. to try to keep us out of too deep a recession or to control inflation, they try to determine how to tinker with the system just enough to keep it from going into a painful recession or  inflation.  Many believe that the system would right itself in time without any intervention because of its nature: we only make minor adjustments because of the immediate problems for us humans. 

Today in the U.S. many of us, especially non-economists,  seem to believe that this system is sacrosanct, that its laws are almost divine, that it is inextricably entwined in "democracy" which we cannot have unless we have capitalism, or in the now-interchangeable term, the free market system.  This is a big problem and not characteristic of  the beliefs of its great architects and critics.

There are some basic "laws" or "governing principles"   of capitalism.  I have compressed a few centuries of thought into much of this. There are multilple themes and variations.

The first and simplest concept is that of supply and demand.  One can consider that there is both a supply of goods and a demand for those goods.  For instance, there is, at the supermarket, a supply of milk and a demand for it:  the supply is the product, the demand is what customers want.  When there is  more milk than people want, the prices for the milk go down.  At its simplest, the principle is that when there is less than people want, the prices go up. 

To the idea of supply and demand we can add  the concept of scarcity.  That is, the notion of not enough.  People go to try to find something when they don't have enough of it.  The trip to the store in the middle of the night for diapers is an example of this.  Today marketsin the United States and much of the "developed" world  depend on people not only needing things, but  wanting them.  Since in our world  a large number  of us have more than enough of what we need to live on and more than enough of most things, capitalists try to create scarcity by creating demand, getting us to feel we need stuff we don't have like the latest fashion, a better  toothbrush, or an SUV.

So scarcity fits right in with the notion of supply and demand.   

Producers will try to sell their goods  at the highest price they can get.   This depends on there being some scarcity.  Parents and doting grandparents rushing frantically to Toys-R-Us at Christmas time to get the latest Elmo is an example of at least perceived scarcity.  The same thing happened with Beannie Babies and Cabbage Patch Dolls.  It happens more subtly when food producers rush lo-carb spaghettie to the supermarket.

Consumers, on the other hand, like it when there is more than can be sold easily...when the prices come down.  This happens obviously when a fad loses momentum: the boxes of low-carb spaghetti pile up in carts with marked down merchandise at the front of the supermarket.

Competition provides a brake on runaway high prices.  If more than one company is making a product, all will have to try to figure out how to attract customers.  And of course all of them  want to make more money than that limited to covering their production costs because a value of capitalism is to make money, and certainly to make more than you spend. So producers  will have to either figure out a cheaper process for making their stuff, thus being able to make more money at the going rate in the market or how to  make their products more desireable than those of  their competitors.  This leads to innovations in production and/or product.  And ads that say things like, "Ford is the Best in Texas." 

As innovations generalize, that is, as a whole bunch of producers make things the new way or in the new style, prices will again fall and new innovations will become necessary to stimulate demand (bigger and bigger SUVs).  If a product is made to last forever (like in the "good old days") the market for that particular product will wither and not only will the producer lose his profits, but workers will lose their jobs.

The essentials of a capitalist system are traditionally considered to be land, labor and capital.  Labor itself is a commodity, too, something which the producers absolutely depend on.  A  scarce labor market  in the pre-industrial days meant workers could demand more wages, an overloaded labor market meant they had to take what the producers offered.   Similarly, the land on which producers would build their production facilities  is subject to the laws of supply and demand.  Landlords and the rent they charge come in for some special treatment by capitalist theorizers.  Capital itself, money, is a market commodity as we all are aware if we have money in money market accounts.  It becomes very important as businesses try to expand or change significantly.  They have to, basically, buy money -- pay interest -- to make the necessary investments in their means of production.  Or maybe we should say,  they need to rent money.

Most theorists of capitalism did not assume it would go on forever.   Adam Smith thought it would go on at least long enough to "raise all boats," for instance, but not necessarily longer than that.   He also thought that as people became wealthier, they would have more children, more demand would be created for the basics and the increasing numbers of children would provide the needed new workers. 

The capitalist system makes assumptions about human nature that weren't really made before or outside of the European  Renaissance and Enlightenment.  While humans weren't  any kinder as a bunch before it, it wasn't until the Renaissance and most especially the Enlightenment that they came to identify themselves as individuals first and members of a society second.  That is, it was, and in many places still is, more the norm to think of the demands of their groups  first, themselves second.  I'm not celebrating the virtues of community here.  Today in negative terms, you see this loyalty to community first  in kamikaze pilots and of course suicide bombers.  A community loyalty can lead to unquestioning acceptance of all kinds of persecution, physical hardship and the like, and similarly, kings and chiefs and priests  justify their positions and their actions as justified by community norms. 

Capitalists do think of people as interested in themselves first.  Many  think  that people are by nature  imbued with the profit motive, that is, that all of us, if left to our own devices and with time on our hands will turn to trying to make more wealth for ourselves.

Another belief is that people will always act in their self-interest.  Individualism as we think of it has its roots in this belief:  people not always will, but should act in their self-interest and shouldn't expect other people to do it for them.

A third, but not universal, capitalist belief is that people will act rationally in their own interest.

In a capitalist society, being productive and consuming are the highest virtues.   Leisure was shunned early on by self-respecting people in the capitalist system.   This industrious economic unit, the working man, was given characteristic advice by Benjamin Franklin:   "Remember that time is money.  He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labor, and goes abroad or sits idle one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness ought not reckon that the only expense; he has really  spent, rather, thrown away, five shillings [more that he would have earned had he worked the whole day]."

Though expecting tremendously individualistic behavior from people, capitalism's theorists see people as impersonal units whose behavior can be described and predicted.

In sum, we see in much  capitalist thought origins of the notion of individualism and the notion that people are compelled most of all by their own self-interst.  We see, too, the capitalist value of working hard and long well past the time needed to meet our necessities.   This is often  framed in the context of self-interest:  making more money for oneself and seeming virtuous in the eyes of potential creditors needed to, for instance, grow a business.  We can also see that it is  easy to move from the idea that the seller will try to make the most money he can and the buyer to buy something for the least possible to the belief that we are all trying to cheat each other, especially car salesman.  Pronouncements about human nature  like these latter ones which are not inherent in capitalism end up shaping behavior, of course.  But I would argue that this  behavior is not  inevitable because other sorts of belief shape behavior just as effectively.  And there are always stubborn folks  among us who will not be unthinkingly shaped by the general expectations of those around us.

Today a lot of Americans seem to believe that capitalism is some kind of God-given system for total  human development and is in its last best stage:  that there is nothing better or different that would work, there is no variation that can come along.  They consider globalization to be capitalism's greatest flowering.  A lot of those same people  see socialism as the only and evil alternative :  as the enemy of capitalism, kind of like the Fallen Angel constantly nipping at the heals of God.   This is a false dichotomy premised on dangerous dogma. As some all-too-often quoted anonymous person said, "change is the only constant."  I suspect we will find ourselves in somewhat unfamiliar territory in the future. Nonetheless, capitalism and the rise of the west are inextricably entwine d and certainly capitalism has been a force for much that is wonderful as well as much that is not.

You gotta know what you're talking about when you talk about economics

I’m sure it’s not hard to figure out that I’m a liberal.  I like to think that hard core right- and left-wingers are black and/or white and that liberals come not only in many shades of gray but in purples and oranges and blues and that we can shift our shades as we learn more.  I hope  that we are liberals because we “question assumptions” as they used to say in the sixties, even our own.   Sometimes liberals are scorned as relativists: as  relativists to such a degree  that we have no cores.  As a liberal, I’m not into absolute relativism: I don’t think that all belief systems are equal and that you can believe anything you want and live anyway you want as long as it doesn’t bother me. A long time ago, Walter Cronkite defined, if I remember correctly, a liberal as someone who had some firmly held principles and examined critically the proposals for solving  problems: that dogma did not guide a liberal to solutions, and in fact following dogma didn't do anything but lead down a dark hole.

Among the principles I hold as a liberal are that the earth needs to be treated with respect, that we should husband its resources, not plunder them; that humans are part of nature, not separate from it and that as such, we are ultimately utterly dependent on its health for our own; that there is no reason some people should be rolling in wealth while far more people don’t have enough to eat and are riddled with sickness and poverty; that we should be looking for ways to enhance the side of our nature that recognizes that we need to care for the rest of our pack and its home and that we need to tame the side that wants to go it alone while recognizing its need for protection, its uniqueness and its value as a fount of creativity and love.  For those who are fierce individualists and are proud of it, I would simply ask how they would do if they literally were alone: if they had to make it by themselves in the desert of  West Texas, for instance. Or even alone on some beautiful, rich uncultivated land in Oregon without all the stuff dreamed up and made by other people: without ploughs and hoes, even, or a well. Or how they will do when they are old and infirm?  Or how, for that matter,  would they have made it as infants?   Finally but no less important I believe that  people should never be enslaved, should never have to live with their necks under the boot of a master, that we have to know in our gut that workers  are at least as important as owners who could get nowhere without them.  Recently I was reminded that Paul Tillich said that no human being should be treated as a "thing."  I would agree with this, too, and I would add that maybe we should say the same thing about any living creature who can feel pain.

So these views inform my outlook on what drives the good ole U.S. of A. Currently, economics is at the center of a lot of what does. I mean economics as a philosophy, if you will, and economics as a system, and unfortunately economics as an ideology, all  of which run like blood through our national discussions about everything from taking care of our elderly and sick to why we were urged to go out and spend, spend, spend after 9/11, to why so many are against taxes and see government as the enemy, to why some people think we have to slice off mountain tops and sully the arctic to survive, and to why some believe that people in Africa or China have to work under terrible conditions and die young from pollution-caused diseases because globalization as we define it is not only inevitable but good for them.

But I realized that while I had some hazy ideas about capitalism, the national budget, why the national debt might be bad on the one hand, but wait a minute, not so bad, and while my “instincts” (George Bush trusts his gut, remember) said that in the name of free markets which are somehow essential to our survival, we were destroying the planet, I couldn’t put things into focus.  So I started to read. And I want to share some of what I have learned so that if you are where I was, you  can perhaps learn some of what I have learned and be able to talk from knowledge as well as instinct about how we got ourselves into this mess. 

My first steps were to look into some practical, immediate issues that I didn’t understand: for instance, the national debt and the GDP/GNP which I’ve already talked about on this blog. But they were only pieces without roots to a bigger understanding.  So I learned more about revenue and the Federal Reserve System and business cycles and so forth. And I went back into history to find out how we came to believe so strongly in individualism, in whatever the free market is, and in capitalism as if it were a religion. Remember, I think we all need to study history not simply so we don’t repeat the past but to knock down our dogmas because dogmas often did not start out that way: ideas and systems and  wrong beliefs  harden into dogma over time.  We humans have not come close to finding any sort of perfect system for running our lives, and in fact our very natures may preclude that we ever can, but we can use our heads and our hearts and our guts  to try  to  fashion  a compassionate world.  Of course , as Buddhists would say, we need to be  mindful:  we need to watch  how  we  decide what we decide.

So I am going to spend several posts weaving back and forth from the present into the past to try to make sense of how and why our system is what it is, all with the goal of making us better citizens by helping us inform ourselves. That may be one belief I hold as dogma: that for our country to function as a democracy, our citizens need to know what the hell is going on in it, and to understand and be able to criticize the arguments of politicians and economists and come up with some of our own.  We  can and  must know enough about economics in this country to  guide our often foolish leaders.

In conclusion, I want to say that I am certainly willing to question my own assumptions and listen to other arguments even if I get grumpy while doing it.

 

Seymour Hersh on What's Next with the Mad Mullah, George Bush

I am sure this will be cited all over the place.  It is scary as hell.  Unbelievable, really, but Seymour Hersh is rarely wrong.  A few selections from his article in the most recent New Yorker.  Read the whole thing either in the New Yorker, or get it at Truthout (see link below).

2005http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/011805A.shtml

The Coming Wars:
    What the Pentagon Can Now Do in Secret
    By Seymour M. Hersh
    The New Yorker

    24-31 January 2005 Issue

    George W. Bush's re-election was not his only victory last

fall. The President and his national-security advisers have

consolidated control over the military and intelligence

communities' strategic analyses and covert operations to a

degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World

War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and

ambitious agenda for using that control-against the mullahs in

Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on

terrorism-during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to

be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one

government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it,

as "facilitators" of policy emanating from President Bush and

Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.

    Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the

Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range

policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of

democracy throughout the region. Bush's re-election is

regarded within the Administration as evidence of America's

support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the

position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon's civilian

leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul

Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas

Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former

high-level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald

Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after

the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had

been heard and the American people did not accept their

message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to

staying in Iraq and that there would be no second-guessing.

    "This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one

campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge

war zone," the former high-level intelligence official told me.

"Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign. We've

declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the

enemy. This is the last hurrah-we've got four years, and want

to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism."

    Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is

Rumsfeld who has directed its implementation and has

absorbed much of the public criticism when things went

wrong-whether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or lack

of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s' vehicles in Iraq. Both

Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for

Rumsfeld's dismissal, and he is not widely admired inside the

military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense

Secretary was never in doubt.

    Rumsfeld will become even more important during the

second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence

and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been

determined before the Presidential election, and much of it

would be Rumsfeld's responsibility. The war on terrorism

would be expanded, and effectively placed under the

Pentagon's control. The President has signed a series of

findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando

groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert

operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as

ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

    The President's decision enables Rumsfeld to run the

operations off the books-free from legal restrictions imposed

on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities

overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and

reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees.

(The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the

nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and

attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) "The Pentagon

doesn't feel obligated to report any of this to Congress," the

former high-level intelligence official said. "They don't even

call it 'covert ops'-it's too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In

their view, it's 'black reconnaissance.' They're not even going

to tell the cincs"-the regional American military

commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the

White House did not respond to requests for comment on this

story.)....

    In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next

strategic target was Iran. "Everyone is saying, 'You can't be

serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,'" the former

intelligence official told me. "But they say, 'We've got some

lessons learned-not militarily, but how we did it politically.

We're not going to rely on agency pissants.' No loose ends,

and that's why the C.I.A. is out of there."

  In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a

much harsher view. The hawks in the Administration believe

that it will soon become clear that the Europeans' negotiated

approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the

Administration will act. "We're not dealing with a set of

National Security Council option papers here," the former

high-level intelligence official told me. "They've already

passed that wicket. It's not if we're going to do anything

against Iran. They're doing it."

    The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or

at least temporarily derail, Iran's ability to go nuclear. But

there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The

government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon,

in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on

Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the

religious leadership. "Within the soul of Iran there is a

struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the

one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic

movement," the consultant told me. "The minute the aura of

invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it

the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will

collapse"-like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East

Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz

share that belief, he said.

    "The idea that an American attack on Iran's nuclear

facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely ill

informed," said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who

worked on the National Security Council in the Bush

Administration. "You have to understand that the nuclear

ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum,

and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on

their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern

nation that's technologically sophisticated." Leverett, who is

now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East

Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American

attack, if it takes place, "will produce an Iranian backlash

against the United States and a rallying around the regime."

They knew about impermanence in the olden days: Percy Bysshe Shelley Poems

Whenever we find ourselves believing, as we too often do,that we have discovered The Ultimate Truth, The Absolute Way Things Should Be, or whenever think We Are The Best and Will Last Forever, it's good to drift through old poetry collections (among other things.  Having our kids study history in a meaningful way would also be extremely helpful).

So here is some relevant poetry bythat old Romantic,  Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings!'
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

And a verse, number LII to be exact, from Adonais.  Adonais is a long, long pastoral elegy following what might be called a classical model.  To the modern American reader, it is  embarassingly lush, extravagant and sentimental filled with excruciating purple prose.  However, the following verse is one of my all time favorites:

     The One remains, the many change and pass;

     Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;

      Life, like a dome of many-colour'd glass,

      Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

      Until Death tramples it to fragments.--Die,

      If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!

 Follow where all is fled!--Rome's azure sky,

      Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak

 The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

The Social Security Debate

The social security argument, introduced as a red flag (red herring) by the Administration,  is an example of an appeal to current beliefs that somehow privatization is always better.  Soon I will have some posts dealing with our underlying assumptions about economic well-being.  Right now, here is a link to Paul Krugman's column on the British experience with privatization.  He includes a link to an article by Norma Cohen  in The American Prospect, which link I also provide.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/14/opinion/14krugman.html?oref=login

www.prospect.org

Senator Ted Kennedy's Speech on Medicare and Health Care for All --Hurray!!!

A Democratic Blueprint for America's Future
An Address by Senator Edward M. Kennedy at the National Press Club
January 12, 2005

To revitalize the American dream, we also need to renew the battle to make health care affordable and available to all our people. In this new century of the life sciences, breakthrough treatments and miracle cures are steadily revolutionizing the practice of medicine and the quality of life. The mapping of the human genome enables us to understand far more about the molecular basis of disease, and to plan far-reaching cures that were inconceivable only a few years ago.

Sadly, in America today, the miracles of modern medicine are too often the province only of the wealthy. We need a new guarantee for the years ahead that the cost of these life-saving treatments and cures will not be beyond the reach of the vast majority of the American people.

An essential part of our progressive vision is an America where no citizen of any age fears the cost of health care, and no employer refuses to create new jobs or cuts back on current jobs because of the high cost of providing health insurance.

The answer is Medicare, whose 40th birthday we will celebrate in July. I propose that as a 40th birthday gift to the American people, we expand Medicare over the next decade to cover every citizen - from birth to the end of life.

It's no secret that America is still dearly in love with Medicare. Administrative costs are low. Patients' satisfaction is high. Unlike with many private insurers, they can still choose their doctor and their hospital.

For those who prefer private insurance, we will offer comparable coverage under the same range of private insurance plans already available to Congress. I can think of nothing more cynical or hypocritical than a Member of Congress who gives a speech denouncing health care for all, then goes to his doctor for a visit paid for by the Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan.

I call this approach Medicare for All, because it will free all Americans from the fear of crippling medical expenses and enable them to seek the best possible care when illness strikes.

The battle to achieve Medicare for All will not be easy. Powerful interests will strongly oppose it, because they profit immensely from the status quo. Right wing forces will unleash false attack ads ranting against socialized medicine and government-run health care.

But those attacks are a generation out of date - retreads of the failed campaign that delayed Medicare in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, we are immunized against such attacks by the obvious success of Medicare. It is long past time to extend that success to all.

The Democratic Party's proudest moments and greatest victories have always come when we stand up against powerful interests and fight for the common good - and this coming battle can be another of our finest achievements.

To make the transition from the current splintered system, I propose to phase in Medicare for All, age group by age group, starting with those closest to retirement, between 55 and 65. Aside from senior citizens themselves, they have the greatest health needs and the highest health costs, and need our help the most.

The first stage of the phase-in should also guarantee good health care to every young child. We made a start with the Children's Health Insurance Program in 1997. It does a major part of the job, and it's time to complete the job now.

As we implement this reform, financing must be a shared responsibility. All will benefit, and all should contribute. Payroll taxes should be part of the financing, but so should general revenues, to make the financing as progressive as possible.

We can offset a large part of the expense by a single giant step - bringing health care into the modern age of information technology.

By moving to electronic medical records for all Americans when they go to the hospital or their doctor, we can save hundreds of billions of dollars a year in administrative costs while improving the quality of care.

Equally important, we should pay for health care based on value and results, not just the number of procedures performed or days in a hospital bed. We must also expand our investments in medical research, so that we can realize even more of its extraordinary promise. We must confront and defeat the misguided ideology that - in the name of life - denies life-saving cures by blocking stem cell research.

http://kennedy.senate.gov/~kennedy/statements/05/1/2005112713.html

Costs of consumption

In this country, we live with the assumption that we must have continuous growth and that consumption to produce that growth is good and very, very necessary.  In fact we define ourselves by what we consume and how much money we have to consume with. 

I still remember visiting Washington D.C. as a thirteen year old in the 1950s with my class and being talked to by someone in some department who revealed to us the concept of  planned obsolescence, which meant it was not only acceptable but necessary and official economic policy that stuff be manufactured with its falling-apart aspect built in to guarantee that people would not only want, but need to buy new stuff and thus keep the economy growing.  We were shocked at the idea:  after all, our parents were the Depression generation and one of their favorite mottoes was, "Waste not, want not."  We laughed uproariously at what this idea of endless consumtion and its consequent growth could mean:  we imagined ourselves surrounded by junk , by acres and acres of land and even special buildings that would have to be built to hold the junk, by the giant caverns and pits resulting from the need to dig up material to make the stuff, by endless power plants needed to provide energy to make the junk, and so on and so on.   

We need to break away from the paradigm that shapes  societies so that they are supported by economies based on endless growth.  One of my favorite websites, run by a single person, I think, has a particularly useful section on problems of consumption and consumerism.  Check it out:  www.globalissues.org.  Below is a list of questions about consumption taken from this site.

From www.global issues.org:

We consume a variety of resources and products today having moved beyond basic needs to include luxury items and technological innovations to try to improve efficiency. Such consumption beyond minimal and basic needs is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, as throughout history we have always sought to find ways to make our lives a bit easier to live. However, increasingly, there are important issues around consumerism that need to be understood. For example:

• How are the products and resources we consume actually produced?
• What are the impacts of that process of production on the environment, society, on individuals?
• What are the impacts of certain forms of consumption on the environment, on society, on individuals?
• Which actors influence our choices of consumption?
• Which actors influence how and why things are produced or not?
• What is a necessity and what is a luxury?
• How do demands on items affect the requirements placed upon the environment?
• How do consumption habits change as societies change?
• Businesses and advertising are major engines in promoting the consumption of products so that they may survive. How much of what we consume is influenced by their needs versus our needs?
• Also influential is the very culture of today in many countries, as well as the media and the political institutions themselves. What is the impact on poorer nations and people on the demands of the wealthier nations and people that are able to afford to consume more?
• How do material values influence our relationships with other people?
• What impact does that have on our personal values?
• And so on.

Opposition even from middle class South Central Texans

Here at the edges of the famed Texas Hill Country just northwest of San Antonio people not necessarily accustomed to being activists are taking on, with what is now a realistic hope  for success, Wal-Mart.  In this community, the issues are similar to those elsewhere, with the addition of growing concern about effects on our area's still relatively pristine and only water source, the Edwards Aquifer.

Below are links to three very recent  news articles and one column on the problem from our local paper, The San Antonio Express-News which in this case actually covered the story completely (the Express-News has a habit of dealing more with pablum and pro-business stuff.  Guess who owns it ).

This link describes early activity against the proposed Wal-Mart:
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA112804.1A.walmart.9c608d0d.html

This link discusses how Wal-Mart wangled its way to thinking it could build at the location and legal problems to blocking it:
http://www.mysanantonio.com/business/stories/MYSA111004.8B.helotes_walmart.3f9ff691.html

This link describes the growth in opposition and its increasing success:
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA011305.3B.helotes_walmart.1cdcb59.html

This is a link to a column by a very good local commentator:
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/columnists/cguerra/stories/MYSA111804.1B.guerra.68d517ed.html