Author Archives: Sheila

Now For Something Different

I spend a lot of time on this blog bemoaning the negatives–and there are certainly plenty of negatives to bemoan and warnings that really must be issued and heeded. But it is also the case that–along with the seeming avalanche of threats and reminders of our collective deficits, many good things are occurring.

I get a weekly newsletter titled “Good News for Humankind,” which helps me balance out all the Bad News for Humankind. (I think the actual title is Spark of Genius, and I don’t have a link–but I assume a Google search will lead to a subscription opportunity.)

The most recent newsletter reported the following items:

Nepal has now become the first country in South Asia to recognize a same-sex marriage,  after issuing a formal recognition of a marriage from 1997.

The U.S., Czech Republic, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Iceland, Kosovo and Norway all formally joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance. The Alliance was launched in 2017 by the U.K. and Canada. The new members have committed to not developing new unabated coal power plants and to phasing out existing unabated coal plants. I hadn’t previously encountered the term “unabated” in this context; according to Dr. Google, it means “the use of coal, oil and gas without substantial efforts to reduce the emissions produced throughout their life cycle.”

In other good news for the environment, a court of appeals in Brussels ordered Belgium to cut its planet-heating pollution by at least 55% from 1990 levels by 2030. Evidently, as of 2021, Belgium had cut its emissions by a bare 24%. The court rejected government arguments that minimized the importance of the country’s efforts, arguing that Belgium’s impact on the climate crisis was limited by its small size.

More good news for the environment–and for drivers–comes from a very promising experiment in Detroit. Detroit became first city in the United States to install a wireless-charging roadway. The experiment will begin with the use of a Ford E-Transit fitted with a receiver to gather data; that is part of a five-year pilot project intended to perfect the technology “in real-world settings” and to study its potential for public transport applications. The report said that there are also plans to open the electric road system to the public within the next few years.

Other “good news” items:

Massachusetts became the fifth state  to make prison calls free.

“Ensuring that individuals in state and county prisons can keep in contact with their loved ones is key to enhancing rehabilitation, reducing recidivism, and improving community safety,” Governor Healey said in a written statement.

There are also positive stories from the Good News Network. A small sample of items having an environmental impact:

In the Bay Area of California, home of San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Clara County, and Silicon Valley a famous Pacific resident is heading home for the holidays—up newly-cleaned creeks to spawn.

Who could have thought that the cradle of 21st-century civilization, with its problems and advancements, would have space for wild river ecosystems capable of supporting salmon runs?

But here they are, reports KTVU, as large as 30 pounds, as long as 35 inches, running up the Guadalupe River Watershed by the hundreds.

Google may be defending against anti-trust accusations, but the company with a former “do no evil” motto is also doing good.

An advanced geothermal project funded and developed by Google has begun pumping carbon-free electricity onto the Nevada grid to power the company’s data centers there.

Geothermal energy was once confined in theory to areas of geothermal activity, but if one drills deep enough, there’s extreme heat from the planet’s core essentially everywhere to be harnessed to make steam and drive turbines to create carbon-free electricity 24 hours a day when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

For this reason, Google made an early bet on this enhanced geothermal technology, and partnered with the Utah-based Fervo Energy, which uses drilling techniques from the oil and gas industry to create a first-of-its-kind power plant in Nevada.

GNN reported that initial tests in July showed that the technology was working, in which the hypothesized 3.5 megawatts were indeed being delivered.

When I am particularly depressed by political turmoil and climate change, I try to remember that there are thousands of people around the globe who are working to understand and hopefully solve our most pressing problems. We owe them not only our gratitude, but our own efforts to improve our political and natural environment–beginning with our votes for sane lawmakers next November.

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They Aren’t Even Pretending Any More

Jim Banks and J.D. Vance–two MAGA Republicans–have introduced a new bill, “The College Admissions Accountability Act.” It would create “a dedicated office for investigating race discrimination in college admissions.” A rightwing publication calls it  “the most dramatic effort yet to enforce the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action.”

Wow…just wow.

As described in glowing terms by the Washington Free Beacon (the rightwing publication), the Act

would establish a special inspector general within the Education Department—separate from the Office of Civil Rights—to probe potential violations of the colorblind standard set forth in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ruled that race-conscious admissions programs violate the 14th Amendment. The bill would also bar schools that flout the decision from receiving any form of federal aid…

The bill would create a new mechanism for applicants and university employees to file discrimination claims against admissions departments. Those claims would be investigated by the special inspector general—nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate—who could then recommend enforcement actions, including the revocation of federal funds, to the secretary of education and attorney general.

The office would also submit quarterly reports to Congress on the allegations it has received and what corrective steps have been taken. That means the secretary of education and attorney general, while theoretically free to ignore the office’s recommendations, would face public pressure to lay down the law.

Universities, meanwhile, would be at constant risk of humiliation if they adopt the sort of race-based policies that have become de rigueur throughout higher education. Though focused on admissions, the bill also covers “financial aid determinations” and “academic programs,” empowering the inspector general to go after scholarships, fellowships, and research programs that exclude non-minorities.

“The federal government has given the universities free rein to discriminate against white and Asian students,” Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist behind numerous state laws banning critical race theory, said of the bill. “Senator Vance’s proposed legislation will put a stop to this.”

Rufo, you will recall, is Ron DeSantis’ go-to guy on education…

The questions just ask themselves…like, where were these proud opponents of racial discrimination when it was Black kids who were being discriminated against? (Answer: Nowhere to be found.) And what happened to those intrepid conservative warriors  who were battling big government and regulatory over-reach? (Answer: It doesn’t count as over-reach if government is imposing policies that benefit White Christian guys.)

I note from the above description of the bill that these Paladins of Non-discrimination are also working hard to ensure that those greedy Black kids who somehow manage to get admitted don’t get any “extra” consideration when it comes to financial assistance. 

Given Banks hostility to LGBTQ Americans, I’m only surprised that he didn’t manage to work some homophobia into his new appreciation for having government oversight and “accountability.” (Of course, I haven’t read the entire bill…)

When the Supreme Court  handed down its decision on affirmative action, the Congressional Black Caucus warned that ending the consideration of race in admissions policies in higher education would have far-reaching, negative consequences. Even that Caucus, however, could not have foreseen the way White Supremicists have rushed to bully and threaten universities in order to ensure that Black applicants receive absolutely no “special” consideration. (And clearly, from the language of Banks’ bill, White guys hostile to Black kids will be the ones who get to decide what “special” consideration looks like.)

When I read the language of this bill, it prompted a twinge of nostalgia for the dear departed days of the “dog whistle.” MAGA Republicans like Banks have substituted a bugle for that whistle. 

Ohio is responsible for J.D. Vance (about whom Mitt Romney recently wrote, “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than JD Vance”), but voters in a Hoosier Congressional district are the ones who inflicted Jim Banks on the country. Now Banks wants to take his fetid brand of MAGA fundamentalism to the U.S. Senate. WE CANNOT ALLOW THAT TO HAPPEN.

As Brian Howey wrote when Banks was supporting Jim Jordan for speaker, “Indiana has a history of Senate lions; Banks is a House hyena.”

We have a chance to get rid of Banks in 2024. Democrat Marc Carmichael is the antithesis of Jim Banks; he would be a Senator Hoosiers could be proud of. He actually wants to be a Senator for ALL Indiana citizens.

Go to his website. Volunteer. Send him money. Tell your friends. 

Help him defeat the hyena.

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Telling It Like It Decidedly Is

Last Sunday, Washington Post contributor (and one of my go-to opinion writers) Jennifer Rubin addressed one of my long-time pet peeves. Okay, not the longest peeve, but prominent since the 2016 election: the evidently widespread, naive belief that very rich people are smarter than the rest of us.

I’ve previously quoted a stanza I love from “If I Were a Rich Man”–the one in which Tevye says that, if he were rich,  the important men in town would call on him, “posing questions that would cross a Rabbi’s eyes.” And we know he understands the way the world works, when he follows up with “And it wouldn’t matter if I answered right or wrong. When you’re rich they think you really know.”

Rubin’s essay underscores that observation.

“The idea of a self-made American billionaire is the super-sized version of all other self-made myths, and outlandish to the point of being at least mildly insulting,” BSchools.org, a blog about business schools, explained. “Individual achievement still deserves recognition. But these things don’t operate in a vacuum — and massive wealth is never solely attributable to the actions of a single person.”

As we have learned again and again this year, sometimes the self-appointed “genius” billionaire is simply a crank, a con man or a beneficiary of familial wealth and luck.

 Rubin proceeds to elaborate. There’s Donald Trump (currently facing four criminal indictments and civil liability for exaggerating wealth that was built on inheritance and inflating his property values), Sam Bankman-Fried  (facing a lengthy prison sentence for fraud), and of course,  Elon Musk (who has now lost more than half of Twitter’s value, and most recently “self-incinerated in a now-viral interview in which he crassly told off advertisers.”)

When outside the protective shell of sycophants and propagandistic media, these characters often reveal themselves to be petulant, deranged and shockingly out of touch with reality.

Rubin explores the historical bases of this very American enchantment with individualism, including the myth of the cowboy, and his celebration by Movement Conservatives, who–as Heather Cox Richardson has pointed out– saw that cowboy as “a hardworking white man who wanted nothing of the government but to be left alone to work out his own future,” .

President Barack Obama in challenging the myth (“You didn’t build that”) attempted to remind these characters that they’ve reaped the benefits of government (which builds the infrastructure, educates the workforce, ensures public confidence in medicines, etc.); for that he was demonized as somehow un-American and anti-capitalist. The episode underscored the degree to which American oligarchs and their political surrogates depend on delusion and denial.

This myth lives on, in large part because the uber-rich are adept at self-promotion, which our celebrity culture gobbles up. “Portraying themselves as rugged individuals who overcame poverty or ‘did it on their own’ remains an effective propaganda tool for the ultrawealthy,” wrote former labor secretary Robert Reich. He continued, “Billionaires say their success proves they can spend money more wisely and efficiently than the government. Well they have no problem with government spending when it comes to corporate subsidies.” And the lure that the ordinary person can achieve the same ends — if they just work harder or put forth the next clever idea — holds a certain attraction while discouraging policies that seek to equalize the playing field (e.g. a progressive tax system, public investment in education).

Rubin’s essay reminded me of my favorite Elizabeth Warren quote:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there – good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea – God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Are there people whose drive and intellect allow them to achieve more than their neighbors? Of course. But individual achievement is either limited or facilitated by the legal and economic systems within which that individual expends his or her effort. And–as Rubin’s essay also reminds us–financial status doesn’t necessarily reflect wisdom or virtue or the possession of other admirable qualities.

Some people are admirable. Some are not. One’s finances, however, are rarely an accurate indicator.

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Appalling

In a comment a couple of days ago, Sharon referenced a truly appalling situation in Floyd County, Indiana. She’d received a request for a donation from the Indiana Sheriff’s Association. The newsletter accompanying the request profiled a program instituted by the sheriff of Floyd County: Residents Encountering Christ. The newsletter described a 3 day retreat, reporting that Sheriff Bush “went in and talked to inmates, sharing his faith and encouraging them in theirs. In all, 41 inmates were baptized during this event. Local news media took note of the program’s success.”

As Sharon wrote, “I’m not sure which I find more appalling, that a law enforcement officer uses his position of power to proselytize to inmates or that local ‘journalists’ consider baptisms achieved under these conditions to be  ‘a success.'”

I am equally appalled.

Law enforcement officers assume an obligation to abide by the Constitution. There is a very lengthy string of  legal precedents confirming the lawlessness–and cluelessness– of Sheriff Bush’s behavior. 

That cluelessness extended to the news coverage.According to the local News and Tribune (paywall),

On July 24th, 41 Inmates at the Floyd County Jail that volunteered to take part in Residents Encounter Christ (REC) were baptized. What a powerful moment to witness! 

One has to be truly naive–or blissfully unaware of the reality of power relationships–to believe that inmates “volunteered.” (As numerous women can attest, when someone with authority to make your life miserable “requests” some “accommodation,” it’s hard to refuse.) 

There is absolutely no legal argument supporting Sheriff Bush’s appalling conduct. Numerous Supreme Court opinions have echoed Justice Black’s words in Engel v. Vitale:

The constitutional prohibition against laws respecting an establishment of religion must at least mean that, in this country, it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by government.

That case considered the constitutionality of a rule promulgated by the New York State Board of Regents, authorizing public schools to hold a short, “voluntary” prayer at the beginning of each school day. The Court held that state laws permitting prayer “must be struck down as a violation of the Establishment Clause because that prayer was composed by governmental officials as a part of a governmental program to further religious beliefs.”

It is true–and very troubling–that the current Supreme Court has eroded previous First Amendment jurisprudence. But even those regrettable decisions don’t come close to making Sheriff Bush’s activities permissible. Perhaps someone should share these paragraphs from Justice Black’s decision with the Sheriff.

By the time of the adoption of the Constitution, our history shows that there was a widespread awareness among many Americans of the dangers of a union of Church and State. These people knew, some of them from bitter personal experience, that one of the greatest dangers to the freedom of the individual to worship in his own way lay in the Government’s placing its official stamp of approval upon one particular kind of prayer or one particular form of religious services. They knew the anguish, hardship and bitter strife that could come when zealous religious groups struggled with one another to obtain the Government’s stamp of approval from each King, Queen, or Protector that came to temporary power.

The Constitution was intended to avert a part of this danger by leaving the government of this country in the hands of the people, rather than in the hands of any monarch. But this safeguard was not enough. Our Founders were no more willing to let the content of their prayers and their privilege of praying whenever they pleased be influenced by the ballot box than they were to let these vital matters of personal conscience depend upon the succession of monarchs. The First Amendment was added to the Constitution to stand as a guarantee that neither the power nor the prestige of the Federal Government would be used to control, support or influence the kinds of prayer the American people can say – that the people’s religions must not be subjected to the pressures of government for change each time a new political administration is elected to office. Under that Amendment’s prohibition against governmental establishment of religion, as reinforced by the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, government in this country, be it state or federal, is without power to prescribe by law any particular form of prayer which is to be used as an official prayer in carrying on any program of governmentally sponsored religious activity.

Sponsorship of religious activity by a government official is unconstitutional.

Floyd County has a Sheriff who is either ignorant of the Constitution or willing to ignore it. In either case, he’s unfit for public office.

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What Else Could We Do With A Trillion Dollars?

I’m not sure where I came across the article I’m going to discuss today; Monthly Review is not one of my typical sources. (The magazine styles itself as an “independent socialist” publication.) I may have clicked through from a different resource.

That said, if the numbers it reports are even close to accurate, it’s very depressing. I am pasting in the rather lengthy first paragraph, which identifies some of the sources of those numbers–sources which certainly seem legitimate–to allow you to make your own assessment.

For decades, it has been recognized by independent researchers that actual U.S. military spending is approximately twice the officially acknowledged level.1 In 2022, actual U.S. military spending reached $1.537 trillion—more than twice the officially acknowledged level of $765.8 billion. Data on U.S. military spending reported by the U.S. government, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI, generally considered the definitive source on international military expenditures), and NATO all primarily rely on the figures of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB). These data, however, are subject to two major shortcomings. First, the numbers provided by the OMB with respect to “defense spending” are substantially lower than those provided in the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA), the most complete and definitive source on U.S. national income and expenditures as a whole, constituting an input-output approach to the whole economy, and the basis of all analysis of the U.S. economy. Second, as is well-known, key areas of U.S. military spending are included in other parts of federal expenditures and do not fall under the OMB’s “defense spending” category. Although SIPRI and NATO adopt wider definitions of “defense spending” than the U.S. government and claim to increase their estimates using the OMB figures as a base, in practice, they do so only marginally and in ways that are not entirely transparent, with the result that their figures are only slightly above those of the officially acknowledged U.S. figures.

The article goes on to detail what is included (medical costs for military personnel, for example), citatons to academic studies and official agency computations, and includes several charts. Bottom line, it asserts that actual U.S. military spending in 2022 came to $1.537 trillion dollars, rather than the (already huge) $765.8 billion in defense spending acknowledged by OMB.

I was already convinced that the United States spends far too much on defense–we spend more than the next ten countries combined–and I’m absolutely gobsmacked by the likelihood  that the real number is $1.537 trillion.

I’ve seen estimates–based upon the lower reported number–that 25% of the defense budget could be cut without affecting the country’s military readiness. What if we accept those estimates and apply the same, very conservative approach, cutting twenty-five percent out of that massive amount? We would have an additional $384 billion dollars to spend every single year on programs that serve the common good.

Think what we could do with that much additional income every year. We could pay the nation’s teachers what they’re worth. We could fill millions of potholes, and fix our substandard bridges. We could plant trees, establish parks, provide affordable childcare… That much money would certainly make a Universal Basic Income more affordable. The list goes on.

One of the reasons America’s defense budget is so bloated is because those dollars enrich the districts where armaments are manufactured and military personnel stationed–a reality that makes both Republican and Democratic representatives of those districts very protective of the Pentagon’s budget. Former Senator John McCain–a supporter of the armed forces–criticized what he called “the military-industrial-congressional complex.” The upshot is that it will be extremely difficult to scale back these expenditures.

It will be even more difficult to change the pro-military worldview.

The Japanese have a saying: when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When a country spends more than a trillion dollars a year on tools of war, it shouldn’t surprise the citizens of that country that it is perennially at war somewhere around the globe.

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