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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Water, Water, Everywhere…

When I first joined the faculty of what is now the O’Neil School of Public and Environmental Affairs, I was fortunate to have my friend Bill Blomquist (then a political science professor, later Dean of Liberal Arts) as an informal academic mentor. Joining the faculty meant–among many other new things–formulating a research agenda, and my lack of understanding of what that entailed might best be conveyed by a brief anecdote: the dean who hired me had noted that I would need to do a lot of reading to keep up in my field. I went home and asked my husband “what do you suppose my field is?” (I still don’t have one.)

Bill helped me sort out a number of academic conventions that I found confusing and/or daunting. During our discussions, I asked him about his own research agenda, and he told me he researched water.

Water?

Bill explained that water–or more accurately, its scarcity– was becoming increasingly political, especially in the West, where there were competing claims to water from the Colorado River. That discussion took place nearly 30 years ago, and as usual, Bill saw the future a lot more clearly than I did.

I thought about my original reaction to the notion of centering one’s research on water rights when I came across an article from Medium on the subject of “water wars.” The lede tells the tale:

Myriad stories have been written about the fight over water rights in the West, especially after 20+ years of a megadrought. The Colorado River Compact was written 101 years ago and no longer applies to today’s environmental conditions.

However, there’s a new area where water is running short: the Midwest.

From Minnesota to Missouri and Iowa to Indiana, the market is quickly identifying water as the most precious resource it always has been.

it turns out that some 50% of the Midwest is technically in drought right now. According to the article, 94% of Iowa is currently in drought, with 24% in extreme drought. And drought is still impacting 68% of Wisconsin and 58% of Minnesota. The report says that the small city of Caney, Kansas will have zero water by next March 1st without decent rain.

All this might be surprising since we’re in the middle of November, but you need to remember that warming temperatures extend the growing season, which increases the amount of water that needs to be used for irrigation. This is just one example of the cascading effects of climate change.

We’re seeing those same effects up and down the Midwest and Plains states, as the Mississippi River is at historically low levels, which translates to smaller loads in the barges that transport much of the country’s grain.

As of Sept. 18, between Cairo, Illinois, and the Gulf of Mexico, average loading drafts for barges are down 24% and average tow sizes are down 17–38%.

Combined, this means more barges will be needed to move the same quantity of products and more boats will be needed…

Water wars are no longer confined to the American West, and we are seeing one emerge right here in Indiana, where a proposed industrial park in Lebanon, Indiana, wants to divert 100 million gallons of water from Tippecanoe County every single day. Boone County, where Lebanon is located, doesn’t have enough water to meet the needs of the kinds of manufacturers Lebanon hopes to attract.

The proposal calls for water to be drawn from the Alluvial Aquifer in Tippecanoe County. That aquifer is not directly connected to the aquifer that both West Lafayette and Lafayette draw from but experts say it is unclear whether the two aquifers could impact one another.

For obvious reasons, residents of Lafayette have reservations. A well-attended forum addressing the issue was sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Greater Lafayette; at the Tippecanoe County Fairground during a question and answer period, experts participating on the panel were asked if the pipeline valve to Lebanon would be closed if there was a drought event impacting Tippecanoe County. The question was met with applause from the crowd.

Water can clearly be political…

A United Nations publication on the effects of climate change on the supply of potable water includes the following paragraph:

Only 0.5 per cent of water on Earth is useable and available freshwater – and climate change is dangerously affecting that supply. Over the past twenty years, terrestrial water storage – including soil moisture, snow and ice – has dropped at a rate of 1 cm per year, with major ramifications for water security.

Remember the sailor’s lament from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge?  “Water everywhere, but not a drop to drink…..”

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Don’t Know Much About History…

Before my stint as Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, I had never heard of David Barton. When that job required me to engage in discussions with people who refused to believe in the separation of Church and State, however, he was frequently quoted.

Barton–a total fraud–was frequently touted in these debates, cited as a “respected Christian historian,” and it was unsurprising that  the folks making those assertions  dismissed the debunking protestations of a female ACLU lawyer (Jewish, to boot!). 

That background may explain why I immediately clicked through to read a Politico article titled “The Bogus Historians Who Teach Evangelicals They Live in a Theocracy.” Here’s what the author–himself a devout Evangelical–had to say about Barton:

The people packed into FloodGate Church in Brighton, Mich., weren’t here for Bill Bolin, the right-wing zealot pastor who’d grown his congregation tenfold by preaching conspiracy-fueled sermons since the onset of Covid-19, turning Sunday morning worship services into amateur Fox News segments. No, they had come out by the hundreds, decked out in patriotic attire this October evening in 2021, to hear from a man who was introduced to them as “America’s greatest living historian.” They had come for David Barton. And so had I.

It would be of little use to tell the folks around me — the people of my conservative hometown — that Barton wasn’t a real historian. They wouldn’t care that his lone academic credential was a bachelor’s degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University. It wouldn’t matter that Barton’s 2012 book on Thomas Jefferson was recalled by Thomas Nelson, the world’s largest Christian publisher, for its countless inaccuracies, or that a panel of 10 conservative Christian academics who reviewed Barton’s body of work in the aftermath ripped the entirety of his scholarship to shreds. It would not bother the congregants of FloodGate Church to learn that they were listening to a man whose work was found by one of America’s foremost conservative theologians to include “embarrassing factual errors, suspiciously selective quotes, and highly misleading claims.”
 
All this would be irrelevant to the people around me because David Barton was one of them. He believed the separation of church and state was a myth. He believed the time had come for evangelicals to reclaim their rightful place atop the nation’s governmental and cultural institutions. Hence the hero’s welcome Barton received when he rolled into FloodGate with his “American Restoration Tour.”

Throughout his decades of public life — working for the Republican Party, becoming a darling of Fox News, advising politicians such as new House Speaker Mike Johnson, launching a small propaganda empire, carving out a niche as the American right’s chosen peddler of nostalgic alternative facts — Barton had never been shy about his ultimate aims. He is an avowed Christian nationalist who favors theocratic rule; moreover, he is a so-called Dominionist, someone who believes Christians should control not only the government but also the media, the education system, and other cultural institutions. Barton and his ilk are invested less in advancing individual policies than they are in reconceiving our system of self-government in its totality, claiming a historical mandate to rule society with biblical dogma just as the founders supposedly intended.

The author went on to describe the speech Barton delivered, which he described as “exalting a curious version of the Christian ideal.” Evidently gun restrictions are un-Christian. So too are progressive income taxes, government health care and public education. During his denunciation of critical race theory, he shared a slide showing logos for The New York Times’s 1619 Project and Black Lives Matter framed around a Soviet hammer and sickle.

There was much more…

What the deeply religious author described is part and parcel of a phenomenon that has become increasingly obvious over the past several years: the transformation of Evangelical Christianity from a religion into a political ideology. In this essay and in his new book,”The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” he documents what he calls the “deterioration of American Christianity.”

The Politico article is quite lengthy. And terrifying. I strongly encourage you to click through and read it in its entirety. It illustrates the politicization of the churches the author witnessed firsthand in his research for the book–research that took him to “half-empty sanctuaries and standing-room-only auditoriums” and included shadowing big-city televangelists and small-town preachers. He says he reported from inside hundreds of churches, Christian colleges, religious advocacy organizations, denominational nonprofits, and assorted independent ministries.

Among the other things his chilling descriptions illuminated was the importance of  teaching accurate history–and the motives of the Christian Nationalists who are attacking the public schools that teach that history.

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