Religious “Morality”

I get alternately amused and annoyed when self-identified “religious” folks question the morality of agnostics and atheists. How, they piously declaim, can one be moral without (their version of) God?

It’s pretty easy, actually.

Most of the nonreligious folks I know have thought deeply about the nature of morality and their ethical obligations to their fellow-humans. And my genuinely religious friends–who tend not to be among the self-righteous and self-congratulatory “Pence-ites”–are equally thoughtful. But lately, I’ve begun wondering just how those “Christian warriors” define the morality they’re so sure we nonbelievers don’t have.

Pat Robertson, for example, has weighed in on the issue of how America should respond to Saudi Arabia’s recent murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

A major evangelical leader has spoken in defense of US-Saudi relations after the apparent killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi consulate, saying that America has more important things — like arms deals — to focus on.

Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, appeared on its flagship television show The 700 Club on Monday to caution Americans against allowing the United States’ relationship with Saudi Arabia to deteriorate over Khashoggi’s death.

“For those who are screaming blood for the Saudis — look, these people are key allies,” Robertson said. While he called the faith of the Wahabists — the hardline Islamist sect to which the Saudi Royal Family belongs — “obnoxious,” he urged viewers to remember that “we’ve got an arms deal that everybody wanted a piece of…it’ll be a lot of jobs, a lot of money come to our coffers. It’s not something you want to blow up willy-nilly.”

I’m going through the Christian bible right now, looking for the place where Jesus said that money from the sale of weapons with which to kill people takes priority over the sanctity of life. (Unless, I assume, it’s the life of a fetus…)

Robertson’s response is part and parcel of the fervid fundamentalist Christian support for Donald Trump–support that has generated numerous academic analyses and chattering class punditry  devoted to the question: how do these “family values” and “morality police” Christians explain their support for a man who exemplifies everything they previously professed to hate?

It isn’t just his personal immorality–three wives, multiple affairs (including with a porn star), bragging about sexual assault, constant bullying and even more constant (and obvious) lying. It’s also his business practices.

A recent article in The New Yorker provided evidence that fraud is at the heart of the Trump business model.

The Times published a remarkable report, on October 2nd, that showed that much of the profit the Trump Organization made came not from successful real-estate investment but from defrauding state and federal governments through tax fraud. This week, ProPublica and WNYC co-published a stunning storyand a “Trump, Inc.” podcast that can be seen as the international companion to the Timespiece. They show that many of the Trump Organization’s international deals also bore the hallmarks of financial fraud, including money laundering, deceptive borrowing, outright lying to investors, and other potential crimes.

Of course, my question is rhetorical. We all know why so many White Christian men (and the women they dominate) support Trump–he tells it like (they think) it is: they are superior by virtue of their religion, their genitals and their skin color, and so they deserve to keep a more privileged status than women and minorities.

There are lots of words that describe that attitude and that support, but “moral” isn’t one of them.

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Money And Trust

A number of people who regularly comment on this blog have repeatedly expressed contempt for the very wealthy CEOs who exercise disproportionate power in our current political environment. I share their disapproval of the systemic flaws that facilitate that influence, but I am unwilling to throw all rich people into the “deplorable” basket.

Just like all minority groups–blacks, Jews, Muslims, LGBTQ folks–the rich are a mixed lot, so I was interested to see a MarketWatch report that looked at personal political contributions by the nation’s CEOs. 

Let me concede right now that the observation I’m about to share is probably unfair. But I’ll share it anyway: the corporate executives that I have previously thought to be honorable have been giving to Democrats during this election cycle. Those who’ve been demonstrably less-than-upright tend to be found in the “donating to Republicans” column.

Warren Buffett gave 100% of his donations to Democrats; Timothy Sloan–who heads up scandal-ridden Wells Fargo–gave to Republicans.

Tim Cook of Apple made only one contribution, to a Democratic candidate for Congress. Jamie Diamond of JPMorgan also made only one contribution–to Orrin Hatch.

I am compelled to admit that the totals donated do tend to support the previously-referenced expressions of contempt for America’s plutocrats. These particular CEOs gave 2,632,234 to Democrats, and a whopping 7,438,781 to Trump’s GOP.

MarketWatch’s analysis found that among the CEOs who did contribute to party-affiliated committees, nearly all leaned heavily blue or red, with few donating equally to the two main parties. More than 84% of the 261 CEOs who contributed to partisan committees donated 70% or more of their money to one party or the other. And about 100 of the CEOs spent above the median amount and contributed 75% of their money to one party.

The behavior of these executives when they are spending their own money is interesting, because corporate PACs mostly spread their money around, presumably in an effort to buy influence on both sides of the political aisle. The study by MarketWatch found that executives within the “corporate elite” tend to donate their personal funds based on ideology rather than strategy.

The chart accompanying the article is interesting. I am not familiar with most of the corporations listed, but I have a very good impression of Salesforce, a company which has become one of Indianapolis’ best corporate citizens since locating here a few years ago. And I’ve upgraded my impression of Netflix…

In the 2018 election cycle, two Silicon Valley bosses — Netflix Inc.’s NFLX, +2.43% Reed Hastings and Salesforce.com Inc.CRM, +1.46% co-CEO Marc Benioff — stand out for contributing only to individual Democratic candidates’ committees or groups tied to the Democratic Party, as shown in our chart, which is based on itemized filings with the Federal Election Commission. Hastings donated $571,600, making him the biggest spender among partisan outliers who favor Democrats, while Benioff gave $188,900. The chart shows the CEOs who were both the most partisan in their outlays and contributed the most money overall (more than $90,000 in partisan donations). Netflix and Salesforce declined to comment.

“A lot of the immigration concerns that tech companies have are going to push them in the direction of supporting Democrats,” said Sarah Bryner, research director for the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign-finance watchdog. “They’re worried about their employee base.” Tech companies, which often employ highly skilled newcomers to the U.S., have voiced opposition to the GOP’s efforts to restrict immigration.

Or maybe they are just appalled by Trump and his takeover of the GOP.

As I say, probably not a totally fair analysis of this particular data. But interesting.

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Is THIS The New World Order?

If the scenario of minority governance painted by Ezra Klein–about which I blogged a few days ago–persists, if the current iteration of the Republican Party continues to control all three branches of America’s government despite being the choice of a dwindling minority of America’s voters, what can we expect?

Rather obviously, we can anticipate tax and spending policies benefitting the rich and well-connected at the expense of the rest of us. And speaking of the rich and well-connected, there have recently been several reports involving rich and connected Erik Prince, and his “vision” of privatized warfare.

Prince is Betsy DeVos’ brother, and the former head of Blackwater. Actually, former is a misnomer: Blackwater still exists, but its name was changed after it became a dirty word.

According to the Washington Post, 

More than a year after his plan to privatize the Afghan war was first shot down by the Trump administration, Erik Prince returned late last month to Kabul to push the proposal on the beleaguered government in Afghanistan, where many believe he has the ear — and the potential backing — of the U.S. president.

That speculation continues, despite a statement from the President of Afghanistan to the effect that the country would “under no circumstances” allow the counterterrorism fight to become a “private, for-profit business.” American military figures are equally negative

At the Pentagon, the head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. Joseph Votel, told reporters that “I absolutely do not agree” with Prince’s contention that he could win the war more quickly and for less money with a few thousand hired guns.

In addition to such a plan violating signed agreements with the Afghan government, Votel said, “the most significant downside is that we turn our national interest over to contractors.” Quoting earlier comments by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Votel said, “I don’t think this is a very good strategy.”

The fact that people who understand warfare are negative only goes so far with a President who thinks his gut knows more than “the generals” (or climate scientists, or economists, or pretty much anyone). The article notes the existence of

a widespread belief in Kabul and Washington that Prince has a willing audience in President Trump, who is known to be frustrated with the cost and slow progress of the strategy he adopted a year ago — a belief buttressed by the White House’s refusal to reject the idea out of hand.

The Afghans aren’t convinced;  Qadir Shah, spokesman for the country’s National Security Council, has been quoted as saying that Prince possesses a “colonialist type of arrogance” and is “a war profiteer who stands to make $10 billion a year from such a plan,” assessments that are hard to dispute.

Since severing his ties to Blackwater — the company he founded that was accused of heavy-handed practices, including the killing of civilians, while under U.S. contract in Iraq — Prince has cycled through several iterations of the same business and now runs a Hong Kong-based company called Frontier Services.

It isn’t simply that Prince is an out-and-out profiteer, an accused murderer, and as despicable as (although clearly brighter than) his sister. Privatizing war is a terrible idea, and we’ve already gone too far down that path. In 2005, I wrote a paper titled “Outsourcing Patriotism” about dubious practices during the Iraq War.

During that war, private corporations were the second biggest contributor to coalition forces after the Pentagon, and nearly a third of the budget earmarked that year for the war, or $30 billion dollars, went to private companies. Wherever possible, soldiers were replaced with highly paid civilians not subject to standard military discipline. As I noted at the time, whether such contractors are mercenaries (whose use is banned by the Geneva conventions) is one concern, but the practice raised much graver issues, among them whether the ability to “hire” soldiers allows policymakers to wage war by proxy and without the kind of congressional and media oversight to which conventional deployments are subject.

In such a world, Congressman X doesn’t have to come home and justify sending a constituent’s son or daughter to war. In such a world, lobbyists for companies being hired to fight  would agitate for military rather than diplomatic “solutions” to international issues. And in such a world, those companies would inevitably be available to the highest bidder, not just to the U.S.–and to the extent they employed former members of our armed forces, our tactics and capacities would become an open book our enemies could read.

But people like Erik Prince would make a lot of money. And idiots like Donald Trump wouldn’t understand why hiring soldiers wasn’t a great idea.

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What The Jury Said

I have heard damning stories about Monsanto for years, so it didn’t surprise me when Trump’s EPA retreated from Obama-era findings that a chemical in one of the company’s herbicides, glyphosate, is a carcinogen. Glyphosate is a component of  Round-Up, which is widely used; numerous studies have linked that use to cancer, shortened pregnancies and other serious health outcomes.

The EPA may have backed off, but just last month, the Guardian reported a fairly stunning legal victory over the company.

Dewayne Johnson tries not to think about dying.

Doctors have said the 46-year-old cancer patient could have months to live, but he doesn’t like to dwell on death. These days, he has an easy distraction – navigating the international attention on his life.

The father of three and former school groundskeeper has been learning to live with the gift and burden of being in the spotlight in the month since a California jury ruled that Monsanto caused his terminal cancer. The historic verdict against the agrochemical corporation, which included an award of $289m, has ignited widespread health concerns about the world’s most popular weedkiller and prompted regulatory debates across the globe.

Johnson, who never imagined he would be known as “dying man” in dozens of news headlines, is still processing the historic win.

What is especially telling about the verdict is that Johnson–the first cancer victim to sue Monsanto and win– alleged that the company had spent decades intentionally covering up the cancer risks of its herbicide.

The groundbreaking verdict further stated that Monsanto “acted with malice” and knew or should have known that its chemicals were “dangerous”.

Monsanto, of course, has already filed a motion seeking to throw out the verdict– and prevent Johnson’s family from receiving the money. When a David like Johnson faces a Goliath like Monsanto, the eventual odds favor Goliath, and there are indications that the Judge is listening to Monsanto.

That said, deceiving the public about the risks of its products is hardly the only “rap” against Monsanto. I’ve read stories for years about the company’s vendetta against small farmers who save patented seeds they’ve purchased for use in ensuing years.

The agricultural giant Monsanto has sued hundreds of small farmers in the United States in recent years in attempts to protect its patent rights on genetically engineered seeds that it produces and sells, a new report said on Tuesday.

The study, produced jointly by the Center for Food Safety and the Save Our Seeds campaigning groups, has outlined what it says is a concerted effort by the multinational to dominate the seeds industry in the US and prevent farmers from replanting crops they have produced from Monsanto seeds.

In its report, called Seed Giants vs US Farmers, the CFS said it had tracked numerous law suits that Monsanto had brought against farmers and found some 142 patent infringement suits against 410 farmers and 56 small businesses in more than 27 states. In total the firm has won more than $23m from its targets, the report said.

There are also allegations that Monsanto will sue farmers whose fields contain more than one percent of crops grown from seeds that have “blown in” from adjacent fields. I was unable to verify the accuracy of that claim, although I once had a colleague whose father was a farmer, and my colleague claimed his father been targeted in just such a suit.

Fifty-three percent of the world’s commercial seed market is controlled by three firms – Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta. That amount of power and market dominance undoubtedly has something to do with the EPA’s reversal, despite the conclusions reached by numerous scientists.

Of course, Trump’s EPA doesn’t believe any science. They probably put more stock in voodoo–and they’re probably sticking pins in a doll that looks like Dewayne Johnson now.

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Hard Cases And Bad Law

Lawyers have a saying: hard cases make bad law. A couple of pending cases over Net Neutrality offer a good illustration.

A bit of background: One of the many outrages perpetrated by the Trump Administration was the cynical elimination of net neutrality rules by Ajit Pai of the FCC, despite the fact that a huge majority of Americans supported those rules. Pai came to the agency from Verizon, where he’d been an executive; Verizon and other large telecom interests don’t want to be restrained by pesky regulations requiring that they treat internet users equally.

When the FCC eliminated Net Neutrality, more than 20 states filed lawsuits, arguing that the agency had acted arbitrarily. Those lawsuits are supported by companies like Mozilla, trade associations representing Amazon, Facebook and Google, and consumer groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge.

For its part, California responded to the elimination of Net Neutrality by passing a version of its own. On September 30th, The Washington Post reported

California on Sunday became the largest state to adopt its own rules requiring Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon to treat all web traffic equally. Golden State legislators took the step of writing their law after the Federal Communications Commission scrapped nationwide protections last year, citing the regulatory burdens they had caused for the telecom industry.

That same Sunday, the Trump Administration announced that it would sue California to block that law, setting up what the Post characterized as a high-stakes legal showdown over the future of the Internet. The administration will argue that only the federal government has the authority to regulate the Internet, and that the reason Congress gave the federal government exclusive authority was to ensure that all 50 states wouldn’t write their own conflicting rules governing the web.

Fair enough. Fifty different regulatory approaches would be a nightmare for ISPs, and arguably impossible to enforce. On the other hand, the  federal government’s actions weren’t just bad policy that ignored the great weight of both expert and public opinion–its nullification of the net neutrality rules arguably constituted yet another gift by the administration to moneyed interests.

When the Justice Department announced that it would sue California, it set up a “lose-lose” “hard cases” scenario. In a sane world, the U.S. would have one comprehensive set of policies governing Internet practices–not 50. But in a sane world, the administration wouldn’t have repealed rules that were widely seen as necessary, reasonable and equitable.

If all this wasn’t bizarre enough, a couple of days ago, the FCC submitted its defense of the repeal in the lawsuit brought by the states by arguing that it had no authority to pass net neutrality rules in the first place.

Chairman Ajit Pai’s FCC argued that broadband is not a “telecommunications service” as defined in federal law, and therefore it must be classified as an information service instead. As an information service, broadband cannot be subject to common carrier regulations such as net neutrality rules, Pai’s FCC said. The FCC is only allowed to impose common carrier regulations on telecommunications services.

That argument would be a tad more convincing if the DC Circuit appeals court hadn’t ruled in 2016 that the rules were legal.

The argument also would seem to complicate the administration’s threatened preemption suit against California; lawyers defending the ability of states to pass rules say the FCC can’t preempt state laws that regulate conduct over which the FCC has no regulatory authority.

Does your head hurt yet? (Mine does.)

The various entities suing the FCC have until November 16 to file reply briefs. Final briefs are due November 27, and oral arguments are scheduled for February 1.

Oh what a tangled web we weave when trying to enrich an administration’s cronies.

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