The Building of Storehouses

The Bible contains two contrasting stories about the building of storehouses — places to store an abundance of things such as grain. The first story is told in Genesis 41, verses 41 through 56. Placing great trust in Joseph who had proved himself to be both wise and responsible, Pharaoh made him “steward,” over all of Egypt with power and authority second only to Pharaoh himself. The second story is found in Luke 12 verse 19, the parable of the foolish farmer.

Joseph was the Hebrew son of Jacob who, because of their jealousy, had been sold into slavery by his brothers. Joseph rightly interpreted dreams, messages sent by God to Joseph through the Pharaoh. He took the grace of God and directed that preparations be made so that the seven years of foretold abundance could be used to sustain everyone in the seven years of famine that were to follow — everyone, Egyptians, Israelites and his own family. Joseph understood his God-given purpose. He told his brothers afterward, “And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you.” (Genesis 45 verse 5)

In the second story, Luke recalls a parable told by Jesus about a Rich Farmer, one who had decided to build larger storehouses or barns after an abundant season so that he wouldn’t have to worry about possible famine or even to work for the rest of his life. The thought that had come to his mind was, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry” (Luke 12 verse19). Surely that was the devil whispering into the farmer’s ear. He took the grace of God and then relied on himself to keep the abundance for himself. He didn’t consider sharing it with the community or even generously compensating his workers. He just took what God provided through good fortune and his workers’ labor. This exemplifies the sin of stealing. The farmer planned to take all of the abundance freely given by God. “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ (Luke 12 verse 20)

Too late for the foolish farmer, but maybe not for us.

There are modern-day store-housing equivalents, things that tempt us when we have been graced with abundance. Consider the expensive homes that we buy, homes that are larger than we need; boats and recreational vehicles that sit idle most of the year. In and of themselves, these things are not evil, neither is the owning them necessarily evil. But they might be if in our excesses they distract us greatly from charitable opportunities. For it is written, “Anyone who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with their own hands, that they may have something to share with those in need.” (Ephesians 4 verse 28)

Lord, God, we pray that, through faithful stewardship – we can do the work you have called each of us to do. Send to us the Holy Spirit to motivate and inspire us to share our abundant harvests.

Wheel Economic Theory

I’ve been formulating this theory for awhile, an overarching theory. It suggests that economies are all like wheels. Some are small, some are large. Some are more perfectly round, balanced and well-greased/maintained. Others, not so much. They all roll, with varying degrees of efficiency, until they develop serious problems and slowdown. Ours, the economic wheel of the United States, has stood the test of time. But, due to constant wear, it’s had to have its tire’s retread replaced/updated a few times. Every once in awhile, it has ceased to roll forward, stopped making progress, and has rolled backward. These times are called recessions. But economic wheels, unless and until they are condemned to the junk yard, never stop rolling, even when they are undergoing repairs, they keep on rolling.

Among economic wheels of relatively equal size, the most efficient are well balanced, the weight/wealth within is distributed such that there is minimal wobble when the wheel increases velocity. In the real world, this velocity is the exchange of money. When velocity increases, progress or productivity increases. The wheel rolls faster. But when too much weight/wealth is concentrated inequitably, the resulting wobble forces the velocity to slow down. That, in my considered opinion, is the condition in which we find our economic wheel these days. Big as our wheel is, and in the real world there is none bigger, wobble has reduced the relative velocity so much that our wheel’s progress/productivity can no longer exceed/offset the cost of fuel/money. We’ve been running on credit, accumulating a vast amount debt. This reduces the purchasing power of our fuel/money which begets less mileage.

It’s time for maintenance, people! We have to get our wheel’s tire retread or replaced with new, ie., replaced/updated economic policy. Once this is accomplished, hopefully, we can rebalance the wheel. It will take a qualified/empowered repairman to do this. In the real world, this repairman is government. The wheel cannot repair itself.

As Close as it Ever Got

On a solo mission in Vietnam to observe the effect of a battalion FA (Field Artillery) TOT (time on target), I came as close to death as I ever want to come. I had navigated to what I thought was a safe distance from ground zero, but there were no landmarks or distant reference points available for resection to confirm my location. The area was covered by miles of a triple canopy of vegetation. As I orbited, listening to the battalions’ countdown for the first of four fire commands, it occurred to me that I was crazy to even be there. But hey… that was the mission.

The time of flight from the first battery’s salvo was seconds away when I heard the second fire command, then the third and the fourth soon after. Barely a breath afterward, all hell started exploding around me and it lasted for what seemed like several minutes. It was only seconds actually, but I didn’t expect to live long enough to hear it end. Fortunately, I was several hundred feet above the trees and above the blasts, but I was close enough to them that I could see tree limbs blown up to my level and above. Most of the rounds had obviously detonated in the trees. Thank God one of them didn’t hit the aircraft on its way down.

There was no way that I could assess the mission’s effectiveness on the ground. But, if there had been enemy forces below, it would not have been a good day for them. It wasn’t a good day for me either. But my Loach and I escaped any damage. Maybe God had more planned for me to do.

Controversial Kindness

On the surface, kindness doesn’t seem like a controversial subject. Kindness seems safe, does it not? Kindness, after all, is what Jesus preached – love your neighbor as yourself… do unto others as you would have them do unto to you. It’s the Golden Rule, right? Yet, if we are honest, we have to admit that kindness, not unlike stewardship, if properly and consistently lived, can lead to controversy, internal controversy that upsets our status quo.

Have you driven your car recently, approaching a homeless person panhandling from the median at a busy intersection? Did you silently wish for the traffic to keep moving along so that you wouldn’t have to stop… stop and give the homeless person an opportunity to walk past you with his sign: “Out of Work, Hungry, Please Help?” Time now for some honesty. Yes, I have.

I struggle with controversy internally at these times. I feel a Christian compulsion to roll down my window and offer a few coins or a dollar bill from the stash that I keep in the center console of my car, the dollar bills that I keep for panhandlers whose signs say that they are veterans. I have a soft place in my heart for veterans. But then, how do I know that they are really veterans? And how do I know that my giving won’t just encourage more begging? Time for more honesty. I don’t know.

Perhaps you too struggle internally with the controversy of kindness at times like these.

You know, we can’t be kind in small things like this without connecting ourselves to big things, big things like homelessness, civil rights, economic justice, gun violence, refugees and human trafficking. Have you thought of kindness in big ways like these as well as in small ways? Have you decided to believe what you don’t truly know about these things to justify your status quo — your biases, your political orientation and your daily decisions, as contrary as they might be to the Holy Scriptures?

“Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” ~ Colossians 3:12

A Democratic Manifesto – Why Democrats Must Prevail in November

“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”

~ George Orwell, 1984

Democrats typically don’t turn out to vote in great numbers for mid-term elections. This year must be different. Here’s why…

History’s dictators all came to power the same way, by dividing citizens against one another. They used fear and hate to pit ethnic, religious and racial majorities against minorities, siding always with the majorities. Trump isn’t a dictator, not yet, but he wants to be. He has even speculated about possibly becoming President for Life on day. Accordingly, he’s doing what any would-be dictator would do. With him in the White House we are becoming more and more divided every day. Events are being staged and the media is being manipulated to distract us from the worst of what’s really going on, namely the wholesale destruction of our representative form of democracy. Government no longer represents the people; it represents corporate interests and those who have the money to buy legislative favor. This, my fellow citizens, defines Fascism.

Think about it. The same thing happened in Lenin’s Russia, in Hitler’s Germany, in Franco’s Spain, in Mussolini’s Italy, in Zedong’s China, in Hussein’s Iraq, in Pasha’s Turkey, in Gaddafi’s Libya, in Kahn’s Pakistan, in Assad’s Syria. It matters not whether their regimes were Communist, Fascist, Monarchy or Military, all were authoritarian regimes, all were dictatorships.

Trump, in a revolutionary move supported by a foreign power — Russia, has taken over the Republican Party. This party, since the Equal Rights Amendment, has become predominantly white and holier-than-thou, Evangelical Protestant and Mormon. It’s not the party it was when I was younger — when I was still trying to decide which party best aligned with my beliefs. It has become the party of militant, phony patriotism — the party of anti-intellectuals — the party of anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-choice and anti-labor. It’s the party that was long ago co-opted by wealthy industrialists. With Donald Trump now at the head of the party, with both houses of Congress under Republican control, and with conservative justices dominating the third branch of government, the Supreme Court, the revolution has accelerated. Corporations are now people with an unfettered right to buy political favors. The Voting Rights Act is now history, states are free to disenfranchise whole groups of people at will. Now, with Brett Kavanaugh confirmed, the highest court in the land is primed and ready to decide whether a sitting President has absolute pardoning authority and is above the law – immune to indictment.

The Republican Party no longer needs to pretend to be the party of fiscal responsibility, or even the party of family values. The Republican Party can ignore Trump’s many impeachable offenses to include: obstruction of justice, human rights violations, suspected campaign finance law violations, conspiracy to interfere with states’ free elections, and violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution.

The revolution to which I am referring is not the typical blood-bath type of revolution. There has been no armed insurrection, no open warfare between the people and government. Up until recently, it has largely been a quiet, long drawn-out, political revolution with corporate interests gaining more and more influence on our two major political parties, Democrat and Republican, especially Republican. The revolution was put on-hold by mutual agreement between all parties involved during the Second World War. But it started up again soon afterward with the Republican Party making a brilliant move, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. The Republican party controlled both houses of Congress then, as it does now, and so, it had enough votes to override President Truman’s veto. With the Act made law, individual states were given the latitude to impose Right-to-Work laws on labor unions. Workers over time lost the right to organize and collectively bargain for fair wages and working conditions, a right guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the Wagner Act) and parts of the Federal Anti-Injunction Act of 1932.

The revolution continues today, one political faction against another, corporate interests against individual citizens’ interests. And Donald Trump has come along at an opportune time to accelerate things to his personal advantage.

No, the Republican Party isn’t against everything, seemingly implied by me in a previous paragraph. No, the party is for some things: lower taxes, especially for the rich who are ostensibly our job-creators; for corporate subsidies and high defense expenditures, even for new weapons systems that the military neither wants nor needs; for laissez-faire free trade (deregulated capitalism), and; for stand-your-ground, open carry gun laws. The party protects the Second Amendment they say, so that we can protect ourselves against all-comers, including the “deep-state” government. Unfortunately, this means that we have to have the highest, by far-and-away, gun violence rate per capita of any civilized country in the world. But that’s just the price of freedom, the price of protecting the Constitution.

The party exploits our fears of drug gangs, of bad hombres, of foreign-born and native Muslims (terrorists), and especially our fear of big government, i.e., creeping socialism and a takeover of our freedoms.

The Republican Party exploits passions as well as fears. The Christian majority among the religious in America has been conditioned over recent years to assail against a woman’s right to choose, her right to decide whether to allow a zygote to develop into a fetus and mature into an unborn. But being anti-abortion has not always been a GOP tenant. Republicans supported legalized abortion before the Roe v Wade decision in 1973. Letting women, not lawmakers, decide whether to give birth was in line with their ideological affinity then for individual rights and small government. Republicans were also more likely to prefer abortion over subsequent years of taxpayer-funded support for poor women and children. Moderate Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller of New York, was a main force behind his state’s abortion reform law in 1970, just as Ronald Reagan, a leader of the party’s rising conservative faction, signed a similar bill in 1967 as governor of California. But, once the school segregation issue was resolved by the Civil Rights Act in 1964, superseding all state and local laws requiring segregation, the party needed a new moral issue for the influx of Evangelical Southern whites. Aided by the strict edict against abortion by the Roman Catholic Church, abortion fit the bill after the Roe v Wade decision was made, and moderate Republican politicians toed the line.

The Republican Party generally gives tacit support to other passions of Evangelical Christians. One of these is to allow, even require, prayer in public schools. Another is to permit religious displays on government property, thus blurring if not eliminating entirely the Separation of Church and State. Some within the party would reverse the recent federal decision to make same sex marriage legal, and they would reinstate the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell guideline for gays serving in the military.

There was a time when, for Republicans, the national debt was a major concern of the party. At least they claimed it was. Party leaders blamed Democratic Tax-and-Spend fiscal policy for it. But the facts did not fit their narrative. When Democratic administrations used expansionary fiscal policy (deficit spending), it was when the economy was left in deep recession by Republicans’ “trickle-down” tax cuts and deregulation. In each case, when Democrats took the budgetary helm, the economy rebounded generating increased tax revenues. So, Republicans cannot make this claim, not with evidence to support it, and especially not since the most recent Republican tax cut. The top 1 percent of Americans will derive over 80 percent of the benefit American Jobs and Tax Cut. The CBO and the Treasury Department are both projecting annual trillion-dollar deficits as a result of it. To bring budgets back into some semblance of balance, Trump’s proposed budget for 2019 makes massive cuts to social programs, even Medicare and Medicaid, programs he pledged to protect before the 2016 election. Now Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, is pushing to revise Social Security, increasing the retirement age and reducing benefits.

So, why is the Democratic Party a better choice? Here are thirteen reasons off the top of my head:

1. Democrats don’t want to live in the past.  The party isn’t as progressive as some younger voters would like, but it’s moving in that direction. We don’t want to make America Great Again. We want to make America Greater, not just for some but for everyone, making our nation a land which is truly one and truly indivisible, with liberty, justice and opportunity for all. Democrats, for the most part, believe the mantra, Greed Is Good, represents an economic ideology which will never advance this goal.

2. Democrats believe in democracy. We believe in a democratic form of government, one that exists to achieve, as a community, state and nation, what we cannot achieve as individuals. We believe too that government must serve all its citizens. Now, while by our Constitution, ours is a “representative” form of democracy, we cannot fairly and equitably be represented if citizens are not allowed to vote. But Republicans have no problem with, through gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws, disenfranchising people of color, Hispanic heritage and culture, and economic disadvantage, from registering to vote, accessing polling places and having their vote considered with diminished weight.

3. Democrats believe in responsible fiscal policies. Congress and the President are responsible for fiscal policy, which is laws on taxation and government spending designed to influence the economy. Fiscal policy is always in place; that is, there are always laws in effect that determine tax levels and government spending. Fiscal policy which rewards businesses and upper the upper echelons of society in the short term and at the expense of average tax payers is irresponsible. This is not just what Democrats believe. It’s what the majority of economists believe, and for good reason; time and again we have seen what policies like this precipitate — time and again, Democratic Presidents and lawmakers have had clean up the mess that Republican administrations have left in their wake. Trickle-down, supply-side fiscal policies and deregulation are components of a sinister, corporate con game.

4. Democrats are not xenophobic. Democrats recognize and celebrate the fact that, except for the few remaining Americans which are one hundred percent Native American, if there even are any left, we are all immigrants or sons and daughters of immigrants.

5. Democrats are not homophobic. For the most part, Democrats believe the science on gender identity which affirms that LGBTQ are who they are, not by choice but by nature. According to a Gallup estimate, 4.5 percent of American adults identify as being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. The percentage works out to be more than 11 million U.S. adults. Accordingly, these persons are very much a part of our society and they deserve to treated with the same rights, privileges and respect as the rest of us.

6. Democrats are not racist. Not that all Republicans are racist, but, according to Pew Research, 83 percent of all registered voters who identify as Republican are non-Hispanic whites. Many Democrats used to be, the so-called Dixiecrats. But, since the Civil Rights Amendment, they’ve all become Republicans. People do not usually proclaim their racist attitudes. Sometimes they do, like when those “fine people” among the Alt-right and KKK members who marched in the torchlight demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia. Recall their chant: “Jews will not overcome us!” But my go-to argument du jour for why I believe so many Republicans are racist is that they cannot understand and will not accept that the “Take a Knee” demonstrations by NFL players are acceptable, Constitutionally-protected protests about Black Injustice, protest that have merit with so many young, unarmed black men being killed by police.

7. Democrats support greener energy. We believe the consensus of climate change scientists. Their prognostications of dire consequences for our planet if we do not step up our collective efforts to reduce the warming of our atmosphere scare us to death. ‘Nuf said.

8. Democrats acknowledge the Separation of Church and State. America is not a Christian nation; The Constitution says so. The First Amendment guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly, and the right to petition. It forbids Congress from both promoting one religion over others and also restricting an individual’s religious practices. It guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely. It also guarantees the right of citizens to assemble peaceably and to petition their government. Literally the First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

9. Democrats support equal pay for women. Women in the U.S. who work full time, year-round are paid only 80 cents for every dollar paid to men — and for women of color, the wage gap is even larger. It’s long past time to close the gap. The free market has no incentive to make this happen. So, if women will ever be treated fairly, equitably in America, government must. But Republicans will never do this.

10. Democrats support a minimum wage increase. It’s been nearly 50 years since the last time the federal minimum wage peaked. This was way back in 1968. That was the last time the then-current federal minimum wage was on par with the rate with inflation, even though the minimum wage rate was raised back in 2009 to $7.25. Nobody can live on today’s minimum wage, and the free market has little incentive to raise it. So, if we are a society that truly cares about people, believes that corporations should not be allowed to exploit the disadvantaged, then government must raise the minimum wage and index it to the rate of inflation. But Republicans will never do this.

11. Democrats believe that, under most conditions, military action should be the last resort not the first. We believe that we have been too quick in the past to assert our influence on foreign nations by military invasion and occupation. Our invasion of Iraq during the Bush administration, is one such example. Yes, we toppled a brutal dictator. But, in so doing, the world is now reaping the consequences of instability in the Middle East and a widening of International terrorism.

12. Democrats support stricter gun control. The Constitutional right to own and “bear” arms is not absolute. The Supreme Court long ago decided this. But Republicans, under considerable influence by the National Rifle Association (NRA) would like to change this. The new SCOTUS may do so despite the fact that multiple studies from researchers at Johns Hopkins University have found that such “permit to purchase” laws, which include a particularly strong background check, reduce homicides, suicides and gun trafficking. Literature reviews that examine a wide range of gun policies throughout the U.S. also consistently find that these laws save lives.

Research also shows that domestic violence restraining orders with the teeth to remove firearms from abusers reduce intimate-partner homicide. Likewise, banning high-capacity magazines would likely reduce the deadly outcome of shootings. Australia’s ban and buyback of semi-automatic firearms significantly reduced gun deaths in that country.

13. Democrats believe that healthcare is a basic human right. The United States and Mexico are the only countries of the 34 members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that do not have universal health care. We believe that this is deplorable.

On December 10, 1948, the United States and 47 other nations signed the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The document stated that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and one’s family, including… medical care.” In 2005, the United States and the other member states of the World Health Organization signed World Health Assembly resolution 58.33, which stated that everyone should have access to health care services and should not suffer financial hardship when obtaining these services. According to a 2008 peer-reviewed study in the Lancet, “right-to-health features are not just good management, justice, or humanitarianism, they are obligations under human-rights law.”

As I said in my introductory paragraph, Fascism already has a foothold in our nation. Government no longer represents the people; it represents corporate interests and those, including corporations now, thanks to Citizens United, who have the money to buy legislative favors. But it doesn’t necessarily have to stay this way; we can restore our democracy and prospects for the future of our children and grandchildren. Whether you subscribe to all or any of the above reasons that I believe in the Democratic Party’s platform, believe this:  Fascism is here and it is supported by the Republican Party. We can defeat it, Fascism, again like we did during WWII, not with military might this time but with the exercise of our civil right to vote.

If we do not take up this challenge, if we do not turnout in large enough numbers and cast our votes for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot, dictatorship will almost certainly follow. Independent and third-party candidates won’t be able to make a difference; they can only caucus with one of the two major parties, Democrat or Republican. Republicans aren’t going to stand in Trump’s way either. GOP party leaders, in my opinion, are implicated in the conspiracy with Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to install him in the White House.

Please feel free to post a comment, pro or con.

The Unvarnished Hypocrisy of the Religious Right

The Bible says, “Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.” ~ Isaiah 1:17 (ESV)

Hypocricy is a common theme in the Bible. We all behave hypocritically at times; it’s human nature. But Jesus and all the prophets admonish us when we do. The thing is, most of us recognize when we are behaving hypocritically and we stop, we apologize to those whom we have offended, and we strive to behave more justly in the future. True hypocrites deceive themselves — they either don’t realize what they are doing, how they are thinking, or they rationalize away their sin. Here is what the Bible has to say about hypocrisy.

I know that I should follow the good advise of a much revered person in my family, my wife’s late father, Popo. Popo used to say, “If you can’t say something nice, keep your mouth shut.” He was right, you know; there are consequences for speaking one’s mind, and I anticipate that this piece will offend a lot of people, some of them my friends. But I have to say it. I have to proclaim the truth as I see it… I call my Evangelicals brothers and sisters, fundamentalist Christians who are on the political right, hypocrites — and I very much doubt that there are many Evangelicals today who are not on the political right. Four-fifths of self-identifying Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the last Presidential election.

How can anyone who loves and reveres the teachings of Jesus Christ support and defend someone with the morals demonstrated by Donald Trump: his affairs, his penchant for lying, his hateful, braggadocios, obviously racist comments, his business practices – multiple bankruptcies and legal judgments against him settled out of court? It’s not just his personality, it’s his character. So, there you have it — hypocrisy.

The Evangelical label says something more to me about a person than just the fervor of his or her religious beliefs. It speaks to me about how that person thinks — not just what they believe but how they come to believe what they do. Their thinking is hypocritical — privileged thinking, and it is unvarnished. It’s unvarnished because it’s in plain sight for everyone else to see. They, of course, cannot see it in themselves or in others who share their beliefs. If they could, they would not be true hypocrites. They can’t see their hypocrisy because they suffer from cognitive dissonance. We all suffer from this to some extent. But thinking critically can get us past our biases to recognize truth, or a better version of it.

When confronted with facts that contradict our personal beliefs, ideals, and values, cognitive dissonance causes us to find ways to resolve the contradiction so as to reduce the incongruity, the discomfort that we feel from it. But rather than adjusting, adapting or changing beliefs, Evangelicals and other “conservative” thinkers will ignore or rationalize away the new information to protect the biases that they so strongly hold. Despite verifiable facts, they are sincere and resolute in what they have chosen to believe. Evangelicals can read the Scriptures as well as I or anyone else can. But despite reading and actually saying aloud, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” the message eludes them. It goes right over their heads and bypasses their hearts. They understand that love, as used in this context, is an action word, one compelling us to do as the Prophet Isaiah admonishes us to do. But they choose to blame the poor for their own plights, they shun sojourners, and they support the withholding of tax dollars from social safety net, education and public assistance programs that help lift the disadvantaged out of poverty. They confess how regrettable it is that refugee children have been separated from parents and held in cages. But they say in response to this, “Well, it’s their own fault; the parents brought it upon themselves. They just better stop coming here!”

The Bible and Christian tradition have much to say about loving the stranger, welcoming and caring for refugees and foreigners. Indeed, a strong argument can be made with scriptural support for permeable borders and for a more compassionate approach to immigration, including a pathway to citizenship for young, undocumented persons who were brought here as children. But these arguments would unlikely convince evangelical Christians in America, Christians who are predominately white and who either grew up in the South or were nurtured by the culture that was Jim Crow, a culture which has dispersed throughout the land. Yes, these people, though most of them will deny it, are more likely to hold racist views.

While Evangelicals, those who claim to hold the Bible in highest regard, are more supportive than not of immigration reform, they have more negative views about immigrants than any other religious demographic. This is despite the advocacy efforts of many evangelical organizations and prominent leaders. In fact, the Bible appears to hold little sway on evangelicals when it comes to immigration. A LifeWay Research poll conducted in 2016 found that 90 percent of all Evangelicals say that Scripture has no impact on their views toward immigration reform. They are equally as supportive of measures to strengthen border control — building a wall — as they are for having a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are already here. Many Evangelicals call this amnesty, and they are adamantly opposed to it.

Evangelicals, it seems to me, are not basing their views on Scripture or on rational thought. Instead, they are acting out of a powerful, cohesive worldview — an ideology that is at the heart of their religious, cultural and political identities, an ideology that is influenced by conservative media sources and deeply rooted in their own cultural traditions. Rather than love, it seems to me, that fear and hate, xenophobia, homophobia and self-interest are the more motivating emotions.

Let me say here that conservative is a word that I have trouble using in a political context anymore. I have trouble using it because it connotes moderation. Conservatives in today’s political environment, many or most of them, are anything but moderate in my opinion.

The hypocrisy of the religious right even hurts them in their own pocketbooks. But they fail to appreciate the backfire. The reason for this myopia is fear… in this case it’s fear of what they consider to be a “foreign” ideology: socialism. Because of this fear, it is easier for them to believe in “trickle-down” economic theory, which they associate now since the Reagan Revolution, actually consider it to be part and parcel with, capitalism. Trickle-down is the belief that when the rich are rich enough, they will create opportunity. It’s easier for them to believe this and in limited government than it is for them to believe in nurturing human infrastructure — loving our neighbors.

In 1978,” according to Robert Reich, “a typical male worker made $48,302, while the typical top 1 percenter earned $393,663, more than eight times as much. In 2010, even as overall gross domestic product and productivity increased, the average male worker’s wage fell to $33,751. Meanwhile, the average top 1 percenter was making more than $1.1 million — 32 times the average earner.” But while U.S. corporations have been raking it in at the expense of middle America, the religious right in America seems only to care about abolishing Roe vs. Wade, getting prayer back in public schools, and discriminating against people who have gender identities differing from the bodies that they were born to and/or are homosexual.

In the 1950s, according to Forbes, a typical corporate CEO made 20 times the salary of his or her average worker. In 2016, CEO pay at a typical S&P 500 Index firm soared to an average of 361 times than the average rank-and-file workers in the same company, or pay of $13,940,000 a year. I can hardly wait to read next year how much this disparity will have increased thanks to this year’s Republican tax cut favoring the rich.

Republican evangelical voters, where is the justice in all this?

One might wonder what happened circa 2001, 2 and 3 that so significantly changed the relationship between corporate profits and average wages. Aside from the fact that large corporations typically surge after the bloodletting that takes place during recessions, consider this: George W. Bush was President during the 2001 recession. It was a short, relatively mild recession compared to the big one at the end of his tenure. But, on the heels of the recession, the Bush administration’s economic footprint was made manifest by significant income tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, the implementation of Medicare Part D in 2003, increased military spending for two wars, a housing bubble due to banking deregulation which contributed to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–2008, and the Great Recession…

George Bush embraced a governing philosophy of deregulation. This philosophy trickled down to federal oversight agencies, which in turn eased off on banks and mortgage brokers. Yes, Bush did push early on for tighter controls over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but he failed to move Congress on this. After the Enron scandal, Bush did back and sign the regulatory Sarbanes-Oxley Act. But it was largely toothless — a political, slap-on-the-wrist response. SEC head William Donaldson tried to boost regulation of mutual and hedge funds. But he was blocked by Bush’s advisers at the White House as well as other powerful Republicans. So he gave up trying.

In 2013, the CBPP (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) estimated that, when the associated interest costs are taken into account, the Bush tax cuts (including those that policymakers later made permanent) would add $5.6 trillion to deficits from 2001 to 2018.

The hypocricy of the religious right plays well into the hands of the political right. Because evangelicals are less prone to be critical thinkers, they are more easily swayed to accept political protestations, talking points rather than historical and scientific facts and statistical evidence on a host of social, environmental and economic matters. Small government (low taxes and lax business regulations) and immigaration are just two of them. Take for example: gun control, climate change, environmental policy, healthcare, and foreign policy. This is why, in my opinion, so many who vote Republican believe what they hear from talk show hosts, politicians and people like Donald Trump rather than scientists and legitimate news agencies.

Please feel free to post a comment or rebuttal.

The Demise of Democracy in America and the Election of Donald Trump

Democracy’s a very fragile thing. You have to take care of it. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and you allow it to turn into scare tactics, it’s no longer democracy, is it? It’s something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism.

~ Sam Shepherd

The polarization of political thinking in America, with conservative thinkers on one side of the political divide and liberal thinkers on the other side, culminated with the demise of democracy and the election of Donald Trump. This happened in stages over time. Most historians tell us that it got started long, long ago. They trace this separation of thinking back to the very beginning of our country, to the thinking of our nation’s Founding Father’s. Among them were Federalists and Anti-Federalists.

Stage I — The Federalists felt that the addition of a Bill of Rights wasn’t necessary. They believed that the Constitution, as it stood, only limited the government not the people. The Anti-Federalists claimed that the Constitution gave the central government too much power, and without a Bill of Rights, the people would be at risk of oppression. These Founders, the Anti-Federalists, tended to be slave owners. They feared that a strong Federal government would eventually outlaw slavery as was being done at that time by European governments.

Stage II — In time, we had to fight Civil War over this, a war to end slavery. But the war did not end the cultural attitude of racial bigotry which was engrained into the hearts and minds of former slave owners and into the hearts and minds of their issue over the generations since.

Stage III — Then came the Civil Rights movement during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations in the 1960s. Eventually, we got the Civil Rights Amendment. Before this, racist sentiment in America was dispersed among the general population, but largely found among Democrats, Southern Democrats. The Civil Rights Amendment, the end of Jim Crow and the integration of black children with white children in public schools, drove these Southern Democrats into the waiting arms of the GOP.

Stage IV — Then Nixon’s Southern Strategy, recognizing how strong the feelings of fear and hate are among conservative thinkers, capitalized on the racism in the South and conservative thinking throughout the nation to cement the emotional appeal of social separation of the races and Goldwater-style conservative thinking into a political strategy. Nixon, elected in 1968, resigned in 1974 rather than face impeachment over the Watergate scandal.

Stage V — In the late 70s, industrialists and libertarian economists found the perfect actor to promote their vision for expanding the nation’s wealth and concentrating it among the wealthy few. This actor was Ronald Reagan who was elected in 1980. The effects of their vision, trickle-down economics with tax cuts favoring the wealthy and deregulation for businesses, exacerbated the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us. But the widening gap was mostly felt by the working poor and minority members of society. So long as it wasn’t too painful for white, middle-class Americans and they were able to feel progress on social issues that they most cared about, gun rights, abortion, and immigration, they were able to rationalize the economic injustice. It became easy for them to believe that the poor are poor because they are lazy or stupid.

Stage VI — Then came 911, the War on Terrorism and the Great Recession during the Bush years, 2001 through 2008. Reeling from social and economic pain caused by another round of trickle-down tax cuts and deregulation, the invasion and occupation of Iraq and subsequent human rights atrocities (recall Abu Ghraib and the enhanced interrogation techniques), we elected Barack Obama, our first black President. He turned our economy around. He saved the auto industry, forged alliances with other nations to address climate change, got Affordable Healthcare passed, relieved deportation fears of the Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children, and he improved our standing with other nations and peoples. To this day he remains the most respected and admired man on earth. But having a black man in the White House was just too much for some Americans. It drove the craziness of racial bigotry to a fanatical level among many Republicans.

Stage VII — On January 21, 2010, in a case brought forward against the government by the conservative, non-profit organization, Citizens United, the Supreme Court held that the free speech clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for communications by nonprofit corporations, for-profit corporations, labor unions, and other associations. Overturning the bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, this made it legal for corporations, not just voting citizens, to use their general treasuries to fund “electioneering communications,” broadcasting advertisements mentioning particular candidates.

Stage VIII — It was to the fanatically racist base within the Republican Party, the basket of deplorables that Hilary Clinton spoke about during her 2016 campaign for President, that Vladimir Putin and his Russian oligarchs played, and the GOP welcomed their help to defeat Clinton. They colluded with the Russians (yes, I believe the collusion went beyond Donald Trump and his election campaign). The conspiracy was engineered to divide the liberal vote and exploit an aspect of the Founding Fathers’ Constitutional genius, the Electoral College. The Founders meant the Electoral College to prevent the election of a charismatic despot. But it had a much different effect.

All three branches of our nation’s government are controlled today by one party, the Republican Party. Congress is controlled by big-money special interest dollars funneled through Political Action Groups (PACs) and the National Rifle Association (NRA). So, with Citizens United now being law of the land, campaign contributions are the votes that really count. Election shaping by states with gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws have been deemed constitutional, and we have a charismatic, narcissistic puppet of a foreign power in the White House. The most unpopular President ever, this person, an unindicted co-conspirator, some say traitor, is systematically destroying our economy, our defense, trade and other treaties with our traditional allies, our confidence and reliance in the free press to keep us informed, our collective sense of human decency, our respect in diplomatic circles elsewhere in the world, and our civil discourse here at home. He has obstructed justice and violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution that he swore to protect and defend. He my even be personally responsible for violation of campaign finance laws. Yet Congress, with the power to impeach him for these crimes, is loath for political reasons to hold him accountable. This makes those in Congress who are preventing a vote on the articles of impeachment put forward by Democratic members of the House, guilty of aiding and abetting the President’s crimes.

What a sorry state of affairs. With the Senate likely soon to confirm a judge who, as a Supreme Court Justice, would rule that a sitting President is immune to indictment, we may indeed be just a proverbial inch away from totalitarianism. This is an American tragedy and Vladimir Putin, no doubt, is well-pleased with his man’s progress do far.

Please feel free to post a rebuttal or other comment.

Mr. Wasden Was Wrong About the Electoral College

The Electoral College is an antiquated aspect of the Constitution of the United States. It no longer serves it’s intended purposes, if in fact it ever did, and it stands as an impediment to true democracy. It is long overdue for revocation, but will probably survive as long as the union itself survives.

It was 1956. I was twelve years old and in the 6th grade. Mr. Wasden was our teacher, my first male teacher, and he was a bigger-than-life role model for me. He was tall, a strappingly handsome, square-jawed, third-generation immigrant of Swedish extraction. In the neighbourhood of my youth, which was in South Salt Lake City, Utah, many were also descended from Scandinavian pioneers. So he was very relatable and, given that ours was a Mormon community, he could have sasily been blood-related, an uncle or distant cousin. In hind-sight, he was the physical personification of the 1960s cartoon character on TV, Dudley Do-right. Never mind that Do-right was a Canadian Mountie. I wanted to be as much like Mr. Wasden as I could.

We were learning about U.S. history and past Presidents. It was after our return from Christmas vacation that year and could have been close to either Lincoln’s or Washington’s birthdays. Maybe that was why Mr. Wasden had chosen to teach us about this. This was years before the two calendar holidays were combined to officially commemorate Presidents’ Day as a single national holiday. It was also soon after Dwight D. Eisenhower had won his second term as President of the United States, a heady time for most Americans. Eisenhower, a national hero of the Second World War, was very popular. He had won 58 percent of the popular vote and carried 41 states. You may recall, if you are old enough, that there were only 48 states back then. I know I’m right about that. I just looked it up.

I remember, just like it was yesterday, how astonished we all were when Mr. Wasden told us about the Electoral College. None of us wanted to believe that a presidential candidate could win an election without winning the most popular votes. “But don’t worry,” he said. “It’s only happened twice before in the entire history of the United States, and it’s not likely to ever happen again.”

He was wrong wasn’t he? Not only had he forgotten about the election in 1824 when the House of Representatives met to elect John Q. Adams over Andrew Jackson. It has also happened twice recently.

The election of 1824 was the only time in our history that the House had had to elect the President under provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The vote was held on February 9, 1825. Although Jackson had received more popular votes than Adams, neither candidate had a majority of electoral votes.

“The President was last chosen by electors over the popular vote back in 1888,” Mr. Wasden told us. “That’s the year that Benjamin Harrison was elected president even though Grover Cleveland had won the popular vote. Before that, it happened the first time in 1876 when Samuel Tilden beat Rutherford B. Hayes in the popular vote but Hayes had won the Electoral College vote.”

Since these three historic happenings, it’s happened twice again… once when George W. Bush won over Al Gore in the 2000 election and again in 2016 with the upset win of Donald Trump over the favored-to-win candidate, Hillary Clinton. Of course, Donald Trump claims that he would have won the popular vote too had there not been so many, over three million of them, illegal immigrants fraudulently voting for Clinton.

The electoral system, for those of you who do not know, is a legacy of the Constitution. It was part of an agreement between the states, including Southern states that had more slaves than free men who were eligible to vote. The Constitution was proposed over the existing Articles of Confederacy to better unite the country. This was during a period of time when most citizens lived far from the few larger cities that existed back then. The Framers of the Constitution rationalised that few citizens of the new country could be expected to know much about the leading political figures of the time, or much at all about issues that involved the nation as a whole. So they decided to leave the “official” decision about who should be President to wise elites like themselves. The Framers thought that they would be a check on demagogues and popular passions of the day. The system also served to ally fears that they knew smaller-population, slave states had about Northern states making future decisions for them. Accordingly, they considered it necessary to ensure the Constitution’s ratification.

The system seems antiquated today. Does it not? Of course, citizens of smaller-population states argue that it protects their interests over the bigger states like California, New York and Texas. But, more than just protecting their interests, it gives these states a decided advantage in Presidential elections. As such, their argument is based on the belief that “the ends justify the means.” In my opinion, the idea doesn’t work like the Founders thought it would. Because of it, we have a would-be demagogue in the White House, the most unpopular President ever, and one that was elected largely based on popular passions of the minority.

My conclusion is that the electoral system is outdated. It is highly unlikely, in my option, to ever be abandoned, however. This is because it serves the political purposes of States Rights people. Notwithstanding, it should be abandoned by Constitutional amendment to make manifest true democracy in America — One Man, One Vote.

Please feel free to post a comment on this, whether you agree or disagree.

Yes, Members of Congress Should Have Term Limits ~ However…

“Mothers all want their sons to grow up to become President. But they don’t want them to become politicians first.” ~ John Fitzgerald Kennedy

How often have you heard someone say, “Congress should have term limits?” I hear it all the time. I’ll bet you have too. Maybe you’ve expressed that same opinion yourself. Second question: Have you ever heard anyone argue against the idea, anyone other than a politician, that is? Well, I’m all for it. But I very much doubt that it’ll ever come to pass.

What would have to happen for Congressional term limits to come about? A Constitutional Amendment would have to happen, that’s what. And how would that work?

Article V of the Constitution provides that an amendment may be proposed either by the Congress, with a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the State legislatures. So far the Constitution has been Amended 27 times. But never has it been amended by constitutional convention. With so much rivalry and independence between the states, that path is just too cumbersome. Besides, many state legislators have their eyes on bigger and better things; they might like to someday make a run for higher office themselves. But even if they have no such ambition, why would any of them want to alienate their state’s federal legislators? They wouldn’t. They need good will in Washington.

Benefits of Congressional term limits, gleaned from Vittana.org pros and cons, are:

1. It would bring new ideas to the table. When the same people get reelected to Congress time and time again, the same debates happen over and over again. Low turnover rates in Congress create a foundation of stale ideas and stalemate. New perspectives can provide different types of influence and that can inspire changes which may benefit the whole of society. Senators and Representatives would be able to bring more to each discussion because they are less likely to be isolated from their districts.

2. It may encourage people to vote. Many people vote in every election, but a majority of people in a district not voting is becoming an all-too-common occurrence. If people know that their Senator or Representative is likely to be re-elected, they feel like there isn’t a need to get involved in the political process. By establishing term limits, more people could come out to vote because there would be more opportunities for change.

3. It would stop political power maneuvering. Many of the political machines in the United States are designed to keep people in office. Before his first 100 days in office were even completed, Donald Trump had a 2020 re-election PAC in place and was raising money for his next campaign. Incumbents can wield a lot of power to stay in office and term limits would help to cut this leverage away. The focus can be placed on governing instead of being elected.

4. It would limit the influence of lobbying. Special interests lobby many of their efforts toward keeping specific people in power once they’ve been elected to Congress. They do this because those people can represent their specific interests. The only problem is that special interests are often contrary to what the will of the people happen to want. By establishing term limits in Congress, more new candidates would be able to present their ideas and that could help to balance out the scales of influence in each election.

5. It allows for newly elected officials to have influence. The system of seniority in Congress does have some benefits for leadership, but it also comes with a large disadvantage. Newly elected officials rarely receive powerful posts on committees or can influence procedures. That responsibility goes to those who have more seniority and power. As a result, new Senators and Representatives may spend more of their time trying to get a foot in the door than the time they spend actually crafting helpful legislation. Term limits would make it possible for more elected officials to influence the direction of the country.

6. It could limit the potential for corruption. When politicians have a specific time in office, there is less of a risk of corruption entering into the conversation. Newly elected officials will usually have less knowledge about how to influence Congress for their own personal gain. New members are usually more skeptical of special interest lobbying efforts as well. Having more new faces come through because of term limits would make it more difficult to unduly influence future laws.

7. It could create rogue politicians. When an elected official is in their last term in office, they can use that opportunity to drive legislation forward that may not be politically popular. They can pursue what they feel is best for their district and their country because criticism and everyday politics can then be ignored. It is a chance to create meaningful and lasting change. This could also be considered an argument against Congressional term limits; many conservative thinking people do not want progressive change (see other reasons below why this could also be a con).

The list of cons is fewer in number:

1. Good leaders would be forced to retire. Term limits are beneficial if there are poor leaders in Congress that keep getting re-elected. At the same time, however, you’re also removing the good leaders who work hard and might deserve to stay in office.

2. It changes the learning curve. There’s a saying that goes, “It takes 6 months to learn a job and another 6 months to become good at it.” Being a Senator or Representative has a learning curve, just like every other job. For Representatives especially, their entire first term might be dedicated to learning how things work in Congress. By enforcing term limits, more politicians would be forced to go through this learning curve and that could mean even less stuff gets done.

3. Networking benefits would be lost. Over time, politicians develop a professional network, just like most people do in their own line of work. The difference is that the network of a politician can include officials from other governments, from industry leaders, and people with niche expertise. The presence of that network can help stuff get done. Term limits would require more networks to be developed from scratch.

4. It could create rogue politicians. If a member of Congress is on their last term in office, they know that they won’t be re-elected. There is no motivation for them to be a true representative at that point. They can choose to ignore what their district wants because there is no longer any accountability. Not every politician would go rogue, but term limits would increase the chances that such an event could occur.

I heard another argument against term limits recently. It came, of course from a politician already serving (maybe a better word would be, “functioning”) in an elected office. The argument was that businesses benefit from legislative stability. To me, this sounds like one more reason for us to have term limits rather than one not have them. But everything depends on one’s perspective.

Despite what seems to me to be the obvious and overwhelming benefits to be derived from having term limits for Congress, the prospects for adoption of the idea, in my considered opinion, are slim to none. Why? Because Congress has a great deal of power, balanced, only in theory, by the two other branches of government, the Presidency and the Supreme Court. Congressional members’ power being near absolute, there is no reason, from their perspective, why they should ever resolve to reduce it. Further, absolute power corrupts absolutely, does it not? Accordingly, we might as well stop talking about this, unless, of course, we are willing to start a second revolution to rid ourselves of the new tyranny with which the Founders have left us.

Please feel free to post a comment on this.

Democrats Do It Better ~ The Economy That Is

“Without the triggers, that tax cut is irresponsible fiscal policy. Eventually, I think that will be the consensus view.” ~ Alan Greenspan

Note: At 12:01 EST today, July 6th 2018, Donald Trump launched the first salvo in a trade war with China, our largest trading partner. He imposed import tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese products. He announced the intent to do this once before this year, in March. But he backed away from it when China promised to reciprocate. His action today is something that he had been talking about doing for some time, saying that, “Trade wars are good for the economy and easy to win.” But policies based on this kind of thinking, to my knowledge, are policies with which no economist in this day and age agrees. Why? Because economists read. They read history and history proves that trade wars are disastrous.

Normally, I would not believe a word out of Trump’s mouth, or from one of his tweets. But he said this himself: “The economy does better under Democrats.” And he was correct. He said this back in 2004, long before he was humiliated by Barack Obama during the White House correspondence dinner in 2011. long before he decided to take revenge and throw his hat in the ring for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. If you doubt this, there is a video of him making this statement on YouTube. Check it out for yourself. He said it during an interview on CNN with Wolf Blitzer.

There are many different ways to evaluate which economic policies actually work and which don’t. The best way is to look back at which policies were historically employed by the party empowered to implement them, and then gauge the result.

Policies are based on various economic theories, and there are at least a couple dozen, including: Supply and Demand (Invisible Hand), Classical Economics, Keynesian, Neoclassical Synthesis (Keynesian for near-term macro and Classical for micro and long-term macro, Neo-Malthusian (Resource Scarcity), Marxism, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, Market Socialism, and Monetarism. Republican politicians, at least since the Reagan/Greenspan days, favor Supply-side policy which is based on Supply and Demand and Laissez-Faire Capitalism (more libertarian) theories. Democrats favor policies based on NeoClassical Synthesis theory.

Information for the following, including links to sources previously cited, has been borrowed with permission from http://politicsthatwork.com/blog/which-party-is-better-for-the-economy.php. For students of economics, this is an excellent source.

Much of the public believes that economists tend to be libertarian and to favor-laissez faire economic policy. This works well for Republican politicians who tend to believe  (because they want to believe) in libertarian-style economics and supply-side ideas like trickle-down. They chose to believe these things because they make it possible in the near-term to reward big campaign donors. They, in my opinion, worry less about long-term policy consequences. But what they and much of the John Q public believes really isn’t true. Imagine that… The idea that economic wisdom favors leaving all things to the free market is actually dead wrong. Instead, most economists support policies that are at least as liberal as those that the Democratic Party supports. Some examples include:

• 71% of economists favor using government to redistribute wealth and only 8% strongly oppose it. In fact, the concept of the diminishing marginal utility of wealth is a very well established and non-controversial economic principle. Even Adam Smith expressed the view that the government should redistribute wealth.
• Only 12% of economists take the view that the costs of the stimulus outweighed the benefits– a view passionately held by nearly all Republicans.
• 75% of economists favor government tuning the economy with monetary policy– an idea often vehemently rejected by the Republican Party- while only 4% of economists strongly oppose it.
• Zero percent- not a single economist in the entire sample- of economists agree with the central tenant of Republican fiscal policy that cutting tax rates would boost the economy enough to cause revenues to increase.
• 94% of economists support taking action to address climate change.

In terms of specific policies, economists consistently, and all but overwhelmingly, either support the Democrats’ policies or support policy proposals to the left of what Democrats choose when empowered to do so. This stance on policy issues unsurprisingly translates into which party economists support: Democratic economists outnumber Republican economists by 2.5 to 1.

In 2012, economists felt that President Obama had a better grasp of economics than Mitt Romney by a margin of almost 2-to-1 and that President Obama would grow the economy faster than Mitt Romney could have by a a margin of 20 points. They were right. Obama, with the consent of Congress, using Keynesian style economic stimulus spending, turned around the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.

The following was published by Kathryn Watson for CBS News June 26, 2018:  “Despite President Trump’s declaration that he would eliminate the national debt over eight years, the debt-to-Gross Domestic Product ratio has reached its highest level since after World War II, this according to a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). If current law and spending levels remain unchanged, the national debt will be nearly the size of the economy by 2028.” This is happening thanks to the recent Republican tax cut which was signed into law at Christmas time last year. The Treasury Department has announced that, just in this year, the government will have to borrow $10 billion to cover the deficit that will result from lost tax revenues. What the wealthy and corporations, those who received the lion’s share of the tax relief, have done with their savings was entirely predictable. Rather than sharing it with employees or investing it to modernize and expand operations, they’ve used it to buy back already-issued shares of their own corporate stocks. This inflates the stocks’ apparent values attracting new investors to buy at inflated prices. Brilliant — just one more way to glean from the middle class. Wealth ever upward!

So, Mr. Greenspan, you were right then, and you would be right again if you were to say about the Trump tax cut what you did about the Bush tax cut. They are indeed irresponsible fiscal polices, especially since the economy both then and this last time was not in need of stimulation. Both times, tax cuts were irresponsible too because the tax relief they gave overwhelmingly favored the wealthy rather than the middle class. Had they favored the middle class, people then would have spent their extra disposable incomes to increase demand for goods and services. Maybe the Great Recession, beginning during Bush’s second term, would never have happened. People today would be doing the same, spending their extra money, but the middle class got peanuts to spend from the tax cuts both then and now. This is the consensus view among economists today. Unfortunately, Republican politicians disagree and most John and Jane Doe citizens aren’t sure. But a second Great Recession is coming, and coming soon. Maybe people will be the wiser for it this time.

Supply responds to demand if it’s going to be worth producing. We should have learned that by now. After all, excess supply was one of the major factors that pushed us over the Great Depression economic cliff  in the nineteen twenties. Another major cause of the Great Depression was an import tariff with Europe, our biggest trading partners then. But politicians, especially Republican politicians, care less about what works for the common good and more about what will get them reelected.

Please feel free to post a comment on this article.

Truth, Justice, and the American Way

“If ever the time should come, when vain & aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.” ~ Samuel Adams

Today is the 4th of July, 2018. Some of the folks on our street are displaying the Stars and Stripes, but I won’t be among them. I’m not in the mood for fireworks, for patriotic parades, or even for hot dogs and beer on the lake with friends. At this time in our nation’s history, I’m actually ashamed of us, of whom we’ve become. Or is it that this is how we’ve always been, our professed love for truth and justice just a show? With Donald Trump as our president, our ugly underbelly is now exposed for all to see, the American Way mocking the twin ideals of Truth and Justice.

A third of us seem to be happy with this ugliness being on display. Maybe it validates how they feel. A third of us seem not to care about it so long as certain agendas get done. A third of us are despondent – sick to the core about it.

I wonder how our Founding Fathers would feel. Would they be aghast or likewise divided emotionally? Were they as noble and visionary as we imagine, or were they just rich, exclusionist elites banding former colonies together for mutual advantage – profit and security?

Anthony Hopkins, acting in the movie, Amistad, as former President, John Quincy Adams, gave us perhaps a clue to the above question. He had a great line addressing members of the Supreme Court. He was arguing in the defense of blacks who had rebelled after having been stolen into slavery from West Africa by Spanish slavers.

Knowing what the justices all knew, that at the time this event took place in America, the import of slaves was illegal in all states, he asked them whether we were still worthy of the famous line in the Declaration of Independence, “All men are created equal.” He then referred to busts of the Founding Fathers aligning one wall of the courtroom. He called to them by name for guidance, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams…  Then he said to the justices who must decide the fate those who were born free but whose freedom was deprived from them in the pursuit of profit, “Who we are is who we were.” — How prophetic… It seems, Samuel, as though the time has come.

I love my country but, when we travel abroad again this summer, I think I’ll try to sound like an Australian. We were going to visit Vietnam this year after a spending some time with our kids who live in Singapore. But maybe we would do better to just hang out with our kids at their place.

Please feel free to comment on this post.

The Next Recession ~ Yes, One is Coming

It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.  ~ Harry S. Truman

One does not have to be an economic wizard to predict the next recession in the United States. As I write this, I can assure you that all the signs are there. So it behooves one to be prepared. This could be a bad one, one that will spread to other countries.

Economists agree that economic recessions are significant slowdowns in overall economic activity, slowdowns which can and often do last long enough to cause  economic contractions. True recessions are characterized by economic decline across all or most sectors of a nation’s economy. This distinguishes them from “structural” crises which can occur in separate industries. True economic recessions, however, can only be confirmed if they last for a period of two or more consecutive quarters so as to nullify any seasonal effects.

Due to the globalization of modern businesses and trade, a recession in one country can easily cross national borders and strike whole regions or the entire world.

A recession becomes visible through decline of all major macroeconomic indicators: GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth slows down or goes negative; production, investment spending, household incomes and spending. All of these decline while bankruptcies and unemployment increase. Recessions are therefore painful. But are they inevitable downsides of business cycles, as most economists think? This economist isn’t quite so sure. If they are part of natural business cycles, a recession will, in theory, always follow economic periods of expansion. Those who believe that recessions are inevitable have history to buoy their persuasions. They certainly seem to be right.

A normal business cycle usually consists of four successive phases: expansion, boom, recession and crisis. Each phase is important for transition of a cycle. Not only do different social and economic contradictions gain momentum during a recession and crisis, but recessions also establish a basis for future growth. Over long-term periods, the highs and lows of business cycles form the trend, or average, economic growth rate. But a boom phase does not always precede recessions.

Numerous factors that cause recessions can be divided in two large groups – internal (endogenous) and external (exogenous). Exogenous causes are represented by various factors of a catastrophic nature: wars, revolutions and natural disasters. The economy of agricultural countries may be influenced by climatic changes. Coffee producing countries of Central America, for example, are already experiencing serious economic problems caused by climate change. Neoclassical economists also consider state regulations, labor union acts, business monopolies and technological shocks to be  exogenous recession factors. In most cases, external factors explain all the economic crises that occurred prior to The Great Depression in the 1930s. The Great Depression was the longest and deepest recession of the 20th Century. It followed a rapid expansion of the U.S. economy, a boom, and overconfidence by investors in an unregulated stock market. Rich people who wanted to be more rich poured too much money into overvalued stocks. And when the market finally crashed, proving the old adage that “what goes up must eventually come down,” millions lost everything they owned. It was triggered by a laissez-faire structural crisis.

Pray that the coming recession, one that will, in my opinion, be triggered by exogenous causes: inept fiscal and trade policies enacted by the current administration, won’t bloom into a Second Great Depression. It could.

Historically, economic expansions in the U.S. rarely last longer than 100 months, and we’re already past that length of time. In fact, there have only been two expansion periods that lasted as long as the one that we’re currently in. To match the record 120-month expansion in the 1990s, we’d need to keep the economy growing past January 2019, an occurrence that The Wall Street Journal deems to be “a very tall order.” It might happen, of course; past performance is not always an accurate predictor of the future. But this, in my opinion, could only come to pass baring a geopolitical/economic shock.

Need I remind you that, thanks to President Donald Trump’s import tariffs, we’re already in the early stages of a trade war with our biggest trading partners: China, Canada, Mexico, and Germany/the EU? In addition, the ten-year/three-month Treasury yield spread, widely used to predict recessions, is nearing inversion. It was all the way down to 0.90 as of June 27, 2018 (the graph shown above is a year old. See what it is today). Recessions always follow spread inversions and, with all the borrowing that the Treasury Department has announced to compensate for lost revenues owing to the recent tax cut, I look for the spread to be in negative territory by July.  Therefore, I predict the next recession will occur before the end of the year, probably before the mid-term elections.

Sorry Republicans. It couldn’t happen at a worse time for y’all. But you’ve made your bed… again.

Please feel free to post a comment, pro or con, in response to this article.

Wealth Inequity in America ~ It’s Killing Us

The U.S. has the largest economy and is the richest nation on earth, but not per capita. Per capita, we rank only 12th among nations. This, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is because of the size of our population relative to our Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This ranking also assumes an equal distribution of our GDP among our people, 325.7 million of us in 2017. But wealth in the U.S. is not equally or even equitably distributed. A Harvard Business School study, conducted four years ago, declared that the growing disparity between the very wealthy and the rest of us in this country is no longer sustainable. Since then, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have greatly exacerbated the wealth disparity.

Not including the net value of “for profit” corporations in the first quarter of 2017, according to NPR, the net worth of U.S. households and “non-profit” organizations was $94.7 trillion. That would have been $760,000 each if divided equally among the 124 million American households accounted for in the last national census. However, the net worth of the bottom 50% of these households averaged only $11,000.

Making America great again, I think, should include reducing this inequity. Do you agree? If so, how should we go about doing this?

Luck and The Will of God.

Ask any Christian what they think about luck and you are likely to hear an answer like this, “We make our own luck.” But do we really? And what does the Bible say about luck? It says nothing actually. The word does not even appear in any translation that I have been able to find. I have found many instances of the word, chance, however. Here’s one: “Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all. For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them…” ~ Ecclesiastes 9:11-12

What is luck if not a chance or random event? And if a chance event should be beneficial, would we not call that, “good luck” in the vernacular of today? If a chance event should befall some misfortune upon us, would we not call that, “bad luck?” And if God should be responsible for all things, sending the proverbial rain to fall on the righteous as well as the wicked, then we are faced with the hard reality that God either causes bad things to happen to good people, or else He passively allows it.

Here’s an example of what I would call, bad luck. You, a good person… mostly, are driving down the road, minding your own business and obeying all the rules of the road. Suddenly — BAM! A driver behind you, distracted by texting on his cell phone while driving, plows into your rear-end. You have just become collateral damage, a casualty of someone else’s bad choice. It was an event that God did not make happen, or maybe He did. We cannot know. But we do know that God did not prevent it from happening.

Here’s an example of what I would call, good luck. You, a typical male teenager, engage in your first sexual encounter, going “all the way,” unprotected, with a young lady who welcomed your advances, actually encouraged you. Weeks later, she informs you that she thinks she’s pregnant. You and she, scared out of your wits, commiserate with one another and postpone telling your parents. Then, a few days later, she tells you that she has miscarried. Did God intervene or was the miscarriage a random, natural event? We cannot know. But you are relieved and thank your proverbial “lucky stars.” Hopefully, you have learned your lesson.

Bible stories suggest that God’s will is manifest in three different ways: His intentional will, His circumstantial will, and His ultimate will. See Leslie D. Weatherford’s book, The Will of God.

God’s intentional will “for us,” according to Jeremiah 29:11, is that we should all prosper, that we should not be harmed, that we should have hope and a future. But why, why did He create us? The Bible makes this clear in Isaiah 43:7, God created us for His glory, God’s glory not ours. Therefore, both His “greater” intentional will and His ultimate will is simply to be glorified. Unfortunately, God’s intentional will for us sometimes has to be sacrificed due to chance events and, of course, our own poor choices. This is God’s circumstantial will. It involves Him passively allowing, rather than causing, something to happen. Chapter 1 of the book of Job, even though most biblical scholars consider Job to be a fictional or parabolic character, illustrates this in what God allowed Satan to do in the life of Job. It is also involved in the evil that God allowed Joseph’s brothers to do to Joseph in order to accomplish a greater good, a good not apparent to Joseph until years later (Genesis 50:20). So we have at least a partial answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people.

Does God ever intervene with the randomness of His creation or to circumvent the negative consequences of our poor choices? Sure He does. That is what we believe, and that is why we pray.

I have previously written about events in my life that I choose to call miracles. See A Tale of Two Miracles in The World According to Opa. In one of these two events I wrote about being Hepatitis-C positive and living  for years with the certain knowledge that I would one day start to display symptoms. I had anticipated having to undergo expensive therapies with uncomfortable side-effects in an attempt to thwart the inevitable, a protracted, painful death like the one my mother had had to endure. I prayed for God to take that cup away from my lips. Then, one day, God answered my prayer. Either that or I just go lucky. I became one of about 25 percent of Hepatitis-C infected individuals to spontaneously convert.

After the divorce from my first wife was final, I opened a letter from the local draft board. “Greetings,” it said… I was being ordered to report for an induction physical. I knew that I would pass the physical and, although I had anticipated that this would happen when filing for the divorce, I considered myself to be a most unlucky fellow. Timing was the problem; our country was in the midst of war in Southeast Asia. American casualties over there were mounting. The news every night was filled with frightening videos: helicopters delivering soldiers into the heat battle, bleeding bodies on stretchers being flown back to rear area aid stations, pictures of flag draped coffins being unloaded back stateside. So I anticipated my odds of surviving combat in the jungles to be only even, fair at best. Besides, I had the best job at that time that I had ever had. I was a TV cameraman for a local television station. I loved that job and I hated having to give it up. I had a new girlfriend too – a couple of them in fact — and a new car. Damn! But my induction into the Army turned out to be a long-term blessing, a blessing in disguise. Oh, I did have to experience combat in Vietnam – eventually.  But not before I had become a commissioned officer in the Army, not before I had learned to fly helicopters, not before I was trained to be an aircraft maintenance officer – a maintenance test pilot. So I dodged the worst of the war. My only year in Vietnam was a relatively quiet year. The worst year, 1968, the year of Tet, was over. During the two and a half years of training before my year in Vietnam, I met my current wife too – the mother of two of my three sons.

1967 and 1968 were the worst years for soldiers in Vietnam. Some of my flight instructors, Warrant Officer pilots who were serving state-side tours of duty between combat tours, prepared us as best they could for the horrors that we would soon face – horrors like red and blue streams of tracer bullets rising up to meet us when on short-final approaches to combat landing zones – horrors like the sound of bullets piercing the thin skins of our utility and gunship helicopters – horrors like watching others’ helicopters crashing and burning next to us – horrors like broken and bleeding bodies of soldiers being piled onto cargo floors behind us for evacuation, some of them still crying out in pain. After graduating from flight school and taking my turn over there, I’d have known a full share of these horrors. But I got lucky.

A week or so before graduation, some of us got amendments to the original orders assigning us to duty in Vietnam with helicopter flight school reroute. Some of us would go on to transition training in either Cobra gunships or in cargo helicopters like the big Chinook. Rarely, some of us would go to fixed-wing transition. Some of us, myself, and the future Best Man at my wedding, Marvin Adams, and another whose name I do not recall, were sent to Aviation Maintenance Officers’ Course in Ft. Eustis, Virginia. Marvin and I were there for twelve weeks while most of the rest of our flight class of commissioned officers was experiencing the worst weeks of the war. The officer who flew right seat with me in a Huey on our graduation formation fly-by flight, Johnny Benton, lasted only three weeks in Vietnam. He took a 50 caliber bullet to the head during one of his first in-country combat assault missions.  I read his name one morning in the Army Times obituaries among other class members’ names. Week after week more class members’ names were listed.

I did not know Johnny well during our time together in flight school. I got to know him much better after he died because I wrote to his parents. Their address was listed in the Army Times. I don’t know why I chose to write to them and not to others from my flight class, others that I had actually known better. But I did. I gave them my APO address so that they could write back to me should they want to. A few days after reporting to my unit in Vietnam, the Aviation Battery of the 101^st Airborne Division’s Division Artillery, a half dozen letters from Johnny’s mother were delivered. Each contained a packet of KoolAide. Each week after that, like clockwork, I got another letter from her with another packet of KoolAide. Johnny had written to her asking her to send him some because, as she told me in a letter, he had said in his last letter to her that the water he had to drink tasted terrible. Those letters from Johnny’s mother were a blessing to me. I hope that her writing to me, and my brief answers, were a blessing to her too.

After returning from Vietnam, I married — the right woman this time, one of a few that I had dated while undergoing flight training. The ladies loved me while I was in flight school, and why wouldn’t they? I was still young, I was free every night of the week, I wasn’t too-bad-looking, an Army officer who had plenty of money to spend and who owned a new white Corvette – one with red interior. Luck struck again when, after a year, the Army offered to move me to attend any accredited university, so as to finish my undergraduate degree, and the Army approved my degree plan too: geography. I loved that subject, love it still. I was paid all pay and allowances, even my flight pay without having to log the obligatory minimum of two flight hours a month. The Army paid for my tuition and books too. In my spare time, I earned a commercial fixed-wing pilot’s license, flying friends and family members around to complete the required cross-country hours involved. This was paid for with Vietnam Era Veterans’ Benefit dollars.

During Advanced Field Artillery Officers’ Course, to which I was sent after graduating from my university under-graduate degree program, I completed a Masters Degree in Business Administration. I was sent to the Advanced Course because I was then too senior to return right away to Vietnam for a second tour. Luck? Maybe, or maybe it was just the way unforeseen events unfolded. I and a handful of other Field Artillery officers at Ft. Sill took advantage of an Oklahoma City University extension course to earn our masters degrees. This too was paid for with Vietnam Era Veterans’ Benefit dollars.

I learned a great deal about working with and leading others during subsequent Army assignments – to flying and various Field Artillery ground assignments at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, a flying and command assignment in Korea, flying, command and staff assignments in Germany, and analyst, test design and test director assignments in materiel acquisitions in Washington, D.C. All of this contributed to a rewarding career servicing engineering and materiel acquisitions contracts for DoD clients and later, teaching high school students in geography and economics courses.

Call me lucky or call me blessed. Either way, it matters only whether you believe in God or not. I do believe in God and I think that I’ve been some lucky and a whole lot blessed. Did I make my own luck? Sure, some of it. I made some good choices that enabled me to take advantage of chance opportunities. But, on the whole, I believe the following passage from scripture best applies: “For all the promises of God find their Yes in Him. That is why it is through Him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory.”                ~ 2 Corinthians 1:20

 Please feel free to post a comment or a question.

 

 

The Purpose of Life

God’s command to subdue the earth means for us to have mastery over it, all of it. But true mastery of anything cannot be accomplished without a thorough understanding of the thing to be mastered. With the authority to rule comes responsibility, the responsibility to rule well.

“He who dies first with the most toys wins!” Maybe you’ve heard this once-popular saying, maybe not. Maybe you laughed when you first heard it. If you’re old enough, maybe you saw it on a bumper sticker back in the 80s and laughed. If you did laugh, maybe you thought, “Well, hell, what else is there really?”

This saying is a quote originally attributed to the flamboyant millionaire, Malcolm Forbes. Forbes was an American entrep- reneur who was prominently known as the publisher of Forbes magazine, a business that he inherited from his wealthy father. He was also known as an avid promoter of free market, laissez faire capitalism. He was known too for an extravagant lifestyle, for throwing large, expensive parties for his wealthy friends, for travel and for his collections of homes, yachts, aircraft, art, motorcycles, and Fabergé eggs.

Forbes’ quote serves to sum up the attitude of people like him, people who tend to be more hedonistic. They see life in terms of opportunities for self-indulgence, for pleasure. Me first, they think, my family and friends next – all who serve me, care for me, comfort me, and those who pleasure me. To these types of people, everybody else is just a potential friend/ally or a potential adversary /competition. True hedonists like Forbes believe that this is the highest good and proper aim of human life. I whole- heartedly disagree. I’m a Christian. I am also a Democrat.

I taught a lesson to second graders today. The subject was biodiversity – a compound word, I taught my students – the first part, bio, meaning life, the second part, diversity, meaning many different kinds. The lesson wasn’t really about life; it was about learning to learn. It was about having an open mind, learning to think critically, learning how to compare and contrast. The lesson included an exercise:  comparing and contrasting two different life forms, animals and plants. Yes, second graders are smart enough for this kind of learning, and they’re able to grasp these ideas if the information is presented to them in ways to which they can relate.

I shared with my students how, when I was in school, it was believed that all solid matter was either animal, vegetable or mineral – it was believed that there were only two kingdoms of life: animal and vegetable. Today, I told them, scientists recognize six different kingdoms of life. Life on earth is truly diverse.

A hand went up. “Yes,” I said, recognizing the student.

“What is life, Opa?” I like it that the students in the class I visit on a regular basis call me Opa. It’s what my grandchildren call me.

I might have been thrown off by this question, a deeper question, one that most would not expect a second grader to ask. But I came prepared. I knew how smart, how inquisitive these students are. So I had thought about it ahead of time, I did some research.

“What do you think life is?” I asked the student.

“A gift,” he said, using a rising voice inflection suggesting a question rather than an answer. I surmise that this is something he had been told by a parent, a pastor or another teacher.

“Yes,” I said, “I believe that life is a gift too, one to be treasured, one to be used to good purpose. But that doesn’t truly answer the question scientifically, does it? Are there any other ideas?” I asked. None were offered, so I endeavored to explain.

“It turns out,” I began, “science now believes that solid matter is either organic or inorganic. Organic matter is that which contains compounds including the carbon element. Compound, remember, is a word that means something made up of more than one part, like the compound word, biodiversity. Solid matter that does not contain carbon compounds, like rocks, cannot be alive. But not all organic matter is alive either. All of it either is or once was alive though. Live organic matter has purpose, its primary purpose, is to survive long enough to reproduce, to create new organic material. Organic matter which is not now alive has a purpose too; it feeds organic matter, either directly or indirectly, which is now living. Think of compost, decaying organic matter which we use to feed our garden plants. Think of worms, insect larva, and scavenger birds feeding on the carcasses of dead squirrels and other small animals.

So,” I told my students, “the scientific definition of life is this: It is a transitory state of organic matter, a state in progress of change during which new organic matter is created. This,” I told my students, “is the cycle of life.”

While my students were thinking about this, processing it, I moved on to the exercise, the compare-and-contrast part of my lesson. We focused the rest of our time talking about the similarities and differences between plants and animals. And this, their answers, assured me that they understood how to think critically. I hope they will continue to think critically for their entire lives.

After returning home, I got to thinking about part of my lesson, that part having to do with life, specifically the part about the purpose of life. Is that all there is, I thought, surviving long enough to reproduce? For some forms of life, sure, but, no… surely not for higher forms of life, surely not for humans. I turned to the Study Bible online and found this explaining the famous passage in chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes: ¹⁹For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other; indeed, they all have the same breath and there is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity. ²⁰ All go to the same place. All came from the dust and all return to the dust. ²¹Who knows that the breath of man ascends upward and the breath of the beast descends downward to the earth?

Hold on, didn’t God set man apart from the other animals, gave us dominion over all the earth? That makes us special, does it not? Yes.

The word dominion means to rule or power over.  God has sovereign power over His creation and has delegated the authority to mankind to have dominion over the plants and other animals (Genesis 1:26). King David reinforces this in Psalm 8:6: “You made [mankind] rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet.” So humanity was meant to “subdue” the earth (Genesis 1:28 to hold a position of command over it; we were placed in a superior role and we are to exercise control over the earth, its flora and fauna.

God’s command to subdue the earth means for us to have mastery over it, all of it. But true mastery of anything cannot be accomplished without a thorough understanding of the thing to be mastered. With the authority to rule comes responsibility, the responsibility to rule well. There is an inherent accountability in God’s command to subdue the earth. Therefore, we have a collective responsibility to learn all there is to know about the earth, its occupants, and our place in the cosmos. We have a collective responsibility to protect and defend the environment.

The word, subdue, doesn’t necessarily imply violence or mistreatment. It can also mean “to bring under cultivation.” It can mean “to love and take care of” and that is the meaning I believe is conveyed in God’s Word. Therefore, understanding its true meaning, we are to be stewards, good stewards, of God’s creation. We are to love ourselves, love our neighbors and all of creation. That is our purpose. That is our greater purpose. But, yes, in due course, we will perform our basic purposes as living organisms too: We will survive to reproduce. But we will also do these things: we will protect and nurture our young as all other higher animals do; we will toil to produce so that we might share with our issue and with our neighbors, especially those who struggle, whether physically, emotionally, or spiritually; we will contribute to the common good; we will leave a legacy, and; in due course, we will return to the dust from whence we came, thus completing the life cycle.

Please feel free to comment on this posting.