Working Together

I just read another one of Sharon Astyk's excellent posts. It was basically an extended question: "So Can (some variations on) Left and (some variations on) Right Work Together?" I replied in the comments, and thought it worth sharing my response here as well:

Like several commenters, I think it is more likely for common people of different political backgrounds to work together than it is for national leaders and movements to cooperate. The sad fact is that it is so often more politically and financially profitable to vilify opponents than to search for common ground, especially when people who do try to put differences aside are merely taken advantage of. I have hope, though, because the small and little-noticed acts of ordinary neighbors working together over time have more power than the top of the establishment. Whether or not public or political cooperation is possible, we should not be discouraged from building community among those with whom we disagree.

My thoughts on the power of ordinary people and their choices are related to another of Sharon's posts, which in my humble opinion is the best blog post ever. They are also in part inspired by Isaiah 61:11 (ESV):

For as the earth brings forth its sprouts,
and as a garden causes what is sown in it to sprout up,
so the Lord GOD will cause righteousness and praise
to sprout up before all the nations.

I guess that makes God the original grassroots activist. Seriously though, it's a reminder that there's a reason looking up at the powers that be can be so depressing, and that we are called to be change agents in our immediate community first. God chooses so often to work among the lowly and the ordinary that it's as if his righteousness is sprouting up from underneath us and all around us. May we all be true ministers of reconciliation and build loving community that includes people of differing opinions!

Osama bin Laden: Economic Terrorist

I have to admit, I didn't react to the news of bin Laden's death very much when I heard it. I was in the midst of preparing for an important exam the very next day, and it wasn't significant enough to me to derail my focus on that. I've had plenty of time to think about it since then, and also plenty of time to absorb some of the constant coverage about it. My mood was and remains somewhat satisfied at bottom yet also subdued. Death is not something I feel like rejoicing over in general, and there are real risks involving possible terrorist retaliation and a strained relationship with Pakistan, so I think it prudent to focus on moving forward.

I am not writing to share my mood, however. I want to reflect on an opinion I heard last night which was new to me and struck me as insightful, if also a bit hard to swallow. Rachel Maddow opened her show last night with a segment on bin Laden through the lens of economics. She gave a bio that focused on his wealthy upbringing, summarized statements he made before and after attacks about wanting to cripple the American economy, and presented a lot of colorful charts outlining economic damages our country has suffered since 9/11. The main point of all this was borrowed from a piece written eariler that day by Ezra Klein (which I have since also read). The thesis in both of these presentations is that from the very beginning, one of bin Laden's goals was to drive America into debt it could not repay, and that in a number of ways, both direct and indirect, he was successful.

Such a reminder of the terrorist mastermind's success, especially success that we're still dealing with today, is quite sobering. I do not think that his success was complete, and I do think in the long term America will recover, but the question is: how? Will we deal with the financial crisis he at least exacerbated by remaining true to our values and proving that liberty prevails in the end? Or will we compromise in the name of emergency and expediency and have as a result a needier populace and a weaker republic?

I can picture the classic fiscal conservative taking these ideas and running with them, saying that this proves how important the debt crisis is, and how we must be willing to sacrifice anything to defeat this last scar of terror. This is precisely what scares me about all of this. If we sacrifice programs like Medicare and Social Security in order to quell this menace, that is a loss, not a win. When a city is under attack, the elderly, the sick, the disabled, and innocent children don't become casualties of war until the enemy has already breached the wall and has free run of everything.

Now we can see how insidious the plan of terror is. More than money, more than human lives, Osama bin Laden was always targeting our values, the beating heart of our nation. The attack of 9/11 opened cracks in the wall of our ideology, allowing opposing thoughts in. For the sake of security, prominence, and prosperity in the world we are tempted to abandon principles that make America what it is. From giving up some of our rights to privacy for the sake of counter-terror intelligence to sacrificing safety net programs in order to finance expensive wars, the demands of our response to terror have eroded the values our country stands for.

Bin Laden is not the source of all of these problems. Indeed, we may have encountered them even if he had never left his horse stables to become a militant. However, his passing gives us opportunity to reflect on this legacy: He understood the weak points in our system and our national psyche, and he blew a hole in them which we will still be patching long after his death. Let's be careful how we heal, so that we can emerge a stronger and better nation, and in so doing have our true victory over Osama bin Laden.

Budget part 2: Scope and Scale

House Republicans have made a lot noise over their decisions to cut specific funding and programs. In the debate over these details, it seems that it's easy to lose sight of the whole picture of the federal budget, so it seems a good first step is to look at the overall numbers to get some perspective. This Wikipedia article is a good place to start, and it has a nice (CC licensed!) pie chart:

Now keep in mind that the 2009 federal deficit was $1.42 trillion. That's about 40% of the above total. That's a huge number; you could completely kill two whole categories of that pie chart and still just barely balance the budget. True, 2009 may have been a high year what with special and hopefully temporary circumstances like the bailout, but the deficit is still a big chunk of the total budget. I'm pointing this out to encourage skepticism whenever someone says they can balance the budget by hacking away at line items. The deficit is a large problem that will only be dealt with through significant and systemic changes.

Let's get back to the budget, though, because there are a couple more things it's helpful to understand. There are two types of federal spending: mandatory spending and discretionary spending. Mandatory spending is spending that was passed into law by Congress, and is automatically spent each year without any need for special approval. Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are the two biggest mandatory expenditures. Changes to mandatory expenditures require changes to the specific laws that call for them, and are generally not dealt with as a part of the budget debates you hear about in the news. Those have to do with discretionary spending. Discretionary spending is not called for by any laws, and so must be approved by Congress in each new budget. The defense budget is by far the largest contributor to discretionary spending, and the rest of discretionary spending is filled by familiar programs such as health and human services, veterans' programs, education, transportation, and many many more. See this chart from the article if you want to see some of those. By my count based on the chart above, 55% of federal spending is mandatory, and 39% is discretionary. (I'm leaving out interest payments on the debt.)

This distinction is important in order to understand what the budget debate, especially the most current possibly-shut-down-the-government debate, is really about. Although many people would like to reform or even remove Social Security and Medicare, that's a separate issue because those programs are mandatory, and it's not addressed as part of the yearly budget. Then there's another distinction that comes into play because no one, least of all Republicans, wants to limit the budget of the military. That means that most of the fuss people have been making over cuts involves solely non-defense discretionary spending. If you read enough news or pundits you'll see this phrase thrown around a bit. It's referring to the orange slice of that pie — only 19% of total federal expenditures. This is the slice that Republican leadership is so adamant about cutting down.

The obvious inconsistency here is that it is impossible to eliminate the deficit by reducing that piece. The deficit is double the size of that whole category! Now it's true that non-defense discretionary spending will have to be trimmed some (though there are reasons there's less waste in this category than in others; more on that later), but the singular and uncompromising focus on such cuts by House Republicans does not match the attitude one would expect from people who claim to be concerned about the deficit first and foremost. The deficit is such a big problem that fixing it will require cuts from multiple categories, including defense, and it will even require an increase in revenue.

Moreover, in the face of a trillion dollar plus deficit, it would seem to be reasonable and humane to compromise on items such as a billion dollars for food and health care assistance to poor kids and pregnant women, or $1.6 billion to the NIH, which is responsible for cancer research. These programs make a significant impact in people's lives and in our nation's future, and they're not contributing significantly to the deficit — the numbers just don't add up!

There's only one way I can see to make sense of these quantitative inconsistencies without supposing that Republicans are completely ignorant of these facts, which I highly doubt. That is to deduce that the deficit is in fact not their #1 priority, but that they are perfectly willing to use it as a propaganda prop in order to persuade voters to get behind their plan to cut things they've wanted to cut all along. This tactic is deceitful, and I can't imagine it is in the best interests in the long run of the American people.

Immoral Budget Decisions part 1: Introduction

I recently re-tweeted something from MoveOn.org about the latest Republican budget proposal, and then I followed it up with a tweet echoing that I actually did for once agree with MoveOn's slogan that the proposed cuts are immoral. This led to a stimulating discussion with a fiscally conservative friend of mine, and as a result of that I've decided it's a good idea to flesh out my ideas in a series of blog posts. This first post will give the gist of my overall argument, and subsequent posts will be focused on compiling references I've drawn on and evaluating the details of my points.

I like analogies, so I'll start off with a story. Imagine two brothers, one of whom is pretty well off, and another who has just gotten into some dire financial trouble. The second brother goes to the first and asks for some money, and the first brother says to him, "I'm really sorry, brother, but I'm having a bit of a budget crisis myself and I really can't afford to help you out right now."

Is the first brother making an immoral choice at this point? Not necessarily. Although I certainly advocate making sacrifices for the sake of helping others, with all we know about the brothers now it could very well be that the well-off brother is telling the truth, and so I wouldn't want to pass judgement at this point.

Now suppose the story continues with the poor brother walking by a car dealership and spotting his brother chatting with a dealer about a sport car. As his brother goes into the dealer's office to close his purchase, the poor brother says hello to the well-off brother's wife and mentions that he didn't know their family was in need of a new car. "Oh we don't need that car," she says, "I just haven't been able to get him to shut up about it. We don't even have the cash on hand to pay for it, so he's financing the thing. I told him he should reconsider but he just wouldn't budge."

Does this part of the story change how we should view the first brother's choices? I would argue that it does, and very much so. For one, the well-off brother is choosing to send himself further into debt at a time when getting out of debt would give him the ability to help his brother. His own financial health impacts not only him but others in his life as well. Perhaps most telling, though, is the fact that even though the well-off brother claims to be in a crisis, he still feels confident enough to take on the extra debt of a new car. If he can finance a car, though, why can't he finance his brother? If he really doesn't need the car, why wouldn't he forgo that purchase and perhaps even take out a loan on behalf of his brother if he's that confident in his credit? Surely that would be a much better reason to take on debt. The other things the first brother does with his finances informs us about his motives, and in this case I think it would be fair to call his priorities and choices immoral.

This analogy is of course imperfect, so I advise against extrapolating too much from it. It does illustrate the central point of contention I have with the GOP budget proposal though. They are slashing already bare-bones programs that provide needy children lunches, pregnant women health care, and homeless veterans shelter. At the same time, much larger and more expensive areas of waste exist on the federal level that they are completely unwilling to discuss. Subsidies to industries such as oil conglomerates who are posting record profits, inefficient and unregulated contracting to private firms, and even superfluous defense projects the Pentagon brass rejects as wasteful are all examples of areas where cuts are either morally neutral or even positive, and Republicans are largely unwilling to take these on. All this, and I haven't even mentioned their virulent fight against a meager 3% increase on the marginal tax rate for the top tax bracket!

Republicans like to talk a lot about balancing the budget and reducing the deficit, goals I definitely agree with. However if we're going to do so, we should have all options on the table, and we should prioritize cutting true waste over cutting programs that actually help people. Putting the needy on the chopping block ahead of real trash is more than irrational and shortsighted, it is immoral.

Stay tuned for follow up posts with details and references!

Christmas Joy

There's a lot of discontent in some circles about the way our culture does Christmas. It's too commercialized, they say, too materialistic. What they say has some merit. Giving gifts has become such a regular part of our yearly routine that we feel entitled to it or fail to notice it much. We give our shopping list of requests to our relatives, friends, and significant others, and we act surprised at the particulars of the gifts they pick out for us. It's really easy to be disillusioned with the traditions when you step back and take a look at all we do, and some go so far as to suggest removing gifts from the picture completely to get back to the heart of the holiday.

I don't think giving gifts is far from the original spirit of Christmas, though. I think back to the story of the angels who visited the shepherds and what they said.

Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.

— Luke 2:10-12, NIV

A bunch of country farm hands get the completely unexpected opportunity to be witnesses of a gift to the entire world. This is at the heart of the story of Christmas: God gives a gift that is unprecedented, unprovoked, and undeserved, and the only reasonable response is great joy. I can't help but think that many of the children who have not learned to take tradition for granted taste a bit of this joy. Reveling in the pure bliss of simply receiving something good for no good reason is surely an appropriate part of Christmas.

My challenge to myself and to anyone silly enough to be reading this tonight or in the morning is this: Try to forget that the advent of Christmas is certain, and receive it as a pure gift. Let it not be an entitlement, nor an obligation, nor even a yearly tradition, but rather a spontaneous outpouring of generosity and good will that can only be met with joy.

Merry Christmas!

Letter to Senators: Internet Censorship Bill

I wrote this letter and emailed it to my senators to ask for their opposition to the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA).  This bill would give the Attorney General power to turn off websites suspected of copyright infringement with a simple court order, without giving the website any chance to defend itself.  If you want to read more, try this Wired article, or hit up Google News.  If you are also a supporter of Internet freedoms and you want to copy or modify my letter to send to your senator, feel free!

Dear Senator,

I’m writing to urge you to oppose the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA).  While the proponents of this bill likely say it will help to provide authors and artists with adequate returns for their work, this bill threatens something much more fundamental to our democracy: the right to free speech.  COICA would allow websites to be shut down without a chance to legally defend themselves, which could jeopardize valid fair use and will likely lead to an environment of fear in the internet instead of one of openness.

Please do not misunderstand: I am not advocating for illegal piracy.  I do think that this bill goes too far, though, and the potential for its misuse poses a grave threat to American freedoms.  Hollywood and the recording industry should find their own ways to protect their content and be competitive, they should not be allowed to make the federal government into their personal security force.  Please do not bow to the interests of these corporations and jeopardize the freedom of the internet.  Please oppose COICA.

Best Regards

Crisis Rush

If you’ve read the most recent issue of Time magazine, you may have noticed the cover article about right-wing militias.  It seems that there’s an upswing in the number of radical conservatives preparing themselves for a “Second Amendment solution” to what they see as a misguided and corrupt federal government.  One member of such a group cited his personal motto as “Life, liberty and the pursuit of anyone who threatens it.”  There are also doom-and-gloom voices coming from the left, such as this article.  While they tend to be more critical of violence, they are no less convinced that American society is on a very steep and slippery slope.  Here’s an excerpt from that article: “Resistance movements will have to look now at the long night of slavery, the decades of oppression in the Soviet Union and the curse of fascism for models.”  Though their views and methods are very different, there’s common anti-government sentiment and a common desperation in these voices.

Now it’s true that there are always radicals on every end of every possible political scale, but what’s notable is that so many of the same sentiments are being voiced by mainstream politicians and pundits, albeit in a less revolutionist tone.  Ever since it began, the Tea Party has decried the “socialist” policies of the Democrats, and this group has elected representatives in primaries and won sway over many older Republicans.  President Obama has warned his supporters time and again about the danger of a “corporate takeover of our democracy” in the wake of the Citizens United vs. FEC ruling.  This sense of urgency is definitely not restricted to the fringes, so there must be something behind it all, but what are we to make of it when it’s coming from all sides and confronts so many issues?

I posit that what we’re seeing is analogous to a gold rush, except that it’s a rush to harness that most potent source of political capital: a true crisis.  That a crisis exists can be readily verified with statistics of unemployment, foreclosure, state bankruptcies, federal debt . . . the list is quite long.  The system that’s failing is complex enough that fingers can be validly pointed in just about any direction, and so a free-for-all has ensued with everyone trying to convince the public that their opponents are the ones responsible, and they themselves are the only ones with the right direction to lead us out of this mess.  Whether their motives are pure or not, they want to harness the anger and indignation of Americans over their very real dilemmas for their agendas.

These observations lead me to two questions: What can we expect to come out of this? and How can we best respond?

As far as what we can expect, history would seem to suggest that anything is possible.  Consider (at the risk of running afoul of Godwin’s law) America and Germany in the 1930s.  That the crises of depression and war were effective political capital was evidenced by the rise of Hitler and the triple reelection of FDR.  The legacy of these men is very different though, especially on the point of human rights.  At first glance it would seem that the character and true motives of whomever wins the crisis rush is most responsible for its outcome.

There is some commonality between these two examples, though: they were able to exert extraordinary control over their governments.  Hitler made himself a dictator and legally disbanded the Weimar Republic.  Roosevelt had his famed first 100 days in office where he managed to set much of the New Deal in motion.  From Julius Caesar to Napoleon and on into modern times there is a recurring theme of leaders emerging out of crisis and effecting drastic change while commanding surprising amounts of loyalty and devotion from their followers.  Whether for good or ill, those able to harness a crisis are able to have a large impact.

This leads me to one possible answer to my second question: keep up the critical thinking.  As someone takes control and the problems start going away, it will be tempting to trust that person or group with ever more influence.  Even if we like them and their methods though, I think it’s important to hold them to account.  It’s also important to keep all of our values in mind, not just the subset that those at the top tend to focus on.  If we all keep asking tough questions and thinking for ourselves, maybe we could prevent the gains in power from solidifying or prevent a leader who turns bad from getting away with too much.

This promises to be a defining moment for our society, whether the consequences are predominantly positive or negative.  Let’s pay attention and make the most of it!