Author: editor@gmail.com

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American jihadist

Don’t let the dorky sweater vest fool you. Beneath that benign-looking garment beats the heart of an extremist, a radical more akin to the Islamic fundamentalists of the Taliban and the ultra-orthodox Jews of Israel than to mainstream Americans. If Rick Santorum and his fundamentalist fans ran this country, we’d have a Bible-based theocracy thrust upon us, a dictatorship of the most divisive, judgmental and intolerant among us.

If you believe that contraception is immoral and any sex except conjugal attempts to procreate is sinful, he’s your guy.

If you think “abortionists” (that inflammatory, demonizing term for doctors who perform a legal operation) ought to be punished, he’s your guy.

If you think our Constitutional rights ought to be limited to conform with Biblical precepts, he’s your guy.

Already, a state legislator in North Carolina (who said on taking office he’d pray for the Lord’s guidance) has suggested public hangings for doctors who do abortions, lumping them in with rapists and kidnappers.

Already, fundamentalists in state legislatures are trying to give legal personhood status to the unborn “from the moment of conception,” however that would be determined. This would enable birth control, abortion and even in vitro fertilization to be criminalized.

Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum wants single mothers and parents of adopted children punished with higher taxes as a way to promote “traditional” families, which she defines as married heterosexual couples raising their own children.

All this under Obama. Imagine the impetus of having a kindred spirit in the White House.

An exhaustive, five-volume study of fundamentalism worldwide edited by two Americans argues that it’s a political phenomenon and is inherently totalitarian. Its goal is to realign all aspects of a nation’s society and government according to rigidly defined and strictly enforced religious principles. There’s nothing democratic or broadly representative about it.

Rick Santorum has a right to his views and is entitled to run for President. Should he win, however, we’ll see a holy war against the right to live without religious interference.

Sources:

Photo by Associated Press

Rick Santorum’s views: www.ricksantorum.com

“This is about a country that believes in God-given rights, and a Constitution that is limited to protect those rights.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/rick-santorums-missouri-victory-speech-full-transcript/2012/02/07/gIQAGcUwxQ_blog.html

 “(Contraception is) not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They’re supposed to be within marriage, for purposes that are, yes, conjugal… but also procreative.” http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/02/rick-santorum-wants-your-sex-life-to-be-special/253104/

 Public hanging comment by Larry Pittman, Republican, North Carolina: http://www.wral.com/news/state/nccapitol/blogpost/10649801/

Rick Santorum’s signed Personhood pledge: http://www.personhoodusa.com/files/Keith%20Ashley/Santorum_Personhood.pdf

Phyllis Schlafly on marriage and taxes: http://www.eagleforum.org/column/2012/jan12/12-01-18.html

The Fundamentalism Project: http://www.illuminos.com/mem/selectPapers/fundamentalismProject.html

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Is covering up pedophilia a matter of conscience?

There is no law requiring the Catholic Church to report pedophile-priests to the police. If there were, it’s likely the Catholic hierarchy and its supporters would denounce it as “a stunning assault on freedom of conscience and religion.”

With those words, a Chicago Tribune columnist lays out the case that requiring insurance coverage of birth control for workers in Church-run secular businesses also amounts to a “gross violation of a civil liberty” on Catholics.

Let’s get this straight: The law does not require practicing Catholics to use birth control. But that’s not good enough for the godly. They object when anyone uses birth control.

Catholic authorities are not alone in this stance; it’s shared by Protestant fundamentalists.  It’s not a view shared by most Americans, including the large majority of American Catholics who use birth control.

The important word here is “control.” This isn’t about freedom of religion or conscience, despite the Church’s attempts to frame its resistance in those high-minded terms. It’s about the Church’s furious efforts to maintain control over its members (especially its female members), even though in this case the horse has already left the barn.

If the Church wants more control over its members, it ought to start by exercising more control over the shepherds of its flocks. It sacrificed the moral authority to preach about matters of conscience when it chose to protect the pedophiles among its priests and to cover up their crimes.

Source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-oped-0207-byrne-20120207,0,3249104.column

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Public policy: If you want to play, you must pay (taxes)

Once again, the Catholic Church is seriously out of step with its parishioners and with mainstream Americans – far enough so that it has crossed the line into conduct of dubious legality.

In sermons all over the country, priests and bishops are urging opposition to a rule requiring no-copay insurance coverage of contraception for employees of faith-based organizations. Part of the Affordable Care Act, it covers millions of people employed in church-affiliated hospitals, social service agenies, charities and universities.

According to the dire pronouncements thundering from pulpits, this narrowly crafted rule constitutes a massive assault on the separation of church and state, and that all church-run organizations ought to be exempt from the contraceptives rule. In fact, many critics say any exemption from the coverage rule is too broad. Here’s how the American Medical Association’s journal of ethics puts it:

“Expanding the exemption would affect millions of teachers and guidance counselors, doctors and nurses, clerks and janitors, by interfering with their access to preventive health care that they deem necessary and in line with their own religious and moral beliefs. For those employees who do adhere to their employer’s religious position on contraception, providing coverage of contraception would not in any way force them to use it in violation of their beliefs.”

This is another example of extremism on the part of those who insist that their religious rights include foisting their particular notions of right or wrong on all people, regardless of their beliefs. 

And using their pulpits to urge followers into opposing public policy decisions approved by publicly elected officials appears to violate the no-electioneering rule required of tax-exempt organizations.

If church officials want to lobby for or against acts of government, let them first agree to pay taxes. Tax exemptions ought to be swiftly yanked from churches trying to influence public policy. There is no good reason for American taxpayers to subsidize those who seek to impose their beliefs on everyone. 

Sources:

http://www.guttmacher.org/media/inthenews/2012/01/24/index.html

http://virtualmentor.ama-assn.org/2012/02/pfor1-1202.html

http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/10314726-418/catholic-priests-urge-parishioners-to-oppose-federal-birth-control-rule.html

http://taxthechurches.org/about.html

http://www.catholiclinks.org/diocesisesunitedstates.htm

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Chicago Trib censors Trudeau – again

The Chicago Tribune has covered yet another act of censorship in a cloak of journalistic purity worn threadbare by its own double standards.

It refused to run today’s “Doonesbury” comic strip, which includes a pitch for the nonprofit Donors Choose, a charity that connects potential donors with cash-strapped public-school classrooms. In a note to readers on page 2, it explained that today’s strip included “a direct fundraising appeal for a specific charity that the author favors.  The Tribune’s editorial policies do not allow individuals to promote their self-interests.”

They do, however, allow Tribune editors to exercise hypocrisy.

There is no more evident self-interest in the “Doonesbury” pitch for this charity than there was in the numerous mentions of the same charity in articles, photos, editorials and letters to the editor published in the last several years by the Tribune and its sister publication, the Los Angeles Times. The Trib’s editors also saw no problem in letting one of its staffers launch and publicize a “Book on Every Bed” campaign to benefit the Family Reading Partnership, or in allowing another staffer to devote one of his columns to pitching his book.

So if the self-interest explanation isn’t the real one, what’s going on?

This isn’t the first time the Trib has censored the work of  Garry Trudeau. “Doonesbury” habitually (but not exclusively) skewers right-wing politicians and pundits. The Trib, always staunchly conservative,  has taken a very hard turn to the right lately, pounding away at union bosses enjoying unearned pensions and decrying illegal immigrants who flee home to avoid facing criminal charges here. This kind of selective demonizing would have warmed the heart of its long-ago publisher, Robert McCormick, who was known for his extreme right-wing views.

The Trib’s false claim of virtue and its petty insult to Trudeau, which sideswiped a worthy cause, will do nothing to enhance its reputation.

Sources:

http://www.doonesbury.com/
http://www.donorschoose.org
http://www.chicagotribune.com/search_results/?q=donorschoose.org
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-12-08/features/ct-ae-1208-amy-20111208_1_pulitzer-new-book-literacy
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-12-27/business/ct-biz-1227-bf-problem-main-20111227_1_ethics-policy-problem-solver-consumer
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/stripping-doonesbury-tribune-silences-satire,
 
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BS buster – “Asset poor”

Okay all you 99 percenters, which of the following describes you: “Income poor,” “asset poor,” “liquid asset poor?” All of the above?

The Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), a seemingly well-meaning think tank in Washington,  just released a report classifying the population of all 50 states according to the sliced-and-diced categories listed above. The meanings of these terms are apparent. Less obvious is whether sorting people into such categories is useful.

I assume the goal is to help craft policy solutions appropriate for each category, and will contact the CFED for an explanation.

In the meantime, does anyone else worry that this focus on the trees might obscure what’s going on with the forest? Could it possibly reveal that factors other than joblessness, tax policies, unregulated financial shenanigans, union busting, inadequate wages, medical expenses and a broken housing market are to blame?

Finally, “asset poor” has the same kind of ring to it as that other, older euphemism for the poverty-stricken: “underprivileged.” Barbara Bush, in a fine example of 1-percenter cluelessness, used the term in 2005 to explain why homeless Hurricane Katrina refugees should be happy to shelter on cots in the Houston Astrodome: They “were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”

It’s all too easy to imagine pundits, politicians and policy wonks using these latest terms in ways that obscure problems, rather than reveal solutions. You aren’t jobless or paid less than a living wage, you’re income poor! You aren’t homeless, you’re asset poor! You aren’t broke, you’re liquid asset poor! 

Try using those terms when bill collectors call.

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Challenge yourself

Margaret Heffernan, an author and former producer for BBC, has an explanation for why politics and even social relations in the United States have become so strained, partisan, divisive and nasty.

It’s not because those on the other side of the spectrum from us lack brains, a heart or courage. The problem is that we only pay attention to the wizards who tell us what we want to hear.  

In her latest book, “Willful Blindness,” Heffernan describes why we do this and the unfortunate effects of the phenomenon. Basically, we seek personal validation by screening out viewpoints we don’t agree with because they make us uncomfortable. The results include an ever-narrower perspective that becomes more extreme with every avoidance of alternative opinions.

She also describes how people’s opinions tend to move away from the edges of the spectrum and towards middle ground when they do allow themselves exposure to different ways of thinking.

With this in mind, President Obama’s attempts to seek grounds for compromise with his political opponents appears to be less a betrayal of principles and more a mature acknowledgement that nobody has a monopoly on truth or answers.

So in the spirit of a broad-minded search for solutions and a dispassionate analysis of facts, I have added conservative websites and publications to Bad-Influence’s media listings. One of them, World Net Daily, caused me an embarrassing Homer Simpson moment when I checked its media-listings page. It includes The Nation, Mother Jones, Progressive Review and the Village Voice, along with conservative stalwarts like The American Partisan, RushLimbaugh.com and Reason Magazine.

A leading conservative website with a broader offering of news sources than Bad-Influence? Doh!

Although Bad-Influence intends to be a resource for progressive activists, Heffernan’s writing has convinced me that nobody will get much of anything done until we pay more attention to opinions we don’t like. So I’m going to start looking at those conservative sites to crack my mind open a bit. Not so much that my brains fall out, but enough to recognize that there may be more than one path through the woods that will lead to home.

 

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Fair employment practices versus jobs is a false choice

Do laws requiring fairness in hiring kill jobs?

That’s the claim being made about Obama’s proposal to outlaw discrimination against the unemployed. It’s a very old argument that surfaces everytime  government has to step in to prevent businesses from ruling out entire classes of people as potential employees. A good example of these arguments against fairness can be found in a Chicago Tribune op-ed column of 9/22/2011, “The wrong help for the unemployed,” with the subtitle, “Employer discrimination is not the real problem.”

Its basic point is that such a law isn’t needed because the practice is not widespread and once the economy improves enough, hiring eventually will include those currently unemployed.

It’s easy for white males (like the column writer) to believe this because many have never experienced discrimination. As everybody who isn’t a white male knows, job discrimination still is widespread, often precisely because the white males making hiring decisions are clueless about their own prejudices. Laws against this aren’t terribly effective, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t needed.

Once again, the old claim is made that market forces on their own will lead to rational hiring policies because companies want to hire the best people available. In reality, when market forces operated without fair-employment laws, businesses demonstrated they wanted to hire only the best white, heterosexual, physically able males available for the highest-paying, most desirable jobs.

In the past several decades, business has enjoyed freedom from hard-won regulations intended to curb their most egregious misbehavior. The results include financial devastation for middle-class investors, homeowners, the unemployed and – as usual – the poor. This will remain true as long as American business remains relentlessly focused on profit as its first, last and only goal, an obsession used to justify all kinds of unjust practices because profit has been enshrined as sacred.

When businesses make job growth their top goal instead of profit, unemployment will ease and the economy will improve. But we’ll always need laws restraining market forces and their use to protect employees, consumers, communities and even businesses from their own worst instincts. 

 

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Class warfare, indeed

The party of greed, guns and God has now stooped to a new low in shameless hypocrisy – branding Obama’s call for higher taxes on the wealthy as “class warfare.” Almost as sickening is their pious claim that calling on corporations and the wealthy to pay their fair share of the bill for the enormous benefits they’ve received amounts to “divisiveness.”

In truth, Republicans have waged class warfare against anyone who isn’t wealthy. During Republican administrations from Reagan on, wages have fallen or remained stagnant, jobs have moved overseas, workplace benefits have been gutted and unions attacked. The goals of the GOP have been to protect property instead of people, to “unburden” business from laws mandating basic fairness and to kowtow to the rich in return for their favors.

It’s long past time to stop appeasing people who deride centrists as radicals and brand liberals as traitors. It’s time to start acknowledging the truth – there is such a thing as class warfare in this country, it’s been directed against the poor (a group that includes more Americans than ever) and unless we protest it loudly and insistently, it will persist. The Banana Republicans would love to turn this country into a Third World haven where 90 percent of the population slaves for the top 10 percent.

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Advice to the jobless: Keep smiling

Rex Huppke of the Chicago Tribune writes a column called “I Just Work Here. ” His latest on how to survive a layoff  (August 22, 2011) offers the advice of two supposed experts on employment and interviews with a couple of people who got lucky following their advice. It prompted me to write to Rex with a comment on their advice and a request that he do a little more reporting. That letter and a link to his column follow:

Dear Rex:

Please allow me to offer a different perspective than the one in your column, “After layoff, stick with job search, stay positive.”

I understand your goal was to present helpful advice, and the standard format is to interview people who should know the broader issues and a few who got lucky.

Their advice is the conventional wisdom. It has changed not an iota in decades, despite the enormous differences between unemployment now and at any other time in our history except the Great Depression. It’s no more useful now than it would have been then, when it would have been obtuse and insensitive to tell people lined up for free soup that to get a job they just have to stay positive and not give up. In reality, it took federal programs, government regulations and a war to resurrect the job market.

The theme of stick-to-it-and-keep-smiling advice, although not true, is clear: “Your employability is in your hands,” “…you’re responsible for your employability.”

The message? If you can’t get a job, it’s because you as an individual didn’t successfully overcome the massive systemic hurdles of outsourcing, consolidation, mechanization by technology, corporate dominance of politics and global economic malaise. You, as an individual, failed to hang on to your tiny piece of a rapidly shrinking pie as business giants gobbled it up and hoarded their huge shares for multimillion-dollar executive salaries.

“Individual situations differ.”  This discourages people from looking at the big picture and realizing they may not be to blame.

“Stay positive.” This is almost impossible emotionally and an unreasonable demand to make of people who’ve been ejected from the job market despite their experience and skills, even after accepting subsistence wages, long hours and few if any benefits.

I understand you are obliged to present the views of sources deemed to be experts. But aren’t you also obliged to examine their statements critically, to see whether their comments fit with reality? Imagine, for example, telling any of the former journalists you know that they must simply “steel themselves” after countless rejections. How will it help for them to keep believing in and chasing after the one-in-a-million chance of landing a job that offers pay commensurate with their skills?

When people use that stay positive, keep-trying approach at the casino, where the odds aren’t much different than on the job market, they’re considered to be impaired.

Tweaks such as a focused cover letter, informational interviews and networking will work for a few people in a few situations. Change that results in good jobs for millions of people requires organized action ranging from voting blocs to disruptive protest.

You hold a privileged position as someone with a platform that can influence many people. I ask that you consider reporting on a different approach to joblessness, one that depends on people getting angry, getting together and acting against the causes of joblessness.

This might require expanding your database of sources. You can find plenty of them at the website www.bad-influence.org.

Although I disagree with the views presented in this particular column, I enjoy “I Just Work Here” and wish you much continued success with it.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/tribu/ct-biz-0822-work-advice-huppke-20110822,0,3012354.column

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TAKE BACK THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

It’s time for the grownups among us to quit indulging the tantrums of the political 2-year-olds hollering “No!” unless they get their way.

One way to accomplish this would be for Democrats, Independents, Greens, Libertarians and moderates of all kinds to join the Republican Party. Take it back from the fanatics who denounce those even slightly left of center as extremists, Marxists or terrorists.

Today’s Tea Party followers are political Puritans – strident, inflexible, judgmental, convinced of their moral superiority and suspicious of anyone who doesn’t see everything as either-or, black or white and right or wrong.

Like children and fundamentalists of all kinds, they’re full of irrational fears, seeing monsters where none exist and unable to see any merit in opposing views.

Good parents don’t attempt to reason with, placate or compromise with toddlers throwing tantrums, for the very good reason that toddlers don’t have the mental capacity or life experience to be reached in those ways. As we’ve seen, giving in to them worsens the misbehavior.

Elections often are swung by a handful of votes. This is why the Tea Party has succeeded in gaining influence despite its small size. It is well organized and very active in getting out votes.

Politicians pay inordinate attention to such groups, knowing that they can provide a winning margin in a close race.

So it really shouldn’t be that hard to swing the pendulum back towards middle ground.

Switch your party registration to Republican. Then find a moderate Republican office holder near you, identify yourself as a Republican voter and tell him or her you support them. Even better, do a little volunteer work on their campaign. In primary elections, vote for anyone who isn’t a hard-right extremist.

None of this will prevent you from voting for the candidates of your choice in general elections, whatever their party might be.

If we don’t help the Republican Party strengthen its moderates, we’ll all be dragged down by kicking, screaming naysayers.