Mitt Romney and Mormonism

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney yesterday gave what was billed as a major speech on faith. While it seemed to be an attempt to allay unease about his Mormon religion in the face of the surging Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee, the strategy he adopted was to not go into specifics about what Mormonism is. Romney’s message was basically: Don’t worry about what “my religion” actually says (he used the word “Mormon” only once); just accept that I have faith just like you and let’s unite against those who feel that faith should not play a role in the public sphere.

He “decries the diminishment of religion in the public square” and says “in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life.”

He then trots out the old ridiculous religious standby, that secularism is also a religion, saying, “It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America — the religion of secularism. They are wrong.” People like Romney are so unnerved by the fact that secular people are quite happy with not having to believe in religious superstitions and myths, that they try desperately to say that we are somehow religious too. Irrationality loves company, it seems.

Romney’s speech was quite different from John F. Kennedy’s speech in 1960 when he had to address concerns about his Catholicism. Kennedy was quite emphatic that religion should be a strictly private matter:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute–where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote–where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference. . . I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.”

As I warned earlier, Romney is pursuing a risky strategy. By saying that faith must play an important role in the public sphere, he is opening himself up to questions about what exactly he means by faith, what faiths he feels belong in the public sphere, and whether his own faith meets that standard.

It would have been better to follow Kennedy’s example and to flatly assert right at the beginning that it was only a person’s public policy principles and positions that mattered, and their personal beliefs should not be a basis for elected office, as the US constitution explicitly says.

But of course he could not say such a thing because, apart from his need to pander to the religious right that forms a core constituency of his party, we live in a crazy time when it is seen as politically damaging if a candidate should say that he or she is a person of rationality and reason and science (all esteemed Enlightenment values) while saying that you have an unwavering belief in mystical unseen entities and powers, which should label you as a holdover from the Dark Ages, is seen as a positive quality in a leader.

But since Romney has said that faith is important not only to him but should play an important part in public life, let’s take a look at his faith.

I have not read much about Mormonism but Christopher Hitchens in his book God is Not Great (2007, p. 161-168) paints a rather unflattering portrait of its founder Joseph Smith as a charismatic con man. Hitchens bases his information on the book No Man Knows My History (1945) by Fawn Brodie.

Smith was born in 1805 and at the age of 21 was convicted of being “a disorderly person and an imposter” after admitting in his trial to defrauding citizens and claiming to possess dark or necromantic powers. But he reappears four years later saying that he had been visited three times by an angle named Moroni who told him where to find the “Book of Mormon” (written on gold plates) which contained the story of creation and said, among other things, that the people of North America were founded by an Israelite named Nephi, son of Lephi, who had come there after fleeing Jerusalem in 600 BC. Moroni also told Smith of the existence of two magic stones that would enable him to translate the golden book.

Smith never showed his book or magic stones to anybody. He said (conveniently) that for anyone else but him to see them would mean instant death. But like Muhammad (whom he modeled himself after) Smith was illiterate and so had to have scribes to write down his translations of the golden book into the vernacular. Smith initially got his wealthy neighbor and disciple Martin Harris to do this task. Harris sat on one side of a blanket dividing the kitchen while Smith sat on the other speaking the translated words. Harris was warned that if he tried to take a peek at the prophet or the golden book, he would be struck dead. In other words, the Mormon god is the standard-issue “compassionate and loving” god who has no scruples about killing people for transgressing arbitrary rules.

Hitchens recounts an amusing story in which Harris’s wife got fed up with her husband’s involvement with what she thought was a racket and stole the first 116 ‘translated’ pages and challenged Smith to reproduce them using again the book and stones. Of course he couldn’t. After a few weeks of unease, he came up with a story that the Lord had told him that translating the same book again was not to be done and had provided him with new, smaller plates created by Nephi which told a similar story.

Hitchens says that Smith, like Muhammad, would regularly claim to have ‘divine revelations’ at short notice that conveniently enough seemed to meet whatever immediate need he had at that moment, especially when he wanted to take another girl as a new wife. Smith died a violent death in 1844 at the hands of a mob and is now seen by his followers as a martyr.

I came across this fascinating animation (thanks to onegoodmove) that gives the history of the origins of the Mormon religion and their mythology. The cartoon seems like it is part of a documentary of some sort but I have not had time to track down the source. The header says that the cartoon was banned by the Mormon church. I have no idea if this is true or why or if the details that it presents are accurate, but the basic features are consistent with what I have read about Mormonism. (If anyone knows more about the cartoon’s origins or its accuracy, please let me know.)

There is nothing in Mormon doctrine or its creation stories that is any more bizarre than what people in other god-based religions believe. The story of Mormon origins seems so weird because it is unfamiliar. Just as Jews and Christians and Muslims and Hindus who are indoctrinated into their faith as children grow up thinking, despite all the evidence, that their religious myths make sense, so I am sure do Mormons. Since Mormonism originated just two hundred years ago, however, we know more about the actual events and people involved, since there exist contemporary newspaper records that enable us to contrast the differences between what the faithful believe and the actual events. Scientology, which was founded in 1953, presents a similar case.

The facts associated with the origins of Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and their founders are likely to be very similar to that of Mormonism and Scientology, but fortunately for those older religions, are buried deep in the sands of time, allowing the myths to seem more reasonable than they deserve to be. If anyone today came along with stories about seeing burning bushes that remain intact or having been born of a virgin or having angels dropping in for regular chats, we would consider them to be either con men or psychotic.

One positive consequence of having a Mormon candidate for president would be if it opens up a serious discussion of why some religious people think that the Mormon origin myths are bizarre and not true, while perfectly confident that their own myths are not only rational but also true. This requires some fairly tricky and self-serving intellectual contortions, like the ones Jacob Weisberg attempted. For the same reason, I think it would be a great idea to have a Scientology candidate in the race too.

Has anyone suggested to Tom Cruise that he should run for president?

POST SCRIPT: Bill Maher discusses Mormonism, religion, and politics

Ahmadinejad at Columbia

The “introduction” that Columbia University’s president Lee Bollinger gave the leader of Iran after the university had invited him to speak there has attracted much attention. Writing in the Nation, Jayati Vora says:

In his statement, combative and unduly vicious, Bollinger accused his invited guest of being nothing more than a “petty and cruel dictator,” of having a “fanatical mindset.” He claimed that this exercise was valuable in knowing one’s enemies and understanding “the mind of evil.”

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Civil liberties and cell phones

I go to a fair number of public talks and on occasion have even been one of the speakers. Invariably at question time there will be people in the audience (usually the first in line to the microphone) who are familiar figures who always speak at such events. They either have a particular agenda that they wish to push and will somehow connect it to the topic at hand, or they have a particular political slant and they will aggressively criticize the speaker on that basis. Sometimes they will ramble, making a small speech, and have to be prompted to actually pose a question. At other times, especially if the featured speaker is a high profile political figure, they may try to hog the microphone and transform the question time into a private debate. Some of these people feel strongly that they have something to say and have no platform to say it, and use these public functions to get it off their chest.

Sometimes these people are simply pranksters, practicing a kind of performance art or trying to prick the balloons of self-important politicians and celebrities.

Some members of the audience get annoyed at the time taken up by these people and try to shout them down. I tend to be more tolerant, treating these episodes as amusing interludes. It seems to me that the price we pay for freedom of speech is that we have to tolerate the occasional jokester or egotistical or obnoxious or even mentally disturbed person taking up time at public meetings. Their behavior is not really appropriate but usually harmless and at worst a waste of time. So I am willing to let it go, both as an audience member and as a speaker.

But as a society we seem to be becoming increasingly intolerant of these kinds of behavior. I am sure many have seen the disturbing video of the 21-year old University of Florida student Andrew Meyer who was Tasered at a meeting at which John Kerry was speaking on September 17, 2007.

To me the student speaker seemed like the many people who attend such events, someone who has many things to say and tries to quickly say them in the guise of a question. He spoke rapidly for about a minute and a half, which is quite long for question time, but not abnormally so. The security people first started trying to shut him down after just thirty seconds. Although the student seemed impassioned and excitable, his behavior came nowhere close to warranting the heavy-handed treatment that he received from the security services. There is no indication that he was dangerous or threatening to anyone.

A previous shocking episode of a student being Tasered in the UCLA library was also captured on cell phones last year and broadcast on YouTube.

What is going on here? Have we become so intolerant of any kind of lack of order that we are willing to so readily condone the use of force to suppress speech? Are we really a people who are so cowed by authority figures that we accept the forcible restraint of any person who even argues with officialdom? One can understand security forces responding with some urgency to prevent harm when there is a clear and present danger. But there seemed to be no indication of that kind in either of these two cases. These were not fast-moving situations that threatened to get out of hand. In both cases, the authorities greatly outnumbered the person being subdued. They both seem to be situations where things could have been settled through patient discussion.

Paul Craig Roberts comments that the fact that the police were confident enough to Taser a student questioner in the midst of a crowd and the presence of a US Senator who did not vigorously protest the action is a sign of how far we have gone down the road of authoritarianism.

Usually when police violate constitutional rights and commit acts of police brutality they do it when they believe no one is watching, not in front of a large audience. Clearly, the police have become more audacious in their abuse of rights and citizens. What explains the new fearlessness of police to violate rights and brutalize citizens without cause?

The answer is that police, most of whom have authoritarian personalities, have seen that constitutional rights are no longer protected. President Bush does not protect our constitutional rights. Neither does Vice President Cheney, nor the Attorney General, nor the US Congress. Just as Kerry allowed Meyer’s rights to be tasered out of him, Congress has enabled Bush to strip people, including American citizens, of constitutional protection and incarcerate them without presenting evidence.

These are not rare instances. If you go to YouTube you can see a whole lot of situations where people are getting Tasered in situations that did not seem to require such strong measures.

I do not own a cell phone but am glad about the ubiquitous presence of such devices, even though they can be abused. Combined with the ability to easily upload to YouTube, they may be an important tool in preserving civil liberties. Because of them, we are no longer dependent on only official sources or the media for information, which is often sanitized by both to paint the authorities in the most favorable light. We now can see the raw footage of events and judge for ourselves.

It has already been realized by politicians that because of cell phones they are always being recorded and they cannot deny things that they said or did as they could have in the past. George Allen’s 2006 bid to be re-elected as Virginia’s US senator was doomed partly by the infamous ‘macaca’ incident captured on a cell phone.

But I don’t think that it has yet dawned on security services that the presence of cells phones means that they no longer control the narrative and cannot blandly assert that they were responding to a threat when they use what seems to be unnecessary force on unarmed people or non-threatening people.

But all the cell phones in the world will not help if people are not outraged when they reveal abuses.

POST SCRIPT: Bush gaffes in Australia

President Bush in Australia made a series of gaffes.

Anyone who speaks in public constantly, no matter how sharp-witted, will make mistakes and slips of the tongue. So why do we focus so much on Bush’s slips? As someone said, with Bush it is the seeming inevitability of it that is the attraction. It is like watching accomplished comedians performing a routine with a careful setup that telegraphs the punch line. You know what is coming and that expectation forms part of the humor, building up to the moment, so that when it inevitably occurs, part of our laughter is due to the release of the tension.

Bush has established for himself a reputation as someone who is completely out of his depth and when he seems to confirm that expectation, the humor is greater than if the same thing had been said and done by (say) Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon.

Going against the norm

The media circus that has surrounded US Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) with his guilty plea for lewd conduct in a Minneapolis airport men’s room, followed by his attempt to withdraw it, and his resignation from the Senate followed by his attempt to withdraw that too, has obscured some of the underlying issues surrounding what is admittedly an unfortunate event. The main one is how things that should be treated similarly are treated wildly differently depending on whether or not they conform to prevailing behavioral norms.

The police report on the events leading up to the arrest of Craig reveals a world in which gay liaisons are established by means of subtle codes and signals. The signals that Craig supposedly sent out to the undercover officer were of such a nature that those who are not gay or not privy to these cues would probably be oblivious to what was going on around them or baffled by what seemed to be merely eccentric or annoying behavior.
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The Powell and Petraeus shows

There has been a huge media build up over the so-called Petraeus report, the progress report by the US commander in Iraq David Petraeus, on how the ‘surge’ strategy in Iraq is going. The report is due to be presented on Monday, September 10, 2007.

This has to be seen as another example of how media is managed by this administration. The Los Angeles Times reports that “Despite Bush’s repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.”
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Reflections on the working poor

(Text of the talk given by me to the first year class at the Share the Vision program, Severance Hall, Cleveland, OH on Friday, August 24, 2007 at 1:00 pm. The common reading for the incoming class was David Shipler’s book The Working Poor: Invisible in America.)

Welcome to Case Western Reserve University! The people you will encounter here are very different from the people described in David Shipler’s book The Working Poor: Invisible in America and I would like to address the question: what makes that difference?

Two answers are usually given. One is that we live in a meritocracy, and that we got where we are because of our own virtues, that we are smarter or worked harder or had a better attitude and work ethic than those who didn’t make the cut. I am sure that everyone in this auditorium has been repeatedly told by their family and friends and teachers that they are good and smart, and it is tempting to believe it. What can be more gratifying than to be told that one’s success is due to one’s own ability and efforts? It makes it all seem so well deserved, that there is justice in the world.

Another answer is that luck plays an important role in educational success. I suspect that most of us were fortunate enough to be born into families that had most, if not all, of the following attributes: stable homes and families, good schools and teachers, safe environments, good health, and sufficient food and clothing. Others are not so fortunate and this negatively affects their performance in school.

But there is a third possibility that is not often discussed and that is that the educational system has been deliberately designed so that large numbers of people end up like the people in the book, people who not only have failed but more importantly have learned to think of themselves as failures.

This idea initially seems shocking. How can we want people to fail? Aren’t our leaders always exhorting everyone to aim high and succeed in education? But let’s travel back in time to the beginnings of widespread schooling in the US. In those early days, schooling was unplanned and focused more on meeting the needs of the learner and less on meeting the needs of the economy.

Recall that this was the time when the so-called robber barons were amassing huge personal wealth while the workers were having appalling working conditions. There was increasing concern that as the general public got more educated, more and more would realize and resent this unequal distribution of wealth.

This fear can be seen in an 1872 Bureau of Education document which speaks about the “problem of educational schooling”, according to which, “inculcating knowledge” teaches workers to be able to “perceive and calculate their grievances,” thus making them “more redoubtable foes” in labor struggles. (John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of US Education (2003) p. 153, now available online.)

This was followed by the report in 1888 that said, “We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes.” (Gatto, p. 153)

The rising expectations of the general public had to be dampened and this was done by creating an education system that would shift the focus away from learning and more towards meeting the needs of the economy. And the economy then, like now, does not need or want everyone to be well educated.

After all, think what would happen if everyone got a good education and college degrees? Where would we get enough people like those in the book, willing to work for low wages, often with little or no benefits, at places like Wal-Mart so that we can buy cheap goods? Or at McDonalds so that we get cheap hamburgers? Or as cleaning staff at restaurants and hotels so that we can eat out often? Or in the fields and sweatshops so that we can get cheap food and clothes? As the French philosopher Voltaire pointed out long ago: “The comfort of the rich depends upon the abundance of the poor.”

One of the most influential figures in shifting education to meet the needs of the work force was Ellwood P. Cubberley, who wrote in 1905 that schools were to be factories “in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products… manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry.” (Gatto, footnote on page 39 in the online edition of the book.)

He also wrote: “We should give up the exceedingly democratic idea that all are equal and that our society is devoid of classes.”

The natural conclusion of this line of reasoning was spelled out in a speech that Woodrow Wilson gave in 1909, three years before he was elected President of the United States. He said: “[W]e want to do two things in modern society. We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” (The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 18, 1908-1909, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1974, p. 597.)

So a third possible answer to why all of us are different from the people described in Shipler’s book is that the educational system is designed to make sure that only a small percentage (us) will succeed and a much larger percentage (like the people in the book) will fail.

But it is not enough to simply exclude people from success as they will resent it and rebel. After all, all people have had dreams of a good life. As Shipler writes on page 231: “Virtually all the youngsters I spoke with in poverty-ridden middle schools wanted to go on to college. . .Their ambitions spilled over the brims of their young lives.” They dreamed of becoming doctors, lawyers, nurses, archeologists, and policemen. But those dreams have to be crushed to meet the needs of the economy. But crushing people’s dreams carries risks.

The poet Langston Hughes warned what might happen in his poem A Dream Deferred:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up 

like a raisin in the sun? 

Or fester like a sore– 

And then run? 

Does it stink like rotten meat? 

Or crust and sugar over– 

like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags 
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

In order to prevent people with crushed dreams from exploding, you have to make them resigned to their fate, to think it is their own fault, to consider themselves failures and unworthy. How do you do that? By making them repeatedly experience failure and discouragement so that by the time they reach high school or even middle school, their love for learning has been destroyed, they have been beaten down, their hopes and dreams crushed by being told repeatedly that they are lazy and no good, so that should not aim high and instead should they think of themselves as so worthless and invisible that it does not even matter if they show up for work or not.

And we have done that. Currently we have an educational system in which people do primarily blame themselves for failure. As Shipler writes in his preface: “Rarely are they infuriated by their conditions, and when their anger surfaces, it is often misdirected against their spouses, their children, or their co-workers. They do not usually blame their bosses, their government, their country, or the hierarchy of wealth, as they reasonably could. They often blame themselves, and they are sometimes right.”

So does this mean that everything that our proud parents and teachers have told us about how smart we are is false? No, that is still true. What is false is the widespread belief that all the other people are poor because they are intrinsically stupid or lazy or incompetent.

You are now in a place that values knowledge and inquiry and has the resources to satisfy your curiosity about almost anything. And all this knowledge is freely shared with you, limited only by your own desire to learn. But all that knowledge that you can gain should not to be used to distance yourself even further from those who have not been as fortunate as you, or to think of yourself as superior to them.

All this knowledge is given to you so that you can become a better steward of the planet, so that you will try and create the kind of world where more people, in fact all people, can live the same kind of life that you will lead.

POST SCRIPT: Bye, Bye, Fredo

Alberto Gonzales surely must rank as a front-runner for the worst Attorney General ever, despite strong competition from people like President Nixon’s John Mitchell. In fact, the administration of George W. Bush has strong candidates for the worst ever nods in all the major categories: President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and National Security Advisor.

Truly this is an administration that can only be described in superlatives.

“I know this is politically incorrect but . . .”

(I am taking a short vacation from new blog posts. I will begin posting new entries again, on August 27, 2007. Until then, I will repost some early ones. Today’s one is from August 14, 2006, edited and updated.)

One of the advantages of being older is that sometimes you can personally witness how language evolves and changes, and how words and phrases undergo changes and sometimes outright reversals of meaning.

One of the interesting evolutions is that of the phrase “politically correct.” It was originally used as a kind of scornful in-joke within Marxist political groups to sneer at those members who seemed to have an excessive concern with political orthodoxy and who seemed to be more preoccupied with vocabulary than with the substance of arguments and actions.

Later it became used as a weapon against those who were trying to make language more nuanced and inclusive and less hurtful, judgmental, or discriminatory. Such people advocated using “disabled” instead of “crippled” or “mentally ill” instead of “crazy,” or “hearing impaired” instead of “deaf” and so on in an effort to remove the stigma under which those groups had traditionally suffered. Those who felt such efforts had been carried to an extreme, or just wanted to use words the way they always had, disparaged those efforts as trying to be “politically correct.”

The most recent development has been to shift the emphasis from sneering at the careful choosing of words to sneering at the ideas and sentiments behind those words. The phrase has started being used pre-emptively, to shield people from the negative repercussions of stating views that otherwise may be offensive or antiquated. This usage usually begins by saying “I know this is politically incorrect but….” and then finishes up by making a statement that would normally provoke quick opposition.

So you can now find people saying “I know this is politically incorrect but perhaps women are inferior to men at mathematics and science” or “I know this is politically incorrect but perhaps poor people are poor because they are stupid” or “I know this is politically incorrect but perhaps blacks are less capable than whites at academics.” The opening preamble is not only designed to make such statements acceptable, the speaker can even claim the mantle of being daring and brave, an outspoken and even heroic bearer of unpopular or unpalatable truths.

Take for example, a blurb by intelligent design creationist Jonathan Wells for his own book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. The cover of the book says: “Darwin is an emperor who has no clothes— but it takes a brave man to say so. Jonathan Wells, a microbiologist with two Ph.D.s (from Berkeley and Yale), is that brave man.” There have been similar books that try this same linguistic maneuver, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism).

Brandishing the label of being ‘politically incorrect’ as a form of argument is silly, as is invoking the fact that one has a doctorate. It is actually a sign of weakness, indicating that one’s arguments cannot stand on their own. For example, physicists assume that all electrons are identical. We don’t really know this for a fact, since it is impossible to compare all electrons. The statement “all electrons are identical” is a kind of default position and, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, does not need to be supported by positive evidence. The assertion that “some electrons are heavier than others” is going to be dismissed in the absence of supporting evidence. Simply saying ” I know this is not politically correct but I believe some electrons are heavier than others and I have a PhD” does not make it any more credible. It merely makes you look pompous and self-aggrandizing.

Sentiments that would normally would be considered discriminatory, biased, and outright offensive if uttered without any supporting evidence are now protected from criticism by this preamble. It is then the person who challenges this view who is put on the defensive, as if he or she was some prig who unthinkingly spouts an orthodox view.

Fintan O’Toole of The Irish Times (May 5, 1994) noted this trend early and pithily said:

We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, “I know this is not politically correct but . . .” in front of the usual string of insults in order to be not just safe from criticism but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the new sin of political correctness……… Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every sort of curmudgeon or crank, from the fascistic to the merely smug.

Hate blacks? Attack positive discrimination – everyone will know the codes. Want to keep Europe white? Attack multiculturalism. Fed up with the girlies making noise? Tired of listening to whining about unemployment when your personal economy is booming? Haul out political correctness and you don’t even have to say what’s on your mind.

Even marketers are cashing in on this anti-PC fad, as illustrated by this cartoon.

Here’s a tip. Anyone who feels the need to invoke the “politically incorrect” trope as an indicator of his or her valor is probably trying to hide the weaknesses in their argument.

POST SCRIPT: Comparing the candidates

How do the presidential candidates compare when it comes to where they stand on the left-right and authoritarian-libertarian continua?

You can see for yourself, based on their positions on a range of issues.

I found it interesting (but not surprising) that every candidate of both parties (except for Democrats Dennis Kucinich and Mike gravel) ended up in the right-wing /authoritarian quadrant.

You can also answer the questions yourself and compare yourself to them. My scores put me in the deep southwest part in the left-libertarian quadrant, more so than Kucinich and Gravel.

These kinds of things are fun but should not be considered a serious analysis of political philosophies.

US military bases abroad: A case study of Vicenza, Italy

In an earlier post, I highlighted Chalmers Johnson’s article that described the US global military empire that is sustained by a vast network of bases around the world, more than most Americans perhaps realize. The huge bases being currently constructed in Iraq should be viewed as the extension of this plan and creating such bases could well have been the driving force behind the decision to invade Iraq. This becomes more plausible since the various ‘official’ justifications (weapons of mass destruction, war on terror, spreading democracy) have been shown to be untenable.

Periodically, one hears of rumblings of discontent among the local population living near these US bases and demands for their removal. When this happens in countries whose governments are friendly with the US, such as in Europe, the reaction here is often one of indignation at those ungrateful people who are biting the hand that protects them.

A fascinating and detailed case study of one particular American military base is that in the town of Vincenza, Italy where in February 2007 somewhere between 70,000 and 150,000 people demonstrated against the expansion and extension of the US base in their city. The kinds of problems such bases create and the hostility they generate can be found in this article (and which has been highlighted here) by Paul Iversen, a professor of classics at Case Western Reserve University, who happens to have family connections in that town that take him there regularly.

Iversen emphasizes the deep and long-standing connections between Vincenza, a “world renowned city of art and architecture,” that influenced US government buildings through the fact that its native son architect Andrea Palladia’s work was the inspiration for many US government buildings including the Capitol dome, the White House, and Monticello. Perhaps because of these connections “Vicenza is thought by many Italians to be the most pro-American of Italian cities” and hence bitter protests over the US plans to expand its military base there cannot be dismissed as reflexive anti-Americanism.

Iversen says the extent of the public opposition was quite severe:

As for public opinion, local polls showed that 61% of the residents were against it, while a whopping 85% were in favor of settling the matter through a popular referendum. The City Council, surrounded by “unprecedented security”, had 20 representatives speak for the “yeas” and 20 speak for the “nays”, and then they voted first to reject the idea of a referendum and then to approve the expansion. The final tally for the project-vote was strictly along party lines, with 21 “yeas” (right coalition), 17 “nays” (left coalition), 2 abstentions, and 1 missing in action. The vote to reject holding a referendum was even closer, winning by only a margin of 1. After the vote, the previous mayor of Vicenza for 15 years, Achille Variati, is reported in the local paper to have said about the council’s decisions, “No, they cannot decide the future of Vicenza themselves. I will work to bring about the referendum.”

The main problem was that the plans for expansion did not take into account the already existing problems of congestion and pollution in the town and would actually aggravate them.

They would also inherit a new US air base that is a mere 25-minute leisurely walk from the Basilica Palladiana, which sits in the heart of the city.
. . .
Expanding the airport here, then, would be far worse than building a major military airbase one and half miles from the most historic piece of real estate in the US. As such it represents a serious callousness on the part of the US to local conditions and thus to justice itself.

As is usually the case, discussions over the decision to expand the US base is being done without consultation with the local populace or taking its interests into account, and involved heavy-handed arm-twisting by the US.

There was, however, one major problem with the discussions and agreement – the governments of Berlusconi, [center-right mayor] Hüllweck and the US had done all of the negotiating behind closed doors, thus keeping the people of Vicenza, including members of the city council, completely in the dark about it.
. . .
In fact, several months later Prodi’s Foreign Minister, Massimo D’Alema, would say that “Revoking the authorization would have been a hostile act on our part against the United States.” This clearly demonstrates that the US government was leaning hard on Prodi’s government and telling them that if they did not allow the base expansion, the US government would put Italy on a list of uncooperative or even “hostile” countries. This “all or nothing” approach to the relationship by the US, which amounts to extortion, is hardly what one would expect of a just and fair ally.

Iversen points out that such bases, contrary to conventional wisdom, are not an unmitigated economic boon to the local area.

Most Americans might be surprised to learn that Italian tax payers actually cover a significant share of American bases on their soil (this is called Host-Nation Support [pdf], see also here). While the exact stipulations of who pays what for each specific project are mostly kept hidden per the stipulations of the post-WWII treaty, in Italy it is widely believed that Italian tax-payers are required to pick up just over 40% of the tab, in addition to the large sums for the enormous amounts of water and electricity. This doesn’t cover time of war, when America often asks Host Nations to kick in even more ad hoc support, so a new base may also entangle Italy in paying greater costs for future conflicts. Any suggestion, therefore that somehow the Italians or the other nations where we have bases are “freeloaders” is terribly misguided. They help pay for a significant chunk of our bases on their soil. In addition, few Vicentini think that America’s help during WWII, as much as it is appreciated, obliges them to build yet another base in their overcrowded and beautiful back yard. Most are tired of America always expecting another pay back and treating them as their eternal client state.

And always in the background is the fact that the disastrous Iraq war and other actions by the US has squandered any goodwill on the part of people around the world towards US government policies. Iversen continues:

There is no doubt that in Italy and most of the world there is a widespread and growing conviction that Bush’s America is no longer the same America that reluctantly fought to end a horrific war sixty years ago; rather, she is going out of her way to pick unnecessary fights, thus displaying obvious signs of fascist, militaristic and imperial behavior herself – things the Italians have quite a bit of experience with, can easily recognize, and for which they now have a term that recalls the Fascismo of yester-year: Bushismo. It also hasn’t helped that the Bush administration has thumbed its nose at the UN, IAEA, the Kyoto Protocols, the Geneva Conventions, Habeas Corpus, and is responsible for Abu Gharib, Guantanamo, the recent probable involvement of CIA agents in an illegal case of extraordinary rendition in Milan, and that the US military cleared of all wrongdoing the American soldiers who in Iraq killed an Italian Secret Service agent named Nicola Calipari while he was rescuing an Italian journalist. Naturally the Italian public would prefer the US to change its policies and behavior, but if the US doesn’t, even traditionally pro-American cities like Vicenza would rather risk future Vandals, Visigoths and Huns rather than be complicit enablers of US imperial hubris by hosting another American base.

Iversen has written a wonderful article. You should read the full thing.

POST SCRIPT: Hubris

It is great fun talking to classics scholars. They are a font of interesting information about the ancient origins of words and ideas, and Iversen’s article had an interesting digression on the origins of the word ‘hubris.’

The noun hybris is derived from the Greek preposition hyper meaning “above” (which is cognate with the Latin preposition super from which is derived the Latin noun superbia). Hubris to the ancient Greek, however, was not just a matter of “pride”, as the word is usually poorly translated in English. Hubris was the condition of having a haughtiness so high that it led to a feeling of impunity, which in turn led to a wanton act of violence. That is why the Athenians prosecuted crimes such as rape under the rubric of hybris. For the Greeks, then, the pride of hubris was one that produced a wanton act of violence that caused great ruin, even death (which is why hubris was later listed amongst the Seven Deadly Sins). That death, however, was not limited to the victim, as any one who has read Greek literature can tell you, but the ruin of hubris eventually doubled back upon the perpetrator’s own head.

While many people have used the word hubris to describe the Bush administration, Iversen’s clarification of its full meaning makes that description even more apt.

The dangerous consequences of a militarized foreign policy

Chalmers Johnson is a former CIA consultant and a professor of Asian studies at Berkeley, and was an avowed cold-war warrior during the Vietnam war era. He has written a very interesting article titled Evil Empire: Is Imperial Liquidation Possible for America? He points out the Iraq war as an unmitigated disaster on many levels and the failure of the media as culpable.

The people of the United States became mere spectators as an array of ideological extremists, vested interests, and foreign operatives — including domestic neoconservatives, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the Israeli Lobby, the petroleum and automobile industries, warmongers and profiteers allied with the military-industrial complex, and the entrenched interests of the professional military establishment — essentially hijacked the government.
. . .
One subject that the government, the military, and the news media try to avoid like the plague is the racist and murderous culture of rank-and-file American troops when operating abroad. Partly as a result of the background racism that is embedded in many Americans’ mental make-up and the propaganda of American imperialism that is drummed into recruits during military training, they do not see assaults on unarmed “rag heads” or “hajis” as murder. . . Some militarists will reply that such inhumanity to the defenseless is always inculcated into the properly trained soldier.
. . .
Imperialism and militarism have thus begun to imperil both the financial and social well-being of our republic. What the country desperately needs is a popular movement to rebuild the Constitutional system and subject the government once again to the discipline of checks and balances. Neither the replacement of one political party by the other, nor protectionist economic policies aimed at rescuing what’s left of our manufacturing economy will correct what has gone wrong. Both of these solutions fail to address the root cause of our national decline.

I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge (still growing) military establishment that undergirds it.

[Read more…]

Discussing health care seriously

In my discussions with people on serious and controversial topics, I have some simple rules of thumb to tell me tell whether the discussion is worth pursuing or whether the other person is not serious and talking further is a waste of time.

For example, when discussing evolution, as soon as someone says something along the lines of Mel Gibson’s “If we descended from monkeys, then how come there are still monkeys? How come apes aren’t people yet?” then you know that you are dealing with someone who is either being willfully dishonest or is so ignorant of the basic facts of the topic under discussion that it is not worth continuing unless one is willing to spend a lot of time to bring that person up to speed. The wrongful use of the second law of thermodynamics is another example of a warning sign.

A similar situation applies to global warming when, during a cold or snowy spell someone triumphantly suggests that this has conclusively proven that global warming is a myth.

In discussing politics, the signal is when one makes a criticism of some action of the US government (such as its decision to ignore habeas corpus, or to invade Iraq, or its numerous covert destabilization actions in other countries) and the other person replies “If you don’t like it, then why don’t you go to Russia/France/China/Cuba/Sweden/(fill in the blank for whatever other country the speaker does not like)?”

In all these cases, the signs are clear that there has been no attempt by the other person to really engage with the issue and he or she has resorted to what he or she thinks is a clever debating point but in actuality has little or no content behind it.

In the case of the debates over the merits of a universal, government run, single-payer health care system, the signal that someone is not serious is when he or she trots out the waiting times for hip replacements in Canada as an argument about how the Canadian system is so terrible in comparison to the US. In the wake of the release of Michael Moore’s film Sicko, we can expect to see this being trotted out repeatedly, as indeed it already has.

As Kevin Drum pointed out a few months ago, the hip replacement argument is a sign of egregious cherry picking of data.

When comparing huge and complex systems like the health care or education systems in different nations, making point-to-point comparisons of isolated cases is of little use. No system is going to be better at every single thing, so this kind of debate results in each side selecting just those pieces of data to suit its purposes. There are probably some elective procedures for which there are longer waiting times in other countries than for those with high quality insurance plans in the US. It would not surprise me in the least if access to tests using expensive equipment like MRI machines is easier in the US (for those who have the requisite insurance coverage, of course) than it is for people in other countries. Health care in the US is aimed at servicing the well-to-do, because it is they who are the decision and policy-makers and as long as they are kept content, they are unlikely to want to make changes that reduce the profits of the health care industry, let alone eliminate them entirely, even if the changes benefit the general public.

One needs to look at aggregate measures to better compare quality and cost across nations. For example, the World Health Organization in 2000 put out The world health report 2000 – Health systems: improving performance in which it used the following measures for the comparison for health systems, using measures of both goodness and fairness:

  1. overall good health (e.g., low infant mortality rates and high disability-adjusted life expectancy);
  2. a fair distribution of good health (e.g., low infant mortality and long life expectancy evenly distributed across population groups);
  3. a high level of overall responsiveness;
  4. a fair distribution of responsiveness across population groups; and
  5. a fair distribution of financing health care (whether the burden of health risks is fairly distributed based on ability to pay, so that everyone is equally protected from the financial risks of illness)

Based on these criteria, according to the WHO study (p. 152), the US comes in at #37 in rank internationally, compared to France (#1), England (#18), Canada (#30), and Cuba (#39).

Michael Moore’s Sicko (which you should really see) points out that on measures like life expectancy at birth and infant mortality rates (i.e., the number of infants who die before reaching the age of one year for each 1,000 births), the US lags behind its developed world counterparts, even though its spends far more on health care as a fraction of its GDP (13.6% in 1998) than its nearest competitor Germany (10.6%). Per capita spending is also highest is the US ($4,178) with the next highest being Switzerland ($2,794).

The reason the US gets so much less for the money it spends on health care is because of the vast amounts siphoned off to the insurance and drug companies, partly due to profits and partly due to a huge bureaucracy to handle the complex billing and processing process involved with private health insurance. Such costs account for between 19.3 and 24.1% of health care spending in the US compared with between 8.4 and 11.1% in (say) Canada.

image001.pngThere is a strong (negative) correlation between infant mortality and life expectancy, as can be seen from this graph, where each dot represents the data for a country, along with a linear regression line. The implication is clear that the best way to improve life expectancy is to reduce infant mortality. The reason that many developing countries have high infant mortality rates and resulting low life expectancy is that lack of access to clean water results in diarrhea and this leads to dehydration, which is often fatal for infants. (As an aside, the international conglomerate Nestle deserves widespread condemnation for its policy of marketing infant formula in the developing countries, despite the lack of easy access to clean water to prevent infection. Breastfeeding is always preferred except in exceptional cases, but because of the Nestle marketing campaign became perceived as inferior to formula.)

But when comparing the US to the rest of the developed world, access to clean water is not the main issue, so widespread access to health care emerges as the prime suspect for its low ranking. For example, infant mortality rates for non-whites in US cities are two to three times as high as the national average.

What really irks many people in the US about Moore’s film is perhaps not so much the adverse comparison with Canada, England and France. People who for some reason are enamored of the system here will complacently trot out once again hip replacement waiting times to claim a spurious superiority. It is the fact that among the 221 countries listed, Cuba’s infant mortality rate (6.04, rank 40) and life expectancy rates (77, rank 56) are almost identical with the US infant mortality (6.37, rank 42) and life expectancy (78, rank 45) that really rankles.

The US government’s implacable animosity to Cuba, trying to strangle its economy with boycotts and embargos and repeated attempts at destabilization and even assassination of its leaders, has to be one of the cruelest policies ever implemented towards a country that is not a threat to its security. And yet despite that deliberate attempt at destroying the Cuban economy, Cuba has managed to create a public health system that is a model for third world countries, and produces results in key indices that are comparable with the US. Cuba is legendary among third world countries in its generosity, sharing its medical personnel and expertise around the world.

Kevin Drum wonders if Moore’s use of Cuba in his film was a clever public relations strategy, knowing that it would trigger the almost reflexive anti-Cuba venom that exists in certain quarters in the US and that they would make a huge fuss, thus giving him free publicity. “Moore’s brilliance at getting his mortal enemies to do all his publicity for him is unparalleled.”

Drum may be right. In the weird media world we live in, it is not enough for Moore to accurately portray the scandal that is the US health system compared to its peer countries. That information has been out there for a long time, and ignored by the power elites. He had to create a fuss and by going to Cuba, he did so.

POST SCRIPT: This Modern World

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow sums up the predictable responses to Sicko by the apologists for the US health care industry.