Pandering to Israel by politicians and the media

If there is one thing that exceeds the absurd extravagance with which American politicians declare their love for Jesus, it is how they describe their love for Israel. It seems like no level of pandering is enough. Just yesterday, six of the Republican candidates attended a forum of the American Jewish Coalition and fell over themselves trying to outdo each other in supporting the most extreme policies of Israel and criticizing president Obama for not doing enough, even though Obama has been as obsequious in appeasing the Israel lobby as any previous president. Ron Paul was not invited to this gathering because he alone has questioned America’s massive subsidizing of Israel’s economy and unquestioned support for its dangerous policies in the Middle East.

The pandering to Israel does not stop with politicians either. The mainstream media is also wary of saying anything that could be construed as anything other than whole-hearted support for Israel. The level of self-censorship in the Western media when it comes to Israel is quite extraordinary. For example, at a recent summit meeting, an open microphone picked up the following bit of dialogue:

French president Nicholas Sarkozy: “I can’t stand him [Netanyahu] any more, he’s a liar.”
US president Barack Obama: “You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day,”

Uri Avnery says that this exchange followed a report that German chancellor Angela Merkel had told her cabinet that “every word that leaves Netanyahu’s mouth is a lie.”

The dialogue was broadcast live to a group of senior French media people, because somebody forgot to turn the microphone off. A piece of luck of the kind that journalists dream about.

Yet not one of the journalists in the hall published a word about it. They kept it to themselves and only told it to their colleagues, who told it to their friends, one of whom told it to a blogger, who published it.

Why? Because the senior journalists who were present are friends and confidants of the people in power. That’s how they get their scoops. The price is suppressing any news that might hurt or embarrass their sponsors. This means in practice that they become lackeys of the people in power – betraying their elementary democratic duty as servants of the public.

I know this from experience. As an editor of a news magazine, I saw it as my duty (and pleasure) to break these conspiracies of silence. Actually, many of our best scoops were given to us by colleagues from other publications who could not use them themselves for the same reason.

Luckily, with the internet now everywhere, it has become almost impossible to suppress news. Blessed be the online Gods.

You would think that the news that the heads of three major economic powers so utterly despise the head of a country they publicly support unconditionally would be big news and the leaders would be repeatedly asked about this. But this news item lasted just a couple of days in the American media, disappearing as fast as it appeared.

But as Avnery said, the Sakozy-Obama exchange might not have made it into the media at all if not for bloggers on the internet, so we should at least be grateful for that.

Billionaire Nick Hanauer on why rich people need to pay more taxes

Four years ago, I made the obvious point of why spreading the wealth was much better for everyone than great inequality. (I wrote a whole series of posts on this but this particular one is the most relevant here.)

The oligarchy and its allies, especially those in the Republican party and Fox News, have fought against this, saying that rich people are ‘job creators’ and taxing them more means that they will invest less and hire less people. A billionaire venture capitalist named Nick Hanauer wrote an op-ed in which he debunks this idea and pretty much makes the same point that people like me have made.

I’m a very rich person… Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.
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It is unquestionably true that without entrepreneurs and investors, you can’t have a dynamic and growing capitalist economy. But it’s equally true that without consumers, you can’t have entrepreneurs and investors. And the more we have happy customers with lots of disposable income, the better our businesses will do.

That’s why our current policies are so upside down. When the American middle class defends a tax system in which the lion’s share of benefits accrues to the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.

And that’s what has been happening in the U.S. for the last 30 years.
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One reason this policy is so wrong-headed is that there can never be enough superrich Americans to power a great economy. The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the average American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. Like everyone else, I go out to eat with friends and family only occasionally.
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I can’t buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans can’t buy any new clothes or enjoy any meals out. Or to make up for the decreasing consumption of the tens of millions of middle-class families that are barely squeaking by, buried by spiraling costs and trapped by stagnant or declining wages.

If the average American family still got the same share of income they earned in 1980, they would have an astounding $13,000 more in their pockets a year. It’s worth pausing to consider what our economy would be like today if middle-class consumers had that additional income to spend. [My italics]
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We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years. Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Middle-class consumers do, and when they thrive, U.S. businesses grow and profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.

So let’s give a break to the true job creators. Let’s tax the rich like we once did and use that money to spur growth by putting purchasing power back in the hands of the middle class. And let’s remember that capitalists without customers are out of business.

What Hanauer is saying is (or should) blindingly obvious to anyone who gives the topic a moment’s thought. Henry Ford said pretty much the same thing a century ago. But our oligarchy has gotten so out of control and so avaricious that they have to counter this renegade from their ranks and so naturally there has been pushback. In this interview Neil Cavuto of Fox News tries to faithfully serve his masters by challenging Hanauer.

Cavuto raises the idiotic argument that I have heard so often, that if Hanauer feels he should pay more taxes why does he not voluntarily send in a check instead of changing the tax rates for everyone?

That is the kind of argument that labels you as being either incredibly stupid or willfully obtuse. It is on a par with those anti-evolutionists who think that the question “If we descended from monkeys, how come there are still monkeys?” is a devastating argument against evolution. Those who are tempted to make such an argument should really think twice, unless they don’t mind people laughing at them.

Being certain about god’s existence

According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 64% of people in the age range 18-29 say they are ‘absolutely certain’ that god exists. This is lower than the 73% of people over 30, another sign of the decrease in religiosity of younger people.

What I find really curious is that the respondents say they are absolutely certain of something that they cannot possibly be certain about. Absolute certainty, as commonly understood, means that you have no doubt whatsoever and that is a very high threshold that cannot be met for something as lacking in evidence as the existence of god. I am about as hard-core an atheist as you are likely to meet and even I would never say that I am ‘absolutely certain’ that god does not exist and most of the atheists I am aware of are like me.

So why do religious people say such things? I suspect that such assertions of certainty are the means by which people try to convince themselves of their beliefs in spite of their misgivings, the equivalent of sticking one’s fingers in the ears to shut out unpleasant sounds. Such emphatic assertions of certainty are really symptoms of doubt.

An interesting follow-up would be to ask those respondents what it is that makes them so certain.

The factors that drive obedience and conformity

There was an old TV program called Candid Camera that used hidden cameras to capture what people did when confronted with awkward or unexpected situations. While the aim of the program was humorous, usually at the expense of the hapless person who happened to be caught on camera, some of the episodes serve as useful experiments on human behavior.

One particularly revealing one involved the desire of people to conform to powerful norms of behavior that we all follow without even thinking about it. For example, when people get into an elevator, they space themselves as far as possible from others, immediately turn around and face the front, and not make eye contact or speak, apart from sometimes a quick nod of greeting upon entering. But in this episode, the camera noted what happens when the norms seem to suddenly change.

Although the above experiment is amusing, psychologist Philip Zimbardo, the person behind the famous Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) , reflects on it and the Milgram obedience study, and says that the Candid Camera elevator experiment reveals how the strong desire to conform to the norms of the people around us can lead to behaviors that are evil, something he calls ‘the Lucifer effect’. (Zimbardo has written a book titled The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil that I have bought and plan to read and write about soon.)

Zimbardo points an interesting feature in the Milgram obedience and the SPE studies about the role that religion plays in the willingness to obey authority and inflict pain on others even when one’s own moral instincts are repulsed by the idea.

The large, diverse cast of ordinary characters in the obedience studies and the normal, healthy, intelligent cast in the prison study also serve to make vivid the tragic conclusion that we all hate to acknowledge: The goodness of Everyman and of Everywoman can be transformed and overwhelmed by the an accumulation of small forces of evil. The character transformation seen in many of the participants in both studies represents “The Lucifer Effect” in action. Both studies teach us lessons about authority; the obedience research teaches us to question authority when it is excessive and unjust, while the SPE teaches us the dangers of too little responsible authority when it is needed to perform oversight of the behavior of individuals within its agency.
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Religious upbringing also comes to play in a complex way, leading both to unquestioning obedience to doctrinal beliefs as well as a profound caring for one’s fellows. The first values should lead to greater obedience to authority in the Milgram paradigm, while the second should lead to less obedience to such authority. Support for the first prediction comes from a Milgram-like study that compared participants with various measured levels religious orientation in the extent to which they obeyed one of three authority figures: neutral, scientific, or religious. The results reveal that the shock scores elicited in this experiment were highest for the most religious participants, less for those moderately religious, and lowest for the least religious. Among those highly and moderately religious, the scientific and religious authorities were more effective than the neutral authority in eliciting the most obedience. Those who scored lowest on the religious measures, that centered around beliefs that one’s life is under divine control, tended to reject any authority, be it religious or scientific. [My emphasis]

There is no question that scientific figures carry authority which is why scientific malpractice or fraud is taken so seriously. It is perhaps not hard to see why being religious or having a religious authority figure makes people more likely to be persuaded to go along with cruel acts. Religious people have usually been indoctrinated from childhood to believe that god is the ultimate authority figure and that unquestioning obedience to god’s commands constitutes a virtue that will be rewarded. Their religious texts also have countless examples of the most appalling atrocities that their god has done or commanded people to do and which are supposed to serve a greater good. The appalling doctrine known as ‘divine command theory‘ justifies such actions by saying that whatever god commands has to be good, even if it goes against every norm of humane behavior. Such beliefs can be a powerful force that can overcome the scruples that come with normal feelings of empathy towards other living things.

As a side note, a few months ago, I wrote about people who get lost in Death Valley and have even died because they followed the instructions of their GPS system even when it erroneously instructed them to take roads that barely existed. I wonder if that is another symptom of this phenomenon. After all, an assured and confident disembodied voice telling them what to do is somewhat like what they imagine some god-like authority figure would do, and they follow blindly.

More evidence of religion’s decline

The Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society & Culture at Trinity College surveys the religious views of Americans and their latest ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey) report done in 2008 found the following:

  • 86% of American adults identified as Christians in 1990 and 76% in 2008.
  • The challenge to Christianity in the U.S. does not come from other religions but rather from a rejection of all forms of organized religion.
  • The “Nones” (no stated religious preference, atheist, or agnostic) continue to grow, though at a much slower pace than in the 1990s, from 8.2% in 1990, to 14.1% in 2001, to 15.0% in 2008.
  • Based on their stated beliefs rather than their religious identification in 2008, 70% of Americans believe in a personal God, roughly 12% of Americans are atheist (no God) or agnostic (unknowable or unsure), and another 12% are deistic (a higher power but no personal God).
  • In 2008 one in five adults does not identify with a religion of any kind compared with one in ten in 1990.

The report finds that when looked at as a percentage of the population growth from 1990 to 2008, the ‘nones’ category captured 37% of this growth while the don’t know/refused to answer category (which the report says shared many of the social profiles and beliefs of the ‘nones’) had 15% of the growth, leaving just 48% of the growth to religiously affiliated people.

There is a lot of data in the report. What I found particularly interesting is that 30% of married respondents did not have a religious ceremony and 27% do not expect to have a religious funeral or service when they die.

I am not sure when or if they will be doing another study to see if the decline continues as I expect it will.

Riddle: What is torture in Bahrain but not in the US?

An interesting report came out last week. The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) investigating the protests in Bahrain delivered its report last week and said that the Bahraini government had used “excessive force and torture” on demonstrators. (The full report can be read here.) This was significant in that the authoritarian Bahraini government that was responsible for those actions, and was aided by the Saudi Arabian military in its harsh crackdown, was still in power. The fact that they created a commission and allowed such a report to be released is a tribute to the fact that popular protests seen worldwide against the repressive government had created considerable pressure on even such a government to try and mitigate the damage.

The commission used as its definition of torture Article 1 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment that says that:

For the purposes of this Convention, the term “torture” means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

But although the report said that the government had used torture, the news reports that I read in the US were curiously coy about exactly what actions were considered to be torture. However much I searched for them, I could not get the details. For example, this typical report in the New York Times, which prides itself on being ‘the newspaper of record’ and usually provides the most details in US media shows how they skated over the issue:

Five detainees were tortured to death while in custody, the panel concluded, and other detainees endured electric shocks and were beaten with rubber hoses and wires.
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In Washington, the Obama administration welcomed the report, but said the onus was now on Bahrain’s government to hold accountable those responsible for abuses and to undertake reforms to make sure they do not occur again.

The subtle implication in this report is that being given electric shocks or beaten with rubber hoses and wires was not part of the torture regimen. I finally found an NPR story that provided more details.

Using words like torture, mistreatment and threatened rape, the head of the commission said the kinds of things that are rarely said out loud — especially in the conservative, oil-rich Gulf.

The commission head, Cherif Bassiouni, listed abuses he says were committed against protesters who were detained: They were blindfolded, forced to stand for long periods of time, whipped, beaten, subjected to electric shock, deprived of sleep, and exposed to high temperatures and insults.

These acts, Bassiouni said, amounted to torture. [My emphasis]

I now understood why the mainstream media was shy about specifying the acts. These are the very same actions, or even worse, that are done by the US on its detainees and since the US media is deferential to the claims by the US government that it does not torture, this element of the Bahraini report must have caused considerable cognitive dissonance and had to be suppressed. In the US, in an effort to excuse the Bush administration from war crimes, there was hesitancy to say that even waterboarding was torture, so all these other forms of torture have to be also not mentioned.

Eric Lewis, a lawyer whose efforts to prosecute Donald Rumsfeld and the military chain of command for torture were opposed by the Obama administration, blasts Obama for his hypocrisy on torture, comparing his statements as a candidate with his actions as president, and says that by not prosecuting those who committed such acts, he has left the door wide open for the use of torture by any future president.

The president has rejected three clear opportunities to erect a high legal wall against the return of torture: he has made it clear that criminal prosecutions for torture will not go forward; he has opposed the creation of a truth commission to examine events comprehensively; and he has affirmatively intervened to stop civil litigation by detainees against their torturers.
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Had President Obama shown the courage of candidate Obama, he would have strongly supported civil litigation under the Constitution against officials who authorized torture. The argument that it involves the courts in foreign policy or causes officials to be wary in their actions is nonsense. The ban on torture should be absolute; it is not a foreign policy or defense issue and it is salutary for officials to know that they will be held accountable for torture.
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The Obama administration can’t just say, “Trust us.” Its challenge was not only to stop the American government from torturing detainees, but to institutionalize the legal infrastructure that would prevent the resumption of torture. President Obama had the opportunity to leave an unambiguous legal legacy that prohibited torture and inhibited the torturers of tomorrow from finding legal cover. Instead, we may reap the whirlwind of his timidity, and soon.

Until such time as we are willing to bring those who commit torture to justice, irrespective of who and where they are, these abuses will continue.

Sleep

I like to sleep. I need a minimum of eight hours a night. But it is not just the good feeling that comes with resting that I find attractive. I really enjoy sleeping, the sensation of drowsing off, and usually have no difficulty doing so anywhere at any time, even on cramped airline seats on long flights. On weekends, I take a long nap after lunch and sometimes take a short nap seated up at my desk during the weekday.

I used to worry that this was a sign that I was lazy but learned later that most people don’t get enough sleep and that this can really be harmful.

Here is a 60 Minutes report on the importance of getting enough sleep every day.

Now comes a new study that suggests that the variations in sleep needs can be traced to the influence of a specific gene.

I learned from the news report that Einstein needed 11 hours of sleep per night, which makes me a real slacker in the sleep department.