What’s Come Over This Country? »

The polarization that has gripped this country is taking a turn for the worse as evidenced by a marked increase in hostility and threats of violence. It is everywhere, in the fights over mask mandates, rebellion Read More »

Those Who Think the System Is Rigged Say, Just Look at CEO Pay »

The anger of the less-educated white males that Donald Trump has mined like a coal seam and brought to the surface is attributed mostly to
Clockwise from top left: Cook,
Ellison,Zaslav, Schwarzman

jobs lost to immigrants or shipped overseas. But it also results from years of public disgust over income inequality made so apparent by the multi-million dollar paychecks of corporate chieftains reported in the media. Those paychecks and the lavish bonuses paid to Wall Street "fat cats" are an in-the-face reminder that the system is rigged.

They see Tim Cook in 2011, in just his first year as Apple's CEO, handed $376 million in stock and options. In 2012 Larry Ellison of Oracle… Read More »

Is Your Newspaper Named Facebook? »

Something of a scandal erupted in May when the website Gizmodo reported that Facebook slants left in the stories it selects for the "Trending" news list it serves up on your Facebook home page.

But the bias concern is not our topic. What was startling was mention that a Pew Research study had found that 63% of Americans consider Facebook and Twitter to be news services and go there to get their news. And Facebook Pulls the Rug from Under: 
July 7: An alarming percentage of Americans turn to Facebook for news, and news organizations have… Read More »

The Home of the Brave Trembles in Fear »

It has become routine for America to disgrace itself. Having always been a scold of other nations' human rights abuses, in the panic after the 9/11 attacks we immediately cast aside the values we preach to others by rounding up over a thousand American Muslims for months of detention without cause. We set up secret black sites outside the country to which we "renditioned" captives for torture. We set up an out of Canada Welcomes Syrians : Dec.14: Newly-elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greeted refugees with "You are home" and might as well have been scolding America when he said, "Tonight, they step off the plane as refugees. But they walk out of this terminal as permanent residents of Canada, with social insurance numbers, with health cards, and with an opportunity to become full Canadians."
    
country site for the indefinite detention without trial of "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo. And now, with Europe overwhelmed with refugees and some countries accepting hundreds of thousands, America's Republican leaders hope to slam the door, defying President Obama's intent to place a mere 10,000 Syrian refugees throughout our country, a minuscule number just 1% of what tiny Lebanon has accepted.

To keep them out, the House passed a bill that would place new hurdles in the path of admitting the refugees; state governors — over two dozen, all but one a Republican — vowed to refuse to accept the Syrians; and all Republican candidates for the presidency announced their opposition to admitting them. The three Democratic candidates would allow entry.

That terrorists could pose as refugees and slip into the country is the nominal fear. The actual driver is the spinelessness of politicians who fear that if that happens, and American deaths result, they will be held responsible and voted from office. They are in accord with the 53% of Americans who oppose the admittance of Syrian refugees, which says that Americans reliably fail in practice to follow what they believe they stand for.

The bill passed by the House was shepherded by newly elected House Speaker Paul Ryan. "Our nation has always been welcoming. But we
cannot allow terrorists to take advantage of our compassion". So we will abandon this spurious compassion, nowhere in evidence, because "the prudent, the responsible thing" is to pause the refugee program "to verify that terrorists are not trying to infiltrate the refugee program". Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has an alternative simpler than admitting refugees. Instead "what we need is a strategy obviously to give the refugees an opportunity to stay in their own country".

And so, voting 289 to 137, with close to 50 Democrats in support, the House passed a bill that would require the heads of the F.B.I., Homeland Security and national intelligence to attest that each applicant for refugee status from Syria and Iraq poses no threat. Already in place is a rigorous process of background checks first by the U.N. and then multiple U.S. agencies that takes two years. Calling upon three parts of the executive branch to do their own vetting and making individuals responsible is clearly aimed at tying the process in knots so as to shut out the refugees altogether.

Mr. Obama emphasizes that refugees are already subjected to “the most rigorous vetting process that we have for anybody who is admitted”. Lavinia Limon, president of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, affirms that “refugees are the most thoroughly vetted people to enter this country”. Nevertheless, our Congress seems incapable of reasoning that, given the length of time a refugee applicant must wait before gaining entry to the U.S., the refugee path is the least sensible way to infiltrate the country. A terrorist could instead simply fly in on a tourist or student visa and go right to work. “That somehow [refugees] pose a more significant threat than all the tourists who pour into the United States every single day just doesn’t jibe with reality,” Obama said.

Over two dozen governors — only one a Democrat — intend to set their own rules. They vow they will disallow refugee placement in their states. "I write to inform you that the State of Texas will not accept any refugees from Syria", said Governor Greg Abbott of Texas to the President, and Texas has now gone to federal court to keep Syrian refugees out of the state. Governor Mike Pence of Indiana turned away a Syrian family and when apprised that he had no authority to do so said he would instruct state agencies to refuse assist the refugees. (The family was relocated to Connecticut; the ACLU has filed suit.)

Washington's Democratic governor, Jay Inslee, reminds us that the United States has always been a refuge for the storm-tossed and warns that now "the American character is being tested".

Apart from the hostility and indifference to people in need, are these two dozen governors really unaware that they cannot deny freedom of movement between the 50 states, that they cannot shut out people from their state?

They are mostly the same governors who have lobbied for years to preventing the closing of Guantánamo and the transfer of detainees to their states. Why they are so fearful is baffling, as if they expect the captives will somehow break out of their prisons to wreak havoc. Congressional Republicans have done the governors' bidding by keeping laws in place to thwart Obama's original campaign pledge to close Guantánamo. In reaction to his recently announced intention to close the base anyway, Congress has just passed a military funding bill with provisions tacked on that make it still more difficult to shut down Guantanamo. The bill bans bringing detainees to the United States altogether, even for prosecution, and even bans transfer to other countries.

The conduct of the Republican candidates for the presidency has been uniformly reprehensible, going well beyond simply recommending a pause or a "timeout".

"The fact is that we need for appropriate vetting", said Chris Christie, indicative of several of the candidates hurriedly making statements in the wake of the Paris bombings before informing themselves of the stringent refugee vetting process already in place.

Ben Carson chose an offensive stand-in for Syrians saying we must protect our children from "a rabid dog running around your neighborhood" but that "doesn’t mean that you hate all dogs by any stretch of the imagination”. He wrote House Speaker Paul Ryan urging legislation to cut off funding for settling Syrian refugees.

Bobby Jindal, who has since dropped out of the race, issued an executive order seeking to prevent Syrian refugees from being resettled in his state of Louisiana. John Kasich said he
will write to President Obama asking him to stop resettling Syrians in his Ohio and thinks there should be a new government agency to broadcast Judeo-Christian values around the world.

Ted Cruz called it "absolute lunacy" to resettle Syrians in this country. "Who in their right mind would want to bring over tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, when we cannot determine…who is and who isn't a terrorist?", he asks. Marco Rubio concurs. He would be "open" to accepting refugees "if there was a way to ensure they were not being infiltrated by terrorists", a requirement of perfect safety not found elsewhere in the affairs of man.

Cruz expressed astonishment that only 3% of the Syrians who have so far gained entry to the U.S. are Christians. Cruz and Jeb Bush think we should only admit Christian Syrians. "We do not have religious tests for our compassion", Obama reminded them.

Donald Trump said, "I'm putting people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration, that if I win, they're going back", contending that Islamic State militants could be hiding among them. A total of 2,290 Syrian refugees have arrived in the United States over the three years of the Syrian civil war. No terrorists have yet emerged. Former ambassador to Syria Ryan Crocker knows "how highly Syrians value hard work and education". In a Wall Street Journal op-ed he says, "They're precisely the people I'd want living next door to me and attending my children's schools." Moreover, State Department data says 67% of those referred to the U.S. by the U.N. have been children under the age of 12 and women.

That scares Christie. "I don't think that orphans under 5 should be admitted to the United States at this point".

As president, Trump would consider creating a government database to track Muslims in the U.S. Does he perhaps think they should be made to wear yellow armbands embroidered with the star and crescent?

"I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric that has been coming out of here during the course of the debate", was Obama's remonstrance. "Many of these refugees are the victims of terrorism themselves. That's what they are fleeing".

And that's the senseless contradiction. To assure the safety of their constituents, politicians are determined to shut out people fleeing from the horrors of a country filled with death and bombed to rubble who themselves want only to find safety. But that does not register with the best and brightest we send to Washington.

In a Wall Street Journal symposium, Marco Rubio says, "You cannot accurately do a background check on 10,000 people". True enough. Nor be sure you will never have an auto accident, or fall off a ladder. Guaranteed safety is not available in life. An obsessive quest to make America safe and hermetically sealed by shutting out refugees from fear there might be a needle in the haystack seems to have become the zeitgeist, witness the parallel at universities where students insist that their institutions be cocoons shielding them from the unpleasantness of the world without. South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy summed up a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee that quizzed government officials on safety with, "I haven’t heard a single one of you say there’s no risk". The new demand is for a country so safe as to be risk-free.

That's impossible, of course. There are risks. That's the chance we have to take. For this of all countries to refuse its part in the massive refugee crisis in order to tuck in safe and sound in our homes while others suffer is shameful. The upshot of excluding the 10,000, and the tens of thousands more that this country should bring in, amounts to massive collective punishment of those in desperate straits out of fear for what some one or two of them might do.

Obama tweeted, "Slamming the door in the face of refugees would betray our deepest values". We have been down this road before, to our eternal shame, as when in the 1930s we turned away 10,000 mostly Jewish refugee children from Germany, sending the ship, the "St. Louis", back to Europe where an untold number would meet their death. (Polls were 2-to-1 against accepting them). We then interned somewhere between 110,000 and 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry out of fear some would spy for Tokyo. Those now in government from new generations who no longer learn history are making the same mistake.

Isn't it odd that we celebrate the extraordinary bravery of the "greatest generation", those hundreds of thousands of Americans who died facing the terrible odds of flying the next mission or attacking the next pillbox, yet half of us seem to have become cowards, unrepentant to casting aside what America has always stood for and turn away "the wretched refuse of your teeming shore", choosing instead to become huddled masses yearning to be safe.

Combat Exaggeration — Transcending Partisanship »

By guest columnist Al Rodbell

Yesterday, some friends who get together after tennis were shooting the breeze, which sometimes gets political and has been known to become a bit heated. We got onto the issue of exaggeration of the closeness to combat, recently in the news, first Brian Williams and later accusations against Bill O'Reilly. I shared an insight that this related to "stolen valor," a specific term meaning a 2005 law (ruled unconstitutional) that would have made it a federal crime to claim possession of a given medal of honor for combat service in wartime.

My antagonist, was a Rush Limbaugh fan I'll call Dave. We both were active in getting our city to triple the size of the tennis center that we now enjoy most every morning, and have collaborated on such recreational issues afterwards. I rib him about his reliance on Rush, and once, when I agreed with the celebrity newsman, I told Dave about it and then when he thought I was being converted, I said, "....after his riff about something that was not really political right before he went to commercial, he had to make a connection, to leave the audience with an out of the blue '...And this is why we have to get rid of that guy occupying the oval office.'"

But, he being a retired aeronautical engineer with an interest in the world beyond his partisan indulgences, we have a respectful "tennis friendship." It turns out he hadn't even heard about the O'Reilly accusations, but he did know about the Veterns Administration chief Robert MacDonald's "lie" about serving in special services. Dave didn't care too much about the circumstances, that it was his echoing the words of a homeless veteran, not a prepared public statement. That it was his way of expanding on the common experiences of one whose life had not gone well. But Dave knew all he had to know about that incident, which is that MacDonald was a Obama appointee.

Well, I let it go. I'm writing this essay not to trash conservatives, but to share how it's possible to connect. As we were talking about the newsman's purported exaggerations, something came to me, which is why a simple misstatement about the degree of intensity of one's military experience can be so meaningful. It turned out that Dave knew the incident well — the example of my "stolen valor" connection — including the man's name, Admiral Jeremy Boorda

It was all about an attachment to a ribbon that military persons wear on their vests on formal occasions, each one as evidence of service, courage and awards of acknowledgement thereof. I'll quote from the Wikipedia article linked above to describe it:

The Navy "V" device is a miniature bronze letter V worn on certain medals and service ribbons, indicating valor in combat. Photographs showed him wearing them in the 1980s, but Boorda had stopped wearing the Vs years before, when he was informed that his experience in Vietnam did not qualify him to wear them. Reports at the time of Boorda's suicide indicated that his wearing of the "V" devices had not been intentional deception on his part, but had been an unintentional mistake that resulted from following verbal instructions delivered to commanders by Admiral Zumwalt when he was Chief of Naval Operations, as well as conflicting interpretations of Navy award regulations.

Yes, "at the time of his suicide". This man who was the first to have risen from the lowest enlisted ranks to be the highest ranking naval officer was so affected by the accusation that it, at the very least, contributed to his taking of his own life.

Dave and I had a little bit of a different interpretation of his action, about how clear was Boorda's breach, whether it was a misunderstanding or a brazen case of stolen valor. When I made the former argument, he responded with "it was bad enough that he killed himself". Meaning, if he had a reasonable argument, he would never have done this. But we went on. He described a story told by his older brother who was waiting at the shores of the Rhine to invade Germany, and the troops were firing across the river. His brother told him how how ranking officers from H.Q. were rushing in, grabbing a rife from a grunt, just to get off a few shots, so they will earn that combat V on their ribbons.

A few hours later when I checked my emails, there was one from Dave, "

Al,

We were both right...sorta. I had the name right but Navy is correct. Boorda was chief of Naval Operations. Wikipedia has a good writeup. The medal in question is called the "combat V" which is added to other ribbons but must be officially awarded. Adm. Zumwalt [his boss] had told him to wear them.

I responded with this:

Just read the Wikipedia article. Perhaps this is something we can both agree on — that it was a profound human tragedy.

Which Dave concluded with:

Agree. Particularly because he came up through the ranks to reach the highest level in the Navy.

                                             •           •           •
I am writing this for one reason, which is that too often our media takes sides in our partisan divide. It becomes a challenge, even if the attempt is made to avoid being attributed to one side or the other. Yet, there are events that have been so distorted that can be understood as touching our common humanity. In this case, the conversation caused Dave to learn more about Admiral Boorda, to see how the extremes of vilification can tap into insecurities that can cause, for some, an unbearable pain.

Partisan identification has a value, it provides cohesion to perspectives that their adherents espouse. While it's worse than some utopia of universal agreement, it's a hell of a lot worse than a commonality based on fear of dissent. In the clash of ideas of a free society, anger can escalate — and the vulnerable individuals behind the labels are lost. Sharing our memory of the tragedy of Admiral Jeremy Boorda reminded two opposing political partisans of the humanity that we all share.

Comment?

Exceptionalism? Maybe Not So Much »

America’s claims to exceptionalism broke the surface again with the recent duel of words between Presidents Obama and Putin a month ago. Arguing in a televised speech for a punitive strike against Syria, Obama closed with “I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional. With humility, but with resolve, let us never lose sight of that essential truth”.

Putin bridled at Obama’s hubris. “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional” he wrote in a New York Times” op-ed. “There are countries big and small, rich and poor…but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal”.

Obama at the United Nations then doubled down with “I believe America is exceptional in part because we have shown a willingness through the sacrifice of blood and treasure to stand up not only for our own narrow self-interest but for the interests of all”.

America’s spotty record brings into question just what interests have been served by those sacrifices given its disastrous missteps in Vietnam and Iraq, but, fair enough. It seems, though, that our exceptionalism is defined by our military rather. As he had said earlier, “For more than seven decades America has been the anchor of global security”. It may have peeved Mr. Putin that several of those decades had to do with holding his country in check.

America thought itself exceptional early on. The Revolution brought about the world’s first large republic to throw off the yoke of divine right and hereditary ascendancy, installing in its place, in Lincoln’s words, “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. The world was watching this grand experiment, and this was understood from the very first in John Winthrop’s shipboard sermon to his fellow Pilgrims who were about to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony: ”We must consider that we shall be as a city on a hill — the eyes of all people are upon us”. As Tom Paine put it, “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind”.

That we had landed on these shores, with a giant continent beckoning, inhabited only by those we thought a backward people, seemed to be telling us it was ours to take. It was our Manifest Destiny to do so. What was exceptional was the incredible courage of pioneers moving west into “Indian country” and entering on a perilous, hardscrabble, unforeseeable future. We would then go on to forge the world’s oldest continuous democracy, which could be claimed as the most exceptional accomplishment of all.

But that was then and this is now.

Now we lecture to the world about democracy, free speech, and human rights yet regularly violate our avowed principles at home. The 9/11 attacks caused us immediately to sink into a depravity of torture, rendition and indefinite imprisonment without trial. Racism persists, evidenced particularly by the otherwise inexplicable ratio of prison-incarcerated blacks. Government, this one especially, has increasingly acted to throttle and intimidate journalists and those who leak the truth to the press.

Our democratic structure has suffered erosion. There was a remarkable turning point when the Supreme Court intervened to choose a president. Then came its ruling that corporations and unions are “persons” in the political process and may now spend unlimited amounts in elections. And as this is written the justices seem sympathetic in McCutcheon v. FEC to the argument that there should be no aggregate limit to what a person may contribute to candidates in elections.

With a majority more than accommodating to business, the Court has allowed corporations to gain increasing sway over the populace. The Court has repeatedly restricted who may band together in class action law suits, leaving to the individual the economically impossible task of taking on big corporations. And to do business with those corporations — mortgage lenders, credit card banks, securities brokers, all are grabbing this brass ring — the Court has upheld their right to require you to agree to arbitration if any dispute arises. Which is to say, you, private citizen, have signed away what you might have thought was a fundamental right: your access to the courts.

The Senate has abandoned simple majority rule; a super majority is now required for anything of consequence.

States nationwide are adopting laws to inhibit voting by blacks and students. Gerrymandering after the 2010 census has made it impossible for one party or the other to have any prospect of electing their candidate in districts all over the country.

And now we witness a complete breakdown of government with a faction of Congress able to bring government to a halt to sabotage a duly voted and signed law it dislikes.

Americans tell themselves that we have the greatest health care in the world. The truth is far from it. We may spend triple what the average of the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) spend per patient, but the results are mixed — highly ranked in heart disease and cancer treatment, yet 4th from last in infant mortality, for example.

In the most recent among many reports that compare health results in developed countries, the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine has us dead last among 17 advanced countries in “deaths from all causes” per unit of population. U.S. death rates for 15 of 21 diseases were higher than the average. A major contributor to this dismal statistic, as compared to countries with socialized medicine, is that uninsured low-income persons only see a doctor when a disease has progressed to a life-threatening stage.

We also allow our hospitals to charge whatever staggering amounts they choose to drive some 700,000 families a year to bankruptcy.

Most disturbing for our future is our steep decline in education. Once the pioneer in public education, America now ranks far down the list when measured by results. The OECD began in 2000 to evaluate student achievement at age 15 in 18 advanced countries with its PISA program (Programme for International Student Assessment). By 2009 their analyses placed the U.S. 17th in reading proficiency, 23rd in science and 31st in math. Finland and Singapore lead the list.

A UNICEF study in 2010 compared the well-being of children in 24 developed countries and found that the United States ranked 23rd in educational resources and child living space, 19th in math and science literacy and 22nd in health, including diet and exercise.

Update: Behind in Workplace Skills Also Oct.11: In a report just released, tests administered by the OECD to about 160,000 people of ages 18 to 65 in 23 countries found that Americans are well behind most other countries in basic math skills (3rd from last), literacy (6th from last) and working with technology (2nd from last).
    
Even in higher education, where more than half of the top universities worldwide are American and eight are in the top ten, we rank 14th in the world in the percentage of 25-to-34 year-olds with degrees.

No end of studies have found that the sooner young children are exposed to learning, the better they do in the years following, but we are 28th in the percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in pre-school, exceeded only by Romania. An Obama proposal in his 2013 State of the Union would provide funds to states to expand early learning, but Republicans viewed it as another entitlement program adding to the deficit rather than an investment in the nation’s future.

Speaking of Romania, at 34th we are exceeded only by that country’s greater proportion of children living in poverty. And for all our prattling about human rights, we were tied at 49th in civil liberties in the "Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index 2008". With the government spying that has been exposed since, it can only be assumed that we are now much deeper on that list. Several countries — Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and Norway — tied for first.

Our land of the free has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners, one in every 107 adults.

And for all our emphasis on business, we have been slipping every year in the World Economic Forum’s ranking of how competitive we are in world markets, dropping to 7th in 2012 behind countries such as Switzerland, Singapore and Finland.

Supposedly egalitarian America had the 4th highest measure of income inequality of the 34 OECD countries measured, and that trend has only grown worse in the latest findings of Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, economists who have regularly reported on this subject. They found that the top 10% took home fully half of all income earned in the United States in 2012. With the bottom tiers of U.S. workers stranded in low-paying jobs offering little opportunity for advancement, this country now ranks below traditionally class-stratified Europe in social mobility.

Put all that together and it is not surprising that the every five year World Happiness Report from the United Nations says Americans' level of happiness declining 4% since 2007.

Yet despite all that, we are full of ourselves. Pew Research’s Global Attitudes Project conducted a survey in 2011 that asked agreement in whether “our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior”. France must have come out on top in notions of self-esteem one would think, but instead it was the U.S., leading Germany, Spain, Britain and France in that order. When they hear us speaking of our exceptionalism, people in those countries must wonder what on earth we are talking about.

Moral Decay the Cause of Income Inequality Says Controversial Book »

Just in time to add ammunition to the class wars, along comes a book that says income inequality isn’t caused by Wall Street bonuses, outsized corporate CEO paychecks or even a tax code skewed to the wealthy.

The book is “Coming Apart, The State of White America”, by Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, who claims it is not the 1% vs. the 99%; rather it is the 20% at the top vs. the 30% at the bottom. The 20% is made up of educated achievers who raise their children to strive for excellence, press them to vie for entrance to the top schools, and see them graduate into the best jobs, marry other smart people, and raise the next batch of bright children to propel the 20% still higher. Meanwhile, the 30% drift ever downward and further apart.

Those in favor of the status quo, eager to deflect Occupiers’ claims that the system is rigged in favor of the wealthy, have embraced Murray’s evaluation of the 30%. Murray says it’s a values thing.

The lower social strata are ordinarily held up as the exemplar of family values, but that’s mythology. Murray says it is the upper stratum that has retained what he calls the key "founding virtues" — industriousness, honesty, marriage and religion — that the lower stratum has forsaken. The latter marry less, have higher divorce rates when they do, and bear far more children out of wedlock. They drop out of high school, are uninvolved with their communities — they even go to church less than the 20%. They lack ambition, they watch television all day, they subsist on one or another welfare program, and fall further behind. They don’t have jobs because they don’t want to work, says Murray.

The cause? He says it was the ‘60s culture and alludes vaguely to “a whole set of reforms” that “élites put in place… which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing”.

Aha. So it’s not the worsening educational system, outsourced jobs to other countries, the decline in manufacturing, the collapse of unions, the sheer lack of jobs because corporations are not hiring — these are not the reasons for the economic decline of the bottom 30%. No surprise, then, that conservatives, who oppose taking action with fiscal stimulus and social programs, have clambered on board in praise of Murray’s worldview.

Niall Ferguson of Harvard, who writes a column for Newsweek proclaims Murray has come yp with “by far the best available analysis of modern American inequality … a blessed relief”. He even works in the canard that President Obama wants to “make America more like Scandinavia”.

David Brooks, the conservative columnist at The New York Times, gushes in this piece that “I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s ‘Coming Apart’”. He goes so far as to say, “the liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1% narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness”, an accusation that we are struggling to make sense of. As a card-carrying member himself of the out of touch élite, he says:

“It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the élites.”

What's wrong is his determination. The problem of the masses is that they would like to see opportunity restored in this country and instead see a plethora of advantages conferred on the wealthy while their world stagnates. In a final head-scratcher Brooks says what we need is a national service program.

At least David Frum, a conservative once a speechwriter for George W. Bush now writing at The Daily Beast/Newsweek, disagrees. Murray, he says, in a multi-part piece, ignores that the decline in wages and living standards is pervasive in the western countries as jobs have moved to low-paying countries in the East. What sense is it therefore to conclude that, whereas economics is the cause there, moral collapse uniquely is the cause here?

Murray is renowned for deploying reams of data but seems guilty of the sin of twisting them to fit his preconceived beliefs. Much more persuasive is how he marshalls data to present the sweeping social changes that support his “Coming Apart” title.

Whereas once those of different economic levels were commingled in smaller towns, living on the same streets or close by, chatting on the church steps after the Sunday service, the long-term trend has been for people to seek out those of their own economic level and political outlooks and cluster into communities of only their own kind. Murray is not the first to make this observation. Most recently there was “The Big Sort”, the 2008 book by Bill Bishop subtitled, “Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart”.

Murray says we need to merge again if we hope to stem this fragmentation, and has taken that step himself, moving his family to a small, rural Maryland town. Bill Clinton, after reading “The Big Sort”, sounded the same theme, saying, "Some of us are going to have to cross the street, folks". That way the 20% would be in place to transfuse their values to the 30% because “the new upper class just need to start preaching what they practice”, says Murray.

Comment?

Mar-a-Lago’s Search for American Workers »

An attempt to hire Americans, Trump's Mar-a-Lago club got U.S. Labor Department permission to hire 70 foreign works as cooks, waiters, and housekeepers to work over the winter. They had first followed the rules to advertise the jobs to all comers, but inexplicably no one responded to the tiny ad in a Palm Beach newspaper that had no phone number or e-mail address and asked that people "apply by fax".

Stopping the Presses »

The mainstream press is in a fix. Year after year, as advertisers follow readers to the Internet, the life-support of advertising linage has dropped. In the third quarter alone, print ads declined 15% for Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher (its flagship is USA Today), 17% at McClatchy (The Miami Herald and The Sacramento Bee among others), 19% at The New York Times and 21% at The Wall Street Journal, which is cutting staff and has already eliminated sections as economy measures. Meanwhile, digital ad revenue for newspapers has barely grown, taking four years to increase from $3 billion to only $3.5 billion between 2010 and 2014.

We are rapidly losing the ranks of trained journalists as newsrooms shrink, a fraternity drawn by its mission "to root out corruption, hold the powerful accountable and sort fact from fiction". And if that drew snickers, you really don't know about… Read More »

Trump Buys His Way Out of Likely Fraud Conviction »

Richard Nixon believed that, "When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal". That above-the-law notion seems to prevail even for president-elects, given that, for defrauding students who attended Donald Trump's real estate courses at his so-called "university", he needed only to write a check to make it all go away. The settlement, just ten days before the case was to go before a jury, puts an end to two class action suits in California at which Trump would have been called to testify, and the racketeering (RICO) charges filed by in New York by its State Attorney Eric Schneiderman. In addition there
had been investigations by a… Read More »

What Kaepernick’s Protest Says About Phony Patriotism »

It's encouraging that Colin Kaepernick's refusing to stand during the playing of the national anthem at a pre-season game has found many who salute his action, in opposition to the automatic outrage of those who believe singing the
anthem, pledging allegiance, stickering their vehicles with yellow ribbons and flying the flag on holidays are what constitute patriotism.

His protest, objecting against a country "that oppresses black people and people of color", was an outsized act of courage by the San Francisco 49ers quarterback for having done so before a stadium of spectators, probably leading to season-long hostility from "fans", and possibly a hefty fine and/or suspension by the NFL for this act of heresy. But supporters spoke out, notably Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in a Washington Post essay.

His demurral was for a specific reason, but it brings up wider issues, such as why we are so accepting of coerced speech in this land that so celebrates free speech. It is coerced speech for those attending that game and every game when we are expected to stand and sing the anthem (or pretend to) or endure the disapproving frowns and glares of those around us — or of a whole stadium of people in the case of Kaepernick if he intends to sit out a season full of anthems.

And for that matter, why the linkage between the anthem and sports events? Are sports our most patriotic moment? The anthem, along with those of other countries, is fitting when winners mount the podium at the Olympics to receive their medals, and before matches at the Euro and World Cup, because there the athletes and teams represent their nations, but why at football and baseball games where it is only cities or colleges competing against each other? This peculiar practice is worthy of a conspiracy theory: is there a secret government beyond the one we know that values the herding together of thousands into stadiums as the perfect opportunity to keep the people in line, calling all to rise from their seats and place their hand s over their hearts to re-affirm their fealty to the nation or else be shamed by those around them? Would you believe that how we are supposed to behave when the anthem is played is in the U.S. Code?

Doubtless many in those crowds think that precede our public rituals with the "Stars Spangled Banner" must be prescribed by the Constitution. In fact, it only became the nation's anthem in 1931. It began as a poem by lawyer Francis Scott Key written two years after watching the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor in 1812 when we were at war again with the British. It was later set to a song, originally written for a British social club, that had become popular in the United States. What is startling, as brought to light by this piece by Jon Schwarz at The Intercept, is that, seemingly unwittingly, Kaepernick chose the anthem as the perfect agency for his protest about oppression of blacks. The article is titled "Colin Kaepernick Is Righter Than You Know: The National Anthem Is a Celebration of Slavery".

The British had been recruiting escaped American slaves into their ranks. With their numbers added to 20,000 British troops "Mr. Madison will be hurled from his throne", read the orders from the Royal Navy’s Admiral Sir George Cockburn, which commanded...

"Let the landings you make be more for the protection of the desertion of the Black Population than with a view to any other advantage."

Schwarz informs us that Key's poem is four verses long. We only sing the first. The third verse ends with:

No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Schwarz then writes,

"So when Key penned 'No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,' he was taking great satisfaction in the death of slaves who’d freed themselves. His perspective may have been affected by the fact he owned several slaves himself."

Kaepernick later told the AP that he did know of the verse before the game. Apart from athletes who agree with him, his statements have launched a following such as #VeteransForKaepernick of military members and vets disgusted by the phony patriotism of Americans, only 1% of whom serve.

We once dealt with a related topic in these pages having to do with coerced speech as when the government requires a job applicant to swear out an oath of secrecy on joining agencies such as the NSA, and the clash of obligations that occurs when, once inside those cloistered walls, violations of laws and the Constitution are discovered. That article, found here, was titled "Snowden, Manning & the Entrapment of Oaths". It spoke of loyalty oaths in general, the dangerous purges of the "McCarthy era", and the need for an "eternal vigilance" against such instruments of intimidation as a means of controlling the people.

In that category is the controversy that has long swirled about the Pledge of Allegiance. It, too, has become a topic in the news, presumably inspired by the Kaeernick episode, with the spreading of a false rumor that President Obama has banned its use in schools.

Originally created in the late 1800s for school children to recite only on Columbus Day, it became an every day indoctrination in schools around the country, and long ago migrated into adult organizations where those who believe that freedom of speech also means the freedom not to speak find it an insidious example of coerced speech. Like the anthem, it explicitly forces groups to demonstrate loyalty else be viewed as unpatriotic pariahs by those assembled, those who likely have never given a thought to just why they should be made to swear loyalty out loud and in front of everyone.

The further argument against is that loyalty pledges do not belong in this country; they are more typically a feature of totalitarian regimes
such as Nazi Germany. (Indeed, before it was changed in 1942, the practice was to extend the right arm while reciting the pledge, as seen in this photo of American school children — the same salute as accompanies "Heil Hitler!".)

On the board of a homeowners' association, this writer was outvoted by the rest who wanted to begin every monthly meeting with the pledge. The relevance of the pledge for a homeowner organization was never considered, and doubly absurd for there always being so few attending. The board was apparently worried that residents' loyalty to country lapsed across each 30-day interval and they therefore needed to be stood up monthly to renew their vows to the flag.

There have been many cases down the years objecting to the pledge. At the onset of World War II, the Supreme Court allowed public schools to demand that children recite the pledge, rejecting the complaint of the Jehovah's Witnesses that it violated their prohibitions against idolatry (in retaliation for their audacity, mobs burned their places of worship and schools expelled their children). That was then reversed in 1943 when Justices Hugo Black and William Douglas said the American war effort did not "depend on compelling little children to participate in a ceremony which ends in nothing for them but a fear of spiritual condemnation". One of the Court's finest jurists, Robert Jackson, who would go on to serve as the chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, wrote in his majority opinion that:

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."

Cases multiplied after the insertion of the words "under God" by Congress in 1954, the most recent in 2014 in New Jersey. That's the principal basis for complaint since: the injection of religion into public schools by the inclusion of those words in violation of the First Amendment's prohibition of establishing religion. The courts have essentially punted by saying students are free not to say those two words or to not take part in the pledge altogether. Civics courses have apparently vanished from the American school curriculum, but kiddies, you will go on daily pledging yourselves to the state.

The Campaign to Discredit the Torture Report »

The uproar over the release of the torture report by the Senate Intelligence Committee revealed an America that has lost its way. We are a country that has always liked to think of itself as holding to a
Nothing to hide
higher code of conduct than tyrannical and repressive countries elsewhere in the world, but the pronounced split in the arguments over the report showed that we have no universally held standards or ideals of "who we are as a nation" and such notions of exceptionalism are an illusion.

One thing became clear: there are those who believe that all rule of U.S. law and international laws and conventions should be cast aside to protect this country, and across a wide gap there are others who believe that America should set an example as a paragon of the human rights and moral principles that we had heretofore believed we stood for.

As with every other topic nowadays, the torture issue hews along political lines. A huge campaign had been mounted to counteract the report, Republicans leading the charge. Anchor Dagen McDowell of Fox Business was within 24 hours somehow able to assess the… Read More »

Is the Supreme Court Establishing a Christian Nation? »

In the endless tug and pull of whether to allow crosses, ten commandment tablets, menorahs and nativity scenes in public spaces, the courts have generally tried to keep church separate from state. But we now have a Supreme Court that is showing a bias toward religion, and that religion is Christianity.

The Court’s surprising ruling May 5th said that beginning a town council meeting with prayer in a New York state town named Greece — and by extension everywhere — was more than acceptable even though those prayers were heavily
infused with Christian liturgical references. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial called it “a good turn for religious freedom” and even said the “disconcerting surprise is that the decision was only 5-4”. The split was the usual right-left clustering with Justice Anthony Kennedy effectively casting the deciding vote and writing the… Read More »

Are We Becoming a Police State? »

Our title sounds alarmist and exaggerated, doesn’t it? But the uniformity of method, the rush to violence by police from New York to Oakland, from Portland to Atlanta to Los Angeles, tell us otherwise.

The Occupy movement told us something we were unsure of, after nearly half a century — that Americans would take to the streets. In 1968 it was primarily the Vietnam War. Today the self-declared 99% are angry at a distorted society that has bestowed too much on too few and left them with dim prospects.

But when they take to the streets, and mayors find reason to shut down the right of  "the people peaceably to assemble" guaranteed by the 1st Amendment, the police quickly resort to violence reminiscent of the “police riots” at the Democratic National Convention of 1968 in Chicago. Evidence of physical provocation by Occupiers are few, non-violence being key to winning public support, but the police in several cities went straight to tear gas, pepper spray and beatings.

So in New York early in the occupation, police attacked protesters and onlookers with pepper spray as seen in the video above, in which we hear women screaming from the burn of the chemical agent.

In another New York incident police used truncheons (now given the gentler name “batons” by the media) to savagely beat the crowd captured on film here. In neither case is there evidence of provocation that justified a violent response.

Ultimately New York City Mayor Bloomberg shut down Zuccotti Park telling us hygiene had suddenly become the problem it had not been for two months. Hundreds of NYPD officers in riot gear swept through the park in early morning hours, rousting campers from sleeping bags and removing and depriving protesters of the tents and gear that had become essential with the change in weather. Police sequestered credentialed reporters two blocks distant where they could not see the action. Bloomberg said this violation of a free press was to “protect the members of the press”. If that truly was the reason, it didn't sound that way when later in a speech he would say, “I have my own army in the N.Y.P.D.”

In Oakland, an Iraq vet suffered a skull fracture and brain function damage when hit by a police projectile thought to be a tear gas canister. Police classify tear gas and other crowd control aids as "non-lethal", but rubber bullets and cans fired from launchers are dangerous at close range and can indeed be lethal. A second Oakland Occupier's spleen was lacerated by a police beating such as seen in this this film clip.

At the University of California, Davis, a campus police officer walked in front of a row of student protesters sitting on the ground with locked arms, thoroughly dousing them with pepper spray, caught in this film:

In Portland, the photo below shows police hitting a young woman directly in the face with pepper spray...

Portland

...with much the same seen in Seattle...

Seattle
...where an 84-year-old woman was a victim of the chemical agent. Pepper spray is derived from the most potent in the spectrum of chili peppers (capsaicin) and causes searing pain and temporary blindness. One student reported that the burn lasted through the night — face, hands — preventing sleep — and into the next day.

In none of these instances caught on film was there any instance of provocation that merited so violent an attack.

In a massive assault, 1,400 police officers, some in riot gear, stormed the Los Angeles Occupier encampment arresting over 200.

“60 Minutes” on November 20th ran a segment on the increasing use by police of Tasers, the brand name for stun guns that shoot into the target’s body a pair of darts at the end of wires, thus closing a circuit for an agonizing electrical shock. The segment shows the unhesitatingly rapid resort to using the weapon on a motorist who is only asking what she had done that called for putting her hands on her car. The weapon has led to heart attacks and death, which, of course, the manufacturer disputes as coincidental. Police, undeterred by its violence toward fellow citizens, seem to gravitate to its use because it is an easy shortcut to bringing a civilian to heel.

These scenes, uploaded to video sites such as YouTube, show the world that the Mecca of free speech that we fashion the United States to be looks false.

The opposing view was more concerned that the protests were noisy, had inconvenienced civilian activity and might cause property damage. Occupiers were labeled unwashed “hippies” — “lice-infested, shiftless human filth” according to one offended commentator on a right wing website — a view helped along by the media's focus on the bizarre sort that street demonstrations inevitably attract. The objective is to persuade that element of society which values order above all to classify protesters as rabble rather than the jobless young people burdened by student debt who formed the core of the 99% movement. That’s the standard self-preservation tactic adopted by those who hold power to keep the public in its place in order to preserve the status quo.

The status quo may be with us for good. Glenn Greenwald, writing at Salon offers this troubling assessment:

Despite all the rights of free speech and assembly flamboyantly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the reality is that punishing the exercise of those rights with police force and state violence has been the reflexive response in America for quite some time...

The intent and effect of such abuse is that it renders those guaranteed freedoms meaningless. If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist. Every time the citizenry watches peaceful protesters getting pepper-sprayed — or hears that an Occupy protester suffered brain damage and almost died after being shot in the skull with a rubber bullet — many become increasingly fearful of participating in this citizen movement, and also become fearful in general of exercising their rights in a way that is bothersome or threatening to those in power. That’s a natural response, and it’s exactly what the climate of fear imposed by all abusive police state actions is intended to achieve: to coerce citizens to “decide” on their own to be passive and compliant — to refrain from exercising their rights — out of fear of what will happen if they don’t.

The genius of this approach is how insidious its effects are: because the rights continue to be offered on paper, the citizenry continues to believe it is free. ... As Rosa Luxemburg so perfectly put it: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” Someone who sits at home and never protests or effectively challenges power factions will not realize that their rights of speech and assembly have been effectively eroded because they never seek to exercise those rights; it’s only when we see steadfast, courageous resistance from the likes of these UC-Davis students is this erosion of rights manifest.

David Frum, a conservative and former Bush speech writer, has more faith in the American people to rebel. He says in this New York Magazine article, an indictment of what the Republican party has become, that “If the social order comes to seem unjust to large numbers of people, what happens next will make Occupy Wall Street look like a street fair”.

Will the police fan the flames or subdue all change?