Canamerican Dies. The great Canadian-born American economist and diplomat John Kenneth Galbraith died last nite, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 97. The world is poorer today.
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It's hard to complain at someone's passing at age 97, but after reading his obituary, I was more upset than I thought I'd be.

He was one of America's best-known liberals, and he never shied away from the label.

"There is no hope for liberals if they seek only to imitate conservatives, and no function either," Galbraith wrote in a 1992 article in Modern Maturity, a publication of the American Association of Retired Persons.

One of his most influential books, "The Affluent Society," was published in 1958.

It argued that the American economy was producing individual wealth but hasn't adequately addressed public needs such as schools and highways. U.S. economists and politicians were still using the assumptions of the world of the past, where scarcity and poverty were near-universal, he said.

We still have not adjusted to the fact that scarcity is a thing of the past for rich countries like the United States, Europe, and Japan. We are still eating as tho we need to store up a layer of fat against the next famine. And the dehumanizing poverty of the Third World, coupled with occasional reminders, like a gasoline-price jump, that economics can bring unpleasant surprises, tends to make us more defensive than generous.
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But sharing the wealth is the best way of preserving our wealth, and a healthy human race prosperous and free makes this planet a far safer place for everyone to be. That is Liberalism: common sense touched by grace.
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Last nite, this benited planet lost a champion of Liberalism. With his passing went another piece of Camelot, that wonderful time in our history when John Kennedy was in the White House and all was right with the world. Oh, there were bad problems, but the world seemed then to be filled with potentiality. The cream of society, in the sense of people who understood that talent and wealth have to be used for the greater good, had risen to the top.
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No one has that feeling about the White House today. Instead, it seems to most Liberals at home and most people of all political outlooks abroad, that the scum of American society has risen to the top.
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Any pond can use a certain amount of algae, and some fish do feed on it. But nobody's eating our pond scum — no Soylent Green here — so we are being asphyxiated by a political algae bloom, a red (state) tide that is poisoning society with greed and short-sighted selfishness.
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Where is today's JFK?
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John Kenneth Galbraith and John Fitzgerald Kennedy made a powerful team, and the history of the world might have been very different if Galbraith had stayed in Canada instead of moving to the U.S. shortly after graduating from the University of Toronto. Would he have made as much of a contribution had he remained in Canada? Dubious.
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For one thing, he would never have been U.S. Ambassador to India. Maybe the U.S.-India relationship today would not be as far along as it has come without his years there.
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How many other Canadians are there who can fulfil their destiny only as citizens of the United States?
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When you merge societies, you create new synergies. The border between the United States and Canada is a border we need to erase.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,400.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:21 PM

 
Silly Objections. Now and then some language prig* complains that "there's no such word" as thus or such. Two instances of that came up this past week. In one, someone who disagreed with the disagreeable Ann Coulter, who had said someone or something was the "stupidest", objected that there's no such word as "stupidest". In another, many people criticized President Bush for saying of himself that he is the "decider", again on the ground that "there's no such word".
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Actually, of course, there is indeed such a word as each of "stupidest" and "decider". They both appear in my unabridged dictionary, but would be words even if they were not listed in the dictionary, because English permits the addition of grammatical endings to turn one type of word into another, and such endings can be added to pretty much any word at all.
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-ER and -EST can be added to a great many adjectives to form the comparative and superlative forms, respectively. American Heritage advises:

Adjectives that have one syllable usually take -er and -est. Adjectives that have two syllables and end in y (early), ow (narrow), and le (gentle), can also take -er and -est. Almost all other adjectives with two or more syllables require the use of more and most.

But "stupider" and "stupidest" are shown plainly in my Random House Unabridged. We even have the idiom "ridiculouser and ridiculouser", tho "ridiculouser" is not expressly listed in my electronic dictionaries.
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Nowadays we increasingly hear affected locutions like "I could not have been more clear", instead of "clearer". Such uses are stilted and pretentious, the kind of thing that people who are actually insecure about what is right and wrong say, thinking they are "playing safe", to sound more educated than in fact they are, such as "an historic", an utterly absurd formulation that no intelligent person uses.
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As for the agent suffix -ER (or, sometimes, -OR — which is pronounced as tho written -ER, not like the word "or"), it can be added to pretty much any verb to create a noun that means "one who does" what the verb does.
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If you want to criticize Coulter and/or Bush, there are plenty of valid grounds to do so. Attacking them for saying "stupidest" or "decider" is not a valid ground.
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You can attack Bush for saying "nucular", because there really is no such word as that, tho there is an ignorant mispronunciation of "nuclear" that sounds like that.
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Or you could attack Bush as a liar for pretending he makes decisions, when in fact all important decisions of his Administration are made by the Republican Politburo of which Dubya is just the craggy face.
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* Prig: "a person who displays or demands of others pointlessly precise conformity, fussiness about trivialities, or exaggerated propriety, esp. in a self-righteous or irritating manner". Random House Unabridged Electronic Dictionary, 1993.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,398.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:41 AM

 
Nuestro Himno (Star-Spangled Banner, Spanish version). AOL today hilited the controversy over a pop version, in Spanish, of the U.S. National Anthem, complete with background on the producer (an immigrant from Britain, not any Spanish-speaking country), a sound file of the complete recording, and opinion polls for readers to take.
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One of the polls asks about the validity of this point, made by Mark Krikorian, head of the Center for Immigration Studies (described as "a think tank that supports tighter immigration controls"): "Would the French accept people singing the La Marseillaise in English as a sign of French patriotism? Of course not."

Does this person make a good point?
Yes 83%
No 17%

The correct answer, of course, is No. France is a nation-state, "a sovereign state inhabited by a relatively homogeneous group of people who share a feeling of common nationality."* The United States is not the slitest homogenous.
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France has an official national language. The United States, despite a comment to the contrary by Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's Colbert Report, has no official language. It's not necessary.
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The CIA World Factbook describes the languages of France thus:

French 100%, rapidly declining regional dialects and languages (Provencal, Breton, Alsatian, Corsican, Catalan, Basque, Flemish)

Of the United States, the Factbook says:

English 82.1%, Spanish 10.7%, other Indo-European 3.8%, Asian and Pacific island 2.7%, other 0.7% (2000 census)

The Factbook might as sensibly have used language parallel to its observation about regional languages in France: that the U.S. has the following 'rapidly declining second languages', because American English is eradicating all challengers faster than ever before.
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The "English only" crowd's insecurity about the primacy of English is based not just on bigotry but also on ignorance of what is really happening linguistically in this country.
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Thanks to massive English-language media penetration into the very homes of immigrants, even adults with the most modest of linguistic ability are learning at least rudimentary English within a few years. It used to be, of immigrants from, say, Italy or Germany, that the men who went into the workplace and the children who went to school learned English, but the women who stayed home did not. Now everybody learns English, depending on need. And part of the need is curiosity about the wider culture and boredom with Spanish-language entertainments, plus the desire to be able to understand the emotional lives of your children, which play out in English.
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Hispanic children master English quickly, and generally prefer it in many situations, even when talking with each other in the absence of Anglos, tho it is commonplace for bilinguals to mix and match words and grammatical structures without regard to the rules of either of the languages they know. Some people have a rigid "radio button" kind of language switch (one or the other, not both): all-English or all-Spanish in any given utterance or conversation. They are the minority. Most bilinguals have a "check box" kind of language array ('choose as many as apply'). In the presence of people who know both, most bilingual kids often start a sentence in one language and end in the other, or use English for most of the sentence but plug in the Spanish for any individual word they can't think of at that instant. This horrifies their parents, who would almost rather they abandon Spanish altogether than speak mutilated "Spanglish".
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The recording Nuestro Himno is not intended to be an official version for use in schools, government events, etc. It is a commercial recording with political uses, not an attempt to provide a second official text. And the words are not an exact translation because rhyme patterns did not permit that.
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That happens even with official versions of national anthems. Case in point? O Canada.
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The original text of O Canada is the French. The English bears very little resemblance to the French.
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Oddities like that happen with national anthems. The AOL article on Nuestro Himno (the H is silent, by the way) points out that our own national anthem is based on a British drinking song (not named in that article, but "To Anachreon in Heaven") — which is more than a little odd, considering that we were at war against Britain at the time the poem that forms the text was written! Canada's national anthem has a comparable quirk.
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As I point out in the Canadian-statehood presentation on the Expansionist Party website:

few people realize it, but the composer of the music for "O Canada", Quebecer Calixa Lavallée, spent much of his life in the United States, became President of the (U.S.) Music Teachers National Association, lived in Boston until his death, and was buried outside Boston. It wasn't until 1933, 42 years later, that his remains were moved to Montreal.

O Canada's English version contains the refrain, "We stand on guard for thee". They stand on guard against us! But the guy who wrote the tune to which those words were put, lived in Boston! He even served in the Union Army in the Civil War! (After the Civil War, there was some talk of sending that Army to take over Canada (then a British colony) as reparations for British assistance to the Confederacy. Alas, that never happened, or we would be twice as large as we are today. And we'd have a sizable French minority as well as Spanish.
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Nuestro Himno is an intricate commercial recording. I'm not at all sure that crowds of ordinary people are going to be singing it in stadiums anytime soon. If it achieves popularity, it will join other Spanish-language recordings that have found favor in the United States, such as Jose Feliciano's Feliz Navidad.
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Feliz Navidad did not destroy the cultural dominance of English. Nuestro Himno won't either.
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* Random House Unabridged Electronic Dictionary, 1993.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,397.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:02 PM

 
Anger at Oil. I played hooky from this blog yesterday, following my maxim that if you have nothing to say, say nothing. Besides, I was out taking pix for my Newark fotoblog. Actually, I do have notes about low-priority topics I could have dipped into, but wasn't in the mood for anything not reasonably incendiary. What could be more incendiary than gasoline prices? (And, for much of the country in this still-cold period, heating oil.)
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Yesterday's survey on the website iWon.com asked about a tax on oil companies' excess profits.

Five months ago, a majority of iWon users (61%) supported the federal government imposing a windfall profits tax on oil companies. We’d like to know what you think today.

Do you support imposing a windfall profits tax on oil companies?

79% - Yes
14% - No
7% - I'm not sure

Congress is scurrying to quell public rage over outrageous gas prices, because Republicans fear that there is finally an issue over which the public is so incensed that they might actually manage, this November, to breach the carefully erected walls that the major parties have raised to protect incumbents from overthrow at the ballot box, mainly by gerrymandering almost all Congressional districts into "safe seats" for one party or the other. But in a winner-take-all, two-party system like ours, a loss for one side is an equal gain for the other.

In the House, currently there are 232 Republicans, 201 Democrats, and one Independent (Socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is, for purposes of organizing in the House, a Democrat). There is one vacancy due to the death of Congressman Bob Matsui [who was a Democrat]. In the Senate, there are 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats, and one Independent - James Jeffords of Vermont (who is practically a Democrat).

With a difference of 30 seats in the House and 10 in the Senate, the November elections need only produce a Republican loss of 16 seats in the House and 6 in the Senate to shift effective control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats (17 in the House and 7 in the Senate to be secure from the "independence" of the two independents). Can this actually happen, tho? Wikipedia shows the difficulty of the challenge.

In the 2000 Congressional Elections out of the 435 Congressional districts in which there were election[s], 359 were listed as "safe" by Congressional Quarterly. In all of these 359 there was no uncertainty as to who would win. The results a week later confirmed that very few House races were competitive. The 2000 House election resulted in a net change of only four seats (+1 for the Democrats, -2 for the Republicans and the electing of an additional independent). In total 98% of all incumbents were reelected, and this was not unusual.

So why are Republicans even worried, if they enjoy a majority 4X the total change the House experienced in 2000? Because people are mad.
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They're mad about gas prices and oil-heating prices — which should be a 'hot' topic again by the November election.
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They're mad about a war sold to them by lies, not least of which was the suggestion that the war would be a cakewalk and 'our boys' would be home in a matter of months, having been greeted as liberators by joyous Iraqis showering them with flowers (not Improvised Explosive Devices).
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They're mad about the Hurricane Katrina emergency not being handled right — and huge numbers of people's FEMA benefits are already running out, long before they have recovered, been returned to their homes, or been successfully resettled in new communities, with new jobs.
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And some are even mad that nothing ever changes except for the worse.
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The Republicans promised us in their 1994 "Contract with America" that they would agitate for 12-year term limits for both Houses of Congress so that Congress would periodically be stirred up by new people and fresh ideas.

Citizen Legislature Act

Summary:

This resolution provides for consideration of two joint resolutions which propose amendments to the constitution limiting the number of terms members of the Senate and the House of Representatives can serve. The first joint resolution ... limits the number of Senate terms to two [total of 12 years] and the number of House terms to six [likewise a total of 12 years]. The second joint resolution ... also limits Senators to two terms [12 years], but it limits members of the House to three terms [6 years]. Under the terms of this resolution, the joint resolution ... will be debated first and the first amendment in order will be a substitute consisting of [the second proposal].

Exactly 12 years later — now — the Republicans elected in 1994 have not voluntarily retired, have they?
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Now a corrupt Republican power structure entrenched far longer than the 12 years the "Contract with America" swore by is being exposed as a bunch of crooks. And 67% of the public feels the country is headed in the wrong direction under the Republicans.
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Still, the numbers are stacked against massive change in November. The only real hope for massive change within the current geographical bounds of the United States* is if the courts strike down the gerrymandering that has eliminated real competition from the bulk of congressional districts. The only current hope of court action is a Texas case, Jackson v. Perry, which is considering the constitutionality of the gerrymandering that recently-deposed House Majority Leader Tom DeLay pushed thru the state legislature. It has yet to be decided, and even if it should impel state legislatures to stop misusing their power to entrench the state majority party of the day in that state's congressional delegation, it would not compel redistricting before November.
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So, is there really any way the electorate can oust incumbents? Or have we lost our democracy beyond retrieval?
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We sometimes hear talk of an "imperial presidency", in which the President seems to regard himself as a temporary emperor not beholden to the people. What I had never heard, however, is this:

The [conservative] Heritage Foundation did much of the heavy lifting in raising concerns about Democratic imperiousness in Congress ["Democrats had controlled Congress more or less continuously since 1932"]. It published "The Imperial Congress" in 1988, a book that cited chapter and verse on the myriad ways one-party domination undermined executive authority, bloated the budget with special interest provisions, crippled national security and threatened our very system of government.

The only difference today is that it is Republicans who feel imperial, not answerable to the riff-r... people.
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November should give us a good indication of whether the ballot box can give us that periodic popular revolution that the Framers of the Constitution envisioned, or only the bullet will suffice. The Framers would understand that too. After all, George III didn't have a term limit, did he?
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* Things would probably change slitely in the Democratic direction if Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands were brought into the Nation as the 51st state, and would surely change enormously if we annexed Canada or Britain. But geographic enlargement of the Nation is not even on the radar of either major party. They are too pedestrian, utterly lacking in vision.

Where are today's Washingtons, Jeffersons, and Adamses?
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Tom Paine would be, well, pained, to see what has become of our Revolution.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,395.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:11 PM

 
Deporting Illegals, Fixing Mexico. A friend here in Newark USA sent me an emailed link to an article about a demonstration in favor of illegal immigrants' "rights" that took place here Sunday. I replied:

I have zero sympathy for illegal immigrants. They had no right to come here when and how they did, so have no right to be here now. I am fully in favor of deporting them ALL — no amnesty for anybody but legitimate refugees, such as gay men who flee dangerously intolerant societies. We should annex Mexico, and if Mexicans want open access to our society, they have to yield their sovereignty to the Nation, just as NJ yielded its sovereignty to the newly formed United States and lost the right to control its borders against residents of other states. If Mexicans, Salvadorans, etc., hate their lack of opportunity in their own countries, they have at least two options: (1) agitate for change in their countries as adamantly as they agitate for the 'right' to be in OUR country and (2) apply for legal immigration to the United States. They do not have the right simply to ignore our laws and pretend they have some superior "human right" to march across our borders as tho they weren't there. We don't have the right to work in Mexico or El Salvador. They don't have the right to work here.

To those, including Bush, who say we "can't" move 12 million people across the border, I agree with Jay Leno's observation last nite: "Mexico did it!" So can we.
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Leno also apparently made a different remark about Mexico that a friend in New York sent me as part of a roundup of late-nite TV witticisms:

This is what I don't get about this. They've got oil. Their citizens love the United States. Forget Iraq, we should have invaded Mexico.

Instead, Mexicans invade the United States.
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We don't have to have an "invasion" from either direction. We can simply merge. Erase the border and let the dynamics of economics and political development determine where people live in what is plainly a natural community that we have artificially bisected with an arbitrary line.
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Americans concerned about "energy independence" should be made keenly aware that yes, Mexico does have oil, but it won't develop it fully and won't export more to the United States because of nationalism. So Mexico's ruling class is willfully keeping its people poor to spite the United States.
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Nationalism is a very bad bargain for the bulk of Mexicans, who would do far better to subsume their nationalism into a larger nationalism, that of the United States, the Great American Union that some of the Founding Fathers dreamed of extending to all the Americas, from Point Barrow in the north to Tierra del Fuego in the south.
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Mexican nationalism is bad for us too. If Mexico were part of the United States, a gallon of gas wouldn't cost $3, much less the $4 and even $5 we seem to be facing.
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The misuse of Mexico's oil wealth is just one small part of the problem of unwise and unfair economics in Mexico.
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The United States didn't make Mexico an unholy mess for the great preponderance of its people. That was the doing of Mexico's own ruling class and culture. Mexicans looking around desperately for someone else to blame, suggest that the reason Mexico is poor is because the U.S. "stole" half the country in taking over Texas and the Southwest — that if Mexico had those rich areas today, it too would be rich.
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But look at Brazil, which is twice as big as Mexico would have been had the U.S. not annexed its northern half. Brazil is a mess at least as bad as Mexico, despite being intrinsically rich, just as Mexico is intrinsically rich.
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In the case of both Mexico and Brazil — indeed, the bulk of Latin America — it is not the country's resources but the society's management of those resources and distribution of opportunity that has produced economic disaster for the mass of their people. The cultures are to blame — their own cultures, not ours.
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If Argentina were a state of the United States, it would be rich and happy. Instead, it is perpetually at the edge of bankruptcy. If Mexico were part of the United States, within 50 years the bulk of Mexico would be as prosperous as that huge swath of territory taken from Mexico in the 19th Century, from California to Colorado and Texas.
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If Mexican illegals (who prefer the dishonest term "undocumented", as tho they are entitled to documents but just don't happen to have them on hand) were honest, they would admit aloud that they left Mexico because Mexico is a horrible country that needs to be reformed from top to bottom, and the reason they could not succeed there is that the cards are stacked against them.
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They should be very loud indeed, and tell the Mexican government that they have had to leave their own country because Mexican society is a nitemare of injustice, and if they have to go back, they will raise hell and change everything that forced them out in the first place.
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And then they should do it.
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Go back, raise hell, change Mexico, and you won't have to leave your own country to live in a country where you can rise as high as your talents take you.
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If you don't want to wait as long as it would take to transform Mexico in isolation, demand that Mexico join the Union, which would accelerate the process at least ten times.
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The United States did not make a mess of Mexico and cannot fix it from the outside. Our first responsibility is to our own people. If Mexicans want to be considered "our own people", and bring the resources of the U.S. Government and national economy to the aid of the people of Mexico, there is that quick fix: join the Union.
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Ten Mexican states would make a huge difference in American society, mostly for the good, and accession to the Union would make a huge difference, all to the good, for the people of Mexico. American social conservatives would be bolstered by the conservative cultural values of Mexicans, while American political liberals would be strengthened by an influx of people concerned about economic justice.
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And after annexation, instead of a 1,951-mile southern border,* we'd have a more manageable 753-mile southern border. If we also annexed Belize, which is largely English-speaking, we'd have only a 597-mile southern border. In fact, if we annexed all of Central America as well, we'd have a 140-mile southern border, between us and Colombia. Now that's defensible.
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* I was, again, ticked off, when I went to check the length of borders at the online CIA World Factbook, to find only metric measures, as required me to do a conversion. So ticked off, indeed, was I that I finally went to the website of my Congressman, Donald M. Payne, and sent him this message by feedback form (thus the BLOCK CAPS for emphasis, there being no way to bold or italicize in feedback forms):

Please compel the CIA to revise its World Factbook (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/) to show American measures, not just metric measures. I wanted to check the length of the U.S.-Mexican border but find only this: >>3,141 km<<. How is that useful to Americans, who PAY for the CIA World Factbook? Why is it that the only country that PAYS for the CIA World Factbook is the one country that CAN'T UNDERSTAND the measures it employs? Why does the CIA feel no obligation to put U.S. measures EVEN SECOND, in parentheses? Congress needs to snap the CIA out of its arrogance and force it to publish all its information in U.S. measures, FIRST. If it ALSO wants to put in foreign measures, fine, but SECOND, and in parentheses. I am very tired of foreign-minded elitists in the Federal Government holding the American people in contempt. Congress needs to tell the CIA that it will cut its funding by 1,000 times the cost of the CIA World Factbook if it does not publish that Factbook with American measures.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,390.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:36 AM

 
Half-Assed Healthcare, Part 1 (of Several, Over Future Weeks). This country has really screwed up healthcare. If you have all the money in the world, and live almost anywhere in the world, you might find U.S. medicine top-notch. And so it is, for those who can afford it. For the rest of us, it is a disaster. It costs ridiculous amounts, and that ridiculous cost goes higher every year at three times the rate of inflation in the economy overall — including healthcare. Were we to exclude healthcare from the general rate of inflation, the rate of inflation in healthcare would be even higher.
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I'll try to divide this enormously complicated topic into small subtopics, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle except that each piece by itself will make sense.
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Let us first address the fact that our elected representatives are entirely out of their depth when it comes to solving the healthcare mess. Hillary Clinton put together a plan for universal coverage that was universally criticized / condemned as overcomplicated. The Bush Administration actually enacted a prescription drug plan that could not be less complicated than Hillary's universal-healthcare plan. Whereas Republicans were extremely vocal about how 'unworkable' Hillary's plan was, they actually put in place a program that is so insane that the people it is meant to serve are hugely disserved instead. And now the Republicans want to punish people who cannot wade thru the masses of data they have to evaluate, in their old age (not to say "dotage", tho that term assuredly does properly apply to some), by fining them if they don't enroll by a certain date in May. Why?
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Why should anyone have to enroll in an ongoing program by a specific date or be punished? Why are Democrats effectively silent about this outrage? Are they merely so feckless that they have in fact protested but nobody has heard of it? Or have they consigned themselves to failure in opposing a Republican steamroller on prescription drugs, so consented to have old people victimized by heavy-handed bureaucrats in the service of private insurance companies?
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The second bit of governmental madness is the various states' utterly inadequate, insane, and counterproductive efforts to insure their own citizens.
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One of the challenges I have had in trying to persuade Canadians to join the Union is their worry that they would lose universal health coverage. I tell them that any state, or group of states, can enact its own universal program any time it likes, because states have that kind of power. If no one state wants to do that, it can join with other states to create a super-"group" with massive bargaining power to control costs. Small states could join together in a consortium like the Powerball or Mega Millions multistate lotteries.
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But the programs that existing states have actually come up with fall miserably short of persuading Canadians that they can replace the Canadian national program with a state-by-state or Canadian regional program within the context of a united North America.
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My younger sister, who lives in Long Beach, California, told me by fone last nite that the California fallback program for residents who are 'declined' by private health insurers will provide coverage for anyone — for $900 a month, nearly twice the going rate for a private insurer! How can that possibly be? How can a state with 35 million people not have the world's largest 'group insurance' program, at the lowest cost?
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On the opposite side of the continent, Massachusetts just enacted a program to compel its citizens to take private health insurance. But no government can compel its citizens to spend their money on any type of private company simply as a condition of living in its jurisdiction. Tho the comparison is made to laws relating to cars — and remember that driving is not a right, whereas living in a given state is a right — and specifically to laws that require people to have liability insurance as a condition of owning a car, the comparison is absurd. Note that drivers who do not own a car are not required to have liability insurance for driving. So the comparison to driving is, from the outset, utterly void.
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Pedestrians are not required to have automotive liability insurance, just because they could conceivably cause a traffic accident if a car has to swerve to avoid them. Renters could not be required to have renters insurance. Vacationers could not required to have vacation insurance, nor purchasers of various appliances be required to purchase extended warranties. These are the kinds of comparison that should actually be made.
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More, how can government possibly require private persons to spend their money in ways they do not personally choose, to give over their hard-earned cash to private businesses against their will? If this is permitted to stand, any government could require its residents to spend a certain amount of money in any area of the state economy its legislators desired. Why not mandate that people spend a certain amount in fast-food restaurants, fine-dining restaurants, motels or hotels, mountain resorts, bed & breakfasts, any area of the economy the legislators feel people need to support?
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The rationale behind Massachusetts' insistence that people have private health insurance, that if they fall seriously ill or have an accident, other people will have to pick up the costs of their treatment, is at once both false and irrelevant, and could be applied to other areas of the economy as well. If financial damage to others is the criterion by which government is empowered to decide that citizens must spend money they don't want to spend on businesses they don't want to patronize, then anything is possible. Because any business failure costs a state in unemployment payouts, loss of sales-tax collections, loss of property-tax payments, and on and on. So to keep any part of the economy 'healthy', any state could require its residents to spend their money as the state demands. That is plainly and absolutely unconstitutional.
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The state (here meaning state of the Union or government in general) has no right to tell people how they must live and how they must spend their own money. The Fifth Amendment to the federal Constitution says plainly:

nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

A person's money is his property. Protecting government from the medical costs of uninsured residents/visitors is a "public use". And what about visitors? should Massachusetts impose an insurance requirement upon visitors to Massachusetts? how about people just passing thru Massachusetts on public roads? couldn't they have accidents that would require uncompensated medical treatment?
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Massachusetts offers no "just compensation" for its mandate that private persons spend their money on private insurance. If a person is healthy for 20 years and makes no demand upon the health insurance he is required to purchase, he could pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for absolutely nothing!
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In the past year I have spent over $5,500 on health insurance and been to the doctor exactly once. That's outrageous. My monthly cost has just gone up by $120 a month, to $575 each month! I have had knee surgeries in the past, so have been told that I have to have continuous health insurance in order to have coverage for a "pre-existing condition".
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Massachusetts wants to require healthy residents to spend a minimum of about $325 a month on health insurance from private insurers. Impossible. Bay Staters need to take the Republican governor and his Democratic lackeys in the state legislature to court to establish that government cannot properly nor legally compel residents to spend their money in government-selected industries, or face punishment by the state.
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What government can properly do is institute universal healthcare by creating one enormous "group" plan, self-insured or backed by a consortium of private insurers, that will use its enormous size and, thus, bargaining power, to drive down the insane costs of healthcare. It can fund universal healthcare thru taxes, because then it is a government charge for a government service. But it cannot use government compulsion to benefit private corporations at the personal expense of ordinary citizens who don't want to buy those corporation's products or services. End of discussion.
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Well, that's the end of this particular discussion. There's a lot more to discuss about how we can fix our healthcare mess. I'll address other aspects of the fix over time. Stay tuned.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,389.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:07 AM

 
Destroying ExxonMobil, as an Example. Recent news stories have called attention to the preposterously excessive pay packages received by some corporate executives. One in particular, the compensation given to ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, drew national attention, especially because its recipient wasn't the slitest embarrassed about it:

Raymond denied having any role in formulating his $52 million 2005 pay package, the $98.4 million lump sum retirement payment he received when he left ExxonMobil ... on Dec. 31, or any other compensation he received over his 43-year career with Exxon. * * *

Raymond defended the large payout, saying that it was Exxon's policy that employees' pay and incentive payments were supposed to reflect the performance of the company.

"When the company does well, the shareholders and employees should do well, and when the company does poorly, then the shareholders and employees should do poorly. The facts are that when prices of oil collapsed, the incentive program went down, substantially," Raymond said.

So Raymond is pretending that every single one of ExxonMobil's ordinary "employees" was richly rewarded during the company's good years? No one on Earth believes that. Nor do we believe that executives' "incentive program went down, substantially" unless by "substantially" he means from obscenely excessive to merely astronomically excessive.
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This Raymond character is a really, really bad man, so bad that he should be flogged at least 500 lashes.
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Society really is not helpless against corporate criminals, and they are all such worthless physical cowards that a little violence would go very, very far toward curbing corporate criminality across the 'board'.
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Alas, they aren't afraid of us because we're paper tigers. They, and Their fawning servants in government, should think of the people as an extremely dangerous mob-in-the-making that can storm every corporate Bastille and throw every corporate wrongdoer under a literal guillotine. They should be scared to death of Us.
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They insist that it is "unrealistic" to think We can severely punish the Few who abuse the Many. No, the reality is there are 300 million of Us and only a few thousand of Them. They, the few thousand people who control the major corporations' corporate suites and boardrooms, the 535 members of both houses of Congress, the few dozen people at the top of the Executive Branch of the Federal Government, and the 9 individuals of the Supreme Court exercise power only because we believe they have power. The physical reality, however, is they have no more actual power than they can muster in personal physical force and the weaponry they can personally, as individuals, employ against attackers. That means, for all practical purposes, small arms.
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The reality is that we are living a delusional existence in which the Few have all the power and the Many have none, whereas the exact opposite is true.
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The Many have all the power, and the Few have none except what we are persuaded to permit Them. It is mere inaction in the face of tyranny that has empowered tyrants to be tyrants for the past several centuries. Never, at least since the development of easily operated guns, have the Few had real power over the Many. In the bad old days when skill with a sword or physical strength and reach enuf to swing a broadsword or battle-ax farthest and fastest determined who controlled whom, there was a real reason why tyrants could tyrannize. But after the development of the bow and arrow or crossbow, when people of only moderate strength could attack from far out of range of a sword or mace (a symbol of power today because it and other weapons of hand-to-hand combat once bestowed real power), the Many have always had the power to destroy the Few. And it doesn't matter which "few" it is, minorities or tyrants.
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To believe other than that the Many have the power to destroy the Few, is delusion.
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We can do anything we want to Them, and They can do nothing but what We permit them to do. They cannot so much as draw breath if we want them dead. Any time We want, We can mount mass violence, from burning to the ground the many headquarters built by corporate greed — hundreds of Towering Infernos — while the executives are trapped inside, to torching Their mansions while they sleep, to shooting Them from rooftops. There are only so many people willing to risk death to protect slimeballs. As often as not, indeed, bodyguards turn against tyrants, as Indira Gandhi found out. It's not just the age of Caligula in which bodyguards can kill the beasts they are tasked to defend.
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ExxonMobil is a bunch of thieves who have co-conspired with other oil companies to gouge the little guy and make life hard as hell for tens of millions of people. The little guy may have to make very loud noises of violent retribution, not just threaten "windfall-profits" taxes, to alter the contemptuous abusiveness of the great corporations toward the public and even government. But windfall-profits taxes are a start, as are confiscatory income-tax rates on unjustifiably astronomical "compensation packages".
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When the typical person makes $25,000 a year, or $35,000 in midlife, We do not have to stand idly by while corporations pay Their executives tens of millions of dollars in cash and hundreds of millions in stock options and other non-cash compensation. We can monetize it all and seize 99% of everything over $5 million gross income per year. Raymond — or his widow or other heirs, if he is flogged to death — can live extremely well on several million dollars a year after taxes.
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But as for what the little guy can do right now, without any reform to any tax law, without government seizing and flogging oil executives, a proposal has been bouncing around the Internet in recent days that even conservative Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly agrees with:

BILL O'REILLY, HOST: In "Back of the Book" segment tonight, the former chairman and CEO Of Exxon Mobil, Lee Raymond, who retired in December, received $140 million in compensation last year, and his entire retirement deal is worth nearly $400 million, according to public reports. * * *

Here's what I'm going to do. I'm not going to buy ever again a drop of gasoline from Exxon Mobil. I'll tell you why. ...

... I, as you know, think the oil companies are gouging the American public, because every time the futures people bid the price of oil up, as they did today over $70 a gallon, because they're worried about Iran, they're worried about Nigeria, they're worried about "American Idol" being canceled, it doesn't matter, they just bid them up, the oil companies say now we have another excuse to raise prices. They don't have to raise them. They do.

And then they turn around and they pay one human being $400 million. That comes out of their bottom line. You know that. It comes out of their bottom line. So they have to charge more money to make the record profits.

I, as an American citizen, am going to exercise my right never to buy one drop of oil from Exxon Mobil again, because I think they're greedy. I don't think they're looking out for the folks.

It's really good to be able to agree with a conservative every now and then. Let's make it unanimous, folks: let Us all agree not to buy anything from ExxonMobil, ever again. Avoid all Exxon stations and Mobil stations for the rest of your life. If ExxonMobil starts to lose money, They will drop Their prices to try to win you back. Don't go back. Let other companies lower their prices to compete, and stay away from ExxonMobil forever.
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I have never been a fan of Exxon or Mobil, and am especially not a fan of ExxonMobil combined. Their prices are always higher than almost everybody else's, and I have had startlingly good results from Shell, among the higher-priced brands. I think Shell has some kind of detergent additives in its gas that clean out my engine to give markedly superior milage, so I buy a tank of Shell every second or third refill. But I will never again in my life buy from Exxon or Mobil unless there is absolutely no alternative because I'm in a desert or arctic waste somewhere and there are no other stations to be found.
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If ExxonMobil tries to buy up other companies — with their $36 billion in profits last year alone — that people have switched to, sic the Feds on them and compel antitrust regulators to bar such acquisitions.
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Let's hire Claes Oldenburg or some other major artist to erect a 50-foot or 100-foot statue of a guillotine on the Mall in Washington, DC, as a reminder every day to the rich and 'powerful' that the people are not powerless to kill them any time We want, for any reason we want, whenever they get too far out of line. Maybe France, which used the guillotine to such good effect in its Revolution, would make this statue another gift to the people of the Nation they helped create, as they did with the Statue of Liberty. We could call the guillotine on the Mall "The Statue of Natural Liberty", to remind the Few that, always and ever, the Many have the power of life and death over Them. All else is illusion.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is .)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:24 PM

 
"Pipe Down", Your Ass! A bunch of home-grown anti-Americans, "Business for Diplomatic Action, a nonprofit group dedicated to boosting our nation's reputation abroad", has issued a guide to Americans as to how we should behave when traveling abroad. It recommends, in essence, massive self-censorship and self-effacement. We are to be quiet — both literally (speak less loudly among ourselves) and figuratively (not talk about religion or politics; and if we dare to express a view, to give more than equal weight to the views of locals. To all that, I say, to Business for Diplomatic Action and everyone else who says there is something so wrong with us that we cannot be ourselves abroad, "Go f*ck yourselves!"
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Fox News summarized the recommendations on its website in part like this:

The "World Citizen's Guide" ... says the stereotype of the "Ugly American" is at an all-time high.

"Anti-Americanism is a growing trend that, unless checked, is certain to have wide-ranging and long-term negative effects," Keith Reinhard, president of BDA, said on the group's Web site.

"[There is] the perception that we are arrogant and insensitive as a people."

The group, funded by leading U.S. corporations, compiled a list of do's and don'ts with the help of the U.S. State Department. It recommends:

— Think as big as you like, but talk and act smaller. In many countries, any form of boasting is considered very rude. [And who determines what is boasting and what is mere statement of fact?]

— Speak lower and slower. A loud voice is often perceived as bragging.

— If you talk politics, talk — don't argue.

Doesn't sound too bad, does it? But Fox put the heading "PIPE DOWN" to that story when it appeared on air, and the woman they interviewed from BDA went along with that. I think she may even have uttered those very words in her appearance. Isn't that rude of her? Is it okay to be rude to Americans in their own country but not okay to be yourself with foreigners in their countries for fear that you might seem rude? Why would it be right actually to be rude to Americans but be wrong to seem rude to foreigners?
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I don't know which countries she was talking about, but there are lots of countries where people are loud in public and argue passionately about politics. They blare their choice of music to the entire vicinity, regardless of whether anyone wants to hear it or not, and people have to go along to get along.
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There is a simple curative if people don't like American tourists. They can refuse to take our money. Then we'll go home, with our money in our pockets, to spend at home where we fit in and don't have to worry about hypersensitivity on the part of resentful members of various loser nations who resent us not because there's anything wrong with us but because we have power and they don't.
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We are, in short, resented not for what we do but who we are. And we're not about to change that.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,386.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:56 PM

 
Not New Jersey. AOL hilites an alarmist bunch of bull today about natural disasters with the heading "No State Is Risk-Free: Disasters Strike Everywhere". No, not really. The best they could do in the way of natural 'disasters' that my state, New Jersey, is "At Particular Risk for" is "Heat waves, hurricanes, ice storms, nor'easters". What a load of crap.
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Let's list some of the things New Jersey is not at risk for: earthquakes, tornados, mudslides, forest fires or brush fires of consequence, tsunamis, golfball-size (or larger) hail, dust storms, or much of any other extreme of nature. We get a glancing blow from a hurricane every 20 years or so, but while the rest of the country rumbles and burns, roofs and entire trailer parks being swirled into the clouds, New Jersey watches the havoc on television secure in the knowledge that none of that will ever happen to us.
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Heat waves? We have air conditioning.
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Ice storms? Big friggin' deal. They last one day and cause a few broken hips and occasional multiple deaths from pileups, but 5 or 12 deaths, not 3,000 as in Hurricane Katrina.
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Nor'easters? Rain. Big deal.
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The late, great Johnny Carson used to joke that people who move to L.A. from other parts of the country miss the change of seasons, and countered that 'We have our seasons: fire season, earthquake season, mudslide season...'. We in NJ ('enjay', as in "enjoy") have just the plain-old four seasons: a bracing but usually not bitter winter, glorious spring, beautiful summer with easy access to the Jersey Shore or the many lakes of our northwestern mountains, and resplendent autumn, when leaves of gold and red climb the hillsides. 'Small' wonder that more people per square mile want to live in New Jersey than in any other state of the Union.
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I left NJ for New York City in my youth, but returned in my (impending) old age. Manhattan is for the young, who can stand the crowds and noise, and who have some chance of successfully outrunning the dangers. New Jersey is a step away from the madness, still close to the action but apart from the unpleasantness of too many people jammed together in too small a space. NJ is a place for unpretentious people who don't have to prove anything to anyone. We are 'comfortable in our skins', and don't need to reside in some ritzy exurb to feel good about ourselves. That is not to say there aren't very wealthy areas of New Jersey (Rumson, Short Hills, etc.), just that we don't have the enclave mentality. Rich New Jerseyans can leave their home and venture into ordinary towns nearby without feeling demeaned or endangered.
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Even those of us (we won't mention anybody by name) who are in Who's Who in America can relax and be ourselves, just ordinary Americans in the Urban Heartland, that state midway in the huge Boston-to-Washington megalopolis in which the bulk of the political and media power of the Nation, and, by extension, much of such power in the entire Western world, reside.
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New Jersey was central to the Revolutionary War too, and earned the name "Cockpit of the Revolution" for its crucial battles of Trenton, Princeton, and Monmouth, and Washington's winter campground at Morristown.
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North Jersey comprises over a fourth of the Nation's largest metropolis, the New York Tristate Metropolitan Area (which is in truth basically a bistate area, Connecticut contributing little to the region's population), and South Jersey contributes mightily to the majesty of the City of Brotherly Love.
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The Midwest is proud of its nickname "The Heartland", but it's not really the Heartland of this country anymore, if ever it was, in anything but myth. The culture of the United States today is "bicoastal", dominated by the great concentrations of mobile Americans who have concentrated themselves, thru migration, in the great urban centers of the East and West Coasts. New York is the actual, emotional capital of the Nation; Washington, only the administrative center of the Federal Government, a much less consequential thing. The New Year begins in Times Square, not on the Mall, and when a national hero captures the Nation's heart, s/he gets a ticker-tape parade on Broadway, not Pennsylvania Avenue. Dow Jones tallies the Nation's economic stats more tellingly and impellingly than the Commerce Department. It is in fact no contest as to which city on the East Coast is most important to the Nation. New York wins hands down.
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On the West Coast, L.A. has replaced the former metropolis of the West, San Francisco, thanks to the entertainment industry's impact on public consciousness, and L.A. has become the Nation's "Second City", eclipsing the former holder of that title, fabulous, muscular Chicago, for the slender reason that L.A. is warm much of the year but Chicago's temperatures plunge to 10 degrees below 0 Fahrenheit mid-winter. Americans are weather sissies. We don't like severe cold. So Chicago, a great city by anyone's estimation, has been left in the dust by that hussy in the sun, "El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora[,] la Reina de los Ángeles[,] sobre El Río Porciuncula ("The Town of Our Lady[,] Queen of the Angels[,] on the River Porciuncula"). Today we call it simply "Los Angeles", tho we might even more simply have called it "Mary" (you know: "Holy Mary, Mother of God" — the lady whom Spaniards regarded as "Queen of the Angels"). Fitting is it then, perhaps, that the old British ocean liner Queen Mary is docked at Long Beach, the second city of the Second City's metropolitan area (as my noble city, Newark, is the second city of the First City's metropolitan area).
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The United States today is far more urban than rural. (For this purpose, suburbs are non-rural, thus "urban".) In the olden days of early urban sprawl, suburbs were "the country" — what later came to be called "exurbs". But that long ago changed, and we now have not only continuous suburban development outward in all directions for tens of miles from the major cities of the Nation, but even the "sluburb", suburbs that have gone so bad that they have become slums with lawns. We pay too much homage to the Jeffersonian, anti-city ideal, in which the pastoral virtues of a bygone era define what is good, whose preservation is regarded as the essence of conservatism.
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The present-day United States is much more like New Jersey than North Dakota or Iowa, but the myth of a rural America is crystallized in Grant Wood's famous painting "American Gothic". There is no modern, urban replacement.
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When Kansas endorses creationism, that is not proof that the Heartland is conservative, because Kansas is not the Heartland. New Jersey is. And New Jersey is about as blue as Blue States come. We're like a sane Massachusetts.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,378.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:26 AM

 
Wuss Caves before Hu. The relationship between the United States and Communist China is profoundly unequal. The United States is vastly more powerful than China, and China desperately needs the U.S. market for its development. You would not, however, know that from the contemptible weakness displayed by the Wuss Administration in demanding changes in Communist China's behavior. Weaklings cannot be strong, even when they are Commander in Chief of the military and government of the world's one superpower.
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George Bush is a coward as well as fool, and he has sold us out to Communist China. He has no principles, and the Real Presidency that stands behind him, pulling his strings and making his mouth move, isn't any braver.
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Like most bullies, they do not hesitate to pick on little guys like Iraq, but when they come up against an adversary powerful at least in resolve, be it (little) Iran or enormous China, they back off and run like little girls teased on the playground.
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Why do we put up with this?
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The Bushies may yet attack Iran, because Israel demands it, and Israel has far more influence with the current Administration than the insignificant people of the United States. We can't seem to stop the drive toward destroying little Iran nor get the Bushite cowards to stand up against Communist China. We have no power, because gerrymandering has made a massive rout of the Republican Establishment almost inconceivable. The most that can happen without term limits (which would require a constitutional amendment) or massive redistricting nationwide is that a couple of dozen seats change hands this November. That would only stymie and slow the Republican Revolution that is subordinating the people of the United States to Zionists abroad and globalists at home, not reverse this devastating Double Whammy that threatens to reduce the United States to an irrelevancy on the world stage, except for the poor people of the Middle East, who are so feeble that residual U.S. power can ravage them at the orders of our Israeli overlord.
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Americans who are anti-Zionist and anti-globalist are being so completely marginalized that perhaps the only thing that will effect quick and striking change is assassinations of key members of the top echelon of the Republican Party.
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Americans can't even get many of the best jobs inside this country, because the globalists at places like CNN are giving them to foreigners.
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Globalism speaks with many accents, except American. Whenever you hear British accents on TV news and Indian accents when you call a tech-support center, know that Americans count for nothing as far as Republicans are concerned. They don't care what we want, because we can't vote them out.
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You'd think a country with 200 million guns could be more effective at freeing itself from creeping enslavement by the few, wouldn't you?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,378.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:25 PM

 
One Less Liar. The Bush Administration's press secretary, Scott McClellan, has resigned. Big whoop.
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The cabal of liars known formally as "The Bush Administration" is responding to pressure from its conservative supporters to clean house and get some new blood into the Administration by trimming a few nobodies on the periphery, mere functionaries who carry out the orders of the core members of the collective leadership for which Dubya is only poster boy and puppet. The Real Presidency — that inner circle of co-conspirators in mass murder abroad and reduction of the bulk of the population to economic slavery at home — is standing fast.
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Rumsfeld isn't going anywhere because he is an important part of the Real Presidency, and the only way he could be ousted, if at all, is by a massive vote of the inner circle. They might not even risk that because Rumsfeld might blow the whistle on the collective nature of the Real Presidency and reveal for all to see that Dubya is no more President of the United States than Howdy Doody formed his own sentences.
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Nor is Karl Rove, another member of the Republican Politburo, going anywhere, tho his duties are supposedly being shifted from controlling aspects of policy to working on the next election.
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We don't know who all the members of the Real Presidency are, but when we see the Andrew Cards and Scott McClellans depart, we can be certain that they were only servants of the Politburo, not integral members of the Junta.
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The python that is strangling this country is shedding its skin, but its musculature, heart, brain, and other internal organs remain, alas, intact.
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McClellan was a teflon kind of guy. He could utter the most outrageous lies, and push aside question after question that the White House didn't want answered, but we were supposed to let it pass because he's a big, pudgy, roly-poly sweetheart, like a puppy. And even when a puppy goes doodoo on the rug, you can't help but love him anyway. The press corps couldn't even push McClellan's nose into the sh*t he shoveled by condemning him as a shameless liar.

"Baby-faces are seen as more honest than mature faces. No doubt, there is a 'choir boy' look that researchers haven't yet fully documented. When they do, I bet it will include smooth complexion, wide eyes, and a large forehead (relative to the chin). These baby-face features convey an innocent look.

Not everyone was charmed or disarmed.

You really have to read Michael Wolff's savaging of White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan in the lastest issue of Vanity Fair to believe it. Wolff calls McClellan a "knucklehead Socrates," "low-wattage," a "pawn", "not the brightest bulb," a "helpless and irresistable target," "strikingly out of his depth," derides him for "verbal haplessness," "ham-handedness" and "lack of verbal acumen," and compares him to Squealer from Animal Farm and Piggy from the Lord of the Flies.

Did Scott McClellan know that he was shoveling sh*t? Or did the Junta just tell him lies and leave it to him to spread them far and wide? I don't know, but suspect they wouldn't let him know the truth for fear he might have a shred of decency that would show when he tried to lie to a roomful of reporters. Maybe the Junta will select a woman to replace him, since women are famous for being more easily able to brazenly look you straight in the eye and lie than are men.
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Lo and behold, when I Googled "scott mcclellan's replacement", what should come up but this speculation nine days ago:

The President has named Dana M. Perino ... as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Press Secretary. Ms. Perino recently served as Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Press Secretary at the White House. This makes her heir apparent to Scott McClellan, who is expected to depart this summer.

Interesting — and logical. Dana Perino is easy on the eyes, and therefore television-ready. And if David Gregory starts giving her a hard time, he may come off looking like a bully, unless Perino can give as good as she gets (which, considering her resemblance to Heather Locklear, is certainly possible).

McClellan's actual resignation is too recent to have produced many results on Google, but I found a laff-out-loud parody of the White House press secretary at http://wuzzadem.typepad.com/wuz/2005/11/mcclellen_out_m.html, wherein McClellan is replaced by a wise-ass Stick Figure who 'sticks' it to the press corps. Would that the reality were as funny as the parody. But it's not.
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The sad fact is that the Bush Administration lies to the American people endlessly and shamelessly, and expects us to believe every outrageous lie it issues because of the Big Lie dynamic I described Monday, that people in general just can't believe that they would dare to insist on something that is absolutely, flat-out false. But they do, all the time, and we've got to hold them accountable in November.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,378.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:13 PM

 
Arabic Language, Solar Power, Lessons from Zionism for Americans in the Southwest. (A long entry; read at your leisure, when you have 10 or 15 minutes free.) My colleague in Durham, England, emailed me this observation on my comment yesterday about using Iraq to teach Americans Arabic.

One major cause of difficulty with the Arabic language is its extensive regional variation. Imagine that all the Romance-speaking regions of the world claimed to speak "Latin" and indeed wrote all their newspapers and books in Latin, while still speaking in French/Italian/Spanish/Portuguese, and you'd have a rough analogy to the Arab world. The main reason why Arabic still claims to be one language is because it is the language of the Qur'an.

I replied:

Perhaps regional variation in Arabic will diminish as Arab countries modernize and become more prosperous, such that the bulk of people gain access to television more than just (battery-operated) radio, films, records, etc., and travel more. One of the difficulties of modernization may be electrification, but if ever there were an area of the world where solar power would be workable, surely it is the Arab world. Not only does it have the money to install arrays, especially of the cheaper kind pioneered in Kenya (Tanzania?), but oil-rich Arab countries would have major incentives to install solar systems. First, a one-time investment would reap long-term rewards, with minimal upkeep. Second, instead of having to ship oil charity without end, each barrel of which is oil they can't sell on the world market, they would keep a large portion of that oil (and gas) for profitable export, while solar panels provide electricity and hot water, and solar ovens do much of the cooking. Solar ovens and battery-operated heaters for nitetime heating charged each day by the sun would make reforestation possible, once trees are no longer destroyed for firewood. Third, tens of millions of individual village- or house-based electric systems are immune from devastation by the kinds of airstrikes that Israel and the U.S. have inflicted upon Arab countries. A single airstrike can devastate a grid-based electrical system or a multi-megawatt generating station. It could make no significant impact upon the electrical functioning of a society in which a grid plays small part. All those things of the modern world that depend on electricity could continue to operate, from small appliances to the pumps in sewage-treatment plants. I don't know why they haven't done this already.
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As for dialects, I am sometimes surprised how far the eradication of local dialects has progressed in the United States. We hear a lot of people in different parts of the country interviewed after tornados, other natural disasters, fires, crimes, and the like, and standard English marked by only a flavor of regionalism is more often the case than not. Even a significant proportion of people from places like Mississippi and Georgia are now speaking standard American English.
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Part of that standardization, of course, is due to there being a single national standard to which people can aspire. Where a local dialect is entrenched by a nationalist government, it will be harder for people to aspire to a transnational standard. Of course, were "the Arab Nation" able to federate economically and/or politically, one could expect a national standard to arise.

I would very much like to see a Common Market / Arab Union (à la the EU) emerge to join together the entire Arab world in a progressive free-trade area that promotes wide transnational exchanges both economic and cultural. Indeed, it distresses me to see that whereas the U.S. has promoted free-trade areas in Europe, Latin America, East Asia, and elsewhere, the U.S. Government has not only not suggested that the Arab world establish such a bloc but has almost certainly set itself against such a project, lest Arabs become prosperous and free — but still militantly anti-Zionist, and empowered by new wealth to build up their armed forces to crush Zionism and create Palestine into a multiethnic and multireligious unitary state in which Jews would have no special rights.
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Perhaps U.S. reticence in promoting federal union of the Arab Nation proceeds from believing the ridiculous idea endlessly propagandized by Zionists that Arabs want to kill all the Jews of Palestine, not just disestablish the State of Israel. The rhetoric we hear is that Arabs want to "push the Jews into the sea". But is that what Arabs really say? What does it mean?
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When the only way people can achieve justice is thru war, you have to expect the passions of war to turn ugly. And maybe in the heat of war people would want to "push the Jews into the sea". But that would hold only if Jews fought to retain tyrannical special rights and thus against liberation of Arabs to equality within a diverse population. Here, as so often elsewhere, a comparison to Nazism is instructive.
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The Allies of World War II destroyed Nazi Germany. They did not destroy Germany. They eradicated the Nazi state. They did not exterminate the German people.
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We demanded "unconditional surrender". If the German people had arrested Hitler and his entire leadership, surrendered early to Eisenhower, and turned over every Nazi the Allies wished to prosecute for war crimes, the war would have ended years before it did, and at least hundreds of thousands and perhaps even millions of lives, on both sides, would have been saved. That did not happen, because the German people could not overthrow Hitler's government. The only way the Allies could get to Hitler was thru the German people.
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Israel, we are told endlessly, is a democracy (for Jews). The people of Israel can overthrow their fascist government any time they want. They don't even have to wait for an election year, because they have a parliamentary form of government that can turn out an administration any day of any year by a simple vote of no-confidence. But instead of voting for justice, the Israeli people have again and again, endlessly, voted for injustice to Arabs. They have thus rendered themselves far more legitimate targets of military destruction than the people of Nazi Germany ever were, and if Arabs have to kill hundreds of thousands of Israelis to end the Zionazi state, so be it.
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But who said the Arabs want to "drive the Jews into the sea", and what does it really mean?
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One website claims that no Arab leader has said any such thing but that David Ben Gurion, first Prime Minister of Israel, projected onto Arabs that wish in a speech of October 11, 1961:

'The Arabs' exit from Palestine [in 1948, in advance of warfare on their territory, proceeded from the understanding that] ... the invasion of the Arab armies at the expiration of the [British] Mandate [over united Palestine] will destroy the Jewish state and push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive.

That March 11, 2005 article, by one William Martin in Counterpunch, a California-based newsletter and website edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, says that Ben Gurion was lying when he said that the Arabs withdrew of their own volition. Documents that have come to lite only since the mid-1980's show that much if not all of the Arab flite in 1948 was the result of military and paramilitary / terrorist operations by Jews to drive Arabs off 'their land'. They didn't drive them "into the sea" but onto their neighbors' lands.
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Researchers who have tried to find the provocative phrase "push the Jews into the sea" in the formal statements and public speeches of major Arab figures of the day have been unable to find it anywhere.

Mr Ben Gurion gives no attribution for this phrase, nor does he [even] claim that it is a quote from an Arab source. It is expressed here as if it is his personal surmise as to the Arab army's intentions.

The phrase has been variously attributed by Zionist supporters to Yasser Arafat, Gamel Abdul Nasser, or any other of Israel's enemies, but none [of these Zionist accusers] whom I have challenged, including U S Congressman Henry Waxman who made the claim in a letter to me, attributing the phrase to Nasser, have been able to provide any documentation of support for their claim. This 1961 [Ben Gurion] speech certainly predates Arafat's 1968 ascension to the head of the PLO. The phrase is very much entrenched in the thinking of Israel supporters and is taken as a factual basis for an Arab intent of Genocide and of their own potential for peril.

The speech by Mr. Ben Gurion appears to be the origin of the phrase. A search of the speeches of Gamel Abdul Nasser fails to reveal it, nor does it reveal any other than a pragmatic[ ] approach to his dealing with Israel. This phrase is sufficiently dramatic and threatening so that if it was in fact uttered by a significant Arab leader, it would be prominent and easily found in any competent historical treatment, which it is not. The phrase, thus, has a Jewish origin and not an Arab origin. Mr Ben Gurion is the originator of the phrase, in all likelihood.

It may be that Ben Gurion was projecting onto Arabs the animus he felt toward Arabs. Or he might just have been lying to fool ignorant Westerners. But this much is sure: when Ben Gurion asserted that Arabs left the area of Palestine designated for the Jews of their own accord, documents now show not only that what he said was false, but that he knew it to be false when he said it.

Mr Ben Gurion was lying through his teeth, to put it plainly.

Long before Partition in 1948, leading Zionists made plain that they intended to force Arabs off 'Jewish land'. No less than Theodor Herzl, whose crazy idea Zionism was to begin with, is quoted as saying forthritely:

[We shall] spirit the penniless [Arab] population across the frontier by denying it employment. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.

It is precisely because it became plain that the Radical Zionist program contemplated the dispossession of the Arabs that the King-Crane Commission in 1919 recommended that the U.S. Government not assist Zionism.
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Ben Gurion is quoted as saying in 1937, eleven years before the establishment of the State of Israel:

We must expel the Arabs and take their places and if we have to use force, to guarantee our own right to settle in those places — then we have force at our disposal.

Americans have bought the lie that Jews were the innocent victims of Arab aggression, when the exact opposite is true. But they have gotten away with this because of the dynamics of the Big Lie. Adolf Hitler is credited as the creator of this concept, in this form: "The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one." Wikipedia contains this fuller explication:

Hitler wrote in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf (James Murphy translation, page 134):

All this was inspired by the principle - which is quite true in itself - that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

In short, the general run of people will think, "Maybe not everything the Zionists say against the Arabs wanting to push the Jews into the sea is true, but surely some of it must be, right?" Wrong.
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What do Arabs really intend when they speak of "destroying" Israel? Martin quotes the PLO (emphasis added, here and in the other quotes in this blog entry):

[Important] in engendering what Arafat called an Israeli "Masada complex" is the common pro-Zionist interpretation of the 1968 PLO Charter as calling for the destruction of the state of Israel in which the term "destruction" is interpreted as "pushing all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive."

Though the document calls for armed struggle, there is nothing in it incompatible with the establishment of a secular democratic state which recognizes and respects the three major religions.

Indeed, article 16 of the document states:

The liberation of Palestine, from a spiritual viewpoint, will prepare an atmosphere of tranquility and peace for the Holy Land in the shade of which all the Holy Places will be safeguarded, and freedom of worship and visitation to all will be guaranteed, without distinction or discrimination of race, colour, language or religion.

The suggestion that the PLO is concealing a will to genocide behind nice words about tolerance is belied by the fact that there are many Palestinian Christians who suffer no discrimination by the Palestinian Authority, and Yasser Arafat himself regularly attended Christmas and Easter services with Christian Palestinians — until Israel stopped him.
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So, as the Counterpunch article asks, in its headline, "Who is Pushing Whom into the Sea?"
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What if someone were able, finally, to find some obscure quotation from some Arab leader that does speak of "pushing the Jews into the sea"? Does that necessarily mean "kill them"? The phrase conjures an image from Biblical epics, of foot soldiers with swords and shields being backed into the ocean by sword-swinging masses of enemy fiters until they struggle to keep their heads above water, then sink beneath the waves under the weight of their armor, to drown to death. That is not the only interpretation.
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You've heard of ships?
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Ships have been used for millennia to move people from one place to another over water. Alive. What if the phrase "push the Jews into the sea" means only "force them onto ships departing for other shores"? That is, "Go back where you came from. You came from the sea [on ships]. Go back to the sea [on your ships]"? That's quite another matter from genocide, isn't it?
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Expulsion of alien invaders has occurred innumerable times throughout history. After World War II, 8 million Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe, where their families had lived for generations, and moved "back" to Germany proper. Of course, they weren't really going "back" to Germany, because they had never lived there, but the Poles, Czechs, and others who expelled them didn't care. They just wanted them off "their" land. Eastern Europe "ethnically cleansed" away Germans, but those Germans were merely relocated. They were not exterminated (tho I'm sure some did die prior to or during the relocation).
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Compare the situation of Palestinians to that of Germans in 1946 or Americans in the Southwest today, who are being inundated under a wave of mass immigration from Mexico. Conservatives have expressed alarm that some of those migrants speak of that region as "Aztlan".

In Chicano folklore, Aztlan is often appropriated as the name for that portion of Mexico that was taken over by the United States after the Mexican-American War of 1846, on the belief that this greater area represents the point of parting of the Aztec migrations. In broad interpretation, there is some truth to this in the sense that all of the groups that would subsequently become the various Nahuatl-speaking peoples of central Mexico passed through this region in a prehistoric epoch, as attested by the existence of linguistically related groups of people distributed throughout the US Pacific Intermountain region, the US southwest and northern Mexico, known as the Uto-Aztecan-Tanoan group, and including such peoples as the Paiute, Shoshoni, Hopi, Pima, Yaqui, Tepehuan, Rarámuri (Tarahumara), Kiowas and Mayas.

Some Chicanos conceive of Aztlan in cultural terms, racial solidarity, ethnic pride, that sort of thing. Others openly advocate that the present Southwest of the U.S. be detached from the United States and reattached to Mexico, from which it was taken ("stolen" according to Chicano militants). That would, of course, entail serious cultural problems for Mexico, inasmuch as those areas contain tens of millions of Anglos. Do the advocates of territorial Aztlan advocate expulsion of Anglos from the territory to be annexed to Mexico thru "reconquista" (reconquest)?
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What if the Mexicans pouring across the border were intent on retaking 'their lost land' the way the Jews 'retook their lost land' in Palestine? What if they took up arms — in concert with the American Indian tribes listed above, who also may feel that their land was stolen from them — first in terrorist violence against small American towns, then in guerrilla war against even major population centers, then in full military conflict, backed by the governments of Mexico, China, and Russia? Would we like that?
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That is pretty much what we have done to Palestine. Palestinians don't like it any more than we would. Do Americans empathize with the Palestinians whose immigrants rose in violent revolt and took their country right out from under them? Or identify with the invaders? Oddly, grotesquely, this "nation of immigrants" has not just taken the stance that immigrants have the right to steal away all or a substantial part of the land they move to, and kill anybody who gets in their way, but we have also poured over $100 billion of taxpayer money, over decades, into carrying off that theft, and imposing ethnic cleansing and religious discrimination on the (re)conquered Palestinian people.
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That is not the American way, and is insanely inconsistent with our own national purposes. It brands us as hypocrites when we assert a right to control our own borders against peaceful invaders. American support for Zionism is crazy. But if we praise Jewish "reconquista", let's be consistent and support Mexican and Indian "reconquista" of the Southwest.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,376.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:08 PM