Jun 3 2014

My Father and Doma’s Education

I wrote what I learned from my mother and what I am learning from Doma. Now I’ve been reflecting on what I learned from my father. Why would he have made no contribution for Doma’s college education?

We inherit our parents’ life experiences and the roles they model. My father was dependable and honest in all his dealings. Also, he was never violent. He felt it was as wrong to kill Germans he didn’t know as it would have been to kill his wife. Like his own father who was jailed for three years for refusing to participate in the madness of WW1, he was jailed in WW2.

I’m not certain what my father believed was the right response to Hitler’s actions. What he knew was that in the years before WW2 he had made a solemn vow that he would not participate in any war, and he was unshakeable when he made a commitment. Because of that, I try very hard to think through all the implications before I make one.

Hard work was another example my father set, a lesson I learned too well since my mother did the same and neither of them did much that was not work. Unlike my father, however, my mother did find one form of work that brought her joy. She cared for babies whose mothers could not keep them.

I’m blessed that my father role-modeled honesty, non-violence, dependability, discipline and hard work. However — true as it is that our richest source of lessons is our own mistakes, we can also learn much from our parents’. How they lived formed us, so by understanding their mistakes, we can see what to change in our own behavior. What can I learn from my father’s mistakes?

Perhaps I’ll write more another time. Enough for now is that his mother died before his first birthday. He lived with his grandparents until his father remarried when he was eight. They moved that same year from England to Ohio and met a man who had bought a citrus farm in extreme SW Texas. When my grandfather went to manage it there were no citrus trees, only brush. He built a shack, cleared the brush and planted vegetables. This was a happy time for my father but his step-mother could not abide the heat, so after three years they returned to Ohio. Going to a “real” school was another happy experience but then my grandfather lost his job in the Great Depression and returned to England. My father stayed to finish High School.

The “citrus farm” owner offered to fund my father’s college education but my grandfather refused and sent him a ticket back to England. My father considered that rejection a matter of principal but all his life my grandfather resented his own father’s refusal to keep him in school after he turned 13. A US education had no value in England. My father found a job dredging waterways — secure, worthwhile and very low paid. Years later, my mother found him a better paid job selling insurance door to door. Believing insurance is a good thing, he sold it with conviction and worked longer and longer hours collecting payments on more and more insurance that he sold so people could have less to fear from life’s insecurities.

Perhaps because he worked too hard, he grew increasingly depressed about the upheavals he considered life had inflicted upon him, beginning with his mother’s death before he even knew her. He continued dutifully selling insurance long after my mother died, afraid to stop because that would change his life yet again. He was hoping for it years before death came to him at last when he was 90.

If we look deep enough inside ourselves, we can see our parents more clearly as childhood recedes. My unquestioning admiration for my father became muddied with anger as I grew increasingly frustrated by his passivity. There is a profound difference between passivity and acceptance. What we commonly term acceptance implies that we must just endure suffering that comes our way. That was my father’s understanding. He felt his number one job was to endure. Buddhism, however, teaches joyful acceptance, how to recognize that this moment is the only one when we actually are alive, and that this is a moment where anything at all is possible.

We cannot control the winds and seas that our ship encounters. We can, however, learn skills to captain our ship. And the greatest lesson is that we alone are captain of our ship. Then we must learn to respond to that not with fear but with relish for the amazing possibilities. It is so sad that my father did not look inside where he could have seen that truth.

It would not have occurred to my father to make a donation for Doma’s education because he was so preoccupied with his own suffering. He simply did not notice charitable appeals. He was committed to his own family’s support and did not feel selfish, but he was in fact self-absorbed.

What I learned from my father’s fundamental mistake is even more important than what I learned from his virtues. One reason I help Doma, who I have no obligation to help but who is in a position where I can is, I have slowly come to recognize, to dissolve my own selfishness.

May 2018 update – Doma graduated in four years with a VA in Mathematics and Interdisciplinary Studies.

May 20 2014

Fireworks, Doma and Impartial Love

I began journaling when I was traveling extensively on business. I’d see something and sense the potential for insight that would come, if at all, only after I had time to reflect. That’s when I began making notes as breadcrumb trails to explore later.

Blogging turns out to be better. It motivates me to try harder to uncover what I can’t see. Also, I get help. Some comments start me on long journeys.

Harold, for example, commented on my post several months ago: “Buddhism is epitomized by how I treat a grandchild, with a great deal of caring and kindness. Now for some reason as people grow older we stop treating them like we would treat our young grandchildren.”

The first note I made was: “Caring and kindness seem to be the expression of our fundamental nature. It manifests without impediment with young children but is obscured with adults by caution. They are not so vulnerable and could be a threat. It is more completely obscured with old people by fear. They are all too obviously close to what we fear most, death.”

Then came this tangential thought: “Like many teenagers I sought a purpose for my life. My mental model was trading. I imagined having an amount of time I could invest for a return and that I must decide what return I wanted and how much to invest. Maybe this is why I went into business despite an instinct that it would not by itself offer a sufficient return.”

Presumably I added the next note because the discussion started from Buddhism: “It is easier to see now the only certainty, a time will come when we can no longer enjoy whatever return we assemble because we will die. We may not even live long enough to assemble any return.”

But next came a segue I couldn’t account for: “Every October my mom would buy a few fireworks. Then she would buy a few more. We never had much money and my dad felt they were a waste. That’s why my mom only bought a few. But she loved fireworks. That’s why she bought a few more. Then a few more. On Guy Fawkes night my dad worried the fireworks would set something on fire. My mom and I enjoyed them. My dad was relieved when they were over with no accidents.”

Those memories are happy, mostly, and they led me to search for a video of fireworks. The unhappy aspect is my father’s worry and that his most positive feeling was relief when it was over.

Presumably, that’s what reminded me of something else: “My mom also enjoyed putting empty toothpaste tubes in the kitchen coal stove where the air trapped inside them expanded until, after a suspenseful wait, there was a loud explosion. My dad really hated that.”

This morning when I meandered along this breadcrumb trail once again it struck me at last how toothpaste and firework explosions relate to Buddhism.

Rainbows are used in Buddhist teaching as an example of something that is real in quite a different way from what we see. Rainbows look almost solid. That’s because we think things are solid even when we know they are not. We know if we go toward the end of the rainbow looking for a pot of gold, it will keep moving away but nevertheless, the rainbow seems real. The way we interpret it is deluded.

Our experience of the light display from fireworks is different. The rainbow persists long enough to appear solid; the display from the firework changes fast so we don’t tell ourselves a story about its nature. We see a firework as an experience, not a thing.

An exploding toothpaste tube is different again, long anticipation, then, with no way to know when it will occur, an instantaneous blast. Surprise! The whack of a stick by a Zen Buddhist master might startle me into seeing past my fog of concepts. The recollected toothpaste blast just revealed the fundamental difference between my mother and father — one loved and the other hated surprises.

How does any of this relate to Doma?

At school in England in that time of fireworks we got religious instruction, stories from the Bible that seemed to have no relevance to our situation two thousand years later in a very different world. Jesus’ Great Commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself” did penetrate my indifference, though. In fact, it felt to be the most important principal of all for a good life. But it puzzled me. Some of my schoolmates were very cruel, always pouncing on anyone vulnerable. Should I love them? And while I had a couple of close friends, it did not seem worthwhile even talking with most of the boys.

Harold’s comment about Buddhism got me thinking about my practice of prayer to “train in impartial love and compassion.” I now see what I didn’t see when I was in school, that our actions, good, bad and neutral, are one thing and our fundamental nature is another. Our impartial love and compassion is obscured by misconceptions and habits that we can train ourselves to discard.

The first love we experience, love for our mother, arises because she nurtures us; it feels good but its root is selfish. Love for our children is also programmed but is less selfish. I have no experience as a grandparent but I don’t doubt that it does, as Harold says, tend to manifest more selflessly. We expect to feel it, so it is programmed, but we feel less need to discipline young grandchildren so we less often trigger their selfishness. Love for grandchildren comes with fewer expectations.

How this relates to Doma is that my experience as her sponsor was not programmed and it did not accumulate expectations. We live far apart and she was eleven when we met. Our interactions developed slowly and grew closer only as she became a young adult. The feeling I have as a result of that happenstance is something I’d have to call love but it’s a different kind from any other experience I would give the same name.

The feeling that has emerged from my interactions with Doma gives me a sense of how impartial love may feel even though I cannot call what I feel now impartial. I only help Doma because I judge her to be worthy of help. I do now have a sense of how it would feel, though, if, instead of first making a judgment about people’s relative worthiness, I had the same powerful desire to help everyone.

What about impartial compassion? Children love but do not feel compassion for their mother. They lack any sense that their mother might suffer. Parents experience compassion for their children — when they’re not feeling impatient, infuriated, disappointed or proud. But how does impartial compassion feel? My experience with Doma is instructive here, too. The way it evolved helps me recognize what she’s feeling without also feeling it myself.

And how does impartial compassion relate to fireworks? Because Doma is alert, enthusiastic and curious, she will definitely create surprises. Mostly they will, like fireworks, be happy-making because she has good sense, but surely not all her decisions will be right. I will need the joyful anticipation of surprises I learned from my mother to maintain impartial compassion no matter what.

Wandering from Harold’s comment about love for grandchildren via my remembrance of fireworks and exploding toothpaste tubes to my experience helping Doma has at last shown me how and why it’s so valuable to train in impartial love and compassion — because I’m not swamped by sharing Doma’s emotions when circumstances spark them, I can more clearly see how to help.

I must continue training in impartiality.

May 2018 update – Doma graduated in four years with a BA in Mathematics and Interdisciplinary Studies.

May 17 2014

A Good Education For All

We like the words of conservatives — they focus on what’s good. Progressives make us angry because when advocating change, they tell us what’s bad. Many compound the problem with their tone — they feel, deep down, that what’s wrong never will be fully righted. Robert Reich is an exception:

“This Saturday, May 17, marks the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling overcoming “separate but equal” school segregation that the Court had approved in 1896. The Brown decision helped fuel the civil rights movement, but it failed to have a lasting effect on school segregation. America’s schools today are almost as segregated as were southern schools before Brown. That’s because the neighborhoods where most black and Latino children now live and attend school are nearly all black and Latino.

We’re segregating geographically by income and race, more dramatically than at any time in the nation’s history. Entire cities are now mostly poor and black or Latino, even though bordered by cities or counties that are largely middle class and white (consider Detroit and its neighbor, Oakland County, Michigan). But as was the case in the 1950s, separate is not equal. In order to integrate our schools we need to integrate our cities and communities. Housing policy is critical to education.”

In fact, it’s hard to see how the problem Reich describes can be overcome under our Constitution, and the problem is broader than he describes. His solution falls short but it is a good basis for discussion because his principal focus always is on a better future.

Our schools are indeed segregated by race but the deeper segregation in our society is by wealth. Schools in poor and affluent white communities look similar because both sets of kids are white. The quality of education, however, is very different. That means so also are the outcomes.

Because almost half the funding for US public schools depends on local taxes, there are inevitable large differences in education between wealthy and impoverished communities. The difference compounds over time because better educated children become higher income adults who choose to live where high property taxes fund good schools for their own children.

Looked at the other way, communities where student poverty is rare have well-funded schools, those where student poverty is rampant get much less funding.

Ours is the only first world nation that funds education based on local wealth. Other nations equalize funding or provide more for students in need. Dutch schools, for example, are funded based on the number of pupils and get almost twice as much funding per minority child and 1.25 times as much per low-income child as per middle-class child. In the US, we do the opposite. Schools for our lower-income and minority students typically receive less funds than those for middle-class white kids.

When our government structure was established by Constitution in the 18th century, most schools were financed by voluntary contributions. By the end of the 19th century most schools were funded with local property taxes. That was OK because people in most communities then had similar standards of living. But urbanization in the 20th century created ever-growing differences between affluent suburbs and poor inner cities. Parents in affluent communities could pay for better schools.

Does that differential funding make a difference? US schools with high funding and few impoverished students got achievement scores comparable to those of Hong Kong, Japan, and other top-scoring countries in a 2001 study by the International Association for the Advancement of Educational Achievement. US schools with the lowest funding and many poor students got achievement scores similar to the worst-scoring nations, Turkey, Jordan, and Iran.

This severe inequality is not likely to change soon. Most parents in affluent communities do not want to pay higher taxes to improve education in poorer communities. They certainly do not want funding to be taken away from their local schools. And in its 1973 San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez ruling, the US Supreme Court found that our Constitution does not require equal funding among school districts. Today’s Court would rule the same way. That decision foreclosed federal remedies for inequitable school funding.

Nevertheless, as pragmatist philosopher and educator John Dewey’s wrote more than a century ago: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must be what the community wants for all its children.”

Most people believe better education leads to a better future. An America where every child and teacher goes to a good school would be better.

I have a dream that we will overcome the obstacles to a better education for all our children. We will get there faster by ranting less about what’s wrong with our institutions, leaders and neighbors and focusing instead on achieving what is better.

May 13 2014

An Unskillful Conversation

Here in Maine the daffodils are up. There must be more flowers further south where I sat in the spring sun in 1971 designing how a global network of computers would communicate. The design was good, it worked well for many years, but it was a long job fixing bugs in the engineering.

Communication media are noisy. We’re used to it with cell phones and in restaurants and such. We know we won’t always hear what each other says or get their meaning. Message-sent is not necessarily equal to message-received. Computer communications work despite that because of error detection and correction protocols. Human communication uses quizzical expressions, tones of voice, “I’m not sure I understand” and so on.

Difficult as it is to perfect computer communication, human communication is far harder because what we say and hear is distorted by our emotions.

Here’s a conversation I recently had that was prompted by Piketty’s book, Capital, which shows that capital grows faster than the economy in which it is invested. The book is the subject of much debate at this time because the wealth of those who are already very wealthy is increasing rapidly while the income of everyone else is shrinking.

The implication of Piketty’s research is that owners of capital inevitably get an ever increasing portion of a capitalist economy’s wealth. In theory, all wealth would end up owned by one individual but in the real world wealth is always redistributed, sometimes as a result of violent revolution, more often in a managed way via a progressive tax system.

A friend asked on Facebook about restoring balance with a wealth tax. Someone I don’t know responded: “Wealth has always been concentrated in the relatively few wealthy. But you just can’t take it and redistribute it like pirates taking a ship and dividing the booty. Some pirates kill the others to get more than their fair share and it starts all over again.” He went on at length about wasteful Big Government and appeared to be opposed not just to income redistribution, but to taxes in general.

I replied: “We need some things governments alone can provide. Governments need revenue. That means taxes, so one set of questions is about the best tax system. One element of a better one than we have now is an inheritance tax because those who inherit a lot of money did nothing to earn it — better to tax inheritances and use that to offset some personal income tax.”

His response was: “One thing many don’t think about when it comes to inheritance tax is all that money was taxed when it was originally made during the deceased individual’s lifetime. You are taxing it all again.” He added: “There’s something else about taxing the rich more than we do presently; they can remove themselves from taxes by moving their wealth or their corporations out of the country.”

I asked: “Why does it matter if inherited money has already been taxed? Those who inherit the money did nothing to earn it — that’s the big point.”

And in response to “something else” I wrote: “It’s important to think separately about taxing corporations and individuals. Corporations are increasingly global entities that can easily relocate aspects of themselves. They can choose which legal systems the side-effects of their operations will be regulated by, and by which their IP and etc will be protected. Human people, however, can only be citizens of one nation. It’s a big step for a wealthy American to give up US citizenship, the only legal way of avoiding US taxes.”

The tone of my reply took the conversation off track. The response was: “The real big point is this: Who are YOU to say how anyone else’s money is yours to give away? There’s no one so generous as someone who is earnestly and self righteously advocating the gifting of someone ELSES money.”

We could have hit “reset” in a face-to-face conversation and gone on to discover what exactly we disagree about but I couldn’t see how to do it on Facebook or any such medium. I ended up answering the question as phrased, knowing it really wasn’t an answer: “I’m a citizen of a democracy, which means it is my responsibility to think through and say what policies I believe are best for our society.”

The apology that came for “misusing a figure of speech” gave me the sense that a face-to-face conversation might have led us both to more insight, but I let the conversation fizzle out.

I’ve written and re-written, over and over again, my lessons from this conversation. First, I convinced myself the problem was the restricted kind of communication inherent in online media. Eventually, I acknowledged that I was more interested in telling the other fellow what to think than having him show me flaws in what I think.

At last, I recognized the root of the problem. I let myself feel angry when in his first comment he dismissed Piketty’s research by calling him a fashionable intellectual. “He’s one of those whose beliefs are impervious to facts,” I said to myself. That set the tone of my reply. I imagined it to be factual and helpful but that was not the only message I sent.

We can see our logic errors, flaws in our perceptions and what we don’t know by articulating what we think and listening carefully to our words. That’s what I’ve been working on as I kept rewriting this post.

But it’s quicker if others tell us our errors. They must listen carefully to be right, of course. What I just relearned is they only do that if we communicate skilfully, which means not just being clear but also putting ourselves in their shoes. That’s especially necessary if we imagine their shoes won’t fit.

May 8 2014

Misunderstanding Ukraine, What To Do

Reading “got some insight into my own psychology and how it colors things,” by a friend who confronted a business challenge, I recognized that what Buddhists call karma is what in the West we call psychology, our emotional and conceptual biases that lead us to misunderstand.

My focus right now is on the Nepali young woman whose education I support but I do still notice other things.

Ukraine, for example. Psychology, which is individual karma, and culture, the karma we share, shape our ideas about current affairs by connecting them with past events that we also misunderstood. Psychology, culture, karma, whatever we call it, is always distorting what we see and in ways that keep changing. What is shaping our ideas now about events in Ukraine?

Having suffered 20 million or more deaths in WW2, the Soviet Union established deep buffers against another invasion — the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, all the way to the center of Germany. It lost those buffers when the Soviet Union collapsed and would face an overwhelming threat if the Baltics, Belarus or Ukraine in particular were to become hostile.

When the Baltics were admitted to NATO, the alliance advanced to less than 100 miles from St. Petersburg. If Ukraine and Belarus follow, NATO will be only 250 miles from Moscow.

NATO is weak now but Germany transformed from much greater weakness in 1932 to massive power by 1938. Russia must stop NATO from absorbing Ukraine.

Why would the US government encourage enticement of Russia’s borderland nations into NATO? Who could that benefit? Only our weapons manufacturers and military contractors.

Do they control the US government? No. But they do have influence just like other wealthy lobbyists and they have at times had insiders like former-VP Cheney whose roots are in for-profit military business. But even then military contractors do not control foreign policy. There’s more going on.

We, by which I mean we the American people, have come to believe it is our job to punish other nations. And because we did not lose our Cold War fears even though the Soviet Union collapsed, we are especially ready to believe we should punish Russia’s leader.

We do not consider President Putin’s reasons for concern about Ukraine. We simply accept the lies by our politicians and media.

Why do they lie? Some have financial incentives but most are like us, deluded.

John McCain, for example, is always eager for military action. Remember President Bush’s axis of evil — here’s McCain in that context wanting to “bomb, bomb, bomb — bomb, bomb Iran.” He later believed, as did President Obama, that we should bomb Syria. We’re fortunate he was not elected President because unlike Obama, he would not have been automatically blocked by Congress — and McCain now wants to take military action in Ukraine.

The majority of Americans oppose our military involvement in Ukraine and perhaps recognize that Russia had to maintain control over its Crimean naval base, but few see the great risk in Ukraine is civil war and it was our own and European Union governments who triggered that potential disaster.

I realize that even if he heard them, my words would not outweigh President Obama’s long-formed biases or the nonsense he’s now being told. There’s little I can do on that front.

What we all can do, however, is work every day to eliminate our own emotional habits and misconceptions. That really does make a difference.

Apr 21 2014

A Compelling Story

Share our excitement! Doma Ghale, a low-caste, very poor Nepali girl we’ve sponsored for seven years has been admitted by a great US college! We’re inspired by her amazing progress. Her degree here will complete her preparation to build a business that creates good jobs in Nepal. But she now needs more help than we alone can give.

All of us get a lot of appeals. Why respond to this one? See Doma explain why she wants a US college education in this video. Watch this Nepali dance performance she choreographed. Learn more about her achievements here. Read about her mother’s life and her own self-transformation here. Financial aid, donation and college expense accounting data are here and here is news about her progress and experiences, as well as updates to the Accounting page.

Join this inspiring journey! Click on the Donate button below to make a one-time or recurring monthly contribution online through Paypal, or mail a check to Bath Savings Institution, PO Box 548, Bath, Maine 04530-0548 for deposit in the Beneficiary Account Doma Ghale 187630. Their ABA for bank-to-bank transfers is 2112 74447. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

Apr 20 2014

Facebook Says It’s My Birthday

Today is my 44th birthday and one of my contemporaries just celebrated his 109th. How can that be? I began to explain here. Now I have a better understanding.

I laughed when my friend set his birth year on Facebook to 1905 and I reset mine to when I came to America. I’ve been celebrating that as Sidwell Day since it occurred to me that if Columbus has a Day for discovering what others discovered thousands of years earlier, I, too, could have such a Day.

But the more I think about it, the less it feels like a joke. There’s disagreement about when birth takes place, for example. My mother would have said I was born on March 25th 1944. That’s when our bodies separated. But Mother Superior at the Catholic orphanage where she grew up might have said I came into being nine months earlier.

And it’s really a lot more complicated. What is this “I” whose birthday Facebook says is today?

My body was born in England but so much of why I think and act as I do is because I’ve lived for 44 years in America. That’s why Facebook says today is my birthday. But experiences in the 26 years before I came here remain important aspects of “me.” And those experiences were set in motion by earlier ones, just as my decision to move to America had causes and conditions.

Why did I leave England? Because my grandfather moved here when my father was 9 and the ten years my father lived here were the happiest of his life. His experiences programmed me to be happy here.

And why did my grandfather leave England? Because one of his younger brothers had in 1915. He came here to make a better future and because he did not want to kill Germans. Why did my grandfather not come then? Because he was in jail for two and a half years for refusing to kill Germans.

Why did my grandfather, his brother, another brother and my father all go back to England in the 1930s? The Great Depression.

So the day WWI broke out and forced my forebears to act on their belief about killing was also a birthday. Another was the day I read Wilfred Owens’ poems and felt I was in the trenches. My body did not have that sensory experience but the poetry changed me forever.

Then I went on changing as more “real”, “imagined” and “reconfigured” experiences accumulated.

The closer I look, the more causes and conditions I see that are the birth of my feelings, thoughts and actions. None of those causes and conditions still exists in the same form. Their effects still exist, though, but they, too, are constantly being changed by other causes and conditions.

I used to imagine I and other things have an intrinsic nature. My imagination, desperately seeking a world I can believe in so I can feel secure, fabricated a realm of appearances.

The appearances are real, but not in the way I used to imagine. Everything, including what I think of as “me” is changing in every aspect in every moment.

This March 25th was, in the conventional sense, my 70th birthday but that no longer feels to be a solid truth. What feels “really true” is my birthday is in this moment, now this moment, and now this beautiful instant when everything is possible.

Mar 17 2014

War on Poverty

This Guest Post prompted by media pieces is chiefly comments on them by friends. I’m posting it because it is so relevant to my post earlier today about our federal jobs program.

LarryN started the discussion by posting this is important, an article about the correlation between income and life expectancy. Nationwide, men in the upper income half who reach 65 live six years longer than in the late 1970s: men in the lower half live one year longer. The article uses a pair of have and have-not counties 350 miles apart to dramatize the issue. Women’s life expectancy grew by five years since 1985 in the wealthy community: in the have-not county it fell by two years.

AngeloC replied [edited for length]: “this article tells us your quality of life across a variety of categories including life expectancy is worse if you are poor. What the author does not comprehend are the circumstances and choices that cause people to become poor and keep them that way. If you are born out of wedlock, or grow up in a chaotic family situation, or use drugs, or drop out of high school, then your chances of being poor are quite high. Conversely, the poverty rate for families comprised of a married couple is miniscule, as is the case for those who have finished college. We’ve been “at war” with poverty for 50 years now, and we are currently spending one Trillion dollars annually to battle poverty. So if money alone is the answer, then how much more would we need to spend to make poverty go away? George Will makes some good points here.”

Will’s main points are: “Nearly 48 million people receive food stamps — this dependency is inimical to upward mobility”, “the government’s [near-zero interest rate] monetary policy breeds inequality” and “the federal government’s fiscal and regulatory policies discourage businesses from growing the economy with the mountain of money the Fed has created.”

JohnK responded [edited for length]: “regulatory policies have something to do with discouraging business expansion, but the primary cause for lack of business expansion is lack of an expanding market. As a result of off-shoring in search of cheap wages to reduce production costs, and increasing use of automation, jobs in the U.S. and therefore the wherewithal to purchase goods is rapidly diminishing. Food stamps and short-term subsidies help a bit by injecting some purchasing wherewithal into the economy, but at best, it’s a Band-Aid on a serious hemorrhage. The Fed is injecting money into the banks to increase borrowing to expand business, but again, why borrow to expand your business if your market is shrinking? The money is being injected where it isn’t used to expand the economy. The Fed is limited in what it can do.

“What might help is for the President and the Congress to set up a long-term, well-planned 20-30 year program to rebuild and expand our infrastructure. Our roads, railroads, bridges need re-building and ongoing maintenance. If we are to meet the electricity needs of a more dynamic economy and the millions of electric vehicles hitting the roads, we should be enhancing and expanding our electric grid. With the ever increasing costs of extracting fossil energy, we should be expanding our renewable energy sources and reducing fossil fuel use by providing a modern efficient railway system. Investing in rebuilding and enhancing our infrastructure over a long period of time will provide for a huge number of jobs in the construction, steel and cement manufacture, and ancillary industries and will give a boost to the whole economy as workers spend their wages on buying goods.

“Why a 20-30 year plan? This will give businesses the confidence to expand, knowing that federal spending on infrastructure enhancement will continue for a long time. The Fed can’t initiate this. Only the President and Congress can do it, but once the program is in place, the Treasury can issue bonds to pay for it and the Fed can buy them. That will pay for a useful enhancement of infrastructure that will support our economic needs for decades to come.”

The discussion continues. We all agree with the initial statement — this is important. Although at first we saw implications that appeared to be in conflict, signs emerged that we may reach agreement on the underlying issue. That means, if we get to that point, we could potentially also agree on an action program.

My proposed program would include revamping our electric grid to facilitate generation from renewable energy sources and make it less vulnerable to attack. We could spend dramatically less on our military if we were not dependent on Middle East oil.

While cutting our military spend I would, however, continue to fund the Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsoring of revolutionary technologies. That is where transformational breakthroughs in power generation and storage technology are most likely to originate.

But the primary point of this post is it illustrates how politicians also have at times debated so as to govern well. They could work that way again.

Mar 17 2014

Our Sacrosanct Jobs Program

A news article this week brought to mind something British politician Tony Benn said, “I remember setting sail to South Africa for training [as a WW2 RAF pilot] and being part of a war aims meeting. It was the most brilliant political meeting I ever attended. One man spoke of the mass unemployment of the 1930s and said that if we could attain full employment by killing Germans, we could have full employment by building houses, schools and hospitals.”

The article is about a $643M contract with Bath Iron Works (BIW) for which Maine Senators Collins, a Republican, and King, an independent, got funding. They say it will “allow the Navy to send another DDG-51 to sea when the Navy’s fleet needs to preserve important combat capabilities in support of our national defense.” Democratic Representative Pingree said, “this is excellent news for the families who earn their living at BIW.” A shop steward who represents BIW workers said, “the contract brings more stability to the company, which employs about 5,400 people.”

So, my representatives in Washington, the BIW workers and their families, local business owners, everyone around here is happy we’re going to build more of these ships that were “originally designed to defend against Soviet aircraft, cruise missiles and nuclear attack submarines.”

What struck me is, although we don’t think of Defense that way, it has grown into an enormous jobs program. What’s more it’s a program whose rationale and scope we do not question.

President Reagan’s budget director David Stockman has points to make, however. In The Ukraine, The War Party and the Pentagon’s Swamp of Waste he writes, “the $625 billion allocated to DOD this year amounts to a colossal destruction of economic resources for no benefit whatsoever to the safety and security of the American people.”

Stockman is angry, perhaps because “About three decades ago I called the Pentagon a “swamp of waste” during an off-the-record interview that ended-up on the evening news. Presently I ended-up in President Reagan’s woodshed–explaining that, well, yes, I did say that because it was in fact true.” His article is excellent background reading.

I don’t feel emotional about this but I am equally determined to do what I can so we do question how we want to spend that $625B of tax revenue. The current program does have some benefit — it provides a lot of jobs — but as Tony Benn realized, some of them could be different jobs. Some could be jobs without the risk of being killed or maimed.

Defense spending has huge support. There was a bi-partisan agreement to cut (sequester) federal spending this year. Stockman notes that “Had every dime of the $55 billion sequester been implemented, this year’s DOD budget would have been roughly $600 billion … in 1989, the DOD budget was about $475 billion in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars.” Even though DOD spending would have been up 25% from 25 years earlier, when the time came to make the cuts, Congressman Paul Ryan and others said making them would be tantamount to surrender. So the cuts were not made.

What provoked Stockman’s article is, “Contrary to the bombast, jingoism, and shrill moralizing flowing from Washington and the mainstream media, America has no interest in the current spat between Putin and the mobs of Kiev.”

Echoing President Eisenhower’s famous warning when he left office sixty years ago, he says, “The source of the current calamity-howling about Russia is the Warfare State–that is, the existence of vast machinery of military, diplomatic and economic maneuver that is ever on the prowl for missions and mandates and that can mobilize a massive propaganda campaign on the slightest excitement.”

Stockman is outraged that we believe the propaganda and by our hypocrisy: “We have invaded every country to our South–from the Dominican Republic to Guatemala and Panama and assassinated or overthrown dozens of their leaders–all within the 60 year span since Nikita Khrushchev gifted Crimea to his minions in Kiev. So precisely which nearby borders are so sacrosanct and exactly who has done the more egregious violating?”

I’ve written before about our defense spending and military strategy over which “we the people” have no control. President Reagan greatly accelerated spending on what was in fact a spurious rationale, it dropped and stabilized in the next decade, then it was driven to extraordinary new heights by President Bush based on a new spurious rationale. The numbers below show our total defense spending, not just what is presented in the US budget defense line item but also the spending on “overseas contingency operations” i.e., the wars President Bush started in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We might be encouraged by Congress’ refusal to approve President Obama’s recent desire to take military action in Syria except that (A) Congress is currently of a mind to refuse everything he proposes and (B) everyone in Congress always wants more military spending in their district.

Important as it is to make rational changes to our defense spending and decide what kind and size jobs program we want to fund, however, we first need a government that functions, one that could debate such questions, arrive at decisions and take action.

I’m still absorbing research about how we could get such a government and, following a break where I’m hoping for sun and heat, I will report back next month.

Mar 15 2014

American Creationism

Astounded by those who believe the antichrist now reigns in the White House, I knew I must learn more about American fundamentalists. I’ve been looking into creationism. How many of us believe humans were created in the recent past, and why does that belief matter?

The first people came to North America about 14,000 years ago. They came over the habitable zone that connected Siberia and Alaska in the exceptionally cold period 30,000 to 15,000 years ago. In 2008 a linguist showed that languages spoken in Siberia, Alaska, western Canada and by the Navajo and Apache are related. Now, from a just-published paper, we know those languages stem from an earlier one whose speakers lived for maybe 15,000 years in that now-disappeared habitable zone. As the world warmed some of them migrated east to North America. Others went west, back into Siberia. I could not know any of that if I believed in creationism. But would that matter?

The main categories of creationism, “young Earth” and Old Earth”, agree that mankind was created long after we know mankind came to North America, but young Earthers believe the universe was created at the same time as mankind while old Earthers agree with the scientifically accepted age of the Earth.

Asking when the universe began actually leads to no conclusion because the question presupposes there was a beginning. Everything we see seems to have had a beginning but when we look closely we see that really, everything is changing and is made up of other things that are also changing. We can’t actually identify beginnings. I’ll say more about that another time .

For now, I just want to add that belief in a beginning can be dangerous. Why? Because it implies an end which many fundamentalists imagine will be a cataclysmic sorting out of “people like me” into eternal bliss and “people like them” into eternal torture. That reinforces our delusion that we and they are different, and encourages our hatred of “them.”

There is enough geological, genetic and other evidence to tell us approximately how long ago categories of things such as the North American continent and humans manifested. Creationists discount that evidence. Unlike scientists who are never more than confident about their conclusions, creationists are certain about what happened. On what do they base their certainty?

Creationists calculate the origin of mankind from the Bible’s line of descent from Adam to Abraham cross-referenced with events such as the Temple of Solomon being built 480 years after the Exodus. The genealogies may be incomplete and there is no certainty about dates of the cross-referenced events, so creationists differ about the exact creation date. All place it between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, each group being certain their date is correct.

Creationists are answering both when and how humans were created. How many Americans believe both answers? According to this Gallup Poll, four in ten Americans (40%) believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago. An almost equal number (38%) believe we developed over millions of years in a process guided by God. Another 16% believe we developed over millions of years without the involvement of a God.

In much the same way there is nothing definite to say about the ultimate origin of the universe, we also cannot know if the world was created by a God. And unlike the origin of the universe, which scientists can at least investigate as far back as the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, we can only have beliefs about the existence of a creator deity.

What we’re left with that we can be confident about, based on an enormous body of evidence, is that humans were on this planet more than 10,000 years ago. The creationist belief about that is simply incorrect.

What are the implications? Most Christians around the world do not take a literal view of the Genesis creation narrative but as we’ve seen, many in the US do. This matters because, unlike, for example, in Europe, political partisanship in the USA is highly correlated with fundamentalist thinking.

A high incidence of belief in creationism in the USA matters because unquestioning belief in religious ideas that are either unprovable or which require ignoring the facts is highly correlated with political partisanship. Fundamentalist religion accustoms people to believe things that their reason would reject and ignore facts that would make their beliefs untenable.

The US media portrays a world “out there” where Islamic fundamentalists either rule or are striving to gain control. What we do not see is that our own situation is not so very different.

This means we may, by democratic vote, choose to be governed by people who promise to lead us to a better future but who may in fact greatly harm us by acting on deluded beliefs.

What to do? I’m now exploring where our fundamentalists live, why they believe as they do and why they reject science. We must understand what their beliefs respond to, the root causes. We can’t just bludgeon them into “the correct view.”

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