In his editorial for the New York Times on Friday, October 08, 2010, Paul Krugman wrote about this country, “We have become . . . a nation whose politicians seem to compete over who can who can show the least vision, the least concern about the future and the greatest willingness to pander to short-term, narrow-minded selfishness.”

I’ve long thought of the similarity of the attitude of the Right to the frequent complaint of two year olds, who never seem to tire of repeating, “MINE!”

 My wife and I recently had some work done in our house, requiring the help of a very “handy-man” who could do plumbing, electrical work, plastering and painting. He did a great job, but as he was leaving, he told us his political philosophy.  He said that what is wrong with this country, (most of the problems of which he thought began with the Obama administration), is a wholesale loss of freedom. 

 He cited as evidence that he needed to prove himself qualified to remove asbestos from homes and had to pay for training and a license to do that work.  He also said that he is required to pay taxes to help people he doesn’t care anything about. He saw both of these governmental demands as unjust impositions on him as a working man and a small business owner. 

 As a retired small business person myself, I had to agree with him that federal and state paper work seemed more confusing than necessary.  I came to the conclusion, however, that if that was what was required for the privilege participating in the economic life of the country and the state, it was not all that bad or burdensome.

 It was the part about his paying taxes to help people he didn’t care anything about that bothered me.  It was then I realized just how selfish American rugged individualism has made us.  We don’t care about one another any more, we only care about ourselves, and those we live with and love.

 Anything the federal government does for US citizens is termed “socialism” and is to be avoided at all costs. It seems to be OK with the Right for us to spend billions each year to fight and die and kill in foreign wars, for “our country”, but we are enjoined against spending “one dime of taxpayers’ money” to save the lives or help our own citizens. 

 I’ve recently come across an interesting study done by one Dr. Jonathon Haidt of the University of Virginia. Dr. Haidt’s thesis is that through the process of evolution, we humans have evolved five values.  He says that they are:

1.     Do no harm and help those who have been harmed

2.     Apply this rule universally to all persons

3.     Respect authority

4.     Be loyal to your group

5.     Avoid bodily fluids, especially of the diseased or deceased.

 Dr. Haidt acknowledges that when we apply these values to politics we realize that, the first two values are especially owned by political liberals, while the last three values are owned more by political conservatives.  The preferences for some, however, were not seen to exclude the others.  Thus the liberally inclined were seen to also respect and own the values of, respect for authority, loyalty to their group, and distaste for bodily fluids. 

 Likewise, those of a conservative bent, were also expected to hold the first two values of helping those who have been harmed and offering help to anyone and everyone in need of help.  These were after all, seen to have evolved by humanity as a whole and thus to be possessed by all human beings. 

 The creed of selfishness of the Right, however, seems to deny the first two values.  Not only do they want to deny help to those in society who have not provided adequately for themselves and their families, (often because policies of the Right have outsourced their jobs) they want to deny benefits to US citizens as a whole because they fear that such help will redound to the benefit of a president they don’t like.

We citizens of this country have long bragged about the proud independence of our nation and its people.  Our independence, however, soured into selfishness, may end causing much pain and suffering, if not the actual demise of our nation.

This morning, (9/20/2010) the “Morning Joe Show” on MSNBC, put up a screen reporting a recent poll on the Obama administration’s performance on the economy. 

 The numbers were: 22% of those polled thought that the economy had improved under the Obama administration, 30% said that it had gotten worse, and 48% said it was unchanged.  The guests, led by John Heilemann (Game Change) moaned and warned us about what terrible shape the economy is in and how devastating President Obama’s policies have been for all Americans.

 I have all but stopped wondering why commentators always focus on what they see as negative in this administration.  Their bias seems indisputable, and this morning put the finishing touches on any remaining doubt in my mind. 

 Please look at those numbers again.  It’s true, only 22% said they thought the economy had gotten better, and 30% said they thought it ad gotten worse.  Those two percentages don’t sound good.  But then, look at the third number.  Nearly half of those polled (48%) say that nothing has really happened with the economy.  True, it hasn’t gotten better, they say, but more importantly, it hasn’t gotten worse! If it hasn’t gotten worse, what’s all the moaning and warning about?

 Adding the 22% who think the economy has improved since President Obama became president (it has certainly improved from the days when we were losing hundreds of thousands of jobs under President Bush, and we were well on our way to another depression) to the 48% who say the economy is unchanged, apparently a full 70% think the economy has not been terrible under this president.

 Seventy percent of those polled are not the ones who are moaning and shouting about the need for a drastic remedy to a dangerously threatening situation in our country.  To hear all the dire forecasts coming from Republicans and Democrats alike about the outcome of the 2010 elections, you’d expect the 70% number to belong to those who think the economy has gotten worse under this administration.  Instead, it belongs to those who think the economy has either improved or has stayed the same.  Only 30% are responsible for all the moaning and warning!

 The near universal ignorance of the meaning of the term, “framing” really does have consequences.  That the majority of the US population is unaware of how easily it can be manipulated, threatens true disaster for the country if the policies of George W. Bush favoring the richest 10% of the country are restored. 

 Please, everybody!  Read and listen to the news critically!  Don’t take the word of the so-called experts in the media who are telling you something that doesn’t Add Up!

 Someone with the opposite bias, (or perhaps no bias) might have arranged the percentages differently: 22% said the economy has improved, 48% say the economy has not changed; 30% say the economy has gotten worse.  With that arrangement of numbers it would have been easier to show that 70% think that the country is not headed for economic disaster after all.

Many years ago, when my mother and I had gone to a weekday Mass, probably on the feast of the Ascension, we stopped at a donut shop on the way home, and I remember the sign they had there. It read:

 “As you travel on through life brother,

Whatever be your goal,

Keep your eye upon the donut,

And not upon the hole.”

Some brilliant, homespun philosopher, just waking up in the early morning, when his creative juices were flowing freely, gave me a simple sentence that’s as meaningful as anything I learned in 23 years of schooling. It’s been helpful in my personal life as well as in understanding the world around me. A prominent example of how I find it helpful in the world around me is the predominantly negative analysis by pundits of the performance of President Obama and his administration with regard to the economy.

It’s not that the administration is losing jobs, or even that it’s not gaining jobs.  It’s that the Obama administration isn’t producing enough jobs.  If a commentator wants to deliver a thoroughly dishonest “piece de resistance”, he resorts to the old saw, “Obama said the jobless rate would not go above eight percent!” This is said in such triumphant tones, that it’s as though every hopeful prediction of every other candidate, had been dead on.  Right Wing think tanks are busy cranking out phrasing to put in the mouths of their Fox and friends “newsmen and women”, and possibly less biased but more credulous, objective commentators.  It’s what the right’s think tanks do for a living.

 A few examples of how stories about the economy are framed so that the president is made responsible for every economic ill the country suffers are:

 1.     President Obama can’t blame President Bush anymore; the economic numbers have gone down during his watch. (So? Every recovery known to man, is irregular, whether recovery from personal illness or  storms like Katrina)

2.     Raising taxes during a recession is always a bad idea, but Obama wants to raise taxes during this recession.  (The president wants to restore the taxes that were exempted for ten years but only on the very rich.  He does not want to raise taxes at all, but to allow the exemption of taxes on those earning $250,000 a year to expire.

3.     Although it’s never been said explicitly, the implication of the statement that “It’s never good to raise taxes during a recession is that YOUR taxes will be raised.  (That’s FALSE and deliberately misleading on the part of right-wingers.  If your annual income is less than $250,000, no one in the administration is even thinking about raising your taxes.)

 4.     Republicans in the Senate said that they would not agree to extend unemployment benefits, because the benefits were not paid for and therefore would add to the deficit. Republicans also said they would oppose a bill to aid small business despite the fact that it was entirely paid for. Hmm! Could the fact that both bills might be good for the president and help Democrats in November have anything to do with the rejection of these proposals, even though they have very different effects on the deficit? 

 Corporations have been responsible for decreased employment by shipping jobs overseas, and using the downturn as an excuse to “let go” many more workers than justified by the downturn. 

 Time was when all working Americans were seen as fellow citizens and their needs were recognized as legitimate and deserving of decent pay.  In the mid 1970s workers became the enemy of employers, because the law (which they were responsible for getting passed) required employers to protect and increase the interests of investors. Workers, after all only invested their lives!  Workers became just another cost of doing business.

 So how bad is the economy? First quarter profits for 2010 were up 44% from the preceding year; the Dow stood at 8,000 on the day Mr. Obama was inaugurated; it’s now well above 10,000.  Doesn’t sound all that bad.  Could all the anxiety be the result of a manufactured crisis? I keep hearing a refrain, repeated over and over from the right wing.  “Something might go wrong”; let’s not wait and find out. Let’s not keep our eye on the hole we Republicans made in the economy and reelect the people who created it; somehow you’ll see that we were right all along!  A right wing version of my bakery ditty would be: Keep your eye upon the hole and not upon the donut.

One of Albert Ellis’ (of Rational Emotive Therapy) statements that I found most surprising was his saying that it’s irrational to expect everyone, including oneself, to be 100% rational all the time.  This is especially true of those who make money from spreading an opposite irrational message.    

In a recent interview on NBC TV with Matt Lauer (8-30-10), President Obama said that he couldn’t spend a lot of time insisting that he was an American born Christian because he had repeated that message many times already.  It sounded a little like the issue of the existence of God that went: “For those who believe, no proof is necessary; for those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.”  In other words, don’t beat a dead horse. Give it up! Whereas “If you don’t succeed, try, try again” may be worthy encouragement, even that maxim suggests trying only twice.

 To listen to right-wing critics of Mr. Obama, one would think the economy is in worse condition than when he took over from President Bush.  Even last month’s jobs report (July 2010) showed an improvement of 1.6%, but the only message that got through the media was that “Growth was not what   was hoped for or expected.”  Are our memories so short that we’ve forgotten the bad old days under W when jobs were being hemorrhaged by hundreds of thousands?

 In a Washington Post article dated August 12, 2010, Ezra Klein quoted economist, Rob Shapiro, who had found Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that between December 2007 and July of 2009 — covering the last year of the Bush administration and the first six months of Mr. Obama’spresidency — Mr. Bush was responsible for the loss of seven million, seven hundred ninety-six thousand (7,796,000) jobs, Mr. Obama for forty-one thousand (41,000) jobs. Subtracting 41,000 from 7,796,000 results in 7,755,000 more jobs lost under President Bush than under President Obama. 

 How did such a difference occur?  The stimulus package! That’s right! The stimulus that the “right” shouts was a terrible mistake, motivated solely by President Obama’s desire to make government bigger and reduce poor corporations to mere shadows of their former selves. That’s how the difference occurred.  Oh yes, it’s the same stimulus package that the “right”  says,  HAS NOT WORKED!??!

 Right Wing Political commentators love to quote polls showing the percentage of Americans who believe the country is on the wrong track or who say that President Obama’s handling of the Gulf Oil Spill was worse than President Bush’s handling of Katrina.  Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe seems especially thrilled when he can quote a poll showing Obama’s receding approval numbers.  But what about all these citizens who are being polled and who say that they are sorely disillusioned with President Obama?  Aren’t they ordinary Americans like you and me? 

  I don’t recall who published the cartoon during the health care debate that showed a man speaking loudly to a reporter.  The top of his head was open and a GOP elephant behind him was dumping a can full of garbage into it.  The caption read, “Garbage in, garbage out.”  That’s how right wingers, like Tea Party members get their “information”.

 Several months ago, I had telephone conversation with retired Congressman Andy Jacobs of Indiana in reference to a Move-On rally for health care.  Mr. Jacobs still suffers from injuries sustained during his service during the Korean War and wasn’t able to participate, but he shared with me this gem.   He said, “There are none so blind as those who are paid to be blind.”  I was reminded of his comment when I read the Frank Rich editorial in the August 29 issue of the New York Times, crediting the Koch brothers, Charles and David with the phenomenal success of the Tea Party.  The brothers whose many enterprises benefit from right wing policies share their billions (100 billion estimated annual income) with various right wing groups and causes.  Of the Tea Party specifically, a Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of the Koch brothers says, “The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it.”  But it’s hard to document, because as Jane Mayer says in her recent article in the New Yorker, the Koch brothers are possibly the most generous contributors of all right wing contributors that you’ve never heard of. 

 So much for the “grassroots” origins of the Tea Party movement, the majority of whose members’ level of dialogue seems not to rise above the chant, “we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

How can an intelligent president communicate with that?  What’s a president to do?

ROBERT REICH AUGUST 11, 2010

The decline of America’s middle class can be charted directly. In the three decades after World War II, the median wage (smack in the middle) grew rapidly, right along with productivity gains. Even as late as 1980, the richest 1 percent of Americans received only about 9 percent of the nation’s total income.

But starting in the 1980s – and increasingly since then – the economy has made the rich far richer without doing squat for the vast middle. The median hourly wage has barely grown, if you take inflation into account. Indeed, it dropped in the last so-called “recovery” between 2001 and 2007. And health-care and pension benefits have declined; we’ve gone from defined-benefit pensions to do-it-yourself pensions, while health insurance premiums, deductibles, and co-payments have skyrocketed.

Meanwhile, the rich have been getting a larger and larger portion of total income. From 9 percent in 1980, the top 1 percent’s take has increased to 23.5 percent in 2007. CEOs who in the 1970s took home 40 times the compensation of average workers now rake in 350 times. Financiers who forty years ago made only modest fortunes today, even after the Great Recession they helped bring on, routinely earn seven and eight-figures. In 2009, when most of the nation’s middle class was deep in recession, the 25 best-paid hedge-fund managers took in an average of $1 billion each. (Their marginal income tax, by the way, was barely over 17 percent, while the typical family paid a marginal tax far higher.)

What happened? It wasn’t just greed. It was also the systematic and ever cleverer manipulation of laws and rules by those able to pay lobbyists, legislators, lawyers, accountants to do their bidding. As income and wealth have risen to the top, so has the power to manipulate the system in order to acquire even more money and more influence.

To be sure, globalization and technological change have bestowed gains disproportionately on those with the education and connections to benefit most from them, while burdening Americans without the education and connections most needed.

But instead of enlarging the circle of prosperity so that the vast middle class could come out winners as well – instead of strengthening trade unions, improving public education, deepening public investments, enlarging safety nets, and making the tax system more progressive – the nation took direction from those at the top, and did the opposite.

It is not surprising America’s middle class is increasingly frustrated and are venting their anger – at politicians, the leaders of big business and Wall Street, as well as global traders, immigrants, and others who are easy targets of resentment.

A politics of audacious hope has turned into a politics of fear – meaner spirited than at any time in recent memory.

I’m not a class warrior. Call me a class worrier.

Who is not familiar with the story of the emperor who really had on no clothes?  Remember how unscrupulous tailors convinced the emperor that they had made a suit for him that was invisible to incompetents and those unfit for their positions, but was really of the most beautiful material in the entire world.

Because no one wanted to seem incompetent or unfit, no one commented on the emperor’s nakedness, except a little boy who apparently held no position so he didn’t need to worry about losing anything.  And he apparently thought anyone who hadn’t noticed the emperor’s nakedness, clearly incompetent themselves.  So, as children often do, he blurted out the truth,     saying,  “The emperor has no clothes!” 

Perhaps you, like me, were amazed and amused at the gullibility and faintheartedness of the people who were so much influenced by the silence of their neighbors that they were afraid to speak. 

I’ve been feeling like those people.  I keep waiting for someone in the media   or politics to notice that the kind of Capitalism we practice in this country is not working.  I keep thinking of the TV ad for a deodorant popular in the 1970s that went in a kind of sing song style, “It’s not working!”  It seems that anyone who does not suffer a severe headache at having a thought, would wonder how anyone believed that it could work. 

In the mid 1970s US Corporations decided that they would no longer honor the time-honored practice of paying workers more if they produced more.  That practice had seemed to make sense to most manufacturers and certainly to workers for many years. If workers worked harder to make more products so that their company grew, they should share in the benefits of that growth. 

Corporate America said No. It also said to workers that if you want more money, invest money in our company; then you can share in the profits we make.  

This new way of making money, new in the 1970s to most workers, set workers at war with one another. On one side were the workers who had discretionary dollars to invest and who wanted to reduce labor costs and thereby increase profits, and on the other side were workers who lived pretty much paycheck to paycheck and who wanted those paychecks to continue to  increase. They had depended on their hard work to feed their families and to gradually improve their standard of living over the years.  Many, I’m sure didn’t know what to make of this new way of making money. They weren’t impressed with the owners and managers public relations carrot that: “Now you can make money like the big guys on Wall Street.” 

In 2006, when French students and workers felt threatened with the possibility of the French government’s adopting the US kind of Capitalism, they took to the streets and turned back the threat.  They called our kind of Capitalism, “Capitalisme Sauvage”, which means exactly what it sounds like it means.  It means cutthroat capitalism that makes the rich richer and the poor, poorer. 

In 1950, the top 1% of Americans claimed 8% of the country’s wealth.  By 2007, the top 1% held 50% of the nation’s wealth! Of course this left just 50% of the nation’s wealth for the bottom 99% of the population.  Some wonder what ever happened to the middle class. The answer seems obvious; the top 10% of the population has taken the wealth of the middle class so that there is hardly anyone left to make a middle class.

Of course, the rape of middle class wealth did not end in the 1970s. In 2008, the gross domestic product fell by about 2.5% but corporations laid off 6% of their work force. Those who kept their jobs were warned that if they didn’t keep production up they’d lose their jobs too.  And this came after the mass export of manufacturing jobs to countries where labor was cheapest, thereby putting American workers in competition with the most poorly paid workers in the world.  

We usually associate nakedness with shame, but as Jim Hightower says, investment bankers on Wall Street (and other corporate “citizens”) were born without the shame gene. While their banks were borrowing billions from taxpayers to save them from bankruptcy, the banks were shoveling 1.6 billion out to their managers in shameless benefits. 

So how are we like the citizens of that mythical country, created by Hans Christian Andersen many years ago? If we don’t see what is happening to our country and raise the alarm, how are we not like them?

It seems that every time an effort is made to do something for American citizens, the Right cries, “Socialism!” I wonder why they do not raise a similar cry about the maintenance of military and intelligence services, both of which exist for the protection of the American people. 

They speak of our “brave men and women in service” who are willing to sacrifice their lives to protect their fellow Americans. But why do these men and women do this (unless perhaps from a dark desire to overthrow the American individualistic, capitalist system that insists that it’s every man for him or herself)? 

Perhaps the Right would answer that our military service people do what they do for money. But there are safer ways of making enough to get by  without risking life and limb!  That is surely true in peacetime; but the Right insists on a strong defense and military build up even in peacetime. They are quick to criticize any who disagree with them as being soft on defense. If even the Pentagon says they no longer need or want a particular weapon, the Right hastens to say, in effect, “Oh yes you do!” 

And look at the Intelligence community that, since 9/11 has grown to such an extent that we count it in the thousands; not just personnel, but agencies–and not just agencies of government but private intelligence agencies as well. Contrast that largesse with the recent effort in the Senate to extend unemployment for families that can’t find work. The Senate vote split 60 to 40 almost entirely along party lines, with only three Republican Senators voting with the majority. 

And even after the passage of the health care reform bill, the Right continues to talk of repealing it, crying “socialism”, even though it promises to save many more American lives each year than were lost in the  9/11 attack and in the ten years of war in the middle East combined.  

Why do conservatives not acknowledge these inconsistencies? Could it be that they do not seem inconsistent to them because their main concern is that cash be kept flowing to US corporations on whom they depend for contributions to their election campaigns, and to keep the return on their investments high? 

Are our “brave men and women” of the military highly regarded by the Right, not because they are protecting American citizens, but because they are protecting corporate “citizens” and the capitalist system that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer?

 Does the Right think that we should reject Social Security and Medicare as entitlement programs unworthy of our fierce individualism, and make everyone, regardless of age or health, “shift for him or herself”?  One wonders how soon should we begin the destruction of our system of national highways, the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration, and the closing down of FBI and CIA offices, as well as the unseating of Congress?  

If the only things we care about are foreign entanglements and acquiring more resources to serve “American Interests”, we might all die from disease or be killed by auto accidents and serial killers before we could enjoy any advantage from those national resources acquired at the cost of hundreds of thousands of military and civilian lives. 

The Right seems to believe that we should spend unstintingly to kill our enemies, but spend nothing at all to save Americans from death from disease or from an increasingly poor quality of life.

OK, maybe not all Republicans, and some Democrats can fit uncomfortably within the ranks of the unpatriotic and unchristian.  But Republican Congressmen and extreme right thinking Republicans do form an anti-govenment “column” within this country. And they do not hesitate to tell you so. Before the dissenting shouts get too loud and the placards too extreme, let me tell you my reasons for making that deliberately offensive assertion.

In the 1940s and ‘50s, the term “fifth column” was as popular as it was mysterious.  Senator Joe McCarthy made everyone familiar with the term with his House Unamerican Activities Investigations that ended in an investigation and national disenchantment with the Senator himself.

I found this explanation of the origin of the phrase in Wikepedia:

“From a 1936 radio address by Spanish Nationalist general Emilio Mola, in which he spoke of four of his army columns moving on Madrid and a fifth column consisting of his militant supporters within the capital, intent on undermining the Republican government from within.”

The reasons I say Republicans are anti-American are:

1. They opposed health care reform so that thousands of citizens would continue to die, in favor of wealthy health care insurance executives; they preferred the one strike and your out for those who had a “pre-existing condition”.

2. They were responsible for sending the majority this country’s well paying manufacturing jobs overseas in favor of wealthy corporations.

3. They   pursue wars overseas with thousands of military deaths rather than take care of citizens’ security needs here at home by preventinmg bridges from collapsing, and shootings in schools.

4. While they accuse Democrats of “tax and spend”, Republicans simply spend without taxing.thereby enlarging the U.S. deficit about which they then complain loudly and endlessly.

5. They scream bloody murder about our children and grandchildren being burdened with our deficits while refusing extended unemplyment benefits to workers who need the money to feed their liviing children.

The list goes on: Republicans like oil companies and other polluters better than workers who make their living from the oceans and waterways of our countrycalling consumer protection of these workers overburdening” and “holding hostage” poor corporations obliged to pay into “slush funds” for the “undeserving” workers.

Republicans are unchristian because:

1. They do not believe there’s anything good about being poor or poor in spirit;  the Republican mantra is “Greed is good”.

2.  They believe in peacemaking but ony after winning a bloody conflict in which thousands of America’s enemies have been “smitten, (killed that is) including thousands of their women and children.

3. When it comes to loving your enemies, they think that may relate to a neighbor who fails to return a borrowed tool, but as far as international enemies, we must smite them with “shock and awe”.

4. And when it comes to seeking what is right and just, that’s ok so long as you understand that the good old USA is nevernot right or unjust. If you want to be persecuted for seeking what is right and just, they’ll be glad to oblige with some pretty nifty persecutions of their own.

Meanwhile, like the Pharisees of old, the new right takes pride in being the last word in patriotism and Christian virtue.  Let’s see, didn’t someone say something like: “When facism comes to this country it will come draped in the Flag and carrying a cross”?  Could they have forseen “our friends” on the right!

JESUS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING(s). 

At the beginning of Advent last year, a friend of mine suggested that we lock all the doors of Christian churches the world over. His point as I understood it at the time was to communicate to attendees that Jesus was no longer to be found therein. In fact, it’s hard not to wonder whether Jesus has not been absent from Christian churches throughout most of history.  

The Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, convened not by bishops but by the emperor of the Roman Empire, Constantine, seemed to turn the Christian church away from the Way taught by Jesus and His confrontation with Rome and rather became co-opted by the Caesars and their power and wealth. The Nicene Creed, articulated by the council, became the oath for Constantine’s army to which formerly pacifist Christians were now conscripted. Things changed radically in the Christian message from that time on. Christians now prayed and fasted for Peace through victory in battle rather than for Peace through Justice and the charity that would assure that everyone – including all nations – had enough. 

The principle virtue of Hebrew scripture was distributive justice and it continued to be the principle virtue of Christians as the followers of Jesus as they worshipped in the temple.  So it also continued to be when the needs of the poor and sick became so heavy on the apostles that they decided that a separate ministry was needed to tend to those in need. Thus a group was constituted known as deacons or  servants, was established. 

Throughout the first and second centuries of Christianity there was no clear code of belief but there was a quite clear code of behavior and of service. Widows and orphans were particularly recognized as being in need because they had no means of obtaining the necessities of life, food, clothing, and shelter. The apostles and deacons continued to care for and heal the sick of body as well as proclaiming the Kingdom of God. Early Christians lived in communities and shared all things in common in order to make sure that everyone had enough. 

Long before the Council of Nicaea, followers of the Way knew what was expected of them as Christians. They knew very well that the principle virtue that defined them was love for one another. The chief sin against the Way was the sin of Injustice. Someone has said, “Justice is love’s minimum”. 

Thus Jesus command to love one another cannot be fulfilled without justice.  

Nor is there any catalog of intricate BELIEFS but simply the requirement that new followers of Jesus put into practice in their lives their debt of justice and love of God and one another. In other words they were asked not to commit to memory all of the beliefs of the Nicene Creed or of any other creed.  They were commanded rather to live their FAITH in Jesus as Lord and follow His Way. Focus seems not to have been on ORTHODOXY, but on ORTHOPRAXIS; kind of an early expression of walking the walk, not just talking the talk.   

All that changed with the legalization of Christianity under Constantine and the emphasis on a catalog of beliefs (ORTHODOXY) required of Christians by the Nicene Creed. One historian estimates that before the Council (and doubtless long after the council too) there were many distinct expressions of Christian belief, even as many as 150 by this historian’s estimate. The “herding cats” analogy comes to mind. The difference after Nicaea however was that one group now assumed authority to accuse and punish dissident groups of adhering to and teaching heresy. Scripture and Tradition tell us that Jesus came as Priest, Prophet, and King; He seems to have remained in Christian churches as Priest, mediating with the faithful their gift of their lives to the Father in the Eucharist, and as King of the Kingdom of God making the People of God members of God’s royal family. But Jesus as Prophet seems seldom to be found in Christian churches today. 

The creed that resulted from the Council of Nicaea is recited every Sunday in many if not most liturgical churches. It is repeated Sunday after Sunday, year after year as Christians continue to believe that if they die after being obedient to church authority and pure of sexual sin, they will enter the kingdom of heaven. Injustice in the stock market and hatred of sinners is A ok. If you believe that lying and dishonesty in dealings with one’s neighbors is wrong and the accumulation of great wealth while others die for lack of the necessities of life, are fundamentally wrong and sinful, then you would probably agree that Jesus as Prophet has left the buildings of contemporary Christian churches. 

Chesterton once said that even watered down Christianity was still hot enough to boil the world; No doubt some heat remains but it seems seldom used for much more than keeping itself warm.

Barack Obama may be one of the best communicators of this generation, but he is not living up to his own talents. In a year of disasters, communication failure doubles the disasters.

If, as he says, the monster spill was his highest priority from Day 1, he needed to communicate that from Day 1 – or at least Day 3 or 4. It took five weeks for him to tell the nation what he and his administration were doing. The result was visible in the press conference yesterday. He was on the defensive. He needed to be on the offensive – from early on. The choice is not doing or communicating. It is doing **and** communicating.

His narrative: This is a tough, unprecedented situation, but I’m in charge, and I’ve been very busy, in the Situation Room where I belong, not on TV. I’m fully competent. I’m a good policy wonk – ask me any question about details. I’m honest. I admit my few policy mistakes. I think about the details day and night. Don’t think I’m oblivious.

It’s defensive, trying to overcome criticism that should never have been allowed to accumulate. But worse, it’s weak when it needs to be strong.

The president did do the required minimum. He placed a moratorium on offshore drilling and cancelled oil leases in the Gulf and off Virginia. He appointed a commission to make safety recommendations. And he is reorganizing the Mining Management Service. All to the good, but…

Crises are opportunities. He has consistently missed them. Today was a grand opportunity to pull together the threads – BP and the spill, Massey and the mine disaster, Wall Street and the economic disaster, Anthem BlueCross and health care, the Arizona Immigration Law, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, even Afghanistan. The press threw him fastballs straight down the middle, and he hit dribblers every time.

It’s not that he said nothing to tie them together.  But there was no home run, no unifying narrative, no patriotic call to the nation on the full gamut of issues. Instead, there were only hints, suggestions, possible implications, notes of concern – as if he had been intimidated by the right-wing message machine.

And yet Obama, of all political leaders, could have done it, because he did before in his campaign.

The central idea is Empathy. Democracy is based on empathy, on people caring about one another and acting to the very best of their ability on that care, for their families, their communities, their nation, and the world. Government must also care and act on that care. Government’s job is to protect and empower its citizens.

That idea is what draws together all the threads. The bottom line for corporations (whether BP, Massey, Anthem or Goldman Sachs) is money, not empathy. The bottom line for those who hate (whether homophobes, the Arizona Legislature, or al Qaeda) is domination and oppression, not empathy.

Empathy, and acting on it effectively, is the main business of government. And Obama knows it in his heart.

Yet the right wing has intimidated Obama into dropping not just the word “empathy,” but the idea. Empathy is a positive deep connection with other people in general and with all living things, the ability to see and feel as they do.  The right wing, which shows little empathy, has confused empathy with a bleeding-heart sympathy for individuals, which they see as a weakness. And though Obama has repeatedly made the distinction clear, he has allowed the right wing to intimidate him into abandoning “the most important thing my mother taught me.” 

At the very end of the press’ questions, there was a hint of the campaign Obama.

…I think everybody understands that when we are fouling the Earth like this, it has concrete implications not just for this generation, but for future generations.

I grew up in Hawaii where the ocean is sacred. And when you see birds flying around with oil all over their feathers and turtles dying, that doesn’t just speak to the immediate economic consequences of this; this speaks to how are we caring for this incredible bounty that we have.

And so sometimes when I hear folks down in Louisiana expressing frustrations, I may not always think that they’re comments are fair; on the other hand, I probably think to myself, these are folks who grew up fishing in these wetlands and seeing this as an integral part of who they are – and to see that messed up in this fashion would be infuriating.

So the thing that the American people need to understand is that not a day goes by where the federal government is not constantly thinking about how do we make sure that we minimize the damage on this, we close this thing down, we review what happened to make sure that it does not happen again. And in that sense, there are analogies to what’s been happening in terms of in the financial markets and some of these other areas where big crises happen – it forces us to do some soul searching. And I think that’s important for all of us to do.

Here, at the very end, he allows the empathy and the moral vision to come out. Future generations, the sacredness of nature over the immediate economic consequences, caring for this incredible bounty that we have, identifying with folks who see fishing as part of who they are, analogies to what’s been happening in the financial markets, soul searching.

That should have – and could have – been the central narrative drawing all the threads together. The narrative about the daily competence and effort should have been in service of the central narrative of his administration. It should be, and can be, the central narrative of American democracy.

But to make it central and powerful would be confrontational. It would bring him head-to-head with right-wing ideology – empathy-free, self-interest maximizing, with disdain or even hatred for those seen as lesser beings. It is self-reinforcing:  a value-system that above all promotes that value-system itself. That is why right-wing Republicans always vote no to his proposals. Because to vote yes would strengthen an empathy-based moral system and weaken their own.

Because right-wing ideology takes precedence over empathy, there will be little or any real bipartisanship with those on the hard-core right.  The right is provoking confrontation. It cannot be avoided. The president should be confronting the right wing on all issues – not issue-by-issue as a policy wonk, but with the master moral narrative that makes sense of our country’s values.

Here’s what that would mean. The following “shoulds” are not mine. They follow naturally from President Obama’s own values as he articulated them is his 2008 campaign, and as they leaked out, largely unnoticed, during his press conference.

The president recognizes that financial reform requires dealing with systemic risk, which means not mere regulation, but restructuring the financial system to minimize, and if possible eliminate, systemic risk. Applying the analogy to oil spills, it would mean no more deep-water drilling because major systemic risks (”worst case scenarios”) cannot be eliminated when you drill starting a mile down where no human being can go and drill three miles deeper.

Like other large corporations, BP uses cost-benefit analysis to maximize profits. It is no surprise that, to save money, BP chose inferior materials in Deepwater Horizon, materials whose defects may well have caused the explosion. The use of cost-benefit analysis for a corporation’s benefit (and not the public’s) is a dangerous practice in many industries.  Cost-benefit analysis itself, used this way, should be considered as an important component of systemic risk by the President’s commission on safety.

The president should support the Cantwell-Collins CLEAR ACT, which will actually cut gasoline consumption radically by 2050 and carbon emissions by 80% by 2050, while stimulating the economy by providing significant financial dividends to all adult citizens, eliminating government imposition on business, and making those who profit from selling polluting fuel pay to clean it up and develop alternative energy. CLEAR is far superior to cap-and-trade alternatives.

The president should generalize from oil spills to coal mining, banning the blowing up of mountaintops and the fouling of streams, and imposing serious safety restrictions on all mining.

The president should review the covert operations imposed by the military and cancel those that are inconsistent with American values.

The president should order military leaders under his command to support the elimination of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

The president should ask the First Lady to sponsor a major government program to do research on and support empathetic parenting, along the lines of his 2008 Father’s Day speech.

And much more.  A great deal follows from a unified moral stance.

Empathy and the discipline to act effectively on it, when seen as the basis of democracy and American values, can be powerful. It can unify the major policies of the administration, and unify people of good will – and that is a majority of our citizens.  But only if the president communicates empathy effectively, and acts on it consistently.

Empathy Now!

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