Life isn’t sunny without money
Body and soul separate too soon
We’ve learned there is no Easter Bunny
You must work hard and cannot swoon
Yet, to inherit the earth, you must first die
So test your freedoms as you fly
You have so little choice
And so I say: Rejoice
Especially you women
Take the day off to go swimmin’
As the GOP commits to fight for freedom, you may begin to ask for whom? Surely, there is no freedom for women to control their own bodies as now a couple dozen “conservative” states are enacting laws that mandate that women asking for an abortion undergo a forced sonogram as a way to shame them. Even if the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest, this denial of 4th amendment rights will be done by state functionaries with the cost to be borne by the woman despite the fact that she gets no medical benefit from the intrusion. Wisconsin, that last year slashed the rights of unions to negotiate, has also declared that women have no right to equal pay for equal work with the bill just signed by Scott Walker. That puts a consistent and official face on Republican policy no matter their utterings.
Several states controlled by Republican legislatures and governors are moving rapidly to tear rights away from women. While the given rationale is to enhance Christian morality, the consistent outcome is to reduce the power of women in our democratic society. Recent presidential candidate Rick Santorum, or “Sanitarium” as some of his Southern supporters call him, has said that he wants to “throw up” when he hears JFK talk about separation of Church and State. He sees this as a rejection of the concept of getting our basic rights from God. There is an almost delicious irony that it is exactly his theme that rights given by states can be taken by states that is being executed by right wing state governments across this great republic. No serious voter would have imagined that law settled in the1950s that guaranteed women the right to contraceptives would be threatened in 2012. Surely nobody imagined that the democratic process of voting for representatives would be shelved in favor of autocratic rule by unelected petty/party czars as now in Michigan. Of all the threats to democracy, I cannot imagine one worse than that now thriving in Michigan. In that state, controlled by an ultra-conservative majority, the governor has absolute authority to disenfranchise legally elected representatives and replace them with highly paid czars who report only to the governor and not to the people. Governor Snyder has, in fact, appointed single authorities to replace the governments of Benton Harbor, Flint, Highland Park, Ecorse, Pontiac and Hamtramck as well as several school districts. In other words, the governor has the power to void the elections of any Michigan political entity and supplant the elected with his appointment. If that sounds totalitarian, and it does, it has been executed in a totalitarian manner as well by violation of the Michigan rule that laws not specifically endorsed by 2/3 of the state legislature cannot be immediately put into effect. The second aberration has been fulfilled in the state legislature where the majority has not allowed a count to prove/disprove that 2/3 voted to support “immediate effect.” No Democrats have voted to support the aberration and video shows Democrats trying to get that count and being rejected by the Majority Speaker. It is a putsch in America.
Surely, Michigan is not the first state to experience money issues or even to have elected politicians who cannot immediately solve a financial crisis. In other states, a receiver has been appointed, often by a court, to guide elected politicians and even manage money. I have known where a receiver was required to sign city checks over a given amount, say $5,000. This is the very first time that I have known of a complete takeover by a governor with the abrogation of duly elected officials. Further, the local czars appointed by Governor Snyder can dispose of city property by selling it to friends or otherwise deprive the city of property/revenue without review. Those are dictatorial powers, not compatible with democracy. Another unique aspect of this dictatorship is that only minority cities and towns were grabbed. This alone poses a threat of creating a permanent underclass of minorities in Michigan. Women have long been subject to deprivation by systems that pay men more for equal work and by systems that block access to women’s healthcare such as that offered by Planned Parenthood. Mittens Romney, when asked by a woman how she could get healthcare if Planned Parenthood were eliminated callously remarked that she “was free to seek the healthcare anywhere,” as if she had the money to do so. Please tell me how a woman who is so resource poor that she depends upon Planned Parenthood for her healthcare can possibly shop for healthcare. This is an insidious sentence to permanent poverty because the woman will be denied healthcare and accelerated in her cycle of poverty. Contraceptives may be available for women with money to pay for them, but poor women simply are not able. The poverty cycle gets boosted by unwanted pregnancies. Women susceptible to complicated gynecological issues need special and expensive contraceptives. Otherwise, they are unable to get meaningful and fairly compensated work. So we have a concentrated effort by the right wing that now controls the GOP to worsen the status quo for women and minorities. Combine this with a tax code that favors the wealthy and demands no sacrifice from them and we begin to see the concrete harden for an ever more permanent underclass.
Historically, we once saw men and women, especially women, lift themselves by their bootstraps with two major components being available to them. We actually had 1) a safety net in healthcare and aid for food subsistence as well as 2) an affordable secondary education system. By using the circular argument that women have no right to equal pay (Wisconsin, 2012 despite Lilly Ledbetter Act) because they may have to leave the workplace due to unwanted pregnancies or health issues and then denying women cheap healthcare and contraception, we have denied them equal access to the workplace. Policies that support outrageously high secondary education costs, seal off the last remaining exit from poverty. So the cycle of the illogical is completed. Women are not entitled to equal pay for equal work because they may not become qualified in the workplace, and our policies will ensure that the women cannot become qualified. While some may see a religious message in all that, I see an economic message. Across this nation, women are being told that the Viagra so needed to enable men to get them pregnant is economically justified, but contraception is not economically justified. Everybody knows that preventive healthcare is about 90% cheaper than emergency room visits or pregnancies. Is the motive for this policy religion or economics? Have women become too competitive for us men in the workplace? Women and minorities suffered most from the 2007 recession. Is it best to write them off as a permanent underclass? When we do hire them (women and minorities), we can pay them less, thus achieving greater competitive power and allowing even higher profits for the real people: “Corporations are people, my friend.” (Mitt Romney, August 11, 2011, Iowa State Fair).
As we continue to lower the cost of labor and compete for the lowest available markets, we need fewer educated people and can return to the good old days of Charles Dickens. The wealthy will protect us and our children by putting us all to work for less. “God Bless us, every one.”
We have an election coming and we need to see what has happened to our nation through the current redistribution of wealth from the have littles to the have lots through corporate welfare/socialism and tax systems that reward wealth (Romney pays less that 15%?) We must take on that mission with as much determination as we have to stop the reverse. Real tax rates are the lowest they have been in more than 50 years and wealth inequity charts demonstrate that we are out of balance. Did we learn that trickle down does not work? The Bush tax cuts have been operating for more than 10 years. Has that helped anybody in the middle or lower classes climb the economic ladder?
Summer will soon be upon us. It is nearly time to go swimming, but keep your eyes peeled for the sharks out there. They will have a feeding frenzy at election time. The chum is in the water.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
14 April 2012
Showing posts with label Conservatism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conservatism. Show all posts
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Conservative Morality
We have seen in grim detail recently just what the Republican program for “solving” our deficit problem is going to entail when Representative Paul Ryan (now Chair of the House Budget Committee) presented his plan for cutting nearly $6 trillion from the deficit. It involved big cuts in spending for social programs—especially Medicare and Medicaid—and NO raising of taxes, especially on the rich. The bitter pill prescribed by the Republicans, in brief, puts the onus of sacrifice on the poorest, most helpless of our citizens in order that the wealthiest, most powerful can avoid sacrifice altogether and continue to thrive beyond all imagining. The House passed this plan April 15 on a strictly party-line vote, nearly all Republicans voting for it, and all Democrats opposing it.
What we have come to in this country, then, is a situation where a major party makes little attempt to hide its callousness toward the poor and weak and its devotion to the strong and rich. Oh, Republicans prate on about the “great crisis” of growing deficits, but their emphasis is on the unsustainability of the “social handouts” instituted by Democrats: Social Security, Medicare, and other attempts to mitigate the suffering of the least among us.
What I keep wondering is what kind of people could adopt programs and policies of this kind. Who could be so heartless as to essentially thumb their noses at the vast majority of human beings on this planet (see also Republican-led House vote April 7 to kill EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases and the science they’re based on)? A recent book by Sam Harris (The Moral Landscape) may offer a few answers. It is not that Harris’ book proposes any kind of socially conscious program. It is that in reviewing neuroscientific and psychological research on the possible cognitive bases for morality, Harris cites studies that are quite revealing indeed about such subjects as psychopathology, religion, belief, and the human capacity for empathy.
Begin with a series of studies by the psychologist Paul Slovic, especially concerning our capacity to reason morally about suffering. What Slovic has found is that humans seem to have an innate mechanism that predisposes most of us to show concern when a single, identifiable human life is threatened, but to decrease our concern almost to indifference when more lives are involved. In other words, there is a “psychic numbing” that sets in as the number of victims of any kind of disaster rises. Instead of being MORE concerned the more people are affected by an earthquake, say, our concern grows progressively less as the death toll rises. This is revealed in donations: people give generously when they are shown a single child suffering; but with two children, the donations drop, while, as more children are shown suffering, the donations (and compassion) grow progressively less. There’s even a name for this: the “identifiable victim effect.” What I wonder is if Republicans/conservatives operate in a more exaggerated way than others in this regard. They pride themselves on being very compassionate to their own. But when it’s thousands or millions of inner city kids who are starving, or millions of homeless who have fallen on hard times, or many millions of seniors who depend on the pittance they derive from social security or medicare, Republican compassion disappears. Let them eat cake.
Such focus on the concern (or lack of it) for the suffering of others brings to the fore another area of research, the study of psychopathology. Psychopaths (and we seem to have had some great examples in high office recently) are characterized by able intelligence and even “sanity” (they understand the difference between right and wrong), but a kind of deficit in their ability to feel compassion for the pain or suffering of others. Many violent criminals are categorized as psychopaths: they simply seem unable to feel anything for their victims. Neuroimaging work now suggests that psychopathy is
…a product of pathological arousal and reward. People scoring high on the psychopathic personality inventory show abnormally high activity in the reward regions of their brain (in particular, the nucleus accumbens) in response to amphetamine and while anticipating monetary gains. (p. 98)
Researchers speculate that since psychopaths respond excessively to anticipated rewards (I’m gonna get rich!), their ability to learn from the negative emotions of others is correspondingly reduced or blocked. In fact, in tests asking psychopaths to identify the mental states of other people from photographs, psychopaths do as well as others except in one area: they seem “unable to recognize expressions of fear and sadness in others.” This failure in emotional learning (a human trait crucial to socialization that is shared even by our primate relatives) seems to be one key to psychopathy: neuroscientists believe that impairments in the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex are associated with the emotional failure. Thus blind to the suffering he causes, the psychopath keeps reinforcing his callousness and cruelty, and simply never learns to care about others. While no one would say that all Republicans or conservatives are psychopaths, surely we can see that their apparent failure in empathy (or perhaps their reduced “circle of empathy”—i.e. limited to only those with whom they have close relations) resembles in alarming ways the indifference to human suffering exhibited by the psychopathic personality.
Finally, we see that Republicans/conservatives often tend to be those who demand open, public fealty to religious belief, more specifically, belief in the literal Christian dictates of the Bible (“57% of Americans think one must believe in God to have good values and to be moral, and 69% want a president guided by strong religious belief”). Their demands to end abortion (Rick Santorum recently made a speech in which he attributed the allegedly failing Social Security system to a high abortion rate—so many children not born means too few contributing to Social Security income!), and to make religion more prominent in public forums, schools, and social legislation, are but a few examples of this mania. Harris is very hard on the effects this has for American public life and for morality in general. For if, as Harris maintains, morality can be understood as fostering the well-being of the highest number in any population (rather than with how many profess belief in God), the United States falls far short of other developed nations. Though the U.S. scores extremely high on the religiosity scale, it scores far lower than many allegedly atheistic nations on the well-being/equality scale. As Harris writes, “In addition to being the most religious of developed nations, the United States also has the greatest economic inequality.” By contrast, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands, among the most atheistic societies on the planet, all do better on measures of well-being like life expectancy, infant mortality, crime, literacy, GDP, child welfare, education, political stability, charity to poorer nations, and so on. As the capper to this critique, Harris cites a 2010 study (Hall, Matz, and Wood, “Why don’t we practice what we preach?” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(1) indicating that American religious commitment is “highly correlated with racism” (146). If this isn’t strong enough, Harris also cites a recent Baltimore court case in which a small Christian group (One Mind Ministries) was accused of murdering an 18-month-old infant, Javon Thompson. His sin: he stopped saying “Amen” before breakfast, an act considered rebellious by the group’s leader, Queen Antoinette. His punishment: being deprived of all food and water for days. The mother agreed to help the prosecution indict the others on condition that all charges against them would be dropped if her dead child was resurrected. Though the group carried the corpse with them for some time, the resurrection has yet to take place. (Dan Morse, “Plea deal includes resurrection clause,” Washington Post, March 31, 2009.)
Harris does not contend that religious training and/or belief trains people in murder or racism. He does suggest that ignorance and such beliefs go hand in hand, as indicated by these statistics: “42% of Americans believe that life has existed in its present form since the beginning of the world” (149). This is tantamount to saying that evolution, as confirmed by virtually all scientists, simply does not exist. Another 78% believe that the Bible is actually the word of God, while 79% of Christians believe that Jesus will “physically return to the earth.” The point is clear: If so many Americans believe in such “truths,” how can anyone expect them to be able to discern truth from falsehood, or right from wrong in any arena whatever? How can they be expected to understand or exhibit compassion towards all the “unbelievers” out there—including the billions who will be most affected by global warming? How can anyone expect them to care in the least for those homeless “sinners” on our streets who have “failed” to provide for themselves?
When I contemplate the fact that much of this nation has fallen into the hands of such fanatics and incipient psychopaths, I have to tell you, it is very hard not to despair.
Lawrence DiStasi
What we have come to in this country, then, is a situation where a major party makes little attempt to hide its callousness toward the poor and weak and its devotion to the strong and rich. Oh, Republicans prate on about the “great crisis” of growing deficits, but their emphasis is on the unsustainability of the “social handouts” instituted by Democrats: Social Security, Medicare, and other attempts to mitigate the suffering of the least among us.
What I keep wondering is what kind of people could adopt programs and policies of this kind. Who could be so heartless as to essentially thumb their noses at the vast majority of human beings on this planet (see also Republican-led House vote April 7 to kill EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases and the science they’re based on)? A recent book by Sam Harris (The Moral Landscape) may offer a few answers. It is not that Harris’ book proposes any kind of socially conscious program. It is that in reviewing neuroscientific and psychological research on the possible cognitive bases for morality, Harris cites studies that are quite revealing indeed about such subjects as psychopathology, religion, belief, and the human capacity for empathy.
Begin with a series of studies by the psychologist Paul Slovic, especially concerning our capacity to reason morally about suffering. What Slovic has found is that humans seem to have an innate mechanism that predisposes most of us to show concern when a single, identifiable human life is threatened, but to decrease our concern almost to indifference when more lives are involved. In other words, there is a “psychic numbing” that sets in as the number of victims of any kind of disaster rises. Instead of being MORE concerned the more people are affected by an earthquake, say, our concern grows progressively less as the death toll rises. This is revealed in donations: people give generously when they are shown a single child suffering; but with two children, the donations drop, while, as more children are shown suffering, the donations (and compassion) grow progressively less. There’s even a name for this: the “identifiable victim effect.” What I wonder is if Republicans/conservatives operate in a more exaggerated way than others in this regard. They pride themselves on being very compassionate to their own. But when it’s thousands or millions of inner city kids who are starving, or millions of homeless who have fallen on hard times, or many millions of seniors who depend on the pittance they derive from social security or medicare, Republican compassion disappears. Let them eat cake.
Such focus on the concern (or lack of it) for the suffering of others brings to the fore another area of research, the study of psychopathology. Psychopaths (and we seem to have had some great examples in high office recently) are characterized by able intelligence and even “sanity” (they understand the difference between right and wrong), but a kind of deficit in their ability to feel compassion for the pain or suffering of others. Many violent criminals are categorized as psychopaths: they simply seem unable to feel anything for their victims. Neuroimaging work now suggests that psychopathy is
…a product of pathological arousal and reward. People scoring high on the psychopathic personality inventory show abnormally high activity in the reward regions of their brain (in particular, the nucleus accumbens) in response to amphetamine and while anticipating monetary gains. (p. 98)
Researchers speculate that since psychopaths respond excessively to anticipated rewards (I’m gonna get rich!), their ability to learn from the negative emotions of others is correspondingly reduced or blocked. In fact, in tests asking psychopaths to identify the mental states of other people from photographs, psychopaths do as well as others except in one area: they seem “unable to recognize expressions of fear and sadness in others.” This failure in emotional learning (a human trait crucial to socialization that is shared even by our primate relatives) seems to be one key to psychopathy: neuroscientists believe that impairments in the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex are associated with the emotional failure. Thus blind to the suffering he causes, the psychopath keeps reinforcing his callousness and cruelty, and simply never learns to care about others. While no one would say that all Republicans or conservatives are psychopaths, surely we can see that their apparent failure in empathy (or perhaps their reduced “circle of empathy”—i.e. limited to only those with whom they have close relations) resembles in alarming ways the indifference to human suffering exhibited by the psychopathic personality.
Finally, we see that Republicans/conservatives often tend to be those who demand open, public fealty to religious belief, more specifically, belief in the literal Christian dictates of the Bible (“57% of Americans think one must believe in God to have good values and to be moral, and 69% want a president guided by strong religious belief”). Their demands to end abortion (Rick Santorum recently made a speech in which he attributed the allegedly failing Social Security system to a high abortion rate—so many children not born means too few contributing to Social Security income!), and to make religion more prominent in public forums, schools, and social legislation, are but a few examples of this mania. Harris is very hard on the effects this has for American public life and for morality in general. For if, as Harris maintains, morality can be understood as fostering the well-being of the highest number in any population (rather than with how many profess belief in God), the United States falls far short of other developed nations. Though the U.S. scores extremely high on the religiosity scale, it scores far lower than many allegedly atheistic nations on the well-being/equality scale. As Harris writes, “In addition to being the most religious of developed nations, the United States also has the greatest economic inequality.” By contrast, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands, among the most atheistic societies on the planet, all do better on measures of well-being like life expectancy, infant mortality, crime, literacy, GDP, child welfare, education, political stability, charity to poorer nations, and so on. As the capper to this critique, Harris cites a 2010 study (Hall, Matz, and Wood, “Why don’t we practice what we preach?” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(1) indicating that American religious commitment is “highly correlated with racism” (146). If this isn’t strong enough, Harris also cites a recent Baltimore court case in which a small Christian group (One Mind Ministries) was accused of murdering an 18-month-old infant, Javon Thompson. His sin: he stopped saying “Amen” before breakfast, an act considered rebellious by the group’s leader, Queen Antoinette. His punishment: being deprived of all food and water for days. The mother agreed to help the prosecution indict the others on condition that all charges against them would be dropped if her dead child was resurrected. Though the group carried the corpse with them for some time, the resurrection has yet to take place. (Dan Morse, “Plea deal includes resurrection clause,” Washington Post, March 31, 2009.)
Harris does not contend that religious training and/or belief trains people in murder or racism. He does suggest that ignorance and such beliefs go hand in hand, as indicated by these statistics: “42% of Americans believe that life has existed in its present form since the beginning of the world” (149). This is tantamount to saying that evolution, as confirmed by virtually all scientists, simply does not exist. Another 78% believe that the Bible is actually the word of God, while 79% of Christians believe that Jesus will “physically return to the earth.” The point is clear: If so many Americans believe in such “truths,” how can anyone expect them to be able to discern truth from falsehood, or right from wrong in any arena whatever? How can they be expected to understand or exhibit compassion towards all the “unbelievers” out there—including the billions who will be most affected by global warming? How can anyone expect them to care in the least for those homeless “sinners” on our streets who have “failed” to provide for themselves?
When I contemplate the fact that much of this nation has fallen into the hands of such fanatics and incipient psychopaths, I have to tell you, it is very hard not to despair.
Lawrence DiStasi
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