Capitalism: Neither God nor Satan

Arlie Russell Hochschild’s incisive book, Strangers in Their Own Land, portrays citizens in Louisiana caught between watching the industrialized devastation of their beloved state and their need for jobs. “It’s the sacrifice we make for capitalism,” one says.

Some of us see capitalism as some kind of god that we must serve. One may also worship socialism or money or government. In fact, all, it seems to me, are neutral, capable of either evil or good, depending on the type of allegiance we give them.

A saying of the early Christian missionary, Paul, is often quoted as “money is the root of all evil.” That is not what he said. He said “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil . . .” It’s the love of money (or capitalism or government or whatever) that is the problem.

Capitalism is neutral. It can be used for good: money from individuals pooled to form companies and create jobs. Or it can be used for evil: the extraction of maximum profit no matter what ecological or human damage it causes.

Government, I believe is similar. It is neither good nor evil in itself. Rightly used, government protects us from foreign enemies, crime, and economic predators. It can create programs that serve its citizens, like social security, in a way that private industry can’t.

Wrongly used, it can take from workers in order to give to the wealthy. Without adequate oversight, its resources can be wasted or riven with corruption.

Workers, needing jobs, tend to worship capitalism and hate government. Others, seeing only the tragedy of ecological devastation, tend to reverse their worship.

In fact, worship is a poor choice for either. Better is a watchful use of both.

The New Elites

We common people watch as the new government elites, those who won political power in 2016, battle among themselves.

Will the family clan, represented by Jared Kushner, win? Will they defeat the ultra conservatives, led by Steve Bannon? Or will Bannon’s group claim victory and bring down government as we have known it since our recovery from the 1930’s Great Depression?

Yet the battle over healthcare suggests an outside chance for ordinary Americans to influence outcomes. How will their interests fare in the looming battle over tax reform?

Will tax changes benefit mostly the wealthy, including the Trump family? Or will changes lead to the wealthy paying their fair share and taking some of the burden off working and middle class families?

Will popular government programs like social security, benefitting ordinary Americans, survive or will we continue our slide toward the inequality of the robber baron era?

Will tax breaks, sometimes used by big corporations to pay little or no taxes, continue to feed our deficit? Or will we ask for a level playing field for the small businesses that provide so many of our jobs?

In the 2016 election, voters supposedly defeated government elites. Now we will see if they can defeat business elites.

Short Term Thinking; Long Term Problems

Terrorism is an evil we can see and fear, unlike more insidious evils. After a terrorist attack, the media instantly portrays dead bodies and grieving families. We are angered, as we should be. We pass legislation for a strong military and sometimes send our armies to foreign countries to fight terrorists.

Other evils are harder to grasp because the results may not show up until years later: inferior schools or inadequate mental health facilities or lack of drug rehabilitation services.

Though most of us would say we believe in “good” schools, we don’t instantly see the damage to our country of a poorly educated work force.

Unless we have a mentally ill family member, we may think of mental illness only when we quickly pass by a troubled street person.

Throwing young drug offenders in prison is less costly than providing rehabilitation and job training for them—in the beginning.

What if we had not decided to invade Iraq after we were already involved in a war in Afghanistan? What if we had invested the money we spent for that war in schools and job training?

What if we had invested more in mass transit and less on securing oil fields in the unstable Middle East?

Going further back into our history, what if early settlers in Virginia had not decided to use slaves to work their tobacco fields? Suppose they had kept to small farms instead of large plantations?

We pay later for those easy choices, sometimes generations later.

I’ve Never Been Hungry . . .

The only time I’ve gone to bed hungry was when I was on a voluntary fast for medical or religious reasons. I’ve never wondered where my next meal was coming from.

I’ve always owned or rented housing with a warm, secure place to sleep.

Except for a few years in my early twenties, I’ve always had health insurance.

I’ve never been jobless, except voluntarily to raise my small children.

For these blessings, I can claim no special goodness or intelligence. I did not choose the parents who loved and nurtured me. I did not choose to live in a time when a college education was affordable for the average family or when most corporations provided health insurance and adequate salaries, and the government began a pension program for all its working citizens.

A society is fair and just only if every child has food, clothing, a secure place in which to grow up, health services, and proper education. Jobs should provide parents adequate salaries as well as the time to nurture their children.

Our religious and voluntary organizations encourage the sharing of blessings. The U.S. Constitution, also, in its preamble, makes the government a partner in these efforts. One of the reasons for our union is to “promote the general welfare.”

Our government is not a business run by a boss to gain material profits for a few owners. It exists for us all, not for a favored few.

Are Free Elections All We Need for Democracy? What Is Illiberal Democracy?

On April 16, Turkish voters gave Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, greatly increased powers. Observers believe Erdogan, already attacking dissent and the free press, will act to further erode civil rights in his country, even becoming something of a modern day sultan.

Turkey is a democracy, a Muslim majority nation located where the Middle East meets Europe. It is a member of NATO and thus allied militarily with the United States and other western nations.

The election in Turkey is the latest in a series of democracies moving to limit civil liberties, including Russia and Hungary.

Two decades ago, Fareed Zakaria wrote “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy” (Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 1997). At the time, U.S. embassies in the Middle East, where I was serving, championed free elections as an answer to many of the problems there.

Zakaria sounded a warning about the consequences of free elections without other safeguards. “It has been difficult to recognize this problem,” Zakaria wrote, “because for almost a century in the West, democracy has meant liberal democracy—a political system marked not only by free and fair elections, but also by the rule of law, a separation of powers, and the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property.”

Free elections alone, Zakaria pointed out, may produce dominance of one ethnic group, or the election of leaders from a single family corrupted by crime, or the suppression of free speech and religion.

Along with free elections, Zakaria said, we must include other measures such as a constitution granting protection to all, regardless of ethnic identity, religious preference, or other identifiers. A judiciary unconstrained by the need to be reelected every few years in partisan contests is also necessary.

Is the recent election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency a move toward illiberal democracy and the protection of favored groups? Or is it a correction, instead, toward a government that includes those left out of a changing economy and culture? Both?

Trump was the first Western leader to congratulate Erdogan. Most other western democracies were more restrained. Russia, however, also congratulated the Turkish leader.

Safe Places

What if girls and young women at risk of unwanted pregnancies found safe places to gather and grow? What if such places offered guidance often missing in dysfunctional families? What if they provided an alternative to all that advertising suggesting that a woman’s only concern is attracting a male?

If those at risk could gather in safe places, they might discover a more mature vision of their purpose. They might find practical help—with their homework, with ideas for careers, with the motivation to set goals for their lives.

Older women could tell stories about finding their place in life and their need for maturity before allowing males into their lives. They could model motherhood as a responsible choice.

Working with young women before an unwanted pregnancy might bring together both sides on the abortion issue.

Not Waiting on Washington (D.C., That Is)

According to our utility company, more of our local electricity is derived from solar energy. Some of it will be produced from a converted former Navy housing site that will sell this newer form of energy.

Still another solar farm is replacing coal-fired plants. It is reported to cover over 600 acres and is among the largest in the country. It will serve more than 17,000 homes.

Executive orders from the Trump administration have rolled back environmental regulations. At the local level, however, changes to less polluting forms of energy continue.

The administration has promised legislation to update our infrastructure and produce more jobs. Hopefully, whatever measures are passed will include support for jobs in the newer energy industries.

The two most populous countries in the world, China and India, are searching for solutions to unhealthy levels of pollution. Think of all those potential customers.

Death is Still Certain; Taxes—Who Knows?

The famous quote: “Nothing is certain except death and taxes” is attributed to Benjamin Franklin. Today taxes are still certain. It’s the kind of taxes and who pays them that appear up for grabs.

Few would disagree with the complaint in The Economist (April 1, 2017) that “the most striking thing about tax in America is its complexity.” Much of the complexity, the article suggests, is because of the number of tax breaks. The U.S. congress has passed multitudes over the years, many of which benefit the wealthy.

The chief source of income for the average American is the wage he or she earns for a job. One criticism of the U.S. tax system is that it tends to tax this kind of income rather than wealth. The wealthy can afford tax advice to take advantage of the myriad—and legal—tax breaks.

This is not to say that the wealthy should be criminalized. Many wealthy individuals donate to worthy causes and use their money to create jobs. However, if tax reform is to take place, it should result in less burden on the working and middle classes and a fairer share paid by the wealthy.

If the Trump administration found healthcare to be more complicated than expected, tax reform promises to be even more difficult. Like healthcare, tax reform should be fair to ordinary Americans. The U.S. deficit does not need to increase because more tax breaks are given to wealthy citizens.

You’re Not From Here, Are You?

As I shopped in a supermarket in my northwest U.S. community, a woman asked me where she might find a certain item. I gave her the information.

“You’re not from here, are you?” she responded.

I admitted my birth and rearing in Nashville, Tennessee. It doesn’t matter that I’ve lived all over the United States and in several foreign countries for decades. The accent remains.

I was reminded of my origins when I read an article in The New York Times, “The Passion of Southern Christians” (April 8, 2017) by Margaret Renkl.

One paragraph especially moved me, reading it as I did after returning from a church service a week before Easter. The service had reminded us of Jesus’ disciple, Peter, and his actions following the arrest of Jesus by the authorities.

Fearful of consequences if he was seen as a Jesus person, Peter denied all connection with him. One person thought Peter had to be a follower, though, because his Galilean accent betrayed him.

Renkl wrote: “I have a lot of sympathy for Peter these days. Here it is nearly Easter, and for the first time in my life I don’t want anyone to know I’m a believer. To many, ‘Christian’ has become synonymous with angry white voters in red hats, personally responsible for handcuffing all those mothers and wrenching them out of their sobbing children’s arms.”

Yes, I’m a Southerner, still following Jesus, the person I first learned about in a church in Nashville, Tennessee. So it’s not just my accent but my religious persuasion that may mark me as “not from here.”

Despite the accent and the religion, I didn’t vote for Trump. As Renkl writes, “Watching Christians put him in the White House has completely broken my heart.”

On the other hand, with Renkl, I believe in resurrection. The accent matters no more in the Christian faith than those early differences between Jew and Gentile.

Third Horseman of the Apocalypse

In the Christian Old Testament, seeking food for self and animals is often a part of the stories. Herdsmen like Abraham moved to find better pastures for their flocks. A famine in Israel sent Jacob and his large family fleeing into Egypt. Lack of rain in the time of the prophets led Elijah to a miraculous encounter with a poor widow.

Obviously, areas with less predictable rain, as in much of the Middle East and parts of Africa, are more likely to suffer famine than countries in temperate climates. Sometimes, however, famine is not caused by weather but by conflict.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who follow each other in the book of Revelation in the Christian New Testament, are sometimes depicted as conquest, war, famine, and death. The third horseman, famine, is not the result of weather but of conquest and war. It is human caused.

This kind of famine is afflicting millions of people in the countries of South Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen. In Sudan, they flee power struggles, often over oil revenues or ethnic rivalries. In Nigeria, people flee terrorism. Somalia’s looming famine is partly a problem with lack of rain but is increased by struggles with the terrorist group, al-Shabab.

Yemen, a country in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, suffers fallout from rivalry between Saudi Arabia and its arch enemy Iran. The two countries are supporting rival factions that are tearing the country apart. Terrorist groups also have made inroads, as they often do in areas of conflict.

Some relief is possible if food shipments can be unloaded in one of the ports. According to reports, Saudi Arabia has so far been unwilling to allow shipments to the people they are fighting.

The United States has supported Saudi Arabia in this struggle. If we are truly a compassionate nation, we will exert as much pressure as possible on Saudi Arabia not to use starvation as a weapon of war. Else, we will be collaborators in the resulting deaths.

Syria: No One Wants to Own It

A previous post “The Graveyard of Empires” pointed to the number of empires throughout history that bogged down after entry into the Middle East. But the Middle East continues to thrust itself onto the world’s stage, like some black pestilence.

Today, it’s the horrendous deaths in Syria apparently caused by a gas attack on civilians. Most nations are condemning the attacks, and especially Bashar al Assad’s rule there, abetted by Russia.

Perhaps things will change, but as of now, no one appears to know what to do to prevent future attacks. No one wants to own the problem.

Recent interventions to “fix” international problems have often made them worse. Unlike World War II, a powerful alliance working together seems nonexistent. Militarily, an immediate fix might tumble Assad, but where’s the will for another Marshall Plan? That effort, after World War II, used billions in aid, not for war, but to build the economies and governments of post war Europe.

The saying is: “If you break it, you fix it.” And no one wants to risk the cost of fixing Syria.

Laughing at Ourselves

One of the great strengths of a democracy is the freedom of its citizens to laugh at themselves.

Humor helps us cope in tough times. American comedians have recently noted the boost given to their profession by the current political upheavals.

Dictators may feel threatened by humor directed at them, but satire and political cartoons have been around since at least the 1700’s in both Great Britain and America. Television and the internet have increased the possibilities for humor. Humor releases tension and sometimes causes us to notice absurdities we didn’t see before.

Even presidents understand the need for humor to lighten the mood. President Lyndon Johnson once said, “If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: ‘President Can’t Swim.’”

Ronald Reagan is reported to have said, “I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency—even if I’m in a Cabinet meeting.”

From George W. Bush: “These stories about my intellectual capacity really get under my skin. You know, for a while I even thought my staff believed it. There on my schedule first thing every morning it said, ‘Intelligence Briefing.’”

Barack Obama: “There are few things in life harder to find and more important to keep than love. Well, love and a birth certificate.”

The White House correspondents’ dinner, begun in 1920, became an occasion for ribbing between the President and the reporters who covered him for the press. In 1924, Calvin Coolidge was the first president to attend. Since then, every president has attended at least one dinner during his time in office.

President Donald Trump refused to attend the first one of his tenure. Too bad he can’t recognize the value of humor, the cleansing humbleness of laughing at oneself.

They Don’t Want to Visit Us Anymore

The Week magazine, March 17, 2017, quoted The Guardian, a British newspaper, about the drop in British visitors to the United States: “Interest in travel to the U.S. has plummeted since President Trump’s inauguration. . . .”

According to the same article, the Global Business Travel Association “estimates the U.S. travel industry has lost $186 million in revenue so far because of Trump’s presidency.”

Citizens of the United Kingdom don’t require visas for temporary visits. If Britons are visiting the U.S. less frequently, think about those who must first go through the hassle of applying at a U.S. embassy or consulate for a visa to visit the country.

My work overseas for the U.S. State Department included processing visas for temporary visits. I dealt with endless lines of visa applicants. Perhaps my successors are less busy.

American tourism depends in part on global travelers paying money for hotels, meals, and recreational activities. Businesses depend on merchants from other countries buying our products. Universities depend on foreign students kicking in hefty fees to attend our schools. Without them, American students would pay even higher tuition costs.

Foreign citizens do not vote in our elections, but they can certainly vote, or refuse to vote, with their money.

Data Scrubbing Fears

Some librarians, civic groups, historians, and others have begun downloading federal websites for safekeeping, just in case the data on these sites disappears (The Seattle Times, March 12, 2017.)

They are alarmed by certain actions of the Trump administration regarding federal data. They include: removal of animal cruelty data from the website of the U.S. Department of Agriculture; suspension of a regulation protecting whistle blowers at the Department of Energy; more difficulty in accessing the log of visitors to the White House.

Do their fears echo George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty Four, in which all information is controlled by a Soviet style government?

Alex Howard is an official of the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks transparency in government. He was quoted in the article as saying that downloading by private citizens is done “because of the antipathy this president has shown toward government statistics and scientific knowledge.”

Government watchers are awaiting Trump’s appointment to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. This little-known agency guides federal policy on various aspects of information policy.

Data watchers wonder if this appointment will change or limit our access to government findings and information.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: Where Are You When We Need You?

Remember Mister Rogers? Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on public television? Sometimes we laughed a bit at this gentle character who so quietly entered our homes and talked about feelings and helped children deal with fear and anger.

“Look for the helpers. Look for the people who are helping” is a quote of his repeated often in recent times after murderous attacks on innocent people.

In 1969, Fred Rogers appeared before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications when President Nixon wanted to decrease funding for public television. Listen to his defense of continued funding so children might have access to quality programming.

How we need his calming, sure presence in these days of anger and incivility. Even the adults need help with proper expression of emotions.

Short Term Thinking Can Be Deadly

No doubt the new administration’s announcement of a hiring freeze for government employees is popular with many. It is to remain in effect, apparently, until the government workforce declines “sufficiently.”

I was recruited to be a Foreign Service Officer by the U.S. Department of State in 1990 after an earlier hiring freeze was lifted.

Part of my job in U.S. missions overseas was the processing of requests for temporary visas to visit the United States. Citizens of other countries apply by the millions to travel to the U.S. for tourism, business, and study as well as for more specialized interests like investment. After the hiring freeze, visa interviewers were understaffed.

During the summer of 2001, the visa section of the embassy in the country where I worked sometimes processed seven or eight hundred visas a day. Just two officers were available to interview and approve or reject their travel to the U.S. Obviously, they had minimal time for careful interviewing.

Around this time, nineteen young men received visas, the majority of them from the country where I worked, to study at flight schools in the United States. These young men later hijacked airliners and plowed them into the World Trade towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. Another crashed in Pennsylvania due to heroic actions of passengers on the plane.

Hurried processing may have contributed to those visas, though other factors certainly played a part. Anyone not closely associated with visa processing has difficulty understanding the toll exacted by too few workers for the jobs assigned.

The same is true for many government agencies that protect us at home as well as overseas. Sometime deadly results only show up years later.

I suppose the country saved money from fewer government employees that summer of 2001, though.

So What’s Wrong with Doubt?

In a thought provoking article, Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times, spoke with a Christian pastor, Timothy Keller: ( “Am I a Christian, Pastor Timothy Keller?” December 23, 2016).

Keller makes the argument that faith and skepticism are not necessarily opposites. Reasoning can, and probably should be, a part of faith. He also answers in the affirmative that he and most people of faith struggle with doubt at times.

Keller says, “Neither statement—‘There is no supernatural reality beyond this world’ and ‘There is a transcendent reality beyond this material world’—can be proved empirically, nor is either self-evident to most people. So they both entail faith.”

Useless wars, religious and otherwise, have been fought between groups, each certain of their reasons for killing the other. The author Ron Hansen was quoted as saying, “the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty.”

Mystics, whom we hold to be especially close to God, have nevertheless spoken of a “dark night of the soul,” a moment of despair that they must work through.

According to the Christian New Testament, even Jesus prayed, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” when he was suffering crucifixion.

Faith that is tested can be a stronger faith for that testing.

Don’t Drink the Water

In several less developed countries where I lived overseas, we had water systems of our own, not trusting the local supply.

In another place, I would wake in the night and hear the guards making their nightly checks of our yard and gates. In other countries, we lived in guarded compounds.

On the other hand, when we lived in Canada, we lived in an apartment of our choosing, with no extra security. We drank water from the tap.

What causes the difference between the two types of nations?

In too many developing countries, corruption means bribes must be paid for getting anything done. Infrastructure is poor or non-existent, schools are inadequate or not available for the majority of children, the water is contaminated, and armed thugs threaten the general population. Sometimes the armed thugs are the police.

Back in my own country, I don’t have private security. I depend on the local police and/or public emergency vehicles to arrive after an accident, acute illness, or possible crime. I drink the local water. When my children were growing up, I sent them to public schools.

I have never minded paying adequate taxes for these public services. Yet taxes often have a bad name. A campaign promise to never raise taxes or even to cut them is often used to secure votes.

Lately, parents in some states have brought suit in courts to require more adequate funding of public schools. Mental health services are proving woefully inadequate. Bridges need to be repaired. Yet, legislators are elected on promises never to raise taxes.

Meanwhile, some of the wealthy pay little or no taxes. We are told we must bribe them with more tax cuts in order to keep our jobs.

We get what we pay for, including the regulations that protect us with oversight of government functions. We can choose not to pay for adequate health services, drug treatment programs, quality education, clean water, infrastructure, and regulations to protect us from wealthy cabals.

Or, we can go the way of those countries with private security forces, crumbling roads, contaminated water, and healthcare and education only for the wealthy.

How to Stage a Coup in a Democracy

First, if a majority of people did not vote for you, proclaim that the election was tainted. Add that millions of those who voted against you were not Americans but illegal immigrants. Against all evidence, continue to make this claim

Second, if some media reporting is critical of you, angrily denounce these critics as the opposition, or even that the free press is the enemy of the American people.

Third, if reports are leaked that a foreign power may have interfered in the election that put you in office, deflect attention from these reports. Loudly state, showing no evidence, that the past president ordered illegal wire taps. Order your administration to continue to push your accusation, throwing as much sand as possible into a clear investigation of possible foreign meddling.

Fourth, turn citizens’ healthy skepticism of government into hatred. Proclaim often that government is the enemy. Appoint amateurs into positions of leadership, declare a hiring freeze, and starve the government of funds, assuring lack of expertise when crises arise.

Coups do not necessarily require troops marching in the streets. Small groups can so manipulate emotions by sound byte slogans and angry rhetoric that the electorate begins to believe them. It they succeed, they will prove the old adage that a lie repeated often enough will be believed.

Waiting for the Good Guys to Win

The biography Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill, by Sonia Purnell, reminds us of Britain’s dark times in early World War II, when the country stood alone against Hitler’s might.

The book lists the number of European countries fallen under Nazi control at that time. France, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and Holland had been swept into the Nazi vortex. Now Britain was to be the next victim.

The author recounts a day in September, 1940, when Clementine and Winston visited the operations center for the British air force. They watched as the command sent up squadrons to counter wave after wave of the German Luftwaffe.

At one point, Winston asked, “How many more planes have you?”

The commander replied, “I am putting in my last.”

Yet, this small force somehow—God only know how—repelled the much stronger enemy.

England was never invaded, and the entry of the United States into the war following the bombing of Pearl Harbor slowly changed the tide.

This reminder of a time when the forces of evil should have won and didn’t offers comfort in this time of moral turmoil. Sometimes the good guys do win.