I read a great article today from Joe Bageant about the decline of American Culture.  It’s mostly a rant about the illogical, self destructive choices we Americans make as a whole:

Doubting readers may consider America's health institutions, the insurance corporations, hospital chains, physicians' lobbies. Between them they have established a perfectly legal right to clip you and me for thousands of dollars at their own discretion. That we so rabidly defend their right to gouge us, given all the information available in the digital age, mystifies the world.

After reading it, I felt smugly comfortable and a little superior.  Then I remembered the Dunning–Kruger effect and came down.  Later, I figured that just knowing what the Dunning–Kruger effect is probably makes me truly above average.  However, in the end I got caught in a recursive loop and had the mental and emotional equivalent of a stack overflow and crashed.

Bageant summed up his article this way:

Some Americans believe we can collectively triumph over the monolith we presently fear and worship. Others believe the best we can do is to find the personal strength to endure and go forward on lonely inner plains of the self.

Doing either will take inner moral, spiritual and intellectual liberation. It all depends on where you choose to fight your battle. Or if you even choose to fight it. But one thing is certain. The only way out is in.

Maybe I’m on the right track after all.

America, why is that we had to “stay the course” for an eight year ride to bottom of an enormous recession but two years into an albeit very slow recovery we have to change horses in mid stream?

I’m not saying that you’re wrong.  I just want to understand.  It seems to me like a double standard, but maybe I’m missing something?

Is it unemployment?  In 2008, we lost an average of 317,250 private sector jobs per month. In 2010, we have gained an average of 95,888 private sector jobs per month. (Source) That's a difference of nearly five million jobs between Bush's last year in office and President Obama's second year.  Just today it was reported that 150K jobs were added in October. (See CNNMoney.com and Washington Monthly.)

Is it the deficit?  When Bill Clinton left office in 2001, the budgets for 2009-12 were expected to have an average surplus of almost $850 Billion.  When Bush came into office one of the first things he did was to cut taxes.  Unfortunately, because of this, there was not nearly enough tax revenue to pay for his agenda which included the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Medicare prescription drug coverage (socialized medicine).  This increased the deficit by $637 billion. 

The wall street bailout in 2008 which was signed by Bush and supported by President Obama added another $185 billion.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which Obama continues to fight but were started during the previous administration added another $232 billion.

The only additions to the deficit that were completely a product of the Obama administration are the $145 billion for the economic stimulus and another $56 billion for other programs.  That’s a total of $201 billion which is not extraordinary compared to some of the other deficit causing measures over the past 10 years mentioned above. (See The Atlantic)

Is it the stock market? On Bush's final day in office, the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 closed at 7,949, 1,440, and 805, respectively. Today, they are at 11,444, 2,579, and 1,226 which are the highest they’ve been in 2 years.  (See CNNMoney.com)

Is it healthcare?  Has any of the new healthcare law even gone into affect yet?  Well, yes, some provisions have taken affect. 

Insurance companies, for example, will be prohibited from canceling policies when customers get sick or from denying coverage to sick children. Some insurers have said they will stop selling policies exclusively for children rather than comply.

The law will allow parents to keep their adult children up to age 26 on their family plans, and will bar insurers from placing lifetime caps on how much they will pay when their customers get ill.

And many consumers will get new rights to appeal claims that are denied by insurers and win new access to preventive care without being asked for co-pays. (See LA Times)

Are these the provisions that people don’t like?  Has anybody been adversely affected by these provisions?

So, America, what is it?  What’s so bad that it just couldn’t wait?  Have the last two years really been all that different than the previous eight?  Never mind better or worse, have they really been different?   I want to know.  What is it that I’m missing?

I received another chain letter today.  This one was urging people to flood the ACLU offices with Christmas Cards because the ACLU is trying to “take God, Christmas or anything religious away from us.”

These kinds of things always get me going and I find it hard to just let them slide.  Chain letters like this one usually include an incredibly long list of email addresses and this one did not disappoint.   I sent the following to each and every one of the addresses on the list (BCC of course).

1. This has been circulating since 2003.  I would think that the ACLU has figured out how to deal with this by now.  See: http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/12/9/191515.shtml
   
   
2. The ACLU defends the rights of all Americans as enshrined in the constitution. However, because the ACLU is often better known for its work preventing the government from promoting and funding selected religious activities, it is sometimes wrongly assumed that the ACLU does not zealously defend the rights of all religious believers to practice their faith.  They work both sides of this issue always on the side of the people against the government.  If you think about it, it is probably better that there’s a group actively keeping the government out of religion.  Having the government involved in religion rarely ever results in anything good for people of any faith.  See: http://www.aclu.org/aclu-defense-religious-practice-and-expression
   
   
3. You might consider whether engaging in deliberate deception and attempting to sabotage an organization isn’t against what Christmas is supposed to be about.
   
   
4. It hasn’t always been a “Christmas” tree.  The practice of decorating evergreens dates back to pagan celebrations.  It was used by the Greeks in their worship of their god Adonia.  The Romans used evergreens in their celebration of Saturnalia and the ancient Germanic people, who are often credited with inventing the Christmas tree, decorated evergreens in their celebrations and worship of their god Woden.  Because the practice was so closely linked to so many pagan rituals, it was originally forbidden by the Church.  It wasn’t until the 16^th century that it was tolerated by the church.   See: http://landscaping.about.com/cs/winterlandscaping1/a/christmas_trees.htm and http://www.religioustolerance.org/xmas_tree.htm
   
   
5. When you send a mass mailing out, it is more polite to use BCC to protect the privacy of the recipients.  See: http://bccplease.com/ or http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/bcc-for-privacy.html

I received one of those political chain letters today.  You know, the kind that takes some article or another, totally misrepresents it and then urges people to “send this to everyone you know”.  These things circulate for years and do nothing other than piss people off.

The one I received this morning was about an article that appeared in the Washington Post in January of 2000.  Yeah, this thing has been making the rounds for almost 10 years.  I’m guessing that it hasn’t really been in active circulation for 10 years and that someone dug it up to prove some point about the current administration not doing enough for the troops and to get people worked up.

This is what passes for discourse today.  People dig up the most poorly written crap that they can find and throw it up as a straw man to be taken down.

I generally try to ignore these types of things, but there was something about this one that made me keep reading.  Perhaps I was in a bad mood this morning.  Whatever it was, I had to respond.  The following is what came out.  Perhaps in 10 years it will still be circulating.

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This started as a simple Facebook status , but for some reason, a Facebook status can only be 420 characters long.  My submission was 628 characters long and when that wasn’t accepted I was forced to move the whole thing here.

It all started with a few expressions of disappointment some friends made about Maine voters repealing a state law that would have allowed same-sex couples to marry. While I shared their disappointment, I was becoming increasingly offended by the descriptions of the repealed law that all included something similar to the description above about “allowing” or “permitting” same-sex couples to get married as if “we” all knew better and had decided that it was OK for “them”.  I found myself in a weird situation of being offended by a law that I had hoped would stand. 

Here is my original status message:

Why does same-sex marriage need to be legalized? Was mixed-sex marriage ever legalized? Was mixed-race marriage ever legalized? Trying to “make it legal” assumes that without legislation it is illegal. That's backwards.  It's ceding the right and then asking for it back. Freedom to marry, or not marry, resides with the individual and cannot be granted or infringed by the State. We need to insist on this and take down any laws that say otherwise.  We can't legalize marriage any more than we can legalize happiness.  It is one of our unalienable rights.  As unfortunate as the decision in Maine is, I think it's for the best.

The law legalizing same-sex marriage in Maine has been repealed, but I think it was a dangerous law to begin with.  It’s because laws can be repealed that something as important as marriage shouldn’t be legislated.  It opens up to debate that which should not be debated.  Rather than fighting for something that should already be, we need to defeat that which denies it.  Rather than passing laws that legalize same-sex marriage we need to rewrite or repeal laws that say it is illegal.  We need to challenge the people and institutions that stand in the way of what is already ours. 

So, while I’m disappointed that people in Maine have voted to deny rights to same-sex couples, I’m even more disappointed that they thought that this was something they could vote on in the first place. 

This American Life presents an excellent primer on the current economic crisis.  If you haven’t already listened to this episode of This American Life, listen to it right now!

 

From the show website:
The collapse of the banking system explained, in just 59 minutes. Our crack economics team—the guys who explained the mortgage crisis, Alex Blumberg and NPR’s Adam Davidson—are back to help all of us understand the news. For instance, when we talk about an insolvent bank, what does it actually mean, and why are we giving hundreds of billions of dollars to rich bankers who screwed up their own businesses? Also, two guys go to New Jersey to look at a toxic asset.

Link: This American Life # 375: Bad Bank

There seems to be three popular plans for dealing with the current economic situation. The plan coming from the right calls for lots of tax cuts. The idea is that the people who receive the tax cuts will use this savings to invest and these investments will spur business growth and this growth will create jobs and generally help the economy. It seems to me that the savings we are talking about is really money that people already have and that there's nothing preventing them from investing it right now. Also, let's assume that some people are reluctant to spend this money because they might need it to pay their enormous tax bills. If we lower those tax bills there is no guarantee that they will go out and spend that money. They could sit on it just like they are doing right now. Obviously, I am not a big fan of this plan, so I will leave it to others who do support it to explain it better.

The plan coming from the left calls for lots of government spending. The idea is that the government, instead of lowering taxes, takes the money it gets from taxes and spends it in all kinds of ways. I like this plan because it guarantees that the money is actually spent. Now there are good ways to spend money and there are bad ways to spend money. It seems to me that the government could very easily spend lots of money without creating very many jobs. However, that could easily be said about any investments made by those receiving tax cuts. In fact, as I've already noted, there's nothing preventing the recipients of the tax cuts from sitting on the money, or worse investing it in foreign business where it would create few if any jobs at home. By having the government spend the money directly, we have a chance to legislate how the money is spent. It seems to me that rather than arguing whether the government should spend money or arguing how much it should spend, the congress would be much more effective if they spent their time arguing about how to spend the money. They can argue over whether the money is spent on infrastructure or construction, or on education or energy independence, or anything else. Pick something. Pick them all for all I care, just get the money out there.

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