On the Legal System and Capital Punishment

Yesterday I posted an essay on Christianity and capital punishment.  That post is written from my perspective as a Christian, indeed as a professional Christian, one trained and ordained in the Christian ministry.  But for many years before I became an ordained Christian pastor I was a lawyer.  I didn't practice criminal law, but I tried many civil cases and experienced the workings of the American judicial system from the inside in the context of personal injury and professional liability cases.  I certainly don't have as much experience trying cases to juries as many lawyers do, but I have a lot of such experience.  Putting aside for the moment, and for purposes of argument only, the foundational moral objection to capital punishment that I expressed in yesterday's post, today I want to explain how I do not see how anyone with any experience at all with the American legal system can support capital punishment.  I do not see how anyone with any experience at all with the American legal system can support capital punishment because the undeniable truth is that courts get it wrong.

Two fundamental truths about the legal system lead to the conclusion that courts get it wrong and cannot guarantee infallible results.  The first is that in a trial the court's primary concern is not with a proper outcome, that is, not with a verdict that accurately reflects what actually happened in the matter before the court.  The court's concern is with the proper functioning of the system, not with the result.  The legal system defines justice not as a result that reflects what actually happened but as a result, whatever it may be, arrived at through the proper functioning of the legal system.  In the legal system justice isn't about guilt or innocence.  It is about due process.  The court's concern is that the procedures established for the conduct of cases be correctly understood and applied.  The court's concern is that the parties, in a criminal case the defendant in particular, receive due process.  Due process doesn't mean that any particular result be reached.  It means that the defendants right established by law are respected.  It means that the law is properly interpreted and applied.  This concern once lead some of the conservative justices on the US Supreme Court to say that factual innocence is not a reason to grant habeas corpus relief to a defendant sentenced to death.  Some justices said that the execution of an innocent person is a constitutionally unacceptable result, but the statement by the conservatives that the court's concern is not innocence or guilt but the proper working of the system reflects, albeit perhaps in extreme form, a fundamental truth about our legal system.  In that system justice is not primarily about factual truth.  It is about process.  Thus, it is quite possible for the system to accept the execution of an innocent person, as the system in Georgia may have done last night.  It's concern is not primarily guilt or innocence in any objective sense.  It is the proper functioning of the system.  The legal system in fact defines justice as the proper working of the system.

The second truth about the legal system that results in results that are simply wrong is that juries get it wrong.  They don't always get it wrong.  They may not get it wrong most of the time, but they get it wrong often enough.  I was once told by a very experienced trial lawyer that you can't call yourself a real trial lawyer until you've won a case you should have lost and lost a case you should have won.  Anyone who has tried more than a handful of cases has had that experience of winning cases that should have been lost and losing cases that should have been won.  I certainly have, especially perhaps in my case the experience of losing cases I should have won.  Juries get it wrong.  They misunderstand the evidence.  They misunderstand the law that the judge gives them.  They are swayed by emotional arguments.  They are swayed by passion and prejudice.  This is not particularly to condemn the citizens who serve on juries or to say that they are flawed human beings.  It is only to say that they are human beings.  They are human beings who are trained neither in the law nor in the psychological dynamics at work whenever another human being gives testimony in court.  I often had the sense that jurors--and sometimes judges and attorneys for that matter--check their common sense at the courthouse door.  The atmosphere of a trial is so artificial and so foreign to most jurors that it is easy to start thinking and evaluating people and facts in ways that are different from the way we think and evaluate matters in everyday life.  For all of these reasons, and I suppose for many others besides, jurors get it wrong.  I am convinced that any trial lawyer who claims that juries always get it right is simply deluding herself.

In the kinds of cases I tried the court's lack of concern with determining what actually happened in a case and the juries getting it wrong had no truly catastrophic consequences.  Most of those cases were only about money, and none of them was about life and death.  Perhaps a defendant had to pay money he shouldn't have had to pay; but in most of my cases that meant an insurance company had to pay, so the result was hardly disastrous.  Maybe an injured person didn't get money she was entitled to, but still we're only talking about money.  We were never talking about a person losing his or her life.

In capital cases of course we are talking precisely about a person losing his or her life.  In that context the fact that juries get it wrong even when all of the proper legal procedures are followed is simply intolerable.  An execution can't be undone.  No one other than perhaps a conservative judicial extremist like the conservatives on the US Supreme Court, can accept the execution of an innocent person even if they can accept the execution of an guilty one.  Our legal system, no legal system, can guarantee that it's results are always correct.  I therefore fail to see how our legal system, how any legal system, can tolerate capital punishment.

Most Americans say murderers should be executed, but most Americans are unaware of the difficulties and uncertainties involved in every case of trying to determine if a defendant is truly a murderer or not.  They are unaware of the nature of the legal system and its concern with process over substance.  Those of us who have worked in the legal system, even if we've never come close to a capital case, know what the public does not know.  In the legal system there simply is no absolute safeguard against wrong results.

There's a famous story about how new law school students so often come to law school saying they are going to go out into the world and work for justice and how some crusty old law professor will say to them:  This is a law school.  If you want justice, go to seminary!  Some of us did.  That crusty old professor's statement may be a bit extreme, but it is not fundamentally untrue.  The legal system is a human institution, and as such it simply cannot promise just, infallible results.  For that reason alone, even if for no other, we simply must stop executing people.

On Christianity and Capital Punishment

There has been a lot of new lately about executions in the United States.  I can't read that news without getting sick to my stomach.  The death penalty is murder by the state.  Capital punishment is morally indefensible.  Period.  I fail to see how any Christian can support it.  The one we call Lord and Savior was executed by the state authorities of his time.  He taught us the way of nonviolence.  He wouldn't even let his followers use violence to prevent his own unjust execution.  He said love your enemies and turn the other cheek, which at the very least means do not repay violence with violence.  Matthew 5:38-39  His great Apostle Paul said do not repay anyone evil for evil and never avenge yourselves.  Romans 12:17, 19  Christianity came to accept capital punishment only after it became the established religion of the Roman Empire.  Accepting capital punishment is one of the many ways in which our faith abandoned its core principles in order to accommodate itself to empire and become powerful in the world.  That our faith accepted capital punishment is something of which we must repent.

So much of the discussion around capital punishment in our country misses the point.  We hear much talk about whether or not a particular prisoner is guilty.  For the Christian it doesn't matter.  Guilty or not every condemned person is a child of God.  That's all that matters.  We hear a lot of talk about the effect of race in capital sentencing.  The statistics prove that our juries are much more likely to condemn a Black man to death than a white one, but that's irrelevant.  Black or white, all people are children of God.  That's all that matters.  We hear a lot of talk about whether it is more expensive to keep a person alive in prison for many years than to execute him.  That's irrelevant.  How can a matter of mere money ever be a consideration in whether or not it is moral to kill someone?  We hear a lot about the deterrent effect of capital punishment.  The statistics prove that it has none, but that's irrelevant.  Every condemned person is a child of God and cannot morally be used as a tool to influence the behavior of others.

There is only one point that is relevant in any discussion of capital punishment.  It's murder.  It's the killing of a human being.  It is the killing of a child of God.  Whatever the victim of our state murder may have done, he or she is still a child of God.  Killing is still wrong.  Killing can never justify more killing.  Capital punishment is immoral.  Capital punishment is a sin committed by the society that sanctions it and the people who carry it out.  All of those other considerations that get discussed at such length in the little public debate that takes place over capital punishment in our country may be helpful in convincing people who don't oppose all capital punishment on moral grounds to oppose it on other grounds, but all of those considerations are morally irrelevant.  The only thing that's relevant is that capital punishment is murder.  It is immoral.  Period.

Every other supposedly advanced country in the world gets it about capital punishment.  We claim to be the most Christian of nations, and we don't get it.  Our commitment to state murder belies our claim to be Christian.  Capital punishment betrays Christ, the most famous victim of capital punishment.  I fail to see how any Christian can support capital punishment.  May Jesus Christ forgive us that we just don't understand.

Reflections on the Tenth Anniversary of September 11, 2001

Tomorrow we will mark the tenth anniversary of the terror attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001.  That day is, apart from many days during the Civil War, one of the most tragic days in American history.  Those of us who were old enough to be aware will never forget where we were and what we were doing when we first heard, read, or saw what happened.  The film images of the airliners crashing into the towers of the World Trade Center are seared into our memories like few others.  Nearly three thousand people, mostly although not exclusively Americans, died in the explosive events of that day.  September 11, 2001, is a painful wound in the American psyche that will be with us for a long time to come.

The aftermath of September 11 is at least as important as the events of that day themselves.  The political leaders of the United States responded by invading Afghanistan (a nation that at least apparently had some connection to the planning and execution of the September 11 attacks), by starting an illegal war of aggression against Iraq (a nation that had nothing whatsoever to do with the September 11 attacks), by a massive expansion of our country’s security institutions, and by passing an abominable and at least partially unconstitutional piece of legislation called the Patriot Act that attacks America’s core values in a way the terrorists never could.  Far more people have died as a result of the actions the United States took in response to September 11 than died in the attacks of that day.  We are still engaged in warfare ten years later on.  A great many American people responded with an irrational hatred of all Muslims, a hatred some of us are working to overcome but which remains a tragic dynamic in the lives of many peaceful Muslim Americans.  Given the enormity of events that unfolded on September 11 ten years ago, of the massive American military response, and of the assault on Americans’ civil liberties that ensued it is necessary that we consider the meaning of these events.

Tomorrow I will do that in a short sermon that I will give as part of a special worship service marking the ten year anniversary of 9/11.  I don’t usually design worship services around secular events and commemorations, but the coincidence of the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks falling on a Sunday led me to do our worship service that day as a September 11 commemorative service.  Here is that sermon.  It expresses my thoughts on the matter as well as I am able to express them.

On the Love of Enemies

A September 11 Meditation

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

September 11, 2011

Scripture:  Romans 12:20-21; Matthew 5:38-48

On September 11, 2001, extremists who claimed to be acting in the name of Islam but who were actually betraying several core principles of Islam attacked the United States of America.  They brought down the two skyscrapers of the World Trade Center in New York.  They crashed an airplane into the Pentagon in Washington, DC.  Another plane they had hijacked, that they apparently intended to crash into either the Capitol Building or the White House, crashed in Pennsylvania when passengers overpowered the terrorists.  The United States responded with a massive military invasion of Afghanistan, the country whose Islamist government we believed (with some but not solid justification) had harbored the terrorists as they planned and trained for their breathtaking act of terrorism.  The United States then responded further with a massive military invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the September 11 terrorists attacks.  Today, ten years later, American troops are still engaged in combat in those two countries, especially in Afghanistan, where we are bogged down in an unwinnable war that has no end in sight.  The United States responded by passing laws and adopting supposed security measures that severely restrict the valued civil liberties of all Americans.

On July 22, 2011, a crazed terrorist set off a bomb outside the office of the Prime Minister in Oslo, the capital of Norway.  A few hours later he opened fire and killed 69 people at a youth camp run by the ruling political party of Norway.  The Norwegian Prime Minister responded by saying that Norway would react to the attack by being more loving and more democratic.  He apparently meant that strengthening the values that the terrorist hated would be the surest way to punish that terrorist.

St. Paul said “If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.  Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”  Romans 12:20-21  By saying we would heap burning coals on the heads of our enemies by loving them he surely meant that returning good for evil is the surest way to lead the evildoers to repentance.  Jesus said “Do not resist an evil doer.  But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one miles, go also the second mile.”  Matthew 5:38-42  He also said “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”  Matthew 5:44  He meant do not resist evil with more evil.  Do not resist evil with violence, but resist evil with creative, assertive measures of nonviolence. 

Our country suffered a terrible wrong on September 11, 2001.  Of that there is no doubt.  Nothing we say here today is intended in any way to excuse what those terrorists did.  They committed a monstrous crime against humanity for which there is no conceivable justification.  That truth is undeniable.  Yet here’s another undeniable truth.  We had no control over what people filled with hate and bad theology did.  We did have, and we do have, control over how we respond to what they do.  And, my friends, we responded very badly to what they did.  We repaid violence with violence.  We repaid hatred with hatred.  We responded to an attack on our way of life by making changes to that way of life through measures like the so-called Patriot Act and in other ways that have diminished our freedom and handed the terrorists a victory they could never win on their own.  Our invasions of two Muslim countries fed the terrorists’ cause of fanning hatred of our country and created more terrorists that it eliminated.

I don’t know if the Prime Minister of Norway is a Christian, but his response to the terrorist attack on his country was far more Christian than was, and is, our response to the terrorist attack on ours.  Yes, the attack on us killed a lot more people than the attack in Norway, but then we’re a much bigger country than Norway.  Jesus calls us to respond to hatred with love.  We didn’t do that.  Jesus calls us to love our enemies.  We don’t do that.  The Church of the Brethren puts out a bumper sticker that reads:  “When Jesus said love your enemies, I think he probably meant don’t kill them.”  It seems such an obvious truth, but it is one we Americans have never learned. 

Today we remember the terrible events of ten years ago.  We remember the pain, the fear, and the anger that we felt.  We remember the lives that were lost, and we grieve with the families whose innocent loved ones died simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  We remember and give thanks for the countless acts of heroism of that day.  We remember and give thanks especially for the members of the New York City Fire and Police Departments who rushed into those blazing buildings trying to save lives and who lost their lives because they did.  We remember and give thanks for the heroism of the airplane passengers whose bravery prevented another completed attack on another symbol of our nation.  We remember and give thanks for the service of the American men and women who chose to respond to the terrible events of that day by serving in the American military.  The decisions on how to use them were not theirs, and so many of them serve out of a true sense of loyalty to their country. 

As we remember the terrible events of that day we remember the power of forgiveness.  That day so demonstrates the need for forgiveness.  Forgiveness for those whose hearts are so filled with hatred that they would do such terrible things.  Forgiveness for ourselves and our nation for the ways in which our actions contributed to and created not a justification but at least a pretense or a rationalization for that hatred.  Forgiveness for the ways in which we have perpetuated violence in the years since that violent day. 

On that terrible day we suffered an act of extreme violence.  And we responded to that violence with more violence.  Far more people have died in the violent aftermath of 9/11 than died on that dreadful day.  More Americans.  More Iraqis.  More Afghanis.  Our violence has not made us safer.  It has merely perpetuated the hatred that led to those acts of terrorism.  Our great faith tradition teaches that nonviolence is God’s way and must be our way.  God’s dream is of that day when we shall beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, when nation shall not lift up arms against nation, and we shall learn war no more.  If that day is ever to come someone must break the cycle of violence.  Someone must respond to hatred with love.

We are the most powerful nation on earth by far, and that means that we are the ones who must break the cycle of violence.  We can’t leave it up to others.  So today let us remember.  Let us grieve.  Let us celebrate the heroes of that day.  But mostly let us learn.  Let us learn that violence only begets more violence.  Let us at long last learn the lesson that Jesus taught so long ago.  Love your enemies.  It is the only way to peace.  Amen.

Why I Probably Will Not Vote for Barack Obama in 2012

Many of my friends were very enthusiastic supporters of Barack Obama during the 2008 Presidential election.  Although I never thought he was as progressive as some of them did, I too was inspired by his soaring rhetoric, his promise of change, and the prospect of electing a man who self-identifies as African-American as President.  Some of my friends have already announced their intention to support President Obama for reelection in 2012.  I, however, am struggling mightily with the question of whether I will be able to bring myself to vote for him in 2012.  Because I respect my friends who will support the President for reelection, and because I respect even if I do not share their reasons for doing so, I want to state here as simply and plainly as I can why I probably will not vote for Barack Obama again.

The principal reason why I will not vote for Barack Obama again is thatI have become more committed than I have ever been to Jesus Christ’s message of nonviolence.  In recent times I have become more convinced than ever that nonviolence is the only legitimate way of the Christian.  I do not judge those who have reached other conclusions on this issue.  Judgment is not mine to render; but I know that Jesus taught and lived nonviolence, and I claim to be a follower of Jesus.  If we are truly to be his followers, I believe, we too must teach and live nonviolence.  Beyond that, I am convinced that a commitment to nonviolence must be a central part of any effort to save the earth from the destruction humans so inflict upon it.  A commitment to environmental justice and responsibility is also required; but we humans have the means to destroy the earth not only gradually through overpopulation and environmental degradation but suddenly through our weapons of war.  I have become convinced that only a radical commitment to nonviolence can save us from ourselves.  I have also become convinced that only a commitment to nonviolence by us Americans can save the rest of the world from American imperialism. 

Barack Obama has no commitment to nonviolence whatsoever.  More than two and a half years into his presidency we still have troops in Iraq.  He has conducted a “surge” of military forces in Afghanistan that is indistinguishable from the policy of former President George W. Bush in Iraq, Bush being the President whose policies we elected Obama to change.  President Obama has resorted to the use of violence in Libya.  Particularly hard for me to swallow is the President’s order to our military to murder Osama bin Ladn rather than capture him and bring him to trial.  I do not see how a true disciple of the nonviolence of Jesus Christ can vote for any politician who so readily resorts to violence, and I cannot see how I can do so with a clear conscience.

Beyond that, not only is President Obama not an advocate of nonviolence or even of a more restrained and defensive use of military force, he is as much a proponent of American exceptionalism as George W. Bush ever was.  His speeches ring with the echoes of American exceptionalism, the notion that what America does is right because it is America that does it.  There is no other possible justification for the violation of international law and the act of murder involved in the operation Obama ordered against bin Ladn.  The President is perfectly happy to perpetuate and perhaps even to increase America’s self-appointed status as policeman to the world.  As nearly as I can tell, when it comes to foreign and military policy there is no significant difference between Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

I also have profound issues with the way President Obama has handled domestic matters.  The things that he touts as great accomplishments are anything but great accomplishments.  The prime example is the health care reform law that Congress passed and President Obama signed last year.  That “reform” of our health care delivery system consists primarily of Republican ideas.  Some of them come from Richard Nixon from the 1960s and the 1970s.  Some of them come from Mitt Romney when he was Governor of Massachusetts.  Their primary effect is to deliver millions of new victims into the grasp of the for-profit health insurance companies.  Yes, there is some good in that law.  Insurance companies will be somewhat less able to deny insurance to applicants on the basis of preexisting conditions.  Still, the law is a lukewarm reform at best.  It is obvious and undeniable to any impartial observer that the only health care delivery system that makes any sense in a modern nation that truly cares about all of its people is a single payer, government-run system that covers everyone without exception and that eliminates the profit motive from the provision of health care benefits.  President Obama gave up on that, the only sensible option, before the battle over health care was even joined against the representatives of the private insurance industry who control Congress.  The joke of the Obama health care reform, that he touts as his major domestic achievement will do little or nothing to change the reality that the US spends more on health care than any other nation but gets health care outcomes in some areas no better than those of impoverished, underdeveloped countries.  It is another reason why I probably will not vote for him again.

The way President Obama handled the health care reform issue is characteristic of how he has approached the political process in Washington, D.C., generally, and that approach is another reason why I probably will not vote for him again.  He has put “bipartisanship” above principle at every turn.  He has tried to work in a bipartisan manner with the Congressional Republicans, apparently oblivious to the fact that the Congressional Republicans have no interest in working in a bipartisan manner with him at all.  His devotion to bipartisanship with people whose only goal is to destroy him and his presidency has produced compromise after compromise that is really nothing but Obama and the Congressional Democrats caving in to the demands of the Republicans, demands which work to the benefit of the wealthy not of the people in every instance.  The best example is the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.  Those tax cuts are perhaps the worst piece of domestic legislation in recent history.  They are largely responsible for our huge budget deficits.  They are a primary engine of the massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich that has been going on in America since the disastrous presidency of Ronald Reagan.  Candidate Obama promised to repeal them or at least to let them expire, but when, as President, he was faced with a refusal by the Republicans even to compromise on them, much less repeal them, he caved; and those disastrous tax cuts remain law.  Yes, there is a new expiration date; but we have no reason to believe that the Republicans will be any more reasonable and decent with regard to them down the line than they are now, and we have every reason to believe that Obama and the Democrats will cave in on them again in the future.  President Obama’s muddle-headed commitment to bipartisanship with the Republicans has produced nothing good for the American people, and it has made him weak and ineffective. 

It is a legitimate question whether President Obama would have gotten anything more, and better, done if he had stood up for Democratic principles and the American people and refused to cave in to the destructive demands of the Republicans.  It seems probable that he would not have, but that fact does not, in my opinion, justify his repeated giving in to the Republicans.  The Republican Party has swung so far to the right that its policies truly threaten to destroy our country.  If we are ever again to be (assuming that we ever were, which may be assuming facts not in evidence) a country that truly cares for what matters—for people, for justice, for peace, for the environment—the Republicans simply must be not just defeated but must be routed at every level of government; but they must be routed by candidates who stand for what’s right, not candidates like President Obama who are functionally if not ideologically Republican light.  That is never going to happen as long as the American people continue to see the Republicans as a legitimate political alternative.  It is never going to happen as long as progressive Americans continue to vote for conservative and ineffective Democrats out of fear of the Republicans, however justified that fear may be.  President Obama could have shown the Republicans up for the tools of the wealthy and the corporate special interests that they truly are by refusing to cave in to their outrageous demands.  He could have made it the mission of his presidency to lay bare the hypocrisy and the lies of the Republicans so that the American people might wake up and stop voting for them.  He could have made himself a true progressive alternative.  He chose not to, so I will probably choose not to vote for his reelection.

Yet you have probably noted my repeated use of the word “probably” when I say I will not vote again for President Obama.  There is one, and only one, reason for that qualification.  I can state it in three words—the Supreme Court.  The appointments to the Supreme court by the two Presidents Bush (especially bush II) have been unmitigated disasters for our country.  They are corporatist ideologues posing as judges who practice legitimate jurisprudence.  They do not practice legitimate jurisprudence.  Their decision in the Citizens United case that overturned decades of settled precedent and opened the floodgates for corporate money to corrupt our political system even more than it already did is all the proof of that truth that we need, although there is a lot more proof available to anyone who goes looking for it.  The question of whether or not to vote for President Obama next year comes down to this for me:  Is taking a stand against the Republicans having the power again to nominate justices for the Supreme Court, given the fact that the Democrats in the Senate routinely cave in and refuse to block those nominations, enough to justify a vote for someone I consider to be guilty of crimes abroad, who is an abject failure at home, and who shares virtually none of my core values? 

I don’t yet have an answer to that question.  I don’t know who I will vote for, or even if I will vote for President in the 2012 election at all.  I lean toward refusing to vote for President Obama reluctantly.  He remains personally appealing.  He remains one of the best orators ever to occupy the White House.  His family is beautiful, and the symbolism of a Black man as President of the United States remains powerful.  We had so much hope when we elected him in 2008.  Yet, for all that, my deeply held personal convictions probably will not let me vote for him again.

Kto Kogo

It is of course always dangerous to quote Vladimir Lenin as an authority on any political question, not quite as dangerous perhaps as quoting Hitler but dangerous nonetheless.  After all, Lenin led the Bolshevik coup that brought the Communists to power in Russia.  He then instituted a reign of terror to effect Communist control over the former Russian Empire.  Lenin is not a hero in my book.  He is in fact a real villain for the way he ushered in Communist totalitarianism in Russia.  That being said, however, it is nonetheless true that Lenin had some valid political insights.  The same can be said of Karl Marx, whose political philosophy Lenin claimed to be implementing.  That Marx was profoundly wrong at the most fundamental level of his thinking, at the level of his dialectical materialism, does not negate the valuable insights that he had regarding the operation of domination based on economic class.  That Lenin created a system that was not only brutally flawed in its own right but led the way to the much worse catastrophe of Stalinism does not negate the validity of those political insights of his that were actually correct.

Lenin expressed one of his most valuable political insights with the nearly untranslatable Russian phrase “kto kogo?”  Pronounced kto kovó despite being spelled with a g in the second word, it is a question that literally means “who whom?”  It was for Lenin the foundational question to ask of any political agenda or policy.  He meant that in evaluating any such political agenda or policy we are to ask “In that agenda or policy, who does what to whom?”  That is, we are to ask who gains and who loses?  Who comes out on top and who suffers?  Who gains wealth or power and who loses wealth or power if this policy or agenda is implemented?  It is a question that unmasks policies and agendas that claim to be for the common good, or for the good of the people, that actually operate only to benefit a particular group within the society.  Lenin, being a Marxist, understood the question in terms of economic class.  He would ask what class benefits from any political action, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat?  We are not so given to rigid class analyses in this country, but it is nonetheless a useful question for us to ask “who whom” of any proposed course of political action.

After all, in a society as socially, economically, and demographically complex as the United States no political act is likely truly to benefit all Americans.  The interests of different groups and classifications of Americans are simply too disparate for that to be true.  At the risk of sounding perhaps more Marxist than I actually am, let me say that the interests of the wealthy financial mavens of Wall Street simply are not the same as the interests of most Americans.  The economic interests of the wealthiest one or two percent of Americans who control by far most of the wealth in this country simply are not the same as the interests of the other ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent of us who share what’s left.  This disparity of interests is particularly visible in regard to the question of tax policy.

The Republican Party has made it an iron rule of Republican orthodoxy that no taxes should be raised.  On anyone.  Ever.  For any reason.  The Republicans in Congress extorted from President Obama a commitment to extend the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy as a condition for passing any legislation on economic issues.  They forced the Democrats to accept an appallingly bad law regarding reducing the national debt and the budget deficit in order to get an increase in the national borrowing limit that was necessary to avert a worldwide economic catastrophe, a law that deals with the deficit only through spending cuts with no tax increases even on the wealthiest Americans.  For many years now Grover Norquist’s group Americans for Tax Reform has required Republican politicians to pledge never to raise taxes on anyone in order to gain the group’s endorsement, and most Republican politicians have made that pledge.  Back when he was running for President George H. W. Bush famously said “Read my lips:  No new taxes!”, mouthing the Republican party line.  His subsequent reneging on that promise and proposing some tax increases was a major reason why he wasn’t reelected.  No tax increases, indeed extending tax reductions for the very wealthy that were enacted under President George W. Bush, has become the foundational economic policy of the Republican Party.

And no one asks of that policy “kto kogo?”  “Who whom?”  Whom does the policy benefit and whom does it burden?  Whose life does it make better and whose life does it make worse?  Who wins and who loses?  The Republicans have done a masterful job of getting a great many Americans never to ask that question by convincing people that all taxes are bad and that everyone should want themselves and everyone else to pay as little in taxes as possible.  But what answer do we get when we do ask the question “kto kogo” of the Republican dogma of low taxes, or at least low taxes for the wealthy?

The answer that we get is undeniably that the anti-tax policy of the Republican Party benefits only the wealthiest Americans and burdens everyone else.  To see that effect of Republican tax policy all we need to do is to compare the tax structure of the 1950s with that in  effect for the last thirty years and its effect on the great American middle class, the vast majority of Americans.  Under President Eisenhower (a Republican who wouldn't even recognize today’s Republican party) the marginal tax rate for the wealthiest Americans was 91%.  Today it is 35%, just over one third of what it was under the Republican Eisenhower.  Even under the more conservative Richard Nixon that top marginal income tax rate was 70%, twice what it is today.  The 1950s and 60s, when the top marginal income tax rates for the wealthiest American were essentially confiscatory, were the decades of the growth and prosperity of the American middle class.  Working men and women could earn a living wage working only one job.  Unemployment, while it of course fluctuated some, was relatively low.  The federal budget wasn't balanced, but it wasn’t as badly out of balance as it is today.  Perhaps most significantly, while significant inequality in income distribution has always been a fact of American life, that inequality is at an all time high today.  It was much lower in the 1950s. 

I don’t mean to paint the 1950s as some kind of lost utopia.  We had lots of social problems back then, and some aspects of American life have improved since the 1950s.  Most significantly, although racism remains an issue among us, America was far more racist in the 1950s than it is today.  The civil rights movement was just getting going, and women’s liberation and gay liberation weren’t even much on our national radar.  Still, the 1950s prove that the policy of reducing taxes on the wealthiest Americans that every president since Ronald Reagan has pursued or at least tolerated benefits only the wealthy and greatly burdens most Americans.  It exacerbates our already grossly inadequate social safety net.  It pushes more and more Americans into poverty.  It makes the rich richer and even more politically powerful than they were before.  The 1950s prove that high marginal tax rates on the rich are not a drag on the economy, and low marginal tax rates on the rich do not create jobs, as the Republicans claim they do.  The Republican policy of lowering taxes on the rich, which Democratic presidents and Democratically controlled Congresses have done nothing to reverse, undeniably benefit the wealthy, burden average Americans, and do not lead to general prosperity and wellbeing in our country.

    So:  Kto kogo?  The rich the rest of us.  The process of concentrating more and more wealth and more and more political power in the hands of a very small number of very wealthy Americans that has been under way now for several decades has the wealthy doing it to the rest of us.  The level of inequality in the distribution of wealth, the levels of unemployment, the size of the federal budget deficit, and the size of the national debt are reaching unsustainable levels.  The massive disparity in wealth between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of us will, in the long run, produce social instability and unrest.  Yes, for now the Republicans have misled a significant number of Americans into believing that low taxes on the rich are good for everyone, but that lie cannot hold forever.  Sooner or later the American people will wake up.  We can only pray that they wake up before the inequality created by Republican policies produces a violent rather than a merely peaceful political upheaval.

We Just Don't Get It: Reflections on Our Current Economic Crisis

     Before I begin let me make one thing clear.  I am not an economist.  I have no training in economics.  I suppose you could argue that I therefore should not be saying anything about the underlying economics of America’s current economic crisis.  Yet some things about our current economic crisis seem so obvious to me, and those things seem to be so overlooked and ignored in the current debate about budget deficits and spending cuts, that I am going to speak out despite my lack of economic training.  I actually don’t think you have to be a trained economic observer to see what is there before our eyes to be seen.  We don’t see it because we don’t look.  We don’t look because we don’t want to see.

     The current economic debate in our country, which is of course inseparable from the current political debate and is largely driven by it, is between those who say that the budget deficit is the problem and that the only appropriate way to deal with it is to cut domestic spending (basically the Republican approach), and those who say that the problem is unemployment and a lack of consumer demand and that the way to deal with it is a massive governmental jobs program something like the New Deal of the 1930s financed perhaps with some “revenues,” our current euphemism for tax increases, and more borrowing,  This is the position of some progressive Democrats and of some leading economists, notable Paul Krugman and Robert Reich among others.  As I read a recent opinion piece by Robert Reich on The Huffington Post (August 10, 2011) in which he was making the increase government spending on jobs programs argument something became clearer to me than it ever has been before.  Both of these approaches are wrong.  The Republican approach is more wrong than the Democratic approach because, more than the Democratic approach, it harms ordinary people and the poor and perpetuates the growing and ultimately destabilizing gap between the immense wealth of the few and the increasing poverty (expressed primarily in unemployment figures) of the many.  But they are both wrong.  They are both wrong because they both seek to perpetuate an economy whose day has passed and that has become unsustainable in today’s world.

     Here’s one underlying fact that both approaches ignore.  The United States represents something less than 5% of the world’s population, but we consume something like 25% of the world’s resources.  The disparity between the standard of living of most Americans, even in these times of relative economic hardship by recent American standards, and the standard of living of people in much of the rest of the world, particularly in South America, Africa, and much of Asia, is radically unjust.  More significantly perhaps for most Americans, in the long run it is unsustainable.  We are the primary beneficiaries of a profoundly unjust global economic system, and if history teaches us anything it is that when disparity in wealth between the haves and the have-nots becomes too great revolutions happen.  Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said that the arc of history bends toward justice.  It does that very slowly of course as King recognized, but it does it; and that arc is bending in the direction of a radical correction in the distribution of wealth in the world.  We see it in the rise of China and India and in the decline of the United States to the status of a debtor nation that can’t, or more correctly won’t, pay its bills. 

     Even more importantly, the earth cannot long sustain the consumption of natural resources at the rate the United States has established as the model the rest of the world seeks to emulate.  The end of the age of oil is already in sight, but so many other natural resources are called non-renewable because that is precisely what they are.  There are only so many minerals in the makeup of the earth.  When all the iron and copper have been mined there will be no more to be taken from the earth.  The same is true of everything that can’t be grown or recycled.  The US models unsustainability for the rest of the world.  That model has dire long-term consequences for the entire world, but first it has them for us.

     Virtually all of the voices in our public debate over economic policy today have as their goal sustaining the American economic model that has prevailed at least since the 1930s.  At least, that’s what the voices say that don’t want us to go back to the 1890s like the so-called Tea Party Republicans do.  That model depends on constant growth.  The economists say it requires grown of over 1% just to keep up with population growth, and it requires more than that to keep unemployment down and middle class incomes up.  Virtually no one seems to grasp the simple and obvious fact that growth can’t continue forever.  The earth simply won’t sustain it.  It seems obvious that any economic model for the US that the earth can sustain in the long run has to be a model that does not require constant growth and that indeed encompasses and accommodates economic retrenchment. 

     There is a way that we can embrace and accommodate economic retrenchment in the direction of a more sustainable economy without seriously harming most Americans.  That way is so obvious that it is amazing how few people among us advocate it.  It is the way of reducing the enormous disparity in wealth between the super rich in this country and the rest of us.  It is the way of income redistribution from the top down.  Ever since the 1980s at least a process has been at work that has accumulated unprecedented wealth in the hands of a very few Americans.  The top 2% of wealthy in this country control more of the nation’s wealth than the bottom 90%.  The income disparity between corporate executives and working men and woman has reached an unprecedented level.  According to one source average CEO compensation is 142 times that of average employees in this country.  In Britain it is 69 times that of workers, and in a more egalitarian nation like Sweden it is only 34 times that of employees.[i]  Even at that level of 34 times the average wage of workers if an average worker’s compensation is $30,000 the average CEO compensation is over one million dollars, hardly a paltry sum.  Our problem is not that we don’t have enough wealth to pay our bills and provide a decent living for our people.  Our problem is that our distribution of the wealth that we have is so profoundly unjust as to be the source of our problems and be unsustainable in the long run.

     Income redistribution is one key to solving our economic problems in the direction of sustainability and justice.  The other is changing what we spend our money on.  The United States spends almost as much on its military as all the other nations of the world combined spend on theirs.  In the last ten years we have spent over a trillion dollars on two foreign wars,[ii] one of which was illegal and immoral from the start (Iraq) and the other of which had some geopolitical justification[iii] in the beginning but has since become an unwinnable quagmire from which we should just withdraw as soon as possible (Afghanistan).  Radically reducing our spending on the military and converting our military to a truly defensive force rather than the tool for projecting American imperial power around the world that it is to today will go a long way toward solving our economic problems in the direction of sustainability and justice.  It won’t be a simple process, for reducing the military and the defense industries that it supports will displace significant numbers of people who will have to be retrained and accommodated in the civilian economy; but that restructuring is absolutely essential if we are ever to have a more just and sustainable economic system.

     Our current debate over economic and political policy almost never gets to the fundamental level.  It stays superficial, and so in the long run it stays irrelevant to our real problems.  Until we have the wisdom and the political will to address the underlying structural issues in our economy, the issues of over consumption, unjust distribution, and overspending on the military, all of our talk, whatever its political bent, will be idle.  So far, we just don’t get it.

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[i] http://www.huff ingtonpost.com/2011/08/04/ceos-warned-mind-the-pay-gap_n_918059.html

[ii] http://costofwar.com/en/

[iii] But no moral justification, for while the use of force may be rationalized in geopolitical terms it is in this author’s opinion, and more importantly in Jesus’ opinion, never truly moral.

Banana Republic USA

I am appalled.  I am disgusted.  I despair for my country.  The forces of economic ignorance, the forces of privilege for the wealthy, the forces of indifference to the plight of people in need and to the hopes and aspirations of most Americans have carried the day.  My national government has enacted a law that will harm millions of people, and it has done so only so that wealthy Americans will not have to pay taxes at a fair rate, a rate that they have paid in the past, a rate that reflects their ability to pay and the benefits and advantages that they have received from the American economic system, a level that would still represent one of the lowest levels of taxation of the wealthy in any so-called developed country.  I refer of course to the credit limit/budget deficit legislation that became law on August 2, 2011.  President Obama botched the whole issue in his naïve belief that the Republicans want to work with him and the Congressional Democrats in a constructive way.  He is the President, and his party controls the Senate; but he let a radical minority of the Republicans in the House of Representatives hold the entire nation hostage to their destructive ideology of small government and low taxes, an ideology that benefits not the American people as a whole, certainly not those in need among us, but only those who need no help from the government, those who need no tax breaks, those whose wealth keeps them above the vicissitudes of the economy, who are insulated in a way that assures that they will prosper no matter what the economy or the government does.  

In his column in the New York Times published August 1, 2011, the day before this unconscionable piece of legislation became law, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman analyzed the matter brilliantly.  He said that the deal President Obama reached with Congressional Republicans to raise the country’s debt limit

is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party.  It will damage an already depressed economy.  It will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.

Krugman is clearly correct.  That the measure that became law on August 2, 2011, “will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status” is a succinct statement of a truth that simply cannot be denied.

To understand that comment we must first understand what “banana republic” means.  The term refers to the governments of Central American countries such as Honduras and Nicaragua during the time when they were dominated by large American corporations, specifically corporations that exploited the resources and the people of those countries by exporting produce, typically bananas.  Those governments were put and kept in power by American corporations.  They served the economic interest of their corporate masters.  They were politically oppressive and brutal.  They would use any means to keep themselves and their corporate overlords in power.  They had no interest in the welfare of the people, only in their own power and their own short-term gain.  The real rulers of the country were the big corporations, and the people had no say in how their land was governed. There was nothing these corporate puppet governments would not do to preserve their power and their privilege.  The phrase “banana republic” is shorthand for a country with a brutal, corrupt, oppressive government that operates in its own interest and in the interest of big corporations and of the wealthy, not in the interests of its own people.

That is what the United States of America is becoming.  Our slide into banana republic status began with the Reagan administration in the 1980s.  That’s when the Republicans began their assault on the few social safety net programs that we have in this country.  That’s when the tax code began to be revised to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the people, a development that reached its nadir under George W. Bush and that the Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats have done nothing to reverse.  That’s when the process of concentrating more and more wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people began.  Yet the ideology of the Republican Party today makes Ronald Reagan look downright reasonable, and that is a very difficult thing to do.  Even Reagan agreed to some tax increases when they were necessary.  Not today’s Republicans.  Certainly not those Republicans today whom we so quaintly call the Tea Party.  They are hell bent on implementing policies that will destroy this country, and they are having considerable success in doing so.  The current debt limit and deficit reduction bill is their crowning achievement (although even it doesn’t go far enough in the direction of benefiting the wealthy at the expense of the people for some of them). 

Today in America money rules.  It has always ruled to some extent, but in some meaningful ways we are returning to the 1890s, the age of the robber barons, the age when big corporations ran the country and exploited the people for their own gain with no meaningful governmental curbs on their power.  The Supreme Court has declared almost all limitations on the power of money in the electoral process to be unconstitutional.  When we faced an economic crisis unlike any we have seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s the government bailed out Wall Street and did nothing meaningful to help as millions of Americans lost their jobs and lost their homes to foreclosure.  When the crisis in American health care became so obvious and so acute that not even the federal government could ignore it any longer the power of the insurance industry, a power exerted through campaign contributions that the Supreme Court will not let the government limit, forced us to accept half measures that do essentially nothing to address the problem of access to affordable health care for millions of Americans.  Today in America money rules, and ordinary Americans are being harmed in myriad ways because it does.

So many Americans have bought the lies of the conservative ideologues that there seems to be no way out.  Progressive pundits and talk show hosts tell us not to despair.  They tell us not to give up.  They tell us that there is hope of turning the tide.  I wish I believed them.  I want to believe them, but somehow I just can’t.  We may have reached the point where the only thing that will reverse our slide into banana republic status is to let the conservatives have their way.  Let their policies ruin the country.  We don’t seem to be able to stop them in any event.  Many people will suffer in the process, but maybe that is what it will take to put American on a path toward justice for the people, a path away from the control of the wealthy and their big corporations, a path toward common decency and care for one another.  I hope it is not the case that only greater economic and social disaster will turn us around, but I’m having a hard time believing that that is not the case today.  I am appalled.  I am disgusted.  I despair for my country.