Today is the 100th anniversary of the federal income tax, which was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on October 3, 1913. To mark the occasion, Moyers & Company caught up with David Cay Johnston, who has probably forgotten more about our tax…
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of Calif. speaks at a news conference Oct. 2 on Capitol Hill after House Democrats unveiled an immigration reform bill. Op-ed contributor Javier H. Valdés writes: 'Comprehensive immigration reform is one of those…
Let me make sure I understand. The tea party Republicans in the House and Senate have determined that the Affordable Care Act is so reprehensible, so pernicious, and so destructive of American liberties that it poses an existential risk to the republic.;
This is going to be an interesting week for Pope Francis. His "countercuria" – a group of eight cardinals from around the world, selected partly for their known hostility to the way the Vatican has been run – is meeting for the first time. Already he has announced that they will form a permanent council. Although that arrangement may not survive him, the intention to remove the church's strategic planning from the curia – the permanent "civil service" in the Vatican – is clear.
Before that committee reports, there is his remarkable interview with the editor of La Republicca, a cradle Catholic turned atheist, which the paper splashed on this morning. This continues on the lines of his earlier interview with a fellow Jesuit, but is even more outspoken:
"The curia as a whole is … what in an army is called the quartermaster's office, it manages the services that serve the Holy See. But it has one defect: it is Vatican-centric. It sees and looks after the interests of the Vatican, which are still, for the most part, temporal interests. This Vatican-centric view neglects the world around us. I do not share this view and I'll do everything I can to change it."
Later, in an extraordinary phrase, he says:
"Heads of the church have often been narcissists, flattered and thrilled by their courtiers. The court is the leprosy of the papacy."
There are times when it is almost impossible to believe this is a pope speaking:
"Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us … The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the good."
Even more astonishing:
"Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place."
It really is difficult to imagine anything more opposed to the spirit of fortress Catholicism, and the doctrines that "error has no rights" and "there is no salvation outside the church".
One of the strangest things about this interview is that it comes from a man who has pressed ahead with the canonisation ofJohn Paul II, whose policy and vision of the papacy he seems more and more directly to reject.
He defends the liberation theologians, whom John Paul II persecuted and in some cases excommunicated:
"[Marxism] certainly gave a political aspect to their theology, but many of them were believers and with a high concept of humanity."
He also speaks with affection of a communist teacher he had – again something unthinkable for the Polish pope who shaped the church he has inherited.
None of this makes him a liberal exactly. The saint he says he feels closest to is Augustine (also, of course, Luther's guiding light), who worked out the doctrine of original sin. In fact I can't help feeling that if Luther had continued as an Augustinian friar, and – who knows – become pope himself, he would have sounded quite a lot like Francis, except for his antisemitism, which Francis explicitly repudiates.
But he certainly offers no comfort to the neoliberals, either. "I think so-called unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded. We need great freedom, no discrimination, no demagoguery and a lot of love. We need rules of conduct and also, if necessary, direct intervention from the state to correct the more intolerable inequalities."
Whatever else happens, this papacy is going to be astounding fun to watch, not least because – although we talk of the pope leading his church – he knows very well that there are a great many Catholics, not all of them in the priesthood, who are determined not to follow in the direction he is pointing them. On the other hand there are millions throughout the world who have been waiting decades for a pope who talks like this.
There is a frustrating tendency in American political reporting to adopt a position of "both sides-ism" – as in, "both sides" are equally to blame for the nation's chronic political dysfunction. Sometimes, it must be said, this assessment is correct. After all, the US political system was practically designed to breed legislative gridlock.
Not this time, however.
There is one party that is solely to blame for the first government shutdown in 17 years. And it's the Republican party.
Indeed, the debate happening in Washington right now is not even between Democrats and Republicans. It's not even about the deficit, or the budget, or government spending priorities. Rather, it is one strictly occurring between Republicans who are trying to find some magic bullet to destroy "Obamacare" – the country's fiscal health be damned.
In the House of Representatives, bills that would allow the government to continue to operate were amended with provisions defunding or delaying Obamacare. This is, for Democrats, a nonstarter. The reason is obvious: the Affordable Care Act is the president's signature achievement and he is not going to sign a bill that undoes or even delays it.
Nor should he. Obamacare is the law of the land. It was passed by Congress, signed by the president, upheld by the US supreme court, and it is already going into effect. There is no reason for President Obama to be cowed by such legislative extortion.
Yet, rather than accept the reality of Obamacare, Republicans are using the prospect of a government shutdown and/or a default on the nation's debt to try to stop it.
In key respects, this dispiriting series of events is the logical conclusion of the Republican party's descent into madness. The GOP has become a party dominated by a group of politicians who are fundamentally nihilistic, contemptuous of democracy and willing (even proud) to operate outside the long-accepted norms of American democracy.
In the US system of government, compromise is perhaps its most essential element. Republicans must work with Democrats; the House of Representatives must work with the Senate; and both bodies must find common ground with the president. It's not always pretty, but it generally works.
The problem today is that the modern GOP thinks about compromise in the same way that imperial Japanese soldiers thought about surrender in the second world war. At least in defeat, Republicans can argue they fought to the last; but by compromising, they would be surrendering their principles.
That's the only explanation for how members of the party can view the possibility of a government shutdown – or even worse, the catastrophe of debt default – as somehow a better option than reconciling themselves to the abomination that, bizarrely, they believe Obamacare to be.
Granted, this isn't the view of all Republican office-holders – or even a majority. But it is the view of the party's most extreme supporters, and today, it's these individuals who are guiding the party's leadership.
In fact, if the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, were to bring a clean budget bill to the House floor, with no provisions defunding or delaying Obamacare, it would almost certainly pass – with Democrats and Republicans joining together to support it. It would then get majority approval in the Senate and be signed by President Obama.
So, why hasn't that happened yet? Because Boehner has pledged only to pass legislation that has the support of enough Republican members (unaided by Democrats) to be enacted. Since that is impossible right now, the government will shut down.
In the end, however, we have a pretty good sense of how this will turn out. The government will shut down for a few days, but perhaps more; and the US will come perilously close to a debt default. In the end, however, semi-sane Republicans will come to their senses, concede defeat and pass a budget resolution and debt limit extension with Democratic support.
That the US will have come to such a pass – for no reason other than the extremism of the Republican party – is an important reminder of who is blame for the governing dysfunction that has come to define the US democracy today.
It’s almost certain that we’ll see the government shut down on Tuesday. The last time that happened, in 1996, it cost $2.1 billion in today’s dollars. Breaching the debt limit would be far, far worse – nobody knows how bad, exactly, but everyone…
How to believe: Do they waste away, or get conquered by something better? Perhaps it is easier to think in terms of gods dying, rather than religions
If religions are born, they must also be able to die. How does this happen? I think we can discount at once the idea that it happens because people realise that science is better. It's obvious that the more people try to replace religion with science, the more they reproduce the worst features of organised religion.
On the other hand, societies might be reconfigured in such a way that the idea of religion made no sense. Interestingly, the reverse process seems to have happened in Japan in the 19th century, after American gunboats broke the country's isolation. According to a recent book from Chicago University Press, there had been until then no concept of "religion" in Japanese society; afterwards, as part of the modernisation, some social practices and beliefs had to be carved out as "religious" while others were classified as "non-religious". I don't know how this account might apply to the spread of Christianity in the 17th century, and then the murderous suppression over generations; I'll have to wait for the book to arrive. But the process seems a plausible one, and something like it may be under way in the "secularising" parts of the world today.
But what is happening there is less of an abandonment of doctrine as a withdrawal of assent from things formerly considered sacred. This is a process as general and impersonal as language change. Nor is it any more driven by rationality. Considered in themselves, there is nothing more "religious" about a teddy bear left out in the rain by the roadside than there is about a man wearing a white lace-trimmed frock. Yet the teddy bear at the site of a road crash is recognised as a meaningful symbol of our horror at mortality, while the young man in a cotta is no longer a priest linking us to the heart of our civilisation but callow and pretentious.
One hundred years ago, the situation would have been completely absurd, a reversal of the natural order of the universe. It's certainly impossible to describe it as progress. It is simply change – evolution, if you like.
Perhaps it is easier to think in terms of gods dying, rather than religions. And if we were to classify religions as involving different forms of worship, then you could certainly think that the extinction of worship towards a particular deity would count as the extinction of that religion. Certainly we can be sure that the religion of the Aztecs is dead with their gods, along with hundreds of thousands of others we can no longer reconstruct, and all the pre-literate ones whose existence we remain quite unaware of. Robert Bellah has a nice passage on this "Perhaps the end of Mesopotamian Civilization was marked, not by the last cuneiform document to be produced, but by the last prayer to be uttered to Marduk or Assur, but of that we have no record."
A slightly less scholarly approach is found in Terry Pratchett's Small Gods, where there is a desert full of shrivelled starving deities who will vanish altogether if they cannot find someone to believe in them. I once preached a kind of anti-sermon based on that book to a shocked evangelical congregation in an Oxford college. In any case, the Gods here are kept alive entirely by the fervency and numbers of their believers. Pratchett, being a child of English Anglicanism, underestimates the importance of ritual and overestimates belief, but it does seem clear that deities die when no one prays to them. That's something subtly but importantly different to believing in them. There is a sense in which I can believe in Thor without this for a moment meaning what it would to a believer. So blasphemy can kill off deities, and the measure of its success is that it comes not to be blasphemous at all.
But there is another threat to organised and literate religions, which they certainly treat as potentially fatal. That's heresy: wrong belief and a misapplication of the sacred. In this context one of the most interesting texts is CS Lewis's denunciation of female priests. They would, he said, constitute a new religion. Yet, when they came, we can see that they appeared as a simple inevitable, development of the old one. They are still priests. And it is this fact which illustrates better than anything the living and evolutionary nature of religions of all sorts. There could no more be a first Christian than there could be a first homo sapiens. We can see religions have been born, and have died, but the moments of birth and death will always be mysterious and shrouded.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Between Barilla pasta's anti-gay jab, the IOC ignoring reality and a Russian activist's death, times are still tough for LGBT community
Sometimes it really does suck to be gay. In addition to the usual hard work – the recruiting of innocents, the destruction of the institution of marriage, compulsory brunch – there's been an unusually high volume of international bigotry and bad news to put up with this week.
Take the recent diss from Guido Barilla, the chairman of his family's famous pasta company. He announced on air that he would never feature a gay family in one of Barilla's ads. Clearly unaware that gay people can actually hear what he says on the radio, Barilla added that he had "no respect for adoption by gay families because this concerns a person who is not able to choose." He then encouraged those of us who found his statements offensive to eat another brand.
Within hours, Italian activists and politicians obliged by calling for a boycott. The hashtag "#boycottbarrilla!" began trending on Twitter and popping up all over Facebook, along with a trove of brilliant satiric images. American blogger John Aravosis, who speaks Italian, nailed the lid on by providing a helpful translation of Barilla's remarks on his Americablog site, plus regular updates of Barilla's frantic attempts to backtrack. At last count, he and the company had issued three separate statements, including one non-sequiturial rambling from Barilla about women's central role in the family, plus an awful "I'm-sorry-if-anyone-was-offended" pseudo-apology that only made him sound like a bigger jerk than ever.
Surpassing even Barilla's unique blend of homophobia and cynicism, the International Olympic Committee issued a statement that it is "fully convinced that Russia will respect the Olympic charter, which prohibits discrimination of any kind". There are two major obstacles to understanding how the IOC reached this conclusion. The first is the extensive documentation, via every imaginable form of media, of Russia's persecution of LGBT people under the country's new, virulently homophobic laws. The second is the IOC charter itself, which states – as this helpful image from Boycott Sochi 2014 reminds us – "Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic movement". It also compels the IOC to "fight against" and "take action against" what the charter calls "discrimination of any kind".
Anyone who wants to know what's responsible for the IOC's strange blindness to the purpose of its own charter – its conviction that none of the anti-gay witch hunt now in full swing in Russia counts as "discrimination" so long as a mob doesn't actually disrupt the figure skating – need look no further than the bottles of Coca-Cola artfully placed in front of the IOC members at their press conference. It's clear that the Olympics – under the auspices of the IOC and the Olympics' top sponsors, including Coke, Visa, General Electric, McDonald's, Procter & Gamble – are no longer about integrity or even sport. The occasional glimpse of skiing or snowboarding is just a brief interruption between commercials.
One can only hope that their same deep focus on market forces, along with a wave of protests urging action, will continue to rattle these corporations, possibly even to the point of actually doing something. They would do well to contemplate the effect on their brand of being linked to everything that happens under their logos in Sochi and the damage of winding up on the wrong side of history.
The Metropolitan Opera ignored pleas to dedicate its opening night to Russia's LGBT population as a protest against the country's draconian anti-gay laws. This, despite featuring a production of "Eugene Onegin" written by the closeted gay Russian composer Tchaikovsky, directed by two lesbians (Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw), and featuring two Putin enthusiasts – the conductor Valery Gergiev and the soprano Anna Netrebko. Ultimately, LGBT activists carried the day by bringing so much attention, through outside pickets and an inside action, that every newspaper review devoted half of their coverage to the plight of Russian gays. But it's disturbing to see the Met deploy the IOC's same twisted arguments – that somehow holding the Olympics in Russia, or featuring two major Putin supporters in one's cast isn't a political statement, but protesting either of those actions is.
Finally, in a huge loss to all human rights supporters, Russian LGBT activist Alexei Davydov died at the age of 36. He was the first to challenge Russia's new "gay propaganda law" by standing on the steps of the Children's Library in Moscow with a sign reading "Gay is normal." Millions of people around the world watched the TV footage of him being hauled off by the police. The police also broke his arm in 2011, after arresting him at a protest defending freedom of assembly for all Russians. Being a gay activist in Russia, and therefore, unemployable, Davydov died poor. His friends are now scrambling to raise funds for his funeral.
Perhaps Putin, who boasted earlier this month that gay people suffer no discrimination in Russia, could step in to insure a hero's funeral for this "valued citizen of the Russian Federation"?
Don't hold your breath.
Watch a trailer for the film below:
The message from the IPCC report is familiar and shattering: it's as bad as we thought it was
Already, a thousand blogs and columns insist the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's new report is a rabid concoction of scare stories whose purpose is to destroy the global economy. But it is, in reality, highly conservative.
Reaching agreement among hundreds of authors and reviewers ensures that only the statements which are hardest to dispute are allowed to pass. Even when the scientists have agreed, the report must be tempered in another forge, as politicians question anything they find disagreeable: the new report received 1,855 comments from 32 governments, and the arguments raged through the night before launch.
In other words, it's perhaps the biggest and most rigorous process of peer review conducted in any scientific field, at any point in human history.
There are no radical departures in this report from the previous assessment, published in 2007; just more evidence demonstrating the extent of global temperature rises, the melting of ice sheets and sea ice, the retreat of the glaciers, the rising and acidification of the oceans and the changes in weather patterns. The message is familiar and shattering: "It's as bad as we thought it was."
What the report describes, in its dry, meticulous language, is the collapse of the benign climate in which humans evolved and have prospered, and the loss of the conditions upon which many other lifeforms depend. Climate change and global warming are inadequate terms for what it reveals. The story it tells is of climate breakdown.
This is a catastrophe we are capable of foreseeing but incapable of imagining. It's a catastrophe we are singularly ill-equipped to prevent.
The IPCC's reports attract denial in all its forms: from a quiet turning away – the response of most people – to shrill disavowal. Despite – or perhaps because of – their rigours, the IPCC's reports attract a magnificent collection of conspiracy theories: the panel is trying to tax us back to the stone age or establish a Nazi/communist dictatorship in which we are herded into camps and forced to crochet our own bicycles. (And they call the scientists scaremongers …)
In the Mail, the Telegraph and the dusty basements of the internet, yesterday's report (or a draft leaked a few weeks ago) has been trawled for any uncertainties that could be used to discredit. The panel reports that on every continent except Antarctica, man-made warming is likely to have made a substantial contribution to the surface temperature. So those who feel threatened by the evidence ignore the other continents and concentrate on Antarctica, as proof that climate change caused by fossil fuels can't be happening.
They make great play of the IPCC's acknowledgement that there has been a "reduction in surface warming trend over the period 1998–2012", but somehow ignore the fact that the past decade is still the warmest in the instrumental record.
They manage to overlook the panel's conclusion that this slowing of the trend is likely to have been caused by volcanic eruptions, fluctuations in solar radiation and natural variability in the planetary cycle.
Were it not for man-made global warming, these factors could have made the world significantly cooler over this period. That there has been a slight increase in temperature shows the power of the human contribution.
But denial is only part of the problem. More significant is the behaviour of powerful people who claim to accept the evidence. This week the former Irish president Mary Robinson added her voice to a call that some of us have been making for years: the only effective means of preventing climate breakdown is to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Press any minister on this matter in private and, in one way or another, they will concede the point. Yet no government will act on it.
As if to mark the publication of the new report, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has now plastered a giant poster across its ground-floor windows: "UK oil and gas: Energising Britain. £13.5bn is being invested in recovering UK oil and gas this year, more than any other industrial sector."
The message couldn't have been clearer if it had said "up yours". It is an example of the way in which all governments collaborate in the disaster they publicly bemoan. They sagely agree with the need to do something to avert the catastrophe the panel foresees, while promoting the industries that cause it.
It doesn't matter how many windmills or solar panels or nuclear plants you build if you are not simultaneously retiring fossil fuel production. We need a global programme whose purpose is to leave most coal and oil and gas reserves in the ground, while developing new sources of power and reducing the amazing amount of energy we waste.
But, far from doing so, governments everywhere are still seeking to squeeze every drop out of their own reserves, while trying to secure access to other people's. As more accessible reservoirs are emptied, energy companies exploit the remotest parts of the planet, bribing and bullying governments to allow them to break open unexploited places: from the deep ocean to the melting Arctic.
And the governments who let them do it weep sticky black tears over the state of the planet.
Over the past couple of days, as I've watched Ted Cruz capture the political world's attention and drive the GOP's self-defeating strategy on the budget and the debt limit, I've tried to think about what is the best metaphor to describe his extraordinary political rise – from freshman Texas senator to ideological lodestar of the Republican party.
Is he a modern-day version of George Wallace (in Gary Younge's analogy)? Is he Elmer Gantry? Is he Frankenstein?
No, he's the Republican's Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
For those not familiar with the reference, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man is "the form of the destructor" in the 1983 film, Ghostbusters. He seems harmless. After all, it's a giant marshmallow with a jaunty sailor's cap. But in reality, he is a 60ft anthropomorphized destroyer, who is chosen (inadvertently) to wage the movie's final showdown between the forces of good (the ghostbusters) and the forces of bad (Gozer).
Now, in the end of the movie everything works out for the best and everyone lives happily ever after (except, unfortunately, for those who paid to see Ghostbusters II). Things, however, are unlikely to work out so well for the Republican party.
For Cruz, on the other hand, capitalizing on the GOP's descent into madness is a deft political move that positions him well to be a clear frontrunner to win the party's presidential nod in 2016.
Over the past several decades, Republicans have cultivated the party's most reactionary, uncompromising and extremist base of supporters. They have portrayed government as a deeply nefarious and destructive force; they have fetishized ideological rigidity; they have derided and demonized compromise of any sort; they have destroyed the party's moderate wing and even drove conservatives out of the party for not being conservative enough.
Things are so bad that Liz Cheney is taking on incumbent Mike Enzi for the Senate seat in Wyoming. The reason for the primary challenge: he's not obstructionist enough and has committed the sin of actually talking with Democrats in the US Senate. That such a challenge would come after a period in which Congress entered a new stratosphere of dysfunction and uselessness is practically unimaginable. But alas, here we are.
Of course, when it comes to Obama, the GOP's rhetoric has been turned up to "11". Republicans have played on the fears of those who believe Obama is a socialist, Muslim, or a proud native son of Kenya. They have decried his war on political freedom; his war on gun rights; his war on business; his war on the middle class; his war on the nation's future generations; and his surrender to foreign tyrants. And they have portrayed his policies as a fast train to America's destruction – none more so than his signature legislation, Obamacare.
Since 2009, Republicans have practically fallen over themselves to describe a plan to provide health insurance coverage for 30 million people and lower healthcare costs as "the worst thing ever to happen to America".
According to Republicans, Obamacare represents a government takeover of the healthcare system (it's not); it was passed in violation of the will of the American people (it wasn't); it covers illegal immigrants (it doesn't, but it should); it will put government bureaucrats in charge of your healthcare decision (it won't); it is already causing widespread job losses (it's not) and will destroy the economy (it won't).
Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, calls it the "single worst piece of legislation passed in the last 50 years". Congressman John Fleming – a Louisiana Republican – went even further, describing Obamacare as "the most dangerous piece of legislation ever passed in Congress", and "the most existential threat" to the US economy "since the Great Depression". The House of Representatives has now voted more than 40 times to repeal the bill and is actively working to sabotage the law.
Conservatives are even running a creepy series of ads encouraging young people to eschew Obamacare and subsidized healthcare coverage, which, it must be said, is one of the more morally depraved activities that this country has seen from a major political group in some time. But in the GOP jihad against Obamacare, this sort of action is par for the course.
Indeed, opposition to Obamacare and the demand by Republicans – largely instigated by Cruz – that any budget or debt limit extension be tied to the defunding or delay of Obamacare has led to a possible government shutdown next week. It's an act both destructive and unworkable. Obama is not going to sign a bill undercutting his signature legislation, and they'll take the blame, which will be politically damaging.
So, why pursue this suicidal, self-defeating course? Enter Ted Cruz – the destructor.
Though many Republicans are wary, conservatives like Cruz have demanded this strategy – and have challenged the conservative bona fides of any who fail to get in line. A month ago, speaker of the House John Boehner was powerless to resist the crazies and finally relented, introducing legislation that tied the federal budget to a defunding of Obamacare.
This move led numerous Republicans to violate Ronald Reagan's so-called "11th commandment" – "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican" – as the two most senior GOP members have attacked Cruz. But none of this should be a surprise to them. Republicans have spent so much time describing Obamacare in the most dire terms imaginable, isn't it completely consistent for some Republicans to take this rhetoric to its logical conclusion?
To be sure, Republicans will find their way out of this current mess, most likely by conceding defeat and passing a clean continuing resolution and debt limit extension. But that will only begin the intra-party bloodletting.
For conservatives like Cruz, who, in just nine months in office, has become a hero to the party's base, it's precisely this retreat that he is counting on. It will only strengthen his political message that the problem for Republicans is the cadre of sellouts like McConnell, Boehner et al who refuse to follow through on their conservative principles. For a politician like Cruz, who clearly has his eyes set on national office, defeat for the GOP on Obamacare will be his ultimate victory.
Indeed, we've seen repeatedly over the past two election cycles that the more radical a Republican is, the more likely he or she is to defeat a slightly less radical Republican in a Senate or House primary. This is actually how Cruz became a senator.
In the end, Republicans have no one to blame but themselves for their current crisis. Ted Cruz was created by Republicans who persistently ramped up the extremism of their attacks on government and on Obama. That reached a point where Cruz's brand of crazy, heartless, morally wanton, uncompromising conservatism is now the default position of the party.
Unfortunately for Republicans, unlike the Ghostbusters, there is no escape from the monster they created.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
[Image via Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons-licensed]
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