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Progressives, liberals and maybe even a lot of centrists are shivering at the news that Charles and David Koch may buy part of the Tribune Company, including the largest newspapers in the second and third largest cities in America.

The Kochs, of course, are the right-wing financiers of the Tea Party and of a number of “thinkless tanks” that work against environmental regulations, unions, action on global warming and fair taxation policies.  These guys are as far right as can be and seem to have an open pocketbook for promoting wacky right-wing notions and dangerous lies.

The fear shared by those left of Attila the Hun is that the Kochs will infuse politics into the reporting and editorials of The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel and Hartford Courant. Additionally, throughout modern history, with right-wing politics has usually come a dumbing down and sensationalizing of the rest of a newspaper.

We already see what right-wing politics has done to the media outlets part of the Murdoch empire. A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that both the Wall Street Journal and Fox TV News distort news and opinion on global warming. Fox TV News recently all but ignored the gun debate in Congress, knowing that 90% of all Americans, including an overwhelming majority of their viewers, were in favor of the background checks that the ultra-right Fox dislike. Fox, of course, was among the first media outlets to practice “Matt Drudge journalism,” which consists of quoting a known liar who is lying so that the lie can be presented in the context of news.

The potential sale of the Los Angeles Times represents a particularly tragic case, since it was once a right-wing rag that under Otis Chandler in the 1960’s and 1970’s grew into one of the most distinguished and well-respected newspapers across the country.  But all these newspapers are centrist and under the Koch’s regime they would all take a sharp turn right.

But let’s face it. Nothing has really changed. Rich folk have always been the only ones who could afford to publish newspapers. The Chandlers, who owned the Los Angeles Times were loaded. So was Rupert Murdoch’s father. So were and are the Sulzbergers, who own the New York Times and the Pulliams, who owned the Arizona Republic and Indiana Star (and also produced that apotheosis of mediocrity, former Vice President Dan Quayle). The Mellon scion who funded the silly investigations into President Clinton’s business dealings in the 1990’s owns the Pittsburgh/Greensburg Tribune-Review and many other newspapers in western Pennsylvania.

While there are rich folk who look beyond their own greed, most will support the status quo that is treating them so well, even if that status quo is unfair to many or causes many to suffer. So much of the left-right divide centers around issues of economic equity—minimum wage, government support of education and health care, unionization, government pension plans and even safety regulations. It makes sense that many of those with money will not want to share it, even if they made their bucks in large part because of an extensive civil, economic and physical infrastructure.  It’s because only the people with lots of money can afford to own newspapers that since the birth of the printing press, most non-government controlled media has been centrist or listed right (in the context of each era).

One early hope of the Internet was that it would level the playing field.  While it is true that the Internet enables people of all opinions to shout out, the sheer number of voices gives added clout to the Internet screeners such as Yahoo! and Google, which favor mainstream and right-wing media in their algorithms.  Those algorithms are subject to manipulation, which takes money, which only the big media has. Thus, while the Internet theoretically levels the playing field, the net effect is to extend the dominance of big media owned by rich folk.

The replacement of large families by large corporations as media owners does not change the situation much, since single individuals or families can so easily control a corporation with as little as five percent of the voting stick.

Let’s face it. The rich will always be able to own the news. But the rich are not one unified monolithic group, but rather comprise a mosaic of opinions. If we can’t prevent media ownership from being dominated by the wealthy, we can at least spread ownership around, so we can achieve as large a diversity of ownership as possible. If we want a free market of ideas, we have to limit the number of media properties owned by any individual or corporation.

The trend over the past 30 years has been to loosen regulations on ownership of media properties, which leads to greater consolidation.  We should instead be moving in the opposite direction.  I would propose that no company, individual or trust be allowed to own more than one print or broadcast media property in any given state and no more than five in all, plus one website per print/broadcast property.

Today, loosening regulations is leading to a loss of freedom speech and freedom of the press. Greater regulation will stem that tide.

 

 

I have nothing to add to the millions of people who have expressed dismay and shock that the Senate could not pass a bill to increase background checks on gun buyers. As all the media except for maybe Fox News have reported, around 90% of all Americans supported increasing background checks. Yet the Senate couldn’t muster the 60 votes needed to prevent a filibuster, and so the bill failed.

The Senators who voted against the bill all have one worry: If they voted in favor of what their constituents wanted, gun rights organizations such as the rabid National Rifle Association and even more rabid Gun Owners of America would give exorbitant amounts of money to their opponents.

While I’m certain that a few of the 45 Senators voting against better background checks are gun crazy, it was the potential loss of their job that made many if not most vote thumbs down.

Forget about integrity or ethics. What happened to doing what the people who elected you want you to do?

Many blame the rules of the Senate for the failure of a bill supported by virtually every American. But I blame it primarily on money.  It should be clear to most Americans by now that money plays too great a role in American politics and political campaigns.  Congress should act to overturn the decision in Citizen’s United and institute real campaign reform.

I would start by limiting the amount of money that can be spent on any candidate’s campaign by anyone—different limits for different campaigns. Negative ads against one candidate would count against the total for every other candidate in that particular race. If a candidate is mentioned positively in an issue ad, say on gun control or abortion, it would count towards his or her total; if mentioned negatively in an issue ad, the amount spent on the ad would count towards the totals of the other candidates. I would begin the count the day after the previous election so that the total would apply to four years worth of spending for a presidential candidate, six years for a candidate for the U.S. Senate and so forth. Included in the count would be all spending for a candidate, including traditional and online advertising, social media campaigns, travel, consultants, polling and public relations efforts.

The immediate objection is that candidates have no control over other groups. Opponents might nefariously spend out a candidate in the first year of a four-year presidential cycle.  That takes a quick fix: forbid third party groups from mentioning a candidate positively or neutrally in an ad or brochure without the candidate’s permission.

I would keep the limits very low. Based on reports that Obama and Romney spent a combined $2 billion waging the 2012 presidential campaign, I would set the limit at $100 million a candidate for president and scale it down from there. The low limit would encourage more candidates and more parties and not give such as extreme edge to wealthy candidates such as Romney.

My proposal is a pipe dream, of course. It might take a constitutional amendment and it certainly would have a tough row through Congress. The political industry comprising consultants, lawyers, PR and advertising agencies, polltakers, IT specialists, graphic designers, printers, actuaries, telemarketing firms and social media companies would be against it. But most importantly, the people behind the money currently being spent on campaigns—be it gun makers, investment banks, multinational manufacturers or right-wing free market free booters like the Koch brothers—would be against it because they would lose their big edge in their battle against the majority—the ability to buy elections.

One of the many controversies roiling education at the moment is the argument over grading essays with software programs. A nonprofit organization that is a joint venture between Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently began making automated essay-grading software free to any educational institution that wants to use it.

Some think it’s a great idea and even postulate that it will help students improve their writing abilities, as they can retake the same essay test multiple times until the software gives them an A.  Opponents wonder if software could ever capture the nuances of good writing.

I’m tending to side with those opposed to machine grading of essays. I spend a lot of time in my job editing the copy of other professional writers. The difference between good and bad writing is often subtle. Sometimes merely placing the last sentence of a paragraph first creates the structure needed to understand the point.  Or breaking a grammatically correct complex sentence into several simpler sentences can create a process or chain of reasoning where only a simple list existed before.

Writing expository prose entails a complicated balancing of grammar, syntax, cultural allusions, context, subtext, rhythms and emotions. No one has yet produced software to check spelling that is without numerous, and sometimes notorious, glitches. For example, Word’s spell-checker insists that a company is a living and animate thing by correcting “the company that” to “the company who.” In the same wise, it also turns people into things, always automatically changing “the person who” into “the person that.”

There are literally hundreds of these simple syntactical and grammatical mistakes such as confusing “that” and “who” which people make in their writing all the time: “the company and their employees” instead of “the company and its employees;” “the animals comprise the zoo” instead of “the zoo comprises animals” (the famous example from Strunk &White); using “anxious” when you mean “eager” and “jealous” when you mean “envious.”  When I was a college instructor grading essays, these minor mistakes turned an A into a B. In the real world of an advertising and public relations firm, they are the difference between getting a promotion and getting fired.

But beyond the simple mechanics of proper English, there are many nuances that go into good writing. Let’s start with the issue of appropriate language, which essential explores when it’s okay to break the rules.  “Ain’t” ain’t good, but in some formal essays it works if it creates a moment of cleverness or allows the writer to allude to an idiomatic expression or famous quote.

Will a machine understand a cultural reference, be it an allusion to a song, a novel, a quote or a famous person? What will software think of a reference to rap or a clever circumlocution lifted from an 18th century novel? Will the software know when the allusion is inaccurate?

And what of tone? Will a software program recognize sarcasm, irony, empathy, anger or other sub-textual emotions that propel the best essay writing? Will it notice when the author changes tone and will it recognize when the change is appropriate and when it is merely sloppy writing?

There is also the issue of the passive construction. The passive is grammatically correct, but it makes for uninteresting and dull writing, as it tends to turn everything into a state of being. Some examples:  The film was seen by the students. The building was destroyed by the earthquake. As I sometimes roar out when I see a lot of passives in a piece I’m editing, “Is, is is! Nothing but is!” Will the software know that writing in the passive makes for a much duller essay than speaking in the active voice: The students saw the film. The earthquake destroyed the building. And just as important, will it recognize the relatively small number of occasions when the passive is appropriate, e.g., when the writer wants to avoid attribution or to describe an actual state of being?

Genre also is an issue in editing.  Each genre and subgenre has its own unique rules and formulae, some of which are hard-and fast (a sonnet must have 14 lines) and some of which are quite flexible (the second or third paragraph of a news release should be a quote).  For example, when writing on legal on engineering issues for other lawyers or engineers, the use of the passive is not such a “no-no.” Will the software be able to distinguish between a news story, news feature, news release about news, news release about non-news, OpEd piece, legal précis, creative non-fiction, five-part essay and scientific paper?

Finally, there is the issue of logic. Often a sentence or paragraph looks reasonable enough until you read it a second time and see it is completely senseless.  Many sentences with if/then clauses look right because both clauses are true, but are illogical since there is no causal relationship between the two. One can’t go more than a few days reading the news media without seeing an opinion piece in which the author writes factually for many paragraphs and then draws a completely false conclusion. Will the computer pick up on logical flaws?

Years ago, Alan Turing proposed a test to know when a computer acquired the ability to think as humans do: when it is able to hold a conversation with someone and the person thinks he or she is speaking with another human being.

I am proposing a similar test: let’s allow software to grade student essays only when it can write an essay itself. I even have the topic about which the software must be able to write. I take it from an example of the nuances in language that the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein gives in his theoretical essay, “Through Theatre to Cinema,” as translated by Jay Leyda. In Leyda’s translation, Eisenstein writes (and note the passive construction), “How easily three shades of meaning can be distinguished in writing—for example: ‘a window without light,’ ‘a dark window,” and ‘an unlit window.’”

When a software program can write an essay that explains the distinction between these three descriptions, I will be willing to let it grade essays.

In a co-op apartment, each tenant owns his or her own unit and has shares in a corporation that owns the apartment. Joining together collectively as a mini-government or a semi-socialist enterprise, the corporation (or a management company it hires) employs a superintendent and a number of doormen and porters. These people are kept busy—they open the doors, sort the mail, accept the delivery of packages, help carry groceries, clean the shared areas of the building, keep the boiler and washer-dryers operational, do minor repairs, enforce building rules (of which there are always many), hail taxis and keep track of the various workers hired by tenants to work in their individual apartments.  To get these services, the apartment owners all pay a monthly fee—more for larger apartments or those on higher floors (which require more time for the building personnel to serve).  Most owners also give the staff seasonal bonuses at the end of the calendar year.

The other day I was thinking about how convenient it would be to apply the co-op/doorman model to blocks of single-family dwellings. Someone to keep the street safe, accept packages, clean snow and ice off the sidewalks, help carry the groceries in and maybe even serve as the block handyperson for simple faucet leaks and picture-hanging. Having the block equivalent of a doorman would certainly make life easier for everyone who owns a single family home in a city and many suburban neighborhoods.

But then I started thinking about the major impediment to such a plan working—the selfishness of Americans. After three decades of the politics of selfishness, wouldn’t many if not most homeowners worry that someone else on the block was using too many of the services offered by the staff? Wouldn’t some people try to “get the most” out of their monthly fees and try to use the staff all the time?  Wouldn’t most Americans reject the block staff concept outright because of the same shortsighted, I’ve-got-mine selfishness that makes people vote to cut support of public schools and mass transit?

While selfishness and other human foibles can muck up the management of a co-op apartment building, the owners are united in one way that forces them to become part of the social compact that generates all the benefits provided by the building’s staff: They all live together in the same building with the same roof, the same elevator and stairs, the same lobby and most important, the same source of hot water, heat and electricity. The only choice anyone has is to be a responsible co-op citizen interested in the overall welfare of the apartment.

And then the big idea hit me: Doesn’t the co-op model have a place in solving our energy crisis?  Specifically, we already have the technology to build small solar-powered electrical generating plants that can provide the electricity for a few city blocks. Many theorists of solar power have often conceived of a situation in which instead of one central power plant that serves large metropolitan areas, there are many smaller plants throughout a region, each of which produces electricity for its neighborhood and all of which are connected to the national grid.  Utilities and politicians don’t like the individual solar plant model, because they lose control of the power source and the ability to make money from it. But for the public, why should it matter if the power comes from a behemoth plant miles away or from a modest unit tucked out of the way around the corner?  If I may speak for most—what we want is a steady source of electricity that doesn’t pollute the planet and is not threatened by energy scarcity.

The co-op model can make the neighborhood solar plant work. Every house on the block must own a share of the power plant, just as every owner of an apartment must have shares in the building. The building hires the staff to take care of the plant. The natural extension would be for the staff to provide many of the services that make co-op living so pleasant.

I’ve pretty much described a utopian dream which combines some of the best elements of socialism and capitalism to give people more control over their lives in some ways in return for certain restrictions, all of which are for the common good.

Of course, as long as world governments are more interest in solutions that require large organizations, it is nothing more than a dream.

OpEdge logs a lot of keystrokes analyzing logical mistakes that appear to be made to advance a cause or an idea:  Surveys which use criteria that ensure the conclusions will support the beliefs of the survey takers. Articles that give facts but then end with a false conclusion. Mislabeling to make an ideological point, e.g., calling Obama a socialist or Eadweard Muybridge a super-genius. Conflating two acts, so that the more heinous or odd one appears in a better light.

This past week’s New York Times “Sunday Review” gives a maddening example of one of the subtlest of propaganda techniques: a half comparison, which is what occurs when a writer or speaker compares the apples of one group to the oranges of another group, even though both groups have both apples and oranges. The logical mistake comes in the suppression of inconvenient facts related to one or both sides of the comparison.

The article in question titled “Pity The Men On Top” by Susan Jacoby compares the glamorous life portrayed on the chattering class’s current favorite TV show, “Mad Men” to the drudgery that most professionals experienced during the 1950s and early 1960s.

Here’s the passage in question, and it’s the opening of the article:

“WHEN I dream about my father, as I do even though he has been dead for more than a quarter of a century, I always wake up when I hear the crunch of tires rolling over rock salt — an unmistakable sound evoking the winters of my Michigan childhood in the 1950s and early ’60s. Dad, an accountant, would pull his car out of our icy driveway and head for his office long before first light. This was tax season, and he could keep his business and our family financially afloat only by working 80-hour weeks.

You won’t find Bob Jacoby or his unglamorous middle-class, middle-income contemporaries in “Mad Men,” the AMC series beginning its sixth season on Sunday. If we are to believe the message of popular culture, the last men on top — who came of age during World War II or in the decade after it — ran the show at work, at home and in bed.”

Let’s take a look at the comparison between the glorified fictional image and reality, which is represented by the single anecdote of a single real white male.  What we read about in the real example are the facts of work: getting up early, working overtime, worrying about finances. In contrast, all we read about in the details of the “Mad Men” myth is status related: “ran the show at work, at home and in bed.” It’s a false comparison, because the author tells us her dad ran the business, so he was just as much in charge as the Mad Men, and more in charge than those in the TV series who don’t have ownership interests in the fictional ad agency at the center of the action. We can only imagine that he was also in charge at home, at least when it came to finances.

Later on, Jacoby writes that most blue or white collar jobs didn’t provide the income or freedom to allow for “hotel rooms for trysts with girlfriends.” Her example, though, is not a blue collar or white collar working male, but her father (again), a business owner of a professional service firm. She claims that he didn’t have time for an affair, he worked so hard. Let’s give her and her dad the benefit of the doubt and merely point out that he doesn’t represent the entire class of upper middle class professional white males in the post-World War II era.

I’m not saying that “Mad Men” is a realistic depiction; in fact it is not. Nor am I saying that the life of most upper middle class white professional males in the ’50s and early ’60s was not drudgery, although I suspect it had more joy in it than was in the lives of repressed and suppressed educated upper-middle class women, poor minorities or unskilled nonunionized laborers of that period.

What I’m saying is that to advance her argument—whatever merit it has—author Susan Jacoby makes a false comparison as a means to argue by anecdote. The polite term for this kind of illogical reasoning is to call it propaganda.

Lately it appears that the New York Times Book Review is trading in stereotypes that support the basic ideological assumptions of American life. Or maybe, I’m just starting to notice it.

About two months ago, OpEdge analyzed a book review that used the not-really-a-super-genius biographical subject of the book under critique as proof that super geniuses are also madmen, a common stereotype that supports the ideological assumption that it’s bad to be smart and that smart people have social adjustment problems and are unhappier than the average person.  The stereotype is false and the ideological assumption—big-banged into us constantly by mass media and entertainment—is not only also false, but serves as a false model for our youth.

The NYT Book Review is at it again this week, publishing a review of a new biography of Karl Marx in which the reviewer presents another false stereotype as gospel: that political radicals are dirty, flighty, loud-mouthed moochers.

Let’s allow the reviewer, Jonathan Freedland, an editorial page columnist for The Guardian of London, to hang himself with his own words:

“The Karl Marx depicted in Jonathan Sperber’s absorbing, meticulously researched biography will be unnervingly familiar to anyone who has had even the most fleeting acquaintance with radical politics. Here is a man never more passionate than when attacking his own side, saddled with perennial money problems and still reliant on his parents for cash, constantly plotting new, world-changing ventures yet having trouble with both deadlines and personal hygiene, living in rooms that some might call bohemian, others plain ‘slummy’…”

The key words come at the beginning: The Karl Marx depicted…will be unnervingly familiar to anyone who has had even the most fleeting acquaintance with radical politics. That sets the scene for Freedland’s description of the hippy of hippies who, worst of all, is living off his folks.

Of course, Freedland is right that most radical political groups have some loud ne’er-do-wells who could bathe more often. In fact, I’ve seen them at every political demonstration that I have ever attended. They have certainly been part of the Occupy protests.

But I’ve also seen smelly wide-eyed hippies at adult chess tournaments.

I’ve seen them at churches and synagogues.

I’ve seen them on every college campus I have ever visited. I used to see one or two slip out of the offices of the Young Republicans when I was in college.

I’ve seen them at public meetings, ball games and parades.

But these other places, institutions and organizations where humans of all sorts collect and interact don’t get tarred with the label of producing people who are ”are saddled with perennial money problems and still reliant on his parents for cash, constantly plotting new, world-changing ventures yet having trouble with both deadlines and personal hygiene…” (well maybe chess, an intellectual game to which weirdness is also unfairly attached.)

The most subtle aspect of Freedland’s cheap shot at the left is that the smelly hippy in question is Karl Marx.  First of all, placing the stereotype in the context of discussing the life of the leading theoretician of communism limits the definition of “radical” to the left. Freedland expresses a coy shock at learning that Marx fits what he calls a “recognizable pattern.” By applying the pattern narrowly to left-wing radicals, Freedland tries to make the left less palatable, just as all the images of intellectuals as socially inept make cracking a book and learning something less palatable.

Freedland wraps a neat bow on his ideological package by declaring additional shock at learning that Marx is not some revolutionary icon, but a “genuine human being,” to use his words. Yes, I’m confident that Marx is presented as more human than symbol in the book under review, Karl Marx, a Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber.

But in Freedland’s review, Marx comes off as an unsavory but buffoonish cartoon character.

Of course, that’s the image that the mass media wants us to have of the left.

 

Gay marriage should be a no-brainer. We live in a secular society in which people of diverse backgrounds and beliefs interact in the public realm according to rules that apply to all and then go home and do as they please.

Our laws constrain behavior that can hurt others, such as killing people, taking what isn’t yours, adulterating food, poisoning water or refusing to hire or serve someone because of their skin color or religion.

But when two private citizens marry, it hurts no one.

Now “hurt” and “offend” are two different things. I understand that many people are offended by homosexuality—typically for religious reasons—and worry that seeing married gays might hurt them and their children. To these good if benighted people I answer with Lenny Bruce’s old sarcasm about not wanting to allow Christians to teach in public school because he was afraid his kids would come home with St. Christopher medals stuck in their palms. Those who feel uncomfortable around married gays should remember that there may be something about themselves that will offend other people, such as wearing a cross, quoting from the Bible or saying “Have a Merry Christmas.”

While our society has always been open and based on tolerance for all full citizens, unfortunately at the beginning only white males were considered full citizens. Thank goodness the suffrage, civil rights and other liberation movements have given full citizenship to just about everyone.

Marriage is clearly not about having children the natural way (i.e., man and woman engage in sex and nine months later a baby pops out). Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan nailed it when she said that if the purpose of marriage were procreation, a state could deny marriage licenses to a heterosexual couple in which both spouses were more than 55 years old.

But what about the children? Studies have exploded all the myths about gay marriage. The children of married gays behave no differently from the children of straights. The insertion of gays into social groups does not lead to an outbreak of crime, disease or a higher incidence of drinking, drug use, gambling problems or any other social problem.

In short there is no overriding public interest that would require or allow the state to outlaw the marriage of two people of the same sex.

If gay marriage were legal throughout the country, it would not prevent any religion or religious leader from refusing to marry gays or accept them in the flock. But it would end the obnoxious hypocrisy of having our secular society imposing the religious views of many on the rest of us.

But the controversy over gay marriage serves a purpose for our politicians. It’s a sideshow that keeps our minds off the real problems, such as global warming, energy and other resource scarcity and the increasing inequitable distribution of wealth.  Moreover, elected officials and candidates opposed to gay marriage bundle it with a bunch of issues that hurt most Americans—like low taxes on the wealthy, privatization of basic government functions, union-busting policies and a low minimum wage.  The “social issues” of the right-wing trick the good people of the religious right into supporting its only-the-rich-matter stands on economic issues.

I have no idea what the Supreme Court will do.  But I do know that those who think Justice Kennedy is the swing vote on this issue have it wrong. The swing vote is Roberts, and here’s why.  Roberts has always voted the way that large corporations want him to vote. That’s why after years of votes that take rights from individuals and give them to corporations, he figured out a way to vote to uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (AKA healthcare reform). Large corporations liked the new healthcare law because it will save them money, and once again, Roberts was their boy.

And large corporations for the most part have swung in favor of gay marriage, or at least no longer oppose it. My guess it that the court will favor gay marriage if Roberts can apply some twisted reason that enables him to affirm the overturning of the California anti-gay marriage law without offending his basic conservative principles and the consistency of his past votes. Otherwise, he’ll cut a deal with the four centrist members of the court to refuse to hear the appeal.

The same goes for the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).  If Roberts can construct an argument that tracks with his “principles” but still allows gay marriage, DOMA dies.

Whatever happens, even more millions of dollars will be spent on both sides over the coming years, money that could be put to better use arguing about real issues or actually doing something to help the country.

A new Mississippi law requires public schools to develop policies to allow students to pray over school intercoms and at assemblies and sporting events. The law permits students to pray publicly with a disclaimer from school administration. I imagine the disclaimer will be read at super warp speed as at the end of commercials for financial planners and prescription drugs.

In supporting the new law, the New York Times reports that Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant said: “We are about making sure that we protect the religious freedoms of all students and adults whenever we can.”

What Bryant means to protect is not the freedom to practice one’s own religion, but the freedom to practice it in public. He forgets that much like tobacco smoking, overtly public religious expressions create a kind of second-hand smoke that bother others, especially when those praying use AV systems and especially in public schools.

Mississippi is just the latest of the southern states to try to get around the basic constitutional separation of religion and state. The Times notes that last year Florida approved a bill to allow students to read inspirational messages at assemblies and sporting events. Also last year, Missouri voters approved a constitutional amendment that gives residents the right to “pray and acknowledge God voluntarily in their schools,” and a similar amendment was introduced in Virginia this year.  South Carolina legislators introduced a bill last year that would allow for prayer during a mandatory minute of silence at the start of the school day, provided that students who do not want to hear the prayer can leave the classroom.

For more than 30 years, we have seen a concerted encroachment on public spaces. The first wave—starting with Reagan and continuing today—consisted of reducing funding for public spaces, facilities and institutions, be it parks, schools, public universities, libraries or mass transit. In trying to assert the right of religious expression in a public place, proponents of bringing prayer into schools represent a second wave, in which conservatives seek to put public space to private use.

Most frightening to me is the rationale that former Arkansas Governor and religious right-wing nut Mike Huckabee gives for prayer in schools: “We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be surprised that schools would become places of carnage?”

When Huckabee says that putting religion in schools will make schools less prone to violence, he is ignoring the violent histories of many religions, including Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism. He forgets the countless religious wars and the countless other wars in which religion was a thin veil for an economic, dynastic or national struggle.  In fact for most of recorded history, rulers and generals have firmly stated that “god is on our side in our war against the unbeliever.” They’ve done it in Europe and in Asia, they’ve done it in the United States and Russia. Even the defenders of the foul institution of slavery in the Confederate States of America claimed that god was on their side.

I would assert that bringing more religion into schools might actually increase violence. It’s not the fact that religion so often advocates violence that concerns me. It’s the permission that religion gives people to engage in violent acts. Those who believe in a life after death must by definition be more prone to engage in violence because they think they will survive into another life and therefore are more willing to take the risks associated with violent behavior. No atheist believes in a life after death. Only those who believe in a personal god believe that a conscious part of us survives this life Instead of risking life, believers in life after death think they are risking only this life. Thus believing in a religion makes one more likely to be ready to commit a violent act. That religion also gives people a motive—god wants me to kill the enemy—also feeds the psychology of violence.

Now inciting people to violence is appropriate in certain contexts—the military for example.  So it’s not surprising that soldiers tend to be more religious than the general public.  For example, the most recent Pew Foundation study on religious affiliation found that 39.2% of all Americans are either atheist, agnostic or have no affiliation. By contrast, the most recent poll of military personnel by The Military Times finds that only 28.68% of our fighting men and women are atheist, agnostic or have no affiliation.

But a public school is not the military. It’s only half-facetiously that I write that putting religion is public schools could be the equivalent of pouring gasoline on a fire.

Yet even if religion decreased violence, that would still be no reason to bring it into public schools.  In the United States, religion is supposed to be a private matter. Those wishing to turn our public spaces into celebrations of their own religious beliefs are about as un-American as one could possibly be.

As we approach the 10 year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by U.S. forces we hear some calling for pursuing a war against Iran over its ostensible development of nuclear weapons.

Before we pull the trigger on another military action anywhere for any reason, we should consider what resulted from the Bush II’s Administration decision to ignore the evidence and invade Iraq under the false pretenses that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was aiding Al Qaida.  I count six major outcomes of the Iraq War, all bad:

1. The enormous loss of life

Estimates of casualties range from 100,000 to more than 600,000 deaths. Many people are starting to use the Brown University figures for deaths:

• 4,488 U.S. soldiers
• 3,400 U.S. mercenaries (AKA military contractors)
• 319 soldiers from allied countries
• 56,000 Iraqi military and security personnel
• 134,000 Iraqi civilians

These numbers refer to deaths alone and do not include the number of people wounded.

2. The destruction of Iraqi society and economy

Iraq has devolved from a totalitarian-authoritarian state to a fragmented and fractionalized mess that is impossible to govern. The economy is still in shambles. One estimate sets at over a million the number of displaced Iraqis. Displaced means they can’t live where they used to live anymore because of the destruction.

3. The cost of the war, now trillions of dollars and still rising

Along with its twin folly in Afghanistan, the Bush II invasion of Iraq has bankrupted the United States. To the degree that the United States has a real deficit problem, it has not been caused by social spending or the bill for Baby Boomer Social Security. No, it’s the Iraq-Afghanistan war spending combined with the enormous tax cut given to the wealthy during the Bush II years.  If you wonder why there are fewer cops on the beat, why your brother-in-law was kicked out of a job training program, why there are more kids in your daughter’s fourth grade class or why you’re waiting at the airport longer, remember that you’re paying so that we could invade Iraq while the rich squirrel away the extra cash they have from lower taxes.

4. The creation of the American torture gulag

The Iraq War served as the main staging ground for the Bush II Administration’s illegal, ineffective and immoral torture program.

5. America’s loss of respect

The U.S. reputation and credibility plummeted around the world.  The world saw us lie, run a war incompetently, resort to torture and then lie some more. By invading Iraq we surrendered whatever sympathy we had gathered in the Arab world and elsewhere following 9/11.

6. The tainting of our political process

By all rights, Bush, Cheney and their henchmen should have all been prosecuted for lying to the country about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and illegally establishing a world-wide program of torture.  Richard Nixon resigned before he could be impeached for one instance of domestic espionage against the opposing party. Bill Clinton was impeached for telling one lie about an affair. And yet not only has Congress not brought Bush II and Cheney to justice, the Obama Administration has sought to bury their crimes under the guise of “looking forward.”

Contemplating the ways that the Iraq War destroyed Iraq while harming Americans in so many direct and indirect ways, I am reminded of a Pete Seeger song about war in general that was made famous 50 years ago during another stupid war.  The song is “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”  Thinking of Iraq and the possibilities of an invasion of Iran, I close my eyes and I can almost hear the sweetly plaintive voices of Peter Yarrow, Paul Stockey and Mary Travers knit together harmoniously for the last line of each verse, “Oh, when will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?”

When will we ever learn?

I was pleased to read that 6 residents of Cincinnati are challenging the City Council’s plan to privatize parking. They want to put the plan on the ballot and let voters decide.

The City Council is giving the typical reason for outsourcing control of what amounts to about 11% of the parking spots in Cincinnati: they say they need the pre-payment of $92 million to close a budget gap and save 344 jobs.   That’s obviously a load of hooey. What will the city do next time it needs to balance a budget? Instead of keeping a steady stream of income from a community asset, the City Council is taking a one-time payment (plus an additional paltry $3 million a year for 30 years). It’s very short-term thinking.

The Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority is paying the money and will then contract with private operators.  The Authority and the private operators would not be involved if they couldn’t make a profit. Why can’t the city continue to operate the parking lots and spaces and make the profit itself? It won’t solve Cincinnati’s fiscal dilemma, but nor will selling off money-making assets.

Cincinnati faces the typical problems of most cities: People work there, but live and pay most of their taxes to the surrounding suburbs. Because Cincinnati is the center of the metropolitan area, it has virtually all of the public institutions such as universities and hospitals, all non-profits exempt from paying property taxes. In short, the tax base is too narrow and unfairly made narrower by the unwillingness of suburbanites to contribute to the municipalities that provide them with jobs, entertainment, tertiary health care and institutions of higher learning. Fixing the basic tax inequities would provide a permanent solution. Instead, the City Council wants to give away the store—probably to political cronies.

The idea of privatizing standard and long-time government functions such as parking, prisons, highways and schools is nothing more than an elaborate scheme to transfer wealth from the many to the few.  Just consider the money flow and you’ll see that I’m right:

• Instead of the government making the profit, the owners of the privatized companies do. The few take the profit from the many.
• The typical company providing privatized services is non-unionized with most employees making far less money than the government workers who previously did the jobs.  Executives in government services typically make far less than their counterparts on the outside. Again, the few take the profit from the many.

One of the most repeated myths in the marketplace of ideas is that the private sector always does it better than the public sector. All evidence indicates that it certainly isn’t true when it comes to prisons, the privatization of which has led to many scandals.

If we compare like populations, we see that privatization of schools hasn’t worked either.  Comparing private schools to public schools proves nothing, since the population of private schools is so much wealthier and well-connected. We have to compare public schools to their replacement in public school areas—the charter school.   Virtually all studies show that the charter school movement has yielded disappointing results in student performance in school and on standardized tests (which don’t test all skills, but do test a lot of skills such as reading and math that are needed to get through life and hold down a job).  But right-wing politicians like charter schools, because charter school teachers typically don’t have to belong to the union.  The teachers make less (and thereby put downward pressure on the pay of other teachers and job-holders) and the charter school operators make more.

What’s funny is that the way to fix the flaws that critics find in public institutions such as schools and prisons is more money. More money for more teachers, better books, labs and computers. More money for more guards and more education programs for prisoners. But the profit reaped by the owners of companies that run outsourced government services results in society having less money to throw at the problems.

What the 20th century should have taught us is that mixed economies work best. There are lots of societal functions for which private businesses are in a position to deliver the best mix of price and benefits. But the services that government has run for ever, or at least since the 18th and 19th centuries, seem to have worked pretty well. At least they did until the
Reaganites and their even more conservative political descendents decided to starve government by lowering taxes.