The Declaration of Independence asserts that all people have the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  We often distill this powerful phrase and the holiday of July 4th into one word: freedom.  For example, I just inputted “July 4th + freedom” into Google and found more than 12.5 million responses.  Inputting “Declaration of Independence + freedom” into Google yields more than 9 million hits (and the word does not appear in the document).

But often people bandy about freedom as a cover for selfishness: freedom from taxation, freedom from regulation, freedom to pollute; even freedom for people with a history of mental illness to carry guns (a truly scary National Rifle Association sponsored movement analyzed in a fine article in this past Sunday’s New York Times.)

In their pursuit of their own selfish ends, many people nowadays forget that with freedom comes responsibility—responsibility to fellow human beings, the community and the Earth.  For the past 30 some odd years, we have lived in a great age of selfishness, as exemplified by Ronald Reagan’s favorite joke about two people who see a bear in the woods.  The first says, “I hope we can we outrun the bear,” to which the second says, “I just have to outrun you.”

I’ve been visiting Toronto this past week, relying on the wonderful mass transit system.  In taking an escalator from the subway platform to street level at rush hour, I had an experience that really symbolized to me how selfish we have become in the United States.  It may seem like a small thing to some readers, but maybe not.

Let me preface my story with the fact that I am a dedicated walker.  When I get on an escalator or a people mover, I want to keep walking. 

In the United States, virtually every time I take an escalator or people mover during rush times there are people standing across the width of the conveyor, and often when I say, politely, “Excuse me,” so I can keep moving, they frown at me or look at me as if I were crazy.  Once in the Washington, D.C. subway, a man got very hostile, as if I was the offending party.  A few minutes later, a woman who looked to be his significant other came over to me on the platform to apologize, saying that he didn’t know one was supposed to stand right to let other people move by on the left. The excuse didn’t hold water, since their clothes and shopping bags from upscale stores suggested that they probably ride a people mover at an airport from time to time and so have heard that ubiquitous recorded chant of “stand right so people can walk left.” 

Now to Canada:  The escalator had people standing on it packed tight on every step from bottom to top, and every one of them was standing right and squeezing to the wall a little, so that people could move by them!!!  By the way, there was no sign telling them to stand right. 

In other words, people were thinking of others and their needs.

A little thing, you might say, but let’s remember that Canadians contribute more to the common good through paying higher taxes, which fund Toronto’s extensive mass transit system, lower costs for higher education, and a state-run healthcare system, which although much maligned in the United States, produces better results in terms of infant mortality and life expectancy than our system currently does (at a much lower cost). 

I’m not saying things are perfect in Canada.  What I am saying is that the escalator experience showed me once again that people in the United States have grown selfish and that it’s killing our society.  We see our roads deteriorating and our public schools choked to death by a lack of funding, and yet we won’t raise taxes.  Large corporations and industry associations that know about the threat of global warming still insist on gutting or stopping environmental regulations.  Physicians refuse to treat Medicare/Medicaid patients.  To sell a few more guns, the industry-fed NRA fights for the right of mentally ill people like the Virginia Tech mass murderer to own and carry firearms.  In Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, where I currently live, very few politicians dare to support reassessment of property taxes, even though that under the current system people in poorer neighborhoods and municipalities pay more than they should in property taxes and people in wealthy areas pay less than they should.

Now some may say that standing right so others can move ahead of you is simply a matter of politeness, but isn’t politeness an aspect of showing concern for others?  Whether it’s not extending unemployment benefits or cutting Social Security benefits so that we don’t have to (god forbid!) raise taxes, what we see is a lack of concern for others.  On an escalator, it’s merely irritating.  In the halls of Congress and our state legislatures, this lack of concern threatens to plunge us into another deep depression and make the Earth unlivable for human beings and other creatures.

The news this morning that U.S. military casualties in Iraq are at their highest since 2008 must have surprised many people who thought the war ended last August.  And those Rip van Winkles among us who just woke up after falling asleep when Bush II stood on an aircraft carrier and declared the war over in 2003 must be completely disoriented.

The death count among our 50,000 troops in Afghanistan in June has been 15 dead, 14 in hostilities.  There has been no report if there have been any deaths among the 100,000 contractors who work for private profit-making companies still performing military services in Iraq.  In the old days, we called them mercenaries.

Last August, President Obama declared that the U.S. combat mission in Iraq would end that month.  But now there’s combat after the end of combat.  Maybe what Obama meant to say was that our forces would cease to attack in Iraq, but only fight back when attacked. 

American presidents have declared the Iraqi War over twice now, once by Obama last August and once by Bush in 2003.  And yet it goes on, as do the wars it has spawned in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Both presidents used overly fine definitions of war’s end to make their case: Obama defined war’s end as the end of a narrow understanding of combat; Bush defined it as the end of major hostilities.  But the combat and the hostilities continue.

These guys went to Harvard and Yale, and at least one was not a legacy (who, as research has shown, receive a much bigger break in getting into colleges than athletes or minorities).  I guess that along the way Bush and Obama never learned that the end of a foreign war either means a country takes all its troops out or that it crushes all but the faintest wisp of an opposition.

Meanwhile, the cost of all these wars has now passed $2.3 trillion, according to a report just released by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.  The Institute estimates that the final cost will be $4.4 trillion by the time we’ve provided care to all the vets whose bodies and minds the war destroyed.  That’s more than $100,000 per U.S. citizen.  That money would go a long way in fixing our roads and bridges, investing in alternative energy and mass transit, educating our youths and helping our aged and poor.  Instead a large part of it is lining the pockets of the owners and operators of the private companies that now perform military tasks that our armed forces once did for themselves.

There was never a reason to be in Iraq and the reason to be in Afghanistan and Pakistan ended when we captured (and then illegally assassinated) Osama bin Laden.  It’s time to start using the standard definition of war’s end and pull all the troops out.  I’m not a military expert, but I don’t see why it has to take more than six months or so to get everyone home.  And by everyone, I mean troops and mercenaries.

Let’s just admit we made a big mistake and leave. 

My first real awareness of Michele Bachmann came about a year ago when she proclaimed from the Conservative media rooftops that 2 million people attended the Glenn Beck march in Washington.  That was 25 times the number that scientific methodologies counted for this much overblown rally.

I thought it amazing that Bachmann could so diffidently throw around what she must have known were false numbers.  The immediate contrast was with Sarah Palin.  Palin seemed to be truly ignorant, whereas Bachmann projected a knowing cunning, as if she knew she was exaggerating far beyond the point of fibbing.

Now Politifact has done one of their truth analyses of Bachmann’s statements.  Politifacts looked into 26 provocative statements Bachmann has recently made, selected at random. 

Politifact likes to rate statements in six descriptive categories, and here’s how Bachmann’s 26 statements fared:

• TRUE:      1
• MOSTLY TRUE: 0
• HALF TRUE: 2
• BARELY TRUE: 5
• FALSE: 11
• PANTS ON FIRE: 7

Basically, Bachmann told the truth once (4%), proffered a semi-truth or a stretcher 7 times (27%) and lied out-and-out 18 times (69%).

Here are a few of Bachmann’s more outrageous lies:

• The President released all of the oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve.  President Obama released a mere 4% of the reserve.
• The price of throwing a barbecue on Memorial Day weekend was 29% more this year than last year.  Nationally, the real increase was 3%
• Small businesses with $250,000 in gross sales are looking at a massive tax increase.  The tax increase would be on profit not gross sales, making this one of the smarmiest of the lies.
• The top 1% of wage earners pay about 40% of all taxes to the federal government.  Wrong again, Michele! It’s only about 28%.

And on and on, lie after lie after lie, some almost criminally absurd.

The question is why such a bald-faced liar is getting so much coverage in the media?

What if Bachmann gains a head of steam like Dukakis or Obama did and sweeps through the caucuses and primaries?  Can the Republicans responsibly nominate for either president or vice president someone who continually lies on the factual level?  We’re not talking about the typical conceptual lies and convoluted reasoning about free markets.  Nor are we talking about an abiding faith that distorts the analysis of every phenomenon.  And we’re not talking about pretty euphemisms or false labeling.

No, we’re talking about an extreme pattern of constant lying about facts to make her case.  We’re talking about someone who told the absolute truth 4% of the time.  How can we have a president whom we can’t trust?

Bachmann, Palin and their ilk get popular because the news media give them plenty of opportunities to tell the people what they want to hear.  Like Reagan’s welfare queens, Bachmann’s lies and Palin’s misunderstandings play into the long-standing myths, prejudices and beliefs of a hardcore minority of the country—maybe 20-25% of our citizenry.  The main stream news media  panders to the beliefs of this minority by letting them set the stage for discussions of debt ceilings, education, war, torture, abortion, and virtually every other issue save (at least lately) gay marriage.

But once again, I wonder, have the moneybags and the media mavens thought through the possible outcome of giving their attentions to Michele Bachmann?  Couldn’t they have found another female Conservative horse to ride, perhaps Nikki Haley or Cathy McMorris Rogers?   

Of course, it takes the proffering of lies to argue in favor of many conservative positions, such as loosening environmental regulations or lowering taxes. Bachmann enables the media to avoid doing the lying themselves.  Instead, they can quote Bachmann telling the lies.  The false ideas get out, and yet the media maintains a fiction of journalistic objectivity.  So instead of her habitual lying serving as a barrier to Bachmann leaping onto the national stage, it may be in fact the reason she is able to take the leap.

Is it something in the water?

Or maybe it’s a weird side effect of Fukushima radiation hitting the American shore?

Or maybe it’s because our political and policy-making classes have all been drinking the same free market Kool-Aid? Lapped up, as we know, from the troughs of large multinational corporations, banks and the ultra wealthy.

Whatever, doesn’t it seem as if a lot of so-called experts had a case of the “stupids” this past weekend?  That, at least, is the impression one would get from reading The New York Times.

Here are three stupid ideas proposed by experts in New York Times articles each wrote this past weekend.  All use a convoluted logic that would drive Friar William of Occam to seek a sharp object.

Let’s start with the most grotesque idea, and it comes from Gideon Rose, the editor of the beltway periodical Foreign Affairs.   In his Sunday Times opinion piece, Rose raises the fear that the drawdown of troops that President Obama plans for Afghanistan will lead to a rout.  He never defines what he means by a rout, but it must be something more than the confused fleeing that took place when the U.S. evacuated Saigon in 1975.

And yet, Rose proposes that to exit Afghanistan Obama follow Nixon’s strategy for winding down the Viet Nam War.  Rose speaks of that strategy in a generalized and squeamish manner, describing Nixon and Kissinger as “masking their withdrawal with deliberate deception and aggression.”  He doesn’t define what that phrase means exactly, so I will: What Nixon did was to institute massive bombing of North Viet Nam including civilian zones.  

Rose employs a tautology in his lame attempt to prove that escalating aggression—oh, heck, let’s just call it massive bombing—is the best way to exit Afghanistan: His proof that you should not announce troop withdrawals and that you should escalate aggression is his claim that these are the first two rules of withdrawal.  It’s a classic tautology: A equals B because A equals B.  His other proof is the Viet Nam War’s ending, which most histories portray as lengthy, bloody, shameful and unsatisfactory to American interests. 

Rose’s tautological complexity misses a simple common sense point: No matter what you do, you can’t hide massive troop withdrawals for very long.

FYI: To my mind, the 33,000 soldiers out of a total of 100,000 now stationed in Afghanistan whom President Obama says will be coming home in 15 months is the troop draw-down equivalent of cold molasses.

Let’s turn now to the most deceptive of the “stupidities” advocated this past weekend.  In the business section of the Sunday Times, Robert Frank, a Cornell economic professor, proposes that for the next 18 months we declare a payroll tax holiday for employees and exempt employers from paying payroll taxes for new hires.  Payroll taxes, by the way, are what employers and employees pay to support Social Security and Medicare. He also insists that we don’t lift the cap of $106,800 a year in income, above which people don’t pay Social Security payroll taxes.

The good professor Frank claims that giving these temporary tax breaks will lead to the creation of 6.2 million jobs. 

Now here comes the deceptive part:  How does Frank propose to pay Social Security benefits during the payroll tax holiday (he never mentions Medicare!)? “The Treasury would have to issue new bonds to cover those payments in the short term.”  

In other words, we lower taxes on businesses and borrow money from the wealthy to pay for the tax breaks.  It’s an old game he’s playing: instead of taxing people, and in particular the wealthy, to pay for government services, we fund deficit spending by giving them a safe investment.

Why not just raise taxes and invest the money in job-producing programs such as adding teachers to public schools, rebuilding our infrastructure and supporting commercialization of alternative energy technologies?  The net result will be more permanent job gains and a more equitable distribution of wealth, because government job-creation programs will funnel funds from the wealthy to the middle class and the poor.  As those who have followed OpEdge for any period of time know, the last 30 years have seen the flow of money in the opposite direction, from the poor and middle class to the wealthy.

Let’s close with the most laughable idea to come out of the weekend, that “Reverse mortgages will help millions of people stay in their homes and pay for a variety of retirement expenses in the coming decades.”  It comes from Ron Lieber, the Saturday Times “Your Money” columnist, whom I have chided before for advocating, albeit sometimes in a subtle way, a “spend first and worry later” mentality in his column.

A reverse mortgage is when the bank pays you from the equity in your house and you don’t have to pay it back until you die (when the heirs pay it back, from your estate, with their own cash or by selling the house).

In his column, Lieber defends reverse mortgages and tries to explain why Bank of America and Wells Fargo won’t write them anymore.  Here’s his reasoning: “Making a mortgage payment is one of the best forms of forced savings we have. So for people who don’t want to sell their homes and downsize to free up money for living expenses (or can’t, for practical reasons), a reverse mortgage may be their best hope for continued solvency.”

Huh, and double huh??!

Lieber’s argument is completely without sense: First of all, making a mortgage payment on a primary residence is a terrible way to enforce savings, because it comes at such a high interest rate.  You make a mortgage because you want to buy a house and it’s very tough to accumulate the cash needed without a loan.  Secondly, even if making a mortgage payment were a good way to enforce savings, that fact would have nothing to do with borrowing equity on your house at high rates to live beyond what Social Security and your retirement savings and pension can afford you.

By the way, Lieber destroys his own case for the reverse mortgage by telling us why the big banks are running from this financial product like rats from a sinking dinghy: They are afraid of bad publicity when they have to foreclose and kick a lot of senior citizens out of their homes because, despite getting the reverse mortgage, they can’t pay their taxes and home insurance.  They’re afraid that like sub-prime loans, the reverse mortgage will lead to another banking fiasco in which millions of people see their lives turned upside down.

Maybe instead of pushing reverse mortgages, Lieber should be giving seniors and those planning to be seniors one day tips about living within their means. 

Among the upper classes in the Germany and Austria of the late 19th and the first few decades of the 20th century, dueling scars, called “Mensur,” were considered a badge of honor, a sign of status.  Fencing was the most popular sport among college students, and the social and economic elite among young men proudly wore scars across their left cheek.  Many seeking to fit in with the upper classes would scar themselves.

In other words, people hurt themselves or welcomed someone else hurting them because they saw it as a sign of status.  As Mel Brooks might put it, “Those crazy Germans!”

I hadn’t thought of the Mensur since my days of studying German literature in graduate school.  But this purposeful scarring came to mind last weekend when I read first online and then in The New York Times about the survey that said that the more debt a young adult had, the more self-esteem they possessed, except among the wealthy. 

The Ohio State researchers looked at both college and credit card debt.  For both kinds of debt, the more that a young person from the lower 25% of family income has of it, the higher the self-esteem.  Only credit card debt raises the self-esteem of those in the middle, and those from the most affluent families get no ego boost from holding either kind of debt.  The effect starts to wane at age 28, by which time people are worried that they may never pay it off.

We can all speculate on why having debt raises self-esteem.  The leader of the team that did the study thinks “young people have come to view debt favorably because they interpret it as an investment in their future.” 

One reason or another, though, the study suggests that debt has become a status symbol.  A status symbol is nothing more than the socialization of self-esteem.  People have high self-esteem because they have attained or embody something that society or a subset of society thinks is of value.

Like a cut on the face, debt is usually harmful, because it results in paying more for something than it is worth and it prevents you from accumulating money for the future, which often necessitates future indebtedness.  Once on the debt merry-go-round, it’s hard to get off.

There are a handful of things for which it is worth going into debt: to fund a business that has a viable business plan; to purchase a house in which you plan to live for a while; and certainly to pay for a college education.

But credit card debt is never a good idea, except for the bankers who collect the interest.  Businesses may like the convenience of credit card payments, but every penny that a customer sends to banks in interest and penalties is a penny not spent on additional goods and services.

The attitude expressed in the survey was not cautiousness about debt, but an embracing of debt as a status symbol.  And like all status symbols in all societies structured into classes, those seeking to attain status put more stock in the symbol than those who already have achieved status.

Something harmful and disfiguring that people embrace as a sign that they’ve made it.  That sounds like both the German dueling scar and debt in contemporary America, especially credit card debt.  Both symbolize a sickness weakening their respective societies.  In Germany and Austria, it was the militarism of the ruling elite that helped cause the slaughter known as World War I.   In 21st century America, it’s the “have it all now” exhortations of advertising, TV, cinema, other mass entertainment and the celebrity, how-to, travel, and lifestyle stories in the news media. 

“Have it now” is part of an unholy trinity of ideological imperatives that are driving us towards environmental, physical and spiritual ruin.  The other two ideas destroying America are: 1) The politics of selfishness, Ronald Reagan’s idea that it is best to seek self interest and never think of the greater good; 2) The idea that buying something is the way to express all emotions, opinions, commemorations, rituals or other inner experiences.   

A study by a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania released this morning shows that children on Medicaid are denied care more and have to wait much longer for appointments than other children. 

The details of the study are stunning: Two-thirds of children whose parents mentioned they were on Medicaid were denied appointments, compared to only 11% of children whose parents did not mention Medicaid.  For those clinics that accepted both kinds of patients, callers who said their kids were Medicaid had to wait an average of 22 days longer for an appointment than those who didn’t mention receiving Medicaid.  The study covered Cook County, Illinois, an enormous metropolitan region that includes Chicago and many suburbs.

These despicable figures follow reports featured in a USA TODAY story a year ago that documented the growing number of physicians who don’t accept Medicare patients:

• The American Academy of Family Physicians reported that 13% of family physicians didn’t participate in Medicare in 2009, up from 6% five years earlier.
• The American Medical Association said 17% of all doctors and 31% of primary care physicians they surveyed limit their Medicare patients.

These physicians who turn away the poor because they won’t get paid as much money to treat them are truly hypocrites, because they all took some form of the traditional Hippocratic oath, named after a Greek physician known as the father of medicine.  Wikipedia’s version of the classic English version of the Hippocratic oath includes this paragraph:

“I will apply dietic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice.”

And here’s a line from the widely used modern version: “I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.”

No one is asking these doctors who turn away Medicare and Medicaid patients to treat them for free.  We ask that they treat the elderly and the poor at a reduced fee. 

U.S. physicians earn a whole lot more money than their peers in every other country in the world.  It’s open to debate whether or not our doctors are better practitioners and therefore deserving of all money.  But consider this: comparative mortality charts suggest that doctors in many other countries achieve superior results to our physicians. 

Let’s not even argue the quality point because it doesn’t matter in the discussion of why American physicians make more than their global peers.  The American doctors live in the only advanced economy that follows the free-market healthcare model.  Their bigger bucks stem from the luck of the draw.  American physicians not only make more than their global peers, they also make more than virtually any of their patients, that is except for docs who cater to what they used to call the carriage trade.

We constrain free markets all the time, with regulations, tax policy and other market incentives and disincentives.  I’m therefore going to propose a new constraint: as a requirement of keeping the right to practice medicine the percentage of all patients that the doctor treats who are Medicare/Medicaid patients must be a minimum of 85% what it is for the Metropolitan Statistical Area where he/she has offices.  For example, if 15% of all patients in the area are on Medicare and Medicaid, then 12.75% of every physician’s patients must be enrolled in Medicare or Medicaid. Physicians going below 85% would automatically lose their medical licenses for a period of three years. 

The costs for this program would be minimal. With modern digital technology and the rapid implementation of electronic medical records in all physician offices, filing an annual report should be quite simple.  Of course, there would also have to be a small increase in the bureaucracy to audit reports and do spot investigations.  My guess is that this new regulations will lead to a decrease in Medicare/Medicaid costs over time, because adding new participants to a free market always reduces overall costs.  It’s an axiom of capitalist economics!

I would think that those thousands of ethical women and men comprising the majority of physicians would wholeheartedly support this new regulation, as it will level the playing field and take from them some of the burden of caring for patients for reduced fees.    

If a Jewish nonfiction writer sticks around long enough, he or she will be tempted to use the shop-worn “define chutzpah” rhetorical device, which consists of defining chutzpah and then applying the term to the acts or statements of someone or some group, or in simply saying that someone embodies the definition of chutzpah.

Alas, the likes of Representative Anthony Weiner, the U.S. Senate and Jena Troutman have driven your humble OpEdge scribe to resort to this hackneyed literary trope.

Merriam-Webster defines chutzpah as extreme confidence or gall.  While it is true that people with chutzpah usually project self-confidence, the essence of what constitutes chutzpah is an audacity that approaches shamelessness and also has the hint of the comic.  My favorite definition of chutzpah is the man who kills both his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.    

Thus it took chutzpah for Mitt Romney to condemn the federal health care law that mimics the Massachusetts healthcare law he shepherded through the state legislature.  And it took chutzpah for the creators of our torture system to say that torture helped to find bin Laden.

But this past week we have seen at least three poster children for chutzpah emerge.

Isn’t it the height of chutzpah for Representative Weiner not to resign?  I don’t care that he showed his stuff online and I don’t care that by doing so he may have betrayed his new wife; those are personal issues.  But to lie when the digital age makes it so easy for the truth to come out either shows appalling ignorance or sheer stupidity, neither of which you want in a Congressional representative. Then there’s the matter of the evidence, which suggests that in more than one instance, his photographic transmissions were unsolicited, out of the blue and completely out of context, raising them from the harmless to potentially harmful harassment, and therefore a cause for resignation.

Of course, in the old days, my great uncles and aunts would have likely engaged in a heated shout-out over tea as to whether Weiner was a schmuck or a putz (two Yiddish words that originally meant a male’s “wiener,” but have long referred to categories of fools).

And isn’t it the height of chutzpah for 56 U.S. Senators to vote to postpone the date when the debit card reforms go into effect?  This vote favored banks, while ignoring the best interests of both consumers and small businesses (which make up more than 98% of all employers, according to the Small Business Administration).  These Senators will now go home and shamelessly and audaciously tell the voters that they are acting in their best interests.  Now that’s chutzpah!  Luckily, the motion needed 60 Senators to approve it, so it failed.

And doesn’t it take chutzpah for Jena Troutman, organizer of the ban circumcision movement in California, to claim that her petition was “never about religion,” when the head of the group that wrote the ballot proposal for her has created a cartoon character named Foreskin Man who fights the evil “Mohel Man.” Mohel, for the uninitiated, is the Hebrew word for the religious specialist who cuts the foreskin during the circumcision rite.  Thank goodness for another small wonder: Troutman is ending her pursuit of this anti-Semitic, anti-Moslem ballot initiative.

Shameless audacity—chutzpah—seems to define the current political tone in this country. 

But let’s not include Tim Pawlenty, former Minnesota Governor and Republican candidate for President, among the “chutzpahim.” 

Yes, it takes chutzpah for Pawlenty to say that by drastically cutting taxes and ending most non-military government spending, he can grow the economy by 5% within a few years and not tell us or show us how.  But in giving his plan to renew the U.S. economy, Pawlenty proposed a “Google” test for government: if you can Google it, the government shouldn’t be providing it.  Pawlenty forgets that the Internet was created as a government project called ARPANET and that without government support, there would be no Google, or any other Internet-based company, because there would be no Internet.  That makes Pawlenty a schmuck or a putz, reader’s choice.