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The theology that was evident throughtout Obama’s Nobel speech was that of Reinhold Niebuhr.  His book, The Irony of American History (1952) made the case for the just war.  In the ’50s and ’60s I was a reader of Niebuhr when he was noted as a neo-orthodox Christian and I would read him either in the New Republic or Nation magazine.  (Wikipedia has a good bio that doesn’t mention neo-orthodox but certainly describes it.)  The shift that R.N. made during his lifetime as a minister and professor of theology is quite dramatic.  He was the first intellectual religious writer that I encountered.  It is interesting to note that Martin Luther King was also greatly influenced by Niebuhr but his writings moved MLK towards non-violence and pacifism.

This site has a lenghty discussion of the relationship between Niehbur’s writings and Obama’s speech:

That book was written in 1952 at the height of the Cold War, but it is as relevant today as it ever was. Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, and author of “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism,” has written an introduction to a new edition of Niebuhr’s classic work.  In a Boston Globe essay penned after Obama’s election, Bacevich explained Niebuhr as he explored the new president’s affinity for the theologian:

“At the root of Niebuhr’s thinking lies an appreciation of original sin, which he views as indelible and omnipresent. In a fallen world, power is necessary, otherwise we lie open to the assaults of the predatory. Yet since we too number among the fallen, our own professions of innocence and altruism are necessarily suspect. Power, wrote Niebuhr, ‘cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest.’ Therefore, any nation wielding great power but lacking self-awareness — never an American strong suit — poses an imminent risk not only to others but to itself.”

…
 
Because Niebuhr (1892-1971) was not cited explicitly, those who did not pick up on the Niebuhrian themes (not to mention the speech’s thoroughly religious and moral orientation) understandably seemed flummoxed.  Without the theological framework, Obama’s address read not as irony but as a series of contradictions that collapsed in on themselves — because they were viewing Obama through the “dualing” political categories of liberal-conservative, dove-hawk, president-candidate.  Yet as a theological meditation of the sort favored by Niebuhr (and, yes, MLK and JFK and JPII) Obama’s speech makes perfect sense because it recognizes that we are imperfect creatures in an imperfect world that requires hard thinking and tough moralizing, about oneself and about the world. 
Michael Gerson of the Washington Post, a former speech writer for Bush, had noted Obama’s Niebuhrian affinities a year ago, and he saw them again Thursday in “a Niebuhrian tension between a fallen world that demands force to restrain evil and a realm of ideals that draws us beyond those compromises.  And he embodied this argument in a kind of dialogue with Martin Luther King, Jr., recognizing the power of nonviolence, but pointing out its limits.  It was a bold and powerful historical statement.”

Brother,

The upsurge in violence in Iraq this week has been troubling and sent me back to my notes and a couple of authors that I relied on because of their documentation of data and quotes.  It’s too cumbersome to give you chapter and verse citations; suffice it to say that if your pore over two books–Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone–you will have all the references that you need and want.

Knowing that you share a curiosity for the workings of foreign societies, for what it is worth, I decided to summarize my notes on the economic issues of Iraq and to share them with you.  (My notes on religious affiliations and political entanglements exist but in a more esoteric and unmanageable form.)

You need to know that as a Keynesian, my perceptions go against privatization for the sake of privatization and that, as a Marxist, I am well convinced that the economic manifestations of a society reflect the central core of belief of that society–not always flattering to us.

While Iraqis were consumed with the daily emergencies in Iraq we sold it off through privatization.  What we called “nation building” was really “nation creating.”  We destroyed everything that was in existence and established Paul Bremer and the CPA as the ruling government with the mission of redoing everything.

(As an aside, one contractor was convicted in the US of fraud and fined $10 million. He appealed on the basis that he gave his [fraudulent] reports to the CPA, which, he contended, was not an official government and he won when the court in Virginia sided with him.)

Bremer fired 500,000 government workers and 400,000 military (who went home with their weapons) and he was left to govern 25 million people with a staff of 1,500. (Halliburton had a staff of 50,000) Iraq had a number of government-owned businesses ranging from the oil industry to cement factories, medical facilities, and food producers.  It also had 67% unemployment.  In the face of that, in the name of privatization, we stopped food handouts and ended subsidized gas prices.  Then we opened the border to unrestricted imports, permitted foreign companies to own 100% of Iraqi firms (which meant that a Kuwaiti business would buy a factory at fire sale prices, lay off most of the workers and bring Kuwaitis in to staff it).  It destroyed the Iraqi businessmen.  Bremer, taking his orders from the Pentagon, privatized the 200 essential government-owned businesses and cut the corporate tax rate from 45% to 15% — but foreign investors could take out all of their profits and pay no tax.  This is The Chicago School of Economics (Milton Freidman) run amok–as they did in Chile and Uruguay.

Bremer, on his own authority, took $80 billion from the Iraqi oil fund for “discretionary spending.”  $8.5 billion is still missing. 

Eight days after declaring “Mission Accomplished,” Bush announced the establishment of a U.S.-Middle East free-trade effort and appointed Dick Cheney’s daughter, Liz, in charge.  This was to give us access to Iraqi oil.  Iraq has one-third of the known oil reserves in the world.  Those who say this fight wasn’t about oil are mistaken.

Although we created a “Marshall Plan for Iraq,” we ran an anti-Marshall Plan.  The original Marshall Plan did not permit foreign ownership of rebuilt factories in Germany and profits and workers stayed in the German economy.  We made no move to rebuild factories in Iraq until 2006, when the blow-back brought us to our senses and the Iraqi government began to exercise more influence in the economy.  (In February 2004, 21% of the Iraqis said that they preferred an Islamic government.  Six months later, 70% had that preference.) 

Our ignorance and incompetence was outstanding but not surprising.  One observer noted, “Conservatives cannot govern well, just as vegetarians cannot make a world-class beef bourguignon:  If you believe that what you are doing is wrong, you are unlikely to do it well.”

Examples,
We gave Creative Associates $100 million to produce new textbooks.  The Iraqis tossed them as not acceptable. 

Research Triangle had a $466 million contract to “bring democracy to Iraq”!  RT is run by Mormons who believed that they could persuade the Moslems that the Book of Mormon was compatible with the teachings of Mohammed.  The point man, Mayfield, was even so audacious as to email that “that the Iraqis will erect a statue of me as their founder of democracy.”

The contractors–Halliburton, Parsons, Bechtel, etc–brought in thousands of foreign workers rather than employ the skilled, out-of-work Iraqis.  In one narrative, a worker tells about a confrontation with the manager of a cement factory that was going under foreign ownership and a huge projected layoff.  He said that before that would happen they would burn the factory down or go inside and blow it up.

Instead of rebuilding cement factories (under Iraqi ownership) the contractors imported cement at 10 times the cost.  When they were brought to their knees in 2006 they got some Iraqi cement factories up and running and expressed surprise that they weren’t is such bad shape and that they had good workers.  The American who put the effort together was called a “Stalinist” by his colleagues because he had abandoned the privatization model.

The American who was put in charge of health care was an opponent of publicly run clinics and tried to even privatize the prescription delivery system to children.  70% of the children’s deaths in Iraq are preventable with proper medication and sanitary conditions.

Often the US contractors would sub-contract with Kuwaiti firms who would sub-contract with Saudi firms who used foreign (often Pakistani) workers.  If they had to use Iraqis, they would go to the Iraqi Kurds.

Parsons was contracted to build 142 clinics.  They built 6 (poorly).

You’ve read recently of several American troops being electrocuted in facilities that are maintained by a Halliburton subsidiary.  The firm said that they had noted the faulty groundings, but “it wasn’t their responsibility to repair them.”

Of 8 water projects that were completed, only one was in operation a year later.

Bremer tried to lock in all of his laws and that was why Bush was so adamant about a new Constitution for Iraq.  The existing Constitution was quite satisfactory–the problem was that Saddam didn’t abide by it.

Much of the chaos that created the blow-back and the civil war could be attributed to Bremer’s (Pentagon-directed) decisions.  The firings removed skilled people from the government and weakened the voice of the secular Iraqis.  It also fueled the resistance with angry people.  And the businessmen who resented the foreign takeovers gave what little money they had to the resisters.

When Bremer left and the Iraqis took over there was poor water quality, no sewage treatment, limited gas supplies, and, at best, two hours of electricity a day.  That’s still true today.

Meanwhile on the home front, as part of the Disaster Capitalism (while the people are still in shock, sock it to them economically) effort, Rumsfeld cut 55,000 jobs from the Department of Defense and the Veterans’ Administration and privatized them.  You wonder how Heath Net had such strong profits and growth–they got the contract to provide medical care for returning, injured military and we know what a lousy job they did to keep the bottom line attractive to shareholders.

In Iraq, Moqtada al-Sadr, Shiite cleric, filled the vacuum by creating his large militia but, more important, created a cadre of workers who went into the community repairing electrical problems, providing food and medical care, etc.

This week the Iraqi Army went after al-Sadr’s militia in Basra.  Friday was the deadline for them to surrender their weapons but Malaki has now extended it by ten days.  I think he sees that he is in a losing cause. 

Brother, we created an economic mess–outside of the invasion–beyond all comprehension and we did it in the name of placing the neoconservative ideal of unrestrained capitalism ahead of the wishes of an informed democracy.  Iraqis are well-educated, secular people but we messed it up and now they, more than us, will be paying a heavy price for years to come.  When emotion trumps reason there is no limit to the extremes to which people will go in desperate times.  Don’t you agree that we should get Nixonian and declare a victory and leave?  Let’s support the IMF and the World Bank in reconstructing the Iraqi economy and stop our partisan meddling.

My guess is that you are as outraged by all this as I am.

The Old Viking (and brother)

It was in the late 1940s when, as a pre-teen,  I first heard the word “bigotry.”  Washington State had restrictive liquor laws.  No Sunday sales.  You could not carry a drink in a bar.  If you wanted to change tables you had to call for a barmaid (hey, it was 60 years ago) to take your beer to your new location.  Few places had liquor by the drink.  I can remember my folks going to the old Dick Parker’s dance hall in north Seattle where they would set a bottle of liquor under the table, order set-ups from the house and enjoy an evening of dancing to Duke Ellington’s band. 

Well, an initiative was placed on the ballot to liberalize the laws and create a “Class H” license whereby liquor by the drink would be readily available.  Although I was a constant captive to the church’s message that this was the work of Satan I was struck by the theme of the pro-initiative forces who called the church groups bigots, which they defined as “I don’t like it so you can’t have it!”  The initiative passed and some still contend that Satan prevailed.  They have a hard time separating “secular” and “Satan.”

Yesterday we had Huckabee echoing the illustrious Ellen Craswell in his statement to the effect that the Bible trumps the Constitution.  The evangelicals captured the Republican party in Washington a few years back and Craswell was nominated to run against Gary Locke–his good fortune.  She repeatedly proclaimed that she would use the Bible as her guide if there were a conflict with the Constitution.  She was trounced.  Huckabee’s religious belief that the wife should be subservient to the husband should make him a good target down the line. 

One of my favorite defining court rulings was by the California Supreme Court when it ruled that a school board, which had banned a book from its district libraries because “it offended Christian values,” had acted unconstitutionally.  It noted that books could be deemed inappropriate but not on the basis of religious considerations.

All of this is an introduction to the God-O-Meter  Earlier today on MSNBC I viewed an interview about it.  Go to the site and start wondering who the bigots are in this country.

H. L. Mencken noted:  Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority.  The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right  and what is wrong.  All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.  The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others.  His culture is based on “I am not too sure.” 

During her Friday visit to Moscow and after meeting with Vladimir Putin, a critical Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated, “In any country, if you don’t have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development.”  Rice went on to criticize Putin for usurping so much power from Russia’s judiciary, legislature and media.

Her concern is well placed but many of us wish that she would shout the same warning in the White House.  Now that our Rasputin has vacated the premises, our president could be instructed on the parallels between his amassed power and the activities of his “soul mate” in Moscow.

Or perhaps she doesn’t recognize the irony of her statement.

Maybe Republicans’ failure to grasp irony goes to that research showing that flexibility is an unknown attribute in the brain of a conservative.  I used to assess early kindergarten admissions by a test of the child’s ability to engage in reciprocal reasoning.  If a boy had a brother, he would be asked, “Does your brother have a brother?”  To the chagrin of many doting parents who knew that they had a genius on their hands, most would say “no.”  Usually the parents would interrupt the child to correct the answer.  Jean Piaget’s research on brain development indicated that this quality of “reciprocity” didn’t develop until about age 6.  Maybe it never develops for some.

My conservative friends manage to keep me abreast of all the scurrilous right-wing emails that are fraught with lies, deception and stupidity.  A new one is making the rounds complaining about the new president dollars that the mint has just issued. 

The allegation is that “In God We Trust” has been left off this new coin: “By omitting these words, our politically correct, secularist leaders made a conscientious decision that either 1) God does not exist, 2) that God exists but can no longer be trusted.”

The email goes on to say, “I am personally offended and fed up with the denigration of God and Christianity in my country.  I am certain George Washington would never have agreed to his picture on the coin if it in any way diminished faith in God.”

Setting aside for the moment the fact that the writer is abysmally ignorant of Washington’s religious beliefs, the real kicker is that the inscription is on the coin.  In a departure from tradition – something conservatives are loathe to tolerate – the inscription is on the outside edge of the coin and not on the obverse or reverse.  The date, “E Pluribus Unum,” and the mint mark are also there.  (Visit the U.S. Mint’s page devoted to the new dollar to see all of the markings in great detail.)

To send such a message the writer had to be: 1) dull-witted; 2) deliberately lying, or 3) non compos mentis – not that those terms are exclusive nor infrequent attributes of the writers of right-wing screed.

Watch for this one and, if the sender has violated the protocols of email and revealed all recipients, which they seem inclined to do, reply to all of the recipients with a dose of the truth.  I get interesting responses from the “reeducated.”

Such tomfoolery would be out of place in Sweden, which trails only Estonia in the percentage of the population that doesn’t believe in God.

(I should note that it is possible that the writer obtained some of the early issues that missed the edge printing but that error was publicized widely and the defective coins have become collector’s items.  I doubt that such is the case with this author of the off-the-wall criticism that I received.)

 - The Old Viking

The Atlantic Monthly article on European and American shifts in secularism/religion is a good history and a good analysis.  In the long haul I think that scepticism will probably carry the day but a lot of new “crusades” will be undertaken – but the banners will be only symbolic because they serve a political and economic purpose to rally the troops and raise the funds for maintaining/replacing political structures.

Speaking of stupid political structures…

The stupidity and arrogance of Homeland Security, particularly as it plays out in airport security is beyond belief.  On 60 Minutes this past Sunday the TSA said that the most dangerous players are not on the list because they don’t want to tip people off that they know who they are but, if your name is Robert Johnson, just accept the inconvenience of being searched every time you try to board–they had a room full of Robert Johnsons who related their experiences. 

That reminded me of the time I was challenged trying to take too much booze into California and, in the interrogation room, I asked to see their written guidelines.  When they asked why, I–big mistake–pulled out my ACLU card and said, “Because they tell me that I have some rights.”  He said that, when I was at the border, I had no rights and that they could even search my body cavities to which I replied, “Oooh, will you?” with a smile.  My wife cringed.  The upshot was that they let me leave with my booze but I couldn’t bring it into California.  It was a case of the border police enforcing a California law, not a federal law which would have allowed the gallon of rum that I was carrying.  From then on, I just hid it in a bag of charcoal in my car figuring that at least they would get dirty retrieving it.

There is constant debate over Bush’s alleged failure to pursue an anti-terrorism policy in the first eight months of his first term. The (9/11 Commission report notes that the Bush administration had three (count them-three) meetings prior to 9/11. The first was in May, four months into Bush’s term and the third was the week prior. It has troubled me that no one is mentioning the Defense Department chartered. Commission on National Security/21st Century Report that was given to Bush in January 2001. (To the discredit of the New York Times, its reporter left the press session early claiming that no one would care about the report. I guess he read the administration’s mind.) This report, a two-and-a-half year bipartisan effort (Gary Hart and Warren Rudman chaired) called for many immediate security measures-among them was strengthening the cockpit doors on aircraft so that they could not be breached. At the time it came out, I read the executive summary and scanned much of the rest. The 156 page report (phase 3) can be accessed here.

While researching this I ran across this Salon interview with Gary Hart.  Excerpts with my emphasis added:

Sept. 12, 2001 | WASHINGTON – They went to great pains not to sound as though they were telling the president “We told you so.” But on Wednesday, two former senators, the bipartisan co-chairs of a Defense Department-chartered commission on national security, spoke with something between frustration and regret about how White House officials failed to embrace any of the recommendations to prevent acts of domestic terrorism delivered earlier this year.

Bush administration officials told former Sens. Gary Hart, D-Colo., and Warren Rudman, R-N.H., that they preferred instead to put aside the recommendations issued in the January report …. Instead, the White House announced in May that it would have Vice President Dick Cheney study the potential problem of domestic terrorism …while assigning responsibility for dealing with the issue to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh.
 
The Hart-Rudman Commission had specifically recommended that the issue of terrorism was such a threat it needed far more than FEMA’s attention.
 
In its Jan. 31 report, seven Democrats and seven Republicans unanimously approved 50 recommendations. Many of them addressed the point that, in the words of the commission’s executive summary, “the combination of unconventional weapons proliferation with the persistence of international terrorism will end the relative invulnerability of the U.S. homeland to catastrophic attack.”

“A direct attack against American citizens on American soil is likely over the next quarter century,” according to the report.

The commission recommended the formation of a Cabinet-level position to combat terrorism. The proposed National Homeland Security Agency director would have “responsibility for planning, coordinating, and integrating various U.S. government activities involved in homeland security,”

The commission was supposed to disband after issuing the report Jan. 31, but Hart and the other commission members got a six-month extension to lobby for their recommendations. Hart says he spent 90 minutes with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and an hour with Secretary of State Colin Powell lobbying for the White House to devote more attention to the imminent dangers of terrorism and their specific, detailed recommendations for a major change in the way the federal government approaches terrorism. He and Rudman briefed National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on the commission’s findings.But in May, Bush announced his plan almost as if the Hart-Rudman Commission never existed, as if it hadn’t spent millions of dollars, “consulting with experts, visiting 25 countries worldwide, really deliberating long and hard,” as Hart describes it.

Bush announced that Cheney and Allbaugh would review the issues and have recommendations for him by Oct. 1. The commission’s report was seemingly put on the shelf.

Just last Thursday, Hart spoke with Rice again. “I told her that I and the others on the commission would do whatever we could to work with the vice president to move on this,” Hart said. “She said she would pass on the message.”

It was a struggle to convince President Clinton of the need for such a commission, Hart says. He urged Clinton to address this problem in ‘94 and ‘95, but Clinton didn’t act until 1998, prompted by politics. “He saw Gingrich was about to do it, so he moved to collaborate,” Hart says. “Seven years had gone by since the end of the Cold War. It could have been much sooner.”

Reading that Clinton didn’t act until 1998 led me on another search. This is from CNN (July 30, 1996.) Excerpts and emphasis added:

“We need to keep this country together right now. We need to focus on this terrorism issue,” Clinton said during a White House news conference.

But while the president pushed for quick legislation, Republican lawmakers hardened their stance against some of the proposed anti-terrorism measures . . .

“The most important thing right now is that they get the best, strongest bill they can out – that they give us as much help as they can,” Clinton said.
 
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, emerged from the meeting and said, “These are very controversial provisions that the White House wants. Some they’re not going to get.”

Hatch called Clinton’s proposed study of taggants – chemical markers in explosives that could help track terrorists – “a phony issue.”

“If they want to, they can study the thing” already, Hatch asserted. He also said he had some problems with the president’s proposals to expand wiretapping.
 
“If they want to, they can study the thing” already, Hatch asserted.