End This Depression NOW!

Let me start out by saying that I’m a huge fan of Paul Krugman.

For most of my life, I pretty much ignored economics, finding it fairly stale and boring stuff. As of late, as a writer of mostly political matters, it seemed prudent to learn a bit about the subject. After all, I’m all in favor of giving one’s opinion on most everything, but it sure helps if you know a little bit about what you are talking about.

It may be that Krugman speaks in a way that is easy to understand by the average lay person. He surely can, and this book is a testament to that fact. Mr. Krugman makes all that international monetary stuff actually understandable.

Given the big recession that we and the world are embraced by in a not very loving way, we need to understand how we got in this mess, and more importantly how we can get out.

A 2008 Nobel winner in economics doesn’t seem like a bad place to start.

Krugman is an avowed Keynesian, believing that the theories of John Maynard Keynes provides the most accurate understanding of how markets work. While among the fashionable economists in the Mideast and some of the West, this has fallen out of favor, Krugman points out that mostly it was because nobody has really pushed back and “tested” the theories of “free markets” made famous by Hayak and the monetary policies favored by Milton Friedman.

When such policies are indeed tested in the world (how did that work for ya), they are of course found most wanting. Krugman makes a good case that the Keynesian model best supports what we should expect to find today, based on what we have done.

And of course, this leads to the “way out” of the morass as well.

The history of the austerity programs ushered in by the crisis in Europe is not a pretty one. Cutting spending, the rally cry of the GOP and the extreme right, has not worked. In fact it has failed miserably. Deficits are not all equal, and the US deficit, Krugman argues is not the problem. In fact more spending is what will pull us out from this mess we are in.

The Right argues that inflation will come galloping forth, yet for all their bellowing over the last five years, inflation is still low, in fact lower than perhaps would be healthy right now. Lower taxes have not induced business expansion or investment. Business is hoarding huge stashes of cash.

We need, Krugman argues, to spend money, on infrastructure, on helping states and local towns, and by assisting the poor. All push money into the economy to selected groups. Those groups in turn spend the money–to hire back teachers and other government employees such as firefighters and police, but also to start back up renovations and repairs long ignored. Most importantly they put money in the hands of those who need it desperately, and they spend it.

Spending causes spending in other words, and that causes demand, and demand forces business to invest and produce. THAT causes hiring.

The rant of the Right, to cut taxes and regulations on the rich has been the model since 2001 or so when Bush pushed through his tax cuts, tax cuts that mainly favored the rich. They have not created jobs, in fact the unbridled greed of Wall Street resulted in the disaster we are still inch by inch clawing our way out of. How many more years must we witness this before we accept it as the failure it is?

Such is Krugman’s message.

The stimulus that President Obama did in 2009 was simply not big enough. The Fed cannot cut interest rates beyond zero, but they can do a whole lot of things in Krugman’s opinion to stimulate growth. As he points out, some will fail, but some will succeed magnificently.

Paul Krugman tells a history of affairs that leads to the Great Recession and tells us what he would do to get us out of it. He shows in stark words and graphs the result of unrestrained banking that the GOP and some Democrats opened the door to back in the Reagan and Clinton days. He explains carefully and persuasively that we don’t have to wait for years to recover from this painful situation in America or in the Europe.

Keynesian methods have proven themselves to be the key to the answer.

It becomes incumbent upon us, the taxpayer, to push our recalcitrant Congress toward fiscal responsibility.

This is a great book for the beginner to wade through the data, learn what data actually matters, and to see the outlines of the answer to our current economic woes. HINT: It has nothing to do with handling the economy as we would our personal family budget!

Related articles

• Paul Krugman: Keynes Was Right (economistsview.typepad.com)
• Paul Krugman: The Urge to Purge (economistsview.typepad.com)
• Krugman and Stiglitz: Our Most Widely Ignored Public Intellectuals (economistsview.typepad.com)
• Paul Krugman: The Austerity Agenda (economistsview.typepad.com)
• Paul Krugman: Contractionary Policy Is Contractionary (delong.typepad.com)
• Conversations w/Great Minds – Paul Krugman – End This Depression Now (ritholtz.com)

 

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks took her famous bus ride in 1955, when I was only five years old. Years later of course, I would hear of her briefly in history class. She was the tired little lady, quiet and demure who was “just too tired” to get up and go to the back of the bus.

Such is the legend.

Such is but the tip of the ice berg as they say.

Mrs. Parks had had a long and serious life before that day in Montgomery, and one that was filled with activism for civil rights. She had been a member of the NAACP for years, and had worked hard for it and other fledgling civil rights groups.

She toiled against injustice in her home state, meeting with people who would later become known to all the world, like Martin Luther King, Jr, and Ralph Abernathy.

She was by no means the first African-American to refuse to move on a bus, but she became the lightening rod for what would become the most famous boycotts in American history.

She was not physically tired, she was simply tired of being tired of being treating like a second-class citizen. She made her stand, and soon a city and then country rallied to her defense. She would have continued her activities in Montgomery but the hate calls and threats were unceasing for years afterward, and finally she moved with her husband and mother to Detroit, where other relatives already lived.

If Rosa expected things to be better, well they only were marginally so. Racism was not as overt as in Montgomery but there were “black” neighborhoods and white neighborhoods and lines were not crossed. There were restaurants like well-known seafood king, Joe Muers who had a separate dining area in the back for black customers. There were hotels that were not open to people of color.

Rosa continued her work for justice and civil rights in Detroit. She was everywhere and anywhere, often not speaking at events, but always supporting them. She especially supported young blacks who, spurred on by the efforts of Malcolm X who she greatly  admired, and of course the successes of Dr. King, were ready to challenge the white world and its defacto segregation policies.

Voting rights and Black history were dear to her heart.

I became enmeshed in Detroit’s Black professional world myself when as a young new attorney, I was hired at the Legal Aid and Defender Association of Detroit, then run by its founder Myzell Sowell. I worked there for nineteen years, and worked as colleagues with some of those that Mrs. Parks also worked with. She was instrumental in helping the elder George W. Crockett, Jr. become elected to the Recorder’s Court, a man whom I had the distinct privilege to practice in front of. I was also blessed with a number of years of working side by side with his son George III.

I found the chapters dealing with Mrs. Parks work in Detroit most interesting to me for that reason alone. I knew these people, sometimes just as mere acquaintances, but nonetheless they were part of my “education” into politics in Detroit and the birthplace of many African-Americans who went on to be leaders around the nation.

The smart ones, knew that Mrs. Parks was a major inspiration to them. She was not a shy and retiring person, although she was quiet. She had strong opinions, she stated them, and she supported causes that seemed right to her, regardless of the dangers (which at times were very real), or what it might cost her.

Like all great heroes, there is a tendency, which the author Jeanne Theoharis explores wonderfully, to take legitimate heroes and then remake them to suit the needs of the day. Mrs. Parks was used in this way, again and again. She became the symbol at one point, of the “way” to go about civil rights–peacefully. She herself was much more of a militant and her allegiances were more closely aligned to the more radical branches of the Black Movement. She was the juxtaposition to the “angry” young black man. Here’s was the “right” approach.

At her death, Mrs. Parks passing was used by some to attempt to herald the “end of racism” in America. Nobody knew better than Rosa Parks that the evil of racism is systemic in America, and is simply more underground that it used to be.

This is simply an excellent treatment of the real life of certainly one of the most important women in our time. The fact that squabbles over her papers leaves a huge cache of them in the hands of an auction house, is a crime. Nobody has even seen the contents, and they are warehoused apparently available to a suitable buyer. Some of her papers were given to WSU, and it is from these that Ms. Theoharis constructed her “history” of Rosa’s life. Of course, those who worked with Mrs. Parks who are still alive, were most useful as well in telling the inside story of this heroic woman’s extraordinary life.

If you want to understand the civil rights movement in this country, this is a necessary part of that education.

Related articles

• Rosa Parks was about more than a bus, and a seat (tv.msnbc.com)
• The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (beaconbroadside.com)
• Rosa Parks Was Tired of Being Tired! (therealwithdarylanddevon.wordpress.com)
• Rosa Parks at 100: a great American rebel for racial justice | Amy Goodman (guardian.co.uk)
• Before Rosa Parks, another woman defied segregation (cbsnews.com)

 

Healthy at Every Size

Linda Bacon has written a great book. It’s one you should read whether you have ever had a weight problem, do now, or never had one. You need to know the truth.

I recently read the better part of The China Study, which I think rather conclusively shows that a diet absent meat and dairy is the healthiest one around. The trouble is, few people can adhere to it. Most people, especially those who are in their 40′s, 50′s, and upwards, have engaged in eating meat and dairy for so long that they cannot bear to give it up, even though they might be healthier for it.

But it makes important points about not trusting the government or a good many so-called health-related groups, for there is so much money in this food industry of ours that it becomes hard to know when a study is legitimate.

The same can be said for Ms. Bacon’s book on diets.

Diets work. They work for most people. And the type of diet doesn’t really matter.

The trouble is, most all diets only work for a bit. You lose weight. You are happy. You buy new clothes. Almost before you can put them on, the weight seems to creep back on. Until you have put it all back, and usually more.

And it’s not the dieter’s fault. It’s the body’s reaction to being starved. Wonderfully evolutionarily designed mechanisms run the body’s need for food, type and amount. It all works pretty darn good until the food industry comes along with additives and chemicals and our bodies no longer respond to set points and satiety controls. Thinks like high fructose corn syrup block the body’s own tools from working. We crave this stuff the more we eat it, and most of it is empty calories, devoid of much food value.

Just knowing that would be sad enough. But the news is not so bleak. For Bacon makes a very good case, with impressive documentation, that being overweight is not the horror you’ve been told.

Remember how we can’t trust the food industry to tell us what we should eat? Well, the diet industry is invested in convincing us that being overweight is unhealthy. In fact there is little to none actual evidence that that is so. Take out the interested groups and their “research” and you find that  overweight persons don’t die earlier, and don’t develop more cases of things like heart disease or diabetes than the average “normal” weight person.

Bacon argues for a sensible approach to food, with the operative phrase being, there is no bad food. Still, we learn that some “fake” food doesn’t help the body’s natural weight control triggers, and we can avoid them. She argues that eating nutritious, real food is the key. It is what the body craves, and what it will be satisfied with.

When you release all the guilt and simply eat when your hungry and what you wish, you can start to reclaim your life. You can learn  again what it feels like to be full, what it feels like to be hungry. You can earn to eat slower, savoring every bite, and allowing your body naturally to tell you when it is full, before you have stuffed yourself.

You can begin to watch your moods and physical responses to foods and their quantity. Do you feel bad an hour after eating? Perhaps you can eat less of that thing next time. Do you feel grumpy and listless  at 10 a.m? Perhaps it is that donut at 7:30 that didn’t provide you with the energy to make it until lunch. That doesn’t mean don’t eat donuts. It just means that you may want to eat one donut, and perhaps some protein along with it.

Exercise must stop being a way to lose weight, and become the way our bodies feel good. Stop thinking of it as torture and a job, and feel and enjoy the movement of your body. Choose things you enjoy, whether it be cycling or swimming or walking. Don’t exhaust yourself. Find new and unique ways to build more movement into your day. As your body responds by becoming stronger and more capable of doing what you want it to do, your emotions will surge upward as well.

Live your life. Stop waiting until that magic moment when your weight is perfect. For almost all of us, that day never comes, or if it does, it is so fleetingly short as to depress us terribly. You may lose some weight, and you may not. That will depend on what your genetically determined body size is. But you will be healthy. You can be healthy you see at any size.

This is a book to read and then to use to build a happy, healthy life. Don’t take my word for it, read it.

It’s Even Worse Than It Looks

Thomas Mann works for the Brookings Institute, Norman Ornstein at American Enterprise. They are centrists. They are long-time watchers of Washington. They have decided that it is time to call a spade a spade so to speak.

It’s time to stop being “bipartisan” when heaping guilt upon the parties for the impossible impasse that is today the US Congress. It’s time to stop looking to equalize out the blame. It’s time, in a word to just tell the truth.

The truth is not stunning to anybody who is fair-minded and watches the shenanigans of Washington with a practiced and alert eye. The true is that the Republican party has gone off the side rails and become as they put it an “outlier.”

Gone are the days of spirited disagreement between parties where the players respected and even liked each other and went out for dinner and a few drinks after arguing with each other all day over policy. Gone are the days where one side or the other even thinks the other side is legitimate. Gone are the days where civility is exercised in any other manner than with saracastic-dripping rhetoric.

That is the world we find ourselves in.

These two very sensible men trace the history of how we got to where we are and find that one party indeed is largely responsible for this state of affairs. It is not that the Democrats haven’t used many of the same tactics, but they have, as the authors tell us, used them still within the parameters of the game. They have not upset the board and sent all the pieces flying in some juvenile temper tantrum of anger.

It started during the Clinton years when Newt Gingrich and others bemoaned the inability of the GOP to gain control of Congress and be a real force. They concocted a scheme, and they played it out. They began an attack on the very institution itself and vilified the Democrats. They got what they asked for: a Congress that is held in disdain by some 80+% of the public. What the GOP has become is an ideological opposition party akin to what we see in Britain. But unlike Britain, we don’t elect a party and then give it control of the government to enact its agenda. Given our system, we just grind to a halt.

What the GOP once supported, they now stand firmly against, simply and ONLY because it is being offered by Mr. Obama and the Democrats. They have proven themselves perfectly willing to set political position above the country and its needs. They are willing to take hostages in order to force acquiesce to their ideologically pure mantras of no taxes, no matter how clearly the evidence suggests that such actions will cause more harm than good.

Worse, the media, beaten by years of being accused of being “leftist” is afraid to speak truth. Those parts of it that think of themselves as truly journalistic have succumbed to the falsity, that giving each side a fair hearing is somehow doing journalism. They simply provide a place where both sides can give their position, and do not mediate and call the out-right lies, what they are: lies.

Of course due credit is also do the influx of more and more outside money into the process, and the degree to which much of it can now be hidden. Credit is also do to those who rant incessantly without factual basis, acting like carnival barkers calling forth the worst fears and concerns of the masses.

Rational heads in the GOP are not responding. They are not calling out the birthers and the conspiracy hunters. They are not denouncing the Limbaughs and the Coulters, for their grifter-like rantings that make them lots of money while misleading and incensing a sadly uninformed public. Of course, what can one expect when the media makes no real attempt to inform.

Mann and Ornstein have sensible ideas of what we can do to return our government to functionality. Some of it starts with ways to engage the public through required voting and making voting easier. Some of obviously has to do with regulating money in our ever-going campaigns. Structural changes to the filibuster rule and to the practice of placing holds on legislation and on nominees to extract whatever a Senator wants in his home state are discussed.

It’s a great read. It’s full of examples that prove the point made again and again, that a parliamentary opposition party cannot function in a federalist system of checks and balances that is unique to the US. All it can do is obstruct, and keep the public good from being enacted.

This is more than a good read. It’s a must read for anyone who wants to do more than simply fling disgust at Washington. If you want to change things, then start here.

Related articles

• Mann-Ornstein: “It’s Even Worse than It Looks” (delong.typepad.com)

Reading Judas

Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King have done the usual great job in presenting the lost Gospel of Judas, first discovered back in the 1970′s. It has taken a long time for it to hit the mainstream since it passed through many hands and has not stood well the treatment it has received. It has been painstakingly reconstructed, and there is not a great deal missing.

The Gospel was written sometime around the mid-second century C.E. (150 CE). What we have is a copy of that gospel, written in Coptic.

The text itself is quite fascinating, and presents a rather different interpretation of the times of Jesus than is traditionally accepted. Here the disciples are condemned for worshiping a false god, and Jesus makes fun of them a good deal of the time.

Judas, on the other hand, finds favor with Jesus, and seems to understand that God is to be found in the Spirit implanted within us. If we find and live attuned to that Spirit, then upon death, our Soul, joined now with the eternal spirit, will ascend to God. All others, who do not seek the internal Spirit of God, will perish in death at their appointed time.

Further, the Gospel points out that worship of Jesus as sacrificial lamb is wrong as is the Eucharist. Martyrdom is also a false teaching. God wants no one to perish as a statement of belief. Judas ridicules those who would think that a loving God would send his son with the intention that he should martyr himself for “the sins of the world” or that we should partake of ritualistic eating of the “sacrifice” as memory or as part of our worship.

This martyrdom was occurring in Rome, where according to the author, church leaders were encouraging believers to stand fast against Roman demands of offering sacrifice and go to their deaths instead. The Gospel claims that this is heinous, and not at all what Jesus taught or what God wants.

Whether this be true or not, is really beside the point. One must accept that given its time of writing, that the author had no personal knowledge of any of the things of which he speaks. But that may well be true of most of the gospels.

It is known that church fathers such as Irenaeus were well aware of this gospel and others that were adjudged as “non-canonical”. In fact the Gospel of Judas was claimed to be heretical.

When we read the gospel, we learn something powerful beyond the accuracy of its allegations regarding “what Jesus meant”. We learn of the disputes and disagreements which were ongoing within the early Christian communities throughout the area. We know that within each town or city, there were several “churches” oftentimes each using different texts as authoritative and practicing different rituals.

In part, Irenaeus and others were intent upon reaching a concord as to what was “scripture” and what was not, and what was orthodoxy as to practice. In part of course they were also attempting to solidify their own power and control over the various communities and bring them into a greater church framework.

If one reads the average “history of the church” one sees almost none of this. One learns of various “heresies” that were stamped out and the hard work of various saints and church elders who worked tirelessly to grow the church and develop the practices and beliefs that became central to the faith. They do not of course admit that there were often as many if not more in dissent, who too were struggling to win the day.

As is always the case, the winners write the history.

The Gospel of Judas, like so many of the other writings that did not make the canon and were destroyed in attempts to eliminate them from the public, show us that the beliefs and practices of the early church were both diverse and wildly different among churches, even those within one city.

In showing us that well-meaning and pious individuals disagreed broadly on much that we take for granted today, we recognize that it behooves us to be generous in our claims of  what constitutes “orthodoxy” ourselves.

The more we learn, the more it seems apparent that those who make claims to being the “true” repository of all truth as regards the life and times of Jesus Christ, are not only wrong, but in serious theological error.

It is an interesting read just for the very different claims it makes as regards the teachings of Christ, but what it tells us about the history of the early church is even more important.

Related articles

• Mark 14:10-11 – Why Did Judas Betray Jesus? (readingacts.wordpress.com)

 

Chomsky on Anarchism

I decided a few weeks ago that I best read some of Noam Chomsky’s stuff. I looked over the body of available work on Amazon, and selected three. I started off with this book, which is a selection of interviews and talks he has given over the years. I read it in the hopes it would give me a basic understanding of what anarchism is and what Chomsky believes.

This book certainly does that.

While not all the selections were equally interesting–the long chapter on the Spanish civil war is a bit hard to follow unless you have a basic understanding of the players and the events–all were informative in one degree or another.

I came away with a basic understanding of Chomsky’s position. I understand the basic outlines of anarchism and how broad and deep the movement is. There are, I learned, a whole lot of folks who fit into the anarchism mold but would be rather surprised should you advise them that they are anarchists themselves.

Given that I grew up in a UAW family, I can relate especially well to his explanation of unions and other worker’s councils. I guess it was a first for me to consider that working “for” someone is a version of slavery, albeit it can be a benevolent one. As anyone one who has any knowledge at all about slavery realizes, there is no such thing as a benevolent slavery, only one that is less harsh than another.

What was shocking to me was his remarks regarding the intelligentsia. I admit to thinking that there is an overall sense of intellectual honesty in our colleges and universities. I still think that, but I also realize that the intellectual community is no more able to avoid the pitfalls of power as the next group might be.

Chomsky pointed out the areas, especially relating to Post-War (WWII) foreign policy and during the Vietnam era, when intellectuals became the “legitimacy” for government action that can only be termed as invasionary in nature and supportive of illegitimate regimes that were “friendly” to US interests. In essence, we violated most everything we say we believe in, because it was “right”. It was right, only because in twisted executions of logical manipulation, it was in our interest and somehow it became in their interest as well.

Of course, much the same can still be said today, both on the part of both the government itself, and sadly public opinion. Case in point are the use of drones to kill people, accepting of course a certain “collateral” damage, meaning the deaths of innocents are just the way it goes. The other side of that is the apparent common belief by some, (all too many it seems) that those who are declared enemy combatants by us are not entitled to the rights of due process, and other procedural safeguards that we claim as definitive to our way of justice. What is good enough for us, is not apparently so necessary to others who have the bad luck to be held by US forces.

In an event, to make a long story short, I’m probably a unknowing anarchist in the making. I intend to read more of Chomsky.

This is definitely a good start and a place to get your feet wet.

Related articles

• My Conversation with Noam Chomsky – The State Journal (chomskywatch.wordpress.com)
• Noam Chomsky On The NDAA: The U.S. Constitution Is Being Scrapped (dandelionsalad.wordpress.com)

 

Review of Where the Conflict Really Lies

Perhaps no where is there more controversy than in the United States over the alleged conflicts between science and religion. Most of that controversy is conducted by folks who are woefully uneducated when it comes to either subject.

Alvin Plantinga, noted philosopher, attempts to bring some systematic thinking to the dispute. His basic premise is that apparent differences between science and theism are largely superficial and the two are actually deeply in agreement. His second basic premise is that the true disagreement lies between science and naturalism.

First let me say, that this is all quite heavy reading for the average person. If you are untrained in logic, statistical analysis, and philosophy, you will probably, as I did, struggle to follow the train of argument. However with patience, you will certainly tease out the main arguments.

It is most important that one understand what evolution is. It is not as is popularly thought, how life arose on planet earth. It is how existing life became increasingly complex over time moving from the more simplistic to the more complicated. In other words, from amoeba to human. The basic scientific explanation for this is commonly known as “Darwinism” or the random genetic mutation which drive evolutionary change.

Plantinga, as I understand him, doesn’t say that this process is inaccurate, but he does say that there is nothing to stop God from using his own laws to “cause” this or that mutation, thus “directing” the movement of otherwise benign processes.

He addresses the issue of miracles by claiming that those who think there is a conflict claim that miracles are antithetical to a universe operating under “laws” which ours seems to be. Indeed, some theologians would agree, and claim that the biblical references to miracles are nothing but fairy tales used to make more consequential arguments, but not reflecting reality. Dr. Plantinga points out that this no-miracle scenario is only compatible with a “closed system”, and whether it be Newtonian physics or quantum physics, modern science no where posits the idea of a closed system. Therefore when God effects a miracle (if indeed God does) it cannot by definition violate any “law”.

He goes on to explain that certain scientific truths are not “defeaters” to theistic belief, such as the interpretation that the earth is flat from a reading of Genesis, and our scientific understanding that the earth is round. Plantinga would argue that this doesn’t defeat belief in God, but merely informs us that our interpretation of some parts of the bible may be faulty.

Generally speaking his finds Bebe’s intelligent design to be flawed in its thinking which I think is basically in accord with most of the mainstream scientific community.

As Plantinga moves into this arguments involving why science and naturalism are really at odds, the going gets quite a bit more tough and only someone with some basic background can make solid sense of the arguments. He finds that we as humans can be assured that our senses are reliable because God, he claims helps us to see truth. This is our compass in discerning the value of our senses and memories and reason. Naturalism only works for survival and reproduction and truth is not part of that equation, though one could argue I would think that a properly functioning memory, sensory apparatus and reasonable faculty do aid in survival in the end.

I’m ill-equipped to make a judgment here as to whether Plantinga has made a compelling case or not. I find his arguments persuasive in large measure, but then I am a believer and carry that foremost into my reading. I hope that I am open-minded enough to see obvious flaws, and were I trained in philosophy, perhaps I could.

However, I will say that I too, like Dr. Plantinga, feel ill-served by the so-called New Atheists who tend to substitute more insult than actual substance to their arguments. It is impossible I find to hold a decent conversation with their followers, well-versed or not, when all you get is snide “santa claus in the sky” retorts when you try to make cogent arguments.

I think this is an important contribution to the discussion, and one that all believers and non-believers need to read and discuss seriously. In the end, if properly understood, I don’t think we have all that much to argue about. Thinking believers are not anti-science and never were.

I am grateful to Oxford University Press and their publicity department for providing this book to me free of charge for review. There are no agreements with them as to the contents of this review, and all the remarks made are mine.

Related articles

• Thomas Nagel Reviews Alvin Plantinga (maverickphilosopher.typepad.com)
• Naturalism and science are incompatible (openparachute.wordpress.com)
• Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism: Notes on the Preface (maverickphilosopher.typepad.com)
• Can Religious Belief Be Tested? (nybooks.com)