Those Oh so Moral Republicans!

One of the most fascinating topics in political philosophy that I’ve run across is the concept of “dirty hands.” While the basic scenario is important, it is off topic for me today. What is important to me is the fundamental issue at work: politics is dirty and there is absolutely no way to perform well in politics and remain clean. Not every action in politics is dirty and that which is dirty is not always equally dirty. And by dirty I don’t necessarily mean illegal.

At the very least there is, as Machiavelli pointed out, a fundamental separation between values within the world of politics and values within the realm of traditional ethics (I’m being general but I am speaking specifically of Christian values, although any teleological normative system is fine, even non-religious ones…although, in my opinion they are easier to work around.).

The Christian God is pretty straightforward on 1) not killing, 2) not lying, 3) not working on some official holy day of rest and a few other things. The Jesus version of the Christian God is pretty straightforward on being peaceful, forgiving another’s trespasses, picking out the plank in our own eye before noting the splinter in our brothers eye, rich people not being able to get into heaven, being humble in all things, and forgoing personal excesses of wealth.

However, a president (and for that matter congresspeople) have to be ready to send troops into battle. A flick of the pen and self-serving theologians can say that God meant “no killing of innocents” although that is not what the law says and, in this instance, I’m a strict constructivist. But even that rewriting of God’s law doesn’t quite work. “Collateral damage” is factored in to every bomb drop and house raid. The president not only knows that ordering an attack will cause civilian (innocent) death, but approximately how many will die. He knows that many of them are children who have not yet been corrupted by the ideologies of their parents (if we assume that the others are somehow “guilty”of something because of their beliefs.)

The same self-serving theologian could argue that the Old Testament God, the one from which the commandment against killing arrived was pro-war and therefore only meant something like “no killing of one of your own” (since the Old Testament wars were almost only wars against opposing religious groups). But that doesn’t explain our firebombing of Dresden, the Revolutionary War against Britain, the Civil War against the South, and all the “small wars” that took place throughout the very Catholic Latin America (keeping in mind I’m not including the “clearly guilty” and atheist communists we fought against, but rather all the “collateral damage” including the CIA-admitted genocide in Nicaragua.) Even locally, how far removed from the commandment against murder is he when the president allows Americans to die if by “one of your own” God meant to define the restriction in terms of citizenship? Certainly God recognized that there were both sins of commission, like putting a Titan missile into a madrassa, and sins of omission, like failing to properly repair the levees outside New Orleans and failing to put a person in charge of FEMA with some emergency management experience.

God does not let you into heaven based on a balance of good and bad acts. It’s not God’s up there with a spreadsheet tallying lives saved against lives wasted. “You killed or were responsible for the deaths of 3 million Mr. Bush, but, thankfully, but since you upheld 10% of your promise for African aid, you saved maybe, 100,000. But you didn’t go into Darfur like you should have which caused the death of 300,000, but you did…” Even a good president who actually used the power of his office to save lives around the world would have a hard time accounting for the millions of deaths from all the unstopped (or actively supported) dictators of the world. And clearly a president can’t be judged on counterfactuals like, “You didn’t bomb Beijing” which would be as good as saying “You didn’t blow up the planet.” I mean, neither did I, and I didn’t cause the deaths of a 1.5 million Iraqi children through ten years of international sanctions.

So presidents murder and they spend a great deal of time not preventing murders that they have the power to stop. There are political reasons of course. We have this thing called “sovereignty”and this related things called “self-determination.” These things are two political concepts, the belief in which prevents presidents from sending in the Army and Marines to stop every genocide it hears about. But, my understanding is God doesn’t care about our made up laws. There is only God’s law, and a good Christian president would have to disobey international law to follow God’s law.

So just in terms of this one commandment, we have to assume that presidents don’t make good Christians and vice versa. And that leads us to two related points. 1) Any president that claims they can balance being a good Christian and being a good president is a liar or they are stupid. In either case, I don’t want them to be my leader. and 2) Since all presidents are going to have to murder people, I feel like I should elect the guy (or gal) who is going to murder the least people…and stop the most worldwide atrocities.

So how does one make that determination? First I think we have to determine at least some of the important ways that people die as a result of the political decisions of our elected leaders.

Right off the bat (and probably because I’m thinking religiously for the moment), there is the death penalty and abortion. There’s also the deaths related to poverty–preventable illnesses like malnutrition, diarrhea, dehdryation. There is, of course, cancer, heart disease, and automobile accidents which, in no particular order, are the top three killers in the country. There is also murder. And suicide.

Internationally the big killers are the poverty diseases: malnutrition, dehydration, diarrhea–like those that afflict the American poor–but also measles, mumps, malaria, tuberculosis, and a handful of others, nearly all of which we have treatments for. There is of course HIV/AIDS. There are the big-name genocides like those in Darfur and there are big-name human rights abuses like the dowry deaths in India, public decapitations in Saudi Arabia, and the constant disappearances of dissidents in China and Russia. The biggest worldwide killer right now after the poverty-related diseases are the peripheral deaths related to civil wars like the one in the Congo.

Oh! And there is the small matter of those two wars we are fighting which is not only causing the deaths of hundreds of thousand of civilians, it is also killing thousands of Americans to boot. In addition to those Americans killed directly in the war (about 3500) the NY Times has found 121 homicides committed by soldiers that have returned from one of the two conflicts and (probably) 102 Afghanistan/Iraq-related suicides which, as far as I’m concerned are casualties of war as well.

And, while there is no commandment against torture, I have to say that, at the very least, those people who are tortured to death should count as murdered–as should those three “detainees” in Guantanamo who finally succeeded in killing themselves last June.

So, if I have to choose my future president based purely off a standard of not increasing the tally of murdered innocents and with the possibility that he or she might actually try to do something to save those already condemned to death by the current state of the world, am I going to vote for a Republican or a Democrat? Well, those Republican are against abortion, and that sounds pretty Christian…

It sure is hard. Which guy was it that said we should “double the size of Guantanamo?” was that Obama? No. Which candidates are running in support of the war? Which candidates are preventing stem cell research to help cure cancer? Which side, Republicans or Democrats have had more effect fighting crime by reducing poverty? Which candidates are talking about extending health coverage to the uninsured so that people can stop dying of malnutrition in the richest country in the world?

Oh yeah, the atheist, secular demons in the DNC. But don’t forget, they are pro-choice and in the grand scheme of things…ach…you get it by now.

There’s lots of ways to murder in the world, how is that Republicans have gotten the stranglehold on morality by fighting against just one of them?

Economic Stimulus

I’m commenting because I have a blog and I can. I am no economist.

The first thing that strikes me as odd about an “economic stimulus package” is where the money comes from. The government only has the money it collects in taxes, or in this case, the money it will collect in taxes. That is, it’s our money, that the government is going to give back…to us. Except that, it costs money to collect the money and it costs money to redistribute it back to us, which means, that the government is losing money overall. It would have been a lot cheaper to just let us keep it to start with.

Except, it’s not like they’re giving me back exactly the money I paid or anything. Almost all of us, so I’m told, are going to get between $300 and $600. But I, for example, paid more than $600 in taxes last year. The people getting $300 didn’t pay any taxes last year. People like Bill Gates, that theoretically paid substantially more in taxes last year than I paid, will still get about $600 or whatever. Of course this $600 won’t effect Bill Gates at all, and won’t stimulate the package…er economy. The $600 to me, yeah, that’s going to help me pay some bills and pay down some debt. Not exactly stimulating but moreso than what Bill and Melinda are going to do with it (unless they end up giving it to some inner city school, and bully for them if they do!). But that $300 to the people who make the least, yeah, that’s going to get used right up.

So what we have here, essentially, if I’m hearing it right, and if we stop right here in our “money cycle” is government-sponsored wealth redistribution: Taking money, in the form of income (and other) taxes, and giving it to people (unprogressively, I might add) that don’t pay taxes. Which is a blatant admission, if ever there was one, that trickle down economics doesn’t work, and that if you want to have a healthy economy you need to get more money into the hands of the people that will spend it.

But, I want to restate something I just said. The government will be passing this package of forced wealth redistribution so that less well-to-do people will spend it. Presumably on things they need like milk and AAA batteries, but with a $300 lump sum, it could just as likely end up as an ill-afforded down payment on a Rent-to-Own plasma screen TV. Whatever. The point is that it’s a government-sponsored wealth redistribution plan, redistributing wealth from the public coffers and to private enterprise.

Yikes.

Like I said, I’m no economist but I’m seeing a lot of things I don’t like here. I’m seeing the government praying to High Heaven that we don’t ask the tough questions about why a plan that’s good for “stimulating” the economy isn’t also good for long-term economic stability. I see them avoiding the issue of how a stronger corporate “tax” in the form of an increase in the minimum wage wouldn’t take more money from the very richest, and put it in the hands of the people who need it the most and thereby create a sustainable, strong economy. I’m seeing them avoid the issue of the failure of capitalist hierarchies. I’m seeing them shy away from an admission of the social failures of corporate greed.

Unfortunately I’m also seeing them feed government money, public money, tax money, back into the hands of the very people that caused the problem to start with. Every gallon of milk, every loaf of bread, every credit card payment, every iPod bought with that tax rebate was bought with money that could have paid for sewage infrastructure, highway repair, more teachers, better schools, lower insurance premiums, lower energy prices, advances in reusable energy and other social causes the increased price of which have caused our average cost of living to go up while wages have stagnated.

Furthermore, it’s an admitted band-aid. It doesn’t fix the issue that caused the problem. It doesn’t punish the guilty. It doesn’t stop a mortgage from defaulting. It doesn’t salvage the loan industry. It won’t stop the bankruptcies that will prevent millions from owning a home for the next seven to ten years. For that matter, the amount that is likely to be distributed is a spit in the ocean in terms of the amount that was “lost” in the housing crisis.

Should I, while I’m ranting, also mention that that money was not lost. It’s comfortably sitting in the bank accounts of billionaire executives at Citicorp and Merril Lynch and others. The money went up but it didn’t come back down. Those banks have been reporting “losses” lately, but those aren’t actual losses. Those are losses compared to last year’s ill-gotten gains. And it doesn’t matter, the guys and gals (but mostly guys) that raised expectations by arranging for multiple mortgage-sized thefts have filled their private coffers with annual and per-project bonuses, with 7- and 8-figure salaries, and with exit packages large enough to buy a third world nation.

And…

They’ll be getting a tax rebate.

If there was any justice, the ones that caused the problems by talking out of both sides of their mouths will be stripped of million-dollar legal aid and forced to defend their duplicitous business dealings with the aid of C-average public defenders. And, when they inevitably lose because of their inability to semantically twist the laws’ intents, they will have to buy the houses they stole and give them to the people that bought them.

That would be justice, that would be an economic stimulus package, and that would be a warning to all the other dollarmongers out there in the world looking for the next big loophole.

Of course, that would never happen, that would never work, and that would shut down the spirit of “entrepreneurship” that “makes this country great.” So, y’know, there’s that.