Moses and Jesus

This year, as happens occasionally, Passover, the Jewish festival, coincides with Christian Holy Week.

During Passover Jews celebrate their liberation from slavery in Egypt where they had been laboring making bricks and building pyramids to glorify the Pharaohs. But, so the story goes, Moses with the help of God persuaded the Pharaoh to let the Jews go after every firstborn Egyptian child died through divine intervention.

Liberation is the key word in this story about the exit from Egypt. This story is a political one about the founding of a new nation, the Jews, with the help of their divine patron.

The Christian story, as usually told, appears to have little in common with that of the Jews. In the Christian story Jesus is revealed to be, indeed, the son of God whose resurrection and later appearance to his disciples testifies to his divinity. The person who had seemed to be so very human, as he walked humbly among the poor and outcast he had chosen to be his companions, was now revealed to be not only human but also divine, clad in mystery demanding from us that we accept what we cannot understand, the mystery of the Trinity.

But from the perspective of Passover we can see a different story manifest in the Gospels--Jesus as a social revolutionary. He was harshly critical of the religious authorities that governed the Jewish people. The Gospels reproduce long sermons of condemnation of the Pharisees and other tribes of rabbis whom Jesus condemns as hypocrites, as men who take advantage of the privileges of their position to benefit themselves and lay heavy burdens on ordinary Jews.

Over and over Jesus praises the poorest and most downtrodden people in the Jewish community. He associates with prostitutes, tax collectors--widely hated because they collected taxes for the Roman occupiers--he stays in the house of a leper. Almost every move is a protest against the social and economic distinctions in the existing Jewish society. Over and over he preaches equality, that every person is of equal value, that every person deserves respect and considerate treatment. Wealth was not to determine how neighbors spoke to or regarded one. One’s position in the society was not to be determined by how one made a living and what work one did in the day to day. The chief command in Jesus's ethics was "love your neighbor like yourself."

In the political vocabulary of our day Jesus would surely be a socialist. We might even say that Jesus was the Bernie Sanders of his day.

That man fired up ordinary Jews. When he entered Jerusalem riding on a donkey crowds lined the streets and cheered for him. The hard-working, the downtrodden understood his message that they too were to be treated as important persons who did their part to keep the society operating. They should not be exploited and disrespected because their hands were calloused and their backs bent.

Not surprisingly the authorities felt threatened by what seemed to be an impending revolution of some sort. They feared that Jesus would overthrow existing authorities and declare himself the new King of the Jews. The SWAT teams of Homeland security were called out to arrest Jesus.

"Are you the King of the Jews?" They kept asking him. Jesus refused to answer.

What was he going to say? He was not the King of the Jews in that he did not aspire to the power and position of the Pharisees or of the colonial governor, Pontius Pilate. But of course he was the king of the Jews in so far as the people revered him and heard in his speeches a renewal of the Jewish people and the beginning of a new era of equality.

The competing stories of Passover and of Easter illustrate for us the profound ambiguities of our histories – the histories of Jews and of Christians. Their traditions celebrate freedom and human equality. The Jews get to leave Egypt and after 40 years to find their own land and construct their own people. And later there comes the prophet Jesus who steadfastly proclaims a gospel of human equality.

But hierarchies of Jewish rabbis or Christian priests and of Roman colonial authorities continually push the message of freedom and equality into the background, concealed behind the mysticism of Christian theology and the complexities of Jewish dietary laws. Jews gave excessive authority to their rabbis and now, when they are citizens of liberal democracies, many of them support the Israeli occupation and oppression of Palestinians and many of them support conservative and reactionary governments in their own countries. The message of freedom and equality is almost forgotten buried under hierarchical religious and political organizations. Social distinctions based on income are revered. Freedom becomes very limited.

The Catholic Church concealed the message of freedom and equality, proclaimed so eloquently by Jesus, under a hierarchy which to this day regards women as second-class citizens, which is unable to make a clean break with the abuse of children, and reluctant to give up the benefits of political power for the sake of being true to the Christian message of loving one's neighbor as one loves oneself. Instead of promoting peace, they went on Crusades, fought bloody religious conflicts and legitimated the imperial wars of kings and emperors.

The belt buckles of Nazi soldiers proclaimed “Gott mit uns. (God with us)”

The history of Passover and of Easter is a sad testimony of humanity's unwillingness to take seriously what the best of us have always insisted on, namely that human beings be equal, equally free and equally respected.

These two celebrations challenge us to remain faithful to the central values of our tradition – freedom and equality – and to keep challenging illegitimate hierarchies of political and religious power. Today that means that we support the slogan that “No Human Being is Illegal.” It means that we commit ourselves to combat the gross economic inequalities everywhere. We must be serious about our basic principle that “All Men are created Equal.”

Memorial Day 2014

 It's Memorial Day again and we are remembering men and women who died in American wars.

It is clearly fitting to remember them, but it is curious that there are many other heroic Americans who do not have their day of remembrance. Think of the many Americans – the majority African Americans – who died in the struggle for racial equality. Martin Luther King got his day but there are no days for Malcolm X. or Medgar Evers and the many less well known victims of racial violence.

While we are remembering heroic lives, why are we not talking about the parents who for many years worked two or even three jobs to provide a better life for their children, essentially giving up their own. Why do we not think of grandparents, barely finished raising their children, only to start all over raising their grandchildren because their children were unable or unwilling to do so.

When are we remembering the men and women who faithfully went off to work one day, as they had gotten so many days before, and died in a workplace accident?

Heroism takes many forms. Why only remember heroes killed in wars?

What makes Memorial Day different is the nationalist mythology that is regularly rehearsed on that day. Inevitably speakers will say that the soldiers who died were all heroes. They died, the speakers will add, to preserve American freedoms.

Let's look at the reality of that.

The period between World War I and World War II, approximately 25 years, was the longest period the United States was at peace. The average time between wars in our history was more like 10 years. The war that claimed most casualties by far was the Civil War in which, according to different estimates, between 600,000 and 750,000 soldiers died. That war clearly contributed to the agonizingly slow liberation of slaves. It is not clear that it preserved anything for whites, or Hispanics, or Native Americans, or various other groups.

The largest number of our wars were fought against Native Americans. The free institutions we boast of owed a great deal to the political practices of some of the Native American tribes. Yet, ironically, these wars clearly did not contribute to their freedom. It cleared space for the rest of us to live however we chose to live.

The soldiers who died in World War II may have protected us against authoritarian regimes. But that is by no means self-evident. It would be difficult to argue that. It is definitely not true of any of the wars we fought since then. The Asian wars were clearly defeats but our institutions remain the same. It is not obvious how the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan preserved American institutions.

The attacks of 9/11 have clearly resulted in restrictions of American freedoms but those were not imposed by Osama bin Laden or by Al Qaeda, but were made in Washington with the approval of the majority of American citizens. To the extent that our institutions are less free than they once were – and that is a plausible claim – we deprived ourselves of those freedoms.

The transition from a popular democracy to an oligarchy of the very rich was not imposed on us by any foreign nation. The very rich and those they bought managed to do that all by themselves.

All wars, whether domestic or foreign, where only peripherally related to the maintenance of American freedoms. The foreign wars were all efforts to maintain our imperial power, to become, to be and to remain the most powerful nation on earth. We are still involved in that project. Congress just appropriated more than $600 billion for the military.

Memorial Day is part of the propaganda that is used to justify this brute striving for power. It tells us that we are not trying to dominate the globe. We are just trying to preserve our freedom.

But that is a blatant lie. It dishonors the men and women who died in all of foreign wars. The least we can do is not to turn they are deaths into a another propaganda tool.

Happy New Year with Big Brother Looking over the Shoulder

As we wish each other a happy and prosperous new year, more comes to light about the government’s single-minded and untiring attempts at total surveillance of everybody.

Jacob Applebaum, a computer expert associated with Edward Snowden, spoke to a hackers conference in Germany about already existing different new surveillance devices, or devices being developed by the National Security Agency.

One of these allows government spies to transform your iPhone into a microphone through which big Brother can listen to your phone calls. In his speech, Applebaum wondered aloud whether that device was developed and inserted with the cooperation of Apple. That company has since then denied in a press release that they were in anyway cooperating with the government to make their phones into surveillance tools.

Applebaum also talked about ways in which a properly prepared computer can share every keystroke a user makes with a spy, even if the computer is at that moment not connected to the Internet. While you are manually typing away on an email to an old friend, the message you are composing shows up on the spy agency’s computer.

Another device, either in use or in development, allows someone to read messages posted on a computer from as far as 8 miles away. The snoops do not have to hide in a tree outside your house. They can be quite comfortable and warm while they capture what you are writing on your machine.

Applebaum also stressed that what is at issue here is not just individual privacy. These growing surveillance capabilities threaten the life and safety itself of journalists or of completely innocent bystanders. Applebaum told the story of an Angolan journalist whose computer had clearly been tampered with and was uploading its content to another computer. That other computer, unfortunately, was a government machine. A short time later the Angolan investigative journalist was arrested and is now under indictment and faces many years in prison, torture, and possible execution.

The aim of all the surveillance is not just to give spies a chuckle when they read your emails. The aim is political control, and enforcing conformity to views approved of by the government. Mind control is the ultimate purpose. The real threat of all this surveillance is enforcement of political conformity.

Make a resolution for 2014 to defend our traditional freedoms in every way you can.

How secure are we? – 2

Authoritarian governments have always told their subjects that the government's coercive and violent acts were necessary in order to protect the people. The inquisition protected the faithful against helpers of the Devil. Stalinist violence was justified by the alleged threats of capitalist reaction and its plan to overthrow the socialist society. Nazi coercion was said to protect the German people against the international Jewish conspiracy and against communism. Episodes of right wing hysteria in our own country were defended on the grounds that they protected us from a communist threat.

The same tired authoritarian rhetoric has become commonplace once again in the last few years as the government has arrogated to itself new powers which are clearly denied it by our Constitution. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution explicitly protect citizens against “unreasonable search and seizure” and demands a warrant before the police can enter your home to search it, before law enforcement can listen to your phone calls or read your e-mails.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution was motivated by the experience of the American colonists of having the British customs services search merchandise and confiscate it without giving the citizens any recourse. Hence the importance of the Fourth Amendment is not only in the demand that law enforcement obtain a warrant before searching your house or arresting you. The importance of the Fourth the amendment lies in the publicity of this requirement. If the police come to your door they have to show you the warrant. They may not enter your house when you are not home.

The reasons for that are obvious: only if the warrant is public, only if you know about it, only if there are no secret invasions of your home or your privacy, can you complain by going to court and challenging the government action.

Your safety as a citizen depends on this ability to challenge the government action. You cannot challenge actions you do not know about. The legal system manages to protect us if we are informed about government actions against us and are given an opportunity to defend ourselves, to bring in evidence and witnesses to show that the government action against us is unjustified or even illegal.

This safety of the citizen is threatened by the USA Patriot Act and by the whole institution of the FISA courts.

The USA Patriot Act allows police to enter your house when you are not home. It may secretly enter your house, confiscate items or install various forms of listening devices. Because these actions are secret, you are in no position to challenge them. Your freedom as a citizen is suddenly limited in very serious ways.

The FISA courts were instituted in 1978 after the government had been caught performing illegal wiretaps on political enemies of the president. The original intent was merely to put an end to using law enforcement for clearly political purposes. Over the years, both the courts themselves and their functions have been expanded. Now the FISA court can allow the national security agency to demand extensive records about phone calls from the phone companies and monitor our actions and communications in other ways.

In order to obtain permission for citizen surveillance, the government needs to go to the secret FISA court and ask for a secret warrant for its surveillance.

Many critics complain that the government does not need to allow the other party to appear before the court. But that is unreasonable. When the police applies to a court for an arrest warrant for a person they consider a criminal, that person is not informed and is certainly not allowed to make a case before the court. But once I am arrested, I go to trial and can there defend myself.

The problem about the FISA courts is its secrecy. These courts have given the government authority to monitor many of my activities. Were it not for Edward Snowden and others we would not even know about that. But now we are still not able to challenge these FISA court warrants in the regular court system, because the government will say that FISA court proceedings are secret and therefore cannot be discussed, let alone challenged.

Once court proceedings become secret, citizens lose their ability to challenge the government. A country where citizens may not challenge the government is by definition an authoritarian country.

The US government trumpets American freedom while it tramples them in the FISA courts. To preserve our freedoms those courts must be abolished.

Creeping Fascism?

Not too long ago President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act. Most of it concerns funding for the military but at the end there are some sections that essentially allow the military to arrest American citizens, suspected of connections with terrorism, without warrants and to hold them indefinitely without bringing them before a judge for an arraignment. This part of the act is now in litigation. A federal judge in New York has declared those sections unconstitutional, but it is not clear that the government will respect that judicial decision.

Even more recently, a story in the New York Times reveals that since 2002 the United States government has been spying on its own citizens. The National Security Agency, established for spying abroad, since 2002 has used a programs written by one William Binney for espionage on the Soviet Union to collect immense amounts of data about every American citizens, to be stored in a very large computer facility under construction in Utah. Binney has spoken out about this top secret program--”Stellar Wind”--concerned that it was clearly illegal, convened the Constitution and Bill of Rights and constitutes a serious threat to our democracy. Spying on its citizens is typical of autocratic governments.

Here are two examples of the government blatantly ignoring the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The freedoms of American citizens apparently do not count for much in the eyes of the present administration, or of its predecessors under George W. Bush.

Is this the beginning of fascism in America?

Fascism is a complex phenomenon. One of its chief characteristics is an authoritarian government that has no regard for individual liberties and constitutional protections of free speech or against arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention. Fascist governments tend to be very nationalistic; they are supportive of large corporations, and are vicious in their persecution of labor organizations. The directors of large corporations have a significant role in Fascist governments.

Full-fledged fascist governments come into power by arresting masses of real or imagined enemies. The first act of the Hitler regime in Germany was to arrest large numbers of political opponents, union leaders, religious leaders who seemed to be hostile to the new government. The Nazis made it very clear that opponents would end up in concentration camps indefinitely.

That is not yet happening in the United States. But the NDAA and the Stellar Wind Program of the NSA may be interpreted as preparations for just such mass arrests.

It certainly appears that there are groups in the US – some of them powerful, some of them influential in the intelligence services, some of them influential in Congress, who would not hesitate to introduce a fascist authoritarian regimes in our country. The passage in Congress of the National Defense Authorization Act indicates the willingness in the highest places – even in Obama's White House – to ignore the Bill of Rights. The program to spy on citizens similarly ignores constitutional guarantees and threatens civil liberties.

America is not yet fascist but a lot of Americans are flirting with fascism.

Before you go to sleep tonight, look under your bed for a fascist or for one of their microphones. They may be recording your snores. Be sure your snores are loyal and patriotic.

Labor Day has come around once again with its familiar speeches about the freedom and good fortune of American labor.

Labor, in our system, is a commodity. That is a long word to indicate that labor is bought and sold and that the price of labor – the workers' wages – depend on supply and demand. There is little demand for workers who never finished high school. Their wages are low. Highly skilled brain surgeons, on the other hand, are in high demand and earn a great deal of money.

All this is familiar. It strikes many people as a fine way of assigning jobs to people, of deciding what sorts of training young people need, and how much anyone should get paid. A person, as it were, rents himself or herself out for eight hours a day. After that their time is their own to do with as they like. The market in labor is no different from the market in hamburgers or in toilet paper.

But consider this story. An older man I met recently works for a manufacturing company as an attorney dealing with inventors whose inventions this company turns into machines. Some companies will pay a small sum every time the invention is used. His company, he told me, pays the inventor a small lump sum and nothing after that. He regards that as immoral but has to do what his employer demands of him. In order to keep his, admittedly well-paying, job he has to compromise his moral convictions. Selling his skills and ability to work has serious implications far beyond the workday. He is selling something of himself.

But he could of course look for a different job, many people will say. But think about that for a moment. He has lived in the same town with his wife for 50 years. They have many friends whom they encountered when they were young, with whom they shared the joys and sorrows of the intervening 50 years, of raising children and welcoming grandchildren, and growing old gradually. Were he to move somewhere else, to work for a different company, his life and that of his wife would also be very seriously disrupted.

He is not just renting out eight hours of his day to his employer. By signing an employment contract he allows the employer enormous power to damage his self-esteem as a moral person or to disrupt his life by forcing him to move elsewhere and to interrupt lifetime friendships.

The employment contract is not an innocent transaction but has a major effect on one's whole life and on one's person. Think of all the schoolteachers who, since the passage of No Child Left Behind, are forced to "teach to the test" instead of doing the sort of teaching which they believe helps students to grow up well educated and prepared for the world they have to confront. Think of all the people who do a job they like and do well, who are then "rewarded" by a promotion to a managerial job which they do not like. Changing from work one enjoys to work one despises has a serious effect on one's entire life, and often on the connection to one's family. But it is within the employer's power to turn one's entire life upside down.

When we hire ourselves out to an employer we cede enormous power over our lives to those we work for. No, we are not slaves. But we are not free either.

Remember that when you hear this year's Labor Day speech about the freedom of the American worker.

                     How we have changed.

A friend told me this story: “When my father was a student at the University of Michigan in the 1930s he lived in a cooperative house known as 'Socialism House.' 25 years later when I lived in the same house at the University of Michigan its name had been changed to `Michigan house'.” In the 1930s the word “socialism” was associated with persons who defended working people earning low wages and suffering grievously during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Socialists were in favor of greater equality and a decent standard of living for everyone. Today Republicans are making the Democrats look bad by accusing them of being socialists. “Socialist” has become a term of abuse.

This story reminded me of what has happened to the word “liberal.” Around 1990, Liberals were still the people who were defending freedom and equality for all. They were good guys. I remember my shock when the elder Bush during his campaign for the presidency started calling Democrats “liberals.” All of a sudden, the word “liberal” had become a serious insult.

Often words change their meaning by accident in the course of being used over and over. But what happened to both of these words is instructive. From being the name for people who were defending the most traditional of American values – equality, fairness, liberty – they are now being used for people who support an expansion of government activity. Why are liberals and socialists considered such a threat to us? The power of government, we are being told again and again, is an impediment to private enterprise, to the expansion of American business which will make all of us richer and richer.

Government actions most likely have been threats to some businesses for a long time. But where government stepped in to defend and expand equality and freedom, Americans have, in the past, been willing to pay a price for that.

In the past, socialism and liberalism, the defense of equality and freedom, may have has some undesirable side effects, but they were thought to be legitimate political projects because the pursuit of equality and freedom was thought to be extremely important. Today the dominant political perspective cares only about the health of our corporations, about their profitability. As soon as there is a hint that wage and hour legislation, worker protection, trade union organization, campaign finance reform, and other efforts to safeguard equality and liberty, large groups are up in arms because the defense of liberty and equality might have a negative effect on corporate profits. Equality and freedom count for very little; profits for a a great deal.

What I find truly alarming is the evidence that so many Americans are more seriously concerned about unfettered growth of business and very little concerned about equality, fairness and liberty. Who are the heroes today? Steve Job, Bill Gates – both people who have made huge sums of money and have been known to be unpleasant persons. What matters to Americans is making money. Their heroes are persons who make obscene amounts of money. There are no heroes today comparable to Rosa Parks or Dr. King.

Socialism and liberalism are seen only as threats to some businesses making a enormous amounts of money. Equality is of no interest. Neither is freedom. The public at large watches passively while our democracy is sold to the highest bidder.

The big businesses with their huge profits are selling us down the river and I'm afraid that we deserve every little bit of it. People who care more for money than for freedom and equality deserve what they get.

Unrest in the Middle East

The Revolution in Tunisia, the demonstrations in Algiers, Yemen and in Egypt are a profound embarrassment for the United States government. Secretary of state Hillary Clinton and President Obama have presented the US as the champion of democracy. But once confronted with real popular movements in favor of popular self-determination the President is rapidly backpedaling. 

The president could not say enough about what a good ally President Hosni Mubarak has been to the United States. (We have been a good ally to Mubarak too- to the tune of $ 1.3 billion a year) There followed some mealymouthed recommendations of allowing free speech. But neither Clinton nor Obama were willing to come right out and say it that Mubarak is an authoritarian ruler, who has for decades arrested and tortured political opponents. Elections in Egypt have been a sham. All through the Mideast, our allies are dictators or absolute monarchs. We have cooperated with them and made it very clear, if only through our actions, that all this talk about freedom and democracy was for local consumption back in the United States and that no dictator need to be worried about US opposition -- with the exception of Ahmadinejad in Iran.

( And even he does not need to be terribly worried. A while ago someone reported that the government had given exemptions from the commercial sanctions against Iran to no less than 10,000 American firms. While our official position is uncompromisingly hostile to the government of Iran, we are willing to allow American firms to make money supplying this enemy, thereby strengthening the Iranian government.)

And indeed, our government’s talk about freedom and democracy is for home consumption. They are trying to persuade us that their primary agenda item in foreign policy is the promotion of democracy. This blatant lie only shows their disrespect for the American electorate. They don’t think they have to tell the truth at home; voters are only there to be manipulated.

To my mind that does not show a lot of respect for democracy either. After all, if people are systematically misinformed by their government, their decisions at the ballot box are not liable to be worth a lot. Perhaps Mubarak is a trusted ally because our government and his play pretty much the same game, except that ours is more sophisticated in its disrespect of its people.

Is Government the enemy?

Many Americans think that. On April 15, tax day, a national organization held a series of “tea parties”all over the country to commemorate the colonists' resistance to government and specifically to taxation. They are planning more events for the 4th of July. At present, the Republicans in Congress are are resisting the proposal to have government provide health insurance for some Americans. Anything done by the government, they believe, is worse than anything done by private business.
This is an old belief among Americans. The authors of the Constitution wrote that document after having successfully freed themselves from the British government and established their own. The political system they created is very concerned to preserve individual liberties against government attempts to limit freedom. It is, we think, a good system. Citizens have elaborate rights to a protest, to tell the government what they think. The leaders of the government are elected; they hold their jobs by the will of the citizens and can be removed from office if they ignore the citizens' wishes.
These are important institutions, but our country has changed fundamentally since the end of the 18th century. Then a citizen's freedoms were threatened by the government and by lawless fellow citizens. We face a third and much more formidable threat today: big business.
In 2005, WalMart had annual sales of $312 billion. In the current fiscal year the budget of the state of New York – one of the larger states in the US-- amounts to $120 billion. Wal-Mart is almost 3 times as large an enterprise as the state of New York.
The governor, the legislators, the attorney generals, the mayors, the city councils, and other officials are elected. They are therefore subject to a certain amount of control by the citizens. What happens if you don't like a policy at Wal-Mart? Who do you write to? The people who run Wal-Mart are not elected. They sell $312 billion worth of goods every year. So they don't really care a lot what you think.
Things get much worse if you actually work for Wal-Mart. Wages are notoriously low. Employees who try to organize unions get fired – even though that's illegal. The employee has nothing to say, nowhere to complain. The Constitution guarantees all citizens the right to assemble peacefully, that means that we have the right to organize; citizens have the right to petition the government, that means, to say what bothers them. Employees of Wal-Mart do not have those rights. If you complain or try to organize you are out the door. Its like living under a dictatorship. The greatest threat to individual freedom are big employers.
Private business, the enemies of government say, is much more efficient. To be sure, government bureaucracy is horrible. But have you ever tried to get your insurance company to pay for a medication, prescribed by your doctor, which was not on the insurance company's approved list? Everyone has horror stories about the inefficiencies of private insurers.
Everyone knows that. Why do people nevertheless keep coming around to say: don't trust the government, trust private enterprise? Look again at the Republican objection to government insurance. Republicans regularly speak for the interest of large business. The large insurance companies do not want to have to compete against the government. That might be bad for the almighty bottom line. Big business has always been opposed to what they call “big government” because government has had the job of enforcing antitrust legislation passed by Congress at the request of ordinary citizens. If it were not for the government enforcing wage and hour legislation, if it were not for OSHA enforcing (sometimes) health and safety standards, if the government did not limit the hours that children are allowed to work, if the government did not protect workers as imperfectly as it does, you can imagine how much more oppressive ordinary employment would be.
Big business does not like the government protecting workers. Big business does not like the government trying to clean up the environment polluted by business. Big business does not like the government supervising, however imperfectly, the formation of huge companies that have too much power. And so they keep harping on the evils of “big government.” But if you think about what your citizen's freedoms are in relation to the government and what your freedoms are in relation to your employers, may be government doesn't look quite so bad. You have to admit that the greatest threat to individual freedom comes from the folks you work for.