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All Posts, islam, religion, Terrorism, war

IS THIS A TIME FOR WAR?

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What should we Americans do about ISIS and other radical Islamists – the ones who want a Caliphate; attack non-believers and violently enforce their religious beliefs on others?  They are as much a problem for most Muslims as they are for the rest of us.  In this dangerous time we should not see all Muslims as radical Islamists and  we must avoid poorly considered, emotional decisions that could make matters worse.

Our world’s mood is changing quickly since the brutal attack on civilians in Paris and the bombing of a Russian airliner.   Western nations are questioning whether to accept Middle Eastern refugees. Many citizens of nations that have been attacked want revenge and want to feel safe from future attacks.  But are revenge and safety are compatible?

Most Americans are in agreement on two goals.  First, protect our citizens and our nation from attack.  Second, encourage people of other countries to develop free and peaceful societies.  Our disagreements are about how to achieve those goals.

Every strategy has risks.  No one can know the best plan with certainty but we do have history as a guide.  It demonstrates that military action alone will not defeat  radical Islamists.  War against them has produced anarchy (civil disorder and the collapse of government).  Anarchy is fertile ground where they can spread their beliefs.  One important example is Afghanistan where a Soviet invasion in 1978 brought on total collapse of the Afghani government.  Over  100,000 Soviet troops, fully equipped with modern weapons, tried to impose a pro-USSR government.  After ten years they withdrew, having been defeated by the Mujahedeen and Taliban.  The anarchy they left behind allowed the radical Islamist Taliban to take charge.  Americans have been fighting the Taliban since 2003 and still have not defeated the ideology or created a stable government.

In Iraq, the American invasion and removal of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship has produced a similar result.   The near collapse of Assad’s Syrian dictatorship created an opening for ISIS there.  Radical Sunni Islamism has morphed from Al-Qaida and Taliban to ISIS and it has spread among Muslims beyond the Middle East into Northern Africa, North America, and Europe.  There is no example where invasion and military occupation have produced good outcomes.  Why would we expect a different result if we invade again?

Critics of President Obama have persuaded many Americans that we have no strategy but he has clearly articulated one.  It is a long term plan focused on two goals:  (1) American safety and (2) development of free, peaceful societies.  Click here to hear the strategy.   It recognizes that ISIS brutalizes non-compliant Muslims even more than it does westerners.  It coordinates our military actions and our foreign policy to encourage Muslims to fight ISIS and replace anarchy with the rule of democratic civil law.  The strategy has had both successes and failures; and it is too early to know whether it can succeed.

Hatred of western civilization fuels ISIS and other radical Islamists.  Without it, they can’t recruit and they can’t convince other Muslims that the West is their enemy.  Today’s battle is against an ideology not a nation.  When we destroy a Muslim nation, even one as bad as Saddam’s Iraq or Assad’s Syria with a massive invasion, we feed radical ideology.  The critical question is whether the President’s strategy can effectively fight ISIS and encourage non-Islamist Muslims to do the same without creating more hatred of the west.

The financial cost of war in Afghanistan was a contributing factor to the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Americans are already saddled with a dangerously large national debt.  Since we have no will to raise taxes, it is all but certain that future warfare will be paid for with borrowed money – probably measured in trillions of dollars – as was the failed war in Iraq. When we calculate costs, we must also remember that any “boots on the ground” will belong to loyal Americans risking their lives to protect ours.

My conclusion is that  encouraging moderate Muslims and their governments to defend themselves from radical Islamism; providing them with military support and intelligence and maintaining our internal security at a high level is our best course of action.  That, in general is the President’s strategy.  I would stick to it until it succeeds or until someone comes up with a demonstrably better idea.  Another war is likely to be a disaster in both human and financial terms.

All Posts, Christianity, justice, north carolina, race

Making Racism Visible

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Today I am publishing word-for-word nine responses to last week’s column about “Silent Sam” because they reveal white supremacist beliefs that persist in our community and nation 150 years after our Civil War.  I’m doing this for two reasons.

  1. We can deal effectively with racism only after it is visible.
  2. Our best hope to successfully deal with racism lies in developing personal acquaintances and friendships with people of other races – bonds strong enough to tolerate frank discussion of personal experiences.

Maybe a few readers will share this with friends and use it to begin a dialogue.  If so, I would be pleased to know about your experience doing that.

I must add that there were readers who agreed and others who did not and who made civilized responses.  What follows are only the ones written from a white supremacist perspective.

WARNING:  Much of what follows is both racist and inflammatory.  Continue reading Making Racism Visible →

All Posts, justice, north carolina, race

Silent Sam needs company

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The lady justice is depicted urging Sam to drop his books and his studies and go to war for the Confederacy. He looks victorious despite losing the war.
The lady justice is depicted urging Sam to drop his books and his studies and go to war for the Confederacy. Sam looks victorious despite losing the war.

While walking across the University of North Carolina campus, I paused to see the controversial statue of “Silent Sam“, a memorial to students who joined the Confederate army.  Some North Carolinians want it removed because it seems to celebrate the causes of racism, slavery, and rebellion against the United States.  Others want to preserve it and similar monuments across the Tarheel state that recognize those who served the Confederate cause.  They say that removing the monuments is tantamount to rewriting history.  The argument raises two questions.  What is the purpose of the statues?  Why did we fight a civil war?

Julian Carr, a wealthy Civil War veteran who delivered the keynote speech at Silent Sam’s 1913 dedication, made it clear that the monument was erected to honor and perpetuate the cause of white supremacy.  Here are a few of his words.  “The present generation…scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the Anglo-Saxon race…the purest strain of the Anglo-Saxon is to be found in the thirteen Southern States —  Praise God…One hundred yards from where we stand, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted…a southern lady…”  Today, a century after the statue was erected, that speech is proudly displayed on the website of the Durham Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The reasons for the war are evident in the reasons for secession declared by the legislatures of Confederate states:

Texas:  “…the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations…”

Mississippi: “There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union…”

Southern state governments claimed slavery as a legitimate social structure that was vital to their economies and they saw the election of President Lincoln as proof that slavery would be ended in the United States.  Underlying slavery and the war was greed that justified ownership of humans, theft of their labor, sale of their children and accumulation of wealth through brutality.

Sons of Confederate Veterans hold ceremonies at the Smiling Sam statue.
Sons of Confederate Veterans hold ceremonies at the Silent Sam statue.

There are “heritage groups”  (a polite description) who regularly honor their ancestors’ loyalty to the Confederacy at its monuments, making speeches and waving battle flags while dressed in Confederate uniforms.  Siding with them this year, Republicans in North Carolina’s legislature made it illegal for local governments and state institutions to remove state-owned memorials; and they rejected repeated requests to stop issuing license plates featuring Confederate battle flags.

It is necessary to acknowledge history before we can rise above it.  Rather than rewriting their Nazi past, Germans acknowledged the holocaust and other horrors of the Third Reich with new monuments alongside Nazi concentration camps and symbols.  An alternative to moving Confederate memorials or preserving them would be to update them by adding a 21st century perspective.  Americans should support victims of Jim Crow laws and descendants of slaves in creating monuments documenting the evils that the Confederacy fought to perpetuate and erecting them beside those of the Confederacy.

Some will deny the comparison of the Confederacy to Nazi Germany, but they have much in common.  Eleven million people, six million of them Jewish,  died in the holocaust.  I can’t find an estimate of how many humans died as American slaves, but approximately four million were  emancipated in the aftermath of the Civil War.  Any estimate of the number who died during more than two centuries of pre-emancipation slavery would produce a count larger than the number of holocaust victims.  Is slavery a fate better or worse than a holocaust death?  I like to think that most humans would fight to avoid either one.

Now is the time to cease government sponsored glorification of the Confederacy, either by removing its monuments or by supplementing them with the values that we have learned in the century and a half since emancipation.  Republican legislators have not yet taken away the authority of local governments and universities to create new monuments alongside old ones.  We are the generation and now is the time for Americans to unite across lines of race and geography into one nation.  If not now, when?  If not us, who?

A victorious Union Soldier looks down in sorrow at fallen comrades

Urbana, Ohio's monument to returning and fallen Union soldiers comrades.
A Midwestern monument to returning and fallen Union soldiers

 

 

 

All Posts, Congress, health

Drug Prices and Corporate Influence

Prescription drug prices are again in the news.  Prices are rising quickly, even for drugs that have been on the market for years.  This column quantifies the problem and presents ideas to improve the situation.

A good benchmark for “fairness” is to compare US prices to other nations.  The best objective research that I can find was done by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2011.  They looked at prices for the thirty most commonly prescribed drugs and found that for every dollar spent by Americans, residents of other nations paid $0.51.  In other words, we were paying twice as much, on average, as residents of other western democracies (Europe, Canada, and Australia).  Americans spent 13% more in 2014 than in 2013, so the situation appears to be getting worse.

There are many reasons why drug prices are higher in the US but underlying most of them is the influence of big campaign contributions and related corporate influence in our nation’s capital.  For example, when the George W Bush administration wanted to create the Medicare Drug benefit (Medicare Part D) there was concern in Congress about whether to expand the Medicare entitlement program.  Drug companies could have killed the idea if they had lobbied against it.  The price for their support was a provision in the law which prohibits Medicare from negotiating drug prices, setting prices or establishing a uniform list of covered drugs, known as a formulary.  That provision made Medicare Part D a goldmine for them.   Efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate prices have failed under both Republican and Democratic leadership due to inability to muster 60 votes to break Senate filibusters.

The negotiating power which Medicare was denied is the tool used by other nations to drive prices down.  When several effective drugs are available for a particular problem,  those nations pay only for the ones that are priced at an acceptable level.  Companies reduce prices in order to have their products covered.  Drug companies say that they need high American prices to pay for research and development.  The undeniable need for R&D does not justify charging Americans more than Europeans for the same drugs.   Medicare should be allowed to negotiate prices and to exclude over-priced drugs from the Medicare benefit.

A second action to drive down drug prices would be to increase government spending on research and development.  It would be good government policy to fund research in targeted areas (prevention of strokes and heart attacks and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease for example) under a policy where all resulting intellectual property such as patents belongs to the taxpayers who funded the research.  We could then allow production of resulting drugs by any drug company which would do the manufacturing here in the US but charge a royalty to companies doing the manufacturing outside the US. The net effect would be more R&D funding at American universities and corporations, lower drug costs and new US manufacturing jobs.  Strong opposition to such ideas can be expected from the US and foreign drug companies who are currently profiting from an American market where taxpayers and patients subsidize the world’s highest prices and have no ability to negotiate them down.

Another idea is to tighten intellectual property laws so that patents don’t seem to run forever and more companies can manufacture drugs at lower costs.  There are loopholes in current laws that allow companies to extend patents by making very minor changes in a drug and preventing expiration of the patent on the original.

A fourth strategy for driving down costs might be to reduce utilization of pharmaceuticals by banning or restricting direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs.  Should corporations have free speech rights to promote prescription drugs directly to patients?  Do the ads encourage patients to imagine symptoms and ask doctors for unnecessary prescriptions?  Current research isn’t adequate to answer that question but most other nations don’t allow such advertising and many have lower utilization of heavily advertised drugs including antidepressants and sleep aids.  This is obviously another public policy question in the hands of legislative bodies that have a hard time saying “no” to corporate influence.

In each case, the barrier to action appears to be the influence of big corporations on American government.  Perhaps we need a prescription for raising the interests of consumers and taxpayers to be as important as the interests of drug companies.

 

 

All Posts, environment, north carolina

DID THE NC LEGISLATURE VIOLATE OUR CONSTITUTION?

Buried deep on page 24 of the undebated “technical corrections” bill authored by North Carolina’s Republican leadership is a provision that takes away all authority for local governments to regulate fracking and oil and gas exploration.  My admittedly amateur opinion is that the legislature may have violated the State Constitution which says it part:

Sec. 5. Conservation of natural resources.

It shall be the policy of this State to conserve and protect its lands and waters for the benefit of all its citizenry, and to this end it shall be a proper function of the State of North Carolina and its political subdivisions to acquire and preserve park, recreational, and scenic areas, to control and limit the pollution of our air and water, to control excessive noise, and in every other appropriate way to preserve as a part of the common heritage of this State its forests, wetlands, estuaries, beaches, historical sites, openlands, and places of beauty.

I hope that one of the municipalities that has restricted fracking will pursue the question in court.  It’s difficult for me, as a non-attorney, to see how the legislature can take away the powers granted to municipalities by the constitution.

 

All Posts, Congress, health, justice

GOP vs Planned Parenthood – New revelations

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My previous post argued that charges against Planned Parenthood are false.  Click any of the green links for added evidence.  Investigation of allegations that Planned Parenthood sold fetal tissue for profit has shown that

  1. The charges are baseless.
  2. The videos used to support the accusation were carefully edited to mislead viewers.
  3. Fetal tissue is vital to medical research and it is governed by appropriate rules.
  4. Carly Fiorina’s horrific claims about Planned Parenthood in the second GOP Presidential debate were false.  Yet she recently complained about other candidates creating their own facts.

The situation reminds us of an important life lesson: What we don’t know is often less dangerous than what we think we know that turns out to be untrue.  Congressional Republicans and GOP Presidential candidates are now so heavily committed to actions based on lies about Planned Parenthood that they can’t (or won’t) admit their error.  Where is Republican outrage at being deceived by anti-choice radicals?  Are they so committed to their current course of action that they’re unable to see that it is based on lies, or are they just unwilling?  Either a terribly dangerous state of affairs.

 

All Posts, Christianity, islam, justice, religion, Terrorism, war

Who is the stranger at my door?

There are times when it can be unpopular, expensive and even dangerous to practice ideals that we cherish and preach.  Those, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Paine, are the times that try men’s (and women’s)  souls.  Responding to millions of refugees from war, repression and poverty who seek survival and opportunity in western democracies will try the souls of Americans.

Before the 20th century, most national borders had little security and they were not major barriers to migration.  Sometimes borders themselves moved.  Californians and Texans lived in Mexico until  wars and treaties moved the borders, instantly making them Americans.  Other than Native Americans and involuntary-immigrant slaves, we are a nation descended from immigrants looking for freedom and opportunity

How will western nations respond to 21st century refugees fleeing from conditions arguably worse than those faced by the Europeans who settled colonial America?  Germany has committed to receive 800,000 mostly Syrian immigrants very quickly.  The great majority of them will be Muslims.  In a recent conversation, I asked a German acquaintance who lives in the US her thoughts about how Germans will respond.  I’ve paraphrased her answer as follows. I’m proud of my country and optimistic that most Germans will welcome refugees and help them assimilate.  But Germany has a significant right-wing population that Americans refer to as neo-Nazis and skinheads who don’t want non-whites or Muslims in Germany.  They will try to intimidate immigrants and some of their tactics may be violent.  Among 800,000 immigrants, there are sure to be a few bad actors, so some conflict is likely.  If even a few Muslim immigrants commit violence that looks like terrorism, it will  frighten many Germans. Public support won’t last long if that happens.    It seemed that she could have been describing America.  Her words and the refugee crisis raise a lot of questions.

  • Are borders that keep out refugees morally defensible?  The EU is confronted by hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees cutting fences and crawling under barbed wire with their children.  Should the EU admit refugees?  Watch them starve at the “wall”?  Shoot them?  The soul of the EU is on trial with such questions today.
  • President Obama has proposed a small increase in the number of refugees to be accepted and wants money budgeted for screening candidates.  Should Congress support that?  Should we do more?  Less?
  • By removing Saddam Hussein as dictator, we spawned civil war in Iraq and removed Iran’s regional competition.  We undermined Assad as dictator in Syria.  ISIS evolved and thrived in the power vacuum that we created in Iraq and Syria.  In this anarchy, there is no western-style democratic movement for us to support.  Do our past actions impose a moral obligation for America to assist the EU by accepting large numbers of refugees?
  • What would refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other Muslim nations be like as Americans?  Would they accept our freedoms of speech and belief or want to limit them?  Would most accept our limitations on the practice of religious traditions like forced marriage and polygamy? Would some isolate themselves; as a few extreme Christian and Mormon sects have done?
  • Will the 83% of Americans who profess to be Christians “love others” by welcoming Muslims or will they be divided?  What about the other 17%?
  • Should the US just get out of Muslim nations or is there something we can do or undo to turn around the anarchy and brutality that make ordinary families into refugees?

If we accept thousands of refugees, regardless of their race, religion, or national origin, we can expect that most of them will become law-abiding and constructive citizens.  Regardless of screening or religion, we can also expect that there will be a few criminals and radicals in the mix.  (Irish immigrants who self-identified as Christians became our terrorist “Irish Mafia”.  It can happen in any religion.)  Are we willing to accept a few who would behave badly in order to help thousands who have no home, no way to support themselves and no possessions beyond what they can carry?  Do their religion and national origin rule them out as immigrants, or are the refugees the ones Jesus described as “… the least of these my brethren…” to be loved and accepted just because they are human?

Answering such questions may indeed try the souls and consciences of Americans.  The time for decisions is upon us.

All Posts, Congress, health, religion

THOUGHTS ABOUT PLANNED PARENTHOOD

Is it OK to use unethical methods to accomplish goals that you think are good?  Does the end justify the means?  Anti-abortion forces are using dishonest propaganda and character assassination in their assault on Planned Parenthood.  They have adopted devilish methods in pursuit of goals that they consider godly. They posed as representatives of companies seeking to acquire fetal tissue for medical research and secretly recorded conversations with Planned Parenthood executives.  Then they extensively edited the recordings to make it appear that Planned Parenthood was selling fetal tissue for a profit.  The accusation is unproven, but their propaganda has convinced a lot of people. Continue reading THOUGHTS ABOUT PLANNED PARENTHOOD →

All Posts, Congress, islam, israel, Terrorism, war

WHY SUPPORT THE IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL?

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Like most readers, I must rely on the judgments of experts as I make up my mind about the proposed agreement with Iran.  This column describes what I’ve learned and why the agreement deserves our support. Continue reading WHY SUPPORT THE IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL? →

All Posts, budget, Christianity, Congress, deficit, economy, justice, medicaid, poverty, public education, taxes

STICKS STONES AND STEREOTYPES

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Election campaigns are under way and the name-calling season is open.  Names, labels and stereotypes can influence our opinions and our elections so it’s important to be aware them. Continue reading STICKS STONES AND STEREOTYPES →