Getting something done in the U.S. Congress

Last week Jim DeMint, a former Republican South Carolina Senator and current head of the rightwing think tank Heritage Foundation, astonished (historically literate) listeners by announcing that it wasn't "big government" that freed the slaves. I guess that Sherman's Union army that marched through his state to hook up with General U.S. Grant in Virginia didn't have a big government behind it. Mr. DeMint may not like remembering that some 18,000 white men from his state were willing to die to keep African-Americans in bondage. (I don't think that figure includes South Carolina slaves who joined the Union Army after the Emancipation proclamation.)

Historian Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money mocks DeMint's crackpot tale:

This is funny on so many levels but my favorite part of this “interpretation” that the federal government didn’t free the slaves is that in fact not only is this wrong, but doing so led to the largest expansion of the federal government in the nation’s history to that time.

What Loomis points out here is one of my main takeaways from James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. The short period (1860-65) when the U.S. government perforce operated without a bunch of conservative southern states obstructing progress was one of tremendous change and accomplishment well beyond the successful war to save the democratic republic.

In the absence of the conservative drag on government (in those days the naysayers were southern Democrats while the innovators were radical Republicans), Congress was able to advance ideas for national growth that had been stymied for a decade or more.

• A Homestead Act enabled settlers moving west to stake claims to more than 3 million acres.

• The Morrill (Land-Grant) Act provided public land to states to found colleges and universities.

• The Paciic Railroad Act and other legislation gave railroads right of ways for their tracks and much additional land, thereby opening the west to modern commerce.

Perhaps most importantly to the growth of big government that causes DeMint such distress, Congress created a modern tax and financial system. While the Confederacy went gradually broke, its unsecured paper money becoming worthless, the modern U.S. dollar, the "greenbacks," paid for the war.

Congressman Elbridge G. Spaulding of New York, chairman of the House subcommittee charged with responsibility for framing emergency legislation, ... introduced a bill to authorize the issuance of $150 million in Treasury notes -- i.e., fiat money. This bill seemed to imitate the dubious Confederate example -- but with a crucial difference. The U. S. notes were to be legal tender receivable for all debts public or private except interest on government bonds and customs duties. ...

Opponents maintained that the legal tender bill was unconstitutional because when the framers empowered Congress "to coin money," they meant coin. Moreover, to require acceptance of paper money for debts previously contracted was a breach of contract. But the attorney general and most Republican congressmen favored a broad construction of the coinage and the "necessary and proper" clauses of the Constitution. "The bill before us is a war measure," Spaulding told the House, "a necessary means of carrying into execution the power granted in the Constitution 'to raise and support armies.' . . . These are extraordinary times, and extraordinary measures must be resorted to in order to save our Government and preserve our nationality." Opponents also questioned the expediency, morality, even the theology of the legal tender bill. ...

But the bill passed and the financing system proved stable thanks to the strength of the northern economy and Union victories -- and thanks to that other innovation of this Congress: an Internal Revenue Act which created a personal income tax as well as a Bureau of Internal Revenue. The former was a war measure; the later never afterwards withered away.

The relationship of the American taxpayer to the government was never again the same.

The new tax was relatively progressive; it exempted the food of the poor and the wages of manual laborers, hitting only persons of some property or other wealth.

Maybe that example is what DeMint truly resents -- along of course with freeing all those uppity black people.

McPherson summarizes the accomplishments of the Civil War Congress:

By its legislation to finance the war, emancipate the slaves, and invest public land in future growth, the 37th Congress did more than any other in history to change the course of national life. As one scholar has aptly written, this Congress drafted "the blueprint for modern America."

Much as I celebrate the accomplishments of my ancestors in preserving a republic that could gradually expand the freedom of all its people, I probably should feel a little cautious knowing that the progressive surge was made possible by war. The current, spurious post-9/11 wars have enabled far less desirable measures.

E.G. Spaulding, pictured here, was a western New York banker, a state assemblyman, mayor of Buffalo, a Congressman, "father of the greenback bill," and my great-great-great grandfather. Until reading "Battle Cry," I never had much sense of what he accomplished besides temporarily enriching himself.

Mr. DickHead steps forward

It's time for this little character to make his appearance. In a season in which powerful men have been mistaking a nether part of their anatomy for a brain, I'm starting an occasional Mr. DickHead Award series to raise up particularly egregious offenders.

First up: former CIA and National Security Agency director Michael Hayden for suggesting about Senator Diane Feinstein's intent to release her intelligence oversight committee's report on U.S. torture atrocities:

that motivation for the report -- may show deep, emotional feeling on the part of the senator ...

Feinstein seems to have thought about the moral as well as soft power demerits of making the U.S. an avowed torture state. But hey, don't go calling Feinstein a softie. She's been my mayor and my senator for most of my life, far too long in my view. She's no fainting female. (Nor are there many of those anywhere; we wouldn't survive the likes of Hayden if we were pushovers.) Feinstein is a politician more like an ice flow, a slow moving glacier that grinds and freezes anyone foolish enough not to get out of the way. Nice to see the NSA in her path.

Then there's ex-Gov. and potential GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee opining:

Guys like to go fishing with other men. They like to go hunting with other men. Women like to go to the restroom with other women. I don't get that. I can tell you this much: if I ever say, 'I have to go to the restroom' and some guy says, 'I'll go with you,' he ain't goin' with me. That much I know.

Paranoid and silly, a proper Mr. DickHead, is Mike.

If you are wondering where Mr. DickHead came from -- he was an item in an exhibit on the subject of "Sex in the Roman Era" I saw last summer in Tarragona, Spain. He appears designed to give a hand to women Romans. I figure with a likely Hillary Clinton candidacy on the horizon, there will be far too many opportunities to give out the Mr. DickHead Award in the next few years.

Nominees for the award gratefully accepted.

Warming Wednesdays: Science Guy against scientific ignorance

Bill Nye explains:

We got to have scientifically literate people to solve the world's problems ...

So he created the Science Guy for our delight and his.

I'm pretty much a scientific illiterate, but I know our civilization and our wellbeing depends on taking what science can tell us seriously. So every Wednesday, I post about global warming and our apparent political and moral incapacity to mitigate and/or prepare for what we are doing to the environment in which we are the alpha species. This doesn't come naturally to me. There are hundreds of other topics I'd prefer to explore. But nobody gets to sit this one out. We're either making solutions or we're deepening the problem.

Take me out to the ball game ...

It's home Opening Day for the San Francisco Giants baseball team, the end of the off-season for local fans.

It's also the beginning of the season for the workers at the food sales concessions at AT&T Park. Their employer is the Centerplate corporation.

These workers have had a busy off-season, visiting community groups and churches to explain their case:

Since 2010, the Giants have won two World Series Championships

• Team Value up 40%

• Attendance of 10 Million fans

• Ticket Prices up 20%

• Beer Prices up to $10.25

Wages for Centerplate concession workers up 0%

There's something easy fans can do to let Centerplate know their workers should get a raise:

No glass bottles or alcoholic beverages; no hard sided coolers -- but otherwise, the Giants allow you to bring your own food.

Torture will out -- in time

Those who order crimes against the bodies and souls of human beings can never be entirely confident their deeds won't come back on them. Today a story from Spain:

MADRID — José María Galante was a leftist college student when he was handcuffed to the ceiling of a basement torture chamber, his body dangling in the air. A police inspector laughed and taunted him, striking martial arts poses before repeatedly kicking and beating his face and chest.

The man who Mr. Galante says tortured him was an infamous enforcer of the Franco dictatorship in the 1970s, widely known as Billy the Kid for his habit of spinning his pistol on his finger. So Mr. Galante was startled last year when he located the man — living in a spacious apartment less than a mile from his own neighborhood in central Madrid.

“How did I feel when I saw him for the first time? We got you now, you bastard,” Mr. Galante said, adding: “I agree with the idea of reconciliation. But you just can’t turn the page. You have to read that page before you turn it.”

This week, Mr. Galante is again planning to see Billy the Kid, whose real name is Antonio González Pacheco. This time, it will be at a hearing at Spain’s National Court, where Mr. Galante and other victims are, for the first time, seeking to prosecute Mr. Pacheco in a case that is reopening the country’s painful Francoist past and threatening the political pact that helped Spain transition from dictatorship to democracy.

Whether anything will come of this involves tortuous legal maneuvers. Because Spain managed its transition from Franco's dictatorship to democracy by passing a broad amnesty law -- and largely choosing to "look forward, not backward" -- accused torturers from the fascist regime can't be tried in Spanish courts. But Argentina has asserted jurisdiction over these internationally condemned offenses and seeks to extradite the individuals named by hundreds of Spanish complainants. Argentina knows far too much about torture regimes. The Spanish government will have to decide whether it wants to protect Franco-era defendants. The stories are being told. The political friction still remains.

Past horrors in Spain still can catch the eye of an attentive tourist. Relics of Franco's coup against the democratic Republic that brought to power his long-lasting terror regime peek out amidst Spanish modernity. History is present. For example, within the gold encrusted Basilica–Cathedral of Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragoza is this martial monument displaying two bombs from that era which failed to detonate.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, David Addington and others of our criminal rulers of the '00s would do well to stay out of Europe and other civilized areas that take seriously international Convention against Torture. They can never be entirely sure they got away with it.

Scraps from the wrong end of the arc bending toward justice

"Those barbarians made me do it" does not cut it from purported leaders.

Brendan Eich, briefly the CEO of Mozilla Corporation which makes the open-source Firefox browser, sought to deflect the uproar over his $1000 donation in 2008 to the California campaign to prohibit gay marriage (since overturned) by explaining to the Guardian:

Eich also stressed that Firefox worked globally, including in countries like Indonesia with “different opinions”, and LGBT marriage was “not considered universal human rights yet, and maybe they will be, but that's in the future, right now we're in a world where we have to be global to have effect”.

A week later he was out of the job, unable to weather the storm of revulsion from within the tech community.

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby isn't going anywhere, but he too justified his own homophobia this week by pointing out how the gays rile up the savage colonials. Welby added a dose of emotional blackmail, just for good measure.

"I have stood by gravesides in Africa of a group of Christians who had been attacked because of something that had happened in America. We have to listen to that. We have to be aware of the fact," Welby said. If the Church of England celebrated gay marriages, he added, "the impact of that on Christians far from here, in South Sudan, Pakistan, Nigeria and other places would be absolutely catastrophic. Everything we say here goes round the world."

This is racist cowardice. Yes, there are people in Africa and in Pakistan who have taught by unscrupulous (often clerical) demagogues to hate and fear gay people. But if you know better, you don't play footsie with hate. You don't hide behind the culpable beliefs and acts of others. A prince of the church claims moral leadership; Welby has forfeited his claim in this instance.

The movement for gay human rights is on a roll in much of the world. Differential rates of change create space for backlash; that backlash is entangled with big power politics. Russia's Vladimir Putin is hoping to enhance his weakened country's status by repudiating "western" ethical innovations.

Putin intends to save the world from the West. He has started with Crimea. When he says he is protecting ethnic Russians in Ukraine, he means he is protecting them from the many terrible things that come from the West. A few days after the December address, Alexei Pushkov, head of the Duma committee on foreign relations, defined that threat on the floor of the chamber: “European Union advisers in practically every ministry of any significance, control over the flow of finances and over national programs, and a broadening of the sphere of gay culture, which has become the European Union’s official policy.”

... The anti-gay agenda may seem like a thin basis for forming a militant international alliance of state-actors, but it has great unifying potential when framed in terms of a broader anti-Western effort and, indeed, a civilizational mission.

Masha Gessen, Washington Post

Well, maybe. Actually, populations that enjoy a reasonable standard of living have assimilated gay equality within a generation. Keeping women barefoot and pregnant or keeping down/out the black and brown people probably have deeper resonance for assembling blocks against human rights.

I'm not sorry Brendan Eich had to go at Mozilla -- his own industry spit him out. Mozilla retains a progressive aura; competing with Google and Apple, it probably needs to.

In general, I think gays could heed what was one of the slogans of the 1980s Nicaraguan insurrection against a dictator: "Implacable in struggle; generous in victory." We are winning unexpected, broad acceptance. For that to happen, a lot of people have had to change their minds. If they have changed, that is the occasion for delight, not criticism of their pasts. That was then; this is now.

¡No Mas! #not1more

From the protest on Friday in San Francisco's Financial District:

What the system never seems to take into account is that undocumented people aren't isolated strangers in the land. Most have jobs, businesses, families, and often U.S.-citizen children. Many, many families include some members who have legal papers and some who don't. Obama is tossing out Grandpa and Auntie.

Under the Obama administration, some two million people have been deported.

This brave family is fighting a deportation order.

Waiting for an immigration reform that politicians promise but which never seems to come, many people have moved beyond fear.

Young people blocked an intersection chanting, awaiting arrest.

Police gave a verbal warning before taking seated protesters to the paddy wagon.

Father Richard Smith from my little Episcopal parish was among the 23 persons taken into custody.***On Friday afternoon I offered this comment at a Democratic Party-oriented website where people were bemoaning the pattern of fall-off in voting among Latinos in non-presidential elections. Why don't they understand how important it is to vote? they asked. My view:

Don't discount disillusionment among the most politically engaged young Latinos at the Obama administration's policy of using deportation as a fruitless "confidence building measure" with Republicans who aren't going to vote for immigration reform anyway. The Obama administration's deportation toll is apparently reaching 2,000,000 people as of this month. There were protest actions in 80 cities this weekend asking for relief. See #not1more. That's a lot of political capacity and energy that isn't going to go into raising Democratic turnout in November.

Friday cat blogging

Morty likes his tacky Petco cat tree. He doesn't know it is a piece of junk; it lets him loom over me while I work. This picture was not posed.

#Not1More

Deportations under the Obama administration are reaching the milestone of two million removals since the President took office.

In February, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network filed a formal rulemaking petition to the Department of Homeland Security under the Administrative Procedure Act requesting a halt to deportations and outlining its authority to do so.

“We want President Obama to be a real reformer, not the deporter-in-chief,” explains Marisa Franco, campaign organizer for the NDLON. “He can give immigrants relief with the stroke of a pen.”

Events will be held in more than 70 cities over the next few days to push these demands. More here.

Obamacare: the grind isn't over

Whew! We've lived through the Obamacare launch (finally -- why did this have to take 4 years?) and we learned a new concept: "exchanges." 7,000,000 signed up nationally through the exchanges; another 4.5 million or so through Medicaid expansion in the states that don't want their poor people to just die. Not bad. Now we need to learn another one new concept as Obamacare moves forward: that is, "churn."

Churn refers to the fact that lots of people lose and gain health insurance through various life changes in any given year. I don't have any trouble understanding this. Partner and I will be among the churners later this year when she takes an unpaid semester leave to promote her book and we are suddenly without her employer-provided health coverage. This sort of thing happens all the time.

The good folks at the UC Berkeley Labor Center have looked into the implications for Obamacare from churn in California -- in this state the exchanges are called Covered California. They figure there is going to be a lot of coming and going.

Researchers at the U.C. Berkeley Labor Center released estimates Wednesday showing that about 20 percent of Covered California enrollees are expected to leave the program because they found a job that offers health insurance. Another 20 percent will see their incomes fall and become eligible for Medi-Cal, the state’s insurance program for people who are low income.

... In addition to the 40 percent of enrollees who move to Medi-Cal or job-based insurance, between 2 and 8 percent of those who sign up for Covered California are estimated to become uninsured, the analysis noted. [Presumably this is the small fraction that don't pay their premiums or just disappear.]

Yet just as people will move out of Covered California and Medi-Cal, other people will move in. While open enrollment in Covered California ended on Monday (with a grace period until April 15 for people who had tried to enroll, but could not for technical reasons), many people are expected to sign up if they experience a life event that triggers a “special enrollment period.” These events include divorce, marriage, birth of a baby or loss of job-based insurance.

Partner's human resources department says she should look at the exchanges when she goes on leave; we'll also be able to take advantage of what's called COBRA (the right to buy into an existing insurance plan when you leave a job.)

All of this just goes to show that the end of the Obamacare sign-up period doesn't mean its over. This law will continue to help millions stay insured year round.

IPCC Climate Change report got you down?

It should.

At the blog DeSmog Canada, Carol Linnitt has pulled out a great list of "All the Positive and Helpful Things in the IPCC Report No One Will Talk About." Since the Conservative Stephen Harper government has thrown itself into making the country a C02 exporting "superpower," Canadians who care about the climate need all the encouragement they can get. So do the rest of us. Here are a few of the items Linnitt found in the scary report:

• 1. Start by making changes at the local level where and how they make sense.
  There’s no single catch-all solution when it comes to a complex problem like global climate change. The report’s authors recommend taking a local approach that addresses “risk reduction and adaptation strategies” that attend to specific socioeconomic processes and needs. Oh, and don’t wait for the perfect local strategy — just pursue all solutions simultaneously, even if they overlap.

• 3. Make everything better for everyone and that will help the climate issue. Seriously.
  If you work hard to “improve human health, livelihoods, social and economic well-being, and environmental quality” you’re pretty much guaranteed to make progress on the climate file. Governments should start working double-time on these fronts as a part of their climate change adaption and mitigation efforts. Co-benefits!

• 4. Don’t be so single-minded.
  Climate change in a way is the result of pursuing the objectives of a small sector of society. If we started to recognize “diverse interests, circumstances, social-cultural contexts, and expectations” that could “benefit decision-making processes.” So, if local communities are suffering as a result of new refineries, coal-fired power plants, oil export pipelines or the expansion of the oilsands — take the interests and needs of those local communities to heart. Giving too much sway to vested fossil-fuel interests is exacerbating climate change, after all. And anyway, “Indigenous, local, and traditional knowledge systems and practices, including indigenous peoples’ holistic view of community and environment, are a major resource for adapting to climate change.” We’ve got to stop ignoring these alternative perspectives.

• 11. Start immediately.
  It turns out the sooner we get started limiting climate change, the more time we’ll have to adequate prepare for adaptation. Mitigation, the report’s authors state, “reduces the rate as well as the magnitude of warming.” So, best to get started right away.

There are nine more items in Linnitt's list. Go read them all. Despite the wrong turn taken by their government (and ours!), we still can look for hints from our northern neighbors.

Warming Wednesdays: takeaways from IPCC Climate Change report

You don't need me writing about this; the news is everywhere. The relevant question is: how do we live inside a civilization that can see what's coming, but seems incapable of altering its path so as to, at least, mitigate the damage and pain?

Red indicates areas of projected drought. Via MoJo.

I'll just repost (by permission) this Moyers and Co. summary. Note the piece ends with the rudiments of an action suggestion. It's never over til it's over ...
***

Five Key Takeaways From the Frightening IPCC Climate Change Report (via Moyers & Company)

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its latest report today. It focuses on how climate change will affect human society in coming years painting a picture of a world destabilized by a rapidly changing environment…

---

Something is not happening here ...

Cherokee Hill, 19, (L) of the Bronx, hugs her friend Devernier Smith, also 19, just before he takes the Oath of Enlistment to join the US Army April 28, 2009 at Fort Hamilton in the Brooklyn borough of New York City.
How to mark a non-event? March was the first month in a decade during which not a single US soldier died in combat. About time:

In Iraq, the death toll reached 4,474 before the last soldier fell in November 2011. ...

To date, 2176 U.S. military personnel have lost their lives in Afghanistan.

Only 6650 too many. Also hundreds of thousands Iraqis and Afghans as war and its violent aftermath continue unabated in both countries. For what? Oh yeah -- somebody hurt us and we had to show 'em.

I needed some cheering up ...

so I'm glad I ran across this.


When Ford thinks this is what it takes to sell cars, something is happening here ... No fooling.

Raw Pussy Riot

"Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out
...
The phantom of liberty is up in heaven,

Gay pride sent to Siberia in a chain gang
...
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist."

For singing these lyrics for 30 seconds in the Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow in 2012, two young women were condemned to endure nearly two years of forced prison labor. A third participant who never even got to open her mouth was sentenced to three years on parole. Other participants and hangers on were never identified or charged. This was the art of Pussy Riot, the anonymous punk performance group, that has been chronicled by Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen in Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot.

I've never been able to make anything of performance art or, more broadly, of most protest art. I'm pretty literal. I respond well to the bold statement, not so well to satire or irony. If I'd been there, I probably would have just gawked. So I'm attentive when Gessen tries to set the context for this unfamiliar tale. She portrays a Russian society in which only the dramatic interruption of the drab humdrum stands a chance of gaining attention within a repressive state and apathetic populace.

To create, and to confront, one has to be an outcast. A constant state of discomfort is a necessary but insufficient condition for protest art, however. One also has to possess a sense that one can do something about it, the sense of being entitled to speak and to be heard. ...

In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history -- political history and art history -- is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies all public conversation is an exercise in using words to mean their opposites -- in describing the brave as traitorous, the weak as frightening, and the good as bad -- and confronting these lies is the most scary and lonely thing a person can do.

To the Russian state, Pussy Riot itself was blasphemous, so the women were charged with blasphemy against the Church, an institution in bed with the state. Their trial, whose proceedings Gessen details exhaustively, was reminiscent of Soviet-era show trials.

The motivation of Pussy Riot and their lawyers was exactly the same as that of their predecessors half a century earlier: they aimed, on the one hand, to act as one would in a courtroom and country where laws were meaningful and respected, and on the other hand, they wanted to use the forum of the court to make political declarations that would be heard.

There was vast international media coverage and many expressions of support from artists and human rights organizations, but the verdict was never in doubt.

Nadya's, Maria's, and Kat's arrests had heralded a new Russian crackdown. In the months following, dozens of people were arrested on charges stemming from various kinds of peaceful protest. ... The courts had become Russia's sole venue for political conversation, the only place where the individual and the state confronted each other. Not that most political defendants in Russia had a clear idea of how to use such venue or a language for speaking in it. But Maria and Nadya knew a stage when they saw one... They were doing what Pussy Riot had always done: illuminating the issues and proposing a conceptual framework for discussing them. ...

The two women who were imprisoned served hard time. Maria became an effective jailhouse lawyer; Nadya sought anonymity among the general population, but eventually resorted to a hunger strike against the brutality of prison conditions. Both were released two months early as part of Vladimir Putin's pre-Olympic effort to quiet international criticism of the human rights climate in Russia.

Gessen's book is not easily comprehensible for a U.S. reader. I felt as if I could know all the words and still not be quite sure I had gotten the meaning. Rather than violate the women again by interpreting their art, their actions, their lives, and their pains in terms that are more readily understandable to us, Gessen transmits their own self-descriptions without much cultural mediation. In our easy apparent freedom, I feel pretty sure we don't quite get it. But I think those of us who are progressive have to recognize that we are on Pussy Riot's side insofar as we can understand their cause. Or maybe I should say insofar they can understand their cause. They have come up in, and choose to remain in, a place and time where life and action define more than self-conscious explanations.

What is justice?

When I spent a year working to end the death penalty in California -- sadly unsuccessfully -- I was exposed to some deep lessons. One stands out: when we held telephone sessions into which people could phone to ask questions, repeatedly some perverse fate made me the individual who picked up the call from a person whose loved one had been murdered. Somewhat to my surprise, not all these trauma survivors wanted to see the victimizer executed. But all of them wanted "justice," whatever they meant by that. We ended up having long, usually inconclusive though amicable, discussions of where is justice might be found. I'd argue that the death penalty would not deliver it; sometimes they agreed, often they did not.

I was reminded of this when reading The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord's Prayer by that prolific chronicler of the historical Jesus, author John Dominic Crossan. I found this little book a challenging delight. It is neither history nor textual Biblical exegesis, but rather a wide-ranging meditation on the familiar prayer, drawing on Crossan's broad scholarship and faithfilled imagination.

Those discussions from the death penalty campaign came back to me when I read his effort to explain how the western Christian world has trapped itself in a theology written out of a very particular feudal metaphor, a worldview that met the needs of Norman overlords imposing themselves on a conquered Saxon and Celtic Britain. The doctrine of vicarious satisfaction or substitutionary atonement entraps us in a picture of God as a rather nasty father who expressed his "love" for humanity by requiring the torture and murder of his only son. If that's what "Jesus died for our sins" means -- and that is pretty much what Anselm, who became archbishop of Canterbury in 1093, argued in his influential Cur Deus Homo? -- no wonder we struggle to envision justice. Crossan explains what this hyper-rational medieval prince of the church was driving at:

Philosopher and theologian, monk and bishop, mystic and saint, Anselm preferred nonviolent debate to violent crusade. His idea was to defend the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus by confronting those he called "infidels" -- that is, Jews and Muslims -- with reason and logic alone. ... His purpose, as he tells us in the book's prologue, was to argue against "infidels, who despise the Christian faith because they deem it contrary to reason."

... Anselm is quite clear on why God must "will" the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus and why God cannot simply forgive everyone without punishment at all. That would mean, he says, that God is indifferent to evil, that God does not care about sin one way or another. But that would be impossible, he concludes, for a just God. ... His major argument was that God had to punish evil or else he was not a just God. ...

Without punishment, the order imposed by the feudal overlord on a rebellious society would be impossible. There's enough obvious experiential truth in this that it can still appeal. When people do bad things, somebody has to suffer -- or so we feel and a millennium of Christian tradition has encouraged us to feel, especially because in this form of shaping the story, Jesus's undeserved pain and death let the "good" ones (us?) off the hook.

Crossan wants to get across that we don't need to constrain our understanding of justice in this narrow frame. We can understand Jesus' life and death as pointing us toward another way of seeking "justice."

I take very, very seriously that the Bible's first mention of "sin" is not just fratricidal murder, but escalatory violence itself. Escalatory violence means that we have never invented a weapon we did not use, never invented one that was not surpassed by the next one, and never slowed down the speed of that replacement. We got, for example, from the first iron sword to the first hydrogen bomb in less than three thousand years.

The death of the nonviolent Jesus as the revelation of God's nonviolent character is a sacrifice (a making sacred) that atones for our sin of escalatory violence. ... Not just the Romans, but every government our world has ever known would have removed or silenced Jesus one way or another. ... God did not "will" the death of Jesus as a vicarious punishment for the human sin of escalatory violence. But did God "will" it as a consequence for that sin? The execution of Jesus was certainly a consequence of normal imperial violence and a witness against it on behalf of God. ...

If we decide to use anthropomorphic, or human-just-like-us, language for God, we should at least allow the same distinctions for God that we make for ourselves. Parents or householders, for example, may will something directly, deliberately, or emphatically for their children. They may also will some other things reluctantly. They may tolerate them, accept them, allow them,but positively not want them for those same children. There are, in other words, consequences of freedom that must be accepted even if never willed. So also with what God "wills." Every martyr needs a murderer and God's will allows such events as the positive and negative results of human freedom. God "wills" our human freedom. All else is consequence.

I find this a fruitful exposition of central Christian mysteries. Anselm's exposition may have worked for his time and place but it is repulsive -- leads away from truth and justice -- in mine.***As a I sat in church this morning, I realized I hadn't said the most important understanding which I brought away from all this plowing through Christian history: there is no necessity for us to believe that just because one very bad thing has happened that something else bad has to follow. We can come closer to "justice" by breaking the cycle than by extending it. Or so I am sure.

My favorite new Senate candidate for the 2014 cycle

If, like me, you occasionally donate even small sums to political candidates you find worthy, your email is probably jammed today with fundraising appeals. We're two days out from the next legal reporting deadline for many local and all federal candidates -- they each want to scare the competition with a big haul. And, if you support them, it's not crazy to help. I do my tiny bit.


Meet Shenna Bellows speaking at a house party this month. She is running for the Senate in Maine against Susan Collins. That's a tough job: the four term incumbent is a fixture in Maine. Collins is called "a moderate." But come on, Collins is a Republican -- what she does in Washington is to enable her party to block anything that might be a progressive agenda. That's her job: making sure her party can prevent any raise in the minimum wage, any effort to get the rich to pay their fair share, any serious attempt to rein in the spook apparatus.

Bellows is good on the economic needs of ordinary people who need government to curb increasing inequality. She is terrific on restoring civil liberties and the rule of law; that's her expertise. We need one of those in the Senate.

If you are at all moved to try to get a better Senator elected and you don't have local candidates to assist this year, take a look at Shenna Bellows. This will be a tough race. Senators can usually die in office if they choose (some seem to have kicked off without anyone much noticing.) It would be great to help install a fresh face among those tired old timers.

San Francisco: what to do about the books?

Sometimes our accumulations overwhelm us and we put the unwanted portion out on street corners -- perhaps someone will adopt these cast offs? The pile looks wistful.

Sometimes we create very personal exchanges:

These street libraries can be more elaborate.

Fortunately we've chosen to build up for ourselves a PUBLIC library; we don't entirely have to spread our books ourselves. The Friends of the San Francisco Public Library will take donated books and facilitate our selling them to each other, for the public benefit.

I imagine that, within the next couple of decades, most reading will be done on electronic devices. But for now, those of us who are readers still struggle with the question: what to do about the books?

Should we split California into six smaller states?

One of our venture capitalist robber barons thinks this would be a great idea. This snarky Economist video spells out the proposed boundaries. Tim Draper is spending nearly a million dollars to get an initiative to do the deed onto the November ballot, proving that you can force the people to vote on almost anything if you spend enough money. The political pros all think the idea is an electoral nonstarter -- even Draper seems less than serious according to USA Today:

"I'm just putting it out there for all of you," he said. "And I'm only doing this once, I don't have unlimited capital. Then I'm going back to work."

Back to work in Silicon Valley – which even if it never becomes a state, is certainly a dream-anything-you-want state of mind.

It took the most minimal research to discover that Draper is part of the growing elite of inherited wealth that Paul Krugman discussed in a column today. Draper's father and grandfather were also venture capital investors. Here's Krugman discussing the trajectory of such figures:

... it’s interesting to look at the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans. By my rough count, about a third of the top 50 inherited large fortunes. Another third are 65 or older, so they will probably be leaving large fortunes to their heirs. We aren’t yet a society with a hereditary aristocracy of wealth, but, if nothing changes, we’ll become that kind of society over the next couple of decades.

A lot of them seem to think having enough money means they can do anything like to the society we all live in together.

Crazy corruption, guns, and brutal politics in the city

Yee at an immigrant rights protest, 2006

Like most of political San Francisco, I'm stunned by the arrest of state Senator Leland Yee on charges of taking political bribes and seeking to profit from facilitating gun running -- including "shoulder-fired weapons or missiles" -- by Philippines-based traffickers. Guess that's not as bad as the concurrent accusation against one of his former fellows on the School Board for murder-for-hire. Still, it is a shocker. The San Jose Mercury has the clearest summary of the charges against Yee (the moribund Chron isn't keeping up).

A 137-page criminal complaint charges 26 people -- including Yee and [Chinatown gangster Raymond "Shrimp Boy"] Chow -- with a panoply of crimes, including firearms trafficking, money laundering, murder-for-hire, drug distribution, trafficking in contraband cigarettes, and honest services fraud.

Yee is charged with conspiracy to traffic in firearms without a license and to illegally import firearms, as well as six counts of scheming to defraud citizens of honest services. Each corruption count is punishable by up to 20 years in federal prison and a fine of up to $250,000, while the gun-trafficking count is punishable by up to five years and $250,000.

The charges are particularly shocking given that Yee has been among the state Senate's most outspoken advocates both of gun control and of good-government initiatives.

Yee seems to have said an awful lot of incriminating things to undercover agents who were recording them.

Yee has always felt like an odd duck. Like any city pol, he's had to show himself at thousands of neighborhood political events over the years. I've photographed him at a few. He would perform his part, but he always looked a little uncomfortable, like an actor who wasn't quite sure what the character he was playing was supposed to feel.

Journalist Tim Redmond, then with Bay Guardian, wrote an insightful profile of Yee in 2011 when he was gearing up to run for mayor (he lost badly). The Guardian had another candidate in 2011, so something of a hit was to be expected, but the article was thoughtful. Besides pointing out that Yee seemed to have more money than his ostensible income could account for, Redmond's picture was of a pol who had been forced by his location in a very liberal city to mask narrowly conservative instincts. I'd call the piece sympathetic -- and devastating.

Yee seems to evoke that sort of response. He seems misplaced in a city whose signature features he doesn't much love. He seems to be someone with no true friends, but an enormous circle of political acquaintances, always a bit of a foreigner. I'm not, by that assertion, saying Yee is Chinese-American -- this city is full of Chinese-origin political players who seem far more "at home."

Redmond's current response to Yee's arrest carries the same mix of empathy and condemnation:

Yee was termed out at the end of 2014, and his state Senate seat has been reapportioned out of existence. He was, as one person told me today, “a political loner,” someone with few close friends or allies in the local scene. I watched him over the years take strange and inexplicable positions on legislation; he was never a pro-tenant vote and as a supervisor was independent of the Willie Brown operation, but generally a fiscal conservative.

I feel sorry for Yee’s family and for the people who have worked with him and trusted him over the years. He has kids; the notion that their dad has gone from prominent and powerful political leader to alleged criminal in one day has to be disturbing, and I wish them the best.

The feds have wrongly charged plenty of people, and Yee has the right to mount a defense. But I don’t see this going to trial; he’s going to take a plea bargain. The only question is what else comes out in the next few weeks, how the Democrats in Sacramento are going to respond, how badly the reputation of the Legislature is damaged – and whether a city that has allowed several generations of politicians to get away with a climate of corruption will finally get the message.

I wonder what Yee has to bargain with. This could be when having been a loner really hurts him. Or we may be in for a season of "pass the popcorn" in city politics.

Yee with "a wolf in sheep's clothing" on campaign with his labor buddies in 2010.