Alan: The Republican Party (with The Democratic Party in hot pursuit) is committed to coddling Big Banks so they continue to operate as predators.
Clutching their carte blanche, cowboy capitalistsare keenly aware that Full Responsibility for the shoddy investments they have designed-to-fail will eventually rest on the shoulders of American taxpayers.
Republican Rule And Economic Catastrophe, A Lockstep Relationship
The American Economic System -- despite blather about "free markets,""level playing fields" and "personal responsibility" -- is structured to re-create boom-bust cycles so that risky bets prompted by irrational exuberance will pay fabulous profits right up to the linchpin moment when reckless investment becomes so extreme that The House of Cards collapses just as it did in 1929 and 2008. When those cards collapse, American citizens will be shafted yet again whileThe Filthy Rich "make out like bandits," grabbing a blizzard of free money blown from the broken seams of The Exploding System.
Then, a red hot poker will be jammed so deep in your dark place that it will vaporize your throat just before it erupts from your mouth.
It is not hard to "see through" this institutionalized scam although you must first release your ankles, stand tall and take a fearless look around.
Follow the money! The same money that is pouring out of your pockets and into the money bags of people already so rich that most Americans cannot imagine the oceanic wealth in which they bobble safe as corks.
Cowboy Capitalists don't give a s___ about you. (Nor do they give squat about the integrity and health of The Body Politic.) They are only interested in lining their pockets. And if they can line them at your expense, their bone-deep cynicism will take double delight looking out on your dependable stupidity and aggressive ignorance.
"Politics And Economics: The 101 Courses You Wish You Had"
"Enough is enough": Elizabeth Warren launches fiery attack after Congress weakens Wall Street regulations
With Congress set to pass a government spending bill that weakens a provision of Dodd-Frank, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) took the floor of the Senate on Friday evening to lash out at her colleagues. In her remarks, she took specific aim at mega-bank Citigroup, saying it wields unusual power in government and must be reigned in. "Many Wall Street institutions have exerted extraordinary influence in Washington’s corridors of power, but Citigroup has risen above the others," she said. "Its grip over economic policymaking in the executive branch is unprecedented."
Warren, pushing her party to take a less friendly attitude toward Wall Street, called on Congress to do as much for families living paycheck to paycheck as it does for big banks. Her prepared remarks follow:
Mr. President, I’m back on the floor to talk about a dangerous provision that was slipped into a must-pass spending bill at the last minute to benefit Wall Street. This provision would repeal a rule called, and I’m quoting the title of the rule, “PROHIBITION AGAINST FEDERAL GOVERNMENT BAILOUTS OF SWAPS ENTITIES.”
On Wednesday, I came to the floor to talk to Democrats, asking them to strip this provision out of the omnibus bill and protect taxpayers.
On Thursday, I came to the floor to talk to Republicans. Republicans say they don’t like bailouts either. So I asked them to vote the way they talk. If they don’t like bailouts, then they could take out this provision that puts taxpayers right back on the hook for bailing out big banks.
Today, I’m coming to the floor not to talk about Democrats or Republicans, but about a third group that also wields tremendous power in Washington: Citigroup. Mr. President, in recent years, many Wall Street institutions have exerted extraordinary influence in Washington’s corridors of power, but Citigroup has risen above the others. Its grip over economic policymaking in the executive branch is unprecedented. Consider a few examples:
Three of the last four Treasury Secretaries under Democratic presidents have had close Citigroup ties. The fourth was offered the CEO position at Citigroup, but turned it down.
The Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve system is a Citigroup alum.
The Undersecretary for International Affairs at Treasury is a Citigroup alum.
The U.S. Trade Representative and the person nominated to be his deputy – who is currently an assistant secretary at Treasury – are Citigroup alums.
A recent chairman of the National Economic Council at the White House was a Citigroup alum.
Another recent Chairman of the Office of Management and Budget went to Citigroup immediately after leaving the White House.
Another recent Chairman of the Office of Management of Budget and Management is also a Citi alum -- but I’m double counting here because now he’s the Secretary of the Treasury.
That’s a lot of powerful people, all from one bank. But they aren’t Citigroup’s only source of power. Over the years, the company has spent millions of dollars on lobbying Congress and funding the political campaigns of its friends in the House and the Senate.
Citigroup has also spent millions trying to influence the political process in ways that are far more subtle—and hidden from public view. Last year, I wrote Citigroup and other big banks a letter asking them to disclose the amount of shareholder money they have been diverting to think tanks to influence public policy. Citigroup’s response to my letter? Stonewalling. A year has gone by, and Citigroup didn’t even acknowledge receiving the letter.
Citigroup has a lot of money, it spends a lot of money, and it uses that money to grow and consolidate a lot of power. And it pays off. Consider a couple facts. Fact one: During the financial crisis, when all the support through TARP and from the FDIC and the Fed is added up, Citi received nearly half a trillion dollars in bailouts. That’s half a trillion with a “t.” That’s almost $140 billion more than the next biggest bank got.
Fact two: During Dodd-Frank, there was an amendment introduced by my colleague Senator Brown and Senator Kaufman that would have broken up Citigroup and the nation’s other largest banks. That amendment had bipartisan support, and it might have passed, but it ran into powerful opposition from an alliance between Wall Streeters on Wall Street and Wall Streeters who held powerful government jobs. They teamed up and blocked the move to break up the banks—and now Citi is bigger than ever.
The role that senior officials working in the Treasury department played in killing the amendment was not subtle: A senior Treasury official acknowledged it at the time in a background interview with New York Magazine. The official from Treasury said, and I’m quoting here, “If we’d been for it, it probably would have happened. But we weren’t, so it didn’t.” That’s power.
Mr. President, Democrats don’t like Wall Street bailouts. Republicans don’t like Wall Street bailouts. The American people are disgusted by Wall Street bailouts. And yet here we are -- five years after Dodd-Frank – with Congress on the verge of ramming through a provision that would do nothing for middle class, do nothing for community banks – do nothing but raise the risk that taxpayers will have to bail out the biggest banks once again. There’s a lot of talk lately about how the Dodd-Frank Act isn’t perfect. There’s a lot of talk coming from Citigroup about how the Dodd-Frank Act isn’t perfect.
So let me say this to anyone who is listening at Citi: I agree with you. Dodd-Frank isn’t perfect.
It should have broken you into pieces.
If this Congress is going to open up Dodd-Frank in the months ahead, let’s open it up to get tougher—not to create more bailout opportunities .
If we are going to open up Dodd-Frank, let’s open it up so that, once and for all, we end Too Big to Fail. And I mean let’s really end it – not just say we did. Instead of passing laws that create new bailout opportunities for Too-Big-To-Fail banks, let’s pass Brown-Kaufman. Let’s pass the bipartisan 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act – a bill I’ve sponsored with John McCain, Angus King, and Maria Cantwell. Let’s pass something – anything – that would help break up these giant banks.
A century ago, Teddy Roosevelt was America’s trustbuster. He went after the giant trusts and monopolies in this country, and a lot of people talk about how those trusts deserved to be broken up because they had too much economic power. But Teddy Roosevelt said we should break them up because they had too much political power. Teddy Roosevelt said break them up because all that concentrated power threatened the very foundations of our democratic system.
And now we’re watching as Congress passes yet another provision that was written by lobbyists for the biggest recipient of bailout money in the history of the country. And it’s attached to a bill that needs to pass or else the entire federal government will grind to a halt.
Think about this kind of power. A financial institution has become so big and so powerful that it can hold the entire country hostage. That alone is a reason enough for us break them up. Enough is enough.
Enough is enough with Wall Street insiders getting key position after key position and the kind of cronyism we have seen in the executive branch. Enough is enough with Citigroup passing 11th hour deregulatory provisions that nobody takes ownership over but that everybody comes to regret. Enough is enough.
Washington already works really well for the billionaires and big corporations and the lawyers and lobbyists. But what about the families who lost their homes or their jobs or their retirement savings the last time Citi bet big on derivatives and lost? What about the families who are living paycheck to paycheck and saw their tax dollars go to bail Citi out just six years ago? We were sent here to fight for those families, and it’s time – it’s past time – for Washington to start working for them.
An explosion rocks the Syrian city of Kobane during a reported suicide car bombing by the Islamic State, as seen from the Turkey-Syria border, on Oct. 20, 2014. The small picture is very bad, but the big picture of violence around the world is about as good as it’s ever been.
Never mind the headlines. We’ve never lived in such peaceful times.
It’s a good time to be a pessimist. ISIS, Crimea, Donetsk, Gaza, Burma, Ebola, school shootings, campus rapes, wife-beating athletes, lethal cops—who can avoid the feeling that things fall apart, the center cannot hold? Last year Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before a Senate committee that the world is “more dangerous than it has ever been.” This past fall,Michael Ignatieff wrote of “the tectonic plates of a world order that are being pushed apart by the volcanic upward pressure of violence and hatred.” Two months ago, the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen lamented, “Many people I talk to, and not only over dinner, have never previously felt so uneasy about the state of the world. … The search is on for someone to dispel foreboding and embody, again, the hope of the world.”
As troubling as the recent headlines have been, these lamentations need a second look. It’s hard to believe we are in greater danger today than we were during the two world wars, or during other perils such as the periodic nuclear confrontations during the Cold War, the numerous conflicts in Africa and Asia that each claimed millions of lives, or the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq that threatened to choke the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf and cripple the world’s economy.
How can we get a less hyperbolic assessment of the state of the world? Certainly not from daily journalism. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a reporter saying to the camera, “Here we are, live from a country where a war has not broken out”—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as violence has not vanished from the world, there will always be enough incidents to fill the evening news. And since the human mind estimates probability by the ease with which it can recall examples, newsreaders will always perceive that they live in dangerous times. All the more so when billions of smartphones turn a fifth of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.
We also have to avoid being fooled by randomness. Cohen laments the “annexations, beheadings, [and] pestilence” of the past year, but surely this collection of calamities is a mere coincidence. Entropy, pathogens, and human folly are a backdrop to life, and it is statistically certain that the lurking disasters will not space themselves evenly in time but will frequently overlap. To read significance into these clusters is to succumb to primitive thinking, a world of evil eyes and cosmic conspiracies.
Finally, we need to be mindful of orders of magnitude. Some categories of violence, like rampage shootings and terrorist attacks, are riveting dramas but (outside war zones) kill relatively small numbers of people. Every day ordinary homicides claim one and a half times as many Americans as the number who died in the Sandy Hook massacre. And as the political scientist John Mueller points out, in most years bee stings, deer collisions, ignition of nightwear, and other mundane accidents kill more Americans than terrorist attacks.
The only sound way to appraise the state of the world is to count. How many violent acts has the world seen compared with the number of opportunities? And is that number going up or down? As Bill Clinton likes to say, “Follow the trend lines, not the headlines.” We will see that the trend lines are more encouraging than a news junkie would guess.
To be sure, adding up corpses and comparing the tallies across different times and places can seem callous, as if it minimized the tragedy of the victims in less violent decades and regions. But a quantitative mindset is in fact the morally enlightened one. It treats every human life as having equal value, rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of violence and thereby implement the measures that are most likely to reduce it. Let’s examine the major categories in turn.
Homicide. Worldwide, about five to 10 times as many people die in police-blotter homicides as die in wars. And in most of the world, the rate of homicide has been sinking. The Great American Crime Decline of the 1990s, which flattened out at the start of the new century, resumed in 2006, and, defying the conventional wisdom that hard times lead to violence, proceeded right through the recession of 2008 and up to the present.
England, Canada, and most other industrialized countries have also seen their homicide rates fall in the past decade. Among the 88 countries with reliable data, 67 have seen a decline in the past 15 years. Though numbers for the entire world exist only for this millennium and include heroic guesstimates for countries that are data deserts, the trend appears to be downward, from 7.1 homicides per 100,000 people in 2003 to 6.2 in 2012.
The global average, to be sure, conceals many regions with horrific rates of killing, particularly in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. But even in those hot zones, it’s easy for the headlines to mislead. The gory drug-fueled killings in parts of Mexico, for example, can create an impression that the country has spiraled into Hobbesian lawlessness. But the trend line belies the impression in two ways.
One is that the 21st-century spike has not undone a massive reduction in homicide that Mexico has enjoyed since 1940, comparable to the reductions that Europe and the United States underwent in earlier centuries. The other is that what goes up often comes down. The rate of Mexican homicide has declined in each of the past two years (including an almost 90 percent drop in Juárez from 2010 to 2012), and many other notoriously dangerous regions have experienced significant turnarounds, including Bogotá, Colombia (a fivefold decline in two decades), Medellín, Colombia (down 85 percent in two decades), São Paolo (down 70 percent in a decade), the favelas of Rio de Janeiro (an almost two-thirds reduction in four years), Russia (down 46 percent in six years), and South Africa (a halving from 1995 to 2011). Many criminologists believe that a reduction of global violence by 50 percent in the next three decades is a feasible target for the next round of Millennium Development Goals.
Violence Against Women. The intense media coverage of famous athletes who have assaulted their wives or girlfriends, and of episodes of rape on college campuses, have suggested to many pundits that we are undergoing a surge of violence against women. But the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics’ victimization surveys (which circumvent the problem of underreporting to the police) show the opposite: Rates of rape or sexual assault and of violence against intimate partners have been sinking for decades, and are now a quarter or less of their peaks in the past. Far too many of these horrendous crimes still take place, but we should be encouraged by the fact that a heightened concern about violence against women is not futile moralizing but has brought about measurable progress—and that continuing this concern can lead to greater progress still.
Few other countries have comparable data, but there is reason to believe that similar trends would be found elsewhere. Most measures of personal violence are correlated over time, so the global decline of homicide suggests that nonlethal violence against women may be falling on a parallel trajectory, though highly unevenly across regions. In 1993 the U.N. General Assembly adopted a Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and polling data show widespread support for women’s rights, even in countries with the most benighted practices. Many countries have implemented laws and public awareness campaigns to reduce rape, forced marriage, genital mutilation, honor killings, domestic violence, and wartime atrocities. Though some of these measures are toothless, and the effectiveness of others has yet to be established, there are grounds for optimism over the long term. Global shaming campaigns, even when they start out as purely aspirational, have led in the past to dramatic reductions of practices such as slavery, dueling, whaling, foot binding, piracy, privateering, chemical warfare, apartheid, and atmospheric nuclear testing.
Violence Against Children. A similar story can be told about children. The incessant media reports of school shootings, abductions, bullying, cyberbullying, sexting, date rape, and sexual and physical abuse make it seem as if children are living in increasingly perilous times. But the data say otherwise: Kids are undoubtedly safer than they were in the past. In a review of the literature on violence against children in the United States published earlier this year, the sociologist David Finkelhor and his colleagues reported, “Of 50 trends in exposure examined, there were 27 significant declines and no significant increases between 2003 and 2011. Declines were particularly large for assault victimization, bullying, and sexual victimization.”
Similar trends are seen in other industrialized countries, and international declarations have made the reduction of violence against children a global concern.
Democratization. In 1975, Daniel Patrick Moynihan lamented that “liberal democracy on the American model increasingly tends to the condition of monarchy in the 19thcentury: a holdover form of government, one which persists in isolated or peculiar places here and there … but which has simply no relevance to the future.” Moynihan was a social scientist, and his pessimism was backed by the numbers of his day: A growing majority of countries were led by communist, fascist, military, or strongman dictators. But the pessimism turned out to be premature, belied by a wave of democratization that began not long after the ink had dried on his eulogy. The pessimists of today who insist that the future belongs to the authoritarian capitalism of Russia and China show no such numeracy. Data from the Polity IV Project on the degree of democracy and autocracy among the world’s countries show that the democracy craze has decelerated of late but shows no signs of going into reverse.
Democracy has proved to be more robust than its eulogizers realize. A majority of the world’s countries today are democratic, and not just the wealthy monocultures of Europe, North America, and East Asia. Governments that are more democratic than not (scoring 6 or higher on the Polity IV Project’s scale from minus 10 to 10) are entrenched (albeit with nerve-wracking ups and downs) in most of Latin America, in floridly multiethnic India, in Islamic Turkey, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and in 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Even the autocracies of Russia and China, which show few signs of liberalizing anytime soon, are incomparably less repressive than the regimes of Stalin, Brezhnev, and Mao.
Genocide and Other Mass Killings of Civilians.The recent atrocities against non-Islamic minorities at the hands of ISIS, together with the ongoing killing of civilians in Syria, Iraq, and central Africa, have fed a narrative in which the world has learned nothing from the Holocaust and genocides continue unabated. But even the most horrific events of the present must be put into historical perspective, if only to identify and eliminate the forces that lead to mass killing. Though the meaning of the word genocide is too fuzzy to support objective analysis, all genocides fall into the more inclusive category of “one-sided violence” or “mass killing of noncombatant civilians,” and several historians and social scientists have estimated their trajectory over time. The numbers are imprecise and often contested, but the overall trends are clear and consistent across datasets.
By any standard, the world is nowhere near as genocidal as it was during its peak in the 1940s, when Nazi, Soviet, and Japanese mass murders, together with the targeting of civilians by all sides in World War II, resulted in a civilian death rate in the vicinity of 350 per 100,000 per year. Stalin and Mao kept the global rate between 75 and 150 through the early 1960s, and it has been falling ever since, though punctuated by spikes of dying in Biafra (1966–1970, 200,000 deaths), Sudan (1983–2002, 1 million), Afghanistan (1978–2002, 1 million), Indonesia (1965–1966, 500,000), Angola (1975–2002, 1 million), Rwanda (1994, 500,000), and Bosnia (1992–1995, 200,000). (All of these estimates are from the Center for Systemic Peace.) These numbers must be kept in mind when we read of the current horrors in Iraq (2003–2014, 150,000 deaths) and Syria (2011–2014, 150,000) and interpret them as signs of a dark new era. Nor, tragically, are the beheadings and crucifixions of the Islamic State historically unusual. Many postwar genocides were accompanied by splurges of ghastly torture and mutilation. The main difference is that they were not broadcasted on social media.
The trend lines for genocide and other civilian killings, fortunately, point sharply downward. After a steady rise during the Cold War until 1992, the proportion of states perpetrating or enabling mass killings of civilians has plummeted, though with a small recent bounce we will examine shortly.
The number of civilians killed in these massacres has also dropped. Reliable data, collected by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, or UCDP, exist only for the past 25 years, and this period is so dominated by the Rwandan genocide that an ordinary graph looks like a tall spike poking through a wrinkled carpet. But when we squish the graph by using a logarithmic scale, we see that by 2013 the rate of civilian killing had fallen by an order of magnitude since the mid-1990s, and by two orders of magnitude since Rwanda.
Though comparisons to the cruder data of previous decades are iffy, the numbers we have suggest that the rate of killing civilians has dropped by about three orders of magnitude since the decade after World War II, and by four orders of magnitude since the war itself. In other words, the world’s civilians are several thousand times less likely to be targeted today than they were 70 years ago.
War. Researchers who track war and peace distinguish “armed conflicts,” which kill as few as 25 soldiers and civilians caught in the line of fire in a year, from “wars,” which kill more than a thousand. They also distinguish “interstate” conflicts, which pit the armed forces of two or more states against each other, from “intrastate” or “civil” conflicts, which pit a state against an insurgency or separatist force, sometimes with the armed intervention of an external state. (Conflicts in which the armed forces of a state are not directly involved, such as the one-sided violence perpetrated by a militia against noncombatants, and intercommunal violence between militias, are counted separately.)
In a historically unprecedented development, the number of interstate wars has plummeted since 1945, and the most destructive kind of war, in which great powers or developed states fight each other, has vanished altogether. (The last one was the Korean War). Today the world rarely sees a major naval battle, or masses of tanks and heavy artillery shelling each other across a battlefield. The green curve in the graph below (from the UCDP) shows how major wars have sputtered out in the postwar period.
The end of the Cold War also saw a steep reduction in the number of armed conflicts of all kinds, including civil wars. The blue curve in the graph shows that recent events have not reversed this trend. In 2013 there were 33 state-based armed conflicts in the world, a number that falls right within the range of fluctuations of the last dozen years (between 31 and 38) and well below the high of 52 shortly after the end of the Cold War. The UCDP has also noted that 2013 saw the signing of six peace agreements, two more than in the previous year.
But the red curve in the graph shows a recent development that is less benign: The number of wars jumped from four in 2010—the lowest total since the end of World War II—to seven in 2013. These wars were fought in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Sudan, and Syria. Conflict data for 2014 will not be available until next year, but we already know that four new wars broke out in the past 12 months, for a total of 11. The jump from 2010 to 2014, the steepest since the end of the Cold War, has brought us to the highest number of wars since 2000. The worldwide rate of battle deaths (available through 2013) has also risen since its low point in 2005, mostly because of the deaths in the Syrian civil war.
Though the recent increase in civil wars and battle deaths is real and worrisome, it must be kept in perspective. It has undone the progress of the last dozen years, but the rates of violence are still well below those of the 1990s, and nowhere near the levels of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s.
The 2010–2014 upsurge is circumscribed in a second way. In seven of the 11 wars that flared during this period, radical Islamist groups were one of the warring parties: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel/Gaza, Iraq, Nigeria, Syria, and Yemen. (Indeed, absent the Islamist conflicts, there would have been no increase in wars in the last few years, with just two in 2013 and three in 2014.) This reflects a broader trend. In January 2014the Pew Research Center reported that the number of countries experiencing high or very high levels of “religious hostilities” increased by more than 40 percent (from 14 to 20) between 2011 and 2012. In all but two of these countries (those listed above together with Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, Russia, Somalia, Sudan, and Thailand) the hostilities were associated with extremist Islamist groups. These groups tend to gain the most traction in countries with exclusionary, inept, or repressive governments or in zones with no effective government at all, including long-anarchic frontier regions and the parts of Syria and Iraq that have been rendered anarchic in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and the Arab Spring.
Because the radical Islamist groups have maximalist goals and reject compromise, the major mechanisms that drove the decline in the number of wars in the preceding decades—negotiated settlements and peacekeeping and peacebuilding programs—are unlikely to succeed in ending these conflicts. Also intensifying the violence is their international scope. External fighters and weapons drive up death tolls and prolong fighting. For these reasons we do not expect the recent upsurge to be quickly reversed.
At the same time, there are reasons to believe that it will not extend into the indefinite future, let alone escalate into global warfare. Let’s examine the three most prominent trouble spots.
Iraq/Syria. The Islamic State will not expand into a pan-Islamic caliphate, and it is unlikely to persist over the long term. For one thing, its ideology and politics are loathed throughout most of the Islamic world; even al-Qaida has excommunicated the movement for being too extreme. The extremists thus lack the mass popular support that is necessary for fighting the kind of “people’s war” that proved successful in places like China and Vietnam.
The Islamic State, moreover, lacks the conventional military capabilities needed to overthrow a heavily defended Baghdad. It has minimal armor, long-range artillery, sophisticated rocketry, and air power, and only a rudimentary air defense system. The Islamists’ remarkable sweep through northern Iraq in the summer of 2014 occurred mainly because hapless Iraqi soldiers, abandoned by officers with no loyalty to the Shiite regime, chose not to fight.
The Islamic State is now overextended and will become more vulnerable as it seeks to become a normal state. Although wealthy by terror group standards, its income—estimated at $2 million a day—is grossly inadequate to the task of governing as a state. It is already under the same U.N. sanction regime as al-Qaida, and it is isolated from the region’s main centers of trade, manufacture, and commerce. As ISIS is decreasingly able to extract, refine, and sell oil, its major source of revenue is shrinking. It has no access to the sea, it has no major-power supporters, and its neighbors are mostly enemies. Last but not least, the United States and its allies, together with the Iraqi army, are planning a spring counteroffensive against ISIS that will be far more punishing than anything attempted thus far.
Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s reabsorption of Crimea into Russia, and his thinly disguised support for Ukrainian secessionist movements, are deeply troubling developments, not just because the resulting fighting has claimed more than 4,000 lives, but also because they challenge the grandfathering of national borders and the near-taboo on conquest that have helped keep the peace since 1945.
Yet comparisons to the world of a century ago—when romantic militarism was widespread, international institutions virtually nonexistent, and leaders naive about the costs of escalating great-power war—are almost certainly overdrawn. So far Russia has sent “little green men” rather than tank divisions across the border, and even the most hawkish of American hawks has not proposed pushing it back with military force. Meanwhile Putin’s adventurism has been hugely costly for Russia. The tough EU sanctions, along with plunging oil prices, will push Russia into a recession in 2015. The ruble is plummeting in value, food prices have risen sharply, and Russian banks are finding it increasingly difficult to borrow foreign capital. All this suggests that the tensions in Ukraine are far more likely to end in an uneasy stalemate like those in Georgia and Moldova, which have endured the loss of pro-Russian breakaway statelets, than a repeat of World War I.
Israel and Palestine. The recurring outbursts of violence between Israel and the Palestinians, including the incursion into Gaza last summer that killed 2,000 people, have obscured two facts that come into view only from a historical and quantitative vantage point.
First, the Israel-Palestine conflict was once a far more dangerous Israel-Arab conflict. Over the course of 25 years, Israel fought the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan five times, with more than 100,000 battle deaths, and in 1973 both Israel and the United States put their nuclear forces on high alert in response to the threat. For the past 41 years there have been no such wars, and neither Egypt nor any other Arab regime has shown an interest in starting one.
For all the world’s obsession with the Israel-Palestine conflict, it has been responsible for a small proportion of the total human cost of war: approximately 22,000 deaths over six decades, coming in at 96th place among the armed conflicts recorded by the Center for Systemic Peace since 1946, and at 14th place among ongoing conflicts. That does not mean that the violence is acceptable, only that it should not be a cause of fatalism or despair. Worse conflicts have come to an end, not least ones that have embroiled Israel itself, and a peaceful settlement to this conflict should not be dismissed as utopian.
* * *
The world is not falling apart. The kinds of violence to which most people are vulnerable—homicide, rape, battering, child abuse—have been in steady decline in most of the world. Autocracy is giving way to democracy. Wars between states—by far the most destructive of all conflicts—are all but obsolete. The increase in the number and deadliness of civil wars since 2010 is circumscribed, puny in comparison with the decline that preceded it, and unlikely to escalate.
We have been told of impending doom before: a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, a line of dominoes in Southeast Asia, revanchism in a reunified Germany, a rising sun in Japan, cities overrun by teenage superpredators, a coming anarchy that would fracture the major nation-states, and weekly 9/11-scale attacks that would pose an existential threat to civilization.
Why is the world always “more dangerous than it has ever been”—even as a greater and greater majority of humanity lives in peace and dies of old age?
Too much of our impression of the world comes from a misleading formula of journalistic narration. Reporters give lavish coverage to gun bursts, explosions, and viral videos, oblivious to how representative they are and apparently innocent of the fact that many were contrived as journalist bait. Then come sound bites from “experts” with vested interests in maximizing the impression of mayhem: generals, politicians, security officials, moral activists. The talking heads on cable news filibuster about the event, desperately hoping to avoid dead air. Newspaper columnists instruct their readers on what emotions to feel.
There is a better way to understand the world. Commentators can brush up their history—not by rummaging throughBartlett’sfor a quote from Clausewitz, but by recounting the events of the recent past that put the events of the present in an intelligible context. And they could consult the analyses of quantitative datasets on violence that are now just a few clicks away.
An evidence-based mindset on the state of the world would bring many benefits. It would calibrate our national and international responses to the magnitude of the dangers that face us. It would limit the influence of terrorists, school shooters, decapitation cinematographers, and other violence impresarios. It might even dispel foreboding and embody, again, the hope of the world
The New York Times (7/22/14 [18]) took a firm editorial position when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over Ukraine, allegedly by Russian-backed separatists: "Whoever unleashed a lethal missile not knowing how to distinguish between a military and a civilian plane is not only irresponsible and stupid, but a war criminal."
The Times (7/5/88 [19]) took an equally firm, but diametrically opposed, editorial position when the US Navy shot down Iran Air 655 over the Persian Gulf: “While horrifying, it was nonetheless an accident. On present evidence, it’s hard to see what the Navy could have done to avoid it.”
A few years earlier, when the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, the Times (9/2/83 [20]) sounded a lot like it did about the Malaysian plane: "There is no conceivable excuse for any nation shooting down a harmless airliner." Unless, of course, that nation is the United States. [21]
$298,500. That's former Florida governor Jeb Bush's compensation as a member of the board of Tenet Healthcare, a hospital company, last year. Tenet has benefited enormously from the Affordable Care Act, and Bush is cutting his ties with the group. Jason Millman in The Washington Post
New polling by The Washington Post-ABC News finds that public opinion about the police is split by race and party. Only about two in 10 blacks say that police treat whites and blacks equally, compared to about six in 10 whites. Among white Republicans, the fraction is more than eight in 10. The poll revealed similar disparities in opinion on the use of force by police, relations between law enforcement and communities, and whether the deaths of Eric Garner on Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. were isolated cases.
These results are about what you'd expect. After all, Americans' bitter differences of opinion on police violence and criminal justice have been impossible to escape in the past several weeks. Cops' silent protest during New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's speech at Officer Rafael Ramos's funeral on Saturday was only the most recent manifestation.
The rancor disappeared, though, when pollsters asked about body cameras. Eighty-six percent of those surveyed, including 85 percent of whites, 91 percent of blacks and 87 percent of Hispanics, said they supported requiring officers to wear cameras. Similarly large majorities agreed that any police killing of an unarmed civilian "should be investigated by an outside prosecutor who does not work with the police on a regular basis."
To be sure, it isn't clear that video evidence from body cameras or special prosecutors would limit police officers' broad discretion to use deadly force when they feel it is necessary, a power protected by law and precedent. But these reforms could at least give the public more confidence into investigations of police killings. In any case, it's encouraging that though Americans are open to new ideas about improving law enforcement, even if they don't agree about whether the police have a serious problem.
What's in Wonkbook: 1) De Blasio 2) Opinions, including Robert Rubin on incarceration and Noah Smith on taxes 3) Issa releases IRS report 4) House to change scoring rules 5) Christie and Cuomo veto a transportation reform bill, Dave Camp's last stand, and more
Number of the day: $298,500. That's former Florida governor Jeb Bush's compensation as a member of the board of Tenet Healthcare, a hospital company, last year. Tenet has benefited enormously from the Affordable Care Act, and Bush is cutting his ties with the group. Jason Millman in The Washington Post.
Lax gun laws allowed Brinsley to acquire his weapon from a pawn shop in Georgia. The shop was the fifth-largest source of guns used in crimes nationwide as of 2010. Brinsley's gun was sold there in 1996 and eventually found its way into his hands. A patchwork of regulations on firearm sales allows a small fraction of unscrupulous dealers to keep the national black market supplied. The New Republic
Airlines have an financial reason to create suffering. By making everything about flying somewhat gratuitously uncomfortable, airlines encourage passengers to pay fees for larger seats, faster boarding, and convenience all around. The New Yorker
Suppose that for some reason you decided to start hitting yourself in the head, repeatedly, with a baseball bat. You’d feel pretty bad. Correspondingly, you’d probably feel a lot better if and when you finally stopped. What would that improvement in your condition tell you?
It certainly wouldn’t imply that hitting yourself in the head was a good idea. It would, however, be an indication that the pain you were experiencing wasn’t a reflection of anything fundamentally wrong with your health. Your head wasn’t hurting because you were sick; it was hurting because you kept hitting it with that baseball bat.
And now you understand the basics of what has been happening to several major economies, including the United States, over the past few years. In fact, you understand these basics better than many politicians and commentators.
Let’s start with a tale from overseas: austerity policy in Britain. As you may know, back in 2010 Britain’s newly installed Conservative government declared that a sharp reduction in budget deficits was needed to keep Britain from turning into Greece. Over the next two years growth in the British economy, which had been recovering fairly well from the financial crisis, more or less stalled. In 2013, however, growth picked up again — and the British government claimed vindication for its policies. Was this claim justified?
No, not at all. What actually happened was that the Tories stopped tightening the screws — they didn’t reverse the austerity that had already occurred, but they effectively put a hold on further cuts. So they stopped hitting Britain in the head with that baseball bat. And sure enough, the nation started feeling better.
To claim that this bounceback vindicated austerity is silly. As Simon Wren-Lewis of Oxford University likes to point out, if rapid growth after a gratuitous slump counts as success, the government should just close down half the economy for a year; the next year’s growth would be fantastic. Or as I’d put it, you shouldn’t conclude that hitting yourself in the head is smart because it feels so good when you stop. Unfortunately, the silliness of the claim hasn’t prevented its widespread acceptance by what Mr. Wren-Lewis calls “mediamacro.”
Meanwhile, back in America we haven’t had an official, declared policy of fiscal austerity — but we’ve nonetheless had plenty of austerity in practice, thanks to the federal sequester and sharp cuts by state and local governments. The good news is that we, too, seem to have stopped tightening the screws: Public spending isn’t surging, but at least it has stopped falling. And the economy is doing much better as a result. We are finally starting to see the kind of growth, in employment and G.D.P., that we should have been seeing all along — and the public’s mood is rapidly improving.
What’s the important lesson from this late Obama bounce? Mainly, I’d suggest, that everything you’ve heard about President Obama’s economic policies is wrong.
You know the spiel: that the U.S. economy is ailing because Obamacare is a job-killer and the president is a redistributionist, that Mr. Obama’s anti-business speeches (he hasn’t actually made any, but never mind) have hurt entrepreneurs’ feelings, inducing them to take their marbles and go home.
This story line never made much sense. The truth is that the private sector has done surprisingly well under Mr. Obama, adding 6.7 million jobs since he took office, compared with just 3.1 million at this point under President George W. Bush. Corporate profits have soared, as have stock prices. What held us back was unprecedented public-sector austerity: At this point in the Bush years, government employment was up by 1.2 million, but under Mr. Obama it’s down by 600,000. Sure enough, now that this de facto austerity is easing, the economy is perking up.
And what this bounce tells you is that the alleged faults of Obamanomics had nothing to do with the pain we were feeling. We weren’t hurting because we were sick; we were hurting because we kept hitting ourselves with that baseball bat, and we’re feeling a lot better now that we’ve stopped.
Will this improvement in our condition continue? Britain’s government has declared its intention to pick up the baseball bat again — to engage in further austerity, which does not bode well. But here the picture looks brighter. Households are in much better financial shape than they were a few years ago; there’s probably still a lot of pent-up demand, especially for housing. And falling oil prices will be good for most of the country, although some regions — especially Texas — may take a hit.
So I’m fairly optimistic about 2015, and probably beyond, as long as we avoid any more self-inflicted damage. Let’s just leave that baseball bat lying on the ground, O.K.?
Time to open an inquiry into Reagan's abandonment of 250 dead Marines in Lebanese terror attack?
A congressional inquiry did not find any connection between the agency and the White House's political staff. There is no evidence that officials at the Internal Revenue Service coordinated with Obama's operatives when deciding on the tax status of political groups in the report released by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). The report does claim that tax officers improperly made decisions based on their personal political inclinations. David S. Joachim in The New York Times The report shows the IRS had nothing against the tea party. Instead, the agency was trying to apply vague and complex standards on political activity across the spectrum. The only group that lost its tax exemption was a Democratic one, a fact the report dodges. Los Angeles Times.
Obamacare is set to exceed its enrollment targets in its second year. Some 6.4 million people signed up for insurance plans through the federal exchange in the first month, including those who automatically renewed plans they bought last year. But this year's targets have always been seen as a low bar. Sam Baker in National Journal.
238 Presidential Historians Rank Obama Near The Top: Dubyah Near The Bottom
Incarceration is an economic problem. "Crime itself has a terrible human cost and a serious economic cost. But appropriate punishment for those who are a risk to public safety shouldn't obscure the vast deficiencies in the criminal-justice system that impose a significant drag on the economy." The Wall Street Journal.
Craig Johnson was halfway through an 80-mile trek through remote Alaska on Dec. 15 when his snowmobile fell through the ice. He was on his way to visit family for the holidays.
"I almost gave up ... But I couldn't give up. I had to do it for my boys, my family," he said. "I think it's a miracle that I'm alive."
Johnson, 38, said he had to crawl back to the thicker part of the ice as his snowmobile sank.
"Everything just happened so fast," he said.
In his icy clothes, Johnson walked 30 miles searching for help while being stalked by a wolverine.
"You could hear it on the ice, just playing with me, toying with me," he said.
After warning shots failed to scare off the animal, Johnson said he used a stick to defend himself. He then stumbled upon a wooden box that he used as shelter.
Johnson was reported missing and several rescue helicopters flew past him.
"That third night when they passed right by me - not even 200, 300 yards - that's when I lost hope," Johnson said. "I just laid back down in that box I was in. It just felt like that was an open grave for me."
As the temperatures dropped to negative 35 degrees, a search team led by Clifford Benson, Johnson's cousin, closed in.
"It doesn't matter the conditions, I had to go. That's my cousin," said Benson.
Benson said the wind and snow erased nearly all signs of Johnson until he heard his cousin yelling.
"I've never heard someone yell like that anywhere," said Benson.
"If Clifford didn't saw me, that was going to be my last night," said Johnson. They were going to bring me home in a body bag."
Johnson was treated for frostbite. He said his will to survive was fueled in part by his father's death in 1998 when he fell through the ice and drowned.
In the passage I quoted -- http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/04/merton-best-imposed-as-norm-becomes.html -- Merton identifies the urge to be perfect -- and to impose perfection even in God's name -- as laying the groundwork for evil. He urges us to look on our "limitations, imperfections (and) errors (as) not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal... The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil."
In other words, "getting it wrong" - when properly construed as intrinsic to any learning process - is salutary, whereas any imposed demand that we/they "get it right" tends to become evil.
I agree with ancient Chinese sage Lao Tzu's observation that "the profoundest truths are paradoxical" and believe that "the wrongness of imposed rightness" ranks high among them.
Much of the confusion that befalls any puritanical "coloration" of Christianity is, I think, largely attributable to confusion concerning the command "Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect."
The word perfect does not mean what most Americans tend to think. Rather it means "complete, whole, entire." Etymologically, "perfection" derives from per fait meaning "completely done." And to be completely done, I believe that we -- as creatures compounded of light and darkness -- need to integrate our "shadow" not project it on "the other guy, over there, far away." As I see it, our fundamental psycho-spiritual task is to re-appropriate our personal "shadows" -- the "dark urges" that are in us all -- and then, instead of saddling them on "the other guy" we become "complete, whole, entire" and thereby truly capable of doing good that minimizes the kind of blowback we see - for example - all across the Middle East.
Pogo put it well: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
I would also clarify that George Orwell -- for whom I have high regard -- was a dedicated socialist. Not doctrinaire, but dedicated. Primarily he was dedicated to anti-Totalitarianism which, again in my view, is very frequently rationalized by people of theocratic inclination.
When Christ tells us to "give to Caesar what is Caesar's" I think he is issuing the single most ignored command. None of us who see ourselves as "good,""blessed" and "saved" want anything to do with giving to Caesar what is Caesar's, starting with taxes - which, by the way, are at their lowest level in 60 years.
At bottom, you and I have radically divergent views of many things.
But here, I think, is the nub.
I sense that you are convinced God will save you and others like you and that he will condemn all the rest.
I do not believe that.
I believe that our souls are on "journeys of learning" and that it is indispensable to make mistakes - some of them serious mistakes - in order to learn.
It is a long road.
Again Merton: "Liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”
Biblical commandments, as helpful as they may be, represent what is "theoretically best" and when "what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”
I think we must learn to embrace "the good commandments" and do so out of love, not out of theoretical imposition.
"Virtue is its own reward" and I am increasingly leary of any reward systems more complicated than that.
My sense of God, and my sense of "salvation" are focused -- at the theological level -- on the thought of George MacDonald, whom C.S. Lewis recognizes as his teacher. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_MacDonald
As a practical matter, I see little good fruit arising from interpretations of Christianity focused on fire, brimstone and end-time terrestrial conflagration.
Rather, it seems to me that these views lure people into 1.) "self-terrorization" (and a correlative impulse to behave violently, certainly on the political level), 2.) disproportionate fixation on The Old Testament and the extraordinarily problematic Book of Revelation, and that 3.) these two "factors" taken together distill to an essential denial of Christ's command to "Love our enemies" and a similar denial of 1 John 4:18 where we are informed that "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love." http://bible.cc/1_john/4-18.htm
Concerning the great good fruit that arises from "ignoring strict morality) I point to an autobiographical reflection by C.S. Lewis: "There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me." C. S. Lewis - "Surprised by Joy" - an autobiography
Nothing was forbidden.
Indeed, as a child, Lewis was free to read books that were emphatically inappropriate for children.
Throughout my elementary, secondary and collegiate Catholic educational process, I was taught this: that although Hell is a "state," there is no need for any Catholic to believe -- in light of God's infinite mercy -- that a single human soul has ever been confined there.
Having said all this, we are all, of course, creatures of conditioning.
Personally, I am happier with the Catholic view of infinite divine mercy -- and the infinite hopefulness which it inspires -- than I am with any alternative teaching from the religious right.
Inter-relatedly, I have long noted how easily we humans are enthralled by biblio-idolatry. But I also harbor a corresponding conviction that God is immeasurably bigger than we think - or than we can think. In fact, the conclusion of John's gospel reads: "There is much else that Jesus did. If it were all to be recorded in detail, I suppose the world could not hold th books that would be written."
And what did Christ mean when, in John 16:12, he says " I have many other things to say to you but you cannot bear them now." What was it that his fellows could not bear - not even his own apostles who had lived with him for three years. I suspect Y'eshua addressed this curious inability to "bear the truth" because he realized his fellow Jews were so conditioned by the primitivity of their world view that, if he had "told all," they themselves would have murdered him for revealing many things that would have contradicted there sense of legalistic propriety.
I'm not at all interested in "all Israel being afraid."
I am interested in getting to that place where I embody the fearlessness of 1 John 4:18, and until I get there, I will assume that my fears are obstacles and not "causes" to champion.
Pax
Alan
On Aug 14, 2010, K wrote:
Alan
Thanks for your insights.
Considering what you've shared here you must be very deeply diasppointed with the present administration and "politically correct" leaders who are taking our nation down such a slippery slope.
As Thomas Jefferson had so rightly observed..
"Government is a wonderful servant, a terrible master"
we can see at this present time how corrupted people who claim to care for the poor
have become when it is beneficial to them to use power to promote themselves rather than the "good of the common man"
Our nation for the first time possibly in our history faces what Eastern Europeans
had under communist dictators who'd come in preaching "liberation theology" you might say..
With the masses struggling to maintain what little they might hold onto in way of the fruit of their hard earned labor a modern day "Marie Antoinette" finds no problem whatsoever in spending millions (much of it taxpayer money) to enjoy living like a queen.
And millions are spent so that a little princess might marry as other royalty spared nothing in way of the grand ball only Cinderella in fairy tale stories are actually able to afford.
I believe our nation, America, has fallen short of the values meant to have kept us rising up to reach our ideals for sure. This present generation has fallen so far from what we have confessed and professed to be the spirit behind our words that it's doubtful many in the next will even begin to understand or believe it is possible ...real liberty and justice for ALL.. not only minorities but also a "majority" who disagree, refuse to embrace the immorality being imposed on us and taxes that the rich claim to be "for the sake of the poor" who only remain enslaved on that very liberal plantation many have warned us would be the end of all "good intentions" that, as Thomas Merton so rightly understood, have been imposed on us..
I totally believe from my heart what happened in the Book of Acts as the first disciples of Jesus so freely obeyed in genuine faith a call to "sell all, give to the poor, and follow Me."
The difference being, of course, Jesus didn't demand a tithe of anyone..nor did he say,
"give to ME so I might live like a king while you work your ass off to make me look like
a prince of Egypt."
He wasn't imposing any politically correct system on anyone but rather inviting whoever might freely come in faith to know a Kingdom that only the angels enjoy of a world that is the exact opposite of our own..
I love Orwell's novels ...I doubt anything yet more prophetic has been written concerning this present administration who is now destroying anything left of our sacred rights to replace them with a lawlessness that is the exact opposite and as diametrically opposed to the Kingdom of our Lord and Christ as any that has yet risen up to exalt itself while punishing the faithful.
Pigs in the parlor.
I think it's about as perfect a description of what it is we are now witnessing in our nation
as yet a generation has seen.
The most hypocritical of all.
Our friends in Haiti are still waiting for a promise of resources to come from a world that
openly stood to make them when "the whole world was watching"
The only real help that has been there for them in this time have been the same who've
been all along... the TRUE CHURCH who is operating out of pure charity not because a king or a pope or anyone else foots the bill or leads the way.
Out of genuine charity, the kind that flowed through our Lord while He walked this earth
that cost him His very life... a Life He gave so willingly for even the ones who mock and scoff so all who believe might live with Him forever... just think of that.
A man who was so totally innocent nailed to a cross by both the religious and political
powers of his time.
Isn't that usually how it works?
When our friend Harlan Popov visited us 25 years ago he'd been only free for a short
time from the Bulgarian prison he'd been sent to by a communist regime who held him
there and tortured him body, mind and soul for 13 years.
His crime?
He refused to renounce his faith in a God bigger than the government that believed it their duty to re-educate anyone who refused to "go along" who dared "disagree."
He told me at the time that the communists made Hitler look like "Mickey Mouse"
once the allied forces had pulled out of their countries and turned a blind eye to the millions of Christians, Jews and whoever refused the "newregime"
I'm sure you have read Animal Farm... you must, as I do, smell the familiar odor of such forces of evil once they become accustomed to the comforts of a house who is no longer occupied by the rightful owner of the barnyard.
In His Grip and by His GRACE we who stay focused on eagles and doves rise to soar with angels... covered under the Wings of the Almighty
The Love of our Father Creator knows no boundary of time or space... we are forever one through ONE Jesus prayed we'd all come to know in Spirit and in Truth so we might
be made free in deed, not only with our words..
"Two men look out from behind the same bars
One sees mud the other sees stars"
That is a lesson I've learned over years of finding friends who'd been in prison for their faith.
And the lesson learned by watching the very God who created us nailed to a cross by the criminals He'd come to pardon..
(Reuters) - New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday drew heckles and boos as well as cheers when he addressed graduating police cadets on Monday, two days after thousands of uniformed officers turned their backs on him at a slain policeman's funeral.
The mayor's appearance at the New York Police Department graduation ceremony at Madison Square Garden came as he struggles to mend the most toxic rift between police and City Hall in decades. The rift was triggered by the mayor's support for protests against the deaths of black men at the hands of white officers in New York, Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere.
The rift sharpened after the weekend before Christmas when two policemen were ambushed and shot to death as they sat in their squad car in Brooklyn.
De Blasio, addressing nearly 900 graduating cadets, said, "You will confront all manner of problems. Problems that you didn't create."
A heckler cried out: "You created them!" Some in the audience applauded the outburst.
De Blasio, briefly flustered, continued with his speech.
A dozen or so people turned their backs on the mayor as he spoke, repeating a gesture by thousands of officers at Saturday's funeral for policeman Rafael Ramos.
Before he had even finished speaking, the mayor's press office circulated a long, evidently prepared email to journalists.
"Want to remind folks that today was not the first time a NYC Mayor has been booed at a police graduation," Marti Adams, a spokeswoman for the mayor, wrote before pointing reporters to old news reports about de Blasio's three predecessors getting similar treatment.
The wake for the second slain officer, Wenjian Liu, is due to be held on Saturday in Brooklyn and the funeral on Sunday.
The man who shot the officers, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, said he was seeking to avenge the deaths of two unarmed black men who died in confrontations with white officers last summer in Ferguson and New York. Brinsley shot himself after the two officers were killed.
The black men's deaths triggered a wave of demonstrations against police violence in New York and other cities this fall.
The killing of Ramos and Liu has become a rallying point for police forces beleaguered by months of criticism.
The head of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association police union, Patrick Lynch, has said the mayor had the officers' blood on his hands.
Police Commissioner William Bratton has said some of the tension is due to labor negotiations between the city and police unions.
Police Academy graduates salute at end of ceremony.
The national conversation on racial tensions and police mistrust "should make us optimistic," he said
Jack Linshi
President Obama believes the racial tensions over the police shootings of unarmed black Americans have “surfaced in a way that probably is healthy,” he said in a recent interviewwith NPR.
“I think that the fact that there’s a conversation about [racial divides and police mistrust], and that there are tools out there that we know can make a difference in bridging those gaps of understanding and mistrust, should make us optimistic,” Obama said in the interview, which was released Monday, but recorded before the Obama family left for their Hawaii vacation.
Protests against police racial profiling have rocked the nation following two high profile grand juries returning non-indictments for the white police officers who had killed Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., both unarmed black men.
Last week, two NYPD officers were killed in an ambush by a civilian, an event which spurred additional dialogue regarding communities’mistrust of police.
Obama also drew attention to the rise in cellphone use to document and hold police accountable for their actions, referring to the cellphone video that showed Garner in a chokehold. He added that while the Garner and Brown cases have exposed racial tensions, he believes Americans’ day-to-day interactions are less racially divided today than in years past.
“It’s understandable the polls might say, you know, that race relations have gotten worse — because when it’s in the news and you see something like Ferguson or the Garner case in New York, then it attracts attention,” he said. “But I assure you, from the perspective of African-Americans or Latinos in poor communities who have been dealing with this all their lives, they wouldn’t suggest somehow that it’s worse now than it was 10, 15 or 20 years ago.”
Argentina's President Adopts Boy to End Werewolf Curse
Argentina's President Christina Fernández de Kirchner had a "magical moment" last week when she ended a young man's werewolf curse — that is, if you believe South American folklore.
Kirchner shared photos from a Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony on her blog, and described "adopting" a young man named Yair Tawil. He is the seventh son of his family, and because of that, was supposedly cursed to become a werewolf on every full moon after his 13th birthday — unless he is adopted by another family. According to legend, seventh daughters become witches.
Enter Argentina's presidents, who since 1907 have been adopting — symbolically, anyway — seventh children so that their families can avoid the superstitious stigma of having a "cursed" child. The practice has traditionally involved Catholic children, but that was changed by presidential decree in 2009.
Under Argentine law, seventh children adopted by the president receive a gold medal and an education scholarship until they turn 21. Last Tuesday's ritual was the first time someone of the Jewish faith was adopted by a president. Yair's parents, Shlomo and Nehama Tawil, had first written a letter asking that their seventh son be adopted in 1993, when he was born, reported the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
In a series of tweets, Kirchner called the ceremony "magical" and the Tawils a "marvelous family."
One is convinced that scripture, doctrine and tradition are supreme.
The other is convinced that acts of love arising from mercy, compassion and forgiveness are supreme.
I suppose most people find themselves in one camp or the other as a result of genetics, conditioning, "cultural momentum" and perceived fidelity to "common sense."
I understand why people put love, mercy and compassion first.
After all, embodied acts of love are self-evidently good.
But I do not understand the "other camp" which believes in the supremacy of scripture, doctrine and tradition. All these "things" are human constructs with roots no deeper than the onset of Judeo-Christianity 3500 years ago.
I say to myself:
Perhaps the people who believe in primacy of The Word -- rather than primacy of The Word Made Flesh -- have never asked themselves, "Why do I believe that The Word is superior to The Incarnation of Love?"
At minimum, those who reside in "The Word Camp" might admit a kind of dynamic equilibrium with certain people leaning in one direction and the rest in the other.
Instead, people who value The Abstract Word more than The Incarnation of Love appear to be under compulsion.
Their worlds would seemingly fall apart if they were not absolutely invested in Scripture - and the other documents which ostensibly derive from Scripture.
Revealingly, this absolute need to champion "The One and Only Truth" does not apply "the other way around."
Rather, those who love The Incarnation even more thanThe Word are typically eager for embrace the heterodox as well as the orthodox.
Those who ultimately believe in The Word are almost always eager for huge swathes of humankind to spend eternity in a lake of unquenchable fire. Islam? God damn them all!
The relative roles of punitive justice and forgiving mercy correspond neatly to the "two camps." Punishment is foundational to those who value The Word, whereas indulgent mercy is cornerstone for those who value The Incarnation of The Word --- "The Word made Flesh."
"There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love."
Notably, those who believe in the primacy of Love Incarnate -- Love Enfleshed -- have no trouble with people who devote their lives to Texts and other manifestations of The Word.
However, the fact that this is not a "two-way" street leaves me with the distinct impression that rigid textualists are subtly (but colossally) egotistical people, determined to protect their man-made systems even though the cause of Love is damaged by that very determination.
My Correspondence With A Christian Fundamentalist: "The Best... Becomes Evil"
By conceiving Yeshua (the observant Jew) as Embodied Love, Pope Francis acknowledges that all Loving Goodness participates in The Incarnation, enriching the world with Love, manifesting The Will and The Presence of God among us -- in effect, making God real as members of The Mystical Body.
"Aquinas, St. Symeon The New Theologian And Their Spiritual Kin"
In the 9th chapter of Mark's Gospel (the oldest to the four canonical gospels) is an episode that occurs shortly after the apostles discover their inability to cast out a demon.
Pondering their impotence, Jesus assures his disciples: “He who is not against you, is for you.”
Mark 9 37-39
John answered him, saying: Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, who followeth not us, and we forbade him. But Jesus said: Do not forbid him. For there is no man that doth a miracle in my name, and can soon speak ill of me. For he that is not against you, is for you.
When Jesus' Nature as The Embodiment of Love is viewed against the Gospel assurance that “God is Love,” the practice of Christianity is no longer constrained by doctrinal orthodoxy even though orthodox practice is a Great Good for millions of practitioners.
To identify Jesus as Embodied Love recognizes that the nature of Christ is realized in every human being who embodies love, however imperfectly.
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”
"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton
When rigid sectarians ponder the identification of Jesus with Embodied Love, they double down on their determination to “play church” - like students who never “grow in understanding” but get quite good at “playing school” where they consistently score at "the top of their class."
“”He's not playing by the rules!” the punctilious gripe. “He's not even on our team?”
God-Love is not concerned with the exclusivity of “teams” any more than Peace is concerned with the deadly antagonism between Crips and Bloods (or crusaders and jihadists).
Yeshua Excoriates Fellow Pharisees: "The Woe Passages"
Among these paradoxes is the exquisitely inconvenient truth that belligerent sectarianism is an affront to "God who is Love” and whose Son taught us to “Love our enemies, to do good to those who persecute us.”
On this glorious Blue Marble where prophets have foretold the "coming of the kingdom," God-Love is only concerned with the ongoing Incarnation and the actual works of mercy, forgiveness and compassion that build up "the kingdom."
If The Texts help, great! If they don't, they weren't needed.
"The Pharisees saw this and asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
When Jesus heard that, he said, “Healthy people don’t need a physician, but sick people do.
Go and learn what this means: ‘I want mercy and not sacrifice,’because I did not come to call righteous people, but sinners.”
Matthew 9:11-13
"Who Were The Tax Collectors And Shepherds In Jesus' Time"
As the great Jesuit Paul Byron homilized (from the altar of my North Carolina parish): “I have no doubt that our Buddhist brothers and sisters are doing the work of Christ.”
Paul understood Tertullian well: "The soul is by nature Christian."
"The Soul Is By Nature Christian." "Anima naturaliter christiana."Tertullian
Since “the soul is by nature Christian,” participation in our existential nature is – to a greater or lesser extent – inherent.
Often, goodness is an effusion of what is deepest in our nature, independent of sectarian affiliation. (And just as often, sectarian affiliation obstructs what is deepest in our nature.)
Although humans can either “stumble upon” or “consciously access” their Christian Nature, participation in the fullness of Being always coincides with “perspective and proportion” whether these inter-related qualiites manifest spontaneously or by deliberation.
Aquinas observed that “perspective and proportion” are fundamental to Reason and Morality.
"Shark Attacks Rise Worldwide: Risk Assessment And Aquinas' Criteria For Sin"
Notably, the world's “First True Scientist,” an Islamic Egyptian named “Alhazen", set forth the rules of visual perspective nearly half a millennium before Renaissance Europeans “discovered” these same principles.
Ibn al-Haytham, "Alhazen,""The First True Scientist," Trailblazes "Perspective"
Currently, Pope Francis is implementing the theological equivalent of "full visual perspective," propagating the multi-dimensional realization that Jesus is properly identified as Embodied Love - and by virtue of this identification everyone who embodies love – however imperfectly – enriches The Incarnation by doing the work of God-Love.
With this identification, Francis has taken Christianity's sectarian, uni-dimensional vision of Love and given it breath, depth and all conceivable space.
Lacking this multi-dimensional experience of Yeshua, here is how heretofore sand-blind Christian experience played out:
I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said "Stop! Don't do it!""Why shouldn't I?" he said. "Well, there's so much to live for!""Like what?""Well... are you religious?" He said yes. I said, "Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?""Christian.""Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant ? "Protestant.""Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?""Baptist""Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?""Baptist Church of God!""Me too! Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you reformed Baptist Church of God?""Reformed Baptist Church of God!""Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915?" He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915!" I said, "Die, heretic scum", and pushed him off.
Emo Philips
Like Teilhard de Chardin before him, Frances is announcing the arrival of The Cosmic Christ, who in St. Paul's world-view, would put an end to the groaning and travail of "the whole Creation's birth."
"All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs." Romans 8:22 The Message
Alan: Jesus made no reference to homosexuality or abortion, a peculiar “oversight” for an individual who, according to Christian orthodoxy, participated in the omniscient nature of God. Did Yeshua fail to see that homosexuality and abortion would become the signal red button issues of post-Modern Christianity?
In light of this perceived importance, why did he not provide specific guidance?
On the other hand, Jesus did say: “Love your enemies. Do good to those who persecute you.”
(He also said: “Judge not lest you be judged.”)
Literalists!
It's your move!
***
"Love Your Enemies. Do Good To Those Who Hate You," Luke 6: 27-42
Erick Erickson built his career stoking populist rage. But now the man who steers the Tea Party says conservative anger
has grown toxic and self-defeating.
Is The Most Powerful Conservative In America Losing His Edge?
Molly Ball
Erick Erickson—the editor in chief of RedState.com, a right-wing pundit whom Democrats loathe and Republicans fear, a man known for his intemperate remarks, and arguably the most powerful conservative in America today—eats his chicken wings with a fork and knife.
To be clear, the wings Erickson ordered when I visited him in Macon, Georgia, last May were boneless wings, which are really glorified chicken nuggets. Erickson, a fastidious man who dislikes getting his hands messy with finger food, apologized for not taking me to a more authentic local restaurant—“one of Macon’s meat-and-three places” (where you get a choice of three sides to go with a serving of meat). But he had promised his 5-year-old son, Gunnar, a serving of the smiley-face fries at the Wild Wing Cafe. So there we were, at a beer-and-wings chain in a characterless exurban mall. “Father, we ask you to bless this meal,” Erickson said, elbows propped on the table, hands clenched, head bowed as we prepared to dig in.
Over the past decade, Erickson, who is 39, has emerged as a driving force behind the Tea Party. In addition to serving as RedState’s editor, he is a paid contributor to Fox News, a syndicated newspaper columnist, and the drive-time host on Atlanta-based WSB, the nation’s fourth-largest talk-radio station. He was a CNN contributor from 2010 to 2013, and he occasionally guest-hosts Rush Limbaugh’s syndicated radio show. Limbaugh, in turn, often cites RedState.
When I visited Erickson in Macon, he welcomed me into his home and showed me around his city. A chubby, neatly dressed man of medium height, he has spiky strawberry-blond hair, narrow eyes, and a grin that scrunches up his broad face. He was an easy conversationalist, jovial and unguarded, with an eagerness to put others at ease that helped explain why so many people spend hours in their cars listening to him. Above all, he was polite.
Which was interesting, because Erickson is famous for saying things that are not polite. There was the time, in 2009, when he called retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter a “goat fucking child molester.” During the Occupy protests, he said his heart was gladdened by “watching a hippie protester get Tased.” He nicknamed Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator, “Abortion Barbie.” And in a blog post considering whether President Obama was “shagging hookers,” he called Michelle Obama a “marxist harpy” who “would go Lorena Bobbit [sic] on him should he even think about it.” (The press, Erickson wrote, wouldn’t care: Obama “could be a serial killing transvestite and the media would turn a blind eye.”)
His attacks sting most when aimed, as they often are, at fellow Republicans he sees as too ready to compromise. In 2009, for example, he claimed that then–Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had “lost his testicles” and called on his readers to send the senator “balls.” Erickson later reported that more than 100 toy balls had been sent to the senator’s office using the Amazon link he’d provided.
“Nationally, people think of me as a Tea Party person, and I am,” Erickson told me. “But in Georgia, the Tea Party can’t stand me.” The local movement, he explained, is dominated by libertarian followers of former Congressman Ron Paul, and Erickson has opposed many of its chosen candidates. Erickson’s conservatism is of a more traditional bent, deeply informed by his evangelical faith. He believes Republicans must not yield in pursuit of small government, strong national defense, and the primacy of the traditional family.
Erickson sounded almost gleeful as he told me about the Tea Party hating him. He seems to delight in confounding expectations, and in almost every way, he refuses to be pigeonholed: he is a southerner who defines himself by his small-town sensibility, but he spent most of his childhood in Dubai. He speaks for the conservative grass roots, but he pals around with cable-news regulars and Beltway elites. He’s a strict no-compromises ideologue, but during his one foray into elected office, he was a model of bipartisan cooperation.
Erickson dismisses criticism of his vulgar taunts as pearl-clutching by politically correct prigs with no sense of humor. (Offensive as some of his comments may be, he makes them in a tone of mockery, not spit-flying rage.) But he also has grown more reflective in the past year, at times even calling out his own readers and listeners for their excesses. In August, he wrote, “I increasingly find conflict between my faith and some conservative discourse.” He cited the right-wing furor over undocumented minors, Ebola, and the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Shortly after I visited him in Georgia, he announced that he had been accepted to the Reformed Theological Seminary in Atlanta, to pursue—part-time, between radio broadcasts—a master’s degree in biblical studies.
He told me about a man who had come up to him to rant about immigrants ruining schools and neighborhoods. “I’m like, ‘Why are you so angry?’ ” He thinks conservatives suffer from a persecution complex. “I hear it in radio. I see it in comments at RedState and in e-mail and on Twitter. When you as a conservative go out there and pound your fist on the table and say, ‘They’re coming to get me,’ who wants to say, ‘Yeah, I’m coming to your side’? I mean, be happy!”
Don’t you get angry?, I asked. Well, sure, he said: at Republicans, for not keeping their promises; at the president, for not doing his job; at the political system. But he explained that he was pointing to something more pervasive. “What I mean is that conservatives are in a constant state of hair-on-fire, yelling anger,” he said—a toxic mind-set that prevents them from seeing straight. “That anger has spread outside the normal bounds of political issues into everything” from the food they eat to the movies they watch.
This didn’t sound anything like the Erick Erickson people think of as Limbaugh Lite, and some have begun to wonder whether he has changed. Could he be mellowing as he nears middle age? Perhaps success—going from a little-known, unpaid blogger to a major power broker on the right—has taken some of the fire out of his belly. Maybe he’s even ready, as Republicans assume control of the Senate, to adopt a more conciliatory approach.
Don’t let his smile fool you.
Erickson broadcasts his radio show from a home studio. He works without a script and tries to create a feeling of companionship.
RedState’s mission statement, posted on the site, explicitly one-ups the famous motto of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.“RedState does not stand athwart history yelling stop,” it says. “We yell ‘ready,’ ‘aim,’ and ‘fire,’ too.”
RedState draws about a quarter of a million unique visitors a month, according to comScore—a fraction of the audience of conservative sites like Newsmax and The Daily Caller. Erickson himself is not nearly as visible a pundit as, say, Ann Coulter or Karl Rove. But he may be more influential: His pronouncements can decide whether a policy lives or dies. His anointment can lift a candidate out of obscurity. Members of Congress have him on speed dial.
Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, told me he consults Erickson regularly, and the conservative faction of the House GOP looks to RedState for guidance. “A lot of times those articles actually steer the direction of members of Congress as we’re making decisions in Washington, D.C.,” Jim Bridenstine, a first-term congressman from Oklahoma, told me, citing gun background checks and immigration reform as two recent areas where many Republicans were leaning toward compromise until RedState urged them to resist.
Erickson’s influence stems from the fact that he’s not just a pundit—he’s an activist who gets involved in contentious primary battles, bestowing endorsements that draw attention and cash to little-known candidates. In 2009, he came out for Marco Rubio in Florida’s Senate race when the former state legislator was polling nearly 50 points behind and the whole GOP apparatus was backing Charlie Crist, the former governor who has since switched parties. More endorsements for Rubio followed, including from the deep-pocketed Senate Conservatives Fund and the Club for Growth, and Crist dropped out of the primary to run as an independent. Rubio ended up winning the general election by 19 points.
Other conservative challengers who benefited from Erickson’s endorsements in the 2010 cycle include Mike Lee, who took down Bob Bennett, a three-term Republican senator from Utah, and Rand Paul, who ran in the Kentucky Senate primary against Mitch McConnell’s preferred candidate, Trey Grayson.
A South Carolina state lawmaker named Nikki Haley was considered a long shot for the 2010 gubernatorial nomination when she caught Erickson’s fancy with her conservative zeal. For 10 days straight, RedState featured her on its front page, urging readers to donate. Haley gained momentum, and a late endorsement from Sarah Palin helped catapult her to the top of the field. “RedState was there in the very beginning,” Haley, who considers Erickson a “dear friend,” told me. “I was ‘Nikki who?’ ” Haley was just reelected to a second term as South Carolina’s governor, and has been on the longer lists of potential 2016 vice-presidential nominees.
Ted Cruz came from 3 percent in the polls and a three-to-one cash disadvantage to win his 2012 Senate primary in Texas, thanks in part to Erickson’s boosting. Cruz has attended every one of RedState’s annual “Gatherings” since they began in 2009. Cruz and Erickson have become friends, and Erickson has said Cruz is as great as “all the Beatles in one person” and called him “the leader of the conservative movement.” (Cruz returns the favor. “RedState gives people a voice,” he told me.)
As Erickson sees it, the conservative movement and the Republican Party are two different things, and the former is more important. For 50 years, the conservative movement has alternately abetted and tormented the Republican Party. It has provided an intellectual framework and activist passion to the GOP, but—from the John Birch Society of the 1960s to the Tea Party of today—it has trained its fire just as often within the party as without, fueling primary battles and a spirit of with-us-or-against-us absolutism. Sometimes it has even won, as with the nomination of Barry Goldwater, which did not go so well, and that of Ronald Reagan (although some conservatives began complaining about Reagan almost immediately after he was elected). Party mandarins have long regarded those on the far right as useful idiots who helped win elections but could not be allowed near the levers of power.
In the Goldwater era, the conservatives communicated through newsletters and direct mail. With the Internet, they gained a megaphone and a better way to talk to one another. RedState was founded just before the 2004 Republican convention, by four young conservatives who saw a need for an analogue on the right to the left-wing blogs, like Daily Kos, that were upending the Democratic Party. “There were a lot of good writers with a lot to say on the right, but the left had a dominant hold on the format,” recalls Ben Domenech, one of RedState’s co‑founders, who is now the publisher of an online magazine called The Federalist. Like Daily Kos, RedState was a site where anyone could author a post.
Almost immediately, Erickson became one of RedState’s stars. Blogging for free while he practiced law in Macon, he began drawing more traffic and responses than the site’s founders. He had a conversational style and a penchant for provocation. Most of all, Domenech says, he wrote what a lot of people were thinking but didn’t see reflected in normal political discourse. “Erickson is your conservative father-in-law at the Thanksgiving table,” Domenech told me.
An early success came in October 2005, after George W. Bush nominated his own lawyer, White House Counsel Harriet Miers, to succeed Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court. Bush had enjoyed reliable support from right-wing media outlets like Fox News and National Review. After his reelection, less than a year earlier, he had announced, “I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” There was little reason to believe the nomination would run into serious trouble.
But trouble came fast. Erickson was among Miers’s earliest and loudest critics. From his point of view, conservatives had worked hard for Bush’s reelection—he himself had been a volunteer lawyer for the campaign—and in return they expected Bush to nominate a conservative heavyweight like the recently appointed John Roberts. Miers, Erickson believed, was both ideologically suspect and lacking in credentials. “This is a profoundly disappointing nomination, a missed opportunity, and an abdication of responsibility to make sound, well qualified nominations,” RedState proclaimed on October 3, the day the nomination was announced.
Erickson dug up dirt on Miers—such as the fact that she had donated to Al Gore’s 1988 presidential campaign—that helped persuade better-known conservatives, like Limbaugh and Coulter, to come out against the nomination too. The backlash “baffled” members of the Bush administration, Matt Latimer, a former Bush speechwriter, recalled recently. “They just didn’t understand how you could have a principled objection to something the administration wanted to do and still be a conservative,” he told me. “Their definition of conservative was whatever they said it was.” Erickson spoke for a GOP base that was tired of being told to fall in line. By getting Republicans elected, grass-roots conservatives, too, felt they’d amassed political capital, but Washington didn’t seem inclined to let them cash it in.
Eventually, even establishment voices on the right, such as David Brooks and writers for National Review, came to oppose Miers. Bush withdrew his nomination on October 27. It was the beginning of a split that would come to define Bush’s second term and dominate the Republican Party into the Obama era: the revolt of the conservative grass roots against the party establishment.
Erickson kept a menu, signed by Dick Cheney and others, from a lunch he attended at the vice president's residence. "Who'd have guessed some random guy in Macon could get to do all this stuff?" he says.
Erickson was born near Jackson, Louisiana, but when he was 5 his family moved to Dubai, where Conoco sent his father, a production foreman, to work on oil platforms in the Persian Gulf. The family didn’t move back to the United States until Erickson was 15. His father worked offshore for seven days at a time, returning for seven days before leaving again. “It would be the second or third day before he got out of bed,” Erickson recalled. Perhaps in reaction to his own father’s absence, Erickson is an involved dad to his two children. His wife, Christy, stopped working a few years ago due to fragile health (she has respiratory problems and a genetic disorder that causes blood clots), and she was resting most of the day I visited. Erickson and I spent the afternoon entertaining Gunnar and picking up Evelyn, who is 9, from school.
Growing up abroad, Erickson developed a more worldly perspective than many give him credit for. “It is super easy for people to caricature him as some knuckle-dragging southern God-squad know-nothing,” a Republican consultant who has worked with Erickson told me. “But this guy ain’t that at all.” To satisfy visa requirements, the family traveled every six months to Europe or Asia. His parents weren’t particularly political, but they were conservative as a matter of course. At one point in his early childhood, a shipping crate full of books got delayed, and for bedtime stories he had nothing but National Review and Southern Living for six months.
“I grew up walking through a high gate into my school, with a guard who would make me remove my sandwich from my lunch bag to inspect it for explosives,” Erickson told me. Terrorist threats were a repeat occurrence; an explosion once shook the ground. “We could see the smoke on the horizon because the Iranians were blowing up oil platforms near where my dad worked.” (This was during the Iran-Iraq War.) As the Ericksons saw it, the American military—and President Reagan—were the only things standing between them and chaos.
Spending so much of his childhood overseas also made him an outsider to American racial dynamics, Erickson says. He claims that, unlike Americans who grew up here, he lacks an intuitive understanding of racial politics. It’s a slightly absurd claim, reminiscent of the parodic color-blindness of Stephen Colbert (“I don’t see race!”), but, unlike some others in talk radio—Limbaugh, for instance—Erickson does not pepper his show with racial provocations. As we drove to get Evelyn from her private Christian day school, where acres of neatly trimmed sports fields gleamed in the sunshine, he told me, with a sad shake of his head, that he believed only time, not government intervention, could heal America’s racial wounds.
When Erickson returned to Louisiana for high school, he was, he says, a “nerd,” unathletic and obsessed with politics. After graduating, he moved to Macon to attend Mercer University and stayed there for law school, figuring he would wind up in D.C. working on Capitol Hill. Instead he got a job with a firm in Macon and married Christy, who made it clear she had no desire to live in the big city—meaning Atlanta.
While practicing law, Erickson developed a sideline as a campaign manager and consultant in local elections. When RedState came along in the summer of 2004, Erickson said, “I was a bored lawyer doing politics in Macon, Georgia, so I e‑mailed them.” The mainstream media couldn’t get enough of the new “political blog” craze, and there was a dearth of conservative voices. Just a few months later, MSNBC flew Erickson to Secaucus, New Jersey, to be the token conservative blogger contributing to its election coverage.
By the time of the Miers nomination, Erickson knew there were people in the White House reading RedState—some of them were sources who fed him intel on Miers. But the blog was not widely known; many publications still put blogger in quotation marks or spelled out blog as web log. I wondered how he got the nerve to make thunderous, this-shall-not-stand pronouncements from his obscure perch. What made him feel he had the standing to tell the president what to do?
To Erickson, the question didn’t make sense. “I was just a guy in Georgia writing what I thought,” he said. “If they didn’t like my opinion, they didn’t have to take it. But I was writing for people at RedState, not the White House.” From his readers’ reactions and the growth of the site, he knew a lot of people out there shared his views.
Erickson and his wife, Christy, at home with their children, 9-year-old Evelyn and 5-year-old Gunnar
In his gray Chevy Tahoe, Erickson gave me a tour of his neighborhood, a tony community of custom homes just this side of McMansions. Macon is dense with churches, and we drove past one whose marquee referred to the week’s primaries: vote for those who will seek wisdom from god.
“This is all new in the last five or six years,” Erickson told me. He moved here from closer to downtown a few years ago, and says he misses the character of the city. But a formerly friendly neighbor had turned hostile after Keith Olbermann declared Erickson “the worst person in the world.” The neighbor, Erickson said, would glare at him from behind his lawn mower, shouting, “How many people did you and Dick Cheney kill today?”
“Generally, the right gets mad at me more than the left,” Erickson told me. “But the worst stuff, the angry-death-threat-level stuff, that tends to come from the left.” The hate mail was relatively mild until Erickson became a CNN contributor in 2010. “That’s when I first got someone saying they were going to tie me up, cut off my eyelids, and rape and murder my wife.” In 2012, a SWAT team was called to Erickson’s house by a harasser claiming it was the site of a violent crime, a dangerous practice known as “swatting.”
Though the Sarah Palin–Ted Cruz wing of the GOP loves him, Erickson has few fans in the Republican establishment. One Washington-based operative, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid provoking Erickson, described him as a “true believer” and a bully who had become “drunk with power.” This operative and other Republicans believe Erickson’s hectoring has helped lead the party into self-destructive crusades.
“He’s part of a very small cabal of people who guided the shutdown,” another D.C. consultant told me. In September 2013, Erickson directed readers to call their senators and urge them to “stand with Cruz” in the push to defund the Affordable Care Act. When the government shutdown followed, in early October, Erickson cheered it, insisting that Republicans were winning and urging the party’s lawmakers to hold their ground.
Erickson especially enjoys needling Mitch McConnell, whom he regards as spineless and ineffective, “a cancer on the Senate Republican caucus,” “emblematic of all that is wrong with Washington, D.C.,” and “a complete and miserable … er … mitch-erable failure.” McConnell loyalists regard Erickson as a major obstacle. “He and others have turned compromise into a dirty word,” Billy Piper, a lobbyist who served as McConnell’s chief of staff until 2011, told me. “He has worked to foster an environment that demonizes that effort in such a way that some members operate on the basis of fear.”
Erickson is unmoved by such criticism. “These guys who think I am a bully are used to a certain Beltway etiquette and hate to be held accountable,” he told me. Nor does he apologize for his opposition to compromise, citing the maxim—attributed, apocryphally, to the former Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen—that there are two parties in Washington, the stupid party and the evil party, who occasionally get together and do something both stupid and evil, and this is called bipartisanship.
But Erickson’s experience in local politics tells a different story. In 2007, Erickson ran for a seat on the Macon city council. Through his consulting work on local races, he was simultaneously helping other members of the council—several of them Democrats—get elected. In part because he was so well connected, Erickson ran unopposed.
Also running that year was Larry Schlesinger, a Democrat and rabbi who was seeking an at-large council seat. Schlesinger had seen Erickson speak at a local Rotary Club meeting; he sought Erickson’s advice when he decided to enter the race, and continued to consult him after getting elected. “I basically didn’t do anything without speaking to Erick first,” Schlesinger told me.
Macon, a former railroad hub, has a population of about 200,000, roughly split between an economically depressed, largely African American inner city and predominantly white suburbs and exurbs. By the time Erickson took his seat, the city council had long been riven by racial, partisan, and personality conflicts. “It was perceived as a circus,” Schlesinger said.
Erickson’s main project on the council was cleaning up the Asian massage parlors that operated as fronts for prostitution and human trafficking in Macon’s downtown. Police raids didn’t work: the women working in the parlors either didn’t speak English or were afraid to talk to the cops. Erickson sought new regulations to drive out the illegitimate massage businesses without burdening the legal ones by, for example, requiring them to keep a log of visitors.
Some of the massage parlors had African American landlords, and Erickson was accused of trying to hurt black business owners. He enlisted an ally to reach out to black churches, asking them to help fight sin in their communities. After three years, his regulatory scheme passed, and for the most part, it has been a success.
Schlesinger described Erickson as a constructive force in city hall, someone who would say what was on everyone’s minds and call out the professional politicians on their posturing. Although Erickson was one of just two Republicans, he wasn’t perpetually at odds with his fellow members. The council passed budgets without tax increases, privatized the operation of the local airport and train station, started a campaign to tear down abandoned properties, and devoted new funding to after-school programs. Erickson’s biggest failure, as he saw it, was not convincing his fellow members to sell off the city-owned golf course. For the most part, he said, “it was an interesting exercise in coalition building.”
The irony is not lost on Erickson: “Yeah, I know, the free-market Republican who ran for office and started passing regulations to put all these businesses out of business,” he told me, chuckling. But he believes more government functions should be performed by local bodies rather than by an overreaching federal bureaucracy, and he does not consider local government an inherently partisan endeavor. (“There’s not a partisan position on trash collection,” he said.)
When I pressed him on whether his zeal for regulation while on the city council was at odds with his less-government philosophy, he said he believed human trafficking was a problem that government should have a role in solving. “I’m not a libertarian,” he said. Even small-government absolutists, after all, can agree that sexual slavery ought to be prevented.
Erickson presents a portrait to Rick Perry at the annual Red State "Gathering" in August.
A little before 5 o’clock, Erickson strapped in for the evening’s radio show, putting on headphones and pulling his chair up to the microphone. He broadcasts from a home studio decorated with paintings by Steve Penley, a Georgia-based artist beloved by conservatives for his impressionist-style renderings of patriotic subjects. Erickson has one of Lincoln and one of the American flag. RedState T‑shirts spilled out of a box on the floor; a bookshelf held volumes by Haley and Coulter.
He works without a script, riffing for short bursts and pausing for traffic and weather reports—he does some of the latter himself. He tries to create a feeling of companionship. “This is the advice Rush gave me when I was first thinking about doing radio,” Erickson told me: “Your job is to entertain people and be their friend in their car.”
During the January 2014 snowstorm that paralyzed Atlanta, trapping commuters in their cars overnight, Erickson stayed on from 4 p.m. to 4:30 a.m., minus a two-hour break when he contributed to Fox News’s online State of the Union coverage. “At 2:30 in the morning, I sent my call screener home. I said, ‘Just fill up the board with calls, and I’ll take as many as I can. I’ll just keep talking until I can’t talk anymore.’ ”
Hearing a cue in his headphones, Erickson swiveled away from me to face his giant iMac, whose screen was crowded with Doppler weather projections and chats with his producers in Atlanta. He started his radio career while still on the city council, filling in at the local AM station, WMAC, and for his friend Herman Cain on WSB. He also became a CNN contributor. The media obligations began to compete with city hall for his time, and The Telegraph, Macon’s newspaper, noted that he had missed nearly half of 2010’s council meetings. In January 2011, Cain prepared to leave WSB to explore a presidential run, and Erickson was offered his spot, contingent on quitting the city council. He took the job.
When CNN first announced him as a contributor, in March 2010, liberals were not thrilled. The progressive Web site AlterNet dubbed Erickson “the new CNN go-to bigot, misogynist and homophobe” and speculated that the network “needed an angry old white guy to fill out their lineup” after the departures of Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs. TheBoston Globe ran an editorial criticizing the introduction of “one more screamer on cable.” In early April, when Erickson was just a few weeks into his new gig, then–White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about Erickson’s statement that he planned to pull out his wife’s shotgun if a census worker came to their house. “It should concern CNN,” Gibbs said. (Erickson made the comment on talk radio, not CNN.)
Paul Begala, the Bill Clinton strategist turned Democratic analyst, first encountered Erickson early in 2010, when they were on CNN together and Erickson disparaged the memory of the recently deceased Senator Edward Kennedy, saying Democrats wouldn’t have lost his Senate seat if Kennedy had resigned when he learned he had brain cancer instead of trying to be a “martyr.”
“I got very, very upset,” Begala recalled recently. “I lit into him.” Begala told the CNN brass he would no longer appear on the air with Erickson. But in the run-up to the 2012 primaries, the men got to know each other while riding around Iowa on the CNN campaign bus, and they became friends. “I realized we needed his perspective,” Begala told me. He came to respect Erickson as a man with the courage of his convictions—unlike Rush Limbaugh, whom he regards as poisonous—and someone who could channel the views of conservative America. And, Begala added, “I love that he serves bourbon at his Bible study.”
Erickson left CNN for Fox News in 2013. He regretted how often CNN had to defend its decision to put him on the air. “I liked to think of myself as job security for the public relations department,” he wrote at RedState the day of his departure. “About the only thing the far right and far left could agree on was that I did not belong at CNN.”
But Erickson also wrote that he had forged unlikely friendships at CNN, with liberal commentators like Begala, James Carville, and Donna Brazile. “I’ve learned that some of the people I grew up thinking were in the enemy’s camp, so to speak, are spectacular people who share many of the same interests and opinions I do,” he wrote. “Because of CNN I’m not just better at my job, but I’m a better person.”
Reflections like these have prompted some to ask whether Erickson has gone soft. The day before my visit to Macon, Mitch McConnell had defeated his conservative primary challenger in Kentucky, Matt Bevin, whom Erickson had supported, and Erickson had announced that he’d sent McConnell a check. Erickson’s inbox filled up with e‑mails calling him a traitor. But Erickson—perhaps stung by the criticism from establishment Republicans that he’s interested only in hurting the party—wanted to demonstrate solidarity against the Democrats. He also wanted to point out a double standard: moderate Republicans expect conservatives to rally behind them come November, but, he believes, when conservatives win primaries, the establishment abandons them.
Still, it was a surprising move considering his longtime antagonism toward McConnell, I noted. With a laugh, Erickson agreed. He explained that he supports conservatives—period. In the primary, the conservative choice had been Bevin, but in the general election (in which McConnell eventually defeated his Democratic opponent and became the Senate majority leader) it was McConnell. It was a logical but uncharacteristic gesture that naturally made one wonder whether he was becoming more pragmatic in other ways, too.
Erickson’s authority has always come from his status as an outsider to the Washington political class. But these days, he has better access to certain politicians than the K Street lobbyists do, and allies like Cruz often seem to wield more power than the GOP’s nominal leaders. Erickson began charging for speaking gigs through an agency this year. He has been known to ride the Acela. Isn’t he turning into one of them?, I asked.
He worries about this—he claims he has turned down “bigger platforms and better jobs” in New York and Washington because he wants to keep his family and his sensibility grounded in Georgia. He has also told the radio station that when Gunnar starts Little League next year, he will need a new time slot.
He knows he has a tendency to get worked up and take things too far. He regrets calling Souter a child molester—he apologized for the comment back in 2009 and still considers it his biggest mistake. “At times, I need to do better,” he told me. But he is of two minds about this, because he also refuses to kowtow to the perpetual-outrage machine of modern politics, and he suspects that many of his critics only pretend to be offended in order to discredit him. “I could say the sky is blue and someone somewhere would get mad,” he said.
He also told me he has matured under the public eye. “If you read my more recent stuff, as opposed to my older stuff, I’ve grown up,” he said. During the Ferguson protests in August, he wrote a sensitive and outraged blog post titled “Must We Have a Dead White Kid?” decrying police-state tactics. “Given what happened in Ferguson, the community had every right to be angry,” he wrote. “Just because Michael Brown may not look like you should not immediately serve as an excuse to ignore the issues involved.” Many RedState commenters objected, insisting that Brown was a lawbreaker who got what he deserved.
“A lot of conservatives are now where liberals were after 2004—hysterically angry about things they have no business being angry about,” Erickson told me. “I think if you believe in a heaven, a hell, a savior who died and rose again, and a last day on which you’ll win because he wins, you probably should spend a lot less time getting worked up over the temporary politics of the here and now.”
I asked him about his increased focus on religion. What was he searching for? Erickson said he felt “called” to learn more about the faith that forms the backbone of his world view. “Some of my most-read posts involve faith,” he said. “At some point, I just accepted that I have a ministry, even if I never get in a pulpit.”
He says that, and then he goes right on throwing stones. In September, while substituting for Limbaugh, Erickson opined on the radio that minimum-wage workers didn’t warrant sympathy, because they were mostly either high-schoolers or people who deserved to be where they were. “If you’re a 30-something-year-old person and you’re making minimum wage, you’ve probably failed at life,” he said. The week before that comment, Erickson had begun his seminary courses.
In November, when Republicans won the midterm elections in a landslide, Erickson was jubilant. He stayed up all night talking on the radio (5 p.m. to 2:30 a.m.), appearing on Fox (on and off from 4:30 a.m. to 7 a.m.), sending celebratory tweets (“Remember Republicans, tears are just water so no calories. Feast on the tears of Democrats tonight with no guilt”), and dealing with RedState glitches—an influx of traffic kept crashing the site.
But despite this display of GOP fellow feeling, Erickson remained suspicious of the party leaders. The next morning, having yet to sleep, he convened a conference call with more than 1,000 RedState diehards.
“The Republican establishment made it very clear that they hate conservatives this year,” he proclaimed. “I am willing to declare a truce with the Republican establishment so that we can sit back and have a glass of bourbon together and watch the Democrats tear each other apart.” But, he said, he was not going to “stand idly by” and watch the party roll over on social issues and the fight for smaller government.
Many observers have chalked up Republicans’ success in the midterms to their having kept the Tea Party in check. The establishment spent tens of millions beating back intraparty challenges, and not a single incumbent GOP senator lost a primary, for the first time since 2008. In his RedState posts, Erickson has argued against the idea that the Tea Party is on the ropes: “I do not expect to have to win every one of the races, but then the brilliance of this effort is that the establishment must win them all and we don’t have to.” Just as terrorists don’t have to blow up every bus to have the intended effect (my metaphor, not Erickson’s), conservatives don’t need to overthrow every incumbent in order to move the GOP’s agenda to the right.
Erickson worries that in 2016, party elites will again try to anoint a Romneyesque milquetoast whose lack of ideological fervor kills the base’s enthusiasm. “I never cease to be amazed at the stupidity of the people running the party,” he told me. But he said he could see himself supporting any of the potential contenders—even Jeb Bush or Chris Christie, whom most conservatives view with skepticism. Many of the possible nominees, he noted, got elected to their current positions with RedState’s help: Rick Perry, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, Rand Paul. “I don’t have a favorite. I like them all, for various reasons,” he said. “Wow. That’s the first time I’ve ever been able to say that.” I asked him whether it spoke to the success of his movement that there was no one in the field he would consider unacceptable—provided, of course, that Romney does not run again. “I kind of think it does,” he said.
When I caught up with Erickson two days after the midterms, he was about to depart with Evelyn for a father-daughter trip to New York City. He was scheduled to appear on Fox’s Outnumbered—the network’s answer to The View, on which a panel of female pundits spar with a rotating male foil. Evelyn, who has an interest in theater and music, was excited to tour Fox’s makeup and wardrobe facilities, and to check out a fabric store that had been recommended by one of Erickson’s friends: Jane Hamsher, the blogger behind the archliberal Firedoglake. “Not a lot of people know that we’re friends,” Erickson said of Hamsher. “Often we hate the same people.” Erickson was wary of the conciliatory posturing of McConnell’s new Republican majority. McConnell and John Boehner, the speaker of the House, were talking about taking a bold stand against gridlock by passing things like corporate-tax reform and free-trade agreements. Erickson scoffed at those as priorities of Wall Street and the donor class, not the conservative voters who’d just given Republicans a mandate—as he saw it, a mandate not to usher in a new bipartisan era but to “resist the president.”
Erickson agreed with many of his conservative colleagues that finding creative ways to undermine the Affordable Care Act should be a top priority for the new Congress. Above all, he thought Republicans ought to undertake investigations—of the IRS, of Benghazi, of the “Fast and Furious” firearms scandal. His message to conservative activists, he said, was “be vigilant”—keep an eye on your newly elected Republican representatives; don’t let them sell you out.
Given his prosecutorial zeal, I asked Erickson whether he, like a lot of other conservatives, believed that Republicans should try to impeach Obama. “Oh, God, no,” he said. “Good lord, it would be insane to do that—to foist Joe Biden on the public.” His reasons were practical, political, and substantive: Obama was legitimately elected, he’d committed no provable crime, and the potential backlash—particularly among black voters—would be ruinous for Republicans. “It’s a rabbit hole,” he said, adding happily: “I get a lot of people angry at me when I say that.”
Molly Ball is a staff writer covering national politics at The Atlantic.
Last year, it was reported that a small city in China had created a texting-only lane for pedestrians. The story went viral before it was somewhat debunked—turns out the lane is in a theme park, and it's just 100 feet long—but there's a reason it got eyeballs: everybody's worried about "texting while walking," and no one knows what to do about it.
According to a 2012 Pew study, most grownups have bumped into stuff while looking at their phones, or been bumped by someone else on their phone. A Stony Brook University study in 2012 found that texting walkers were 61 percent more likely to veer off course than undistracted ones, a finding backed up by other researchers.
Greatest "hits" compilations abound on YouTube. One woman tumbled into a mall fountain, another off a pier. A man nearly collided with a roaming bear. While pride suffered most in those cases, more than 1,500 pedestrians landed in emergency rooms due to a cell-phone related distracted walking injury in 2010—a nearly 500 percent jump since 2005—according to a recent study from Ohio State University.
Jack Nasar, professor of urban planning at Ohio State University and one of the study's co-authors, said the real number of injuries could be much, much higher. "Not every pedestrian who gets injured while using a cell phone goes to an emergency room," he told Mother Jones. Some lack health insurance or (erroneously) decide their injuries aren't serious. Others will deny a phone had anything to do with their injury. "People who die from cell-phone distraction also don't show up in the emergency room numbers," says Nasar.
Of course, pedestrians aren't the only ones with their noses in their phones. According to a 2013 University of Nebraska Medical Center study, the rate of pedestrians getting hit by distracted drivers grew by about 45 percent between 2005 and 2010. The good news is that 44 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Ricohave banned texting and driving for all drivers, but the bad news is that texting and walking is potentially more dangerous and has proved harder to ban.
For one thing, local governments often define "pedestrian" quite broadly. In San Diego, anyone who chooses to "walk, sit, [or] stand in public places" is a pedestrian; so would a ban mean no more texting at the bus stop? With the endless variation in how people use their phones, and phone technology changing all the time, it's hard for lawmakers to keep up. And for some politicians, proposed bans raise "nanny-state" hackles. Utah State Rep. Craig Frank, a Republican who opposed a ban in Utah in 2012, said at the time, "I never thought the government needed to cite me for using my cell phone in a reasonable manner."
Statewide bans have failed in Arkansas, New York, and Nevada. Some cities have made progress; despite opposition from Frank and others, the Utah Transit Authority imposed a $50 civil fine for distracted walking near trains in 2012—including phone use—and it seems to be working. Rexburg, Idaho, has a ban on texting in crosswalks, and Fort Lee, New Jersey, added distracted walking to its finable violations under jaywalking. San Francisco and Oregon are using public awareness campaigns to get the word out. And some advocacy groups have created their own PSAs, like this highly dramatic one from AAA's Operation Click road-safety campaign:
Melodrama aside, the video raises the obvious question: is it really that hard for pedestrians to police themselves? A July 2014 experiment by National Geographicin Washington, D.C. set up a texting-only lane at a busy DC intersection, but found that most people just ignored the markings. And there's the rub: If walking and texting is inherently distracting, would people even notice a cell-phone-only lane, or other environmental cues? "I think there is good evidence out there that [engaging a phone after a ring or vibration] is a trained and conditioned response," says Dr. Beth Ebel, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington. She co-authored a study in 2012 that found that people texting and walking were four times less likely to look before crossing a street, or obey traffic signals or cross at the appropriate place in the road. "This compulsive nature applies to all of us," she says.
Maybe the answer lies in the phones. An app called Type n Walk lets you text while the phone's camera shows you what's in front of the phone (but doesn't work with Apple's iMessage). Another app in the works is Audio Aware, which interrupts your music if it hears screeching tires, a siren, or other street sounds. Then there's CrashAlert, a proof-of-concept developed by researchers at the University of Manitoba in 2012, which would use the front-facing camera on your phone to scan for obstacles in your path (but isn't currently in development). It's too soon to say whether these apps will take off, or how well they'd work.
For the time being, Ebel isn't advocating we abandon our phones—"We don't have to go backwards. I love my phone."—but that at the very least we have honest conversations with ourselves about our phone use and the risks we're taking. As for critics who fly the "nanny state" banner whenever texting-and-walking bans come up, Ebel says they're downplaying the danger. "From a law enforcement perspective, this is a form of impairment. It needs to be treated as such."
Additional reporting by Maddie Oatman and Brett Brownell.
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