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Click to go to article. It’s an interesting read.

Here’s the link…

From 1884

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,

‘Twould not be you, Niagara – nor you, ye limitless prairies – nor your huge

rifts of canyons, Colorado,

Nor you, Yosemite – nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyserloops

ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,

Nor Oregon’s white cones – nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes – nor

Mississippi’s stream:

This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name – the still small

voice vibrating – America’s choosing day…

Maybe I am adding flames to the fire, but the amount any of us writes to the federal government is going to get a whole lot bigger because of previous Republican leadership, instead of just getting a little bigger like it might have. The truth is social security worked and the only reason we questioned it is because people wanted to be taking cruises and living in huge mansions on Caribbean islands when they retired instead of living modestly. I reiterate my arguments from during the previous election against privatization. We are basically financing a war rooted in energy issues on money from China. What’s more immoral than that? We consume more than a ¼ of the world’s oil.

McCain wants to talk about more war for God’s sake. And if we question that we aren’t being patriotic. When will this crap end? I watched the Republican National Convention and it amounted to a worship of war. We’ve already crossed the Rubicon that Wright talks about in Nonzero that the Roman Empire crossed when their society was hollowed out because all the production was based outside of their country on the backs of workers that had no citizens rights (basically modern slavery), but were building the empire. The military was stretched too thin and the leadership imploded. Sound familiar? I also can’t believe that twice in formal forums, McCain has accused Russia of being “energy greedy” and “trying to rebuild their empire”. Not that I agree at all with Russia’s treatment of Georgian territories and people, but the hypocrisy is so obvious it staggers the imagination. We, like the British, must undergo de-colonization pangs or pay the price.

For Christians at least, I believe Christ addresses the “I earned it” issue in the parable of the workers coming to work at different times of day, but all getting the same pay. A sense of justice is the last barrier to grace. Our entire country was built on the back of slain natives and slave foreigners in less than two hundred years, and though that doesn’t mean people today don’t work hard, we should remember this before we tout some kind of work ethic.

The writer Defoe once argued that a man will be civil until his life and the life of his loved ones depend on being uncivil. I don’t know if this is true or not, but if it is, can we really defend our lifestyle to the rest of the world? I’m going to post more Ruskin here. If you read this carefully, he touches on Defoe’s quote and also here, and later in the essay, he defeats the “I earned it” mentality. He also hits the population question, the “homeless are lazy” argument, and the idea of fair trade. And in this quote we see how very related these all are.

“In all the ranges of human thought I know none so melancholy as the speculations of political economists on the population question. It is proposed to better the condition of the labourer by giving him higher wages. ‘Nay’ says the economist, – ‘if you raise his wages, he will either people down to the same point of misery at which you found him, or drink your wages away.’ He will. I know it. Who gave him this will? Suppose it were your own son of whom you spoke, declaring to me that you dared not take him into your firm, nor even give him his just labourer’s wages, because if you did he would die of drunkenness, and leave half a score of children to the parish. ‘Who gave your son these dispositions?’ – I should enquire. Has he them by inheritance or by education? By one or other they must come; and as in him, so also in the poor. Either these poor are of a race essentially different from ours, and unredeemable (which, however often implied, I have heard none yet openly say), or else by such care as we ourselves have received, we may make them continent and sober as ourselves – wise and dispassionate as we are – models arduous of imitation. ‘But’ it is answered, ‘they cannot receive education.’ Why not? That is precisely the point at issue. Charitable persons suppose the worst fault of the rich is to refuse the people meat; and the people cry for their meat, kept back by fraud from the Lord of Multitudes. Alas! It is not meat of which the refusal is the cruelest, or to which the claim is validest. The life is more than the meat. The rich not only refuse food to the poor; they refuse wisdom; they refuse virtue; they refuse salvation… “
John Ruskin

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception, but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is keeping with this insight…The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.”
Walter Benjamin

So finally, for the spiritual among us I have this from one of my favorite spiritual writers on the concept of entitlement and the Lord’s Prayer:

“…And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors…”

At the moment of saying these words we must have already remitted everything that is owing to us. This not only includes reparation for any wrongs we think we have suffered, but also gratitude for the good we think we have done, and it applies in a quite general way to all we expect from people and things, to all we consider as our due and without which we should feel our lives to have been frustrated.

All these are the rights that we think the past has given us over the future.

First there is a right to a certain permanence. When we have enjoyed something for a long time, we think that it is ours and that we are entitled to expect fate to let us go on enjoying it.

Then there is the right to a compensation for every effort whatever its nature, be it work, suffering, or desire. Every time that we put forth some effort and the equivalent of this effort does not come back to us in the form of some visible fruit, we have a sense of false balance and emptiness which makes us think that we have been cheated. The effort of suffering from some offense causes us to expect the punishment or apologies of the offender, the effort of doing good makes us expect the gratitude of the person we have helped, but these are only particular cases of a universal law of the soul.

Every time we give anything out we have an absolute need that at least the equivalents should come into us, and because we need this we think that we have a right to it. Our debtors comprise all beings and all things; they are the entire universe. We think we have claims everywhere. In every claim we think we possess there is always the idea of an imaginary claim of the past on the future. That is the claim we have to renounce.

. . . In renouncing at one stroke all the fruits of the past without exception, we can ask of God that our sins may not bear their miserable fruits of evil and terror. So long as we cling to the past, God himself cannot stop this horrible fruiting. We cannot hold onto the past without retaining our crimes, for we are unaware of what is most essentially bad in us. . . ”

Simone Weil

I heard Bill O’Reilly talking the other night and accusing Obama of wanting to do wealth redistribution. This got me thinking: “this is something people think of as negative because it means taking something hard-earned from those who have toiled to earn it and giving it to those whose actions have done nothing to make it.”

Then, my thoughts drifted to a few events, one from Policy class and two more recently occurring at family reunions. First of all, the statistic that something like 97 percent of the wealth is controlled by three percent of the population. The others are a game of Risk with my cousins, and a conversation with Mandy about her family.

As we know the divide of the uber-wealthy and the lower classes is growing. The amount of wealth is continuing to be governed by a smaller percentage of the population. This is fact. This is inevitable if you have read much on behavioral economics. I recommend the “logic of Life” as a book to illustrate this point.

This became clear to me as I found myself on side of a losing campaign in Risk, a game I had not played since young. At one point I decided to hole up in Australia, after spreading too thin and being conquered elsewhere. I thought, ” at least I can defend the bottle neck here in the south pacific by putting all my new resources into the defense of the one country blocking my cousin’s way to world domination. The fallacy that I quickly discovered is that if you had captured continents you amassed more armies because you had more resources, same too for just having sheer numbers of already existing armies. In essence, if you already had wealth, you could make so much more. So there is a tipping point there where defeat is inevitable, no matter how great your geographical advantage. I realized that the percentages were about the same as those discussed previously in policy class, my cousin owned about 95 percent of the board and defeat began to unfold at an exponential rate.

We attended a wedding this last weekend of one of Mandy’s cousins. Their family clearly had some financial advantages over what we have had. Mandy’s cousin and her husband decided for example to rent the condo just purchased to add to their income. Again, having the resources to make more.

So, why wouldn’t the republican stance of lower taxes be better? Because, in this system, the rich get richer and bigger breaks and eventually have control over about everything they accuse the democrats of wanting to give to government. At least in government, we may have a little more influence about whether the money is spent on the common good vs. being spent solely on corporate interests. I think Obama may be right in raising taxes higher on those who can afford to pay more, but in this system where wealth and power are synonymous, it may take an occasional redistribution to keep the Risk scenario from unfolding. After all, unless you quit in the middle, the end game for risk is inevitably the same, one winner and everyone else loses. cheers. vote Obama:)