Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad the health care reform bill was passed, and I’m glad that President Obama finally “got his mojo back” (as they say) and started acting like the person we thought we had elected. But while the Champagne was being popped, I couldn’t help but think about how scaled down, cut down, and minimalized this bill actually is. (Here’s a balanced description of what is in it.)
As many have pointed out, it is a little further to the right of the bill that the Republicans, under that radical Marxist, socialist Senate leader Bob Dole, were pushing back in 1993. So there.
For example,
1.Not only is there nothing like the universal care that most of the developed world already has,
2.there is also not even the mini-me version we called the “public option.”
(Ironically, while the public doesn’t support universal health care or the “public option” they do support, by 65 percent, the expansion of Medicare to all people…which is, um, different somehow?).
3.There’s no federal rate commission on insurance industry pay hikes.
4.There’s no removal of the anti-trust exemption for health insurers.
5.There is a reversal of decades of support for abortion rights.
6.And a scary number of the real benefits don’t begin until 2014. For example:
a.Coverage for adults with preexisting conditions (though, their children will be covered next year).
b.The expansion of Medicaid coverage to single poor adults.
c.The state-based health insurance exchanges, which help people find the cheapest coverage and force insurance companies to compete.
d.Penalties on employers who don’t offer coverage (even if government subsidized)
7.And while it may be nitpicking, the House bill placed a ceiling for coverage at 150% of the poverty line, and this bill scaled it down to 133%.
I’m also not terribly happy with the ways we bought the silence of the drug companies and the insurance companies to keep their “Harry and Louise” ads off the air.
1.The insurance companies were guaranteed a whopping explosion of around thirty million new clients now that everybody and their aunt Sadie will be required to buy insurance. It is estimated that that could bring in as much as a trillion dollars in new income for them. And if you are too poor to pay for their coverage, the Federal government will pay them for you at about $447 billion. What a deal. I know it’s cynical to point this out, but it also means that now insurance companies will have a boatload of new cash to lobby with on the off chance we ever elect some officials who want to push for real reform.
2.“Big PhRMA,” the drug lobby gets a similar boost because all of those newly insured people will go to doctors and get drug prescriptions. And if they can’t afford the prescriptions, the government will subsidize them. Plus, in a deal cut in early 2009, the industry agreed to cap drug cost increases at $80 billion over ten years, and in return the government agrees to
a.Not bargain for lower drug prices and
b.Not allow the import drugs from Canada, and
c.Not pursue Medicare rebates and
d.Not shift some drugs from Medicare Part B to Medicare Part D.
A nice trade off, all things considered. (Here’s a copy of the drug deal.) And did you notice that in anticipation of the signing of the bill, stock in Walgreens, the world’s largest drugstore chain, rose by 4.5 percent? (Click here.)
On the other hand, even this tiny version of health care is a major step forward considering how overwhelming the opposition has been from Roosevelt to now. But I just wonder what kind of bill we might have had if Obama and the leaders of the House and Senate had acted like leaders and pushed for what the polls said the people wanted a year ago (like an expansion of Medicare which is supported by 65 percent) instead of allowing opponents of health care reform to waste our time talking about death panels and killing off granny.
Updates
Wahu Kaara, Speaking/preaching at Hope Central Church, Jamaica Plain
Leading debt relief activist from KenyaSunday, April 11, 4:00 pm., reception, discussion, and worship following. Ms. Kaara has spent thirty years working for justice throughout Kenya and Africa. From Jubilee USA, which explores the economic and political systems that impoverish developing nations.
Hope Central Church is located at 87 Seaverns Ave., just up the hill from the Green Street T station and a few blocks from Centre Street. This event is free to the public. Child care will be available. For more information call (617) 522-0600 (617) 522-0600 or email at: info@hopeboston.org. For directions to the church,click here: http://www.hopeboston.org/directions Uncle JubileeJustice Wants You
Have your church become a Jubilee Congregation. (Click here, or send a note here)
Join the Mass Conference JubileeJustice Task Force (Click Here.)
Have your justice organization affiliate with the newly-forming faith and conscience Jubilee Chapter. (Click here.)
Play "Whack a Banker" and think about this later. (Click here.)
Help For Chile
From Beverly Prestwood-Taylor for the Chile Mission Partnership Committee
You have been asking how you can help for several days and we can finally give you an answer! Two needs are most pressing. The first is providing housing before the winter sets in and the second is trauma healing.
HOUSING
A rough estimate is that 200 houses are needed and each house will cost about $2,000. If you would like to donate to housing, please send your donation to the Massachusetts Conference (MACUCC) designated "Pentecostal Church of Chile-housing; earthquake relief." These funds will be sent to UCC Global Ministries.
TRAUMA TRAINING
The second need is for Trauma healing. If you would like to help, you may send your donation to The Brookfield Institute P.O Box 388 Brookfield, MA. 01506 and mark it "Trauma Healing-Chile earthquake."
For more information on the institute and it's work, click here.
President Obama’s winning passage of national health care is both exhilarating and sobering. Covering so many uninsured Americans is a historic achievement. But the president had to postpone trips, buy off companies and cut every conceivable side deal to just barely make it happen, without a single Republican vote. If the Democrats now lose seats in the midterm elections, we’re headed for even worse gridlock, even though we still have so much more nation-building for America to do — from education to energy to environment to innovation to tax policy. That is why I want my own Tea Party. I want a Tea Party of the radical center.
Say what? I write often about innovation in energy and education. But I’ve come to realize that none of these innovations will emerge at scale until we get the most important innovation of all — political innovation that will empower independents and centrists, which describes a lot of the country.
Larry Diamond, a Stanford University democracy expert, put it best: “If you don’t get governance right, it is very hard to get anything else right that government needs to deal with. We have to rethink in some basic ways how our political institutions work, because they are increasingly incapable of delivering effective solutions any longer.”
My definition of broken is simple. It is a system in which Republicans will be voted out for doing the right thing (raising taxes when needed) and Democrats will be voted out for doing the right thing (cutting services when needed). When your political system punishes lawmakers for the doing the right things, it is broken. That is why we need political innovation that takes America’s disempowered radical center and enables it to act in proportion to its true size, unconstrained by the two parties, interest groups and orthodoxies that have tied our politics in knots.
The radical center is “radical” in its desire for a radical departure from politics as usual. It advocates: raising taxes to close our budgetary shortfalls, but doing so with a spirit of equity and social justice; guaranteeing that every American is covered by health insurance, but with market reforms to really bring down costs; legally expanding immigration to attract more job-creators to America’s shores; increasing corporate tax credits for research and lowering corporate taxes if companies will move more manufacturing jobs back onshore; investing more in our public schools, while insisting on rising national education standards and greater accountability for teachers, principals and parents; massively investing in clean energy, including nuclear, while allowing more offshore drilling in the transition. You get the idea.
How best to promote these hybrid ideas? Break the oligopoly of our two-party system. Diamond suggests two innovations. First, let every state emulate California’s recent grass-roots initiative that took away the power to design Congressional districts from the state legislature and put it in the hands of an independent, politically neutral, Citizens Redistricting Commission. It will go to work after the 2010 census and reshape California’s Congressional districts for the 2012 elections. Henceforth, districts in California will not be designed to be automatically Democratic or Republican — so more of them will be competitive, so more candidates will only be electable if they appeal to the center, not just cater to one party.
Second, get states to adopt “alternative voting.” One reason independent, third-party, centrist candidates can’t get elected is because if, in a three-person race, a Democrat votes for an independent, and the independent loses, the Democrat fears his vote will have actually helped the Republican win, or vice versa. Alternative voting allows you to rank the independent candidate your No. 1 choice, and the Democrat or Republican No. 2. Therefore, if the independent does not win, your vote is immediately transferred to your second choice, say, the Democrat. Therefore, you have no fear that in voting for an independent you might help elect your real nightmare — the Republican. Nothing has held back the growth of independent, centrist candidates more, said Diamond, “than the fear that if you vote for one of them you will be wasting your vote. Alternative voting, which Australia has, can overcome that.”
Obama won the presidency by tapping the center — centrist Democrats, independents and Republicans who wanted to see nation-building at home “to make their own lives and those of others better,” said Tim Shriver, the C.E.O. of the Special Olympics. They saw in Obama a pragmatist who could pull us together for pragmatic solutions. But hyperpartisanship has frustrated those hopes. (Alas, though, it is not equal. There are still many conservative Blue Dog Democrats, but the liberal Rockefeller Republicans have been wiped out.) If that radical center wants to be empowered, it can’t just whine. It needs its own grass-roots movement to promote reforms like nonpartisan redistricting and alternative voting in every state. It’s tea time for the center.
Chapter Five of The BIG Issue: The Bible and Homosexuality from a Christian Perspective, Stan G. Duncan (2008).
1. Background on Homosexuality in the ancient world
In the 6th Century BCE
What we might today call “homosexual” love was prominent in the ancient Greek and Roman world (though the word itself was not invented until late in the 19th century), and was generally accepted. For men, women had come to be seen more and more as merely propagators of the species. Love (as opposed to sex), was increasingly homosexual, and increasingly pederastic (that is, an older man and younger boy).
An older man, known as an erastes would take on an eromanos, a boy between 12-18, as a student. This was an arrangement that was accepted and promoted by the parents. In it the older man would teach such "coming of age" skills as hunting, warfare, etc., to the boy. An important part of this relationship—and the part that makes it important to our discussion today—was anal intercourse, with the teacher playing the active role and the student playing the passive role. There were two reasons for this. First, the Greeks believed that a man's semen contained spiritual, masculine qualities, such as arete (virtue), power, etc., that would be passed on to the student during the sex act. Second, social roles were demonstrated. Females had no rights in Greek culture, and were considered property. In the Greek mindset, men's dominance of women was a part of nature, and must be expressed in every aspect of the male-female relationship. In the erastes/eromanos relationship, the teacher is the dominant player, and must subjugate his student. In this way, the student is inculcated with skills in domination. Regardless of our cultural judgment on this form of ritual propagation of ideology, this was a large part of Greek culture, especially in certain geographical locations.
Philosophers even extolled its virtues. The relationship of the younger boy was seen as an apprentice or student of the older man. The man was like a mentor. On the island of Crete, it was in fact thought shameful for a boy not to have an adult lover.
Plato called it the noblest of all relationships, hence the term “Platonic Love,” love which goes beyond sexuality, ascends from sexual love of the individual toward contemplation of the universal and ideal.
Sappho, the sixth century BCE poet, led a colony of women on the isle of Lesbos. Famous for her love poems to her young protégés. It is from her that we get the term “Lesbianism.”
Writings about same gender relations during the Roman Era and the First Century CE (i.e. Paul’s time)
In Paul's day the behavior we have loosely referred to as "homosexuality" was still being practiced, but had become mainly a practice of the upper classes. It was increasingly seen as abusive of the young men being kept by the older men. The younger men used in the relationship were increasingly poor or slaves. Here are the thoughts of a few contemporaries of Paul on the topic.
Seneca
A Roman Praetor about 49 CE and tutor to young Nero. Nero’s mother was married to Emperor Claudius who died in CE 54. Nero then became emperor, and Seneca became Nero’s political advisor, but he resigned in CE 62 in protest of Nero’s politics. He wrote the Moral Epistles about the lack of direction and responsibility in his society. He argues that Homosexuality came from lust, not love, associated with luxury, not relationship, and was a practice of exploitation, not mutuality. In an essay entitled “On Master and Slave,” he complains about a slave who serves wine to the guests who must, “...dress like a woman and wrestle with his advancing years; he cannot get away from his boyhood;...he is kept beardless by having his hair smoothed away or plucked out by the roots, and he must remain awake throughout the night, dividing his time between his master’s drunkenness and his lust.
Plutarch
A Greek biographer, essayist, moralist. He lived in the first Century also. He wrote Dialogue on Love, a conversation between several young men about whether a man named Bacchon should marry a rich widow, Ismenodora. One of the men in the dialogue is Pisias (who was attracted himself to Bacchon), and who is against marriage. He believes that women are merely propagators of the species and says that a decent woman is incapable of giving or receiving pleasure. To him, homosexual love is the best love (with the implication that Bacchon should stay with him). Another of the men in the debate is Daphnaeus, who argues against homosexual love and says that homosexual intercourse is sexually exploitative. One thing he notes, which is important for our understanding Paul's position in the New Testament is a difference between two types of same gender relations: that which is without consent, in which case it involves "violence and brigandage,” and that which is “with consent” in which case “there is still weakness and effeminacy on the part of those who, contrary to nature, allow themselves...to be covered and mounted like cattle."
The concern for him is that there is sexual exploitation in the same-gender relationship, even when there is consent.
Dio Chrysostom
He also lived in the first Century along with Paul. He was banished from Rome early in the reign of Domititian. He wandered for years through Greece, and the Balkans preaching the philosophy and values of the Stoics and the Cynics. He believed that Homosexuality is essentially exploitative and that it comes from raw lust, rather than healthy relationships. He decried men who, through wantonness and lawlessness wish to have boys and emasculate them. And thus a far worse and more unfortunate breed is created, weaker than the female and more effeminate.
In his writings he cites the classic example of Nero in 67 CE. After the death of his second wife, Poppaea Sabina, Nero had his male lover, Sporus, mutilated. Sporus was then renamed “Sabina” and publicly married to the Emperor.
Conclusions:
The terms and the concepts “homosexual” and “homosexuality” were unknown during Paul’s day. Terms such as “heterosexual,” “heterosexuality,” “bisexual,” and “bisexuality,” “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” etc. presume a twentieth century understanding of psychology and sociology which was unavailable to people in the ancient world.
The homosexual behavior which was known at the time (as distinct from adult personal intimate relationships about which we know nothing) was increasingly associated with lust and avarice, and mutilation and control, in Paul’s time. Whatever merits it might have had in the centuries before Paul, by his time it had become a rich man’s sport. Plato’s ideal of pure, disinterested love between a man and boy had been lost in Roman decadence.
2. References to Homosexuality in the Writings of Paul
One of the difficulties is finding the texts. There are only three passages in the Bible which are attributed to Paul and which address the subject. And one of those passages is in 1 Timothy, which most scholars agree was written by someone else, long after Paul died. Another difficulty is that in neither of the passages which Paul actually did write, was homosexuality the subject of the passage. In both cases he only alludes to homosexual acts on the way toward making a much different point. Here are the two passages. We will spend much more time on the first than the second.
The First Pauline reference to homosexuality to be discussed is found in his first letter to the church in Corinth:
Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes (malakos, ìáëáêüò), sodomites (arsenokoiteôs, Pñóåíïêïßôçò), thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.
—1 Corinthians 6:9-11; italics added (nrsv).
Comments on this passage:
Paul frequently includes lists of “sins” in his writings. They vary from place to place and time to time. Other places to find cataloged lists are 1 Corinthians 5:10-11, Galatians 5:19-21, Romans 1:29-31. There are two key words used in the passage translated above as “male prostitutes,” and “sodomites.” Most translations (and the earlier versions of the RSV) translate the two words as one word. Here’s a survey of various Bible translations:
Bibles which translated the two words in 1 Corinthians 6:9 as one word (or one concept):
Bibles that translate them as one word
Revised Standard (rsv) 1945 Homosexuals
Living Bible 1971: Homosexuals
New English Bible (neb) 1961: Homosexual Perverts
New American (nab): Sodomites
rsv 1972: Sexual perverts
Today's English Version 1966 homosexual perverts
Bibles that translate them as two words (or two concepts)
King James (kjv) effeminate, abusers of themselves with
mankind
Moffatt catamites (a boy kept by pederast), sodomites
JB Phillips 1958 effeminate, pervert
Goodspeed 1951 sensual, given to unnatural vice
New American Standard (nas) 1963 effeminate, homosexuals
New International 1973 male prostitutes, homosexual
offenders
New King James 1979 homosexuals, sodomites
New American Catholic 1987 boy prostitutes, practicing
homosexuals
nrsv 1990 male prostitutes, sodomites
New English Translation (net) passive homosexual partners,
Practicing homosexuals
The first key word in this passage is malakos, (ìáëáêüò), which means “soft,” or “weak.” Perhaps as a result of most translators being male, it is often translated as “effeminate,” though in actual practice it technically it had little to nothing to do with being female. When it was used in Classical Greek—when it was used at all—it tended to be applied simply to the passive partner in same-gender intercourse, which could mean a slave, an abused child, or anybody else who was controlled by the stronger partner. This is the word used of “call-boys” whom older men (arsenokoitai), in a corrupted and declining Rome, took to bed. (The term is also used in 1 Tim. 1:10, which is another list of vices.)
The second word is arsenokoiteôs (Pñóåíïêïßôçò), which is a compound of arseôn, (áñóçí) an adjective meaning “a male something,” and koiteô (êïßôç), a noun meaning “a place for resting or lying down.” So roughly it means, “a man who lies down somewhere.” Classical Greek, when it used the term at all, tended apply it to the active partner in male intercourse. However, it was used so seldom that this is barely more than a guess by linguists. The extreme difficulty in defining terms in this case is that there is no ancient reference to the word at all prior to Paul, and very few instances after him. So how does a Christian interpreter base a doctrine on such a difficult and indefinitely defined word? Paul himself is not much help because he only places the term in a list of condemnable actions without explanation. So, with all of that in mind, a tentative, but probably more complete translation of v. 9 above might be something like the following:
“Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, men who are the weaker (the recipients of a sex act), and men who are the more powerful (the perpetrators of a sex act), thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.
The New rsv (nrsv) used above comes close to this if one assumes a “sodomite” means a male who performs oral sex, but this is only one of its meanings (and incidentally has little to do with the crimes of the Biblical city of “Sodom”). “Male prostitute” also comes close to the meaning, but it doesn’t carry with it the sense of force or violence that the term Malakoirightfully should have. A Malakoi does not volunteer to be in this relationship. He/she is forced. When only one side of a sexual relationship agrees or benefits, force or violence is either actual or threatened.
One last thing. Evangelical New Testament scholar, Jeremy Townsley, did some research on the word, arsenokoites and made a very interesting discovery. He did a database search of all of the ancient writings in Greek and found 43 references to this word. All but one of the references used it in lists of vices (and the one that wasn't was brief and unhelpful). In looking through the lists he made the interesting observation that in most cases the lists of vices were organized by themes. Those that referred to sexual vices were roughly grouped together and those that referred to economic injustice vices were grouped together and so on. The difficulty this poses in translating the word was that throughout the lists arsenokoites was found occasionally in one kind of grouping and sometimes in another, and sometimes in between the sexual and injustice classes. Which means that the early writers themselves were not of one voice on the nature of this vice: was it a sexual sin or an economic injustice sin? Probably both.
So, in attempting to get at what Paul had in mind in using the word, Townsley concludes:
If we put in the English translation "homosexual" in place of arsenokoites [in Paul's writings], it makes no sense. It doesn't fit with the categories. What makes much more sense, is to say that the placing of arsenokoites in the [lists] in between the sexual sins and economic/injustice sins is not an accident. What makes sense is that arsenokoites is a term referring somehow to sexual injustice. For example, when arsenokoites is placed just before slave-trader, this seems particularly appropriate, since homosexual slaves were normative in both Greek and Roman societies. The interpretation of arsenokoitai therefore, as one of …subjugation and/or exploitation, rather than referring to all homosexual behavior, seems most appropriate as we see from these contexts.
—“Greek Culture and Homosexuality,”
Search For God's Heart and Truth, 1996, by Jeramy Townsley
Conclusions:
So what can we know about this passage? What conclusions can we draw from looking at it closely now? Here are a few.
1)The list describes the behaviors of believers in Paul’s day; the crimes are descriptions of what Roman culture was up to in Paul’s day (cf. 1 Corinthians. 6:1-8).
2)Paul sounds like the ethicists of his time. He is reflecting the moral critique of his day against the abuses of older male-on-younger-male sexuality that was in the Rome of his day. Abuse, not homosexuality, was the subject at issue.
3)Paul does not call these kinds of things “sins.” Generally speaking (with exceptions), when Paul uses the word “Sins,” he is quoting from his tradition. When he speaks of “Sin” (in the singular) he is referring to (a) a power that drives a wedge between God and God’s people and (b) as the condition of alienation from God that results. Strictly speaking, these are actually symptoms of Sin, not sins.
Paul’s Second Reference to Homosexuality
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, and ruthless. They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.
—Romans 1:18-32
Summary comments on this passage:
To Paul, God’s way was apparent to the world (vv. 19-20), but the world (by which in this passage he means mainly the Romans) chose not to recognize it, preferring to worship creations of their own hands (idolatry: v. 23). So “God gave them up” to their own lustful devices, a list of which follows. The list is meant to be typical Gentile vices of the day. They are the standard Jewish accusations against the Gentiles, the behavior of those who have not recognized God’s sovereignty.
The Context of the Passage in the Larger Letter:
As with the passage in Corinthians, Paul’s words here on homosexuality were incidental parts of a much larger argument. This section is meant to condemn the gentiles and their wicked behavior (and the Jews were supposed to applaud). This is followed by Romans 1:21-3:20 which was meant to show them that even though they (the Jews) feel special, they too are guilty of their own sin (and then the Jews were supposed to get angry). Paul’s point was not to make a reasoned theological point about male-male relations or female-female relations. His purpose was rhetorical. He was using the most inflammatory words he could think of in order to make the Gentiles look bad to his Jewish readers. He was trying to draw them into his condemnation of the Gentiles and their “Sin,” so that they would look foolish later in Romans 1:21-3:20 when he is equally critical of the Jews. His point is to say that all have sinned and are separated from God, and that that was why God sent the Christ to the earth to reconcile creature and creator once again. In fact, one could say that for the purpose of his argument, Paul actually exaggerated the evilness of the Gentiles, so that the comeuppance of his Jewish readers would be more startling later.
The Jews were in no position to feel proud of being better than the crimes of the gentiles, because “all of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23). “What then?” he says, “Are we (the Jews) any better off? No, not at all; for we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin.” (Rom 3:9) That is why God sent the Christ. “They are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus whom God put forward as a place of atonement...effective through faith” (Rom. 3:24-25).
Final Comments:
1.Note again that these deeds are not called “sins,” in and of themselves. Paul tends not to believe that these things are “sins.” They are the consequences of the root sin which is idolatry.
2.Note also that Idolatry and sexual immorality are connected (vv. 22-24 etc.) See Wisdom of Solomon 14:12 for the idea that making idols was the beginning of fornication, and the invention of them was the corruption of life.
Nothing in this passage from Romans is different from that of any of Paul’s contemporaries. What is uniquely Paul’s is his use of this section in the structure of the rest of the letter of Romans. It is used as a ploy to get his readers to understand that since all people have fallen away from God, all are in need of a mediator, the “Christ.”
Dani Rodrik, Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the first recipient of the Social Science Research Council’s Albert O. Hirschman Prize. His latest book is One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth.
Some of you may have already seen this. It's several years old, from the middle of the Bush Administration, but it's message is one of those that doesn't go out of date very quickly
This is a little soon after my last note and on a subject I usually don’t comment on. But with the health Care Summit and the president submitting his own watered-down Republican-sounding plan, and with the Republicans calling it a Socialist government takeover, I got reflective.
I’ve been thinking in particular about the previously obscure procedure in the Senate known as a “filibuster.” As you know, the Senate usually passes items by a majority vote, meaning more than fifty percent. But when someone—usually from a minority party—is about to lose a vote, he or she can call for a filibuster, and suddenly it takes a “super majority” of sixty votes to call for “cloture” and overturn the filibuster. Here are the statistics: From 1990 to 2006 the average times per year the filibuster was called was about 70, usually for not very interesting reasons. In the 2007-2008 term—the first full year that the Democrats were in the majority—it nearly doubled, to 139 times, almost always by Republicans. That’s a 60 percent increase. So far this year, it’s been 75 times, which is more than what we used to call “normal” for an entire year. And that is why all policy-making has ground to a halt in Congress.
Three of the most frequently mentioned ways of returning the Senate to majority voting are (1) limiting the number of times a filibuster can be used per year, (2) limiting the number of votes it would take to overcome it (down to, say, 55), and using the standard Senate “Budget Reconciliation” rules, which require only a majority vote on important pieces of legislation. The Republicans used the Reconciliation process numerous times during the Bush administration when they only had a fifty-one person majority (for example for his controversial tax cuts in 2001 and 2003), so they are very familiar with it. It has also been the procedure used to pass healthcare legislation for over thirty years. COBRA, S-CHIP, and every major Medicare enhancement since 1982, are examples. Click here for Julie rovner’s report on this on NPR, February 24, 2010.
Muddying the waters somewhat, the Republicans have recently been calling the Reconciliation process the “Nuclear Option.” This is a term they coined during the Bush administration to describe their attempts to destroy filibusters altogether to keep Democrats from using it to block some of Mr. Bush’s judicial appointments. It doesn’t have much to do with using Reconciliation to pass important pieces of legislation, which has been standard procedure for health care legislation for decades. Evidently many journalists who cover our political system don’t have much knowledge of our political system and they haven’t recognized that.
So, having said all that, why hasn’t Harry Reid and the Democratic majority called for a “Reconciliation vote”? So far as I can tell, there are the top five reasons. My apologies to a variety of other commentators (especially Robert Reich) who have been saying much the same thing. And one note before I start: According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, if we do nothing, health care spending will take up one hundred percent of America's gross domestic product by the 2080s. Our elected officials created this mess; Satan has clean hands on this one. See the chart below and click here to go to an article in the Atlantic about their statistics.
1. Reconciliation is too important a measure to use on a piece of legislation so important.
Well, remember that President Bush used it for his important and controversial tax cut bills. In 2003 he actually only got 50 votes, forcing Vice President Cheney to cast the deciding vote. And remember the S-CHIPs bill, Medicare Advantage, and COBRA (the “R” in COBRA stands for “Reconciliation”). Shouldn’t these acts be considered “important”?
2. Use of reconciliation would make Senate Republicans mad.
Um, and the point is? When someone says this, do they mean theRepublicans who wouldn’t vote for it anyway? Or the Republicans who wouldn’t vote for it anyway? I have trouble telling the two apart.
3. The Senate shouldn’t get too controversial because President Obama needs Republican votes on military policy.
I heard this on CNBC this morning and I don’t understand it. The majority of Republicans are always going to support the majority of wars, and what are the odds that the Republicans are going to call for a filibuster, forcing a sixty-vote super majority vote for something that the majority of them support? Imagine what Rush Limbaugh would call them if they blocked making war on a foreign country.
4. Reid has privately been saying that he fears he can’t even get 51 votes in the Senate now, after Scott Brown’s win.
Most estimates say he has about fifty-five or six votes for anything on healthcare. So, if he means that, he’s a coward; if he doesn’t mean it, he’s lying. If Harry Reid can’t lead a thirsty horse to water, then he can’t lead at all.
5. Some representatives argue that they are afraid to take a vote on health care until after the elections because the public is against it.
Not true. Most of the polls say that if you take away the rhetoric and just present the specific planks of the health care bills, most Americans support them. What they don’t support is what the Republicans have been saying is in the bills, not what is actually in them. And I suspect that now, when most insurance companies are jacking up their rates to unconscionable levels, even more people will be ready for reform.
Nobody has asked for my advice, but just in case somebody does, I’d argue for the president doing what the American people want and need to have done. I would push Harry Reid to bring back democracy. And I would ask people of faith to write their representatives telling them who put them in office. Remind them that the three most important parts of Jesus’ ministry were poverty, food security, and health care. We can’t afford to let one third of his ministry slide away for the third time in seventy years.
Resources:
For the UCC health Care Reform page and calls to action, click here.
For a good description of Republican Health Care Plans and a great side-by-side comparison with Democratic plans from Factcheck.org, click here.
If you are on Facebook, click here to sign a petition to get Harry Reid to become a leader again and call for a reconciliation vote on health care.
If you have Twitter (please tell me you don’t, but if you do) click here to send an automatic tweet that says, “Goodbye "filibuster-proof" majority. Tell Dems: Use reconciliation to pass public option.”
A Prayer for Health Care Reform (from “Faithful Reform in Health Care”)
In the presence of all that is holy within and around us, and in the sacred bonds of our common humanity, we give thanks for the life that we share and for our calling to care for each other. We remember our brothers and sisters who suffer or die for lack of needed health care. We confess that we have fallen short in caring for every member of our human family, and that in spite of our abundant resources we have failed to ensure that all may receive the health care they need for the life that is intended for every person. So we pray for forgiveness… for hearts that have been slow to feel another’s pain… for hands that have been still when a healing touch was needed… and for voices that have remained silent while millions suffer for lack of needed health care. May the valleys and the burdens of sickness and disease be conquered as we raise our voices of faith to the simple, moral, and merciful imperative of meeting one another’s health care needs. Amen.
Friends,
One of the official "readers" of my book on globalization, noted that several sections of it could be stand-alone articles and that maybe I should pull out sections of it now and then and share them around to get comments and critiques. So, here's one. It's from a much larger section on the "rules" of globalization, but it has a lot to do with the economic meltdown of last year and was meant to help people put our own crisis in the larger context of a series of economic crises the world has been experiencing for decades.
Enjoy
Stan Duncan
Here is a quick picture of how the global trading in the value of money works. Not the trade in products, but the trade in the relative value of money itself.
What most of us think of when we think of international trading is what is known as “foreign direct investment,” as when, for example, a corporation in the U.S. spends money to purchase shares in a factory in a foreign country. However, in truth, the vast majority of international trade is simply speculation on the value of money, or bets on the future value of that money. It’s old fashioned, “Old West”-style gambling. Some actually refer to it as “Casino Capitalism,” and for good reason. Investors, speculators, currency traders, etc., will literally place bets on the rise (or fall) of the value of currency on the global markets, selling now when they think it is going to go down and buying when they think it will soon go up. Or even if there is a legitimate investment in the building of a new marina in Jakarta, there might be at least as much if not more money speculated on its success or failure, or insurance policies taken out on it, as there is in the project itself. Sometimes this is done by third parties that are not even involved in the project. This element in the global economy is seldom mentioned in the business pages of our local papers, but it is a phenomenon that has ballooned in recent decades as regulations on capital transfers have been reduced or eliminated all over the world. It is now larger than all of the other international financial transactions combined. It was a contributing factor in the worsening of Argentina’s 1999-2002 recession, and was the key factor in creating the horrendous collapse of many South East Asian economies in the late 1990s.
These countries had just restructured their economies in a number of ways to make themselves more attractive to western investors and then the world came to an end. Following the advice of the experts in the developed world and their banking allies, they eliminated restrictions on the flows of money in and out of their countries, they allowed high domestic interest rates (to make the return for foreign investors higher), and they pegged their currency to the U.S. dollar (to assure foreign investors against risks). In the short term, these measures resulted in an explosion of new money flowing into the countries, creating a sharp (but shallow) boom in economic growth. However, even though large amounts of foreign capital was rushing in, little of it ever made its way into the “real” economy, such as manufacturing or farming. Instead most of it went to high yield, high risk sectors like the stock market, consumer loans, and real estate. The economy looked good, but with so many of the controls and regulations on money flows eliminated, the boom was far more fragile than anybody thought. People were in effect betting on the growth of the growth, and—though Alan Greenspan frequently and characteristically denied it in our own country—they were clearly creating a “bubble.” Things appeared good, so they invested in the appearances, not the reality, making the appearances, well, appear even better.
This kind of rapid slinging of money all around the world, borrowing, investing, insuring, and in fact gambling, looks a lot like the old shell game of our grandfathers. In that trick the magician claims he has eight peas covered by eight shells. He whirls them around rapidly, lifting one now, and then another, showing the pea underneath. But then at the end of the show you discover that it was all a slight of hand and there were only two peas under two shells; all the others were empty. His hands covered it up and the speed blurred it, but in the end the abundance of peas was just an illusion. And like the shell game of global finance, if the “magician” keeps slinging peas around too long, eventually he’ll get tired and some of the shells will flip over and we will discover that they were empty. And then everyone reaches for the two remaining peas and all hell breaks loose.
The government of Iceland got into game in 2001 when it raised its bond interest rates to about fifteen percent to encourage foreigners (mainly British) to invest in their country. It worked and for a while in the mid-2000s they received tons of outside money. At the same time, the high interest rates raised the costs for local Icelanders wanting to borrow money, so a large percentage of them arranged home and car loans from sources outside of the country, which brought in even more foreign money. For about six years these factors were sucking in outside money and making Iceland look like it had a booming economy. Its financial planners were all considered wizards. But the whole shell game was based on borrowed money, shifted from shell to shell, and eventually when the global economy began to teeter, someone looked under the shells and saw there was little of substance there and the whole charade evaporated. Interest on foreign loans for local Icelanders went up, foreign investments coming into the country went down, and the nation imploded. In 2008 their net losses were higher than their entire GDP. They became the first developed country to apply for IMF help in 30 years. It was a painful, terrifying disaster.
More recently, Greece got caught in a similar spiral of taking on debts and then betting that they could raise money fast enough to pay them all back. Our own Goldman Sachs played “enabler” for their gambling addiction by arranging a deal to swap $10 billion in Greece’s debt, issued in dollars and yen, for euro debt. They used a false exchange rate which gave them a huge profit in the swap. Then Sachs arranged for them to postpone paying anything back for several years, giving the country the illusion that it actually owned all of that borrowed, traded money. That kind of swap is illegal today, but Goldman put it together for the Greeks just under the legal wire. As with Iceland, when the global economy began to sputter and Greece’s “balloon note” came due, people looked under Greece’s shells and found bupkis, not many peas but plenty of lies and cover-ups.
The East Asian currency crisis of the nineties was an even larger and darker tragedy. Dropping controls on money flows allowed rapid new investments to come into the countries, but it also allowed rapid withdrawals if investors ever got jittery. And eventually they did. The Asian “Tigers” looked amazing during most of the nineties as investors sought greater and greater returns on their money, again investing in the promise or illusion that there would eventually be productive economies there which would catch up, turn a profit, and make everyone rich. As with any Ponzi Scheme, the early investors did make miraculous amounts of money off of these promises, but it couldn’t continue forever and in 1997, the currency of Thailand, the baht, began to falter. Investors questioned whether it was really worth what the government said it was. Some got nervous and began to pull their money out, which made other investors do the same, and within weeks the economy of Thailand collapsed. In a nanosecond, there was a withdrawal frenzy across the entire region, with each investor racing to pull more of its money out with the smallest losses. But in the process they created a cataclysmic currency implosion that nearly bankrupted all of the economies of South East Asia. Within months millions of people lost their jobs; tens of millions had declines in income. Factories closed. Wages were cut. Food riots broke out. Hunger and even starvation became common. In Indonesia unemployment rose to forty-five percent, and the government itself collapsed (which, by the way, was not an altogether bad thing). The IMF rushed in with the largest financial bailout in history (and made conditions worse with its usual people-punishing—business-rewarding strings attached). The crisis ricocheted across the globe and shook the ground under countries as different and as far away as Russia and Brazil.
If all of this sounds a bit familiar, it’s because you read our own version of this whole story recently in the U.S. during the unraveling of our own fast-and-easy money era. There were lots of Wall Street investors slinging buckets of money all over the world in insanely risky investments, gambling on potential changes in the exchange rates between various currencies, all claiming that their money was backed by this huge stash of peas they held under their shells. But then when their original source of money to play with, the shaky sub-prime mortgages, began to crumble, a few investors began lifting their shells and found barely anything there. The rest of us then began to stop spending what few peas we did have and the economy ground to a stop. And like the deep pockets of the IMF, the U.S. government stepped in with lots of cash to bail out and reward the investors who gambled away your grandmother’s savings (and within months they were back at the casino tables again.) It’s helpful to keep the stories of Asia, Greece, Iceland, and our American counterpart in mind when you hear pundits on TV speak of “economic globalization” and mainly mean by that the rules governing trade. As we saw when our own financial problems ricocheted around the world, the movement of money alone, and not just goods and services, can be a dramatic (and sometimes deadly) force in the global economy.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad the health care reform bill was passed, and I’m glad that President Obama finally “got his mojo back” (as they say) and started acting like the person we thought we had elected. But while the 
doctors and get drug prescriptions. And if they can’t afford the prescriptions, the government will subsidize them. Plus, in a deal cut in early 2009, the industry agreed to cap drug cost increases at $80 billion over ten years, and in return the government agrees to 
