‘Budget cuts’ may even amount to $3.3 billion increase
WASHINGTON – The budget deal struck last Friday to avert a government shutdown cuts the fiscal 2011 deficit by just $352 million, not the $38 billion touted by both parties, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
A CBO analysis found Wednesday that the measure negotiated by President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to fund the government through September would yield less than one-100th of the deficit savings touted.
The study confirms that the resolution cuts federal spending authority by $38 billion, but concludes that most of the money was unlikely to be spent anyway.
The CBO figure was achieved after clearing the smoke and mirrors, by adjusting for savings that are likely to occur in a future year, spending increases elsewhere in the budget, and the hike in the military budget.
When factoring in war funding, the analysis found that the legislation could even increase total federal outlays by $3.3 billion from 2010 levels.
The trimmed-down figure reflects the harsh realities of cutting spending at a time when dozens of lawmakers were recently ushered into Congress on a mandate to attack the federal budget.
The House is expected to vote on the measure Thursday.
If one were to remove the smoke and mirrors and be really cynical, one might say that $38 billion in social spending was replaced by $41 billion in military spending. Nice job, Obama!
Post-speech progressivesI listened to President Obama’s speech again, and found it soothing. And that created internal turmoil.
There are certain maxims in politics, such as “they lie, they lie, they lie,” “if it’s worth fighting for, it’s worth fighting dirty for,” “the facts, although interesting, are irrelevant,” and “‘no’ is only an interim response.” It is wise to keep those concepts in mind, to use them as an orientation point as we wander through the hall of mirrors called American politics.
The most important maxim of all is one that progressives need to have tattooed on the inside of their eyelids, that “a porcupine with his quills down is just another fat rodent.” Since Obama’s election, the pwoggies have lived with quills down and suffered a significant weight gain.
After I listened to Obama’s speech, my quills were down, and not too long after that I realized why this man is a successful politician. He was patting me on the head, speaking soothing words, telling me to go to sleep now, little boy, and tomorrow will be a brand new day. Obama the candidate had re-emerged.
In American politics words uttered in public are usually meant for effect, and do not contain policy. So it follows that Obama’s message yesterday was intended for effect. What effect? Well, I’m fairly typical. I voted for him once. What effect did it have on me? It relaxed me. It reassured me that he is looking out for my interests. I put my quills down.
I took away three messages – three lines that stuck with me:
1: Social Security is not causing the deficit. I’ve known this from the beginning, but as easy a concept is it is to grasp, those words are rarely, if ever spoken in public policy debates. Why now?, President Candidate Obama? Why now?
2: Medicare and Medicaid recipients will not be turned over the the private insurers via private vouchers. Obama version 1.0 talked about single payer. This was before he was thought to resonate presidential timbre. Candidate Obama supported a public option. President Obama gave the insurance cartel everything it wanted in the health care debate. Why has President Candidate Obama now turned on them?
3: The wealthy among us need to step up, endure a tax hike, do their share. President Obama had his chance last year when the Bush tax cuts were being debated. He didn’t even try. The teams have left the field, the stands are empty and wind is blowing wrappers around. Why, after his total capitulation, is he calling for a do-over? Why now, President Candidate Obama?
Every possibility is always available. It could be that every word was genuine, that he has spent time with the Oracle and has returned to be our general. It could be that what the progressives like to call the “real” Obama has returned. But we’ve had two years of him now, and if these past two years are not real Obama, then these past two years have exhibited one of the weakest men ever to hold that office.
The odds say that it is a good time to have quills up, and not down.
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but it was already impossible to say which was which. (George Orwell, closing passage from Animal Farm)
It would be so refreshing to be wrong about this guy, but Obama is giving a talk today on the deficit. I’m hiding my wallet. It’s me he’s after.
Food for thought:
1. The deficit only becomes a “crisis” when the two parties decide it is a crisis. We didn’t have serious deficits until World War II, when they consumed more than half of the economy. Then they got paid back. After that, we were pretty much deficit-free until 1980, when Ronald Reagan took office. Through Reagan, Bush and Bush again, we’ve been on a merry spending spree. Now they decide it’s a problem. Hmmmmm ….
2. Since he took office, Obama has expanded the Central Asian war global war on Islam, extended the Bush tax cuts, and has now started a war in Libya. But when it comes to social programs, man, we are fresh out of cash!
3. He’s going after Medicare and Medicaid. That’s been the whole point of the Kabuki Theater of the threatened shut down of government … a three act play, and today is the third act.
Hope to be wrong. I hope he talks about how Social Security is not part of the General Fund and is not running in the red. I hope he talks about how private sector health care costs (run up by the private insurance cartel) and not just Medicare and Medicaid, are bleeding us dry. I hope he talks about how there is no known connection between economic vitality and tax rates. I hope he distinguishes himself in some manner from the two parties, and acts like a leader.
Hope to be wrong.
___________________ Follow-up: I heard parts of his speech but the phone at that moment started ringing. What I heard is somewhat encouraging – although he acts as if our whole political debate is contained in the short walk between the two parties, he did say some things that are encouraging: One, he acknowledged that the health insurance companies are not good “persons” (Citizens United variety), and so refuses to voucher out senior health care and expose our seniors more to those persons than has already been done via Medicare supplements and Medicare Advantage; two, he acknowledged that Social Security is not causing any part of the deficit (music to my ears); three, he acknowledged that the tax code needs to be simplified (I just did a return that is 159 pages long for a guy who has some oil and gas and some rental properties – that’s absurd!); and he said again that he will not extend the Bush tax cuts (he already backed down from that fight once, so I’m not trusting here).
All in all, his message was tailored for his liberal base, and so resonates. Devil will turn up in details.
Hey! I never got my rucksack!Many, many years ago, when I had just bolted from the right wing, I joined the local branch of the Sierra Club in Billings, Montana. There were maybe ten of us, and with such numbers posed a lethal threat to the business community in Billings. I am not kidding … they even sent in a spy! (Spies are not hard to spot in groups of ten people.)
It was a technically a much larger group. Here’s how that works: For a pittance, people “join” the national Sierra Club, and get a tote bag and the national magazine. They are then referred down to the local group, and are put on the local mailing list and receive the local newsletter. So from maybe 200 people in the Billings area formed the “branch,” and from that came the ten who actually went to meetings. (I later learned from Montana Wilderness Association that membership counting is quite an art, and often includes spouses and children of the joining member. But not pets. Well, dogs maybe. But no cats!) “Members” serve as a front to give the group a grassroots feel as they pull down money from Pew or other foundations that are their true funding source
Many environmental groups, like Alliance for the Wild Rockies, really are grassroots. Wild West Institute is another, and each of these websites will lead to other worthy groups. These groups understand that to sell out for funding is to sell out the mission. I belonged to Montana Wilderness Association for years when it too was mostly grassroots. Since I left its budget has mushroomed, paid positions multiplied, and the mission is down the toilet.
I soon became the newsletter editor for Sierra Club, and in the early days of desktop publishing, it was an excruciating task. I had to fill four full pages each month, and so wrote things to fill space, and eventually was taken aside by the Grand Poobah whose name I have long forgotten and told that all writing had to go through him for vetting. That’s fair, I know. But I just could not bear the idea that my thoughts had to be subordinated to his. So I didn’t do it much. It was my first indication that I am not a good person to have in a group.
David Brower, the Sierra Club's "Archdruid," was a Sierra Club Foundation founder. He became an outsider as the club went mainstream, and made it a point to cast his vote for Ralph Nader before his death in 2000. One thing I did do without permission of the Poobah gave me indication of what was to come in the ensuing years. I thought it important that groups with differing viewpoints meet each other face-to-face. There was a local right wing pro-development anti-wilderness group, name also long forgotten, that was headed by Charles Hauptman, an oil geologist. I picked up the phone and called him and ask for an interview. I told him it would be respectful, that I would not be hitting him from the bushes. He agreed.
I was nervous, as I had never done such a thing before. Further, because I had worked in oil and gas, where there is great technological expertise, I assumed that there was also great political intelligence on the right wing, and that I would be challenged by a strong intellect and fierce competitor. I prepared a list of questions and on the day of the interview called Chuck to double-check time and place. He said forget it. No interview.
I have long since learned that there is not much more intelligence on the right than on the left, and that the best minds are often outliers. I’ve met people from all ideologies, and so have developed a disdain for isms and ogies. All I want are smart people with good hearts.
Prototypical talk radio hostI had often heard the word “polarization,” but never really understood the psychological mechanism behind it. It’s both fear and projection. If we are to hate someone, it is best not to know the person we hate, as that only makes it harder. It was much easier for Hauptman and his group to sculpt the left and environmentalists as a mental construct, a demon, than as real people. Polarization is a large part of propaganda, as groups need to be isolated from one another to promote hidden agendas.
The greatest polarizing force in the media is radio. As McLuhan discovered, radio is a tribal drum, a one-on-one medium – one speaker, one listener. It has inflammatory power. A talented radio speaker is able to make the listener angry, and the angry listener has to do something with that anger. Since radio does not allow feedback (“talk radio” is an illusion), the inflamed listener seeks other outlets. From there it is easy to manipulate him.
In case you don’t know it, I have just outlined the origins of the Tea Party – they are polarized talk radio listeners. People on the left who have ‘infiltrated’ rallies are surprised to find out that they are often intelligent and well-educated, but the one common theme among them is sources of information.
This is the reasoning behind imposing a Fairness Doctrine on public air waves. It’s good public policy. It forces people to deal with one another.
The Internet is an anti-polarizing force. Or could be. But once polarized, the natural tendency of people is to stay that way.
_____________ PS: Polarization even happens within groups. I’m going on memory here, often faulty and selective. David Brower, pictured above, led an insurgent movement within the Sierra Club, called the “John Muir Sierrans” to remove the club from the grip of professional Democrats like its leader, Carl Pope. In 2000 some who ran for the national board said they would endorse Nader instead of Gore, enough that they might swing the vote. Two were from Montana, as I remember, and they won their seats. Even though board members had fought for their seats based on the promise to endorse Nader, once seated, they changed their minds. (Budgets were probably the lever – Pope likely told the two from Montana that their state would suffer if they did not endorse Gore.)
Later I talked to a regional organizer for Sierra working out of Bozeman. She was salaried help with an office and budget and all of that. I asked her about her thoughts on the Brower/Pope battle. She knew nothing of it, didn’t even know it had happened. Apparently professional staff knew less than outsiders.
Michael Moore, speaking at a rally in Madison last month, mentioned that “Just 400 Americans — 400 — have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.” That’s an interesting statement, and coming from Moore instead of, say, Joseph Stiglitz, it needs to be analyzed carefully. (Try here.) But I think it is safe to say that there is probably more concentrated power each year nested in Bohemian Grove than at Burning Man, so that Moore’s statistic, while perhaps indicative of a huge imbalance of wealth in this country, is not worth haggling over. It’s a nice talking point.
The question can be rephrased in the following manner: Who has more power: The 69 million people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, or the people who decided that our only available choices were to be Barack Obama and John McCain? That terribly oversimplifies a complex process, but the bottom line is this: If not those two men, it was going to be two others, and those two would be determined by an apparent voting process that was mere Kabuki Theater. There were perhaps a dozen viable possibilities, and none of that dozen would be objectionable to Bohemian Grove. Burning Man, on the other hand, was high as kite and could not care less.
The problem is academic: How does power work? Even more academic: What is power?
Power is the ability to make another person do things in your favor even if that person does not want to do those things. The essential power relationship is parent-child, where the child is dependent on the parent for sustenance. “Good” kids are submissive to parental authority. From there we enter school, and the authority transfers to teacher/coach/administrator, and the “good” students again, are submissive. From there it is the strained relationship that virtually all of us endure forever – boss/employee.
We are so inured to power that we accept it, usually without question. It never occurs to us that bosses should not have such power over other people – we accept it as normal. We accept absurdities as normal … health insurance companies can exclude us from access to the health care system; mobile phone providers can insist that we use only their phones and sign two -year contracts; the president, once elected, will abandon campaign rhetoric (and even acknowledge that much of it was a lie).
Wait a minute! We accept that campaigns are meaningless exercises?
Yes, we do. Just as parents in a household might allow children to have an opinion, schools have student councils, and bosses have a “suggestion” box, campaigns and elections are transparent fictions that willfully ignore the power equation. But we willingly go through them because, honestly, if we didn’t have that, we’d have nothing.
Moving on then, how do the people at Bohemian Grove* manage to exercise their authority over the rest of us, controlling our choices for elected office and rendering our vote meaningless? What are the mechanisms?
My thoughts on this subject pop up here every now and then, but are not well-developed. I fall back on ethereal notions like “propaganda” and “illusion,” each very real, but also vague enough to lack real explanatory power.
If I stop here and say that I don’t know how it works, but do know that it does work, can I get on with my day?
I’ll stop. I have so much more to learn. But a good starting point can be found in William C. Donhoff’s 2005 essay, The Class-Domination Theory of Power. The roots of this essay go much farther back in his career, and the essay is really just a capsule of a 1967 text book, Who Rules America.
I’ll have more to say, of course, as blogging is a Latin term that roughly translated means “Can’t STFU.”
_____________
*The annual gathering at the Bohemian Grove complex is a weird orgy of rituals and substance abuse, like Burning Man, but the phrase is used here to mean the 1/10 of 1% of us who hold real power.
Amazing and fortuitous error discovered by Possner operative!Election fraud in Wisconsin: The discovery of enough votes in Wisconsin to assure victory for David Prosser, and further to give him just enough votes to be outside the range that would yield a mandatory recount, is nothing short of a goddammed miracle! The question is, will anyone do anything about it? I doubt the Wisconsin Attorney General is going to turn on Scott Walker, and the Obama Administration will stay out of it for some sniveling reason. The only hope for redress of that grievance will be the courts. Good luck, Wisconsinites.
It reminds me of something that troubled me when I heard that petitions were being circulated to do recall elections in that state. Our election system in this country is not secure, and in all the years since 2004, nothing has been done to fix any of the deficiencies. The precincts are still using easily hackable computer systems. When it appeared that Bush had stolen (yet another) election in 2004, I was curious why the Democrats were not concerned. In the succeeding years, I’ve come to appreciate that they are essentailly the same party, and though there may be inter-party squabbling for seats now and then, when the leadership of each party is in cahoots with the other, then the ability to turn an election can be useful at times to “both” parties against outsiders.
The failure to address election fraud in 2000, 2002 and 2004 essentially set the precedent, and the system is now open to hackery whenever needed. Machines that cannot be audited or kept secure are deemed to be reliable, per se, because the “other” party refused to do anything. Our elections, never anything to brag about, are not secure. It would be nice when they do they recall elections in Wisconsin, if they would call in international observers from say, Haiti or Libya, to assure that we are up to their standards.
So when 2008 came up clean (and I was surprised how the exit polls showed it to be clean it was throughout the fifty states), I was not reassured that we were having clean elections again. It just told me (and this is wisdom after the fact), that Obama did not challenge the leadership of either party.
_______________ Government Shutdown:And now they are going to shut down the government. It’s really hard to know what this is all about or what is in store for us. Some think that this is the beginning of a bipartisan assault on Medicare and Social Security, which will take place in the next two months. Some say that one or the other party will be “hurt” by a shutdown, but if there is only one party, that hardly matters.
This I know today, and not much else: It’s not about Planned Parenthood. Neither party gives a rat’s ass about the abortion issue. It’s pure wedge. Harry Reid has said that there is agreement on everything that will be cut, and that should be the focus of attention – that the Democrats have capitulated in this latest rollicking round of Kabuki Theater. But it’s not really capitulation if all they were looking for was a cover story for helping the Republicans cut or shut down a host of popular social programs.
It’s just business as usual here in our one-party state, and note well that there is no disagreement between them that the biggest discretionary spending program of all – the war budget, which is sacrosanct.
I spoke yesterday at Harvard’s Kennedy School and was asked whether I’ve ever been told by MSNBC or any other television program on which I’ve appeared not to speak about a certain issue. I replied that the media’s narrowing of political debate doesn’t generally operate in such an explicit way (though sometimes it does); rather, by confining themselves only to those issues relating to the partisan conflicts between Democrats and Republicans, anything that exists outside of that sphere is simply ignored. Any positions that enjoy bipartisan consensus — or issues that the two parties jointly ignore — are rarely examined in establishment media venues.
So the media essentially freezes debate on issues to those issues raised by either party, and since so many crucial issues are not disputed between them, the media does not cover them either.
Ah, the wonders of our two-party system that is really one.
Earlier this year I submitted two 650 word op-ed pieces to the Denver Post as part of a contest they were running to find some new writers for their pages. The results were just announced and I was not among the winners. It was a long shot, as Denver is a big city with many talented writers, but I gave it my best. This is one of the pieces I submitted:
Napkin Economics
I am an accountant. To outsiders, my profession is boring and obtuse. For insiders … ditto. It takes a person with a special tolerance for gobbledygook to do this job.
Even given my bent for specialized jargon, I find economics incomprehensible. Economists chart our behaviors and predict the future, but are so rarely right that their official symbol ought to be the dart board. They don’t even agree among themselves. For every political philosophy from Karl Marx to Ayn Rand there is a “school” of economists to support it.
Even though economists don’t offer sound advice or agree among themselves, they don’t seem to suffer professionally. When advice turns up bad and predictions wrong, they simply move on to new predictions and advice.
I was a good college student and studied hard. But economics seemed detached from reality. The theories did not hook up with the real world. If economics was a nail, my head was concrete. The teachers were smart and sincere and hammered hard, but it did not matter. Those courses (and Greek) were a drag on my GPA.
For the last thirty years, we have been governed by people who offer us “supply side” economics. It is the idea we should live in a low-tax environment with few government regulations. This, they say, fosters growth and prosperity.
The economics behind it is best illustrated by a graph called the “Laffer Curve,” drawn on a napkin in 1974 by economist Arthur Laffer. Lunching with him that day were Jude Wanniski, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who would later implement the napkin solution.
The Laffer Curve is a simple thought experiment: Two tax rates yield zero revenue: zero and one hundred percent. As rates move towards one hundred, revenues decline. Therefore, tax rate cuts will produce additional revenue for government.
Of course, it would be good to know where we are on the curve before implementing drastic tax cuts, but the men lunching that day have never suffered from lack of certainty. Cheney and Rumsfeld came to power under Ronald Reagan and the Bush’s, and the theory was put into practice.
It didn’t work. Reagan cut taxes for the wealthiest among us, and what followed was decades of massive deficits. He was constantly caught short, and after implementing the cuts had to sign into law tax increases in six of eight years (including a massive tax hike on low-to middle income working people via the Social Security tax).
But the failure of the theory in practice doesn’t matter. The only cause-effect that seems to correlate with the Laffer-based tax rate cuts for the wealthy is an increased concentration of wealth in the upper strata coupled with a shrinking middle. It doesn’t take much surface scratching to find economic distress among the rest of us. People are suffering. In addition, we are prone to more (and more extreme) boom-bust cycles. Our public institutions are starving, and our bridges and levies collapsing.
In a staff lunch one day in 1998, the writers of the TV show South Park came up with their own economic theory: The Underpants Solution. It was business model sketched on a napkin:
1: Collect underpants
2:???
3: Profit
It works every bit as well as the Laffer Curve.
Instead of napkin (or underpants) economics we need a theory that works for all of us. We had it once. It was based on the lessons of the early twentieth century: Our economy is an engine capable of generating incredible wealth. But like fire, capitalism can either serve or destroy us. It must be tempered to minimize excesses. Regulation of economic activities serves as a damper.
And there’s no magical economic mystery to taxes. We should tax higher earners at higher rates, but give them socially beneficial ways to avoid those high taxes, like investment credits and charitable deductions.
It’s not complicated. We should concentrate on what has worked, and ignore what has not.
I am reading Obama and the Empire, by Fidel Castro. It’s a collection of short essays, maybe even reprinted op-ed pieces from Granma.
He is a smart man, or would not still be defying the empire fifty years after taking power. On this side of the pond we have only been allowed to see the Cuban response to American aggression. Without the other half of the story what they do indeed seems like aggression, repression and tyranny. Taken as a whole, it is a story of a large and powerful country trying to retake a happenstance breakaway republic. There have been crimes, high and low. Castro is no saint. But most of those crimes originated in Langley. When others do those same crimes to us, we call it “terrorism.”
But I’m not going to spend a great deal of time with this book. Castro is interesting and well-versed, but not deep. The following snippet, slightly poignant, jumped out at me this morning, however.
Nuclear power plants are among the sources of energy [Obama] promises to hastily develop. These are already opposed by a great many people due to the high risk of accidents with disastrous consequences for life, the environment and human food. Moreover, it is absolutely impossible to prevent some of these accidents [from] occurring. (Essay dated February 4, 2009)
Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist and author of Predictably Irrational. He contends that we make decisions that allow us to think we have more control over our lives than we do. We are essentially irrational beings in the face of a complex and indecipherable world, but he argues that this is not necessarily a self-defeating trait (look at how many of us there are!).
He was recently interviewed by Skeptic Magazine for their official podcast, Skepticality. (See #149 – it’s about one hour long, and so not immediately gratifying). He was asked if he thought we would ever give up our comfortable beliefs, such as correlation being causality, the existence of miracles, or drawing large conclusions based on tiny evidence … no, he said. We will not. Irrationality offers great comfort.
Rob Natelson 'The Perfesser' offers sophisticated irrationalityHave you ever encountered the Randian? I have – they haunt the blogs – one guy even calls himself “Ann Rand.” Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged fed right into our need for self-validation by providing a system of economics that is 1) cannot be tested, and 2) would always yield good outcomes if put into practice. Thus the Randian smugly asserts that s/he has a capsule of answers that, when dropped into Kool Aid, produces a hearty brew that cures the world. Like religion itself, Randianism is comprised of splinter groups and sects, and some like to keep their distance. But it is religious faith, or belief without evidence, and so requires huge doses of confirmation bias to sustain the think tanks and the legions of followers that are invested in it.
It’s an odd turn of language, but Rand’s “objectivism” provides no objective evidence of its value, and so sends its Heavens Gate throngs on futile missions in search of validating evidence. They can only return with empty buckets, and yet are so in need of a fruitful harvest that their mythology is their sustenance.
That’s me, and not Ariely, providing Ayn Rand in a nutshell.
Here’s a snippet from the Ariely interview:
Skepticality: The discussion of “meaning, as you said, either with a big or a little “m”, it shows [that] we put more effort into activities where we’re assured will have the most meaning or impact, because that’s part of what motivates us. But what about people who are motivated by things that are unknowable, trying to find proof of things that may never be proved? How do we get meaning from that?
Ariely: The people who do these tasks do find meaning in that, and you can think about religion on one hand, and economics on the other, in which there’s some things we just can’t prove. I recently had a debate with the guy who runs the Ayn Rand Institute [Yaron Brook], and one of the discussions was about regulations in the market. His statement was that of course you saw all these bank failings, but that it was not that there was not enough regulation, but that there was too much regulation. And he said that if you only avoided every possible regulation, if there was not a single regulation on the banks, then you would see how magnificently they would behave and operate.
And of course nobody can test that. We can’t have a reality in which banks have absolutely no regulation just to see if it really works. It’s an incredibly expensive experiment. But he finds meaning in chasing the ideology. The fact that it’s very hard to test only helps him maintain his ideology.
What we find in those cases is that … people who benefit from believing that the world works a certain way adopt those beliefs and hold them in a strong way. But they are self-serving beliefs. Because they are self-serving, they are even harder to overcome.
Like belief in miracles, ghosts, UFO’s and secret friends, Randians will never go away. (We can only hope that one is never again appointed head of the Federal Reserve.) The Millerites of the 19th century believed that Jesus Christ would return to the earth in 1843. He didn’t show, but Seventh Day Adventists are still with us … 168 years later. In fact, they are the twelfth largest religious body on the planet. That blind belief that they exhibit is either our doom or salvation, or both at once.
Aroldos ChapmanToday is opening day, and as a loyal Cincinnati Reds fan, I take note that it is usually the only day of the season on which the team is tied for first place. I love the game of baseball, with all its nuances, intricacies and traditions. Outsiders find it boring, and I get that. It’s a pastoral sport, played by people who are not worried about a time clock. Its roots go far back beyond those of American football with its industrial era time clocks and smash-mouth demeanor.
A few years back, the Yankees were in the World Series and Alex Rodriguez (“A-Rod”), in trying to make it safely to first base on a ground ball, reached out with his hand and tried to jar the ball lose from the first baseman’s glove. It was considered a low act, and he was rightly scolded by the media and opposing fans. Imagine that, football fans – that’s about the extent of physical brutality in the sport of baseball.
The talent is superb – the ability to hit a ball thrown at you at 90+ mph in a fifth of a second rests on only a few. Owners would replace them tomorrow with lesser-paid players if they could, but the talent is rare enough to support the salary structure of baseball, ludicrous as it is.
The Reds have a young pitcher, Araldos Chapman, who is a Cuban defector. They signed him two years ago to a $30 million five-year deal. Last year was his breaking-in year. He was uncomfortable, and did not understand such concepts as “investment”, as in the team being concerned about his health for financial reasons. He would try to play injured, and the manager and pitching coach had to watch him carefully and convince him that his body was a temple. Chapman did not know who to trust, and did not understand American culture.
A full year later, he is more comfortable, and his delightful personality is coming out. He loves American fast food. He has formed friendships on the team and is learning English. The Reds’ GM, Walt Jocketty, is amazed at how well educated Chapman is – did he suppose, along with most Americans, that Cubans are merely the raw meat of a dictatorship?
Oh, yeah, last year Chapman threw a 105 mph fastball, the fastest pitch ever recorded in baseball history.
Who wrote the following?
1. Is it right for the president of the United States to order the assassination of any other person in the world, whatever the pretext may be?
2. Is it ethical for the president of the United States to order the torture of other human beings?
3. Should state terrorism be used by a country as powerful as the United States as an instrument to bring about peace on the planet?
4. Can the United States do without immigrants, who grow vegetables, fruits, almonds and other delicacies for US citizens? Who would sweep the streets, work as servants in the homes or do the worst and lowest-paid jobs?
5. Is the brain drain – the continuous theft of the best scientific and intellectual minds from poor countries – moral and justifiable?
The author of those words also notes that ““…today, the United States has nothing of the spirit behind the Philadelphia declaration of principles formulated by the 13 colonies that rebelled against English colonialism. Today, it is a gigantic empire that could never have been imagined by the country’s original founders.”
I see in baseball a passion for life expressed in pursuit of excellence and respect for others. It holds my interest even as I know that they are just throwing the ball, catching the ball. It is sullied in some ways – I don’t like that they feel the need to “honor America” with the national anthem before each game. Military flyovers at big games are an abomination. Regular season games, with the flashing lights and pre-recorded spontaneous enthusiasm, are often visual and aural pornogrpahy. But it otherwise preserves our best traditions.
We recently sat through four games in spring training in Arizona. During those games we chatted and laughed with perfect strangers, often losing track of events on the field. When the woman sitting next to me yelled “can of corn!”, I quizzed her on her basic knowledge of the game – turns out she also knew “chin music,” “hum batter,” “rope” and “parachute.” There was no anger expressed at events on the field, and of course every spectator possessed Superior Knowledge of the game over that of the the manager and general manager of each team.
It’s a splendid little game, made for the American way of life that existed before we became a military/industrial behemoth. Of course football is more popular by a hundred cubits. That doesn’t necessarily speak well of us.
The study confirms that the resolution cuts federal spending authority by $38 billion, but concludes that most of the money was unlikely to be spent anyway.
Piece of Mindful 