ReligiousLeftLaw.com

An Update on the Home Mortgage Bridge Loan Assistance Act

Hi Friends,

Early last year, I noted with pleasure some progress underway in connection with a truly 'win-win' mortgage bridge loan statute I'd drafted with a friend and colleague at FRBNY.  Today I am pleased to be able to report that the same is now S 5035, under consideration in the New York Senate.  Here is hoping it passes in what remains of the current legislative session, for reasons elaborated in brief at the previous link and more fully here.

Hope you all are enjoying a truly beautiful weekend like that underway at least here in New Haven today,

Bob

 

Cross-Posted at MOJ

Open U.S. Intervention in Syrian War

Most of us are waking up to the following news about the Syrian war:

WASHINGTON — “The White House declared Thursday that Syria had crossed a ‘red line’ by using chemical weapons in that country’s civil war, and in response, U.S. officials said, President Obama had authorized sending arms to some rebel groups.

The arms will be provided to the rebel Supreme Military Council, an official said. The council is the military arm of an umbrella group that represents more moderate factions of the forces arrayed against the government of President Bashar Assad. White House officials would not comment on the decision to supply arms.” [….] See today’s Los Angeles Times.

Does this in part reflect the substantial influence of “liberal hawks” like Susan Rice and Samantha Power?

See too this post on Rice and Power from IntLawGrrls.

As to several compelling reasons we might be distressed by this development, please see David Bromwich, “Stay Out of Syria,” in the New York Review of Books, and Patrick Cockburn’s piece on the Syrian war in the London Review of Books.

Images: “Before” (the war) and “after” pictures of the Great Mosque of Aleppo.

 

An Anchor, Not a Bubble: Student Loans and the New American Serfdom

The economic world, some would have it, has been awash in a sea of frothy bubbles for a couple of decades now.  And there is some truth to this claim.  The NASDAQ stock surge of the late 1990s was a bubble.  The underlying valuations never justified the NASDAQ at 5,000 and despite all the relentless hype by the big brokerage firms, the bubble inevitably deflated.  A few years later, residential real estate went through its own bust.  "Homes never lose value," went the mantra.  But the slicers and dicers of the securitization market exploited this false assurance, driving prices beyond the ability of home-owners to pay and the great crash followed.

In the last few years, talk of bubbles has migrated to all corners of the business world.  But one place where such talk is certainly out of place is the student loan market.  For sure, there are many who describe student loans as a bubble.  Right-wing blogs have been fairly screaming this from the rooftops.  Patrick Hedger, a policy analyst for FreedomWorks, thus writes that "Student Loans are the New Housing Bubble."  Ben Gersten documents "The Scary Reality of the Student Loan Bubble in 5 Charts," But the bubble talk has also begun appearing in mainstream sources as well.  See "Bankers Warn Fed of Farm, Student Loan Bubbles Echoing Subprime," here.

The claim that student loans are a bubble is mainly based on the exponential rise in borrowing in recent years, coupled with rising default rates.  But this combination does not a bubble make.  The NASDAQ deflated for the simple reason that stock markets are liquid.  A stampede for the exits was inevitable and easy once the selling began.  Real estate similarly deflated when prices reached unsustainable levels because in many jurisdictions it is easy for home owners to walk away from mortgage loans.  When home owners could no longer refinance, when the balloon payments became unmanageable, when purchasers who might take the property off the distressed home owner's hands could no longer be found, prices came down like a leaden souffle.

Student loans, however, are not like this, for the simple reason that they are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.  They are not a bubble and cannot become one.  What they can become -- and show increasing signs of actually becoming -- is an anchor that is sinking the fortunes of an entire generation.

Consider a recent story in U.S. News -- "Are Student Loans Ruining the Economy?" the author asks.  The answer is a resounding "yes."  There was a time, not too many years ago, when young people with student-loan debt were more likely to buy homes.  Their incomes were high, their futures bright, and the debt load manageable.  But that reality has now reversed.  Those without student loans are now more likely to buy homes.

What this means now, in practice, is that homeownership among the young is shrinking and is increasingly class-based -- young people from wealthy, well-connected families who don't have to borrow heavily if at all to attend school can still buy homes, but the less affluent are squeezed to the sidelines.  There is little wonder that record numbers of young people are living with their parents into their twenties and thirties, unable to marry, to have children, or start households of their own.  Many young people today are unable even to purchase that traditional ticket to freedom and the open road, the automobile.

Congress has considered reform of the system, but most proposals are little better than tinkering at the edges.  In 2012, Congressman Hansen Clarke, (D.-Mich), proposed a loan forgiveness program, but its ambitions were modest and its stimulative effects would have been negligible since its main provisions were to be implemented only ten years down the road.  Senator Elizabeth Warren's proposal to cap interest rates at 0.75 % -- the rate that banks can borrow from the Federal Reserve -- is an interesting and important proposal.  But this bill does not address the mountain of debt already accumulated.

The student loan crisis is rooted in a fundamental change in the way American higher education has been perceived in the United States.  Historically, from the very creation of the Republic, higher education was seen as something beneficial to the nation as a whole.  Thus George Washington called on Congress in 1796 to create a national university, sufficiently well-funded to attract "the ablest professors," and intended to promote "the different departments of liberal knowledge." 

Two generations later, in 1862, Abraham Lincoln called on Congress to pass the Morrill Act, creating America's first land-grant colleges.  Justin Smith Morrill, the Act's principal sponsor, defended a robust role for government in promoting knowledge.  "[W]e shall have done something to enable the farmer to raise two blades of grass instead of one; something for every owner of land; something for all who desire to own land; something for cheap scientific education; something for every man who loves intelligence and not ignorance ... something to remove the last vestiges of pauperism from our land."

For much of the 20th century, Americans preserved this connection between higher education and the public good.  Dwight Eisenhower praised Lincolns' commitment to higher education, and called upon America to do more because education "is vital to free government."  In signing the Higher Education Act of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson invoked this long tradition and committed the federal government "to nourish human potential today, so that our Nation can realize its rich promise tomorrow."

In the last two decades or so, however, this long-standing American ideal, this commitment to higher education as a public value, this belief that an educated citizenry served not merely private interests but the good of the entire community, has been corroded by the individualist rhetoric of right-wing economists.

One can take the work of Richard Vedder as an example.  Vedder argues that public support for higher education results in a host of evils -- price insensitivity on the part of consumers (i.e., students might attend a better college than they could otherwise afford); higher taxes (because we all know that the government which taxes least governs best); and the private enrichment of students who attend colleges and professional schools to increase their income potential (washed down the memory hole is any remembrance of the American commitment to the public values of a productive and informed citizenry).

Really, isn't it time to break free of these tired, threadbare neoconservative bromides?  This iron triangle of political resentment -- and the claim that someone, somewhere is reaping a benefit at public expense is always a summons to resentment -- must be broken.

Nearly a year ago, in my first blog in The Huffington Post, I called for a year of jubilee for student loans.  We need large-scale student-loan forgiveness even more today.  Aggregate student-loan debt has broken the trillion dollar barrier.  For too long, governments in thrall to the siren song that education is a purely private pursuit have had their way, making student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, permitting interest to accrue even while students are in school, hiking interest rates to levels not justified by market forces.

It is time to recapture the vision of Washington and Lincoln, Eisenhower and LBJ.  To those who say to heavily-indebted student borrowers, they should pay for what they bought, I answer back, at how steep a price?  Is it worth it to extract every penny of compound interest from the young while sacrificing economic recovery?  To crush the hopes and aspirations of a generation who cannot afford to form families of their own?  To injure generations as yet unborn by frustrating the formation of new households?  We have tried the neoconservative vision to our great detriment and it is time to pronounce it a failure.

Cross-posted at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/an-anchor-not-a-bubble-st_b_3405250.html

The Morality of Human Rights

Some RLL readers may be interested in a paper I just posted to SSRN (here):  "The Morality of Human Rights".  This is the abstract:

In the period since the end of the Second World War, there has emerged what never before existed: a truly global morality. That morality — which I call “the morality of human rights” — consists not only of various rights recognized by the great majority of the countries of the world as human rights, but also of a fundamental imperative that directs “all human beings” to “act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” The imperative — articulated in the very first article of the foundational human rights document of our time, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — is fundamental in the sense that it serves, in the morality of human rights, as the normative ground of human rights.

I begin, in the first section of this essay, by explaining what the term “human right” means in the context of the internationalization of human rights. I also explain both the sense in which some human rights are, in some legal systems, “legal” rights and the sense in which all human rights are “moral” rights.

Then, in the longer second section, I turn to the inquiry that is my principal concern in this essay: Why should one take seriously the imperative that serves, in the morality of human rights, as the normative ground of human rights? That is, what reason or reasons does one have, if any, to live one’s life in accord with the imperative to “act towards all human beings in a spirit of brotherhood”?

This essay, the final draft of which will be published in a symposium issue of the San Diego Law Review, was my contribution to the conference on “The Status of International Law and International Human Rights” that was held at the University of San Diego School of Law on May 3-4, 2013, under the auspices of the School’s Institute of Law and Philosophy. Some of the material in this essay is drawn from my new book, Human Rights in the Constitutional Law of the United States (2013). Most of the material here that is not drawn from my book was first presented in a lecture I was honored to deliver at Santa Clara University in March 2013, under the auspices of the Bannon Institute of the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education.

Camus to the Dominicans

“When I think about the Church’s social teaching,  I love to recall some words that Albert Camus ... addressed to a group of Dominicans who invited him to come and speak to them at the end of the Second World War.  Camus said he would discuss the problem of evil in life, as he understood it as an agnostic.  He closed his talk, as I recall the story, with this thought:  ‘It may not be possible for us to create a world in which no innocent children suffer, but it is possible to create a world in which fewer innocent children suffer.  If we try to do that, if we look to the Christians and do not find help, where else will we go?’”  --Bryan Hehir, "Wanted:  A New Global Order," The Tablet, Dec. 1, 2001, at 1700, 1702.

No Mr. President I Do Not Trust You or the Courts with the Fourth Amendment

In the midst of revelations that the Federal Government has been indiscriminately spying on who millions of Americans call on their telephones and how often, President Obama said yesterday, “If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process, and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.”

The problem is that federal judges ran away from the Constitution years ago on this very issue, and the President’s characterization of this program as a “modest encroachment” on privacy shows that he either lacks integrity or he has an impoverished conception of privacy. Surely, it is a serious privacy intrusion to collect information about the associations of millions of Americans without probable cause. This is an area where privacy and the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of association run together.

The notion that we should trust federal judges to uphold the Fourth Amendment is impossible to take seriously.  As the Supreme Court stated in United States v. Miller, “This Court has held repeatedly that the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party and conveyed by him to Government authorities, even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed.” This third party principle permits the Federal Government without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion and without any notice to you: to get all of your bank records, a record of who you have sent mail to and received mail from, and who you have phoned and who phoned you. Indeed, the third party principle allows the F.B.I. to search your garbage without probable cause. Why don’t these actions violate the Fourth Amendment? The courts we are supposed to trust, according to the President, say these actions revealing intimate details of our private lives are not “searches” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. The claim is that we have no reasonable expectation of privacy in material we have exposed to a third party like a bank, a post office, or an internet provider.  This line of reasoning is worthy of a totalitarian state. That I use a credit card and the bank is aware of the transactions should not remotely suggest that I have no reasonable privacy interest in the bank's making the material available to others.   

So no I do not trust the Federal courts to enforce the Fourth Amendment. Fortunately, what the Federal courts permit need not be what law enforcement agencies are permitted to do. Many states have refused to follow the Supreme Court’s lead and afford greater protection for privacy. Moreover, the Congress can provide limits on the third party principle. And, indeed, no one forced the President to follow the third party principle. Do I expect the Congress to reject the third party principle? No. But I do think it is imperative for the public to renounce this utterly immodest and shameless invasion of privacy.

Am I supposed to trust you Mr. President with the Constitution, the President who after saying he would abandon the Bush program of spying, secretly maintained it? No Mr. President, I do not trust you.

Psychotherapy and Buddhism: A Basic Reading Guide

 

This is a subject I hope to post something on in the near future, but in the interim I thought I’d make available some of the titles I’ll be reading in preparation.

• Aronson, Harvey B. Buddhist Practice on Western Ground: Reconciling Eastern Ideals and Western Psychology. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2004.
• Bobrow, Joseph. Zen and Psychotherapy: Partners in Liberation. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010.
  
• Claxton, Guy, ed. Beyond Therapy: The Impact of Eastern Religions on Psychological Theory and Practice. London: Wisdom Publications, 1986.
• Epstein, Mark. Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
• Epstein, Mark. Psychotherapy without the Self: A Buddhist Perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
• Fromm, Erich, D.T. Suzuki, and Richard De Martino. Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis. New York: Harper & Row, 1960.
• Germer, Christopher K., Ronald D. Siegel, and Paul R. Fulton, eds. Mindfulness and Psychotherapy. New York: Guilford Press, 2005.
• Germer, Christopher K. and Ronald D. Siegel, eds. Wisdom and Compassion in Psychotherapy: Deepening Mindfulness in Clinical Practice. New York: Guilford Press, 2012.
• Kaklauskas, Francis J., Susan Nimanheminda, Louis Hoffman, and MacAndrew S. Jack, eds. Brilliant Sanity: Buddhist Approaches to Psychotherapy. Colorado Springs, CO: University of the Rockies Press, 2008.
• Kawai, Hayao. Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1996.
• Magid, Barry. Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychotherapy. Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2002.
• Moacanin, Radmila. Jung’s Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism: Western and Eastern Paths to the Heart. London: Wisdom Publications, 1986. Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2002.
• Molino, Anthony, ed. The Couch and the Tree: Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism. New York: North Point Press, 1998.
• Rubin, Jeffrey B. Psychotherapy and Buddhism: Toward an Integration. New York: Plenum Press, 1996.
• Safran, Jeremy D., ed. Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: An Unfolding Dialogue. Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2003.
• Spiegelman, J. Marvin and Mokusen Miyuki. Buddhism and Jungian Psychology. Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publications, 1985.
• Suler, John R. Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Eastern Thought. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993.
• Welwood, John. Toward a Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2000.
• Young-Eisendrath, Polly and Shoji Muramoto, eds. Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy. New York: Brunner-Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2002.

 

Is the First Amendment Designed to Keep Workers in Ignorance?

I am guessing you did not know that the First Amendment was designed to keep workers ignorant of their rights under labor law. Neither did I, but the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in National Association of Manufacturers v. NLRB discovered this heretofore unknown nuance of First Amendment law earlier this month. The Court held that the NLRB could not require employers to post notices calling attention to the rights of workers. According to the court, this was akin to compelling a school child to salute the flag or forcing motorists to carry a slogan on their license plates to which they are ideologically opposed. In the next breath the court noticed that there might be a difference between compelling the disclosure of fact and forcing one to support an ideology. But the court was reassured by the Riley case in which charitable fundraisers could not be compelled to reveal percentages of receipts that went to administration.  The court ignored the facts that Riley found those particular disclosure requirement to be unduly burdensome, that Riley also concluded that fundraisers could be required to disclose their professional status, and that Riley stressed the non-commercial character of the solicitations. In the Zauderer case, however, the Supreme Court held that an attorney commercial advertiser could be required to disclose further particulars of fee arrangements than the attorney wished to include in his speech.

The D.C. Court of Appeals brushed over Zauderer by saying the disclosure requirement there was designed to prevent the consumer from being misled. The court spied a difference of constitutional dimension in not being misled and being kept in the dark altogether about the existence of important rights. Who knows what’s next in this corporate Disneyland? Perhaps corporations have a First Amendment right not to warn workers of health hazards and safety concerns. The First Amendment was once a vital tool in a democratic society. Instead, it has become a weapon in the hands of extremists who are bent on turning our democracy into a corpocracy.

Rutgers-Newark Law School: People’s Electric

Professor George W. Conk has published his much anticipated (well, at least in some quarters) article on Rutgers-Newark Law School—People’s Electric—in the 1960s and ‘70s. Loyal and attentive readers might recall the inclusion of this school as one of the exemplary elements in my piece from last year, Toward a Manifesto for Inspiration for a People’s Law School. Here is the abstract:

“Rutgers-Newark Law School was the most innovative, exciting, and effective law school in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Civil rights and liberties, ‘poverty law,’ women’s rights, employment discrimination, open housing, and public education, were the foci of legal education at Rutgers - which is the State University of New Jersey. In those two decades Rutgers-Newark - which we affectionately called People’s Electric - developed a model of engaged legal education that was and is unique.

No other law school of its era - and perhaps since - to my knowledge has been so thoroughly characterized by a broad progressive social agenda. Affirmative action, racial justice, women’s rights, public education, open housing, and civil liberties were the focus of the frequently landmark litigation which originated or was substantially aided by students and faculty from Rutgers Newark.

The unique activism of Rutgers-Newark - a small public law school in an afflicted city - had a huge impact in the development of the law. The activist faculty and the clinics engaged law students deeply in innovative and intense litigation regarding the most important and controversial issues of the day. Students at People’s Electric learned first-hand the law-making function of the courts. They often helped make that law. No other law school in the country can begin to match its record in the 1970’s. This was accomplished without endowment, without a base of high ranking or wealthy alumni, without a tradition of such activism at the school, a public law school whose tuition was nominal. Students learned from extraordinarily talented lawyers who they assisted. Their successes showed students how to succeed by really trying. We left Rutgers confident that we knew how to and could change the law, confident that we could make a difference.

Graduates continued the mission in many ways. One outstanding example is the cadre who joined the Office of the Public Defender - a statewide agency - which led or participated in the defense of over two hundred capital trials from 1982-2007 when the death penalty was repealed and replaced with life without parole. There were no executions.”

Download the article here.

Human Rights: Philosophical, Legal, and Political Perspectives—A Bibliography

My updated bibliography for human rights is here (Thanks again to Jim Chen for formatting this and other bibliographies posted online.)

On Crime & Punishment (apologies to Dostoyevsky)

At Ratio Juris I’ve posted two new bibliographies: one on (municipal and international) “criminal law,” the other a companion compilation on “punishment and prison.”

"The Case for Food Stamps"

“The Case for Food Stamps”

By Christopher D. Cook for the Los Angeles Times (May 24, 2013)

Slashing food aid makes no sense in humanitarian, economic or public health terms.

“To hear Republicans — and some Democrats — in Congress talk, you’d think food-stamp dollars just disappear into a black hole. The prevailing debate in the Senate and House versions of the farm bill, which contains funding for food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP), is over how much to cut. But when more than 15% of Americans remain impoverished, slashing food assistance for the poor makes no sense in humanitarian, economic or public health terms.

The House bill, which is gaining steam after passage by the Agriculture Committee last week, is the more draconian of the two. It would chop $20 billion over 10 years from SNAP, and its changes to food-stamp eligibility rules would cut off vital sustenance for about 2 million low-income people, including seniors and families with children. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 210,000 children in low-income families would lose their free school meals under the House plan.

The Senate version would cut far less, though a final figure will be hashed out by a conference committee in June. But the attacks on food assistance for the poor are deeply misguided and are only going to get worse. The proposed House budget from Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) seeks to gut food stamps by another $135 billion through block grants to states.

Yet government and other studies clearly show that food stamps are among the most wisely spent public dollars, providing essential nourishment and public health benefits to low-income people as well as economic stimulus to rural and urban communities. These are returns on spending that you won’t find in the corporate tax giveaways and military spending boondoggles routinely supported by both political parties, even as they scream for austerity when it comes to slashing ‘entitlements’ and food assistance for the poor.

The Trust for America’s Health, a health advocacy organization that focuses on disease prevention, warned recently of the consequences of cutting food stamps: ‘If the nation continues to underfund vital public health programs, we will never achieve long-term fiscal stability, as it will be impossible to help people get/stay healthy, happy and productive.’

Indeed, according to a 2011 study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, ‘research shows that low-income households participating in SNAP have access to more food energy, protein and a broad array of essential vitamins and minerals in their home food supply compared to eligible nonparticipants.’ [….]

In another key finding, the National Academy of Sciences reported that food stamps helped lift nearly 4 million Americans out of poverty in 2010, while improving basic food and economic security for millions more.

Cutting food stamps also means reducing economic stimulus and job creation, precisely what’s needed to help reduce poverty and hunger. The 2011 USDA study found that food-stamp dollars ‘ripple throughout the economies of the community, state and nation,’ creating multiple levels of economic stimulus. The study also found that ‘every $5 in new SNAP benefits generates a total of $9.20 in community spending.’ Each additional food-stamp dollar generates another 17 to 47 cents of additional food purchases. [….]

In the farm bills moving through Congress, the politics of austerity are again being used to undermine food assistance for the poor. As the House and Senate debate how many dollars and people to cut from food stamps, their members should consider the daily realities the poor face. Most are living on a few dollars a day for food and, at best, work in minimum-wage jobs that barely cover rent. Cutting off these basic supports for those at the bottom of our economy is unwise, counterproductive and shameful.”

Christopher D. Cook is a journalist and the author of Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis (2006).

Please note: Inexplicaby, Typepad has twice failed to post my reply to the first comment to this post so I am making it here. First, the “case for Food Stamps” was not made by me, but by the author of the editorial, Christopher Cook, although I am in wholehearted agreement with his views. Second, the discussion and debate in Congress is not about possible alternatives to the Food Stamp program but about possible cuts to this particular Welfare State provision of food aid to the poor. Personally, I would prefer a Guaranteed Annual Income (or Basic Income Grant) scheme, but that is not what is at issue here. Finally, and assuming what is intended by the garbled and inarticulate word “gummint” is the term government, in a democratic welfare regime (be it liberal, corporatist, or social democratic), the payment of taxes does not amount to theft, either literally or figuratively. To believe otherwise, evidences a failure in  understanding the nature of modern democratic governance, in the nature of taxation, and in the role of economics in solving collective action problems in a democratic polity (in this case, as a modest principle of interpersonal ethics writ large so as to discharge our moral duties to vulnerable and thus dependent others) wherein the function of markets depends on the laws of the State. In any case, as Robert E. Goodin persuasively argued in Reasons for Welfare: The Political Theory of the Welfare State (1988), those who advocate market principles will find it difficult if not impossible to avoid at the same time committing themselves to a least a minimal welfare state, as the welfare state addresses well-known historical instances of market failure while at the same time affording new opportunities for those are vulnerable and dependent to participate in markets. The welfare state in fact serves to safeguard several fundamental preconditions of the market in Goodin’s argument, as markets presuppose, first, secure property rights, second, that not all goods or things will be subect to the marketplace, “for there to one sector that is governed by the laws of the market, there must be some other sector that is not.” Third, markets presume  or presuppose that its participants are essentially independent (or free) agents: “A variety of arguments (political, sociological, economic, and ultimately moral) converge on the conclusion that dependent agents [the converse of the state of independence or the state of insufficient freedom] ought to be beyond the play of market forces. In order for people to participate in the market as independent agents, there must be some nonmarket sector to meet the sorts of needs that would otherwise render those people dependent, and hence unqualified for market relations.” In short, welfare state provision like Food Stamps renders otherwise dependent individuals substantially independent of those market transactions that created or exacerbate their vulnerability (and increase the likelihood of exploitation), while enhancing their potential or capacity for some forms of market participation.   

Christians Must Confront Scientific Illiteracy

Where science is concerned, responsible Christians are caught in the vice grip of two extremes.  On the one hand, there is the defiant and willful ignorance of persons like Congressman Paul Broun (R-Ga.), who famously declared during last fall's election cycle that "evolution and the big bang theory are lies straight from the pit of hell." And on the other hand, there is the cool atheism of someone like Richard Dawkins, contentedly dismissing the whole of religious experience as the magical thinking of the great superstitious mass of humankind.

Christians must provide effective witness against both extremes.  But before Christianity can engage atheism it must first address the scientific illiteracy in its own house.  For the greatest danger Christianity confronts at the present moment is not incipient persecution, but increasing marginalization and irrelevance.  If Christians cannot engage reasonably and responsibly with science, there will be no place for them in the public life of advanced societies.

I recently had my attention called to the work of Ken Ham. I must confess that I had not heard of him, but I soon learned that he is a figure of some influence in fundamentalist circles.  He was born in Australia, where he took an undergraduate degree in environmental biology.  He has since immigrated to the United States, settling in Cincinnati.

He expounds a doctrine known as "young earth creationism," which promotes the view that the first chapters of Genesis must be seen as scientifically valid.  The Earth was created just 6,000 years ago.  Dinosaurs and human beings walked together in those early days.

"The Bible,' Ham declares, "clearly teaches that God created [Earth] in six literal, 24-hour days a few thousand years ago" (Ken Ham, "The New Answers Book, No. 1," p. 26).  He then twists and turns all of the tools and findings of modern science to support this thesis.  Radiocarbon dating is unreliable, Ham asserts.  When "a scientist's interpretation of data does not match the clear meaning of the text in the Bible, we should never reinterpret the Bible" (p. 78).  What about the "ice ages"?  We need to be vigilant against those "secular/uniformitarian scientists" who understand glacial periods in terms of hundreds of thousands or millions of years (pp. 212-213).

Creation scientists, however, know better.  At best, there was only one ice age, directly after Noah's Flood, and it lasted for only a few hundred years (p. 214).  There never was a big bang (p. 245), and the speed of light is variable, meaning that accurate dating of the universe is impossible (p. 247).

It is easy to dismiss this stuff, but there is real danger in treating it lightly.  In the secular imagination, this fantasy view of the world is fast becoming the public face of Christianity.  Certainly, Ken Ham is a respected figure in his own community. He recently received an honorary degree from Liberty University.  His website promotes a mix of pseudo-science and survivalism.  (Check out the blog entry, "Noah the Super Prepper," May 16, 2013, AnswersinGenesis.org, for a cheerful mix of both strains of thought.)  In 2007, he opened the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky, just outside of Cincinnati.  In its first three years of operation, the Museum received more than 1 million visitors.  Even though attendance has recently declined, more than a quarter-million annually still visit it.

Christians have not always been such enemies of science.  Aside from the occasional embarrassment, such as the persecution of Galileo, science often thrived in explicitly Christian settings.  In early Christianity, there was the Bishop Synesius (373- ca. 414).  In his student days, Synesius, with his pagan instructor, the woman philosopher Hypatia, he explored the deep mathematical structure of the universe.

Then there is Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543).  A brilliant man and a Catholic monk, Copernicus held important positions in both secular and ecclesiastical government, all the while writing voluminously.  A sophisticated economic thinker, Copernicus was the first to propose that increases in the money supply have a tendency to drive price inflation.  But what he is remembered for today is his heliocentric theory of the solar system.  Through patient observation and calculation, Copernicus displaced the earth from the center of things, reorienting the way we view everything and thereby ushering in the modern world.

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) was an Augustinian monk and professor of natural philosophy and eventually became the abbot of his monastery.  And today he is recalled for his path-breaking studies of pea plants which showed the existence of recessive and dominant genes, an essential cornerstone of modern genetics.

But of them all, my own favorite is the unjustly obscure Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966), the "father of the big bang."  A Belgian priest, Fr. Lemaitre did his graduate work in theoretical physics at Cambridge University and Harvard. In 1927, while still a junior lecturer at the Catholic University of Louvain, he proposed an expansionary theory of the universe at odds with the then-prevailing belief that the universe had always existed in a steady state.  Four years later, in 1931, he asserted that the entire universe began with what he called a "cosmic egg" or "primeval atom" -- a theory that Sir Fred Hoyle derisively dismissed as "the big bang."  Later that same year, Fr. Lemaitre argued that not only was the universe expanding, its expansion was accelerating in speed.  While it has taken decades, Lemaitre's theories have been confirmed in every major particular.

This is the heritage that Christians must reclaim and reassert.  Science and religion are not opposites.  Faith and reason can be reconciled in truth.  And Christians, furthermore, must police their ranks.  When someone like Congressman Broun -- who sits on the House Committee on Science and Technology -- denounces scientific knowledge in the name of misguided fundamentalism, Christians should be the first to call him out.

Cross-posted at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/christians-must-confront-scientific-illiteracy_b_3307516.html

For God's Sake, Mr. President, Reclaim Your Spine.

Both Patrick's recent post marking the birthday of Malcom X, and Steve's post before it questioning just how 'scandalous' the IRS pseudoscandal really is, invite some reflection on President Obama's reaction to the mentioned pseudoscandal thus far.  In my humble opinion, that reaction has been the very contrary of what it ought to be, and this might owe partly to a handicap that many have long suggested the President might labor under.  If that perception of handicap does indeed partly explain the President's weak showing right now, I very much hope he will recognize that he has nothing to worry about, then reclaim his spine and resume his hard work for the nation.  Let me explain.

To begin with, let us refresh ourselves on the backdrop against which the President has recently professed 'outrage' and accepted the resignation of acting commissioner Steven Miller at the IRS.  There is so much irony, injustice, and outright lying in these latest Republican and 'Tea Party' attacks on the IRS and the President that it is difficult to know where to begin in demonstrating their empirical falsehood and sheer venality. 

First, note that the head of the IRS at the time in question (2010-2012) was a Bush appointee who, as a Republican, had much more reason to 'target' Tea Party groups for scrutiny concerning their right to tax subsidization for non-qualifying, avowedly political activities than did any Democrat.  For the 'Tea Party' circa 2010, recall, was to the Republican Party much what Ralph Nader was to Al Gore circa 2000 - a spoiler.   

Second, note that huge numbers of these new 'Tea Party' groups - groups named, by the way, lest we forget, for a famous act of criminal vandalism and property-destruction in the name of an anti-tax protest - began suddenly claiming tax exempt status during the time in question, requiring IRS verification of the groups' charitable rather than political status.  Even if deliberations at the IRS over how best to meet these new verification needs antedated by some months the actual influx of applications, as suggested by the Washington Post late last week, this would hardly be surprising given how likely it clearly became that such screening would be necessary once these groups began forming in 2009 and the Supreme Court's infamous Citizens United decision virtually invited them to begin seeking 501(c)(4) status.  

Third, House Republicans had by this time cut funding for the IRS to the point (check the numbers - they're shocking) that such verification was nearly impossible without using streamlined 'profiling' methods commonly employed in law enforcement - methods, by the way, that self-professed 'conservatives' regularly endorse when it is African Americans or putative 'Islamist terrorists' who are to be profiled rather than racist rightwing hate groups and gun-toting tax-evaders.  This fund-cutting of course followed a familiar pattern of Republican slash and burn tactics where the drowing of government in Grover Norquist's bathtub is concerned.  Indeed, that other preposterous pseudoscandal which has plagued news outlets in recent months - 'Benghazi!' - itself stems directly from the Republican House's slashing of funding for US embassy needs abroad, and is itself being used now to 'target' the front-runner for 2016's forthcoming Presidential Campaign, former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. 

(And this is of course not to mention the recently revealed real scandal, to the effect that Republican operatives actually doctored White House documents which they sent to ABC News last week with a view to slandering the Obama Administration - why is this not being 'investigated'?) 

Fourth, and as mysteriously unmentioned by 'conservatives,' the IRS used the same methods to screen for progressive, not just 'Tea Party' groups, while Republican Senator McConnell is on record as claiming that such progressive groups should be specifically 'targeted.'  You can watch and listen to McConnell on this point here, at 3.12 minutes in. 

Fifth, the IRS ultimately (and to my mind, bizarrely) approved the tax-exempt status of all of the 'Tea Party' groups whose applications for tax subsidization it reviewed, while denying that status to some of the progressive groups that applied (just as Republican Senator McConnell recommended).  You can read about that in painstaking detail on the front page of yesterday's Sunday NYT. 

Sixth, as we all know, Republicans have fought the President at every turn to prevent his restoring equity to the tax code in the name of both justice and budget-balancing.  So devoted have they been to this cause that they have actually made history by forcing the nation's first-ever credit downgrade by a bond rating agency in 2011, all in the name of economically illiterate 'austerity' policies that have brought Europe to virtual ruin.  The Republicans finally lost this ongoing battle decisively in November 2012, yet they are now on record as being willing to pursue their ends, in the immortal words of Malcolm X, 'by any means necessary' - e.g., through appropriations refusals and false 'scandal' manufacture - when they lose, as they increasingly are doing now, at the ballot box. 

Seventh, the same holds true in respect of the President's signature health insurance reform legislation, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, which Republicans have now voted 37 times to undo or 'repeal,' and which is administered in part by the IRS.  Indeed, that the latest attack on the IRS is simply a new front in this ceaseless guerilla war against res judicata and the ACA is essentially admitted both by Mr. McConnell in yesterday's Meet the Press interview linked to above, and in a host of similar Sunday morning speaches by and talkshow interviews with other Republican legislators that aired yesterday.  (Not a single Republican speaker or interviewee in recent days has failed to highlight the shrunken IRS's role in administering their favorite 'big government power grab,' 'Obamacare.')

And finally eighth, the Republicans are also on record as having explicitly adopted a srategy, immediately following the 2008 election and during the months preceeding the President's taking office, of preventing the President's accomplishing anything at all while in office - even things that they themselves might agree to be good for the country - simply in order to enhance their own future electoral prospects.  Republicans have even regularly admitted this, apparently taking a chortling pride in it, as can be read about in further detail here.  This is of course fully as astonishing as was Republican willingness to ruin the nation's credit rating.  It is nothing short of a clucking, Cheshire cat style admission of intent to sabotage the nation itself in the name of future partisan prospects - the very contrary of that repudiation of 'faction' which so characterized the ideals of the Founders whom Republicans and Tea Party types comically purport to admire and follow.  

Add all of this together, throw in now-routine Republican filibuster abuse in the Senate and attempts to prevent voting during electoral seasons in racial minority districts, and you see at once what the latest Republican pseudo-scandals are really about.  They are about nothing more than continuing, systematically planned Republican 'dirty tricks' in the name of undermining national tax policy, health care policy, economic policy more broadly and even the democratic  process itself.  They are simply the latest tactic, in other words, in the ongoing Republican strategy of systematic sabotage. 

Against this backdrop, I submit, the only real offense of which the President is guilty is either Pollyannish blindness, low energy, or cowardice.  And this takes me to the putative 'handicap' to which I referred above. 

Why in heaven's name did the President presumably ask for and certainly accept the resignation of a decent man, Mr. Miller, over at the understaffed, underfunded IRS last week?  Why did he stand by in silence while grandstanding and outright lying Republican House members publically humiliated this decent public servant in bad faith showtrial 'hearings' last week?  And why does the President not change course now, now that Republican intentions are so transparent? 

Many will recall that, during the 2008 electoral cycle, some commentators worried that then Senator Obama would have to take care to avoid evoking the 'angry black man' stereotype in his campaigning, and that this need to appear 'more Martin than Malcolm' might render him vulnerable to unscrupulous campaign tactics on the part of the McCain campaign.  After all, it would require a form of unilateral disarmament.  This worry became all the more manifest when some began attacking the then Senator for his past attendance at the church of the so-called 'firebrand' Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and when the self-congratulatorily know-nuthin' Republican Vice Presidential candidate began suggesting that Senator 'Barack Hussain Obama' liked to 'pal[ ] around with terrorists' such as the educator William Ayres. 

While the then future President fortunately weathered this ugly storm in 2008, during his first term - especially during its first half - he seemed often to continue to act as if he still had to bend over backwards to seem more Martin than Malcolm, even after he had long since come by many to be considered 'post-racial.'  So, for example, very shortly after the Fox 'News' clown Glenn Beck began relentlessly slandering White House 'Green Energy Czar' Van Jones in 2009, the President accepted Jones's resignation.  Then, shortly after perennially angry Andrew Breitbart began slandering Shirley Sherrod of the Department of Agriculture the following year, the same happened.  And of course, all the while, the President continually sought to demonstrate his cooperative and compromising spirit by preemptively surrendering all of his principal druthers ahead of all negotiations with Republicans on matters of financial reform, health insurance reform, tax policy and budget policy more generally.        

None of this placating and preemptively compromising behavior, of course, availed the President - or the causes of justice and national economic recovery - anything.  For the President was dealing with nothing more than political boors - bestial types who view good faith and friendliness as no more than weakness inviting more bullying.  And happily, for a time, the President seemed to have figured this out. 

Upon discovering that Breitbart had outright lied about Ms. Sherrod, for example, the President's Department of Agriculture offered her a new position.  And as the 'Occupy' movement proved it safe to discuss plutocracy and worsening inequality again just as the 2012 electoral cycle began picking up in late 2011, the President grew increasingly vocal in his Teddy-Roosevelt-channeling commitment to restoring the American middle class, even if this meant holding firm on allowing some of the profoundly unjust and profligate Bush era tax cuts for plutocrats to expire.  And then, best of all, upon decisively winning reelection this past November, the President seemed virtually a new man, ready to push hard for what he professed to believe and no longer worried about latent racialist fears in 'post-racial' America. 

What, then, has happened?  Why do we seem to be right back to 2010 only four months into the President's new term?  

I confess, I do not know.  Perhaps the President is tired.  Or perhaps he is disgusted and demoralized by the recent failure of new gun 'background check' regulation to get past yet another Senate Republican abuse of the philibuster.  What ever the cause, I think we must all pray - and now urge - that the President return to his January 2013 mentality at once.  He should not be professing 'surprise' and 'outrage' at the IRS, or acting as an accomplice to venal Republicans seeking to gut that essential government instrumentality - and with it, his own signature ACA - even further than they have done since the 1990s.  He should not be throwing Mr. Miller under the bus of grotesque Republican posturing and bullying.  And, finally, he should not be acting as if he were aloof or 'above the fray.'  'Transformational' leaders don't duck frays; they win them - precisely because their causes are just. 

What then should the President do?  And what should the other forces of light - in this case, the Democrats - do?  I think it's very simple.  They should 'come clean with the American people,' as all of those ersatz-'outraged' Republicans often put it, and call out the current Republican tactics for what they are.  The President should hold a frank, thorough discussion with the public, in the form of a long address, interview, press conference, or some combination thereof, in which he begins with Mr. McConnell's first articulation of the Republican scorched earth policy immediately after the 2008 election and proceeds from episode to episode, demonstrating in stark detail the sabotage policy that has been at work in literally every Republican action and tactic of the past four years. 

He should sprinkle the discussion with all telling numbers - number of IRS employees in 1998 and now, number of resorts to the philibuster, number of agency posts and judgeships still unfilled, magnitude of cuts to agency budgets, amounts of campaign donations from sectional interests to Republican candidates for office, etc., etc., etc.  He should paint the entire picture in bold strokes and with full narrative sweep, finally closing with both a demand that Republicans begin actually joining in governing rather than sabotaging all governance and a request that the public join him in this demand.  Call the Republican tactics for what they are.  And do it every single hour of every single day until it becomes the subject of the national discussion, as well it ought.  For this is the scandal - literally the only true scandal.  As it has been since late November of 2008. 

Meanwhile, and in this same spirit, the Democratic Senate should complement the President's efforts by holding 'hearings' of its own to supplement and correct the Republican House's bad faith showtrial proceedings.  It should call before it all private political 'operatives' and 'consultants' with whom the Republican 'leadership' has met since late 2008, requesting enlightenment as to every detail of the scorched earth, propaganda and sabotage strategy that has been Republican 'governance' policy since losing the 2008 election.  This should be easy, in view, once again, of how proud these self-satisfied creatures seem ever to be in discussing the successes thus far of their tactics. 

The Senate should also, of course, conduct a very public inquest into how Republican operatives came literally to doctor White House documents released to ABC, with a view to falsely incriminating the Administration in connection with the 'Benghazi' nonscandal.  And it should commence at once to change the philibuster rules to put an end once and for all to antimajoritarianism in the Senate.  Again, the goal should be to show all of this to constitute the scandal.  For again, that is precisely what it is.  The Republican sabotage strategy, at work since 2008, is the scandal.  The only scandal.         

All of this, it seems to me, should be done at once, while there is still time to salvage the first half of the President's second term.  And the President should coordinate with the Democrats in both chambers on all of it, while also compiling a comprehensive agenda of all helpful measures that the Administration can constitutionally take without antidemocratic House approval (recall that even the House is now undemocratic, inasmuch as gerrymandered districts yielded a slim Republican majority notwithstanding over 1.4 million more votes' having been cast for Democrats than Republicans).  It should also go without saying that the President and the Democratic Caucus should now be working quite energetically to ensure a return of the House to the Democrats - the one party that still believes in governance - in 2014, so that the process of full economic recovery can be well and truly completed before the President leaves office.  Only then will his presidency be truly 'transformational.' 

Oh, and finally, lest I forget: the President should rescind his acceptance of Mr. Miller's resignation from the IRS - and offer a new position while at it to Van Jones for good measure.  (What better symbol of his finally having learned his lesson?)  Here's hoping he does this 'with all deliberate speed' - if possible, as early as tomorrow morning.     

Teresa Forcades, the radical Catalan nun on a mission ...

"Sister Teresa Forcades is one of Catalonia's foremost political figures, but uniquely for a faith-led figure in Spain, her ideology is feminist and left-wing. Against a backdrop of continued economic contraction and austerity, she spoke to the Guardian about the need for an alternative to capitalism and criticised the misogyny of the Catholic church."

You can watch the six-minute video about Sister Forcades here.

Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965)

Today is the birthday of Malcolm X. By way of celebration, I leave you with three provocative books discussing his life and ideas:

• Cone, James. Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare? (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1992).
• Marable, Manning. Malcolm X: A Life of Revolution (New York: Viking, 2011).
• Wolfenstein, Eugene Victor. The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (London: Free Association Books, 1989).

The Marxist Spirituality of C.L.R. James

I found occasion once before to post something on the “cricketing Marxist,” C.L.R. James, and now I’d like to draw your attention to a piece by Kenan Malik on “the 50th anniversary of C.L.R.  James’ wonderful, groundbreaking work Beyond a Boundary.” James exemplifies what I can only describe as a Marxist spirituality, the adjective qualifying something like the following:

“[A]t the richer end of the spectrum [of spirituality], we find the term used in connection with activities and attitudes which command widespread appeal, irrespective of metaphysical commitment or doctrinal allegiance. Even the most convinced atheist may be prepared to avow an interest in the ‘spiritual’ dimension of human existence, if that dimension is taken to cover forms of life that put a premium on certain kinds of intensely focused moral and aesthetic response, or on the search for deeper reflective awareness of the meaning of our lives and of our relationship to others and to the natural world.”—John Cottingham in The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy, and Human Value (2005)

In Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World (2009) the Indian psychoanalyst and writer Sudhir Kakar, reminds us that

“Spirituality, like culture, has many definitions and yet manages to give a sense of familiarity to most of us. For me, the spiritual occupies a continuum from moments of self-transcendence marked by loving connection to an object—nature, art, visions of philosophy or science, the beloved in sexual embrace—to the mystical union of saints where the sense of the self completely disappears. The spiritual, then, incorporates the transformative possibilities of the human psyche: total love without a trace of hate, selflessness carved out of the psyche’s normal self-centeredness, a fearlessness that is not a counter-phobic reaction to the fear that is an innate part of the human psyche.”

Finally, a neurosurgeon, professor of medical ethics, and a philosopher, Grant Gillett, completes our generous conception of a spirituality that embraces a Marxist like James:

“Spirituality lifts our eyes from the possibilities defined by the everyday and economic. The divine wind recalls the breath that gives us life and the cleansing water that allows healing and refreshment in the arid wastes of suffering is a figure with meaning that goes beyond the material. In the most unlikely places we find loving and transformative touches, that are the things of the spirit in that they are ways not only of understanding but also beatifying what we do, however bloody, messy and unromantic it is. We are beset by directives and discourses that reduce, demean, and obscure our humanity, that are not noble, uplifting, inspiring, and fulfilling. We can render life in operational (or narrowly functional) terms and make it tolerable through escapism and pleasure but there is another way. We live and love in a world where real tragedies happen, real joy is found, and real connections are forged through time and across barriers of culture and position. In those things we discover the resonance in ourselves of inscriptions, utterances, and works that deepen our understanding.” From Gillett’s book, Subjectivity and Being Somebody: Human Identity and Neuroethics (2008)

Our conception of spirituality thus clarified, here are the first two paragraphs from Malik’s post on James:

“This year marks the 50^th anniversary of CLR James’ wonderful, groundbreaking work Beyond a Boundary.  To call it a book about cricket is a bit like calling cricket a ‘game.’ Beyond a Boundary blends politics and memoir, history and journalism, biography and reportage, in a manner that transcends literary, sporting and political boundaries. V S Naipaul, not a man given to offering easy praise, described it as ‘one of the finest and most finished books to come out of the West Indies.’ John Arlott, that most wonderful of cricket commentators, wrote of Beyond the Boundary, that it was ‘a book so outstanding as to compel any reviewer to check his adjectives several times before he describes it and, since he is likely to be dealing in superlatives, to measure them carefully to avoid over-praise – which this book does not need.’

Beyond the Boundary was a book that CLR James had to write, and that only he could write. Novelist and orator, philosopher and cricketer, historian and revolutionary, Trotskyist and Pan-Africanist – there are few modern figures who can match the intellectual depth, cultural breadth or sheer political contrariness of Cyril Lionel Robert James. He was a lifelong Marxist, yet one with an uncommonly fierce independence of mind that expressed itself both in his rejection of conventional Marxist arguments and in his refusal to repent of his politics even when it became fashionable to do so. He was an icon of black liberation struggles, and yet someone whose politics was steeped in a love of Western literature and Western civilization. He was a man whose affection for cricket was matched only by his love for Shakespeare. The book is in the image of the man himself. Brilliant, complex, contradictory, beautifully observed, deeply insightful, but sometimes also romantic and naïve. And, of course, boundary-crossing.” [….]

The rest is here.

Should the IRS Pay Special Attention to those Groups Who Believe Taxes are too High?

Is it unreasonable to suppose that groups who are ideologically committed to the proposition that taxes are too high are more likely than other groups to play fast and loose with the tax laws? If so, would it not make sense for the IRS to pay special attention to these groups to make sure they comply? Is this significantly different than paying special attention to those who meet a drug courier profile or to those who match a dangerousness profile upon entering the country? Of course, it is possible that the IRS paid special attention to conservative groups because of distaste for their politics. But it is also possible that the IRS paid special attention to these groups without regard to their own feelings about the politics of the groups they looked at. I cannot say that about the Republicans or the Democrats. The Speaker of the House is ready to send someone, anyone, to jail before the facts are determined. Fox News and George Will compare this to Watergate with no evidence that the President was remotely involved. Worse, the Democrats support throwing people under the bus to show their disapproval of what might have happened without a showing that the stigmatized individuals were any more involved in partisan discrimination than the President. Political meanness, corruption, and cynicism is not a good substitute for political morality.

Several Updated Bibliographies

I’ve recently updated several of my bibliographies:

(i)    Ecological & Environmental Worldviews: A Basic Transdisciplinary Bibliography

(ii)   Punishment & Prison: A Bibliography   

(iii)  Terrorism—Moral, Psychological, Political & Legal Perspectives: A Select Bibliography

(iv)  Torture: Moral, Legal & Political Dimensions—A Basic Bibliography

WASHINGTON — “A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that ‘it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture’ and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.” (New York Times, April 16, 2013)

The Superimposition* of a False Scandal upon a Real One at the IRS

Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times provides us with much needed context and perspective on the so-called “IRS Scandal.”

As Juan Cole notes, “The IRS scrutiny of Tea Party groups applying for tax-exempt charitable status derived from a legitimate concern at the more than doubling of such requests after the Citizens United ruling, and a suspicion that the groups were backed by Republican billionaires intending to use them for politics, not charity. It may be that the scrutiny was sometimes invidious, but it is not obvious on the surface as to whether the bureaucrats actually did anything out of the ordinary (left-wing requests for tax exempt status were flat; if they had suddenly doubled presumably they would have attracted attention too).”

See too, Peter S. Goodman at The Huffington Post: “The IRS was Dead Right to Scrutinize Tea Party.”

* Adhyāsa (Sanskrit: अध्यास) in Advaita Vedānta philosophy: “Throwing over or casting upon; misconception or erroneous attribution, the significance being that the mind casts upon facts, which are misunderstood, certain mistaken notions; hence false or erroneous attribution. Simply put, adhyāsa means superimposition or false attribution of properties of one thing on another thing.” [Adapted from Wikipedia entry]