Rooting for Uniforms

This is a post in three parts. Not to be confused with This American Life.

Part I: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Kevin Garnett

I grew up loving the Boston Celtics. I loved everything about them. Their teamwork, their style of play, their attitude, their ugliness -- everything. Maybe it had to do with the fact that I was an average sized white kid who had no hops, but loved basketball, and instead of relying on talent, had to rely on a bruising, physical game in order to survive. Whatever the reason, I lived and died with Boston Celtics basketball.

The Celtics went 22 years between NBA championships. The years between 1986 and 2008 were beset with tragedy (the deaths of Len Bias and Reggie Lewis) and mediocrity. Many of the Celtics teams scraped the bottom of the barrell, rarely winning and often times being an embarrassment to themselves and their fans. During the same time the game changed for the worse. The NBA no longer relied on quick, smart passing, elaborate teamwork, and superior shooting, but was a one-on-one up and down the floor style with brick after brick being thrown up. It was boring and almost unwatchable.

But, prior to the 2007-08 season, the Celtics signed two superstars -- Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen -- to supplement their resident all-star forward Paul Pierce and instantly became a contender for the NBA crown. They reached the 2008 finals against the hated Los Angeles Lakers, and there I was again, living and dying with each game rooting on my beloved Celtics.

So, why did I suddenly care? There was certainly no connection between the team that featured Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Danny Ainge, Bill Walton, Robert Parrish, Dennis Johnson and a host of various scrubs, and this sleek athletic showtime Celtics team chock full of superstars. I was certainly far removed from the teenager that obsessed over every statistic in every game all season long.

What it comes down to that we as Americans root for uniforms. If we grew up rooting for the Yankees, even though Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield and Graig Nettles have long since retired, chances are we will still root for the Yankees, or Celtics, or Cowboys or what have you. This is the same if our team suddenly trades for a player we hated when he played for our rival team. He has our uniform now, so suddenly we love him today when we hated him yesterday. Our loyalty is not to the players or even the franchise, our loyalty is to the brand. There is something truly Capitalist about that, and the fact that brands can have such an influential effect on our behavior.

When this is related to sports teams, it really doesn't have a huge impact on our society. However, when it relates to politics and policies, this type of behavior is much more serious.

Part II: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love ObamaCare

The American political system for better or for worse (oh, ok, for worse) is divided into two main parties -- Democrat and Republican. Those who maintain their allegience to one of these parties really do see substantive differences between the two, and sometimes there are. However, it amazes me how the positions of these parties can morph almost imperceptably overnight and take their millions of loyalists along for the ride.

One example of this is the years long fight over ObamaCare.

When he was elected in 2008, and took office in 2009 as our nation's first African-American President, Barack Obama decided, whether wisely or unwisely, to make the push for a national health insurance system his number one domestic policy initiative. The policy that he introduced would mandate most citizens to purchase private health insurance, would make reforms to the private health care insurance system such as banning denials based upon pre-existing conditions, would set up health insurance exchanges similar to risk pools where individuals could shop for the lowest cost plans, and would penalize those who did not purchase insurance by making them pay a penalty or tax.

This plan was nothing new. It had been implemented in Massachusetts by then Republican governor Mitt Romney. But, the plan was much older than that. In fact it was the exact plan that had been hatched by the ultra conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation and floated as the Republican alternative to Bill Clinton's auspicious but ultimately failed universal national healthcare plan in 1993. I know this because I was standing outside the press conference where all of the Republican Senators announced their plan back then, handing out press releases to all of the reporters trying to get them to cover a press conference later that afternoon put forth by the Health Care Coalition, a conglomerate of labor leaders and other progressive groups pushing to support the Clinton plan.

The Republican plan in 1993 was roundly criticized by Democrats of all stripes as a boondoggle and a sell out to the insurance industry, falling fall short of the goal of universal coverage that was touted by the Clintons. As it turned out, nothing was passed and we were left with a system which became more and more expensive, leaving any kind of adequate health coverage beyond the reach of more and more Americans.

So, having a Democrat touting a plan which had been hatched by the most conservative parts of the Republican party and had been implemented by a self-described severely conservative governor to pretty good success, you would think that passage would be fairly easy. Of course, the opposite was the case. Republicans viciously attacked Obama's health care plan, alleging it limited freedom, was socialized medicine, would lead to rationed care, and would establish death panels who would decide when to kill your grandma. None of these were remotely true, of course, but their vehement opposition to the Affordable Care Act probably helped the GOP take over the House of Representatives and gain seats in the Senate in 2010, while at the same time costing them the Presidency in 2012.

To show how exactly this was "rooting for uniforms" much like in sports, let's look at what would have likely happened had Mitt Romney bested John McCain for the GOP nomination in 2008 and won the Presidency against Obama (it's less far fetched than you think).

Upon taking office, President Romney would have almost certainly introduced as his main domestic policy initiative, the very same plan which he so successfully implemented as Governor in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts health insurance plan is almost identical to Obama's Affordable Care Act. What would have followed would be almost farcical knowing what happened over the last five years. Immediately, every Republican elected official would line up touting the benefits of the plan. They would almost certainly emphasize that the Romney plan would promote personal responsibility and reward those who had purchased health care all along by lowering their rates and punish those who lazily refused to pay into the system by fining them. The benefits to small businesses by setting up separate exchanges for small business would be shown to be a way to lift up the job creators who up to now had been unable to afford to provide health insurance for their employees even though they had wanted to. Moreover, the Republicans would have responded to criticisms from the Left that unlike socialized medicine or a single payer system that was run by the government, the Romney health care plan kept individual choice and private benefits, keeping the government out of your health care decisions.

The main opposition to President Romney's plan would be led by Nancy Pelosi and probably Senator Obama, pointing out the huge subsidies being paid to the health insurance industry and drug manufacturers. They would call this more corporate welfare. They would lament the huge costs that would be imposed on the poor. You would hear heartbreaking tales of single mothers, or old retirees forced to choose between health insurance and food. These same working poor would end up homeless when forced to pay the penalty for not being able to afford private health insurance. This would be attacked as another tax being imposed on the least fortunate among us, while fat cats and the wealthiest with their Cadillac policies got superior coverage and at the same time were getting huge tax cuts proposed by the same Republicans trying to force this despicable plan on our nation.

Eventually the Democrats would squeeze out some small concessions probably in the form of expanded exchanges, or greater subsidies for lower income individuals, but would in the end go ahead and vote in favor of the Romney plan. This would be hailed by both sides as a huge step forward and much better than the system we had before hand. But you would never hear a peep about how the Romney plan was an attack on individual freedoms, nor anything about death panels or killing grandma. The only people railing about things like this would be considered lunatic libertarian fringe elements and this would never see the inside of any courtroom, much less come down to a breathless 5-4 decision in the Supreme Court.

Part III: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Drones

But nothing shows the outright absurdity of the willingness of Americans to support policies that they would have despised had they been proposed by the "other team" more than President Obama's drone program. When he ran for President in 2008, Senator Barack Obama was overwhelmingly critical (rightfully so, in my opinion) of the foreign policy of then President George W. Bush. He was most outspoken about the use of torture to attempt to obtain information and the prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Based on the posture of his campaign, one would have been reasonable in expecting that once elected, President Obama would reverse course on these programs, immediately draw down troops, close Guantanamo Bay, end indefinite detention, and in a responsible manner in our dealings around the world.

However, once elected, President Obama continued our troop deployments, increasing our troop levels in Afghanistan, kept Guantanamo open, increased the use of indefinite detention expanding it beyond any levels previously used by the Bush administration, and continued to act aggressively and recklessly in our foreign policy.

But the one policy implemented by Obama that has caused the most consternation world wide is his use of drones to carry out targeted killings across the Middle East. These attacks know no geographic limitations being carried out in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East. We actually know very little about the program, including the rules of engagement and exactly where the drones have been deployed, against whom they have been deployed, or the reasons that any particular individual or group was targeted based on the extreme secrecy the Obama administration has placed over the program.

What little we do know about the program is incredibly disturbing. We know that many of the attacks are so-called "signature" killings, not directed at any particular person or Al-Qaeda leader, but instead executed because the target fits a profile which is indicative of persons who may be terrorists. This has resulted in killings of innocent civilians. When faced with criticisms over the killing of civilians, the administration inexplicably simply re-defined the term combatant to include any male person of military age who is found in a combat zone.

We have learned that the administration does not exempt American citizens from being targeted by drones, as was evident with the assassination of American citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki in Yemen. Awlaki had been a high priority target of the Obama administration based upon his popularity among young Muslims who were exposed to his militant speeches mostly through You Tube videos, as well as his apparent participation in plots against the U.S. including the supposed underwear bomber on a plane headed for Detroit. Two weeks after his assassination, Awlaki's 16 year-old son, American citizen Abdulrahman Awlaki was killed by a predator drone. We still do not know if the younger Awlaki was targeted since the administration will not release this information, but there appears to be no evidence that Abdulrahman Awlaki had any involvement in Al Qaeda. When pressed to answer about the younger Awlaki's death by We Are Change's Luke Rudkowski, former Obama press secretary and current MSNBC contributor Robert Gibbs stated "I would suggest you should have a far more responsible father."

We learned in a New York Times article that there was a secret kill list, presided over by the President himself, in which it is decided who will be targeted for assassination next. These weekly meetings have been dubbed Terror Tuesdays and the potential targets laid out on cards similar to baseball cards. The term developed for the criteria for which it is decided who lives and who dies is the Orwellian sounding "disposition matrix." In all of these drone strikes, meetings, assassination decisions, there is no judicial oversight and the position of the administration is that having representatives of the various parts of the executive branch alone discuss whether due process has been met is sufficient under the Constitution.

All of this came to a head during the confirmation hearings for CIA director John Brennan who had participated both in the prosecution of the drone program as well as in the previous administration's "enhanced interrogation", i.e. torture program. A couple of Senators, some Republican, some Democrat, pressed the nominee on the issue of drones and whether American citizens in the United States could be the target of drone strikes. It was learned that the Obama administration had failed to respond to multiple inquiries of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding the drone program and had not provided any of the legal memos justifying the extrajudicial assassination program. It was clear that the administration was not only bypassing the judiciary, but the legislative branch as well, ignoring all oversight of its program. The climax of this was a 12 hour filibuster of Brennan's nomination by Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky to draw attention to the administration's abuse of their power and refusal to give answers to the legitimate and reasonable inquiries of the Senate.

There is no doubt that had these policies been carried out by the Bush administration that there would be outrage on the left. It would be the top story every night on MSNBC. Democratic Senators would be lining up demanding answers, calling for hearings and investigations into the abuse of power by the Bush administration. There would be more than one call for the President to be impeached. There would be mass protests in the streets and robust debate over whether or not this activity was even legal under U.S. and international law.

So, what was the reaction from Democrats? Mostly silence. The very same people who vented overwhelming criticism at the previous administration now agreed overwhelmingly with these policies being carried out by Obama. This can best be exemplified in this picture showing the results of a phone in poll on the liberal Ed Show on MSNBC the night of the Brennan hearings:

It is simply inconceivable that the viewership of the Ed Show would be agreeing with a Republican president targeting American citizens for assassination, much less supporting it by a nearly four to one margin. This is probably the most overwhelming example of the American public rooting for uniforms, willing to accept something they previously found distasteful simply because it is proposed by someone they voted for or like.

Conclusion: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Third Parties

So what does this all tell us?

I'm not going to venture a guess as to why the American electorate acts this way, or why those who strongly identify as either Democrats or Republicans are so quick to defend any policy put forth by their party regardless of whether they supported or extremely opposed the same policy previously. That is something for psychologists and sociologists to study.

What I can conclude is that what this does show is that our two-party political system is much less about ideology and much more about gaining and maintaining power. The similarities between Democrats and Republicans are far greater than their differences. But by being able to marshall their party loyalists to support them no matter what and to stick with their parties as their policies shift more often than the wind, both Democrats and Republicans have been able to stave off any serious challenges from parties either on the left or the right.

Both the Republican and Democratic parties exist to maintain a system of corporate governance whereby elected officials adopt legislation which creates the most favorable conditions possible for their large corporate paymasters. As money becomes more and more involved in the political system and politicians rely on large donors to maintain their careers, the entrenchment of this corporatocracy will increase and become permanent.

Of course, as long as people are willing to support their stated political party no matter how far they stray from their stated positions, there will be less and less incentive for them to hold themselves accountable to their non corporate constituents. The parties know this, and as Obama has shown us, the ability to campaign in one way and govern in a completely different way is not only possible, but overwhelmingly successful. This will be the template upon which future Democratic campaigns will be built.

Until people are willing to demand accountability from their leaders, and be willing to walk away from their stated parties, this will not change. I cannot see myself voting for a Presidential candidate from either major party in the future. There will be those who claim to be liberals who will criticize this saying that I am empowering Republicans. But I simply refuse to take part in this grand political Kabuki theater wherein the candidates act out their elaborate roles simply for show, while carrying out policies which completely undercut their promises and stated beliefs.

It is only through more people making this kind of commitment to refuse the current corrupt system of government which controls our nation that we can begin to see real change.

Sympathy for the Coward

I want you to for a minute think of Jesus of Nazareth. Not Jesus our Lord and Savior, deity to more than a billion Christians around the world, but Jesus the carpenter, activist, revolutionary, the human being. It is thinking of Jesus in this sense, removed from his Godly nature, where I find much insight into both my faith and my life.

During this Holy Week, as in every Holy Week, the minds of Christians and non-Christians alike are drawn to reflect on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Every year, I focus much attention on one of the most fascinating individuals in the Bible - Pontius Pilate. Pilate is the notorious Roman governor of Judea who condemns Christ to death on the Cross. His notorious washing of his hands prior to giving into the will of the crowds calling for Jesus's crucifixion and inability to stand up for the law and his own beliefs in the face of the overwhelming opinion of the crowds facing him have condemned Pilate to eternal infamy in the annals of history.

But, should we not have sympathy for Pilate? Are we not surrounded by Pilates every day of our lives? Do we not ourselves give into the crowd and public opinion and authority rather than speak the unpopular or harsh truth?

My view on this, as with many things spiritual, is influenced greatly by my parish priest growing up. Father Tom's favorite and probably most profound sermon was on Pilate. He ended it in his usual crescendo and dramatic effect by saying "I know Pontius Pilate. I see him in the mirror every day." I keep coming back to this view of Pilate as my spirituality and reading of the Gospels grows within the Episcopal Church.

Pilate's ultimate failure is cowardice. It is clear from the Gospels that Pilate did not believe that Jesus had done anything to deserve death. He repeatedly states that he has no basis under the law to put him to death. He tries to foist Jesus off on the Jewish authorities to no avail. He does everything he can to clear himself of the responsibility for this rabble-rouser who is brought in front of him. Yet, ultimately, he accedes to the cries of  the crowd to crucify Jesus and against his own judgment and belief, sentences Jesus to die.

When looking at the circumstances, if we are honest with ourselves, it's really not all that difficult to understand why Pilate would do this. After all, here he is in God-forsaken Judea, probably the least attractive of all of the far flung assignments for a Roman bureaucrat. He is constantly dealing with insurrections, revolts, someone or another claiming to be the Messiah, and an unruly foreign group of people over which he was given rule. What would be the harm to him of sending another trouble maker to be hanged on a cross? It might even help him politically, after all.

Unfortunately, we have seen this act repeated throughout history right up to today and we will continue to see it in our future. How many people who, like Jesus, stood up for what is right and speak the truth even when it is unpopular end up meeting a similar fate to that of Jesus. Just in the last century, the list is frighteningly long. Mohandas Gandhi, a Hindu who followed the radical life of Christ forsaking his wealth and standing up to the greatest Empire of his time, assassinated. Martin Luther King, who in the face of the most vicious violence and racism refused to back down from his enemies while at the same time refused to give into violence, assassinated. Robert Kennedy, who dared us to see a world without poverty, without discrimination, without inequality, assassinated. Nelson Mandela, who stood up to one of the most evil governments of our time, challenging racist Apartheid through the use of law, imprisoned for 27 years. Even today, those that speak truth to power, Thomas Drake prosecuted for blowing the whistle and bringing attention to illegal wiretaps; John Kiriakou currently in prison for standing up to the government and exposing the horrific use of torture against prisoners at Guantanamo; Bradley Manning, facing life in prison for exposing U.S. military misdeeds and illegalities during the Iraq War; Julian Assange, who has become an international pariah and is stuck in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, due to his wide scale exposing of illegality around the world and publishing the truth for all to see.

I'm not saying that any of these people should be compared to Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, King of Heaven and Son of God. Remember, I'm asking you to look at the human nature of Jesus - the man courageously standing against the authority of his day both politically and religiously, professing radical truth to those who refused to hear it. What I am saying, is that for each of these individuals, there was at least one Pontius Pilate who refused to do the right thing and allowed their persecution or death to occur.

What's worse is how many times have we ourselves refused to stand up in the face of overwhelming opposition to do the right thing, to stand up for the person being treated unjustly, to voice the unpopular opinion, even though we knew doing so would be the right thing to do?

This is what we are called upon as Christians to do. As followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to do as he did, to stand up for the downtrodden, to voice the radical truth to those in power, to express the unpopular opinion because we know it is right, even though we may suffer persecution, ostracism, or even in extreme cases death.

This Holy Week, we must dedicate ourselves to act more like Jesus and act less like Pilate. Our world could use a lot more truth, and a lot less cowardice.

Steubenville and What We Haven't Learned

Like many who were following the situation in Steubenville, Ohio involving the rape and horrific mistreatment of a 16 year-old girl by two high school student football players and their friends, I was relieved by the guilty verdict handed down by the Judge in the case. Relieved because this case and the attention it received could have served as a serious set back for victims of rape and sexual assault in the future, much like the tawdry William Kennedy Smith case in the early 1990s served as yet another disincentive to women to come forward to report their rapes and risk having their reputations, life, and even name dragged through the mud (remember NBC inexplicably published the name of the victim in the Kennedy Smith case for no good reason).

What I was not prepared for was the intense backlash against the victim coming from seemingly every direction including a mainstream television network, CNN, who when reporting the verdict lamented what the effect would be on these young boy's promising futures. When was the last time we saw someone convicted of murder or robbery have the type of sympathy that these young men were shown for their horrific and nearly inhuman acts they committed.

The internet, and especially Twitter, was awash with the most unbelievably violent, uncaring, and quite frankly insanely dumb attacks against the victim that you could imagine. If you want a nice collection of the worst of the tweets, please check out Matt Binder's twitter feed @MattBinder. Most of these were the usual, blaming the victim for getting drunk, saying what did she expect, so on, so forth. But an alarming number of these attacks seemed to go further than that. They seem to endorse a rape culture which accepts rape as a normal part of life. The attacks seem to say not only that if a woman gets drunk she should expect to get raped (an argument that is unbelievably stupid and scary in its own right), but that if a woman gets drunk (or dresses provocatively, or has had sex before, or engages in kissing or petting, etc.) that it is OK to rape her. An alarming number of these attacks came from women.

I'm tempted to just throw up my arms and say our society is going straight to Hell (which it may be). But to do that would be to ignore everything I've done in my adult life to combat rape and sexual assault. So, instead, I and everyone else who cares about this issue, and cares about each other and humanity in general have to rededicate ourselves to combating rape in our culture and the best, most effective way to do that is through education.

Recently, Democratic strategist and rape survivor Zerlina Maxwell went on Fox News and made a statement that instead of arming women and telling them how to avoid getting raped in order to prevent rape, perhaps we should teach men not to rape. I don't know how this was such a controversial statement, but it was. Immediately Maxwell was deluged with death threats and attacks for daring to suggest what seems to be, to me at least, a rather obvious statement.

The reason that it is an obvious statement to me is that teaching men not to rape, and moreover teaching both men and women not to accept a culture in which rape is acceptable is something I've been doing for more than twenty years. When I was in college at Syracuse University, a group of students formed a group called Students Concerned About Rape Education (SCARED), of which I was proud to be a member and in my junior year its President. In addition to speaking out against campus rape and forcing the administration of the university to stop sweeping the problem under the rug and adopt actual policies which dealt with the problem, we embarked on a very successful and groundbreaking educational program. In it we simply spoke to both men and women about the crime of rape: what it was, how it affected us and them, how to prevent it (which included nothing about not wearing short skirts) and what changes we could implement in our lives to prevent rape from happening.

What amazed me then and what amazes me now is how many people (including both the defendants and the victim in the Steubenville case) don't know what rape and sexual assault is. Robin Warshaw wrote a revolutionary book called "I Never Called It Rape." I recommend it for every person reading this. It should be mandatory reading in every high school orientation in the country. Warshaw's work was the foundation for our programs at Syracuse. In it Warshaw calls out actions which  then and now are all too accepted for what they are -- rape. Whether it be an unconscious victim, a dating situation in which one partner forces himself on the other resulting in unwanted sex, whether a victim has been promiscuous in the past, etc, it is rape.

What happened in Steubenville is all too common and I think it is a pretty safe bet to state that the same thing has probably happened in your community as well. Alcohol is a part of high school life. It always has been. It was when I was in high school and it is now. Overly privileged athletes who are held up as heroes in their towns are especially at risk for committing rape because of a culture which tells them the rules don't apply to them, and will help cover up the crime afterward in order to protect their futures, or more realistically, the fortunes of the current sports season.

The prosecution in Steubenville is one way to combat this. But, the more effective way to combat it is being open and honest with our young people about sex, relationships, respect for one another, and rape. I have to think, that had the young men and women at that party had the same kind of educational program that we did back when I was in college, that the chances of there being at least one person who would have stepped in and said "Enough!" or "Stop!" or "This isn't cool," would have been better. I have to believe that had the parents and educators in Steubenville, or Syracuse, or Shelby, NC educated their children about these issues better that this rape and the many, many others which happened across our country that very same night might not have happened.

And for those of you out there who are lamenting the "tragedy" that happened to these good young boys and how their future is destroyed, had we educated them about the law, and sex, and sexuality, and responsibility, and respect, they wouldn't be waking up each day for the next several years in a youth detention facility (i.e. jail for kids).

I used to be asked the question when I was serving as President of SCARED "How many rapes have you really prevented?" I always answered that question without fail with "You can start with the one that I could have committed." Although that answer was intentionally provocative, it does have a central truth about it.

We can teach men not to rape. We can save lives. We can learn to treat each other with dignity and respect. We can destroy this culture of rape that is all to prevalent in our society.

Will you join me in seeing that this happens?

Canaries in a Coalmine

This is a brief follow up on a previous post about how I believe the next great economic collapse will be brought about by the securitization of student loans into collateralized debt obligations, much like the CDO's backed by residential mortgages brought about the last collapse in 2007-2008.

There were three seemingly unrelated events that got my attention over the last couple of weeks that brought about a sense of foreboding and for me acted as a canary acted for coal miners in previous centuries - as a warning of imminent doom. These three were in no particular order, the stock market reaching 14,000, my main local bank collapsing and having to be bought out for peanuts by another regional bank, and the news that ratings agencies were threatening to lower the credit rating of colleges or universities who lowered their tuition.

Let's look at these in reverse order. First, the ratings agencies.

If you have followed the aftermath of the economic collapse five years ago, or have read my previous blog posts on the subject, you will know that the credit ratings agencies played an important part in the run-up to the collapse. The agencies, of which there a primarily three -- S & P, Moody's, and Fitch -- were either duped or knowingly participated in fraud by classifying mortgage backed securities made up of liars' loans and sub-prime mortgages as AAA investments. Since the agencies were paid by the very same banks that were selling the loans, the answer is probably a little bit of both. By labeling investments that were garbage as AAA, they allowed investors to buy up these assets believing they were safe, while the banks putting them together were actually betting against them.

Since the collapse, the ratings agencies have appeared to get tough on investments, whether it be by dropping entire countries' credit ratings (as S & P famously did to the U.S. following the debt ceiling debacle in 2011) or by issuing harsher more critical reviews of various investments. At least this gives the appearance of independence and freedom of thought within the ratings agencies themselves. This is simply a mirage.

Over the last couple of months, there were reports that several colleges and universities were bucking the trend of exponentially increasing tuition costs and were instead deciding to lower their tuition, in some cases drastically. One of those colleges was Belmont Abbey, a small Catholic college nearby to where I live. (See here) At first this seemed like great news to me, possibly that colleges and universities were responding to the market rather than to investors and speculators and that possibly this death spiral of debt caused by increasing tuition could be coming to an end.

Then I saw this. Less than a month after news came out that some colleges were thinking of lowering their tuition to meet the demands of students for low cost education, Moody's dropped their forecast for colleges and universities to negative based on a stagnant or diminishing tuition income. Although the news is couched in terms of lowering costs and increasing efficiency, the message to colleges and universities thinking about lowering their tuition was clear -- DON'T.

Why this is a signal to me of the impending doom to the economy is that is shows that the ratings agencies are still working as agents of the Wall Street banks that are dependent on ever-increasing amounts of student loans in order to have a constant stream of loans to securitize into investment products to sell to investors. Whereas the ratings agencies in the run-up to 2007-2008 acted simply as a rubber stamp for the investments they were being paid to approve, now they are acting as the enforcer for the banks in order to insure that the loans keep coming in as the tuition amounts keep increasing and increasing. There is really very little difference between the actions of Moody's on this occasion and a protection scheme by a two-bit mafia hood extorting money out of business owners to make sure that their business doesn't literally go up in smoke.

The next portent of doom was the fire sale of my local bank, First National Bank of Shelby, NC. First National, which had been in business since 1874 was sold to Bank of the Ozarks for the paltry sum of $67.8 million. This bank had previously seemed to be merger proof. They had survived multiple financial collapses intact and had refused bail-out money during the 2008 collapse. While other small banks were being gobbled up by larger and larger institutions following the deregulation of the banking industry in the late 1990s, First National was purchasing other regional banks. They seemed to continue practicing old fashioned painfully conservative banking which may have led to their downfall.

The reason this caused concern to me is that the failure of this bank shows that our economy is still far from robust. The term irrational exuberance has been thrown around over the past several years and appears to be applicable here. The bank simply couldn't overcome the long, drawn-out recession which produced still double digit unemployment in our area, along with the related business failures and unpaid mortgages, which made this pillar of solvency for well more than a century become basically bankrupt.

Throw this in with the Dow reaching 14,000 late last week and you have my third canary. The celebrations surrounding the "milestone" seemed almost crazy when looking at the continuing high unemployment, fiscal malaise, and stumbling recovery. The last time the Dow was this high it was repeated over and over was in the Fall of 2007. The implication was that at least in terms of the stock market, our recovery was complete and we had climbed all the way back from the collapse of late 2008. Of course, it also could signal that we are right back where we were in the Fall of 2007, on the precipice of a financial cliff which would throw us into the the greatest economic disaster since the 1930s.

By failing to act to curb the excesses and lawlessness that led to the economic collapse of 2007-2008, we have insured that it will repeat. We have failed on all levels. We have failed to enact laws that would prevent or at least contain a collapse in any one area of the financial world. The Dodd-Frank act was at best window dressing to give the public the appearance that Congress was doing something while allowing Wall Street to continue the excess that led to the last bubble. We have failed judicially by refusing to enforce our criminal laws to hold accountable the people who benefited most from the collapse and subsequent bailout, namely the executives and CEO's of the large Wall Street banks. We have failed financially by continuing to prop up failed financial institutions through policies by the Federal Reserve and Treasury such as Quantitative Easing and Zero Interest Rate Policy which have led to the propping up of failed financial institutions while at the same time encouraging the continued investment in exotic securities to receive anything near a reasonable return on investment, destroying savings and looting pension funds and state treasuries.

Recently, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Lanny Breuer resigned the day after a hard hitting expose by the PBS show Frontline exposed his agency's unwillingness to hold executives and CEO's of Wall Street banks accountable for the fraud that was perpetrated both on investors and the public leading to the economic collapse of 2007-2008. I sure hope that President Obama nominates someone with courage and tenacity to take his place, because the same fraud is happening today, and they will surely soon get the same opportunity to hold these same executives responsible when their same actions cause the next impending economic collapse. I'm, of course, not holding my breath on this.

All the signals are there. Is anybody paying attention?

Why I Love #StrikeDebt

Sorry for the long absence. I had a completed post on shopping locally and the emergence of a cool vibe in Uptown Shelby, but for some reason I hit the wrong thing on the iPhone app for Blogger and it zapped into the ethersphere somewhere and was lost forever. Pity, because it was a pretty darn good article if I may say so myself. Alas, it is gone and I threw my little tantrum and pity party and have now moved on. Back to the more familiar ground -- debt, banking crises, and the economy (Oh my!).

One of my favorite things in the world is a simple solution to a complex and seemingly impossible problem. I love it when one person sees a population suffering from generation upon generation of debilitating and painful goiter and eradicates the problem entirely simply by introducing iodized salt into their diet. Or when faced with needless preventable deaths due to an epidemic of malaria in Africa, people simply introduce mosquito nets saving thousands upon thousands of lives. Problems which have seemed impossible and overwhelming for so long can sometimes be solved with just one simple idea. This is why I love Strike Debt and Rolling Jubilee.

In the Fall of 2011, Occupy Wall Street took the nation by storm when they set up an encampment occupying Zuccotti Park in the heart of lower Manhattan's financial district drawing attention to the crimes that had been committed on Wall Street which led to the collapse of the nation's economy in 2008 ushering in the worst economic down turn since the Great Depression. With their protests, marches, occupations and outreach, OWS did more to shine a light on the root causes of our financial strife than any reporter, expert, politician, or economist did in the previous four years. They caught for a brief period of time the imagination, desperation, and outrage of much of the American public.

But, American sensibilities and attention spans being what they are, the occupiers were eventually evicted from what had become known as Freedom Park and their cause seemed to have died out. The main criticism of OWS was their amorphous organization, their lack of any stated goals or plans to achieve such goals. It seemed that OWS would go down as a blip and footnote to the financial scandals which brought about the financial bailout and recession of the late naughts and early teens of the 21st Century.

However, what OWS accomplished during their encampment and went unreported by the media who never could understand the movement, was the sharing of ideas of passionate and committed individuals who had the energy and know-how to put these plans into action. One of those plans grew into the group Strike Debt and their movement Rolling Jubilee.

Strike Debt saw the staggering problem of consumer debt and decided to use the exact same practices which lead to and perpetuate that system of debt to eliminate the debt entirely. Here's how debt works in a nutshell. A creditor whether it be a bank, credit card company, or institution such as a hospital lends a consumer debt which the consumer uses to purchase goods or services with a promise to pay that debt back over a period of time. The creditor makes money on the transaction by charging and collecting interest on the debt. However, many creditors will sell their right to collect the debts owed to them for a variety of reasons, usually because the consumer has defaulted on the debt and the likelihood of collecting further payment has diminished to the point where there is no longer any profit in the transaction for the original creditor.

What happens at this point is when things usually go horribly badly for the consumer. The original creditor will now sell the debt to the highest bidder so that they can realize some return on their remaining investment. Usually these are purchased by collection agencies. Collection agencies are the bottom feeders of the financial world. They buy bad debts for pennies on the dollar and then do absolutely everything they can get away with in order to collect on that debt. Anyone who, like me at one point in my life, has ever had to deal with these poor excuses for humanity, knows the type of abuse and stress that having a collection agency hound you can involve.

When I was in civil practice, I used to take great pleasure in throwing every conceivable legal roadblock up in front of these agencies to cost them as much money as I possibly could in order to collect their money. When possible, I took even greater pleasure in making life incredibly uncomfortable for any of these agencies I could prove engaged in illegal debt collection practices. My absolute favorite involved one insipid agency which had purchased a debt which was more than a decade old and was for all intents and purposes uncollectable. What they did to get around the impediment of the statute of limitations was to send a new credit card offer to the drug addled and mentally ill debtor. A new credit card offer for someone whose credit was destroyed for years would be seen as a gift from God for any such individual. However, what transferring the old uncollectable debt to the new credit card would make it collectable again. Fortunately, the debtors elderly parents intercepted the offer and brought it to me. After a very tersely worded letter offering to forego suing the pants off of the collection firm for illegally trying to collect an uncollectable debt if they would forego ever contacting my client again, they discharged the debt from their books.

But, the genius of Strike Debt is that they looked at the process by which these scum sucking maggots known as collection agencies buy the debts and realized that they could do the exact same thing. Strike Debt formed a 501(c)(4) corporation which serves essentially as a debt collection agency and bids against other debt collection agencies in auctions of distressed consumer debt. Because these debts are worthless to the original holders of the debt, they can be bought for substantially less than what is owed. In fact, they found that for every $1 paid, as much as $20 of debt could be purchased.

Once the debt was purchased, however, unlike the circling carcass gorging vultures known as collection agencies, instead of trying to collect on the debt, Strike Debt would simply extinguish the debt. That's right, the debt would simply no longer exist. In the financial world, this is known as "forgiving" debt. Strike Debt doesn't use this term because in their view, rightly, the debtor has nothing to forgive as they haven't done anything wrong.

This became known to some as the People's Bailout and with good reason. What Strike Debt had done was similar to what the government and the Federal Reserve had done to wipe out the toxic debt held by the Too Big to Fail financial institutions and apply it instead to ordinary debtors. What's even more ingenious is that they used the exact process which had shackled millions of Americans in a spiral of debt and financial ruin, to subvert the system and free those same Americans from those shackles.

But, Strike Debt doesn't stop there. There is also the Rolling Jubilee, a movement which brings this process to the next level and has the potential for permanent debt relief for America and across the world. The term "jubilee" refers to the year in the Biblical  Dueteronomic Code in which land and property were returned to its original owner and slaves were freed. Because Strike Debt is purchasing debt and then extinguishing it, thereby returning it to its owner, it is in some fashion acting similarly to this traditional Hebrew law. The term Rolling Jubilee refers to the movement which encourages those receiving a benefit from this purchase and extinguishing of debt to then pass it on and contribute to the purchasing and extinguishing of debt of others.

For example, if you have a medical debt of $40,000 for an operation that you had to have but have no means to pay for it and have defaulted on your debt, your debt will most likely be sold and purchased by a debt collection agency in a debt auction. If you are fortunate enough to have your debt purchased by Strike Debt (they have no way of choosing which debts or debtors they purchase and extinguish, they are simply purchasing a block of debt) you would be notified of this fact. Rolling Jubilee is based on the hope that those whose debts have been extinguished will then use the money that has been freed up to donate back to Strike Debt in order to allow them to purchase and extinguish more debt.

This is what makes Strike Debt and Rolling Jubilee a community building, community empowering self-help organization rather than a charity. If this movement works, it could seriously change the nation's entire economic power structure which causes and perpetuates the economic inequality we see today. So far they have raised over $7 million. With this they can potentially buy $140 million in debt. If those whose debt is eliminated donate just 10% of what was extinguished back, with that $14 million, Strike Debt could purchase $280 million in debt, and so on, and so on.

Right now, this is an infinitesimal amount when looking at the staggering level of consumer debt currently owed in this nation, which the Federal Reserve estimates stands at approximately $2.4 Trillion. However, this movement can have incredible influence if it grows and reaches its potential. The affects of this will be felt throughout our entire financial and political structure. This has the potential to literally change our world.

Not bad for a bunch of dirty, unwashed hippies hanging out in a New York park banging drums, huh? Simple ideas can have incredible effects. It makes me excited to see what other ideas have been planted in the garden of Zuccotti Park that are just waiting to emerge and blossom.

Been a While

Hey there. Been a while, I know. Is there anyone still out there? Work and life have been conspiring to leave me little blogging time. That doesn't mean the ideas aren't there, however. So, you'll probably be deluged with a bunch of posts in a very short time. First, there is the matter of Uptown Shelby which is suddenly cool. Enjoy.

In Praise of Sisters

Recently, the stodgy old men's club known as the Vatican decided to launch an all out inquisition of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. The allegations concerned the group's apparent focus on ministering to the poor and suffering among us, rather than focusing on more important issues like, you know, speaking out about abortion and making sure that people don't use condoms or birth control pills. The Vatican went as far as calling this group of American nuns "radical feminists." I was reminded of Inego Montoya's line from the Princess Bride "I don't think that word means what you think it means."

I guess by radical feminism the Vatican means that these Catholic religious women look to God, rather than their religion's all male hierarchy for guidance in their ministry. How absolutely Christ like of them!

Needless to say, more than a few current and former Catholics are disturbed by the treatment of their Sisters by the leadership in Rome. For many of us, Sisters have served as a tremendous influence especially in the foundation of our faith and personhood. Despite our jokes about rulers, rapt knuckles, and roller skates, almost everyone I know, myself included, has heart warming memories of the Sisters from our childhood.

For me, it was my first Principal at St. Mary's School in Baldwinsville, New York. Sister Eucharista was simply the kindest person I've ever met. Although she was no pushover, she loved teaching and even moreso loved children. In return, we loved her back.

Sister Eucharista knew that the true meaning of the axiom "spare the rod, spoil the child" referred not to physical discipline, but to parental guidance, steering the pupils under her care in the right direction. Still to this day when I come upon two people facing each other having a conversation, I go out of my way to go around them or, if stepping in between them is unavoidable, doing so as unobtrusively as possible and apologizing as I do. This is because in my tender years, I unknowingly walked between a conversation she was having with someone and was stopped by Sister Eucharista and told, quite gently, that this was not the proper way to act and told to apologize. This was not done in a way to embarrass me or to be mean in any way, it was done to teach me and done with firm kindness because she understood I had not encountered this situation before. This is how you teach children, and this is why I think of her each time this happens to this day.

But more importantly than her guidance and her leadership, Sister Eucharista was our strength when we needed it, too. This was most apparent to me in an incident which happened to me in First Grade.

Up until I had my tonsils and adenoids out when I was 7, I was a rather sickly child. I had constant ear infections and nasty tasting thick pink penicillin was a mainstay in my Parent's refrigerator.
I was suffering an ear infection on the day of the incident.

Now, to understand this story, I have to explain something about the winters in Central New York and the clothing of the time. On this day, just like on most days, we were having a fairly heavy snow fall. The boots we wore for some reason that I can't quite remember required the wearing of plastic bags over our feet which we would then place in the boots. This, combined with the hats, scarves, mittens, and snowmobile suits that we would layer on each morning made the arrival in the classroom rather time consuming as we commenced the inevitable disrobing necessary to get ready for class.

On this particular day, my bus which covered the neighborhoods of Seneca Knolls and Village Green was late arriving due to the heavy snow. My fellow classmates on the bus were doing our ritual disrobing, placing our boots under the heater to melt the snow, placing our school shoes on our feet and so on, while the morning prayer, pledge, and announcements were being read over the loud speaker.

Inevitably there was some kind of commotion going on as would be expected of 6 and 7 year-olds on a snowy winter morning. Our teacher, the rather stern Sister Charles Dorothy not taking kindly to the commotion decided to make an example of one of us and for no particular reason at all chose me. She asked me to repeat what the announcement had been. I could not tell her since I had not heard the announcement. She assumed it had been because I was goofing off. What she didn't know is that I couldn't hear it because I was suffering a raging ear infection and my ears were filled to the brim with fluid and puss. Her punishment was banishment and I was made to leave the classroom and stand outside in the hallway.

Of course, it didn't take long for the tears to start flowing. As I stood alone in the hallway with tears streaming down my face, Sister Eucharista happened to walk by. She asked me why I was in the hallway. I explained what happened and why I had been made to stand in the hallway. She asked if I had been talking during the announcement and I explained about my ears.

Sister Eucharista very calmly told me to return to the classroom and asked me to have Sister Charles Dorothy come to speak with her. After a couple of minutes the most incredible thing up to that point in my life happened. Sister Charles Dorothy returned to the class and apologized for having made me stand in the hallway.

Now, looking back on the incident, I can see this with a whole lot of perspective I didn't have at the time. First, in my memory, Sister Eucharista went up one side and down the other of Sister Charles Dorothy. I know for certain this didn't happen. I imagine that she treated the younger, less experienced teacher with the same firm kindness with which she treated me when I walked in the middle if her conversation - not to embarrass, but to guide. And, looking back Sister Charles Dorothy is not the ogre I thought she was at the time either. She was a very young woman, inexperienced and in over her head trying to control a bunch of hyperactive First Graders while trying to impart the basic foundations of education. Like all of us, she was doing her best and sometimes coming up short.

But what Sister Eucharista did was in fact extraordinary because what she was able to show a sickly, skinny, scared little boy was that it was ok to stand up for yourself when you are right. She did that not with words but with actions. She taught me to stand up for myself by standing up for me when I couldn't. I never forgot that and I am forever grateful.

Everyone has experiences like this. The Catholic women religious are the heart and soul of the church. It pains me to see what they are being put through with this investigation which seemingly aims to cloister them, returning them to the meek, silent stereotype of nuns spending their time in secluded prayer and meditation.

I have heard many of the leaders of the LCWR interviewed about this. They are inevitably asked why they don't just leave the church, or if they would consider doing that if the commission comes down harshly against them which is everyone's expectation. They always respond with great sadness. Leaving the church to which they have dedicated their life is like a death to them. It is almost inconceivable and a choice which they should not be forced to make, but which they know they may have to. My heart breaks for these incredible women who have done nothing but do the thankless dirty work of their faith, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, comforting the afflicted, and yes at times afflicting the comfortable. In other words, they are doing the work that Christ himself did in his ministry.

It is my sincere hope that the Sisters are able to carry on as before, or at least to find a place of comfort within the faith to which they have dedicated their lives. If they don't find this place of comfort, I know that they will find their place, as I have, elsewhere in a faith that stands with its arms and hearts open to offer comfort and loving acceptance of the gifts that they offer every day of their lives.

For our Sisters, let us pray. Amen.