RIGHT - November 12, 2009

I was stunned last week to hear that the prosecutor in Council Bluffs has made the defense in a legal action that there is no constitutional bar to framing a defendant in a legal case, and I understand that prosecutors around the nation are alleging that they are protected by something like the sovereign immunity of States from being charged with deliberately denying a defendant a legal trial by keeping secret evidence of innocence. I have always been impressed by the supposed rights conferred by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, no doubt taken in by the immense brouhaha about the perfection of democratic law in this country, but to hear lawyers state that they have no constitutional obligation not to frame a defendant is more than even my cynical mind can bear. And yet I know that in Wisconsin the Attorney General’s office can connive in firing a professor out of tenure, which means out of the profession, with no evidence whatever except for the public reaction to a planted story in the local press. That and the Attorney General’s belief that he is a bad man. Even the law’s explicit requirement is defended on the claim that the State government can give the prosecutor leave to secure the firing even when the legal committees, both faculty and in the Regents, have spoken in explicit terms that there is no evidence against him. But if one can jail an innocent man for decades on forged evidence and claim that the Supreme Court should and will say that he has no remedy against deliberate fraud on the Court by the prosecutor puts the actions of State functionaries above the provisions of constitutional bars against State takings of life, liberty and property without due process. Opportunism of this magnitude makes a complete mockery of US prattling about democracy and the rule of law, operating very close to the rule that might makes right. Is the Supreme Court so openly corrupt?

HOPE - November 5, 2009

It seems that Obama has shot his wad, and has little but hope to offer those who are suffering in the early stages of what appears to be the opening years of a very long Depression. Following Cheney, and listening to the self-proclaimed economic scientists of the Reagan, Clinton and Bush cabinets, Obama has dealt with the banksters with a very open hand, not knowing what they would do with hundreds of billions of Federal dollars, stalling the auto industry for a while, but leaving the States and the working class to reap the results of what the future might bring them. It has been a year now. Many of the States, pinned between constitutions that forbid deficit spending and the urgent needs of the moment, and workers, whose jobs have decreased by about 8 million, not counting those on short hours. And now there has been a trickle of recovery money and a temporary reduction of about 8 % in the number of jobless, even without counting those who have come of working age in this year. And all Obama has for them amounts to crocodile tears and Hope. But Hope delayed, as Proverbs tells us, maketh the heart sick, and hope has little to give to those whose jobs and contracts have been cancelled. The Dem party has little to offer, including many who think that they can leave the jobless to the restoration of time, rather like a farmer who is waiting for his wheat field to plant itself. And while Obama, like Hoover 80 years ago, is a decent man wishing the best for those who are suffering, he is also similarly without a program. And he is leaving the weak with little more than crocodile tears to ease their agony.

HEALTH - October 22, 2009

I have been interested in the constant comments being made about the increasing cost of health care. Like many similar comments, this fails to take into account what we buy with that money. In short, we buy our lives and our good health, where that has become possible. A notable example was the carping we heard a few years ago about the cost of MRI diagnosis. It would seem that the complainers would rather that we were without that machinery, with all its costs. What many fail to take into account is that many of the uses we put MRI to are investigations that we would never have made before, because the cost, pain and danger of the investigative diagnoses would have kept us out of the picture in certain cases. I had an instance myself where such an investigation revealed an edema in my femur, a condition that was unknown until the investigations of a certain physicist from Columbia made possible the deep picturing of the inside of the human body without cutting into the flesh. Indeed, in this case I might have taken on an investigative surgery. And it would have done no good even then, as no reputable surgeon would have cut open the bone to find the cause of the pain. It was never heard of until the invention of the machine based on Prof. Rabi’s investigations into a never-before suspected phenomenon called NMR. And now it costs some money, where before all it cost was bearing the pain of the illness. In addition, we now make some medical coverage available to people who formerly had to bear the pain without recourse, a supposed disadvantage that conservatives think we could get away with by pretending not to notice the suffering of the victims. As in many other things, it is time we were paying the cost of our new blessings. And it is well worth the cost, so let’s all stop that particular complaining.

PROFLIGATE - October 15, 2009

Much verbiage has been expended in the past week over the enthusiastic and (some say) excessive way in which the Nobel Peace Prize Committee received the nomination of Pres. Obama for that Prize. Lots of jokes, some pretty bitter, and much laughter, almost hysterical, attended that announcement. And almost everyone, including Obama’s friends and supporters, commented on the apparent haste of the action. To put it in its proper place, we must remember the position of America in the political and intellectual life of the world, and especially of Europe, over the past 250 years. It was the first nation to embody the (mostly French) thinking of the Enlightenment, and while France joined in shortly afterwards, was highly successful for the first century of its incorporation. Those who believed in the thinking of the Age of Reason could look over the ocean and behold it in operation, more or less, and yearn for its triumph. Meanwhile, France tumbled from republic to empire to monarchy throughout the XIX century while fighting its wars of imperial domination on the European continent. The Germans had a small revolution of their own that was put down quickly and many of the survivors fled to Wisconsin to found the Progressive movement. Meanwhile the dreams of the American founders were compromised by Jackson and their moral integrity tested by the ordeal of slavery. But in all of this, the Dream of the Enlightenment burned in the New World and bore the hopes and wishes of the cream of humanity. But in the past 50 years it has been growing harder for the rest of the world to swallow the Empire of London transplanted to Washington and New York. There was no substitute site for the impeccable moral leadership of the Enlightenment discarded by the American empire. So the resurrection of the illusion of the City on the Hill signaled by the election of Obama was hailed with millennial enthusiasm. Halleluiah!

AFGHANISTAN - October 8, 2009

The news these days concerns the situation in Afghanistan, which seems to be no-win, in which the only choice seems to be between 2 unacceptable routes. Yet it is possible to expand the suggestion about buying Afghanistani poppy resin as a means to stem its use in the illegal drug trade and at the same time to provide low-cost morphine for medical use, in both the industrial and developing world. A bit of additional thought might be given to further methods to accomplish even more. It involves making Afghanistan a trading partner by paying more for the agricultural material than the illegal trade can match. A basic thought in that trade is that the heroin powder, so expensive in the supply to addicts, is far cheaper in the raw, and represents the asset that enables the Taliban to afford its costs in the arms trade. Despite the great wealth of some of their underwriters, it is hard to believe that they can keep a competition with America, especially in light of the costs of the illegal operation. If America bought the bulk of the crop and manufactured the opiates in legal factories, we should easily be able to keep ahead of the drug barons. Into the bargain, we might have found a reason why the Afghanis would want to be on the right side of US. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, we have tended to put all our reliance in discouraging antisocial conduct on the practice of extracting punishment if people don’t do things the way we think we would want, rather than by socializing them to see the benefits in voluntary cooperation. It might be, after all, that we get more favorable response from the Afghani farmers as trading partners, even at some cost to us, than in trying to force them by what we imagine is our overwhelming power to live the way our puritanical nation wants them to.

WINNING - October 1, 2009

Gen. McChristall has assured Pres. Obama that if he does not authorize a substantial rise in the number of US troops in Afghanistan within a year, then it will not be possible to defeat the insurgency there. People not trained in logic might miss the fact that he has not said that pouring in more troops WILL make that possible. Indeed, when asked that question, he carefully does not say so. So that leaves the possibility that it will never be possible to say so truthfully. That actually reflects my own opinion and that of a growing number of American people. Indeed, we should notice that in the lexicon of victory, there are many levels, some noted by the points Winning, Never Losing, Never Winning, and Losing. Indeed, the majority of Americans, and of Afghanis, seem to believe that we are stalled at Never Winning and that number seems to be rising. As it rises, we must be moving ever closer to Losing. The Cheney regime started with armed forces in deep trouble and moved them to the edge of Ruin. Based on the false belief that we could establish a democratic regime in Iraq, they have left us with the shreds of an Army and Marine Corps. With the failed effort in Afghanistan, the illusion of Winning has faded and left us only with a situation in which no one wants to be at the helm when this once proud ship sinks. The US armed forces have not had a victory since vanquishing those of the proud Empire of Grenada, an island with the area and population of Sheboygan County WI. Now Obama wants to intimidate the Islamic Republic of Iran, which he can order bombed or shelled, but dares not attack on the ground. All to resist Losing. And he can order a sanction, until someone needs their oil too much. As we shall see, I am afraid.

TIME - September 24, 2009

One of the discouraging things about time is the circumstances in which we are supposed to have plenty in which a solution to a problem may be dealt with and those in which urgent need demands immediate attention. The model for the second is the incipient avalanche where once it starts, it cannot be stopped until it fulfills its destiny, and the destiny might be terrible. The model for the other is the time for a tree to grow and provide needed shade, and little can be done to advance it. We were told that the threat to the big banks was of the first kind, and that a collapse of the 1930s variety was the only alternative to giving the bankers and their ilk everything they claimed, and right away. In the other, the action of the Administration on unemployment, and especially of their opposition, was condemned to let it ripen in the fullness of time, no matter how many decades that would take, rather like the 100 Years’ War. By contrast, I tried to impress upon the new Senator Russell Feingold the terrible corrosive effect of joblessness, and the urgency of stringent measures to bring it under control, even if at the cost of increased debt. I tried to paint the picture of the ways in which it could destroy a family’s life and even lead to illness, divorce, homelessness, mental breakdown, or even death. I failed to move him from the position that the most urgent matter facing the US Government then was the size of the budget deficit. And all this to a politician I had always supported, and do today. But to those facing the avalanche-like collapse of their link on what they took to be the earned status of an American who had faced all the things required, there were not months and years in which to correct the destruction of their economic well-being. And today the involuntarily jobless have again the greatest need facing an inert government, and maybe losing everything they had worked for, there is no time in which to let the problem solve itself.