[Dialogue] 9/01/11, Spong: Political Gridlock and Presidential Politics

Thu Sep 1 10:11:25 EDT 2011

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Political Gridlock and Presidential Politics
As I watch political gridlock creating recession in the United States, I find myself at a loss for words.  It does not help that I have just finished reading William D. Cohan’s book House of Cards, based on the collapse of Bear Stearns in 2008.  In that book, I discovered that the behavior of many Wall Street establishment types was barely legal and was overtly immoral.  The very ones who violated the rules for their own gain still today continue to lift their voices against any government regulations.  Of course regulations can be counter-productive and destructive, but every fact of history screams that they are essential.  Somehow there is an unwillingness to recognize that the purpose of government regulation of the financial markets is not to make the lives of those who work on Wall Street more difficult, but to guarantee their honesty that was blatantly missing in the sub-prime buildup to the economic disaster of 2008.
To complicate this difficult time, we have now entered the silly season of presidential politics where insults, sometimes with a germ of truth in them, now mark our political rhetoric.  We listen to one candidate call the Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, a George W. Bush appointee, a traitor.  Another denies the reality of global warming. Another dismisses evolution as an “unproven theory,” apparently unaware that modern medicine today assumes its truth at every level.  Still another claims that homosexuality can be cured, despite the denial of this possibility by every reputable medical board and professional association.  We see candidates railing against government spending without mentioning that they are major recipients of government largesse.  When all of this is put together, it is more than most rational minds can tolerate.  The one economic reality in the developed world today is that over the past 50 years, the wealthy have become wealthier, the middle class is overtly shrinking and the poor are getting visibly poorer.
In case people haven’t noticed, the anger level in this nation is also rising.  We saw anger first sweep the Middle East.  It was born in Tunisia, moved to Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, Syria and now has even engulfed Great Britain and China.  Then moving much closer, we watched riots break out in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan.  Riots are always a destructive political tactic that increases in fury and intensity when people begin to perceive that no one is either willing or capable of redressing their grievances through the normal political processes.  Much of the anger in America today is actually directed against the government.  Depending on how one defines government it has a deep partisan bias.  The facts are that increasingly the masses of the citizens in this nation are hurting economically. We Americans have paid dearly for the tactics of the banks and investment businesses in that our houses are now worth less, our 401Ks are deflated, our health care is more expensive, jobs have disappeared and unemployment is at an unsustainably high level.  Governmental and individual belt-tightening is now essential. Federal spending does need to be curbed, but in that act we must not lose sight of that fact that all government spending has been authorized by a majority vote of both the Senate and the House and these votes occurred with both parties in the majority.  It is not a partisan issue.
The first blow to the balanced budget, which George W. Bush inherited when he was elected president in 2000, came in the cause of national defense.  This nation underwent a terrorist attack of huge proportions on September 11, 2001.  This attack necessitated a rise in both the size and function of government.  New York City and the Pentagon absorbed the primary damage, but the nation itself was attacked and the nation stood as one to help absorb the costs of this attack.  No one was either a liberal or a conservative when the vote to aid the victims of the first responders and their families was passed.  To guarantee that another attack would not occur or be successful, the Department of Homeland Security was created and defense spending was rapidly increased.  These were the issues that caused the deficit to begin to rise and the federal bureaucracy to expand. That occurred with almost unanimous bi-partisan support.
Since the conventional political wisdom is that a major power cannot absorb an enemy attack without retaliation, our leaders promised to strike at those who had attacked us. Deciding which nation was responsible for launching this terrorist strike was, however, not easy to do.  Most of the 9/11 terrorists were citizens of Saudi Arabia, but Saudi Arabia was a staunch ally, having allowed American forces to deploy in that country during the first Iraqi war.  It made no sense militarily or politically to attack the Saudis.  Afghanistan was the nation where the terrorists had trained and its government had supported Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, so it became the logical place for retaliation.  The Afghanistan war was thus launched by a Republican president with the approval of large majorities of both parties in Congress.  Wars in foreign lands are expensive, but surprisingly no provision was made to fund this war.  It became an extra-budgetary item and inevitably contributed to the rising deficit.
There was, however, something unsatisfactory about the Afghanistan war.  Defeating the Afghans made no great contribution to America’s well-being or to its image.  There were no national resources to be gained.  Afghanistan was primarily an opium-based, drug economy.  Perhaps the United States military could disrupt the opium traffic, but that did not meet the national desire to proclaim our might and to satisfy our outrage at being attacked.
So a concerted political effort was made to associate Saddam Hussein and Iraq with the terrorist attack as a preliminary to the desire to finish what many still regarded as an unfinished war in Iraq.  To remove Saddam Hussein, to create a democracy in the Middle East and to insure a continued flow of oil to oil-thirsty America became reasons enough for war.  For months this campaign was orchestrated to show what a threat Iraq was to the security of America.  Vice President Cheney spoke regularly about the perceived Iraqi links to Al-Quaeda.  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, seeking to enhance her charges that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, spoke of the next terrorist attack being fueled by an Iraqi created “mushroom cloud.”  It worked and the country was prepared to resume the war in Iraq.  Again, it was a Republican president, with bi-partisan support in the Congress, including such well-known Democratic senators as Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, who plunged this nation into another Middle Eastern conflict.  The assumption was that this war would be swift and brief.  No greater miscalculation ever occurred in American history.  Our forces are still in Iraq nine years later!  The sectarian split in that country still borders on civil war.  There were no weapons of mass destruction.  Once again, no financial sacrifices were asked of the American people.  The cost of the war was simply added to the expanding deficit.  Both parties were guilty of malfeasance.
While this deficit was exploding, in what was surely an act of political irresponsibility, President Bush called for and the Congress passed with bi-partisan support, a second tax cutting bill, this one heavily weighted toward the wealthy.  The argument was that this tax cut would stimulate jobs.  That did not happen.  Jobs were largely stagnant in the eight years of the Bush administration.  Executive pay and corporate bonuses, however, skyrocketed.
Then came the subprime housing crisis that compromised the integrity of our banking system, filled as it was with toxic mortgages and worthless debts, and ultimately creating the “Great Recession” of 2008.  Led by Republican Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson, the Federal Government began to rescue the banks, the automobile industry, the insurance industry and the bond industry, once again adding immeasurably to the deficit, even as capital losses in the stock markets sent government revenues down.  This stimulus money, designed to save the nation from a depression, also sent government spending to a new high.
My point is that we did not get into this economic maelstrom without the participation of both parties.  Unwise political decisions were piled onto unwise economic decisions made by a greedy corporate world, almost killing America’s future.  Now the time has come to pay the piper and everyone is going to have to pay.  The idea that there can be no revenue increases to address this crisis is ludicrous.  The idea that the total burden must fall on cuts in Social Security, health care, educational scholarships and other parts of the American safety net is immoral. The fact is that the standard of living for all Americans is going to go down for the next few years.  Democrats must be willing to allow cuts in domestic spending.  Republicans must be willing to increase revenues from the top 10% of this nation’s earners.  Bickering over this, attempting to hold the nation hostage to the threat of default is not only irresponsible, it is almost criminal.
Our present economic predicament is the gift of both of our political parties. All of us must now take the strong medicine that our present circumstances require.  Those who think that the problem will be solved if President Obama is not re-elected are naïve.  Even if the most conservative Republican becomes president in 21012, this problem will still have to be addressed.  If the Republicans try to solve this problem on the backs of the poor and the middle classes, they will be risking a social upheaval the likes of which this nation has not seen since the Civil War.  If the Democrats try to solve this problem by excessive taxes without sacrifices from all, the stagnation that will grip our nation will be severe and decades long.
The future of this nation now rests in the hands of a Super Congressional Committee of Twelve – six Democrats and six Republicans – six senators and six representatives.  They have three months to reach a conclusion.  That conclusion is far more important than whether anyone is elected or re-elected in 2012.  This is the time for genuine American leadership to arise.  The only question is who will provide it.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer
Debbie Medves from Waxhaw, North Carolina, via the internet writes:
Question:
I heard you speak in Charlotte last October at Myers Park Baptist Church and thoroughly appreciated you and your books.  I have bought two sweet young pygmy goats to help me with the weeding on our four acres.  I have never had anything more than a dog or a cat as a pet so this is an adventure of sorts.  I know many folks raised around livestock do not have the same appreciation that I do for this inquisitive, alert creature.  I have even started a goat blog to share our experiences. (Don’t worry, I am a middle school counselor during most of the year and my husband is in law enforcement. - we do have other things to do in our life!)  My concern is how the Bible characterizes goats as opposed to sheep. Don’t laugh, okay, laugh if you must…but I don’t think from what I’ve found they are getting a fair personality assessment.  YOU are the man I’d like to hear from about how this negative reputation for goats in the bible came to be. I bet it’s another of man’s distortions or perceptions at the time scripture was written.  I’d love to see your response to this—wonder if your audience would be interested.  I enclose a picture of my goats for your enjoyment.  Keep on with your marvelous work.
Answer:
Dear Debbie,

I’ve never been asked about the image of goats in the Bible before, so thank you for forcing me to expand my thinking.  In my career there are very few questions that I haven’t had to confront previously, but yours is quite new.  My sources turned up very little, but I will share what I have learned.

Goats are more independent than sheep, more adventuresome and thus harder to manage and control.  That may be the source of some of the negativity.  Goats are strong minded creatures and are, therefore, not good followers.  The Church and its leadership have always preferred passive sheep-like lay people and clergy.  Goats seem to like freedom and do not like being confined.

The reason the sheep and the goats have to be separated at night– as the shepherd was said to do in the parable of the Judgment in Matthew 25 – is that goats need to be kept warm at night and are therefore housed inside while sheep prefer the open air.  In biblical times, sheep also cost more than goats since sheep had more uses, producing both wool and meat, so they were thought of more highly.  Economic value, I suspect, is part of the biblical system that accorded a higher worth to a sheep than to a goat.

I have also read that goats are symbolic of sexuality, sexual desire and even lechery.  This reference came to me from one who is supposed to be an authority on dreams and dream analysis and I do not know how to evaluate its correctness, but if that is true the church has historically tried to repress and to devalue all sexual feelings..  Perhaps we see an echo of this when a man who makes women feel sexually uncomfortable is referred to as “an old goat.”

In the Bible a goat is also mentioned in Leviticus as part of the Yom Kippur Liturgy.  The goat is the creature upon which the sins of the people are symbolically laid before it is driven out of the assembly.  The goat is thus the sin bearer that carries the people’s sins with it into the exile of the wilderness, leaving the people sinless and virtuous.  This image may also have led to the biblical negativity toward goats.

We refer in our vernacular to a grouchy person as someone from whom another has “gotten his goat.”  In tracing down this image, I discovered that it came from the custom of placing a goat into the stall of a nervous horse because of the goat’s calming influence. If the goat was removed prematurely the horse became or remained irritable.  So we say of a nervous and irritable human being that “someone must have gotten his goat.”

Boil all of this down and perhaps we might find some clues to explain the Bible’s negativity toward goats.

For what it is worth, I also learned in my research that the tail of the sheep is made up primarily of suet.  I do not know what that proves, but it was something I did not know before and so I pass it on.

I’m not sure that sheep come off in the Bible or in our culture with a very positive reputation either.  They are not considered to be particularly bright.  Sheep are followers not leaders and are referred to as “dumb sheep.”  I’m not sure that the traditional image of clergy as shepherds and the congregation as sheep is a very positive image!

Hope this helps.  Enjoy your new pets.  Thanks for sending me their pictures and yours.
~John Shelby Spong

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