An email from Elizabeth Warren sent me to her web page, Fight back against Hobby Lobby: Support the Protect Women’s Health from Corporate Interference Act.

If we’re going to respond to Hobby Lobby, it’s got to be through a legislative fix. Today, my Democratic colleagues and I are fighting to do what the Supreme Court failed to do: to protect the basic rights of American women and families.

Led by Senators Patty Murray and Mark Udall, we’ve just introduced a new bill – the Protect Women’s Health from Corporate Interference Act.

The bill reverses the Supreme Court’s decision by making it clear that employers cannot deny access to any of the health benefits required by the ACA – not immunizations, not blood transfusions, not HIV treatments, and not birth control – while preserving reasonable accommodations for religiously exempt employers.

It’s about time we had a bunch of progressive Senators who did not give up just because there was a minor setback.  They are starting to realize that you can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.  The way you do it is  to use the opposition’s tactical advances against them.  They may have won 5 votes in the Supreme Court, but they haven’t seen how many votes they will lose in November.

The Real News Network has the interview Growing Up Privileged in Apartheid, Colonial Israel – Shir Hever on Reality Asserts Itself (1/5).

Mr. Hever says he became politically active after the Second Intifada was repressed with extreme violence by the Israeli military and police –   July 9, 2014

Note: We are in the process of fixing the audio issue that appears around the 20 minute mark. Thank you for your patience

Note: I have update the video. Presumably this version has the audio problem fixed.

The discussion of some history in around 1920 in Israel, I found particularly interesting. This history contradicts a response I got from a comment I made on the Jerusalem Post web site on the article Iron Dome intercepts rocket over central Israel, sirens sound in Tel Aviv.

The response I received was a quote from David Ben Gurion:

“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti – Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
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David Ben-Gurion quotes (Polish born Israeli Statesman and Prime Minister (1948-53, 1955-63). Chief architect of the state of Israel and revered as Father of the Nation, 1886-1973)

Perhaps mistakenly, I took this as an attempt to connect Hitler and anti-Semitism to the Palestinians’ behavior with regard to Israel.

The Real News Network shows some of the reasons for the Arab residents of what is now Israel to dislike what was being done to them already in the 1920s. This is not part of the story I learned about Israeli history from my family and from my Hebrew school.

On of the concepts mentioned in the video was Hebrew Labor. The previous entry is to the Wikipedia entry on the topic. You can apply as many grains of salt as you apply to anything you read about the middle east. The article seems pretty even handed, but how do I really know what the reality was?

If we could only get passed the who did what to whom in the past, we might be able to get to everyone is a human being now and should be treated as such.

July 10, 2014

Here is the second segment of the interview – Fear and Loathing in Israel – Shir Hever on Reality Asserts Itself (2/5). The title more reflects the interviewers preconceived notions than it does the notions of the interviewee.

The interviewee’s understanding is far more nuanced than the interviewer’s. Perhaps the impact of this interview on Paul Jay will occur later as he has a chance to mull over what he heard. I guess it is too much to expect him to change his point of view while the interview is being conducted.

I think it is too easy to decry the racism of a person who is mortally afraid of an existential threat when you are able to view the situation from the relative safety of living in another country. This is not a defense of the racism, but a statement on being so disingenuous about its existence. Perhaps a minor quibble? However, still one that bothers me.

Patient:

It hurts when I touch my toes without bending my knees

Doctor:

So, bend your knees.

Patient:

Yeah, why didn’t I think of that? You idiot, I am trying to talk about my symptoms, but you only care about making sarcastic remarks.

New Economic Perspectives has the article National Retirement Infrastructure.

First it describes a big chunk of what that infrastructure would be and talks about what it would cost.

The “Retirement Infrastructure” building effort we have in mind is not a “big government” program run by federal, state and local bureaucracies—it is exactly the opposite. It is a program that “big government” (except for one small piece of the puzzle) has no role in whatsoever. Instead, what we have in mind is this: the formation—on a national scale, all across the country—of small, cooperative groups of retirees who (a) plan and (b) manage the construction of modest, sustainable, cohousing projects which they subsequently will live in—for free—and then pass on to the following generations.

A very large part of the article talks about how we could afford such a project.  It discusses how we managed to afford World War II as an example.  The article concludes with:

Now: Let’s imagine a collective effort similar to World War Two, perhaps not on such an all-encompassing grand scale, but an effort nevertheless addressing an urgent collective need. Let’s further imagine the federal government issuing Dollars “out of thin air” to pay U.S. citizens to produce the work and build the things necessary to provide for that need. Finally, let’s imagine that the things created by that effort, instead of being things that would be destroyed, or things that citizens had no use for, were things they very much could use to their benefit every day—like, for example, a National Retirement Infrastructure of cohousing they could live in for free, generation after generation. Now that we understand we can actually “afford” to do something like that, why would we not seriously consider doing it?

The logic in the article is so well thought out and so clearly correct, that the only objection you could possibly have is that it couldn’t possibly be true.  You can spend the next few years trying to come up with reasons why the logic is flawed, and it might be a worthwhile exercise.  If you took as a given that for each reason why this couldn’t work, you would try to think of a way to overcome whatever roadblock appeared, you would find at the end of those years that you had come up with a workable plan to make it happen.

Then all you would have to do is decide to do it.  What possible, logical reason would there be for you, the country as a whole, to decide not to do it?

The only possible reason the country would decide not to do this is that the country has decided that we can no longer do what our country has done before when it was weaker and less powerful.  Or as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “The only thing you have to fear is fear itself.”

The Boston Globe has the Associated Press story Sharia edicts ruled invalid in India.

NEW DELHI — Islamic courts have no legal authority in India, the country’s Supreme Court ruled Monday, saying Muslims cannot be legally subject to a parallel religious authority.

Individuals may abide by Sharia court rulings if they wish but cannot be legally forced to do so, Judge C. K. Prasad said.

‘‘No religion is allowed to curb anyone’s fundamental rights,’’ he told the court, giving the decision of a two-judge bench. Indian law does not recognize Sharia court rulings, he said.

Can you imagine if our Supreme Court majority had the intelligence of these judges in India?  I know that this is asking you to stretch your imagination beyond the bounds of what is possible.

I also wonder why these decisions always seem to come down to the issue of men taking advantage of women in a sexual way.

I am such a fan of my own writing (a little self-directed sarcasm there), that I thought an excerpt from a previous post deserved a post of its own.

It is great irony that the issue in the Hobby Lobby case revolved around contraception.  It is typical of the majority of Justices that they did not think ahead to the consequences of their action.  The majority was all male.  Men frequently do not think about the consequences of sexual activity the way that women do.

Most often women have to deal with the consequences in a way that men do not.  So their thinking about the consequences is in a way that men do not always have the necessity to think.

Extra focus on consequences is but one example of the kind of thought that women can bring to the court that men are not as likely to bring.

The New York Times has the story Immigrant Surge Rooted in Law to Curb Child Trafficking.

WASHINGTON — It was one of the final pieces of legislation signed into law by President George W. Bush, a measure that passed without controversy, along with a pension bill and another one calling for national parks to be commemorated on quarters.

“This is a piece of legislation we’re very proud to sign,” a White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, told reporters on Dec. 23, 2008, as the president put his pen to the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, named for a 19th-century British abolitionist. “This program has been very effective around the world in trying to stop trafficking in persons.”

Now the legislation, enacted quietly during the transition to the Obama administration, is at the root of the potentially calamitous flow of unaccompanied minors to the nation’s southern border.

As with any article from The New York Times, you cannot treat what it says as gospel.  However, if you hadn’t known about the “William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008” before, you now have some new information to consider.

One side-effect of reading this article is the highlighting of unintended consequences of governmental action.  Perhaps the lawmakers should have asked themselves how people will learn to take advantage of this new legislation.  The Judiciary branch also needs to partake of this same type of introspection.  The Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Hobby Lobby case specifically refused to consider the unintended consequences of their decision with the reasoning that these consequences had not occurred yet.  Of course the unintended consequences of their decision could not have already taken place before they made the decision.  The consequences of an action, by definition, can only occur after the action.

This is the same deficiency in thinking that allowed the securitization of mortgages to lead to catastrophe.  All the studies about what could happen with securitized mortgages looked at the history of mortgage default rates before securitization had been introduced into the market.  No thought had been given in the research to how the incentives in the market would change by the introduction of securitization.  It turns out that the due diligence of the lenders that produced the history of low default rates was rendered unnecessary  by this change in the environment of lending.

It is great irony that the issue in the Hobby Lobby case revolved around contraception.  It is typical of the majority of Justices that they did not think ahead to the consequences of their action.  The majority was all male.  Men frequently do not think about the consequences of sexual activity the way that women do.

Naked Capitalism has the article Ilargi: Overshoot Loop and Evolution. I’ll just quote Yves Smith’s summary:

Yves here. As Ilargi himself acknowledges, even by the standards of his fare, this post on “overshoot” is plenty sobering. We do seem to be on our way to precipitating a mass species die off (as in it’s underway already and humans seem remarkably unwilling to take sufficiently stern measures to stop it). The end of civilization as we know it seems almost inevitable, given that most “advanced” economies are seeing serious erosion of their social fabric, as reflected in falling social well-being measures. However, the provocative point that Jay Hanson argues is that our hard-wired political habits guarantee our undoing.

The main article introduces some very thought provoking ideas. The comments also go a long way toward preventing the original author from getting away with too much. You get the most out of this by considering both the article and the body of comments.

I particularly like the thought that the open source software development movement might be a template for how we conduct ourselves in the post industrial society. When we don’t have to work the majority of the time to survive, what will we do with our time?

The Daily Kos has the article Do Republican men ever have sex?

There’s a predictable but bizarre reaction from Republicans with penises (and a few without) to the backlash against the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision: only sluts and whores use birth control. The obvious conclusion is that these guys aren’t getting much in the way of action if they don’t think women should get to have sex for fun. Or they’re only getting it when they pay for it.

They then go on to print quotes from Rush Limpbaugh and Sean Handnity.

The other possible conclusion is that many Republicans just don’t know that much about sex.  If they had any idea how their remarks about sex show how ignorant of the subject that they are, they would be embarrassed to make these remarks.  If they demonstrated this lack of knowledge in High School or even Junior High, they might have been laughed right out of the school by their peers.

In my case, I knew how ignorant I was back then, so I just kept my mouth shut on the topic.

I’ll have to add the following quote to my quotes page.

“It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt”
― Mark Twain

My source is the web site goodreads.com.

Naked Capitalism has the article Obama’s Nominee for the VA, Robert McDonald, Former P&G CEO, Should be Held Accountable for Unethical Pharma Study.

While Mr McDonald held high executive positions at Procter and Gamble, the company was involved in a dodgy affair involving conflicts of interest, manipulation of research, and attempted silencing of whistle blowers. In my humble opinion, given that these events occurred directly on his watch, his fitness to run a huge health care system ought to be in question unless his responsibility for these events is disproved.

Where do we find such people to appoint to high offices of trust?  What McDonald is supposed to fix in the VA is very similar to what went on at Procter and Gamble even while he was in charge.  So they fire Shinseki and bring in a guy who made all the same mistakes and never admitted to them nor apologized for them.

Is there any leader in the public or private sector that doesn’t make a habit of shady practices, cutting corners, and suppressing dissent?  Is this just human nature to do these things?  If so, what can we do to protect society from this?

Actually, the problem might originate in how we are brought up in this country.  I don’t know how wide spread this is in the world.  Our parents or aunts and uncles probably had a hand in teaching us that it is not nice to be a tattle-tale.  Perhaps this is where people get the idea that it is right to suppress dissent.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Obama Consults a “Wide Variety of Economists” – Just Not Those Who Got it Right by William K. Black.

The real difference, the thing sure to exclude Galbraith, Baker, Wray, and Kelton from Obama’s luncheon list, is that they have committed the unforgivable sin of having been proved correct (again) about big finance and the crisis.  There is, of course, no chance that Obama will ever invite any of us, much less our friends at Amherst, to lunch to discuss economic policy.

The good news for Americans, which I will explain in my next column, is that Obama is not remotely as bad as the European troika’s leaders and economists that set the EU’s catastrophic economic policies.

Well, at least he ends on some good news about Obama.

Why would you ever want to consult with the people who got it right?  In a perverse application of an investment theory which does not apply here, you don’t want to switch your mutual funds that you own to last year’s best performing mutual funds.  Chances are, they used an unorthodox strategy which just happened to be right for the conditions last year.  Next year, they will be out of phase with the economy. You’d better stick to your losing mutual funds.  The losers might be in phase next year.  They might be next years best performers.

To mix metaphors here, just keep consulting your stopped watch.  It’s going to be exactly right sometime.  Never mind those other watches which are pretty close to right all the time.