Midterm Election Results in Perspective

The Bigger Picture
Published on November 15th 2010 in Metro Éireann By Charles Laffiteau

In my last column published on the eve of America’s 2010 mid-term elections I predicted that; “while I don’t see much chance for Republicans to regain control of the Senate, I think it is likely they will achieve the net gain of 39 seats they will need to take control of the US House of Representatives. So barring an unexpectedly large turnout of voters on Election Day, I foresee America reverting once again to divided government. If this indeed happens, then that raises the question of; “What will Americans expect from the ‘Party of No’, once they are back in power?”
Given the fact that my predictions proved to be accurate, I will spend my remaining columns before the New Year trying to address this query. But before I attempt to answer my own question, I would first like to place the election results in their proper perspective. Did President Obama and the Democratic Party take a hiding on 2 November? Yes. In fact, the Republican Party made up most of its losses in Congress from both the 2006 and 2008 elections in just this one single mid-term election. No question Obama and the Democrats took a beating.
But it would also be unwise for President Obama and either the Republican or Democratic Party to read too much into the sound thrashing voters delivered to Democrats in Congress and in many state Governors’ races. Why? Because if you drill down below the surface of what appears to have been a landslide victory for Congressional Republicans, you will find ample evidence which indicates this election was not the resounding voter mandate to oppose President Obama that Republican leaders in Congress and elsewhere are claiming it was.
To begin with, almost one third fewer American voters went to the polls in this year’s midterm elections than those who did so in the 2008 Presidential elections. Overall voter turnout dropped off a veritable cliff falling from 61.6 percent in November 2008, to a dismal 41.5 percent in November 2010. In other words, instead of these elections being decided by close to two thirds of America’s voters, they were decided by just over two fifths of eligible voters.
Another telling statistic was the demographic make-up of the voters in the 2010 elections compared to those who voted in the 2008 elections. Whereas white voters, who generally tend to be a bit older and more conservative than minority voters, comprised only 74 percent of overall voters in 2008, they made up 78 percent of the electorate in 2010. Furthermore, the turnout of voters under 30, who cast 66 percent of their votes for President Obama and his Democratic Party allies in 2008, dropped from a high of 52 percent in 2008 to a dismal 20 percent in the most recent elections. So given the fact that the Republicans’ base of older white voters showed up at the polls and the Democratic Party’s base of minority and younger voters did not, is it really a surprise that the results turned out so bad for President Obama and the Democrats? No.
The danger for both Republicans and Democrats is that both camps have a long history of misreading the results of midterm elections, usually with disastrous consequences for their candidates. The lesson for President Obama and his Democratic Party allies in Congress is not to panic. President Reagan and the Republican Party suffered a similar setback in the midterm elections of 1982 and Reagan responded by winning reelection in 1984 with one of the biggest electoral landslides in American political history.
President Obama’s Democratic allies in Congress should also take note of what happened to Democrats who waffled in their support of President Obama’s legislative agenda and or voted against his economic stimulus or healthcare proposals. To be sure, 32 Democrats who voted for Obama’s healthcare package were indeed defeated by Republicans in their bids for reelection. But many of them were also running in districts that had voted for John McCain in the 2008 elections, so given the low Democratic voter turnout and the anti-incumbent tide the Republicans were riding the chances are good they would have lost their seats regardless.
The more telling statistic is the fact that of the 34 Democrats who did vote against the President’s healthcare legislation, exactly half of them also went down to Republican challengers. Many of these Democratic incumbents figured that opposing the President on this issue would ensure their continued survival in Congress. In other words, holding on to their personal political power was more important than serving the interests of their party and their country. As for the other 4 Democrats who also voted against the healthcare plan but chose to retire instead of running for reelection, 3 of their open seats were also won by Republicans.
Other Democrats, like Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, who waffled in their support of President Obama’s economic and healthcare agenda did no better in their reelection bids than the Democrats who had opposed Obama in Congress. Lincoln figured the best way for her to win a fourth term in the Senate was to flip flop her votes for and against President Obama’s legislation thereby proving her independence to more conservative white voters. But she angered Democratic voters in the process which led to a nasty primary fight with the states popular Lieutenant Governor. She won that battle but lost the war as Arkansas voters handily reelected their Democratic Governor while simultaneously kicking their Democratic Senator to the curb.
The lesson for President Obama and Democrats is that while they need to show willingness to compromise with their Republican opponents, they should not ignore their principles or betray their convictions in the process. They were elected to serve the greater public good, not their own personal interests such as retaining their political power. As for my fellow (I use this term loosely) Republicans, I will discuss the lessons they should take away from the midterm election results in my next column.

Midterm Election Predictions for The Party of No.

The Bigger Picture
Published on November 1st 2010 in Metro Éireann By Charles Laffiteau

With America’s mid-term elections looming on Tuesday I will now attempt to gaze into my crystal ball and make some predictions ahead of this trip to the polls. Given the historically low overall turnout of voters in mid-term elections, these predictions will also prove to be the ultimate test of my political prognostications skills.
I will begin with a discussion of some of the most important races for seats in the US Senate where the Democratic Party briefly held the twenty seat majority required by arcane Senate rules to overcome filibusters and pass legislation. I will begin with the Senate races in the ‘swing’ states such as Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania whose electoral votes often determine the outcome of Presidential elections.
In Florida, little known Democratic candidate Kendrick Meek trails Tea Party favourite Marco Rubio, who is the Republican nominee, as well as Governor Charlie Crist, a moderate Republican who is running as an Independent candidate. This is a Republican seat and although Rubio has succeeded in winning most of the support of Florida Republicans, most Independents and many Democrats are supporting Crist. I believe Charlie Crist will win this race if more Democrats decide to vote against Rubio and cast their votes for Crist instead of wasting them by voting for Kendrick Meek, who has no realistic chance of winning. If not, then Rubio will keep this seat in the Republican column with less than 45% of the votes cast.
In Ohio, another Republican seat must also be defended and because this state continues to suffer more than others from high levels of unemployment, Republican candidate Rob Portman stands to gain from voter dissatisfaction with the slow pace of economic recovery in their region. Many American’s have notoriously short memories and have likewise become addicted to the idea of quick fixes, so Portman is using this to his advantage by telling voters that Obama and the Democrats have failed to turn the economy around. Democratic candidate Lee Fisher has tried to remind Ohio voters that Portman was President Bush’s trade czar and budget director but has been unable to make much headway against the tide of sentiment that blames Obama rather than Bush for the economic malaise.
Pennsylvania is a neighboring state where the Republican Senate seat became a Democratic one when longtime moderate Republican Senator Arlen Specter switched parties rather than attempt to swim against the Tea Party tide sweeping the Republican Party. But Pennsylvania Democrats ignored the pleas of President Obama and opted to give their party’s Senate nomination to lifelong Democrat Joe Sestak instead of incumbent Arlen Specter. This was a classic case of Democrats ‘cutting off their nose to spite their face’ because despite their distaste for former Republican Specter, at least he had a good chance of retaining this Senate seat, while Sestak had no chance of defeating Republican candidate Pat Toomey.
But for Republicans to regain control of the US Senate they must not only retain or regain the aforementioned traditionally Republican Senate seats, they must also win some traditionally Democratic seats. Republicans initially appeared to have some pretty good prospects of doing just that given the tendency of Americans to vote against the party of the President in mid-term elections. But the Tea Party movement’s desire for ideologically pure conservative Republican candidates resulted in the defeat of the moderate Republican nominees who had a chance of winning Democratic Senate seats in Delaware, New York, Nevada and Colorado.
The most glaring example of Republicans following the lead of Democrats and ‘cutting off their noses to spite their faces’, occurred in Delaware where Tea Party activists succeeded in getting Christine O’Donnell nominated instead of Republican Congressman Mike Castle. The moderate Castle would have won Vice President Joe Biden’s former Senate seat in a walk but he wasn’t ideologically pure enough for Republican members of the Tea Party movement. As a result I expect Democratic nominee Chris Coons to easily win this seat and keep it in the hands of Democrats.
In New York, conservatives eschewed nominating the Republican State Convention candidate, Bruce Blakeman as well as the other establishment Republican candidate, David Malpass, and instead cast their Republican primary votes for Joe DioGuardi, an anti-tax gadfly. Among other things, DioGuardi has gained notoriety for burning the Serbian flag in front of the Serbian Embassy and for getting $5000 a month to serve as a consultant and member of the board of directors for Medical Capital Holdings, a Ponzi scheme that federal officials claim bilked investors of more than $1.7 billion. As a result, Kristen Gillibrand will easily retain her Democratic Senate seat.
Like Delaware, Nevada is another case where Tea Party activists succeeded in winning the battle for the Republican Senate seat on behalf of their favourite, Sharon Angle, which in turn will result in Republicans losing the war for Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s Senate seat. Tea Party activists opted to support Angle despite the fact that most state polls showed that former Republican state legislator Sue Lowden would likely defeat Harry Reid in November and that Angle probably couldn’t.
In Colorado, Tea Party activists likewise got their man, Ken Buck, nominated instead of the well respected Republican Lieutenant Governor, Jane Norton. Norton had an excellent chance of winning this seat that had once been held by Republican senator Ken Salazar before he accepted a job as President Obama’s Secretary of the Interior. Now it appears increasingly likely this will remain a Democratic Senate seat.
But while I don’t see much chance for Republicans to regain control of the Senate, I think it is likely they will achieve the net gain of 39 seats they will need to take control of the US House of Representatives. So barring an unexpectedly large turnout of voters on Election Day, I foresee America reverting once again to divided government. If this indeed happens, then that raises the question of; “What will Americans expect from the ‘Party of No’, once they are back in power?”

Will The Tea Party Help or Hurt Republicans?

The Bigger Picture
Published on October 15th 2010 in Metro Éireann By Charles Laffiteau

In my most recent column I said that I had serious doubts enough Republican candidates for Congressional seats would succeed in broadening their appeal to independent voters for the Republican Party to regain its old position of power in Congress. While many political pundits in America, particularly those who are supportive of the uber-conservative Tea Party movement, have no such doubts, I believe there are simply too many things that must fall their way for Republicans to win control of the next US Congress.
To begin with, in order to take control of the all important US Senate, the Republican Party must successfully defend all of its own Senate seats and win at least 10 seats now held by Democrats. Now if the Democratic Senate seats that were most at risk were all in the more conservative Southern states or more sparsely populated Western states, then a net gain of 10 Senate seats might just have been possible.
But the very same Tea Party movement that the Republican Party has been so quick to embrace, has also succeeded in getting a number of ultra-conservative Republican candidates nominated in Democratic leaning Northeastern states such as New York, Connecticut and Delaware. But had the more moderate Republican candidates in these states won the Republican nomination to contest these Democratic Party Senate seats, then I believe a net gain of 10 Senate seats would have been within the Republican Party’s grasp.
However, absent a tectonic shift in voter sentiments in these normally Democratic leaning states, I simply don’t see the darlings of the Tea Party winning there on Election Day. Furthermore, I’m also not so sure the Tea Party candidates, that won the Republican Party’s nomination in Western states like Nevada and Colorado, are capable of wining back Democratic Senate seats in those normally Republican leaning states either. Nor is retaining control of Republican held US Senate seats in the states of Alaska, Kentucky, Florida and New Hampshire a given come Election Day.
One of the keys to Republican Party success on Election Day that I cited in my previous column is the ability of their candidates to win the support of the Republicans they vanquished in their party primaries earlier this year. Well in Alaska the Republican loser, Lisa Murkowski, is running against the Republican winner who was supported by the Tea Party and Sarah Palin, Joe Miller, as a write-in candidate. In Florida, Republican Governor Charlie Crist is running as an Independent against another Republican nominee who was a Palin and Tea Party favorite. Furthermore, Republicans are also locked in close contests to retain control of other Republican held Senates seats in Kentucky and New Hampshire.
So even if the Republican Senate candidates are able to mount aggressive get-out-the-vote campaigns involving their Tea Party supporters and or are blessed with bad weather in their respective states on Election Day, which historically holds down Democratic voter turn out, I still don’t see them also overcoming many of these internal splits between moderate Republican voters and ultra- conservative Tea Party movement supporters. I also question how successful Republican candidates backed by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement will be attracting support from independent voters.
Granted, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party activists have energized older predominately white and more conservative voters throughout America and garnered support for the more conservative Republican candidates they favor. But while this was a benefit in Republican primaries, it is at best a mixed blessing for Republican candidates in the General Election.
For one thing, while Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement are viewed favorably by a majority of Republican voters, such is not the case with Democratic or Independent voters. But since the American electorate is split with roughly a third of voters supporting the Republican Party and another third the Democratic Party, it is the other third of Independent voters who hold the key to winning most General Election battles.
Independent voters may not share the overwhelmingly negative views of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement that Democratic voters have, but they are nonetheless decidedly negative towards both Palin and the Tea Party movement. Recent polls show that although 52% of Independent voters have no opinion about the Tea Party movement, just over 30% have a negative view while only 18% regard the Tea Party movement favorably.
As for the Tea Party movement’s favorite national (i.e. Presidential) candidate, Sarah Palin fares even worse among both Democratic and Independent voters. While the overwhelmingly negative views of Democrats are hardly surprising, Sarah Palin’s decidedly negative polling among independent voters is an ominous sign for both the Republican Party and the Republican candidates Sarah Palin has endorsed and supported. Over 50% of American voters and almost 40% of Independent voters have negative views about Sarah Palin and over 66% of American voters rather cynically believe she is more interested in staying in the public’s eye than in helping elect the Republican candidates she has endorsed
To regain control of Congress, Republicans must also defend their own seats in the US House of Representatives and realize a net gain of 39 seats currently held by Democrats. This is another tall order for the Republican Party, but also one that is more achievable than winning control of the US Senate since 55 of the Democrats must defend their House seats in districts that voted for John McCain in the 2008 Presidential election. Another favorable omen for Republicans in US House races is the fact that the political party that controls the US Presidency historically loses at least 20-25 seats in the House in mid-term elections.
But just as the Tea Party endorsements helped many Republican House candidates win the Republican nomination, so too will these endorsements hinder their attempts to appeal to more centrist independent voters on Election Day. So in my next column I will make some predictions about the Election Day outcomes and Republican prospects for taking control of both the US House and Senate.

What Republicans Must Do To Win Big In November

The Bigger Picture
Published on October 1st 2010 in Metro Éireann By Charles Laffiteau
Back in the states the party primaries have concluded so Democratic and Republican candidates for state and federal offices are now entering the home stretch of their respective bids to win election in November. At the federal level Democrats are facing a ‘perfect storm’ of historically negative trends which has led most political observers in America to predict huge gains in the US Congress for the opposition Republican Party. The only real question is; Will Republicans successfully ride this ‘perfect storm’s’ political wave back into power?
Although most of the political analysts I respect are now predicting that Republicans will regain control of the US House of Representatives and a number of them are also predicting Republicans will win the Senate too, I’m still not so sure. Maybe this is simply wishful thinking on my part, but I believe when the dust finally settles on November 3rd, the Democratic Party will have lost a number of Congressional seats, but will still retain their majority party status in both houses of Congress, if only by a slim margin.
Make no mistake, the convergence of several historically negative voting trends augers a crushing defeat for the Democratic Party at the polls this November. But for the Republican Party to turn their mid-term election gains into a controlling position in the next Congress will require an unlikely convergence of several other factors. First and foremost, Republicans need overall voter turnout to below 39% of all eligible voters (which is likely), and the corresponding turnout of their older, conservative white voters to be above 60%.
In other words, Republicans must ensure they have a higher than normal turnout of their voters in order to overcome the fact that their base of support is the only segment of the voters that is declining as a percentage of America’s voting age population. But making sure you get your supporters to the polls on Election Day also requires a strong nation-wide organizational plan that accounts for uncontrollable variables like cold and rainy weather.
Prior to the most recent national elections in 2008, the RNC (Republican National Committee) in Washington DC had always excelled at developing very detailed get-out-the-vote plans for all of its candidates in every American state. However, for the last 18 months the RNC has been wracked by internal dissent over the actions of its controversial Chairman, Michael Steele. This turmoil at headquarters has been a huge distraction for the RNC, causing many Republican candidates to independently develop their own get-out-the-vote plans.
Another factor which can work against Republican candidates and weaken turn out of their voters is the bloody primary battles fought between establishment Republican candidates and more right wing conservatives who had the support of members of the Tea Party movement. In some cases the Tea Party candidate won the Republican primary battle while in others the more moderate establishment Republicans did. But regardless of which candidate won, an inevitable consequence of such internecine conflicts is bruised feelings on the part of those who ended up on the losing side of these intra-party battles. So persuading the loser’s supporters to vote for the victors is often the key to winning the general election.
Bereft of a single national political leader, the Republican Party also needs a unified national message or theme for its candidates that will resonate with a majority of American voters, particularly those running for Congress. But for the last 18 months, Congressional Republicans unbending opposition to all of President Obama’s proposed policies has allowed Democrats to largely succeed in portraying the Republican Party as ‘the party of no’. Since this message of rigid opposition resonates with the conservative base of the Republican Party, its candidates continued to reinforce this theme during the summer primary season.
But Republican candidates for Congress are no longer jostling with other Republicans for the support of Republican voters; they are now in the midst of running against Democrats in a general election campaign. So with the exception of a few states like Utah, where winning the Republican nomination is tantamount to winning the general election, Republicans candidates must now broaden their appeal in an effort to win the support of independent voters if they want to succeed on 2 November.
That’s because only a third of eligible voters are reliably Republican voters with a slightly larger percentage consistently voting for Democrats. So at the end of the day, success on Election Day for most Democratic and Republican candidates is dependent on garnering a majority of the votes of independents who make up the other third of the American electorate. But independent voters hew to fairly moderate political positions on most issues by and large. As a general rule they are not keen on either very conservative or very liberal political stances, which means the winners of the intra-party primary battles must ‘run to the middle’.
So the traditional general election strategy of most Democratic and Republican candidates has been to moderate or ‘paper over’ political positions that appeal to their liberal or conservative base during the general election campaign in an effort to win the support of independent voters. The Democratic candidates are well positioned to do so again this year. But because of the intra-party strife between establishment Republicans and Tea Party activists many of the Republican winners had to adopt more extreme conservative positions than they might otherwise in an effort to secure their party’s nomination. Now if they want to ‘run to the middle’ they must also weigh the risk of losing the support of Tea Party activists.
Republican Party candidates who; secure the support of their primary opponents’ voters, run aggressive get-out-the-vote campaigns, develop consistent messages about what they will do to address America’s problems rather than ‘just saying no’ to Democratic proposals, and who moderate their more extreme positions to appeal to independent voters, will do well in November. But I continue to have serious doubts enough of them will for the Republican Party to regain power in Congress.

A Perfect Political Storm for Republicans

The Bigger Picture
Published on September 15th 2010 in Metro Éireann By Charles Laffiteau
In my last column I expressed my belief that the Tea Party movement is just another one of those alternative Americans have to exhaust before they decide to do the right thing. However, based on the history of similar quasi-political movements in America, this process will probably take at least at least one or possibly two election cycles to run its course. With mid-term elections looming in November, this is not good news for President Obama and a Democratic Party hoping to retain control of the US Senate and House of Representatives.
Unfortunately for the President and his Democratic supporters in Congress, there are also several other historical trends that augur significant losses in the upcoming elections. First, voter turnout in non-Presidential election years tends to fall by about one third from 55-60% of eligible voters in Presidential election years, to around 36-38% in mid-term elections. This isn’t good for Democrats because the percentages of older, rural white voters who tend to favor Republican candidates’ remains constant in both Presidential and mid-term elections, while the number of younger, urban minority voters falls significantly in mid-term elections.
Another worrisome trend for Democrats is that, with the exception of the post 9/11 2002 mid-term elections, the political party that holds the office of US President always loses seats in Congress. The reason why President Bush was able to buck this historic trend in the 2002 mid-term elections was because Karl Rove and company were able to whip up patriotic support for the President and Republicans in Congress by playing up the threats to American national security posed by Saddam Hussein as well as al Qaeda inspired Islamic terrorism.
The other historic trend working against President Obama and Democrats in Congress is the tendency of voters in America to blame the party in power for whatever economic problems are bedeviling their country and or the region of it they reside in. I might add that this is also a voting trend consistently seen in other wealthy countries’ democratic elections. This type of voter reaction also reflects the fact that most voters don’t really grasp the long term economic implications of their government’s complex economic and fiscal policies.
With respect to the tendency of many voters to blame the party in power for their nation’s economic problems, this kind of reaction is quite often appropriate, especially when that political party has been in power for several election cycles. Conversely however, it is also not a fitting response when a political party has only held the reins of power for less than a couple of years. This is especially true when a political party’s ascent to power coincides with an economic downturn caused largely by the ruinous fiscal policies of its predecessor.
The truth about America’s current economic malaise is that while it took hold during President Bush’s last year in office, it was precipitated by the budgetary, regulatory and tax policies President Bush and a Republican led Congress enacted between 2002 and 2006. Furthermore, you won’t find any reputable economists in America who will agree with the contentions of most Congressional Republicans that President Obama’s economic stimulus measures’ impact on America’s budget deficits has hurt the nation’s economy. What most economists, be they political liberals or conservatives, will say however, is that without those stimulus measures the recession would have been much worse and the recovery much slower.
The painful reality many Americans refuse to acknowledge is that it took years of fiscal and regulatory mismanagement by Republicans, as well as some Democrats, to create the conditions that led to the financial crisis on Wall Street and the subsequent economic meltdown. But America’s greedy bankers and deficit spending politicians were by no means the only culprits. Many American voters also bought into the notion that they could go out and ‘charge’ the good life to their credit cards instead of working and saving to attain it.
But following years of easy credit, which allowed many Americans to drunkenly spend someone else’s money for the homes and other luxuries of life they desired without having to work and save to get them, those Americans who did are now feeling the pain of a rather nasty hangover. Unfortunately for the Democratic Party and its standard bearer, President Obama, ever since the end of World War II many American voters have also become addicted to the ‘quick fix’ for their problems. So the prospect that it will take some years for America to dig itself out of its financial hole is patently unacceptable to them.
Many of these same American voters also believe that they can avoid taking responsibility for their troubles by blaming someone else like ‘them’ as the culprit. ‘Them’ can be illegal immigrants who steal jobs from American citizens, greedy Wall Street bankers, the federal government that unreasonably taxes their income and regulates their business practices or people of color who don’t look or speak like white American citizens do.
The fragmented leadership of the Republican Party has decided to cast their lot with this older and overwhelmingly white segment of the American population because they believe these voters will provide Republicans with the quickest and easiest route back to the position of political power they had in Washington DC until four years ago.
It’s quick because these voters have been gravitating to the Republican Party for years and thus provide its candidates with a very reliable base of Election Day support. It’s easy because these voters are so angry and afraid that Republicans don’t have to worry about offering them realistic solutions for America’s problems, which might cause those voters to stop and think about the implications of the policies Republicans want to implement. In other words, they’ll vote for Republicans without thinking about the consequences. Given the historic trends I’ve discussed, it would appear that Democrats are confronting a ‘perfect storm’ of political discontent. But can Republicans ride this political wave back to power? I’ll discuss this in my next column.

Americans Will Always Do The Right Thing But...

The Bigger Picture
Published on September 1st 2010 in Metro Éireann By Charles Laffiteau
In addition to the concerns I expressed in previous columns about the Tea Partiers lack of viable solutions, anti-immigrant prejudice and thinly disguised racial biases, I am also concerned because the Tea Partiers’ distrust of government institutions and their unwarranted confidence in their own abilities are characteristics typical of many other Americans. So today I will discuss some of the dangerous assumptions embodied by these classic American psychological traits.
This year’s Tea Party movement bears more than a passing resemblance to both its 19th century forerunner, the Know-Nothings and its 20th century predecessor, the Dixiecrats. Like those earlier movements virtually all of its members are either employed or retired, white, middle class, a bit older as well as less likely to have ever been unemployed than the average American.
The other important characteristic of the Tea Partiers is that, much like their Know-Nothing and Dixiecrat forbearers, they are motivated by their anger and fear that they are losing ground to ‘them.’ To the Know-Nothings ‘them’ were immigrant Catholics, for the Dixiecrats ‘them’ were people of color and for the Tea Partiers ‘them’ are those who support the policies of President Obama, the non-white son of a black African immigrant and a white American liberal.
In the aftermath of the liberal activism that characterized the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s, most of the electoral energy in American politics over the last 3 decades since then has emanated from the populist right instead of the liberal left. The anti-abortion movement began to take shape in the latter part of the 1970’s as did the Howard Jarvis’s anti-property tax and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority Christian crusaders. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1982, followed by the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and George Bush’s elections in 2000 and 2004 effectively turned right wing populism into mainstream politics.
But in the wake of a needless and ruinous war in Iraq, record government spending and budget deficits followed by a financial meltdown on Wall Street, right wing populism lost the support of many independent voters and finally ran out of steam. This provided an opening for a new and different type of politician named Barack Obama, who promised Americans he would shake up the political establishment and change the way things were done in Washington DC. As a result, many of independent voters who had once supported Reagan and Bush voted for Obama because they were disgusted with Bush and Republicans in Congress who supported his policies.
Like the Know-Nothings and the Dixiecrats, supporters of the Tea Party movement also claim to be independent of and equally disgusted with the political establishment of both the Democratic and Republican parties. Indeed when those 19th and 20th century Tea Party ancestor movements splintered, equal numbers of their supporters either joined the Democratic or the Republican parties. But in a July 2nd Gallup poll, 8 out of 10 Tea Partiers identified themselves as conservative Republicans. This suggests “that the Tea Party movement is more a rebranding of core Republicanism than a new or distinct entity on the American political scene.”
But a common thread running through the past thirty years of right wing electoral victories was a distrust of big-government and a desire on the part of many Americans to rely more on themselves and less on government to solve many of America’s problems. These sentiments were a consequence of the failure of the Great Society programs of the 1960’s to reduce crime by eradicating the poverty that was often seen as the root cause of many of America’s social ills. So the fear of big-government expressed by Tea Party supporters isn’t a new or recent fear any more than their unspoken fear of ‘them’ Hispanic immigrants and blacks.
What concerns me about this latest Tea Party movement is that with the exception of the Know-Nothings and the Dixiecrats, previous populist movements in America have used their populist rhetoric in an effort to seize political power so that they could exercise it for their common benefit. The 19th century anti-slavery abolitionist and 20th century women’s suffrage, civil rights and anti-war movements were all notable examples of such populist movements.
Even Ronald Reagan’s right wing anti-big government populist rhetoric was based on the policy ideas of intellectuals like economist Milton Friedman, business and technology guru George Gilder and libertarian political scientist Charles Murray so the policies Reagan implemented when he became President were based largely on ‘real’ ideas and concepts. But although the supporters of the Tea Party movement speak with fondness and reverence about President Reagan, they are noticeably devoid of any ideas about what to do if they seize power.
Unlike Reagan, today’s primarily Republican Tea Party conservatives prefer the populist rhetoric of anti-intellectuals like Sarah Palin and cynical conservative talk show pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, all of whom are experts at exploiting and manipulating the non-intellectual supporters of the Tea Party movement. Theirs is a new and virulent strain of populism based on the same American libertarian bias as previous movements, but one that is much more childish and selfish. It appeals to individuals who are convinced that they could achieve the material success they desire but the government is preventing them from doing so. They don’t have a constructive political agenda, so their only recourse is to disparage ‘them’ in an attempt to preserve what they believe is their God given right to do whatever they please.
Before America’s entry into World War II, Winston Churchill addressed concerns that England’s situation looked bleak without the help of America by saying he wasn’t worried and that he knew America would eventually enter the war on England’s side because:“Americans will always do the right thing ……. after they have exhausted all the alternatives.” My hope is that Churchill’s observation is still true and that the Tea Party movement is just another one of those alternatives Americans have to exhaust before they decide to do the right thing.

Is the Tea Party Movement A New Political Phenomenon?

The Bigger Picture
Published on August 15th 2010 in Metro Éireann By Charles Laffiteau
In my last column I said I was concerned that the Tea Party segment of American voters, who have no real ideas or solutions to offer, will nonetheless have a major influence on the outcomes of several crucial federal elections. I am concerned because the Tea Party movement is reminiscent of other short lived, fear based political movements in America’s history which have had a thankfully brief but nonetheless negative impact on American society.
America’s Founding Fathers, who the Tea Partiers so revere, struggled mightily over many months to develop an American Constitution that struck a balance between American citizens’ native distrust of governmental authority and the young nation’s urgent need for a governance system that unified its far flung citizens and provided order under a system of laws. The founding fathers hated the monarchial system of kings which then dominated the world, but they were equally afraid of the excesses of mob rule and the inherent desire of states and cities to do as they pleased regardless of how their actions might affect other states and cities in America.
Thomas Jefferson was a founding father who was an opponent of industrialization, an advocate of states’ rights and the leader of those who distrusted a strong central government. Alexander Hamilton was the leader of the political coalition that advocated for more trade and commerce as well as a strong national government. So America’s founding fathers drafted a compromise Constitution that attempted to restrict the authority of the new national government while simultaneously restricting different aspects of the independence of the new nation’s individual states because of the often divergent interests of those states and their citizens.
But from the outset it was apparent during the ensuing state debates about ratifying the American Constitution that despite his endorsement of the new Constitution, many of Jefferson’s supporters still viewed the proposed new federal government as a conspiracy of the bankers and urban elites living in the northeastern states to subvert the will of other free Americans. But Jefferson and his ally, James Madison, were able to use their vision of America as a growing continental nation to successfully persuade a majority of their supporters to support it anyway.
What I find ironic is the fact that most of the ‘true conservatives’ who support the Tea Party movement also support the unfettered economic growth and development of America’s military industrial complex and that most of them don’t like Thomas Jefferson because of Jefferson’s strong support for the separation of government and religion. So despite their avowed reverence for the ideals of America’s founding fathers, the members of the Tea Party movement I talked to apparently don’t have a clue about what America’s founding fathers actually believed.
Therein we find the first clue as to the actual roots of the current Tea Party movement; not the Boston Tea Party patriots, who lit the first flames of America’s Revolutionary War in 1773, but rather the Know-Nothing movement which began in New York in 1843, seventy years after the Boston Tea Party. The Know-Nothing movement was the first American political movement whose supporters were, much like today’s Tea Partiers, primarily motivated by fear.
The Know-Nothing movement was a political reaction to the successive waves of poor German, Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants who came to America to live in urban tenements beginning in the 1830’s, as well as the prejudicial religious fears of many Protestant Americans. Between 1830 and 1850, more than 2.5 million immigrants moved to America and close to a million of these were poor Irish Catholic immigrants escaping the mid-1840’s potato famine.
When economic times got tough in the latter part of the 1840’s and early 1850’s, the mostly Protestant middle class workers living in the Northeast and Midwest sections of America reacted in horror to this influx of poor and mainly Catholic immigrants. The Know Nothing movement eventually became a national political party called the American Party and by 1855 43 of its members had been elected to Congress. The Know-Nothings’ main political aim was to bring a halt to immigration from foreign lands and to restrict American citizenship to native born Americans and naturalization to Protestant men over 21 who were of British descent.
However many of the supporters of the Know Nothings were not content to only use peaceful means to bring about the changes in America’s immigration policy they wanted. Their use of intimidation tactics to prevent Catholics from voting culminated in anti-Catholic riots in Louisville Kentucky during an August 1855 election for Kentucky’s governor that killed 22 Catholic voters, injured scores of others and resulted in widespread property losses. But by 1860 the Know-Nothing movement had fallen apart due to a fractious split over the issue of slavery.
Then a hundred years later another fear based political movement arose to take up the Know-Nothing’s mantle. However, instead of immigrant Catholic religious fear, this successor political movement’s fear was based on race. When the Democratic Party voted to include a civil-rights plank in its 1948 Presidential election platform, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond formed the States' Rights Democratic Party (“Dixiecrats”) and won the 1948 Presidential electoral votes of the states of South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama.
Twenty years later George Wallace formed the American Independent Party to take advantage of American’s racial fears by using the same theme of ‘states rights’ when he ran for President in 1968. Wallace broadened his appeal to American racial fears by winning 13.5% of the vote and the electoral votes of Arkansas and the four states won by Thurmond in 1948.
Another forty years has passed since George Wallace made his appeal to America’s racial fears by using states rights as a politically correct disguise for it. While most Tea Partiers will adamantly deny they are racially biased, their anti-Obama and anti-immigrant rhetoric harkens back to the anti-federal populism and politics of fear used by the aforementioned political movements. I will discuss my remaining Tea Party concerns in my next column.

Spending the 4th of July with Tea Party Members

The Bigger Picture
Published on August 1st 2010 in Metro Éireann By Charles Laffiteau
Having spent the 4th of July Independence Day weekend back in the states taking the political pulse of my fellow Americans, in today’s column I want to begin discussing my views about the American Tea Party movement. Some of you have no doubt heard about the Tea Party given the American news media’s fascination with this phenomenon, but for those of you who haven’t, I think it’s important to understand both what the Tea Party is and what it is not.
I refer to the Tea Party as a movement because it is not an organized political party in the sense that the Republican, Democratic, Libertarian and Green Parties are. The American Tea Party does not appear next to political candidates’ names on any local, state or federal election ballots, nor does it have any means of ‘officially’ endorsing political candidates. The Tea Party also does not have a concrete platform of political ideas, offices or paid staff, nor does it exist as a political organization or entity that can be regulated by state and federal election commissions. In other words, the American Tea Party actually does not exist in any sort of tangible sense.
So if the Tea Party doesn’t actually exist, how is it that in a recent Gallup poll three out of ten Americans described themselves as Tea Party supporters? The answer is that the American Tea Party is essentially a figment of these Americans’ imagination. The American Tea Party is really a state of mind more than it is a political movement, because political movements have a concrete set of objectives and a plan for how to achieve them via the ballot box.
Real political movements also have a set of ideas about government policies that they believe their political leaders will implement if they are successful in getting their candidates elected to political office. For example they might want to replace the current graduated income tax scheme with a flat tax on income or a national sales tax. Or they might want to implement a carbon tax in order to spur the development of alternative energy or reduce their dependence on imported oil and natural gas. In other words they have ideas about how to fix our problems.
By contrast the American Tea Party movement has no real plan for governing or addressing America’s problems. What the supporters of the Tea Party movement have instead is an abiding faith in America’s founding fathers, men who have also been dead for more than 200 years. Their devotion to these men borders on religious and in many ways their rallies and demonstrations remind me of the traveling religious revivals that are part of my southern US heritage. They regard themselves as ‘true’ American patriots and many of them attend Tea Party demonstrations dressed like Benjamin Franklin or George Washington, swathed in American flags or are dressed in Revolutionary War costumes and carrying musket rifles.
But contrary to the ‘Tea Partiers’ belief that our nation’s founding fathers represent the last word in wise and statesmanlike political governance, I and most political historians believe that the founding fathers did not see themselves in this light. I believe they wanted and expected future generations of the American people to go much further than they did and use the wisdom gained through our own governance experiences to continue to modify our political governance structures in order to cope with changes in American society and the rest of the world.
I attended a Tea Party rally in order to find out what kind of solutions the ‘Tea Partiers’ were proposing and or what ideas they had for addressing America’s problems. What I heard from them instead was deep seated frustration with our nation’s government and anger towards virtually every institution of government. For instance, Tea Party supporters are not only against America’s progressive income tax system, but they are also against virtually all other forms of taxation as well. But when I asked them how they would propose that governments pay for things like building and maintaining roads and schools, they didn’t seem to have any answers.
They described President Obama’s health care reforms as “government tyranny” or ‘socialism’ and said that the federal government needed to stay out of the heath care business. But when I noted that many of them were receiving government funded health care through Medicare, their response was to complain that the federal government was taking over everything and we needed to have less government. In other words, they still had no answers.
Another favourite complaint of the ‘Tea Partiers’ is the huge budget deficits the federal government is currently running up. When I noted that the biggest contributor to the federal budget deficit was Social Security and Medicare entitlement spending, most of them either disputed this fact or claimed that we could balance the budget by cutting all sorts of other unnecessary federal programs. But when I then mentioned the possibility of cutting Medicare or Social Security benefits as part of a larger scheme to rein in the federal deficit, their reaction was one of vehement opposition.
Regardless, even though they don’t appear to have any real ideas about how to address America’s problems, the ‘Tea Partiers’ are still much more engaged in this year’s mid-term elections than my other friends and acquaintances be they Republicans, Democrats or Independents. So I left the Tea Party rally with a deep sense of unease as regards what the future holds for our nation’s ability to deal with many of its problems. My concern is that this Tea Party segment of American voters, who have no real ideas or solutions to offer will nonetheless have a major influence on the outcomes of several crucial federal elections. However, the Tea Partiers distrust of government institutions and an oft times unwarranted self confidence are characteristics typical of many other Americans. So I will discuss the dangerous assumptions embodied by these two classic American psychological traits in more detail next week.

Volcano Ash Cloud Claims General McChrystal as its First Victim

The Bigger Picture
Published on July 15th 2010 in Metro Éireann By Charles Laffiteau
Today I’m going to discuss President Obama’s recent decision to relieve his top military commander, General Stanley McChrystal, of his command. But before I place the McChrystal story in its proper context, it is incumbent on me that I first pay tribute to a highly respected Washington DC journalist, Helen Thomas, who also just lost her job.
Over the last month I have written a series of columns which were sharply critical of the current Israeli government’s policies towards Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and in particular, Gaza. As a Hearst News Service columnist, Helen Thomas was also a well known critic of Israeli policies such as the Jewish settlements in the occupied West bank, which she likened to Israeli “colonies.” And as an American of Lebanese descent she also criticized America’s normally slavish and unquestioned support for a Jewish state “that oppresses a helpless people with its military power and daily humiliation.”
But Helen Thomas was best known to me, and most other Americans, as the most senior member of the White House press corps who always occupied the center seat on the front row of the White House Press Briefing-Conference Room. She was also usually the first member of the press corps to be called upon to ask a question by each of the 10 US Presidents she covered whenever they held a nationally televised press conference.
Helen Thomas was also a pioneer for women journalists everywhere when she was first assigned to cover President John F. Kennedy. Prior to Helen’s first White House assignment women journalists had previously only been used to cover the President’s wife and the fashions she wore or her activities as First Lady. In other words, pure fluff!
However, despite her long and respected career as a White House political correspondent, Helen Thomas ultimately fell victim to the same ‘gotcha’ journalism that has caused problems for many celebrities and politicians in recent years. In an unguarded moment, Helen let fly with a caustic comment about Israel, which put her in the middle of a cause célèbre after the video of her comments was posted on the web hours later. So instead of covering a White House story, Helen Thomas found out that she was the story.
Fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, thanks to the brave new world of web based publishing, public figures in America and many other nations around world no longer have the luxury of unguarded moments when they can feel free to express their true feelings or personal opinions. Although Helen Thomas never actually thought of herself as a public figure or as a celebrity, she found out the hard way that you can’t appear on national television asking the US President questions without becoming one.
Helen Thomas had always been a tough and relentless questioner of both Democratic and Republican Presidents throughout her storied sixty year career at the heart of the American political scene. That’s right. I said sixty years. And therein lies the rub for me as regards her losing her job. She is almost ninety years old for Pete’s sake.
Granted, in expressing her own personal frustration with Israeli policies towards the Palestinian people, her choice of words was definitely inappropriate. Still I have to ask why can’t we just acknowledge that Helen Thomas simply had a “senior moment” and then move on? I mean haven’t we all said something out of anger or frustration at some time in our lives that we later regretted or wish we hadn’t? I know I have.
This leads me to the second subject of this week’s column; General Stanly McChrystal’s departure as America’s top military commander in Iraq and Afghanistan. By now many of you, as well as most Americans, are already aware that President Obama was forced to relieve General McChrystal of his military command following the publication of disparaging remarks made by McChrystal and his staff about other members of the Obama administration, including Vice President Joe Biden.
In at least one sense, General McChrystal is also probably the highest level victim to date of the Icelandic volcano ash cloud that halted European air travel back in April. I can understand why you might find this statement hard to believe, so I ask you to delay making any judgments about it until after I have placed the McChrystal story in what I believe is a more proper perspective.
Like Helen Thomas, McChrystal was forced to resign from his job because of the manner in which he expressed his frustration, although in this case it was with the actions of other members of the Obama administration. But the withering comments published in Rolling Stone magazine, which were attributed to General McChrystal and his staff, were also not made during the course of a traditional interview between a journalist and the person they are profiling or writing an article about. As such, at least some members of McChrystal’s staff have complained that they though their remarks were “off the record’, which is a fairly common journalistic practice when sensitive issues are being discussed.
But experienced politicians and government officials who frequently talk with journalists and other members of the press also know that they must preface comments they don’t want publicly attributed to them with the words “This is off the record”. Because General McChrystal and his hand picked staff don’t fit the profile of government officials who frequently commiserate with members of the press, I am therefore inclined to believe that they didn’t realize the stuff they were saying would ever be published.
In fact the Rolling Stone article was actually based on a series of drunken interviews conducted primarily in a Parisian Irish Pub called Kitty O’Shea’s. So why were they in Paris for two weeks? McChrystal had gone to Paris to deliver a NATO speech and meet his wife on their 33rd anniversary. Then he and his staff had to remain there when the volcano ash grounded all flights in Europe.

Blockades Rarely If Ever Succeed

The Bigger Picture
Published on July 1st 2010 in Metro Éireann By Charles Laffiteau
Last week I closed my column by noting the inanity of attempting to censor information that some people consider religiously offensive. By cutting off access to facebook for the two and a half million Pakistani facebook users because of a religiously offensive caricature page, the Pakistan government and its citizens also missed seeing that a facebook page called “Against Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” had drawn 106,300 fans versus only 105,000 for the caricature page.
But the governments of Muslim nations have by no means cornered the market when it comes to idiotic actions made in the name of ‘defending’ their citizens against supposedly ‘hostile’ actions by non-governmental groups. A case in point is the Israeli government’s decision to intercept and board the six naval vessels that were a part of a multi-national aid flotilla bound for the Gaza Strip. Whether the pro-Palestinian activists and or the Israeli commandos were responsible for the subsequent violence on the Turkish pleasure ship Mavi Marmara, which left nine activists dead and many other Israeli commandos and Palestinian activists wounded, is beside the point. The Israelis never should have stopped the aid flotilla.
In fact, the Israeli policy of blockading Gaza has been an abject failure because it has only served to entrench Hamas as the governing authority in Gaza rather than undermine popular support for Hamas. When Israel first undertook this blockade of Gaza, it did so in an internationally supported attempt to weaken the democratically elected Hamas regime by isolating Gaza and its Palestinian residents from the rest of the world. As such, Israel was not alone in its belief that such sanctions would work because the United States and many European countries also provided tacit government support for Israel’s blockade.
But while the Israeli’s and their western allies have been wrong about the effect the blockade would have on Hamas, the Israelis were right regarding their fears about Hamas in Gaza. Prior to the 2005 Palestinian elections in Gaza, the Israelis had been justifiably concerned that democratic elections would benefit Hamas rather than the more moderate Palestinian Fatah organization. But the neo-conservatives President Bush had put in charge of his administration’s foreign policy strategies following the 9/11 al Qaeda attacks on New York City and Washington DC were staunch proponents of democratic elections in Gaza.
President Bush’s foreign policy mavens dismissed Israel’s objections because they believed that democracy was the answer to America and the western world’s problems with Islamic countries. These international relations neophytes foolishly thought they could use democratic elections to remake first Iraq and then Gaza into American versions of democratic Muslim states whose citizens would then naturally eschew Islamic extremism in favor of the benefits of American led pro-western economic development. When the subsequent 2005 democratic elections were won by Hamas thus proving the neo-conservatives wrong, their response was to punish them and force the citizens of Gaza to see the error of their ways by withholding the American economic development aid the citizens of Gaza so badly needed.
But instead of undermining popular support for Hamas, the blockade has only served to harm the Palestinian residents of Gaza, many of whom were once supporters of Hamas’ Palestinian opponent, Fatah. The economic deprivation, which was initially felt by virtually all Gaza residents in the initial years of the Israeli blockade, has now largely disappeared thanks to the myriad webs of tunnels dug by Hamas’ engineers under Gaza’s border with Egypt. The larger harm for Gaza residents has been the relentless subornation of political debates and the systematic annihilation of any political dissent aimed at the Hamas regime.
The Israeli blockade has instead actually proven to be quite a fortuitous boon for the Hamas militants and I believe it is the main reason why Hamas has been able to tighten its grip on society throughout Gaza. Hamas made a number of mistakes after they took control of Gaza following the 2005 elections and a subsequent bloody civil war with the Palestinian Fatah organization, which lost its mandate to govern Gaza in the 2005 elections.
The Hamas militants initially responded to the western backed Israeli blockade by ratcheting up its cross border missile attacks on innocent Israeli citizens culminating in a devastating Israeli war of reprisal in 2009. But the destruction wrought by this ruinous 2009 conflict led to a change in strategy by Hamas. Hamas had fired almost 1800 rockets at Israel in 2008 but following the January 2009 war with Israel Hamas not only stopped hurling projectiles at Israel, it also forced other Palestinian militants to do likewise. So far in 2010 only 34 rockets have been fired at Israel and none of them were from Hamas militants.
Hamas has in effect become a defender of Israel and has instead turned its focus on consolidating its hold on Gaza society. The Israeli blockade has shielded Hamas from outside scrutiny and given its internal security forces free rein to bend dissident Palestinians to its will. Hamas has reinstituted the death penalty and has also bulldozed the homes of Gaza residents who built homes on land that had once been Jewish settlements. When leftist Palestinians protested that the taxes imposed by Hamas were adding to the burden of citizens most affected by the blockade they were rounded up and hauled off to jail.
By keeping its borders with Gaza closed, Israel doesn’t permit people in Gaza to travel to other countries and bring back ideas that would serve as a counterweight to Hamas’ absolutist political control. Nor is the blockade working to prevent economic development. Hamas is using its network of tunnels to create an economy it then takes a big share of the profits from in order to finance its regime. So the economic blockade doesn’t undermine Hamas but instead reinforces Hamas’s control over Gaza and the Palestinians who are unfortunate enough to be trapped there.
Ending the Gaza blockade won’t force Hamas from power, but it just might prevent Hamas from transforming Gaza into another authoritarian state.

The Roots of Religious Intolerance

The Bigger Picture
Published on June 17th 2010 in Metro Éireann By Charles Laffiteau
Last week I noted that I was dismayed by the fact that many mainstream religious leaders within the Abrahamic faiths are also noticeably reticent about emphasizing these religions’ many similarities. So today I want to discuss why these religious leaders don’t emphasize these similarities and the role I think this plays in recent controversies about women wearing burqas and Muslim anger over a draw Mohammed day posting on facebook.
As regards the reason why I believe most mainstream Christian priests or ministers, Jewish rabbis and Muslim mullahs don’t emphasize the many similarities between the Abrahamic faiths, I think the answer is fear. They are all afraid that if they did so, the reason for their existence as leaders of the numerous separate religious institutions that comprise the Abrahamic faiths will slowly fade away.
All religious faiths are essentially man made institutions and systems of spiritual beliefs that were designed by humans to provide spiritual guidance and places of worship for other humans. They are all inspired by different human interpretations of what God wants or expects from humanity, but in and of themselves they are not heavenly creations.
So despite what the human founders and current human leaders of the worlds various different religions might wish us and their devoted followers to believe, I don’t think the few differences that distinguish our different religious faiths really matters that much in the grand scheme of things. In fact the reason why I do believe most religions probably are divinely inspired is based on my sense that they all share a common set of moral values and beliefs.
In other words it is the diversity in religious customs, traditions and specific aspects of different religious beliefs that lead me to conclude that they are merely a reflection of their human origins and the differences that have always existed in human interpretations of causes and effects in the world around them. But the fact that the core beliefs are virtually identical among these different religions is what leads me to believe that this aspect of all the worlds’ major religions probably was inspired by God.
So what do I mean by divinely inspired core religious beliefs as opposed to religious beliefs that are simply reflections of human interpretations of what God wants or expects us to do? Well I believe that I can sum up the divinely inspired religious beliefs in a single sentence. In your words, and even more importantly through your actions, show other human beings the same love, tolerance, patience and kindness you would wish them to show you.
Allow me to be more specific about what exactly this means. Since I don’t like it when others judge or condemn me for my actions or behaviour, even when I know these are not appropriate, doesn’t it stand to reason that I should also avoid doing this to others? Since I am desirous of love and affection from others without expectations that I must do something for them to get this, shouldn’t I also be willing to offer mine to them with no strings attached? If I wish someone would be kind to me or patient with me when I am struggling to deal with or learn something shouldn’t I try to treat others I see in the same circumstances likewise?
As for a few examples of what I mean by different human interpretations of what God expects from us, consider these. Is the Catholic Church’s prohibition on married priests a human religious interpretation or divinely inspired? Is the Christian belief that only those who are baptized will be able to go to heaven a human religious interpretation? Are the Jewish and Muslim dietary proscriptions against eating pork divinely inspired, or are they simply human religious interpretations of what God desires that date to the time of Abraham?
By now I’m sure you have probably guessed how I would respond to these questions so I will now attempt to discuss the role that these differences in religious beliefs based on human interpretations have played and will continue to play in recent controversies about wearing burqas in public and posting drawings of Mohammed on facebook.
While I am sympathetic to the reasons why the French government, as well as other European governments, are seeking to ban Muslim women from wearing burqas in public, they are wrong to propose doing so. Granted, despite what some extremist mullahs would have Muslims believe, there is no suggestion that Muslim women should be required to wear burqas anywhere in the Qur’an, and yes some women are forced to do so by their rigid and overbearing husbands. But there are also Christian religious sects that believe women should never cut their hair or wear pants so what should we do about them? Force them to go to the beauty salon at least once a year? As for women who are married to abusive husbands, the Muslim faith probably has the same proportion of these that every other religious faith has.
I believe these European proposals to ban the wearing of burqas are just as wrong as the Taliban regime’s insistence that women must do so. Both of these mandates are based on anachronistic beliefs that don’t relieve the tensions over differences in religious beliefs based on human interpretations that exist in different cultures, but rather serve to exacerbate them.
I am likewise sympathetic to the anger Muslims feel when unthinking members of non-Muslim societies promote things like offensive drawings of the prophet Mohammed. The guy who created this facebook page claimed he was standing up for the right to freedom of expression. By insulting Muslims who had never done anything to endanger it? I don’t buy his justification, but I also think the Pakistani government and many Muslims overreacted by cutting off access to facebook. As a result, they missed seeing that a facebook page called “Against Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” had 106,300 fans versus only 105,000 for the caricature page. Indeed, censorship cuts both ways.

Religious Intolerance

The Bigger Picture
Published on June 10th 2010 in Metro Éireann By Charles Laffiteau
I closed last week’s column by asking a question. How can we expect others that are intolerant of the actions or views of those they disagree with, to somehow become less so if we react in an angry or intolerant manner towards them?
In my opinion such behaviour only results in reinforcing their misguided beliefs that they are right and or that their views are morally superior to my own. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but it has been my experience that the only effective response to intolerance is to act in a more tolerant manner towards those who are condemning your own views. Instead of answering their attacks with your own criticism, I think a much better approach is to ask them to please help you understand why they feel this way by explaining their reasoning. Mind you, using this type of response is not an admission that they are right or that we are wrong. It merely provides an opening for those critical of us to explain their reasons why.
I’m not suggesting that we should always do this, because in some instances we are dealing with people who either don’t want to discuss their reasons, or who have adopted positions that are so radically different there isn’t really any point in discussing them. When I am confronted with these kinds of circumstances, I simply say that I don’t agree and then I either try to change the subject or just walk away.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that within every organized religion, as well as all in most other areas of the wider society we live in, there is a minority of people who find it impossible to reconcile their own beliefs with those of others that are different than their own. Getting angry or arguing with them is a useless exercise that only serves to reinforce their twisted and narrow minded ideas about right and wrong. Such people deserve our pity rather than our scorn because in many instances, they are not wholly to blame for thinking this way.
For reasons that the majority of us find difficult to understand, some individuals, regardless of their socio-economic backgrounds or family upbringing, are simply unable to process and sort through the complexities of all the different opinions and information life exposes us to. This makes them pre-disposed to adopt rigid ideas of right and wrong, which are easier for them to understand as well as to equate with the concepts of good and evil.
Many religious extremists have also been brainwashed or otherwise indoctrinated with these rigid and simplistic beliefs by other members of their respective communities who they have come to trust and rely on for spiritual guidance. As a consequence, other people, who may have slightly different religious beliefs, are viewed by their fragile psyches as an evil threat to their physical existence as well as their hopes for eventual spiritual redemption. It is therefore impossible for them to acknowledge that such abnormal religious beliefs might actually be acceptable in the eyes of the God they believe in. In turn, because of the imminent threat such deviant and evil ideas pose to their very existence, this serves as their justification for anti-social behaviour such as indiscriminate murders of those who don’t share their beliefs.
Every religious faith has its share of radical religious leaders and their minions who are slavishly devoted to their twisted spiritual views. Within the world’s largest religious persuasion, the Abrahamic faiths that I am most familiar with of Christianity, Judaism and Islam all have their own unique but equally extreme religious factions. But there are also many similarities and very few differences in what the so-called spiritual leaders of these hard-line religious factions preach to their followers.
These quasi-spiritual religious guides pluck isolated passages from the Christian Bible (i.e. ‘an eye for an eye’), the Jewish Torah (i.e. God hates those who hate the people of Israel) and the Islamic Qur’an (i.e. ‘Strike terror into God's enemies, and your enemies’) to justify violence towards other people whom they say are sinners, enemies or perpetrators of evil.
They promulgate a message of hate because their objective isn’t a spiritual one, but rather their own unholy desire for power over the thinking and actions of their fellow human beings. But in order to acquire this power, these religious hate mongers must first subvert the overall message that runs through all of these religious texts, one that extols the virtues of kindness, love, patience and tolerance towards others; be they believers or non-believers.
But the Abrahamic faiths also share many other religious views such as their belief in a single God and the fact that all three religions trace their religious beliefs to God’s prophet, Abraham. Furthermore, all three faiths consider Jerusalem to be one of God’s holy cities and share religious customs such as fasting, the necessity for rituals of penance for one’s sins, prayers as well as worship on a holy day of the week, (Sunday, Saturday or Friday) and at certain times of the year (Christmas, Passover and Ramadan).
However, discussion of the numerous similarities between the Abrahamic religions is avoided by religious extremists because doing so would make it either difficult or impossible to arouse the passions of hatred extremist pseudo-religious leaders need and use to control and direct their followers. By instead focusing on the relatively few differences that actually do exist between these religions, these power hungry religious leaders are thus able to prey on the human desire to feel superior to others who are different from them.
But what dismays me even more is the fact that other religious leaders within the Abrahamic faiths who do not share such blood thirsty desires for power over their flocks, are also noticeably reticent about emphasizing these religious similarities. So next week I will discuss why they don’t as well as the role different religious beliefs based on human interpretations have played in recent burqa and facebook controversies.

Intolerant Behavior

The Bigger Picture
Published on June 3rd 2010 in Metro Éireann By Charles Laffiteau
I ended last week’s column by saying that the essential truth about why many native citizens blame immigrants for their economic troubles, is because they don’t want to face the truth about their own failure to upgrade their skills in order to remain employable. But there is another equally troubling reason why native citizens seek to blame immigrants for their country’s economic or social ills that I want discuss today. It is their lack of tolerance for others who don’t dress, speak or think like they do.
Unfortunately for our respective national and global societies, the issue of intolerance of others who don’t act, look or worship the same way we do, isn’t confined to native citizens’ who are critical of immigrants from other countries; it applies to all of us! Granted, some of us are much more tolerant than others, but the bottom line is; all of have been intolerant of others at some point in our lives; it is part of the human condition.
Be honest now. Who among us doesn’t like to feel at least a little bit superior to someone else from time to time? I’ll admit that I do. Mind you, I’m not exactly proud to admit it. But if I’m going to be honest, at least with myself, then I have to acknowledge I’m guilty of this from time to time. But because I have admitted that I like feeling this way, and also know this is a character failing, not an attribute, I use my awareness of this flaw to try and make sure that at least my behaviour towards others doesn’t betray such attitudes.
In other words, it is one thing to feel you are smarter or better looking than someone else, but quite another to actually act as if you are. Tolerance and intolerance are models of your behaviour towards others rather than your actual feelings about them. For example, even though I have very strong feelings that I am right about issues like the death penalty, which I strongly oppose, I refuse to morally condemn those who argue in favour of it.
Instead of arguing with them and pointing out why I believe this is an ‘immoral’ type of retribution, I seek to understand why they support the use of this form of punishment by engaging them in a conversation about the reasons why they favour its use. Then, during the course of listening to the reasons why they favour death sentences, I try to focus our conversation on the similarities in our concerns about crime and how to deter it, rather than our differences over what constitutes more or less ‘moral’ forms of punishment for it.
Through this process of constructive engagement, we inevitably discover that we share many more similarities in our concerns about crimes like murder and the need for society to punish and deter it, than our differences over punishing such offenses. By refusing to debate the moral superiority of my position, our discussion about the death penalty can then be focused on evidence about capital punishment’s effectiveness and the fact that innocent people are sometimes convicted of crimes that someone else committed. It has been my experience that this is the only means by which someone might then change their mind or at least acknowledge that maybe my reasons for opposing the death penalty are valid.
Gossip is another example of what I mean when I say all of us are guilty of intolerant behaviour on occasion. Who among us can say we have not engaged in gossip about other people from time to time? When we discuss someone else during our conversations with friends and work colleagues, and say things about them that we wouldn’t say if they were present, we are gossiping. Nor does it matter whether we are actively agreeing with what is being said or merely listening to it; we are still engaging in gossip because by listening and not defending the person being discussed, we are acknowledging the truth about what is said.
Gossiping is our human way of acting out our feelings that we are somehow superior to others in terms of how we would and would not behave or act in certain situations. It is a model of intolerant behaviour that we use to criticize the actions or behaviour of others and is in effect; a polite form of murder through the use of character assassination. I’m not proud of it, but I can admit that I have been guilty of such intolerant behaviour at times. Can you?
By being honest with myself about the fact that I like engaging in gossip, even though I know this isn’t a demonstration of tolerant behaviour, I have been able to use this awareness in a conscious attempt to correct my use of this intolerant behaviour. While I have not always succeeded, more often than not I have been able to do so by either pointing out more positive qualities of the person being discussed, or by changing the topic of the conversation. But when this doesn’t work, I usually excuse myself and walk away from the conversation.
Does this mean I’m now morally superior or somehow better than those who continue to engage in this more polite form of murder? No! It simply means that I am working to become the kind of person I wish to be, by trying not to engage in displays of intolerant behaviour as frequently as I know I have in the past. I’m not morally superior nor will I ever be morally perfect. But that doesn’t prevent me from improving my tolerance of the behaviours or feelings of moral superiority held by those who I disagree with.
How can we expect others that are intolerant of the actions or views of those they disagree with, to somehow become less so if we react in an angry or intolerant manner towards them? I will discuss this in the context of religious intolerance next week.

Myths About Illegal Immigrants

The Bigger Picture
Published on May 27th 2010 in Metro Éireann By Charles Laffiteau
To conclude my discussion about why citizens in America and other countries need more legal or even illegal immigrants, I will discuss the four most common American myths about immigration and to what extent these myths also apply to other developed countries.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word “myth” in several different contexts, so the definition of within the context of this discussion is “Common American popular beliefs or stories about ‘immigrants’ that are either half truths or fictions.” The dictionary’s reference to ‘half truths’ is appropriate because some myths are not ‘fictions.’ There is actually an element of truth in them.
The most common myth about immigration in America and Europe is that immigrants take jobs away from American and other countries’ native citizens. This would be a half ‘truth’ because while there is an element of truth to it, the actual numbers of jobs that immigrants take that could be filled by American citizens or native citizens in other developed countries is quite small. Furthermore, virtually all economists also estimate that for every job an immigrant takes, a new one is created.
This is because immigrants generally take either highly skilled jobs like computer engineering or medical staff where there is a shortage of native workers, or very low skill jobs such as cleaning staff which native workers refuse to apply for. So for the most part, immigrants take jobs that complement rather than compete with the types of jobs held by native workers. In this way, immigrants add to the number of workers paying taxes that in turn fund the pension payments to native pensioners.
Furthermore, immigrants who have either highly skilled jobs or low pay, low skill jobs are usually the last to be hired and the first workers to be fired when business turns bad like it did in the Great Recession of 2009. This allows business owners to more easily expand and contract their business based on the health of the economy thus protecting the jobs of more senior native citizen workers. Unemployment statistics show that immigrants suffer much higher rates of unemployment during economic downturns than native workers experience.
The second most common myth is that immigrant workers push down the wages paid by employers to native citizen workers. This is another half truth that ignores the overall positive impact of immigrants on native citizen wages. While it is true that American citizens who only have a second level education have experienced a decline in pay for the low skills jobs they are qualified for due to competition from immigrant workers, the actual decline is only between 1 and 2%.
Furthermore this decline really only applies to wages paid for hard, back breaking work, like jobs in meat packing plants, collecting garbage or replacing roofs under a hot sun, that most native citizens decline to do. Native citizens who only have a second level diploma, but are employed in trades requiring more skills and training, such as plumbers, electricians or mechanics, have seen no effect on their incomes from immigrant competition. Third level university graduates have also seen no reduction in wages due to immigrant competition for more highly skilled jobs.
But looking at the bigger picture, economists’ estimate that for each job an immigrant takes, at least one additional job is created. This is due to the fact that immigrants stimulate overall economic growth because not only do they buy more products as consumers, but also because many of them create new jobs acting either as investors in native citizen businesses or as entrepreneurs creating new businesses and jobs. This is why economists claim that for the majority of American workers, their current pay is actually slightly higher than it would be without immigration.
The third myth isn’t just a half truth however; it is a total fiction. This myth claims that immigrants, particularly illegal immigrants, take advantage of America and other developed nations’ social welfare systems that are meant to provide child support, food, health care and education for native citizens. In the case of illegal immigrants the myth is they don’t pay taxes, so native citizens are footing the costs of providing these services to illegal immigrants and their families.
While less than 5% of illegal immigrants in America do collect food stamp benefits to feed their families and educate their children in America’s public schools, they also pay the same taxes that native citizens pay to support these services. They pay sales taxes (or VAT) on the goods or services they purchase and they pay rent, which landlords in turn use to pay their own property taxes.
In the United States most illegal immigrants also have federal, state and local income taxes as well as Social Security and Medicare payments deducted from their wages with no hope of ever getting an income tax refund or claiming welfare benefits, because they have to provide fake social security numbers to their employers since they will not be hired without them. The US federal government alone collects over $10 billion a year in taxes it has no valid social security number to credit them to.
The fourth myth is also a fiction. It claims that America is over-run with illegal immigrants and because they don’t integrate with the broader population, they are responsible for increases in property and violent crimes.
However, in 1890 immigrants made up 15% of America’s population versus only 13% today. Furthermore, back then natives were also claiming that Irish and Italian immigrants did not integrate into society and were responsible for increases in crime, just as they claim Mexican immigrants are today.
The truth about these myths is that native citizens and politicians that pander to them use them to blame immigrants for their problems, instead of being honest about the real problem. The essential truth is these native citizens never took the time or made an effort to upgrade their skills in order to remain employable in a constantly changing and more technologically advanced world.

The Truth About Illegal Immigrants

The Bigger Picture
Published on May 20th 2010 in Metro Éireann By Charles Laffiteau
Last week in my discussion about why the developed countries of the world actually need more immigrants, even if our current levels of unemployment are uncomfortably high, I mentioned that one reason was because all of these nation’s pension systems were designed based on the assumption that their working age populations would increase at the same rate as their retiree population.
But there are some other assumptions that are also built into the design of those pension systems that are going to have to be dealt with sooner rather than later.
When the American and European pension systems were originally set up more than sixty years ago, the average life expectancy in the world’s developed countries was around 68 years of age. So deductions from worker’s wages to fund these pension schemes were based on the assumption that pension payments to workers would last for an average of 3 to 6 years if they retired between the ages of 62 and 65.
But as of 2010, advances in healthcare and medical treatments have now extended the average life expectancy in those same developed countries to an average age of 80. So that means the government funded pension schemes are now providing pension payments for an average of twelve more years than their pension schemes were designed to. Assuming a reduction in current and future pension payments is not an option, there are only three prudent courses of action under these circumstances:
1) A 250%-300% increase in deductions from every worker’s wages to fund an average of 12 additional years of pension payments.
2) Increase the retirement age for workers by the same number of years that their life expectancy has risen so they can’t retire until they are 74 to 77.
3) A combination of increased wage deductions and retirement ages.
But politicians in America and Europe are usually not too keen about telling their constituents “Oh, by the way, you’re going to have to work a few more years before you can retire and or we are going to have to double or triple the amount we take from your wages to fund your pension scheme.” So rather than tell voters the truth about their pension schemes, they look for a way to avoid dealing with the issue.
They can get away with putting off facing the problem and taking potentially risky political actions to fix it, so long as the working age population is increasing at a rate that is commensurate with the number of workers who are retiring, Of course this also means that when the day finally arrives when they have to make unpleasant adjustments like cutting benefits, raising wage deductions and retirement ages, these are much more painful and difficult for those constituents to accept. Think Greece!
The German political option means politicians have to be more honest with their constituents and start making smaller adjustments much earlier in the process. Nonetheless, the demographic pressures of a declining working age population and increasing numbers of pensioners will result in significant pension scheme changes. These include reducing future pension benefits by an average of 7-10% and increasing workers’ contributions by a similar amount as well as raising the retirement age to 67.
On the other hand, the American social security system has already increased workers’ contributions by 5% and begun to raise the retirement age to 67 (and will continue to gradually increase it to at least 70, 72 or maybe 75). But because America has a higher fertility rate, thanks to its legal and illegal immigrants, it doesn’t have to use reductions in current or future benefits to address its funding problem because its working age population continues to keep pace with increases in its retirement rolls.
Make no mistake, I am not suggesting that throwing open your doors to legal and illegal immigrants is the solution to the developed world’s underfunded pension schemes. The core of the problem, after all, is the combination of fewer native citizen workers paying taxes due to low fertility rates, and the fact that more pensioners are being paid more in benefits from those taxes because they are also living longer.
What I am suggesting is that if developed countries allow more immigration from less developed countries; they can avoid cutting benefits to future retirees and mitigate some of the pain associated with increasing workers’ contributions to their pension schemes, and reducing their take home pay in the process, as well as increases in the age when workers can retire with full benefits. Even though America has higher levels of both legal and illegal immigration than its European and Asian (Australia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore) counterparts, it has still not been able to avoid raising workers’ contributions as well as their future retirement age.
Nor is the issue of underfunded pension schemes exclusively the province of the world’s more developed countries. Why? Because we live in an increasingly interconnected globalized world where no country or region is immune to the problems experienced in other parts of the world. One of the lessons learned from the recent ‘Great Recession’ is that although it was caused by the financial excesses of the developed countries, developing countries like Brazil and China also suffered during the downturn because they rely on the developed world to buy most of their exports.
Granted, the emerging economies in the developing world did not suffer as deep or as long of a recession as America and Europe have, but they still need the developed countries as customers for much of their output. If the developed countries don’t fix their pension scheme problems soon, then the inevitable cuts in benefits to pensioners and higher taxes for workers will translate into less money for both groups of citizens to spend on consumer products imported from the developing world.
So if immigration helps America address its pension problems, why are some Americans so upset about illegal immigration? I will discuss the most common myths about immigration next week.
To keep the global economy on track, people in the United States and the rest of the developed world need to work longer before retiring, pay higher taxes and expect less from government. And the cheap imports lining the shelves of mega-chains such as Wal-Mart and Target? They need to be more expensive.

We Need Immigrants

The Bigger Picture
Published on May 13th 2010 in Metro Éireann By Charles Laffiteau
Today I want to discuss what is for many, a very emotional issue; Illegal Immigrants!
This is a matter that has been receiving a great deal of media attention in the states lately, due to a new law that was just passed in the great state of Arizona, but I also know it is a touchy subject for some people here in Ireland as well as much of western Europe. So although the facts and figures I will be using in this column are based on my own research of this topic in America, they are nonetheless applicable to legal immigrants as well as to other developed countries such as Ireland, where it is an equally emotional subject within certain segments of the general population.
America is a nation of immigrants. Virtually every single person you meet in the states is either an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants. In 2008, 1,046,539 of our legal immigrants became U.S. citizens, a record number. Out of a total 2010 population of approximately 310 million people, an estimated 40 million, about 13%, are either legal or illegal immigrants and of that total, an estimated 12 million are in America illegally, roughly 30%. So how does that affect legal US citizens?
Well for starters, even though legal and illegal immigrants make up 13% of our population, they account for almost 16% of our nation’s workforce. So given my country’s current 10% unemployment rate, it would seem one could easily argue that they are obviously taking jobs away from American citizens, right? Or if we could just rid ourselves of those 12 million illegal immigrants, we wouldn’t have an unemployment problem, right? Wrong!
They reason why immigrants are over-represented as a percentage of America’s workforce is because our population of native-born American citizens is aging! The truth is, legal and illegal immigrants, along with their children, are responsible for 58 percent of America’s population growth over the past 30 years.
Fertility and birth rates for the native citizen populations in America and all of the wealthier developed countries of the world have been declining for the past thirty years. In every country they are below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per couple and in many countries the population has already begun to fall as a result. Therefore, our low U.S. citizen fertility rates coupled with retiring baby boomers, means the only likely source of growth in America’s ‘prime age’ workforce of 25 to 55 year olds for the foreseeable future. Legal or illegal; we need them!
We need them primarily because we need working age immigrants to pay taxes to the government so it can pay for the Social Security benefits record numbers of retiring baby boomers will soon be drawing. If you are already retired you need them too because without their taxes, your benefits will be cut! If you are under the illusion that all of those deductions from your pay checks were being deposited in a government bank account that you will draw down after you retire, think again!
That money has already been used to pay benefits in return for a government bond, a glorified government IOU. Social welfare systems in the US and Europe were all designed this way. The money they take in each year is then paid out to current pensioners based on the assumption that as the population grows; the size of the tax paying workforce will grow too. This provides the government the additional money they will need to provide pensions for an increasing number of pensioners.
So what happens if the working age population doesn’t grow? Well regardless of whether it stays level or begins to decline, the government faces some hard choices! Assuming that cutting the amount it pays current and future pensioners is not an option, if the number of pensioners increases but the size of the workforce remains the same, or if the number of pensioners stays the same but the size of the working age population declines, then the government can no longer balance its books.
In this situation the government has only three choices. The first one I call Greece! The government borrows the money by selling bonds, which are just fancy government IOUs, with a promise to pay the money back later, but at a higher rate of interest because it has a poor record of balancing its books. The government assumes that it will be able to afford this costly option thanks to some future surplus of tax revenues. This surplus is generated by raising retirement ages to decrease the amount it pays out in benefits, increasing workforce taxes or some combination of the two.
The second choice I call Germany. The government also borrows the money by issuing bonds; with a promise to pay the money back later with less interest. The government assumes that it will be able to afford this less costly interest rate option because it has a good record of balancing its books and will also need a smaller future surplus of tax revenues to do so. The smaller surplus it needs is generated by raising the retirement age so that it can lower or keep the total number of pensioners the same and by maintaining or slightly increasing taxes.
The third choice I call America. Here the government also borrows the money by issuing bonds; with a promise to pay the money back later with less interest. The smaller surplus of tax revenues it needs to balance the books is generated by raising the retirement age so that it can slow down the increase in its number of pensioners, and by increasing the size of its tax paying workforce by adding more immigrants.
But all developed countries need more immigrants because there are other assumptions that the world’s pension systems are based on. When these assumptions are also off the mark, the problem of financing pensions doesn’t get better; it gets worse! I will discuss them in detail next week.