Do nothing Congress: let’s hope

 

While at the vet office this morning having our cat’s nails trimmed, l picked up the local paper and read the front page national news story:  “New report warns social security and Medicare could run out of money even earlier than feared.”  I’m of course, as you are, well aware of the media’s capacity for alarmist reporting.  Anyway, what a lousy way to start off a Saturday meant for more pleasant things like doing some gardening or watching the Red-Sox-Yankee volatile match-up. 

Still, this matter of our nation’s financial ills, how it all happened, and what we might do to preempt its becoming a contagion is serious business that we can’t simply ignore without putting ourselves at considerable risk for a precarious future of escalating expenses concurrent with diminishing income.  Today’s news story only underscores our economic cancer.  We may not be able to even sustain two enormously successful entitlement programs:  Social Security and Medicare, both of which are now projected to be depleted by 2036, or a year earlier than anticipated. 

As to Medicare, representative Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) has unleashed a storm of controversy, proposing to slash 5.8 trillion in federal spending over the next decade.  Presently, and this is real sticker shock, our federal deficit is 14.3 trillion!  Ryan’s linchpins focus on revamping Medicare and Social Security.  Medicare recipients would receive vouchers to help pay their medical costs.  It’s conceivable that Medicare patients might ultimately fork-out 68% of their costs, versus 25% at present.

Right now, cutting back on entitlements is a brave thing to do, fraught with controversy, and perhaps so frightening to public constituencies that Republicans may have assured Obama’s second term in a landslide.  Almost by way of hypocrisy,  even the Tea Party, whose focus is reducing government taxes through reduced spending, bristles at the idea of cutting back on Medicare and Social Security, a recent poll indicating that 70% of them are opposed to such measures.

As it stands right now, we have several unpleasant options:

  Increase payroll taxes for both programs and remove the current salary cap for Social Security, presently set at $106,900.  Republicans are adamantly opposed.  Democrats also are reluctant, except for the President’s proposal to levy a 2% increase on incomes above $250,000.  One problem here:  in running for his first term, Obama pledged he wouldn’t raise taxes on those making less than $250,000.

 Cut benefits.  In order to keep these programs solvent, some have said that cutbacks in Social Security, for example, need to be made in the 15% range.  This is doubtless DOA.

Ironically, the Republicans (and I write as an Independent) are responsible for a good deal of the budget debacle.  House Speaker John Boehner has recently said that “if the President begins the discussion by saying we must increase taxes on the American people–as his budget does–my response will be clear:  tax increases are unacceptable and are a nonstarter.”  (The President is actually proposing an increase on just 2% of wage earners.)

Laurence Mitchell of the Economic Policy Institute, hits the nail on the head, commenting that “In a way, all of this debate, all of this bravery is largely about paying for the Bush tax cuts.”  The facts are that keeping the George W. Bush cuts through 2018 will cost 4.4 trillion in revenue with its reduction of the top marginal rate from 39.6 to 35%. 

Of course if the Congress does nothing about revenue, the Bush cuts will expire at the end of 2012, resulting in 75% of the deficit problem being erased over the next five years, according to David Leonard (“Do-Nothing Congress as a Cure.”  New York Times, Apr. 13, 2011).  Hey, that’s not a bad thing!

I personally think we should all–not just the wealthy–pay a fair share in taxes, and I don’t like the Obama political game of playing one economic class against another.  As I pointed out in an earlier entry (April 18), 40% of Americans pay no federal tax at all, apart from  payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare.

There’s no free lunch!  We all pay our share or we all sink together.

On the dilemmas of being a woman

 
You may have seen the recent news out of Bangladesh of the death of a 14-year old girl as a consequence of a public lashing meted out by community leaders applying Shakira law.  Hena Begum had complained she had been raped by her 40-year old married cousin, who later fled. Collapsing at the 70th lash of  the 120 designated. she died a short time later. 
 
The UN Population Fund suggests that up to 5000 women are victims of honor killings annually, but doesn’t specify Muslim perpetrators.  This is important because the truth is that violence against women transcends all ethnicities and economic denominators.  In our own country, the FBI’s Expanded Homicide Data of 2008 records 14,180 murders in the U. S., of which 930 were women and girls murdered by a family member.
 
But let’s also talk about rape.  Nearly 18 percent of American women have been raped or been victims of  a rape attempt, 22 %  of them under the age of 12 (Violence Against Women Survey, 2000).  The numbers are actually much higher.  Only 37 percent of victims report their rape to local police, according to the FBI.  Shockingly, only 1 of 20 rapists serves even a day in jail (Victimization Survey, 2005). 
 
Upwards of 50,000 women and children are trafficked into the U. S. annually for  sexual exploitation or forced labor (CIA, 2000).  Alas, slavery didn’t cease with the end of the Civil War, not for women at least.  Worldwide, 1 million children , mostly girls, enter into the sex trade annually (UNICEF).
 
Internationally, there exist selective abortion, infanticide, and neglect, mostly in Asian nations, resulting in some 60 million females having been denied life (UN Study on the Status of Women, 2000).
Genital mutilation is common in Africa and there women suffer a much higher rated of HIV incidence than males (UNICEF and UNAIDS, 2007).
 
In the undeveloped nations, many women are  denied access to education and its corollaries:  economic independence and smaller families.  In Afghanistan, the Taliban have aggressively destroyed schools set up to provide education access to girls.
 
Economic discrimination against women, both in the U. S. and abroad, abounds.  You can almost bet on it that whenever women are the majority work-force in places such as schools, fast food restaurants, and block stores, it will result in low wages.  There are exceptions such as in nursing and auto plants, thanks to a critical shortage and/or strong unions. It’s going to be really interesting how the present Wal-Mart discrimination suit before the U. S. Supreme Court turns out.
 
I haven’t  talked about the marriage and relationship sectors, where often as not, the woman performs double duty in holding-down a full-time job, then returning home to resume care of the children, cooking, and other domestic needs.  I know too many men who see women as primarily bedmates, mommies, and cooks.  Men tend to put looks high on their priority scale for a partner; women, less so, preferring sensitivity and intelligence.  Is it any wonder?
 
Mistreating women has been an endemic feature of male cultural history, whether  religious, political, economic, or domestic..  Unfortunately, we live in a world where those perceived as weak are continuously exploited:  women, children and animals.  For those of us who care, our challenge is to empower “earth’s disinherited” through protest, legislation, education, and economic sanction.  The struggle isn’t easy and the road is long, but every journey begins with the first step.

 

Why I like Natalie Portman

 

I confess to being a fan of Natalie Portman, Academy Award winner for her performance in Black Swan. Let me count the reasons why:

She’s a very good actress:  At age 13, she starred in the French film, Leon.  In 1997,  she played Anne Frank in the Broadway rendition.  In 2005, she won a Golden Globe Award  and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in Closer. This present year has seen spectacular successes:  a Golden Globes Award, Screen Actors Guild Award, BAFTA Award, and Academy Award for her stellar role in Black Swan.

I admire her intelligence:  After all, we’re talking about a Harvard graduate in psychology.  I like how she put it in a New York Post interview:  “I’d rather be smart than a movie star.”  She been a guest lecturer at Columbia. A lover of languages, she’s fluent  in English, French and Hebrew and has also studied Arabic, Japanese and German.  She’s taken graduate courses at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  She’s also published professional articles in leading science journals.

I like her political beliefs:  She is a Democrat who campaigned for John Kerry in 2004, for Hillary Clinton in the New York primary, and Obama in 2008. 

I admire her social activism:  She’s devoted herself to helping eliminate poverty, traveling to Africa and Latin America to advocate micro-lending, a program to assist women in financing their own businesses.  She’s also spoken for this cause at several leading American universities.

I identify with her religious views:  In an interview with Rolling Stone (2006), She commented on whether there’s an afterlife, “I don’t believe in that. I believe this is it, and I believe it’s the best way to live.”  Although committed to her Jewish heritage (she’s a dual citizen of the U. S. and Israel), she thinks that good character and partnership are the primary staples in a love relationship.

I’m enthusiastic about her views on animals and vegetarianism:  Since childhood, she’s been committed to vegetarianism and became a vegan in 2009 after reading Safran Foer’s classic, Eating Animals.  She doesn’t wear furs, feathers or leather.  In 2007, she started her own  franchise for vegan footwear and in the same year participated in the filming of the documentary, Gorillas on the Brink in Rwanda.

She’s just plain nice to look at:  Need I say more?

A people set apart

“What doesn’t kill makes one stronger.”
–Japanese proverb
For two weeks now we’ve watched horrendous news footage on TV of  Japanese suffering following the 9.0 earthquake and its tsunami aftermath of 30 foot water swirling into Sendai streets, bursting over banks, uprooting houses from their foundations, turning ships upside down, drowning everything within its mindless path; even then, in Job-like fashion, venues of more calamity and angst with the loss of electrical power necessary to cooling the six reactors of the nearby Fukushima nuclear plant and daily heroic efforts to limit radiation fallout and, worse case scenario, prevent meltdown. 
But nightly we’ve also seen the Japanese people up close in their dignity and discipline.  While sorrow abounds and mounts—at present count, 6700 dead and thousands more missing, whole towns and villages swamped by the sea, their inhabitants presumably dead__there isn’t any panic or looting.  Soldiers are here to rescue, not impose order.  In personal interviews the tenor is the same:  a stoic acceptance of life’s engrained insecurity; the solace of being alive; the sense of dependency on each other.  I shudder to think what might be the situation in our own country were we to experience a calamity on the scale of what’s befallen the Japanese.
I’m not surprised by their equanimity, orderly and quiet resolve, absence of rancor at the failure of government to react quickly and sufficiently, and refusal to politicize calamity by pointing fingers.  (I think of our BP disaster in the Gulf last year, high in economic consequences, but low in fatalities.)
I first met the Japanese as a 17-year old serviceman enroute to Korea.  Dakota Air Base outside Tokyo was my initial touch-down.  Their cleanliness, kindness, and ubiquitous honesty lent a lasting impression.  Leave something behind in a restaurant or train station, rest assured, they’ll keep the item for you.  Theft, like most crime, is generally rare in Japan.  Travel books abound with the good news that Japan’s a place where you don’t have to look over your shoulder.  When I think of Japan, I associate several prominent characteristics unique to the country that help us see their present response in cultural perspective:
1. collective identity:  The Japanese value the group more than the individual. They think as one.   It’s not what’s in it for me, but how will it affect others—nation, family, friends.   Westerners sometimes disparage this, finding it regimentation or group sanctioned inhibition of self-identity.  But I think this a shallow view prejudiced by contrary cultural values.  We have personal freedom to do pretty much what we like in the West, but at what cost?  I lament our greatest loss and primary source of our national and personal fractiousness: the erosion of the communal ethic.  That ethic remains salient in Japanese culture, particularly with regard to the primacy of family.  Japanese find it difficult to fathom that parents might live 3,000 miles from their children or that children might seldom visit an aging parent.  The Japanese language itself reflects the culture’s guardianship of the interiority of the family and its special intimacy and potential solace in a wider, impersonal world pursuing material values. There are separate vocabularies designating family members:  one for family and one for outsiders.
2. Discipline:  Perhaps it derives from Buddhism, reflected in Zen, that you have this sense of integration, or self-mastery, the ability to delay gratification, a sense of the goal and the patience to pursue it.  Discipline was at the heart of the samurai warrior code and is embedded in today’s Japanese schools that are centered in more than the academic as repositories teaching pragmatic values:  social etiquette, obeying the law, esteeming the nation.  In the home, parents reenforce these values as well.  Japanese children are well-behaved. Through self-discipline, the Japanese are often better able to master deprivation and pain.  I’ve watched with fascination their patient queuing in line, accepting their beverage and bread stick in the crowded shelters.   
3. Courtesy:  related to discipline, it’s a fine art in Japan and another aspect of the primacy of the social fabric.  When we think of Japan, we often notice the extended politeness on saying hello in its accompanying ritual of bowing. The lower you bow, the more respect you convey.  Humorously, this ritual is so engrained that often you’ll see Japanese bowing as they converse on their cell phones.  Rites of etiquette extend seemingly everywhere.  There are conventions for entering and leaving trains, getting on and off an escalator.  I remember my GI delight visiting a department store in Fukuoka (Kyushu) and being taken on and off escalators by the white gloved hands of dimpled, smiling Japanese girls. 
4. artistry:  I can’t think of any place I’ve been where the creative is so much a staple of daily life from flower arranging to public  gardens and tea rituals.  Westerners sometimes say that Japanese art is imitative rather than creative.  This simply isn’t so; in fact, we’re more apt to imitate them as seen in our own penchant for Japanese gardens. One of Japan’s contemporary artistic legacies is its  sophisticated anime and comic book genres, along with video games.  We’re still catching-up.
5. Simplicity:  There exists an understated elegance to Japanese culture in its advocacy of minimalism, whether in gardening, the haiku and tanka poetry genres, or its cuisine, a simplicity that seeks not to use, but reflect nature.  Living on a crowded archipelago of  islands, the Japanese are nonetheless able to bring nature into their very living rooms with bonsai renditions of pine and cypress..  Traditional Japanese homes are furnished lightly, tables and chairs low to the floor, beds that are futons folded and stored each morning in keeping with a spatial emphasis allowing, reconfiguration.  Materials in a Japanese home are drawn directly from nature: fine woods, bamboo, silk, rice straw mats, and paper.  Colors are always subdued, light diffused.   I experienced all of this first hand when I stayed briefly in a mountain inn, or ryokan,  in the vicinity of the Shinto shrine city of Nikko in northern Honshu, wearing the kimono, eating Japanese food, largely fresh from the sea, sleeping on the floor  
It isn’t a perfect society.  In recent years the economy has struggled as other Asian nations, principally China, compete with Japanese exports in the global market; women have yet to gain full equality; the population is aging, with 1 out of 4 Japanese over 65; vestiges of an ugly nationalism is on the increase; and there exists a defensive hostility towards other ethnicities (Japan remains a homogeneous society).  While all nations have their freckles, the virtues of the Japanese nevertheless far exceed their blemishes, underscoring their likeliness to right themselves.
In its long history, Japan has faced many crises and always transcended. 1n 1730, an earthquake killed 130,000; nearly a century later, a tsunami killed 27,000; then, in 1923, in Japan’s greatest natural disaster, an earthquake striking the Kanto plain near Tokyo and subsequent fire took up to 200,000 lives.  More recently (1995), an earthquake struck the Osaka area, taking 6,000 lives. The Japanese are a resilient people who will rebuild just as they have always done.  They did it after WWII.  If character is fate, then surely the Japanese are a people set apart.