230905 Israeli and Palestinian Claims to Biblical Lands

Netanyahu’s government is trying to replace the Palestinian population with Jewish settlers. That’s not some fictional replacement theory. They’ve been expanding the territory that Jewish Israelis are allowed to seize, squat on, and defend, against the prior Palestinian owners, settlers and communities. Nothing subtle about it.

Their so-called “justification” is that the land belonged to the Jews in Biblical times. But the land was owned, occupied and cultivated by others both before and after the Hebrew settlements. Biblical times were a sacred but historical blip.

If their “justification” were allowed, ALL of us, everyone, across the world, on every continent, lives and works on land once settled, owned, occupied, cultivated by some other group, who claimed it was blessed by their deity. That’s how the world worked. Property rights are historically recent. Native Americans have powerful claims. But to force present occupants off that ancestral land would invite chaos, war, mutually assured destruction. Far better to make sure they benefit from the universal principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and the 14^th Amendment – equal rights to life, liberty and property. Only that way can we respect everybody while keeping the peace. I deliberately said “benefit” – it’s insufficient to admit we screwed them before but they’re free to compete now that they no longer have the resources – land, property, tax base, or access – to compete. Colorblindness perpetuates old wrongs. But taking land based on ancient claims creates new ones.

American law provides rights to “quiet title” and “adverse possession,” designed to end property disputes and keep the peace. Without the notion that there needs to be an end, there is no end – no end to war, displacement, refugees, and murder. It’s got to stop. Israel has no rights created by Biblical times. And its moral claims as a people are completely undermined by its treatment of the Palestinians.

Louis Brandeis, whom lawyers remember as one of our greatest Supreme Court justices, also a founder of the American Jewish Congress, and a leader of world Zionism, understood. He believed Jews had the same right to a homeland as other nationalities. BUT he warned that Palestine must not be claimed by war but by purchase and settlement, “with clean hands … [so] as to ennoble the Jewish people. Otherwise,” he added, “it will not be worth having.”[1]

It is fitting to quote a Jewish, Zionist, American Supreme Court justice on the rights of the population Netanyahu and his wrong-wing partners are trying to displace. They should hang their heads in shame, somewhere other than the Biblical lands of a people who lay claim to a strong moral backbone.

What does it mean to be a Jewish state? That people wear yarmulkas, prayer shawls, tefillin and the clothing Jews wore in Germany centuries ago? That they’re genetically related? Or does it mean obeying the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, which commands “Justice, justice, shalt thou pursue.” It’s not justice to drive innocent people out of their homes or to impose collective punishment for the crimes of individuals.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on September 5, 2023.

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^[1] Quoted in Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and the Breakdown of American Politics 34 (NYU Press 2016).

Conservative Action Project (CAP) objection to a Continuing Resolution

I’d love to give them a taste of their own medicine. I’d block all spending for their dear dear Supreme court, and all spending they want for their districts and spend everything possible on everything they don’t want – WOKE, climate change, antitrust, consumer protection, Medicare but in every other district.

Global Warming is Deeply Embedded into All Our Problems

Gambling’s a kick for some of us. Even small bets make the track more exciting. But parents must protect their children from serious risks to their lives, health and safety. We’ve no right to gamble with other’s lives. Legally, that’s a tort. Law makes us pay for the harm we do when we take our eyes off the road. Ignoring risks may be fun, but we don’t have that right.

Since ALL our problems are aggravated by global warming, it’s a risk we’ve no right to ignore, and can only avoid having our loved ones baked, broiled or BBQ’d by global warming by doing everything we can to deal with it.

The ocean temperature recently reached 101 degrees off the coast of Florida, the temperature of a hot tub. That will sound nice to some of you but it will kill coral reefs at the base of the food chain, and with them a lot of what we eat and the oxygen we breathe. They’re reefs and they’re far away but the effect on us is fundamental.

A warming world affects our health by sapping our energy, stressing our bodies, killing us with heat stroke and sending swarms of unfamiliar bugs at us. At some point it’s just too hot for human life.

A warming world drives inflation, by shifting where we can grow or get food and water, disrupting how, what and where we eat and forcing us to build new machinery to withstand the heat.

A warming world disrupts our jobs, leaving many unemployed, destroying industries, flooding or burning houses, offices and towns, destroying roads, bridges and supply lines, or just making it harder to work. Global warming threatens pensions and retirement accounts that guess wrong on investments. Republicans don’t want brokers to examine which businesses take the environment into account. But since businesses aren’t immune to global warming, that threatens the safety net for those of us who didn’t think we needed one.

A warming world will disrupt where we live, aggravating the housing, refugee, and homelessness crises as coastlines flood, wooded areas burn, and deserts expand. Fire, floods, drought and heat make us refugees in our own country, our houses suddenly worthless.  

A warming world will force us to change housing codes. We’ve stopped locating and designing buildings to lessen heat naturally and now depend on air conditioning instead. That made the modern industrial south possible, but warms the world even more, threatening everything we depend on. 

A warming world will force us to change zoning codes. We’ve been wasting land and water and need to start protecting trees, green space and wetlands to tamp the temperature down. That means building higher and closer, and learning to live together, keeping our teachers, nurses, craftsmen, mechanics and “essential workers” closer, as they do in many of the world’s older cities.

Food, air, health, jobs, housing and stability are all threatened by global warming, and, ultimately, it will make the earth uninhabitable. We’ve no right to ignore those consequences.

We must stop climate change before it makes life more lawless, dangerous, miserable, and extinct, and do it fast. We can stop the warming from getting worse if we do it now. We just have to want to do it enough – and make it an imperative in what we demand from our politicians.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on August 29, 2023.

Second Amendment for the 21st Century

The jury chose to send the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooter to his death. But let’s talk about the use of the Second Amendment in ways that made his and the many mass killings possible.

You probably know the Second Amendment begins with the words “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…” You may not realize that was because militia members were expected to bring their own guns both for training and to any wars they had to fight. Today, soldiers are completely prohibited from bringing or using their own weapons. The Army supplies standard munitions for standardized guns. And of course, in 1791, when the amendment was ratified, you had to stuff powder and a shell into the barrel separately for each and every shot. So the Second Amendment as written is completely outdated and obsolete and should be treated that way – except this Court’s been in bed with political groups supporting gun rights fanatics.

Gun rights fanatics are determined to extend the Second Amendment to guns that were unavailable and unknown in the eighteenth century when the Amendment was created, for a purpose which no longer exists. Those guns now exist to challenge the militia, not to support it. Gun shows are full of claims about “tyranny,” obviously aimed at government and the people we’ve elected. Some in the gun rights movement think the language of the Second Amendment is sufficiently open to justify having howitzers, tanks and bombs – which itself makes clear the fanaticism of the movement and the danger of leaving the Second Amendment unchanged.

I have no doubt that Mr. Trump and his extreme wrong-wing followers are familiar with Hitler’s speeches and fully aware of the history of Hitler’s Brown Shirts in his takeover of Germany and are using the Second Amendment to arm the worst and most irresponsible people in America to threaten, intimidate and conquer the rest of us for their disgusting and inhumane purposes – unless we stop them.

Gun shows have also been full of racism and antisemitism. The gun rights movement has been driven by those dreaming of overturning the results of the Civil War. Many of the fanatics refer to African-Americans as “Fourteenth Amendment citizens” as if the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment don’t count. The so-called “sovereign citizens” movement makes explicit that they don’t feel bound by the federal Constitution. And the people who stormed the Capital on January 6 to prevent counting the votes that reflected Biden’s victory made clear they felt entitled to overturn election results to suit themselves regardless of democratic rules. This is all about disloyalty.

I would rewrite the Second Amendment so that the right to own, possess or carry guns or weapons applies only to hunting rifles and protects state power to prohibit or control the possession or carriage of weapons outside areas set aside for hunting.

And I would defund the US Supreme Court in every possible way until its makeup has been changed. We should not allow them to continue doing the one thing which is most destructive of civilized and democratic society – spreading guns among us.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on August 22, 2023.

Affirmative Action After Supreme Court Rejection

The US Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action at the end of June. What difference will it make?

Affirmative action existed before it was named. It was called “discrimination.” Discrimination against blacks but welcoming whites was affirmative action for whites in all but name. “Discrimination” is still prohibited by law. But the current Court dislikes measuring “discrimination” by the pattern of behavior, which is the best evidence of what was intended. Measuring whether people are discriminating by insisting on direct evidence of what’s in their hearts and minds without drawing inferences from what they did is almost useless and allows judges to refuse to find that Blacks have been discriminated against and refuse to find that whites benefitted from discrimination against Blacks.

It’s hard to tell how big a difference the Court’s decision in June may make. Some schools will give up. Some won’t have the resources to deal with it. I have some hope for others. Let me use my own education as an example. After World War II, Princeton deliberately changed its admission policies, significantly increasing the number of Jews admitted. I hadn’t considered Princeton because of its prior exclusion of Jews but our high school college advisor got the message and told me to apply. My on-campus interview was all about encouraging me to come. That warm welcome made all the difference. I accepted their offer and joined the class of 1962.

Princeton deliberately kept broadening its student body. Woodrow Wilson, a former president of Princeton, had left a horrible legacy by excluding Blacks coupled with “affirmative action” for whites. So Blacks shied away from Princeton the same way Jews had. But President Robert Goheen brought new people to the admissions office to recruit Blacks, and appointed a Black assistant dean. Only one Black man graduated from my class at Princeton, but within a decade Princeton’s complexion was changing. At the same time, Princeton began making plans to admit women, who were first admitted in 1969.

So, my first point is that it took “affirmative action” to keep Blacks, Jews and women out.

My second point is that the culture of many schools changed. We celebrate Reunions with a P-rade in which the returning classes and new graduates parade in front of each other. As we walk the parade route, the changing complexion and gender of Princeton graduates is obvious, and the mood is celebratory. I can imagine changes around the edges but I can’t imagine going back to the kind of place it was before World War II, or alumni allowing it. Many elite schools will find workarounds. At those schools, the Court can take its decisions and shove them into the appropriate receptacle.

That leads to my third point – we’re headed for an increasingly three-tiered educational system. Many elite schools will find ways to integrate while community colleges will continue to educate large numbers of children from disadvantaged families, Black and white. But others will be all over the lot.

There are a lot of pressures in this society toward being able to work comfortably together. We’re a very diverse country and most of us have learned to live and work together and enjoy the company of people from different religious, ethnic and racial backgrounds as well as across the gender divides. Those who refuse to learn that lesson are disadvantaging themselves. That’s the point the Supreme Court refused to get and it’s not clear how many of the students they have injured will be white, Black or just about everybody.

Along with our disappointment, I’d cheer for the good guys, contribute to the historically Black colleges and universities, and dismantle the un-American Supreme Court.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on August 15, 2023.

Krugman’s commentary on the effect of the American culture war on our military preparedness

I think his post is fabulous.

STOP CLIMATE CHANGE NOW

There’s a lot going on but nothing’s more important than the damage climate change is and will be doing. It’s already extremely painful, deadly and will keep getting worse.

The question isn’t what we can do by 2050. It’s what we have to do now to avert major change. We’ve already missed tipping points. Global warming’s been melting glaciers and ice sheets that reflected heat from the sun back into space. Global warming’s already stoked huge fires that are sending carbon up into our atmosphere, destroying trees that shaded the ground, trees that converted the sun’s rays into green growth, and replacing them with naked ground that absorbs heat and leaves us hotter. This isn’t about 2050; it’s about now.

Politicians shudder if any sacrifice is required. My starting point is what’s necessary and then getting it done. Dealing with climate change is more like war – it will require sacrifice from all of us. We need a better electric grid – build it. We need to stop making gas engines – convert the factories. We need to replace coal, oil and gas plants with systems much better for the environment – replace them. We need to discourage the use of fossil fuels by taxing them – fix the tax code. We need a single approach – get the job done now.

Stop worrying about government and regulation. Individual efforts won’t be enough to do those jobs in time and at scale. Government is essential to get everyone on board.

Jobs? Taking care of jobs and workers is the right thing to do plus we won’t get the job done without everyone on board. Everybody has a right to a job and a decent income, and if private industry won’t provide them, there are plenty of public service jobs that we don’t fund because they’re [quote] “too expensive.” Forget it – we’ve got to be willing to help each other during the transition – that’s not “too expensive;” it’s absolutely necessary. And if providing more public services strikes you wrong, a productive solution is to expand education to prepare people for better and different jobs. Do both. On a war footing, nothing is “too expensive.” And this is war – for survival – for ourselves, our children and grandchildren, our spouses, parents, relatives and friends.

Lots of us were unhappy about Biden’s deal with Manchin that allowed more drilling and a new pipeline. Me too. But I didn’t blame Biden for doing his best to get the most he could past Congress. It’s our job to elect a Congress that will give the president whatever is needed to fight climate change – indeed a Congress that will force whoever is president to do everything necessary in this war.

Forget the folk who think patriotism is about waving the flag and claiming they’re better than everybody else. Real patriots willingly sacrifice for America’s survival to protect its people. Everyone else is an imposter. CEOs of the major companies have to get on board, or they’re no better than traitors. Politicians at every level have got to accept that this is war and they have to get on board or be driven out of public life like we once did to people labeled “un-American.” This is a you’re-with-us-or-you’re-against-us moment and there’s no room for shirkers.

You can leave a comment on my blog and tell me what would get more people to do more to protect the world we live in for the people we cherish.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on August 8, 2023.