Author: Ophelia Benson

State governments and (Republican) Governors currently are going through paroxysms of false hand wringing and despair.  They pretend not to know why state budgets are so wildly out of balance.  In mock anguish they lament the need to cut education budgets, renege on public employee pensions and cut health benefits for these groups.

Something has to be done to balance state budgets.  But the nation can’t simply eliminate all the give-away programs and policies for the wealthy and the big corporations.  These are the people and businesses that provide the hand-full of jobs in the U.S. that haven’t yet been moved abroad or phased out in essential cost saving measures.

But wait……there may be yet another (Republican) way out after all.  What about all those bloated pension funds and costly health care benefits promised to state employees and their families in return for years of low-paying, unrecognized public service employment?  It was the (Democrat [sic]) policies of providing reasonable assurances of old age and health benefits to these public workers that got us into this mess.  And, of course, the unions, that allowed public employees to actually bargain for a few insignificant rights.  Not in Texas, of course, but in some socialistic northern states.

So if we simply crush those nasty public employee unions, and renege on all those promises to take care of public employees and their families in retirement, we might be able to save the states and balance state budgets without imposing on our rich supporters.  After all, these public employees and their families have to be willing to make some sacrifices, just like the Wall Street financiers and mortgage and insurance brokers had to forego multi-billion dollar bonuses for an entire year, in 2009.

The financial crises facing state and local governments were not caused by public employee retirement and benefit programs.  They were caused by unregulated and irresponsible profiteering by the people and institutions in control of the major private financial systems of the country, and by individual greed.  Under the blind eye of Republican deregulation the “whiz kids” of these entities embarked on one of their most ‘creative’ periods of financial fraud in U.S. and world history.  They made Enron, Kenneth Lay, Bernie Ebbers, and Worldcom look like kids playing tinker toys.

The whiz kids invented the derivative.  This clever, deliberately misleading financial device created paper values where none previously existed, and permitted financial titans to bundle worthless loans (i.e. loans in or near default) into packages, for sale abroad or to unsuspecting domestic investors.  The good loans in the bundle surely would balance out the bad loans and no one would be hurt, or any the wiser. 

This enabled the financial whiz kids and their bosses to rake in literally billions of dollars in bonuses annually.  And thanks to their friends in the White House and Congress they got to keep an even larger share of the loot than their fathers and mothers.  Life was good —– for the whiz kids.

But the fraud couldn’t last forever.  The housing bubble was destined to burst and with it the “junk” derivatives loan bundles.  Some of the investors in the “junk” bundles began to smell the odor coming from the derivative loan packages they had purchased from the Wall Street whiz kids.  Some of them began to demand a refund or a “do over.”  Uh, oh……bad news for the whiz kids.  They now owned billion dollar mansions and vacation properties of their own and had to make huge mortgage payments.  “We need regulatory relief and financial relief,” became the new mantra.

The whiz kids’ fraud of the public and world financial markets was so immense that their fake empire began to shake and soon crumble. Since the whiz kids and their enablers all were against big government interference with private markets, they naturally turned to the government for a rescue, for a bail out. (“Forget the deregulation stuff for now, this is a real emergency and calls for  public assistance.”)  Holding as their ace-in-the hole the threat of a complete collapse of world finances, they asked for a financial bailout from the same people they had defrauded, the public. “We’re too big to allow to fail.  If you don’t rescue us it will cost you more in the long run.”

So the Federal Reserve Bank and the U.S. Treasury and the administration and Congress all joined the Wall Street/corporate bread line and assembled a huge bailout package for the crooks, more than a trillion dollars and counting.

Whew!  The huge bonuses were back for the whiz kids,–they only had to survive without them for a little more than a year.  And only one financial titan had to file for bankruptcy protection.

The effects of the financial fraud were not limited to Wall Street.  The cancer spread to the entire nation.  Millions of ordinary people lost their jobs, their homes and all sources of income.  Their inability to spend and pay state sales taxes and income taxes helped fuel a financial crisis for the states and for local governments.

So the whiz kids and politicians, federal, state and local, all agreed that it was the state pension funds and health benefits and even Social Security that were responsible for the states’ financial problems.  Outlaw unions, renege on state promises, eliminate programs for the needy and suffocate public education.  It’s a bitter pill they all hated to inflict but because these items cost taxpayers too much money, it was the only thing that could work.  The New York Times joined the juggernaut with an lop-sided, uncontested* editorial you can read here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/opinion/06sun1.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha21

WRONG!  Here is a simpler, better, honest and fool proof way to solve the states’ financial problems.  And the nation and the states are not broke, far from it.

Make those responsible for the problem — Wall Street, mortgage brokers, insurance giants, big corporations and very rich people — pay for the damage they have caused.  “You broke it, you bought it.”

Rescind the huge tax breaks given to the richest people in the nation by the Republican administration of George W. Bush and Tom (Felonius) DeLay.  Require these heavy contributors to the national debt to pay back the taxes they legitimately owe on the immoral benefits they’ve already received at the expense of the American working class.  Require the financial billionaires to refund to the public their fraudulent gains and multi-billion dollar bonuses they received for wrecking the economy.  Require the politicians who voted for the huge give away to the rich, to forfeit their own pensions and life time health care to help out the working people of the states and local governments who have been defrauded.

Levy special surcharges on the bloated incomes of the fraudsters to help bail out the states.  Require the corporate beneficiaries of government largess to fund unmet state financial needs to pay for legitimate state and local obligations to working people and for education, a cleaner environment and public health.

It isn’t rocket science.  Place the blame where it belongs.   And it can be done.

All honest and fair minded Americans need to remind their state legislators and congresspersons in forceful terms who their representatives work for and that this is not an oligarchy ruled by the rich for the rich.

*Fox news style ‘fair and balanced’ reporting.

My time in Pakistan was glorious.  I taught bright, beautiful and hopeful students who saw the world not as a series of entitlements but rather as a steep staircase to be climbed, littered with challenges set up by a crooked government that lunged from disaster to catastrophe.  It is easy in such circumstances to forget that Pakistan was founded on a crest of hope that soon dissipated into old rivalries, pissing contests between elites, indifference to the mountain men of the Pashto borderlands, suspicion (much of it justified) of eastern and western geopolitics, and an infrastructure that in every decade after 1950 fell further and further behind its more progressive western neighbor and rival–India.

But that is history.  Pakistan treated the Sikhs badly, turning the once Sikh-dominated Punjab and its lead city Lahore into a dying old man with dreams of former glory.  In hard times, given the choice between restoring a splendid (Non-Islamic) religious shrine or buying another nuclear warhead, you can bet the bricks will continue to fall from the shrine. I wasn’t in Lahore long enough to know the city well.  I was just there long enough to know that it was a city of disappointments. –Symbolic of the country as a whole.

The biggest disappointment was the disappointment of the young. Stuck with a government that looks like it was strung together with character actors from a gypsy jamboree, they wait impatiently while it plods on–blaming the west for the ills it has foisted on itself. Insofar as any nation’s government reflects the average face of the nation, they find it hard to swallow western criticism, not least because western criticism is dull (often duller than they are), uninformed, and monotonous. 

There is even a segment of the young and hopeful population that has to be seen biblically: when things got politically impossible for the Jews in the first century of the common era and it was clear to even the most political that their time was running put, they looked to the heavens for deliverance, a messiah.  One of those apocalyptic sects was pacifist—the Christians—not all, not uniformly but mainly.  Others, like the zealots and sicarii were contract killers and had they lived into the modern era, they would have been suicide bombers.  The fallacies of the sociology of history are many; but I stake my claim on the fact that Pakistan is going violently downhill because it has entered into the apocalyptic age.

The assassination of Pakistani Christian Shahbaz Bhatti, the government leader for minority religious affairs, is symbolic of that hopelessness. It follows closely on the heels of the murder of Pakistani Muslim Salman Taseer who had criticized the  blasphemy laws. 

The laws themselves date from the British era, and were subject to a number of revisions through the time of Independence in 1947. From imprisonment and fines, the law, under Zia-ul-Haq, degenerated further in 1986 with a death penalty for defaming Islam. The current (post-2008) controversy springs from the case of Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman, who was sentenced to death last November after being found guilty of insulting the Prophet Mohammed following a row with Muslim women in her village. According to Human Rights Watch, Aasia was “charged under the blasphemy law after a June 2009 altercation with fellow farm workers who refused to drink water she had touched, contending it was unclean because she was a Christian.” 

The operant offensive sections of the law are these:

Section 295: Insult

“Injuring or defiling place of worship, with Intent to insult the religion of any class: Whoever destroys, damages or defiles any place of worship, or any object held sacred by any class of persons with the intention of thereby insulting the religion of any class of persons or with the knowledge that any class of persons is likely to consider such destruction damage or defilement as an insult to their religion. Shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or with both.”

Section 295-A: Deliberate insult — imprisonment for 10 years, fine

“Deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting Its religion or religious beliefs: Whoever, with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of the citizens of Pakistan, by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representations insults the religion or the religious beliefs of that class, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, or with fine, or with both.”

Section 295-B: Defiling — life imprisonment

“Defiling, etc., of Holy Qur’an: Whoever wilfully defiles, damages or desecrates a copy of the Holy Qur’an or of an extract therefrom or uses it in any derogatory manner or for any unlawful purpose shall be punishable with imprisonment for life.”

Let me repeat my assertion this is not a free speech issue—not yet.  It is an attempt to remove from the books laws that belong to a sect that rejects the ability of the human animal to reason.

The day before I left Lahore to return to the States, the country was ablaze with gossip that Christians were stuffing pages of the Quran down toilets.  The rumours were (almost certainly) spread by children.  Whatever the source, it is a recurrent pathological lie dragged out on cue by troublemakers.  There are always thousands willing to believe it, such is the religious insecurity of the country. A fraction of that number will kill Christians because they believe it—behavior according to type.

But there is a lesson here.

It is time for the Pakistani government to acknowledge that only when blasphemy laws are repealed is a religion deserving of respect.  Religions will not do that: protected status is their writ of survival and dominance. Only a nation-state can do that. Only when it is no longer an offense against the state to criticize the worst and most repugnant elements of religion can a religion begin to talk about tolerance.  Officially, as opposed to the Islamic diaspora currying favor in the west, that has not happened in the Islamic world. And only when a religion is able to define tolerance should it be entitled to  suggest (not demand) to any other nation or any world body–like the United Nations– that it deserves respect simply because it is a religion.

Pakistan so far has followed just the opposite course.  While practicing intolerance and the murder of innocent nonconformists at home, it deigns to lecture the world on the prerogatives of Islam.  Almost bizarrely, it then dances a dance of death and calls it life: defends truth through murder, and righteousness with violence.  

I am an unbeliever who knows the sins of the west as well as any citizen of the realm.  I will shed a tear for the crusades, or for the Raj, or for the arrogance of the west if I have to.  But that is hardly the place to begin modern discussion

So let me remind our Muslim brothers and sisters that there is not nearly as much Muslim blood on Christian hands as there is Christian blood on Muslim hands. I hate to put it so starkly, and I am likely to be bludgeoned with statistics from Iraq and Afghanistan. But bludgeon me as you will, I do not think those conflicts were religious.  I do not think they would have eventuated without the apocalyptic mentality that still dominates the religious ethos of the Middle East and other parts of the Islamic world.  

And I do not think—believe it or not—that most Americans who had to fight those dirty battles did it as Christians. That is my rejoinder, take it or leave it.

But the murder of Shabaz Bhatti is a pathological symptom of religious dysfunction in real time.  By synergy, it includes his family and the not quite 3,000,000 Christians remaining (not for long) in Pakistan. Change the mood, and you can substitute the name “Lebanon,” where the entire absurd Constitution is based on a census taken when almost half the population was Christian.

What of course makes the blame-the-west message harder to sell however is not the death of Christians in an Islamic country.  It is the death of so many Muslims who find tolerance, co-existence, and simple justice a “foreign” concept–an un-Islamic one.  We have a long way to go before this becomes a matter of free speech.