5/03/2007

It's O'Bama!!

I knew there was something I liked about this guy! This is about the only thing however.

Pyro

It's here!

My new Notebook just arrived!

I apoligize to all free workers everywhere. I see that the box declares that my new HP laptop is a product of China.

oh well,...

Pyro

Zero Tolerance

A conversation with a relative this morning got me thinking. Most schools have a zero tolerance for violence policy. What that means is that any violent act (fighting, wrestling, puching, kicking, assault) will get you expelled from school. No contingency exists which allows for defense of self or others. You strike someone, you're out!

Traditional Christian moral philosophy, best expressed by the Catholic Church in which subsists the fullness of God's revelation to man, says this about the legitimate use of force.

From the Catechism:
Legitimate defense
2263 The legitimate defense of persons and societies is not an exception to the prohibition against the murder of the innocent that constitutes intentional killing. "The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation of one's own life; and the killing of the aggressor. . . . The one is intended, the other is not."65
2264 Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one's own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow:
If a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful. . . . Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the act of moderate self-defense to avoid killing the other man, since one is bound to take more care of one's own life than of another's.66
2265 Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for one who is responsible for the lives of others. The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm. For this reason, those who legitimately hold authority also have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their responsibility.
2266 The efforts of the state to curb the spread of behavior harmful to people's rights and to the basic rules of civil society correspond to the requirement of safeguarding the common good. Legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense. Punishment has the primary aim of redressing the disorder introduced by the offense. When it is willingly accepted by the guilty party, it assumes the value of expiation. Punishment then, in addition to defending public order and protecting people's safety, has a medicinal purpose: as far as possible, it must contribute to the correction of the guilty party.67
2267 Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.
If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.
Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent."68


I think zero tolerance policies are the cowards way out of using logic and reason when faced with the necessity of making a judgment of a situation. This cowards way out is probably the result of the litigation industry (attorneys) and their pursuit of money instead of justice. It is immoral and unjust to punish someone for excercising their right to defend themselves or another innocent party in the face of an assault.

I also wonder how much "zero tolerance policies" and the refusal to use corporal punishment in schools has contributed to the increase of violence in our society? If there were real and understandable reprecussions to misbehavior for students in K-8 (getting a spanking), would there be the amount of lethal violence in our schools? Why have things like Columbine and Virginia Tech started to happen?

Pyro


5/01/2007

"It Didn't Happen Here"

This would be a good read. It talks about why Socialism never got the strong base here in the United States that it has in European Democracies. Of particular interest to me was the influence of both Catholic social doctrine, Protestant cultural tendencies, and the influence of Organized Labor.

(Excerpt from the Hoover Institution www.hoover.org)

Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks.It Didn’t Happen Here: Why SocialismFailed in the United States.W. W. Norton & Company. 379 pages. $26.95

Socialism is fading throughout the Western world. In Germany, after two decades of immobility by the centrist Christian Democrats, taxes have now been reduced substantially by a Social Democratic government. In Australia and New Zealand, where conservative governments long pursued interventionist policies and left economies wracked by inflation, labor parties now apply neoliberal market principles. According to Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, the greatest ideological distance has been traveled by the Labour Party in Britain, whose leader, Prime Minister Tony Blair, stated in an interview that his administration would "leave British law the most restrictive on trade unionism in the Western world."

While the death knell sounds for socialist theories, it may be timely to consider again the old question of why the United States never experienced a socialist movement with the strength and durability of those in Europe or the revolutionary force of those elsewhere in the world. Lipset and Marks revisit this topic in their fine new book, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States.

At first, socialists turned a hopeful eye to American shores. After all, by the late nineteenth century the United States had the most advanced capitalist economy in the world. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and other socialist thinkers believed that a mature capitalist society would produce contradictions that would compel workers into a socialist mass movement. As we know, it soon became apparent that capitalism was not headed into collapse. The increasing mechanization of industry did not deprive businessmen of the surplus value "expropriated" from their laborers; rather, it created enormous windfalls, and at the same time made goods available to a broader proportion of the population than ever before.

Still, the American working class was not without grievances. As Lipset and Marks tell it, the Socialist Party of America did find limited popular support in the first decades after its founding in 1901. But the party achieved its very circumscribed success by maintaining its distance from European socialism and, instead, by laying claim to distinctively American values.

Much credit for the early success of the Socialist Party is due to its smart and charismatic leader, Eugene Victor Debs of Indiana, who first gained prominence organizing railway workers. In the 1912 presidential election, with Debs as their candidate, the Socialists received almost a million votes. They also did well in 1920, while Debs was in an Atlanta federal prison, serving time on a sedition conviction for speaking against the 1918 war bond drive. Popular outcry eventually led Republican Warren Harding to release Debs from prison. Throughout his career, Debs portrayed himself as a victim of government repression and capitalized on the American tradition of sympathy for free speech and hostility to the state.

Few socialists found their way into Congress, the most notable of these being Victor Berger, elected many times from Milwaukee, and Meyer London from Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Numerous cities, however, elected socialist mayors. Mayors Daniel Hoan in Milwaukee and Jasper McLevy in Bridgeport, Conn., were both longstanding Socialist Party members. The populations that repeatedly elected these men were not a stereotypical propertyless proletariat. The workers in these cities were homeowners and civic participants — members of unions and fraternal and life insurance societies.

In another contrast to European-style socialism, low taxes were a major plank in successful Socialist Party platforms. In Milwaukee, according to Lipset and Marks "[p]roperty taxes under successive socialist mayors from 1910 to 1940 were actually lower than in the period before and after their administrations." Socialist-led municipalities placed a strong emphasis on fiscal restraint and efficiency and on eliminating corruption. They often had the full support of the business community in addition to homeowning workers. Victor Berger, the leading socialist in Milwaukee, emphasized the consonance of socialist ideas with those of the American Founders, declaring in 1905: "Friedrich Engels once said: ‘Give every citizen a good rifle and fifty cartridges and you have the best guarantee for the liberty of the people.’ Thomas Jefferson held the same views exactly."

Lipset and marks provide an important analysis of the early American union movement, one which goes far in explaining the failure of European socialism to win adherents in the United States. In a section entitled "American Antistatism and Labor," the authors argue that the American labor movement long opposed programs that would have extended the role of the government. The reasoning behind this attitude, expressed eloquently by labor leader Samuel Gompers, was that the state would be far less likely to protect the American worker than to serve the interests of his corporate masters. Gompers was a London-born cigar maker who emigrated to New York in 1863. He was president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) from 1886 until 1923 (except for 1895, after he was defeated by a Socialist Party candidate). Gompers advocated "the wage-earners doing for themselves what they can toward working out their own salvation," massing their own collective power against the power of the industrialists, without the intervention of the state. The authors note that "the AFL was opposed to state provision of old-age pensions, compulsory health insurance, minimum wage legislation, and unemployment compensation, and from 1914 on was against legislating minimum hours for men." Quoting historian David DeLeon, they argue that "‘Social democracy, communism, and other relatively authoritarian movements that rely upon coercive centers of state power’ have run against deep libertarian currents in American culture and as a result have never succeeded in developing deep roots."

The size and diversity of America’s immigrant population presented further obstacles, cultural and organizational, to the American socialist movement. Lipset and Marks report that by the mid-nineteenth century, only one-fifth of wage earners in the United States had native white parents, and almost three-fifths were of immigrant origin. The labor force in the United States soon became the most ethnically heterogeneous in the world, they state, and by 1930 "roughly one-third of the total population was of foreign stock." Seeking to explain "why the party failed to gain the allegiance of the poorest, most vulnerable sections of the population," Lipset and Marks point to the difficulties of uniting immigrants of different languages and cultures — populations which competed for jobs and whose ethnic animosities were often encouraged by employers and politicians. Studies have shown that immigrants were far more likely to look to their own people than to a political movement for help with their immediate needs and long-term security. Jewish and Catholic immigrants created flourishing voluntary and fraternal societies that provided social services and health, unemployment, and life insurance. Fraternal life insurance companies had 8.5 million members by 1910; more wage earners were members of fraternal societies than of labor unions. The proliferation of voluntary associations among Jewish, Italian, and Slavic immigrants in cities like Chicago and New York amazed reformers.

Moreover, the traditions immigrants brought from the old world were often hostile to socialist aims. Lipset and Marks point particularly to resistance to socialism among immigrants from Catholic countries. Political observers were already commenting on this phenomenon in the years before Word War I. Lipset and Marks cite British author G.D.H. Cole, who wrote, "the growing political strength of Catholicism was of great influence in keeping the Trade Unions aloof from any movement wearing a socialist label or ‘tainted’ with class war doctrine or materialist philosophy of action." Lipset and Marks argue that while Catholic leaders in the United States endorsed trade unionism, they repeatedly attacked socialism and pronounced the sanctity of private property. In doing so, they followed the lead of the Vatican, which condemned socialism in the papal encyclicals of 1891 and 1903. Archbishop Sebastian Messmer of Milwaukee did not transgress the bounds of his authority in declaring that "the private ownership of property is supported by the gospel apostolic teaching, and the rules of the Church, and is a divine ordination, not to be changed by the hand of man. . . . A man cannot be a Catholic and a Socialist."

As the proportion of Catholic workers grew, the American Catholic church also had direct influence over the political leanings of the labor movement. Church leaders urged the American Federation of Labor to adhere to Catholic social views and to eshew political remedies in favor of "pure and simple" trade unionism. They were persuasive. Lipset and Marks write that "Samuel Gompers, although a Jew, worked hard to convince Catholic church leaders that he was sympathetic to their outlook."

This analysis contrasts with the traditional linking of capitalism and bourgeois democracy with the Protestant faith, an association that arises from Max Weber’s original formulation in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Lipset and Marks argue the opposite: that there is a strong correlation between capitalism and Catholicism. They point out that "in Germany, socialism flourished primarily in the Protestant areas in the east, e.g., Prussia, while in western Germany, the Catholic Church, as in Latin Europe, repeatedly condemned atheistic materialistic socialism and weakened the appeal of the Social Democratic party." Recent studies have demonstrated that Catholic immigrants were longtime supporters of the liberal parties in England, Canada, and Australia, and the U. S. Democratic Party. As these parties strayed from principles of individual liberty, sound money, parental rights, and voluntarism, however, Catholics moved to the parties that newly espoused them, as the Republican party has done since the New Deal. Lipset and Marks do, however, lay at Protestantism’s feet another trait that repeatedly bedeviled the American Socialist Party — a tendency towards sectarianism, doctrinal wrangling, and schism.

Lipset and Marks thus demonstrate how homegrown traditions of mistrust of state power and respect for private property interacted with the attitudes of immigrant populations to deny European theorists’ dreams of a socialist America. They give credit to American affluence and social mobility. They lay out the reasons why the significant labor unrest of the years surrounding the turn of the century was not often expressed in political terms. And they point to structural features, foremost among them our two-party system, that made it difficult for the Socialist Party to gain a political foothold. It is by this close attention to historical circumstance, as well as a grasp of broad cultural features, that Lipset and Marks make an important contribution to a discussion that has been marred by overgeneralizations on one side of the political spectrum and bitterness and self-delusion on the other.

Pyro

May Day?

Today is the feast of St. Joseph the Worker.

Pope Pius XII hoped that this feast (established 1955) would accentuate the dignity of labor and would bring a spiritual dimension to labor unions. May 1st had been designated by communists as the day to celebrate the international solidarity of workers. Communism, and Capitalism to a certain degree, both lack truly benevolent behavior towards workers. Not that there aren't scattered examples of workers being treated well. The Church has put much effort in to combatting this attitude towards laborers. in 1891 Pope Leo XIII wrote his ground breaking Encyclical Rerum Novarum (On Capital and Labor). This Encyclical was instrumental in providing the moral impetus in changing the way laborers and industrialists related and how governments in the West finally took action to protect the lives and wellbeing of the workers.With Quadragesimo Anno in 1931 Pope Pius XI built on Rerum Novarum in pointing a way for us to establish a more just society in light of the changing political and industrial landscape of the times. With Laborem Exercens John Paul II further developed the thoughts of the previous Encylicals and applied them to the present day in order to address technological advances and failures of society in practicing the behaviors encouraged in the previous documents. In Centesimus Annus (On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum) John Paul II honored the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum by pointing out successes over the last 100 years and advances in the development of a more just society in relation to human labor. He also synthesised the thoughts of all the previous documents in pointing out needs of the present day and the future.

It's a lot of reading to make it through all those documents. But it would be very rewarding. It's often said that Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher were instrumental in the downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Most of you could probably say what Reagan and Thatcher did to bring down the Iron Curtain. But you'd be hard pressed to describe what John Paul the Great did. Read these documents, then imagine a man who embodied the virtues put to paper and emboldened others to do the same. Half a billion people were freed from Communism without armed conflict. That's a miracle.

Thanks and honor to St. Joseph, Patron of Workers, who through the love of God the Father, the grace of God the Son, and the power of the God the Spirit confers God's blessings upon us in the Communion of Saints.

Pyro