Buying and Owning

Remember, ladies and gentlemen, there is no background check if you want to buy a senator.

-- David Letterman

I don’t believe that the men and women who defended American democracy fought to create a situation where American billionaires own the political process.

-- Bernie Sanders

This week's featured posts are "Turning the Theocracy Against Itself" and "The 2016 Stump Speeches: Bernie Sanders".

This week everybody was talking about Ireland

Friday, the Irish voted to legalize same-sex marriage by a whopping 62%-38% margin. Turnout was impressive: 61% of the electorate. This is the first time a country has legalized same-sex marriage by a national referendum, and points out just how fast public opinion has been changing: Homosexual acts were illegal in Ireland just 22 years ago.

From The Guardian:

All but one of the republic’s 43 parliamentary constituencies voted Yes to same-sex marriage. And fears of an urban-rural, Yes/No split were not realised either. Constituencies such as Donegal South West, which in the past voted against divorce and abortion reform, backed the Yes side.

There's some debate about whether a referendum is proper when we're talking about a basic right. (I've seen a t-shirt that says "How about we vote on your marriage?") But when the result comes in clear and strong like this, it's the most satisfying way to establish marriage equality. Nobody can argue that out-of-touch elitists forced this change on a silent majority.

And so the Archbishop of Dublin reacted like this:

I ask myself, most of these young people who voted yes are products of our Catholic school system for 12 years. I’m saying there’s a big challenge there to see how we get across the message of the church.

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Here's what I don't understand about the Catholic Church and all the other religious groups who are dead-set against marriage equality: Compare to divorce. A web site of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops says:

The Church does not recognize a civil divorce because the State cannot dissolve what is indissoluble.

Or, as Catholics sometimes put it, the couple is still married "in the eyes of God". If a person who gets a civil divorce then marries someone else, those marriages aren't valid "in the eyes of God", who sees the sex in those second marriages as adulterous and sinful.

And yet, Catholic politicians like Rick Santorum aren't campaigning to make second marriages illegal. Bakers and caterers aren't asserting their "religious freedom" to deny service to the receptions after second marriages -- which, just like same-sex marriages, are public announcements of the couple's intention to sin.

In short, American Catholics long ago made peace with the notion that civil marriage and sacramental marriage are different things. Why isn't a similar outcome sufficient here, for all the conservative religious groups? Why not accept that same-sex couples can be married under the law, with all the legal rights and privileges civil marriage offers, but go on teaching that they aren't married in the eyes of the Deity? Like taxes and currency, the civil code is a thing of Caesar, not of God.

and the coverage of the Waco shoot-out

A week ago yesterday, nine people died in a shoot-out between biker gangs at a Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas. A large number of liberal pundits have noticed how this has been covered compared to, say, the violence in Baltimore or Ferguson.

The apparent difference is the number of white people involved. Violence among whites is covered as some bizarre exception -- crazy people do crazy things -- while black violence is presented as an indictment of the whole community. Charles Blow comments:

Does the violence in Waco say something universal about white culture or Hispanic culture? Even the question sounds ridiculous — and yet we don’t hesitate to ask such questions around black violence, and to answer it, in the affirmative. And invariably, the single-mother, absent-father trope is dragged out.

But a father in the home is no guarantor against violence. By the way, is anyone asking about the family makeup of the bikers in Waco?

No? Exactly.

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The shooting also drew attention to Twin Peaks, a racier version of Hooters that was the fastest-growing restaurant chain of 2013. Some of that attention has exposed TP's demeaning image of its customers. "Men are simple creatures," TP's director of marketing (a woman) told Huffington Post in January. A leaked internal memo says the restaurant targets men who "love to have their ego stroked by beautiful girls." Especially beautiful girls who are paid, I guess. Simple creatures crave simple relationships.

and the Santa Barbara oil spill

A pipe owned by Plains All-American Pipeline broke Tuesday, spilling oil into the waters near Santa Barbara and sludging about nine miles of previously beautiful beach. The exact whys and wherefores are still under investigation, but The LA Times reports that Plains has had a "long record of problems".

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For me, the oil spill has a personal angle: To what extent am I responsible for it?

You see, when my Dad died, I inherited half his shares in Plains. I still have them. So while the rest of you look at Plains spokemen on TV and think "those evil bastards", I'm thinking "they believe they represent me".

And that raises an issue that I seldom write about, but think about quite a bit: I've never come up with a theory of socially responsible investing I like. Occasionally I make a decision to avoid companies out of sheer moral repugnance -- tobacco companies, for example. After the 2008 crash, I sold my Citicorp shares at a huge loss without waiting to see if the bank could cash in on this government-bailout thing. But this is always an emotional response rather than a thought-out principle. I'm trying to soothe my conscience, not improve the world.

Other times, I invest in something socially responsible because I believe the world will eventually see its potential the way I do. (Sometimes it does. A year or so ago I mentioned Hannon Armstrong Sustainable Infrastructure, which provides capital for sustainable-energy projects. Its shares were around 14 then and are near 20 now.)

But divestment movements in general leave me scratching my head. Me selling a stock drives the price down (by a miniscule amount, given the quantities I trade in) and makes it a better deal for somebody else. (Thursday, when I asked my broker what he knew about the oil spill, he opined that this price dip might be a good time to buy more of Plains. That's how the investment community thinks.) No matter what socially responsible investors do with their money, we're still going to live in a fossil fuel economy. There are still going to be oil wells and pipelines -- partly to service customers like me, who drive cars.

So anyway, I'm feeling an emotional repugnance towards Plains right now -- not because they're a pipeline company, but because it looks like they're a bad pipeline company (rather than a decent company that had the kind of accident that could happen to anybody). I'm watching the news to see if their/our actions have really been as negligent/corrupt as I suspect.

But I'm still no closer to a principle. If you have one you're happy with, please talk about it in the comments.

and you also might be interested in ...

Republicans and 14 Democrats in the Senate voted to give President Obama and the next president "trade promotion authority" to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The bill requires an up-or-down vote on the treaty as the president signs it, with no amendments of filibusters. The bill goes to the House now, where the vote should be close. Few Democrats currently support it, while far-right Republicans are balking. Rush Limbaugh has announced his opposition, on the general principle that Obama should not be given more authority to do anything.

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David Letterman signed off. The tributes were so glowing that he admonished well-wishers to "save a little for my funeral".

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An Atlanta TV station shines a light on the secretive ALEC meetings.

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Robert Reich points to an interesting political fault line that someday -- but probably no time soon -- will cause an earthquake: the uneasy juncture between small business owners and giant corporations. Currently it's having a tiny rumble over the push to lower the corporate tax rate. Small business associations aren't supporting that push, because the majority of small businesspeople don't pay the corporate tax rate. (Their profits show up on Schedule C or some other part of their individual 1040s.) So lowering the corporate rate while leaving individual rates fixed would shift the balance in favor of big business and against small business.

In general, small businesses provide political cover for big businesses and get little in return. Whenever some proposal would hurt Citicorp or Walmart, their PR flacks want you to focus instead on your favorite chef-owned restaurant or your cousin's hardware store. And they want the chef and your cousin to identify with them and support their full political agenda, even as that agenda favors the banks who won't loan small businesses money or the big chains that are squeezing individual proprietors out of the market. They want the 600-acre farmer to blame government regulations for his problems, and not the monopolistic power of the Monsantos who supply him or the Cargills he has to sell to.

There's room for a psychological study here, and a polemic along the lines of What's the Matter With Kansas?. What's the matter with small businesspeople? When the mega-corps completely take over, they'll be peons just like the rest of us. Why can't they see that their best allies are below them on the economic scale, not above?

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It took a while, but Prime Minister Netanyahu has put together a new government following the recent Israeli elections. He himself is the acting foreign minister, so the deputy foreign minister is the country's top full-time diplomat.

That would be Tzipi Hotovely, who gave a speech Thursday re-orienting Israel's diplomatic rhetoric. Those who speak for Israel abroad, she said, need to start talking about the morality of Israel's domination of the occupied territories, not just Israel's practical need for security.

It’s important to say [that] this land is ours. All of it is ours. We didn’t come here to apologize for that.

She referenced a great medieval Jewish scholar:

Rashi says the Torah opens with the story of the creation of the world so that if the nations of the world come and tell you that you are occupiers, you must respond that all of the land belonged to the creator of world and when he wanted to, he took from them and gave to us.

In short, the religious fanatics in the Middle East aren't all on one side.

and this week, let's do a double closing

I mean, I've already blown away my weekly word limit, so why not?

First, this cartoon is supposed to encourage people to travel in groups, but I find a political message here too.

and then there's Coldplay's idea to do a Game of Thrones musical with the original cast. What could go wrong?