The comedian and social satirist Bill Maher devotes a section of his program to “Dispatches from the Bubble,” in which he attempts to show how right wing Republicans are living in a bubble that has little to do with reality in the rest of the United States.  But there are far more bubbles than just the one Maher points out, and some bubbles exist within other bubbles.

I live in Utah, a state that well might be termed the “semi-sovereign theocracy of Deseret,” where we have a state legislature that believes freedom of information requires giving schools the right not to teach sex education and has just passed a bill to that effect and that will forbid any mention of birth control except abstinence. It’s a state where legislators continue to demand and legislate ways to try to “reclaim” Utah lands from the federal government, but where one of the legislative leaders is pushing a bill to allow the condemnation of private lands to facilitate the development of oil wells and coal mines by industry.  It’s a state where every public high school in the state has an LDS Seminary of Religion across the street and where students are scheduled for “release time” during the date to attend seminary… and where the legislature balked at beefing up the high school curriculum because that would require cutting “release time,”  i.e., religious instruction, during the school day.

Wall Street financiers all live in a bubble.  They honestly think that “bonuses” aren’t the same as earned income and that paying only 15% income taxes on sums of money/securities received for services is eminently fair when middle class families pay far higher rates on infinitesimally smaller wages.

Then there’s the Congressional bubble, where no Representative or Senator can ever afford to change his position on anything, for fear that the media will discover that he or she actually thought and changed his or her mind – and that the voters would then throw them out of office – even if it happened to result in something getting done.

There’s the special bubble for climate change deniers… who somehow can’t see that the world is indeed warmer… or accept the fact that all the glaciers in the world have drastically diminished [except for three or so, which they use to refute the case], that the Arctic sea ice is vanishing, that the coral reefs are dying, that sea levels are rising…

Then there are the ultra-feminists, some of whom have declared that every act of heterosexual intercourse is an act of rape, and they won’t accept any other interpretation.

Or the black extremists, who lay every problem of U.S. black culture and subcultures on the “whites” because of slavery, conveniently forgetting that every single slave sold to the white slavers who took them from Africa had first been captured and enslaved by blacks first. That doesn’t excuse the inhumanity of slavery, but the blame for it covers all races and shades, because at one time or another, pretty much every culture has had a form of slavery, sometimes dressed up as penal servitude or indentured workers.

But the bubble problem isn’t just American.

The problem today is that, especially with globalization, we have different culture bubbles across the world.  Some of those “bubbles” coincide with national barriers, but many don’t. In a way, I’m reminded of the “Well of Souls” books by the late Jack Chalker, where there’s a massive “world” in which smaller worlds are separated by physical barriers, and the physical and cultural rules are different… except our bubbles aren’t protectively physically separated from each other.

India and Pakistan live in separate “bubbles”… and to make matters worse, each has nuclear capabilities.  Iran and Israel live in vastly different bubbles… and before long the Iranians likely will have nuclear weapons as well.

In much of the Middle East, women and children are still property (and yes, I know, that for all practical purposes, Rick Santorum and many Republicans believe the same thing, except they cloak it in terms of preserving traditional beliefs and personal freedoms – of men, of course), and people in those Middle Eastern cultures believe that Americans are infidels.  Do we live in a bubble… or do they?

The Japanese, those oh so polite folks, are one of the most xenophobic cultures around, at least if you’re Ainu or Chinese with roots in Japan for decades or centuries.

What bothers me is not that so many of us live in bubbles, but that so many of us are so absolutely convinced that the way of life in our bubble is the only way – and that laws should be enacted to force “our” way on others, whether those laws deal with abortion and restricting free speech in the United States or insisting on strict Sharia law in the Middle East or… [fill in the blank].  All too many nations, if not states and regions within those nations, seek to not only change their neighbors and their enemies, but also to restrict the rights of those within their own societies… and I’m not talking about civil order, but more basic rights, such as the rights to free speech, the rights to believe in whatever Deity the individual wishes (or not to believe), the right not only to own property, but the right to buy or sell it, regardless of faith or color…

Paraphrasing the Bard…

Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire, burn; and caldron bubble.
Legislate all into our bubble,
Turn the world to strife and rubble.

The big old idea behind much of the Republican Party today is the idea of states’ rights, that somehow devolution of federal “overcontrol” and federal powers to the states will not only solve our problems but give us greater freedoms.  It’s a lovely argument, but it doesn’t hold water if you look at the origin of so-called states’ rights and what they really mean.

The fundamental issue behind the vast majority of issues debated under the rubric of “states rights” is the issue of property rights, in particular property rights as they existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in English speaking lands, i.e., the property rights of landed white males.  At that time, not only were real estate and structures considered property, but so were wives and all unmarried females, as well as underage males [unless they were the sole surviving heir, requiring a guardian to protect that property], and, of course, slaves.  The initial impetus for the American Revolution was the infringement of property rights of white males in the colonies without their consent or participation.

After the revolution, among the first champions of states’ rights were the Federalists of the New England states, who proposed secession from the union at the Hartford Convention of 1814-15 over the War of 1812, which they opposed because the war effectively infringed on their trade with England and Europe… and their property rights.     In 1832, the state of South Carolina passed a Nullification Ordinance, declaring null and void the federal tariffs imposed in 1828, because those tariffs increased the costs of British and European manufactured goods being imported to the south and thus threatened the value of southern cotton prosperity. President Andrew Jackson sent a flotilla to blockade South Carolina ports, and threatened to send federal troops as well.  Following that, the next to raise the issue of states’ rights were the states of the confederacy, and they wanted those rights not only in order to continue the right to enslave others, but also to ban the dissemination of anti-slavery literature in the southern states, because both acts infringed on their rights to their property – slaves in particular.

After Reconstruction, the states’ rights position centered on the use, largely in the south, on ways to restrict voting rights of blacks, equal access to education and other facilities. In fact, in 1948, the so-called segregationist “Dixiecrat party” was officially called the “States’ Rights Party,” and the term “states’ rights” was an open “code” term for supporters of segregation.

Over the last fifty years, the usage of the term has broadened, but in general it’s been used to identify opposition to federal laws or regulations unpopular in specific states.

In 1964, the state of California enacted a Proposition 14, which nullified the federal Fair Housing Act, a proposition later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.  Again, the state was acting to allow discrimination in housing, by supporting the “right” of owners to refuse to sell or rent property on the basis of the buyer’s or renter’s religion, creed, or color.  What Proposition 14 attempted was to continue as a property right the absolute right of the seller to determine who could purchase property on the basis of the purchaser’s color, creed, or other factors not related to his or her financial ability to meet the sales price.  Proposition 14 would have established in law an inequality in freedom to purchase or rent property, arrogating the rights of the property owner over the rights of some groups of buyers, resulting in a diminution or restriction of freedom.

Another “leftover” issue from the white male property owner’s rights is that of reproductive freedom.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, as property, women had no such rights, even if their lives were threatened by childbearing. Both before and after the U.S. Supreme Court decision on abortion [Roe v. Wade] many opponents of abortion insisted, and still do, that whether abortion should be legal should be a matter of state law, effectively making the point that they want states to limit women’s freedom to determine what happens to their own body.  Regardless of the moral issues, in practical terms, the demand for states’ rights is a way to obtain restriction of personal freedom, in effect a carryover of male property rights, and in no way an expansion of freedom.  The ramifications of Roe v Wade do not require any woman to have an abortion, even in the cases of rape or incest.  They leave the decision to her.  To give that decision to anyone else is essentially re-affirming that child-bearing women are property.

The issues over the teaching of birth control, evolution, climate change are not about faith or states’ rights; they’re essentially about power over what children should be taught, and they’re also an extension of the “property mindset.”  Those who oppose such teaching are effectively stating that they do not believe that children should have the freedom to be exposed to such knowledge, and that parents regard their children as property and should control to what knowledge those children should be exposed.

Other “states’ rights” issues follow a similar pattern. Another “states’ rights” issue was raised with the Obama Affordable Healthcare Act.  A number of states have filed lawsuits over the provisions, but what tends to be overlooked is that close to 50 million Americans have no healthcare – and that’s the largest number and percentage of uninsured in any advanced western nation.  Furthermore, under the previous practices of the insurance industry, the majority of the uninsured not afford health care or could not obtain it at all.  The legislation effectively curtailed the “rights” of the insurance industry to refuse coverage, but expanded the rights of 50 million people to obtain it.  How does this restrict overall freedoms?

A great many of the federal regulations that states’ rights activists and others find excessive and burdensome, such as environmental regulations, financial regulations, and even regulations requiring access for the disabled, are about restricting property rights because the unrestricted exercise of those rights infringes the freedom of others.  The right to operate a factory or a power plant without regulation allows pollution or air and water and can impair the health of not only the environment, but of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of individuals.  The same is true of the Food and Drug acts. Do some regulations go too far?  Undoubtedly, but those regulations were enacted because the unrestrained exercise of property rights proved unhealthy to millions, and in a heavily populated world, everyone’s rights impinge on everyone else, a fact conveniently overlooked by those who champion “states’ rights.”

Here in Utah, virtually every piece of legislation bandied about on the states’ rights platform is not about more rights, but about restricting rights.  The legislature is now considering a bill to prohibit photographing of farms and agriculture, because animal rights groups might target abusive Utah farmers.  It has restricted the dissemination of information about birth control to students.  It is attempting to take over the administration of Medicare and Medicaid in order to limit services.  It is seriously considering a law to claim all federal lands as state lands, so that it can grant mineral leases to private industry, and it has already given the state the power to condemn private lands to allow access to all mineral and mining production areas.  Similar restrictive laws are being attempted and enacted in a number of other states as well.

I’m sorry… but the states’ rights argument is almost always used either to restrict the freedoms of large numbers of people or to maintain or enhance the rights of small numbers of people, if not both, and historically, that has almost always been its use, even as those people who champion the supremacy of truly old-fashioned private property rights claim to be for the rights of the people.

Just which rights for what people?

The other day my wife and I read an editorial which listed the unpleasant situation facing young people today, which cited the difficulties they faced, one of which was that more than half of the people aged 18-34 worked in a job to pay the bills, not because it was a career choice. Then we looked at each other and laughed.  We weren’t laughing to ridicule anyone, but because the entire idea of “career choices” is so American and so recent a phenomenon… and yet it’s almost a given today that it’s a hardship not to have a “career choice.”  Except for the upper class and upper middle class, which comprise perhaps ten percent of the population, there haven’t been many career choices for most people in the United States for most of its history. Throughout history, young people either followed in their parents’ craft or trade or in that of another crafter who needed a spare pair of hands.  People felt fortunate to be able to make ends meet, and many could not even do that.

For most of us who predate the Baby Boomers, even if we were able to find a job in a field of our choice, the positions open were usually limited and involved more than a few trade-offs, including moving all over the country.  There were usually many qualified applicants for each job, and in many fields this is still true.  There are usually several hundred applicants, if not more, for each opening in my wife’s profession, and in our entire working lives, neither of us ever has had the luxury of making a choice between two jobs, and more than once took jobs that were anything but ideal to “pay the bills.” This was true for most people of our not-quite-that-advanced age.

So… it’s no surprise that we laughed at the idea that “taking a job to pay the bills” was thought to be such a mighty hardship on younger workers. Jobs exist to fill the needs of those who offer them, not to meet the career aspirations of workers.  That’s frankly one reason why I wrote long hours after the day job for years… because it was the only way I could get to where I wanted to be, and I know I’m exceedingly fortunate to have been able to get where I am – and it’s also why I still work long hours… because I never want to be at the whim of an employer again.  But… to even hint that career choices are some sort of right or that today’s young workers are facing an unprecedented change in not having that many “career choices”… that is laughable.

What I find actually amazing is that we as a society have progressed over the past century or so to the point where half the young workers are actually working in a field of their choice. If that is indeed true, then it marks real progress… but it also wouldn’t hurt to remember that such is not the case in all too many countries across the globe… and it’s anything but a “right.”

According to a recent article in the Economist, the United States has become “America the Overregulated,” and that’s quite a claim, especially from a British publication. There’s been a great deal of rhetoric about the amount of “unnecessary” federal regulations, particularly from the far right, but also across the political spectrum.  Given the opposition to excessive regulation, why does it continue?

The simple, and largely accurate, answer is because there’s political pressure for more regulations to protect everything from workers to threatened and endangered species.  Personally, I believe the majority of that pressure comes because of real concerns, but that raises another question.  Why do we need regulations to deal with these concerns?

That’s where matters get interesting.  One reason often cited is that, in a world economy, goods are purchased largely on price, and companies will do anything they can to keep costs down – unless effective regulations preclude practices that are unsafe, unhealthy, polluting, or environmentally degrading.  Yet… over the past two years, U.S. corporate profits have soared, while wages have remained largely stagnant.  At the same time, more and more wealth and income have gone to the top 1/10^th of one percent of the U.S. population.  People – those who have jobs – are working harder and longer, and usually under more stress, just to keep what they have… but the rich get richer.

Maybe… just maybe, we’ve been looking at only part of the problem.  Would all of those regulations be necessary if there weren’t so much pressure to be more and more profitable?  And that such profitability depends on lower costs and greater productivity?  What if those at the top of the pyramid, and I’m talking about the 1/10^th of one percent, not the top one or two percent, didn’t get to keep over 85% of their income?

Would investment bankers and CEOs be quite so inclined to push everything and everyone to the wall to get their $100 million bonuses if the government took 90% of everything over, say, $10 million?

A study from the University of Southern California found that a high percentage of young investment bankers who worked 80-120 weeks developed a wide range of stress-related illnesses and conditions that would likely reduce their life expectancy and that such conditions contributed to the high rate of burn-out in the field. We’ve also seen a huge growth in the use of steroids and other substances that build muscles in young adulthood, especially for young men seeking a professional athletic career, but such artificially enhanced muscular abilities almost invariably result in early death among those who wish to be professional athletes.  Would the temptation be quite so great, if 90% of those $10-$100 million contracts went to the government? Would all the outsourcing take place if there weren’t so much pressure to be more and more profitable?

It seems to me that a great deal of the excesses in our society have been driven by greed… but if government were the beneficiary of the greatest excesses of that greed… would the pressures be so great to cut all the corners?  Would regulation after regulation be so necessary to curb the excesses of the financial sector?  Or to protect workers from greater and greater pressure to produce more and more with less and less?

Just a thought.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently declared that President Obama’s acts as President were about “some phony theology… not a theology based on the Bible.” Frankly, I find an assertion such as this incredibly disturbing, because what Santorum is effectively saying is that public policy should be based on his reading of Christian theology.  As I’ve noted before, as have Constitutional scholars for more than a century, while the Founding Fathers did mention the Deity, they made it very clear that specific theologies – or theological belief systems – were not to be a part of government.  Yet Santorum is apparently attacking the president – and anyone else who doesn’t believe as Santorum does – for failing to base their policies and acts upon specific doctrinaire theological points.

Like it or not, the President of the United States and the Congress are responsible for the health and welfare of all the people of the United States and for allowing all of them the same freedoms, as set out in the Constitution and as interpreted, again, like it or not, by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now, according to the best figures I can find, 75% of Americans define themselves as members of faiths considered Christian by most theologians.  Fifteen percent are atheists, and the remaining ten percent belong to other faiths.  Of those considered Christian, 25% are Catholic, 15% Baptist, and 4% evangelical or Pentecostal Christians, meaning that, in rough terms, essentially half of the American people, assuming they follow the theological guidelines of their faiths, might agree with Senator Santorum’s theological beliefs. The problem with Santorum’s position is that as much as half the population might well not agree, and fully one quarter of all Americans are not believing Christians at all.

In addition, a study conducted by Baylor University, based on interviews with 35,000 people, definitely a healthy sample, showed that more than 40% of the people had changed their faith and belief at least once in their lifetime, which also suggests that “faith” is far less constant than the protections in the Constitution.

Even more to the point, Santorum is not talking about freedom of religion, but about imposing restrictions on all members of society, restrictions based on his theological biases, and restrictions with which tens of millions of Americans do not agree.  Those who agree with the senator are not precluded from following exactly, and with no persecution whatsoever, the dictates of their own conscience insofar as their own property and bodies are concerned.  Under the Constitution and current law, however, they are precluded from imposing those beliefs on others, and effectively limiting the rights of half the population [women]. The senator clearly wants to change this.

It’s taken a long time to reduce discrimination based on color, creed, or gender… and Santorum’s use of religion, whether intended or not, would essentially turn the clock back to a time of greater discrimination under the guise of “true religion.”

Putting power in the hands of religious true believers has been a disaster wherever it’s happened, whether in the time of the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, the ayatollahs in Iran, the Taliban in Afghanistan, or any other number of instances.  Doing so here wouldn’t be any different… and it would be a betrayal of the Founding Fathers that all so many of those of Santorum’s stripe quote so much when it suits their needs… and ignore when it doesn’t.