No bully left behind

Rush Limbaugh and the conservative hacks who savaged and defamed Sandra Fluke for urging Congress to protect contraception coverage in The Affordable Care Act, deserve our pity; just as any other bully does.

All the smoke and sparks about sponsors, free speech, and religious freedom veil what Rush and all other agents of torment are telling the world about themselves. As well, all the PSA talk about bullies as a social menace, how to survive them, or about how "it gets better" (though that's a crucial message)--misses the message conveyed by their acts of cruelty. What they illustrate are the lengths (or depths) bullies are willing to go to forget or smother the memory of their own suffering (always endured as children).

Most certainly not one member of Rush Limbaugh's radio audience (numbered in the tens of millions) was present at any moment of humiliation or deprivation he experienced as a child. Yet his massive appeal owes to the bond he shares with listeners as individuals who rile up over any reminder of their own pain or vulnerability; summoning a pox upon anyone who might dare let their difference from prevailing norms, show.

Anyone who might scoff at this reality have no other way to account for how a grown adult could recklessly and repeatedly speculate on the sexual habits of a woman he knows nothing about. Oh, but Rush is an entertainer--a provocateur--wanting to reach the widest audience possible, his defenders explain away.

Indeed, leave it to Rush and his drones to 'give away the goods' as it concerns their own sexual hangups or unexplored psyches: sexual pleasure and self-empowered women rank as intolerable aspects of our culture that must--must!--be ridiculed, debased, caricatured.

The struggle against bullies demands another, mostly unexplored front--that is the threshold of their psyches. All responses to hostility should point out that the bully is just as wounded as the victim he attempts to afflict. Instead of allowing the brute imagine his actions come from a place of strength, the social menace should endure a gauntlet of reminders that the victim's greatest offense was reminding the agressor of his own weakness.

Rush Limbaugh and petty tyrants of his ilk may not reform their behavior as a result of being thus confronted; this approach at the very least reframes the prevailing conversation about bullies--that they share a deep kinship with the victims they torment to forget.

As we lay dying: terminal illness as a national metaphor

Earl Shorris is dying. A cancer survivor, he endures the near failure of organs, shuffling among hospitals and a kaleidescope of attending doctors. All the while he muses about death and suffering, by turns elegaic and rhapsodic.

His essay, "American Vespers: The ebbing of the body politic", featured in Harper's Dec. 2011 issue, is a memoir in diptych; a view of terminal illness as an individual and as a metaphor for a waning nation. What a compelling read for the end of a troubled 2011.

The pivotal passage between both frames reads: "I lie alongside my country, patriot of my body and my home, dying from an enemy within. Everything had come for me as it had come for America. How similarly we failed!"

For Earl Shorris, Paul Valéry stands at the terminus of a string of writers known as "decadent"--those who criticized the French middle class for their materialism made possible by the output the Industrial Revolution. The decadents considered the national decline as a loss of vitality. Though Shorris does not state this specifically, their art making emphasized passion and beauty in abundance--proportional to the excess of accumilating products.

Because of the bourgeois fixation on accumilation, decadents saw a nation in decline; a loss of vitality. Though Shorris does not state this specifically, their art making emphasized passion and beauty in abundance--a revolt proportional to the excess of middle class materialism.

A nation endures only so much consumption before illness sets in. In Shorris's view, Ronald Reagan introduced the pathogen--a deficiency of ethics--that now afflicts the United States. To emphasize the point by contrast, Shorris refers to Scottish Enlightenment thinker Frances Hutcheson, who argued that the greatest good is the happiness of others. The heirs of Reagan's ethics legacy--Kristol, Cheney, Bush, Podhoretz, Falwell, Strauss and Bloom--said otherwise through their policy decisions.

The writer takes certain liberties interpreting the impact of Ronald Reagan's candidacy and presidency. There is the first speech Reagan gave after wrapping up the Republican presidential nomination in Aug. 1980. At a county fair in Mississippi, not far from where three civil rights workers were slain in 1964, Reagan asserted "states' rights" in an address to a Southern audience--considered at best an insensitive gesture toward the victims of intolerance. "States rights" is well known among Southerners as a polite reference to turning back the clock on civil rights and racial integration. Additionally, Shorris recalls the time Reagan met with the Republican black caucus and could not recall the name of a single member of the group.

The infirmity that now sickens this nation sprouted without being recognized. "The cell that multiplies, the killing thing," Shorris writes, "lies beneath the observable world." Indeed, the pestilent agent lies out of sight because we, as a nation, are far more complicit than we are capable of acknowledging.

With the ascendancy of a figure like Reagan or George Walker Bush, one might point out that such figures simply reflect a prevailing quality or character already at work within a nation's citizenry.

A Reagan or Bush manifests simply because enough of us--void of curiosity, brazen and shadow projecting louts--have summoned such leaders.

In a medical case such as ours the undeniable message is, "Sick nation, heal thyself."

Suddenly Santorum (now hoping the money comes in)

Rick Santorum's surprise showing at the Republican Iowa caucus and his prospects for competing in New Hampshire, switches focus to the dollar figure his campaign has spent; finance folks like to bandy about those ROI (return on investment) numbers factoring the investment value of each vote.

This kind of talk illustrates what fundamentally afflicts this country's decision making when choosing its decision makers. Now that Santorum's campaign is suddenly competitive the question becomes, will he or won't he raise the cash to remain viable beyond this Iowa surge?

Why couldn't the good citizens of New Hampshire, or of any other state, muster a broad enough voting presence that forces the millions in big dollar donations into political irrelevance?

What the 'free speech' of wealthy campaign donors ultimately represents is a built-in voter apathy that tilts electoral politics into the 1%'s favor. Voters should view Rick Santorum's unlikely success as what is possible when a plurality of citizens casts aside prevailing thought to cast their vote.

Quiet riot brewing

A fascinating read in the Harper's Jan. 2012 issue features the story of foreclosed homeowners challenging lenders in courts across the country. Among organizations that have taken shape to push back against banks is the National Homeowners Cooperative.

As Harper's writer Christopher Ketcham reveals in his report, "Stop Payment", the NHC teaches homeowners how to counteract a bank's foreclosing efforts. Suing for "quiet title" compels a bank to produce evidence of an unbroken chain of title (documenting ownership going back to the time property was first parceled and recorded). If the foreclosing institution cannot prove it owns the loan, then the title in question is considered "clouded".

Enter the Mortgage Electronic Registry Systems, what Ketcham calls "the heart of the clouded title problem." The purpose of the MERS--going back to the mid 1990s when Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and a handful of major banks launched it--has been to keep an electronic record of the sale of mortgages between lenders. In doing so it became the 'in-name-only' owner of the loan for the public record. This allowed mortgage companies an alternative to the time-consuming and costly recording process handled through the county clerk's office.

Ketcham's piece does not mention the specifics of the county clerk's office role after the advent of MERS, except to state that the electronic registry "had single handedly unraveled centuries of precedent in property titling and mortgage recordation...".

A very telling quote from University of Utah law professor Christopher Peterson captures the meaning of MERS's 'achievement' on a wider scope: "What's happened is that, almost overnight, we've switched from democracy in real-property recording to oligarchy real property recording.... There was no court case behind this, no statute from Congress or the state legislatures. It was accompished in a private corporate decision. The banks just did it."

Professor Peterson also considers it no coincidence that as more Americans face foreclosure than at any other time since the Great Depression, it happens as the records of home ownership and mortgages shift to a private database.

An estimate of the number of mortgages held by MERS stands at around 62 million.

Occupy Wall Street: what next?

 Talk is abundant about what next steps the civil protest movement faces. As the cold weather sets in and municipality tolerance unravels, should the occupation continue--"protest as usual"--or could the movement parley the national spotlight and notoriety into a meaningful, sustained strategy?

They could do a lot worse than to peer over winter's horizon toward the 2012 primary and fall elections. Though the Occupy movement has been acknowledged by candidates for president and various other elected officials, nothing has changed about the political system that continues to favor wealthy and corporate interests over everyone else.

OWS has sensibly called for reform of our influence peddling election process--which allowed elected officials the latitude to look the other way as underregulated investment and banking industries executed one of the great wealth-siphoning swindles of our lifetimes. Not only have the securities fraud decision makers remained unpunished, the galactically risky derivatives market carries on unregulated and in the dark.

Protest participants continue to build a consensus on a number of demands for which they assemble; the most relevant and actionable being the reform of campaign finance.

Getting money out of politics has summoned a number of solutions ranging from publicly financing elections to amending the constitution. Robert Steele, former CIA agent turned government reform activist makes the case for an electoral reform act that voters could leverage against incumbant members of Congress--if the legislative body failed to pass it.

More recently an election reform working group arrived at the conclusion that "[though] the bill is an outstanding effort worthy of passing, it is too complex for the average citizen to support without an extensive education campaign, and therefore not passable in the short run."

What could force this issue as a make-or-break matter for incumbants and opposition candidates? A non-partisan, legislation-focused online resource called aGREATER.US may have an answer. Today the organization is in the process of building consensus to address what voters consider the most pressing problems our country faces. Near the top of all issues participants have submitted and voted on, is a campaign finance reform effort called The PRE-Plan.

The 'plan' is comprised of the following three initiatives: clean elections standards, term limits and ending gerrymandering. The lynchpin to this effort involves compelling a public commitment to these goals from those running for elected office--incumbant and challenger. Depending on who is willing to commit to the PRE-Plan, voters can gauge which candidate stands the best chance of making said reforms law.

Assuming the PRE-Plan reaches an indispensable plurality of voters, it will be fascinating to watch how candidates will reconcile reaching reform-minded voters whileaccepting large, bundled campaign donations.

As effort-worthy such aims are, they do not address the influence gap that privileges wealthy campaign contributors over all other voters. Most members of Congress, obliged to the givers of such generous donations, would not be inclined to support any legislative measures that limited the elite contributor's influence. The prevailing assumption for a viable candidacy is having to raise stunning sums of money to pay for ultra costly airtime on television and radio.

The question for voters is whether they can exert the collective will to restore electoral accountability to a prodigal U.S. Congress.