Religion, Morality and Crime

 [NOTE: This was originally written in October, 2014, and may not reflect the latest statistics.]

As an atheist I have come to expect that in any debate about religion with believers someone will eventually ask the question, "Without religion, what's to stop people from raping/robbing/murdering each other?". My first thought is usually, "Well, it's good to know that the only thing stopping you from doing those things is the fear of divine punishment." With this question in mind, I decided to look up the per capita rape and murder rates by country, as well as rates of "irreligion" in those same countries. Here's what I found:

Countries that are less religious:
Sweden
Rate of irrelegion: 88%
Murder (per 100,000): 0.7
Rape (per 100,000): 63.5

Denmark
Rate of irrelegion: 83%
Murder (per 100,000): 0.8
Rape (per 100,000): 6.4

United Kingdom
Rate of irrelegion: 76%
Murder (per 100,000): 1.0
Rape (per 100,000): ??

Japan
Rate of irrelegion: 71%
Murder (per 100,000): 0.3
Rape (per 100,000): 1.0


Countries that are more religious:
Afghanistan
Rate of irrelegion: 3%
Murder (per 100,000): 6.5
Rape (per 100,000): ??

Rwanda
Rate of irrelegion: 5%
Murder (per 100,000): 23.1
Rape (per 100,000): ??

South Africa
Rate of irrelegion: 20%
Murder (per 100,000): 31.0
Rape (per 100,000): 132.4

Mexico
Rate of irrelegion: 44%
Murder (per 100,000): 21.5
Rape (per 100,000): 13.2


United States
Rate of irrelegion: 36%
Murder (per 100,000): 4.7
Rape (per 100,000): 27.3

There is a pattern among this sample. The less religious countries have far fewer murders and, with the exception of Sweden, fewer rapes as well ( though I couldn't find rape stats for all of the countries). Of course, I'm sure you could find another set of countries that would yield the opposite results, with the less religious countries having higher rates of violent crime, but I used this set of nations to prove a point. If more religion equals more morality, how does one explain these statistics?

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_by_country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Rape-rate#country

The Genius of ISIS

(NOTE: This piece was originally written three days after the terror attacks in Paris in November, 2015.)

First, let's go back. On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda pulled off the deadliest terror attack in American history, killing nearly 3,000 people, destroying the Twin Towers and severely damaging the Pentagon. I would argue that al-Qaeda's greatest success was not scored on 9/11. Their greatest success came after. You see, we here in the West are very predictable people. When a shock to the system occurs, our brains shut off and we react strictly from the gut. Thinking deeply about things is seen as hesitation, while knee-jerk reactions based on a shallow reading of events is often seen as strength. In the wake or midst of some frightening or terrible event we always overreact, both politically and militarily, and the people cheer as they watch their rights erode in the name of safety.

So no, al-Qaeda's greatest triumph wasn't 9/11 itself; their great victory can be found in our reaction to 9/11. Now we live with the Patriot Act and the NDAA, the NSA bulk collection of our phone calls and snooping of our e-mails (Constitution be damned). Now we must look at our own government through a lens of paranoia and distrust. We fought two wars that cost trillions of dollars and the lives of thousands of American soldiers, as well as over a hundred thousand civilian lives in the countries who were the target of our just crusade. Here at home we saw a predictable rise in Islamophobia. Attacks on mosques (as well as attempts by some politicians and so-called patriot groups to ban the building of mosques altogether), attacks on Muslims (as well as many Sikhs due to the confusion among many dimwitted bigots of the differences between Sikhs and Muslims).

We had people harassing Muslim-Americans from the West Coast (I recall a story about a Muslim-American group that held an anti-domestic violence banquet, and a group of "patriots" were stationed right outside, screaming at men in the company of their wives and children that they were all child molesters) to the East Coast (remember when Republican Peter King wanted to set up HUAC-style hearings to investigate the "loyalty" of Muslim-Americans in government?). Time and again Muslim-Americans were told that they will always be "other", that they will always be suspect, that they will never be "real" Americans. They are told by society at large that they are born guilty, and that no amount of patriotism or loyalty will wash away that guilt.

So now this. The new kid on the block is ISIS. Despite repeated claims by conservatives that ISIS represents a war on Christianity by Muslims, the truth is that the vast majority of ISIS's victims are their fellow Muslims. What many fail to see is ISIS's true aim. George Orwell wrote:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power...Power is not a means; it is an end...The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.

Just as Ingsoc dressed its quest for power in revolutionary robes, so ISIS dresses its own quest in religious ones. And of what use is power if there is no one to exert that power over?

Right now tens of thousands of civilians a day are fleeing the power of ISIS, and these people are landing on the shores of Europe. These are people who have left their entire lives behind them to get on a raft with their children and take a trip that they must accept might very likely end with a watery death, all for a chance to live without the threat of death squads and death from the sky. Well, for ISIS this just won't do. How to put a stop to it? That's a simple question when you are dealing with an enemy as predictable as the West. Slip a couple terrorists in among the refugees and viola!, Western governments now have the reason they've been looking for to stop the refugees at the border, to block them out, to send them back. If a violent death awaits them when they are sent back, well, that's between them and their God. We're just protecting ourselves.

But stopping the exodus of potential victims is only one part of the plan. Other parts are playing out just as predictably. The smartest thing about the recent Paris attack (and the Charlie Hebdo attack before it), is that they knew enough to attack white folks. Anyone remember the attack last month in Turkey, where a peace rally was bombed and ninety-seven people died? Remember any "we stand with Turkey" rallies? How about the terrorist bombing in Lebanon just days ago that killed forty civilians? No? Nobody? Precisely. Killing tan-skinned Muslims is good for terrifying the locals, but it gets little play in Western media. From a PR standpoint it's small potatoes. Attacking fair-skinned people where they live? Now that gets attention.

After Charlie Hebdo there were reprisal attacks against Muslim civilians and businesses in France, and I see no reason to think the same won't happen again. French President Hollande wants to have a three month state of emergency, during which civil rights will be cheerfully disregarded, and suspicion will be treated as accomplished fact.

Here in the States someone just tried to burn down a mosque. There may very well be more attacks on Muslim-Americans (and Sikh-Americans...again, the whole thing about xenophobic extremists not being overly smart). Several Governors are threatening to refuse to take Syrian refugees. (How they plan to prevent refugees from being brought to their states, or traveling there freely if they arrive first in another state, none of them have said.) We have contenders for the Presidency of the United States declaring that only Christian refugees should be accepted, and Muslim refugees forbidden. There are increasing calls for an all-out ground war, so another trillion dollars and thousands more American soldiers' lives can be wasted. We have ridiculous threats to "nuke the Middle East" proposed by amateur foreign policy “experts”.

And all the while disaffected Muslims in America, in France and in the rest of Europe are hearing the message loud and clear: You are not one of us. You will never be one of us. You will always be "other".

They are listening. And some of them, regrettably, will come to believe it is true.

And that is the genius if ISIS. In one stroke they have insured that we will help them by: A) Putting a cork in the exodus of their victims from the territories they control (so they can continue exerting power for power's sake), and B) Our predictable knee-jerk position of xenophobia and Islamophobia will be a better recruitment tool than they could ever have dreamed of.

Hats off to you ISIS. Well played. I can only hope that one day we will actually learn enough from our mistakes to keep from repeating them. But I'm not holding my breath.

Obama, the Job Killer?

It’s an oft-repeated claim by the Right: Obama is a job killer. If we don’t put a Republican in the White House soon, a “job creator” who can reverse the devastation that Barack Obama has wrought upon the U.S. economy, America may become a dystopian wasteland in which roaming gangs of cannibals prowl the streets, hunting their fellow man for sustenance…or something like that. Okay, that last part may just be the plot of a script I wrote called Cannibal Carnage. I sent a copy of it to several production companies about eight years ago, and I’m still waiting to hear back from them. Fingers crossed!!!

Much of the blame for Obama’s “job killing” has been placed on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly referred to as Obamacare, which all of the current Republican candidates running for president promise to repeal in toto if they are elected in November. What they will replace it with…well, don’t worry about it. They’ve got a plan, but you’ll have to put them in the White House if you want to see it.

Bobby Jindal, ex-Governor of Louisiana and amateur exorcist, once said of the ACA, “Why not delay all of the mandates in Obamacare [which] has become such a job killer in our economy.” Ted Cruz, Canada’s least favorite son, said, “It’s been a disaster. It is the biggest job-killer in this country; millions of Americans have lost their jobs.” Marco Rubio said that the ACA was a “certified job-killer”. So, is Obama in general (and the ACA in particular) really a job killer? Is Obama a Marxist who has crushed businesses large and small in an attempt to destroy capitalism?

Let us begin by looking at what President Obama was faced with when he took office in January, 2009. Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, inherited a 4.2% unemployment rate (courtesy of Bill Clinton). When he left office the nation was in a recession and unemployment was at 7.8%. I guess “trickledown economics” didn’t quite trickle down the way it was expected to. When Obama sat behind his desk in the Oval Office for the first time he found himself sitting at the helm of a nation that was losing 700,000 jobs a month, and whose stock market was sinking faster than the Titanic.

An economy in freefall can’t be turned around on a dime, and over the first nine months of Obama’s presidency the unemployment rate continued to rise, peaking at 10.1% in October, 2009, two months before Obama’s greatest “job killing” bill, the ACA,  would be passed by the Senate. Since then the unemployment rate has fallen to 4.9%, the lowest it has been since February, 2008. Here is a graph showing the official unemployment rate over the last ten years (recession period shaded gray):

 Source: MacroTrends

“But how can this be?”, some of you may be asking. Didn’t Donald Trump say that the real unemployment rate may be as high as 42%? Trump’s claim seems to have been gleaned from a column by Ronald Reagan’s budget director David Stockman. Politifact explains Strockman’s reasoning thusly:

Stockman calculated that there are currently 210 million Americans between the ages of 16 and 68 -- what he calls a "plausible measure of the potential workforce." If you assume that each of those people is able to hold down a full-time job, he wrote, they would offer a total of 420 billion potential working hours. However, during 2014, Stockman noted, only 240 billion working hours were actually recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Using this formula Strockman calculated that the unemployment rate was really 42.9%. However, as the same Politifact article makes clear, Strockman’s calculation treats people working part-time hours as partly unemployed,  and doesn’t account for the valid reasons why many part-time workers may be doing so by choice, e.g. parents unable to work full-time because of child-rearing duties, students who are balancing work and school, and the disabled.

“Okay,” you may concede, “the official unemployment rate, also called the U-3 rate, may be 4.9%, but what about the U-6 rate, which includes those who are officially unemployed as well as those who are working part time for economic reasons and those who are ‘marginally attached’ to the work force?”

And I would ask, “Why are you speaking like that? Talk like a normal person!”

It’s true that the U-6 rate, now and always, is higher than the U-3 rate. The current U-6 rate is 9.9%, down from a high of 17.4% in the same month that the official unemployment rate peaked in 2009, and from 14%, which was where it was at in the month that Obama first took office. Another graph showing the unemployment rate over the last 22 years (U-3 in red, U-6 in green):

Source: MacroTrends

As stated above George W. Bush left office with a U-6 rate of 14%  compared to 7.3% when he took office. So we see that both the U-3 and U-6 rates have markedly improved under Obama compared to where they were when he started his first term.

Yet 53% of Republicans still think the unemployment rate has risen under Obama, a misconception happily reinforced by the Right-Wing Spin Machine and the party’s presidential candidates. The truth is that under Obama the economy has had a record 71 straight months of private-sector job growth, while the size of the government, which the Right claims is too big and bloated, actually shrunk.

Here are three charts showing the performance of Bush v. Obama using three different measurements, fig. 1:  private sector job creation,  fig 2: official (i.e. U-3) unemployment rates, and  fig. 3: corporate after-tax profits (this last puts the lie to the Right’s claims that Obama is a Far Left Socialist who has spent seven years destroying business in this country):

fig. 1

fig, 2

fig. 3

Source: ourfuture.org

There is a saying attributed to former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York): Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. The 53% of Republicans who think unemployment has gone up under Obama are not entitled to their own facts, to say nothing of the 43% who believe he his is a Muslim,  or the 35% who believe he was born outside of the United States. Neither Obama, nor the ACA, is a job killer. It’s not just me saying that; reality is saying that.

Lastly, let’s talk about the ACA, a bill that the Right warned would lead us down the road to jackboot Socialism, mass unemployment and ultimately the death of the American Dream. Since 2010 the rate of uninsured Americans has fallen from 16% to 9%:

Source: Forbes

That seven point drop isn’t just a number--it’s millions of Americans who no longer have to worry about what will happen if they get sick, Americans who will no longer have to wait until a treatable condition escalates and become untreatable, who will no longer be clogging emergency rooms for illnesses that would be more cost-effectively treated by a family doctor. People no longer have to fear that they will be denied health coverage because they have a pre-existing condition, or that they will be dropped on a technicality if they already have insurance and they get sick, or hit an arbitrary cap on benefits set by their insurer.

How many more Americans would have to access to life-saving health coverage if the governors of the 19 states that have refuse to expand their Medicare programs (nearly all of these states being governed by Republicans) would stop their political posturing? How many people have died, or will die, because a small group of people, many of whom pride themselves on their Christian values, have decided that turning their noses up at the President is more important than the health of their citizens?



sources:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate
http://www.macrotrends.net/1339/unemployment-rate-last-ten-years
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/11/20/the-amount-of-misinformation-about-our-economy-is-amazing/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/02/26/is-obamacare-a-job-killer/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2014/09/05/obama-outperforms-reagan-on-jobs-growth-and-investing/#1efb688820bc
http://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2015/11/05/americas-uninsured-rate-is-now-historically-low/#71964ef76f70
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/29/ted-cruz/ted-cruzs-pants-fire-claim-health-care-law-nations/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/30/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-unemployment-rate-may-be-42-perc/
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/01/cruz-claims-%E2%80%9Cmillions%E2%80%9D-have-lost-their-jobs-because-obamacare
http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/02/26/rubio-and-cruz-echo-right-wing-media-with-their/208840
http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/08/news/economy/us-economy-jobs-second-best-year-since-1999/
http://obamacarefacts.com/uninsured-rates/
http://historyinpieces.com/research/us-unemployment-rates-president
https://ourfuture.org/20141208/bush-vs-obama-on-the-economy-in-3-simple-charts
https://www.dpcc.senate.gov/?p=blog&id=462
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/01/14/job-shifts-under-obama-fewer-government-workers-more-caregivers-servers-and-temps/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/02/americans-obama-anti-christ-conspiracy-theories
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2015/09/01/iowa-poll-republicans-believe-obama-not-born-us/71502150/
http://familiesusa.org/product/50-state-look-medicaid-expansion

Block the vote: How Republicans are trying to rig the game in their favor

You would think that a party that claims to represent a "silent majority" of Americans wouldn't feel the need to rig the elections to the extent that the Republican Party does. These are just a few of the ways they do this:

Enacting voter ID laws

Like the poll tax (which disproportionately affected poor and minority voters) and literacy tests (which affected those same voters) before it, voter ID laws are a so-called common sense set of laws which, once you look into them, appear to be nothing more than an attempt to disenfranchise enough poor and minority voters to turn the election in the Republicans favor. Time and again when the Right is challenged to show cases in which voter impersonation fraud (the only type of voter fraud that voter ID laws protect against), they can never find anything but a handful.

 One researcher found that between 2000 and 2014 there were as many as 31 cases of voter impersonation fraud out of more than 1 billion total votes cast. That works out to about 0.0000031%  of votes. In order to prevent the 0.0000031% chance that a fraudulent vote may be cast, the Right is keen on passing voter ID laws which have the potential to take away the vote of millions of Americans, a disproportionate number of whom just happen to be minorities.  According to one study Hispanic voters are 3.2 times more likely than white voters to lack ID, while black voters are 2.3 times more likely to lack such ID.

One study concerning the reasons why eligible voters don't vote found that ID and/or registration issues were cited by blacks and Hispanics more than twice as often as non-Hispanic whites. The age group (of all races) found to be most affected were 18-30 year -olds, i.e. younger voters who Democrats typically do better in the polls with.

In the run-up to the 2012 election,  Pennsylvania House majority leader Mike Turzai said that his state's recently passed voter ID law was “gonna allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”  Of course Obama actually won that state., but after the election Pennsylvania Republican Party Chair Robert Gleason bragged that his state’s voter ID law had cut Obama's victory margin by 5 points compared to his win in Pennsylvania in 2008.

I hear you right now asking, “But why don’t people just go out and get an ID?” Good question. Well, it's not always easy to get the required ID. In Wisconsin, Alabama, and Mississippi, fewer than half of all ID-issuing offices are open five days a week, none on weekends. In addition to this some DMV offices have unusual hours. The DMV office in Woodville, Mississippi is open only on the second Thursday of each month. The office in Sauk City, Wisconsin is only open on the fifth Wednesday of the month between the hours of 8:15 a.m. and 4 p.m. [Note: Only four months in 2016 have a fifth Wednesday.]  In Alabama, there were plans to close most of the state’s DMV offices. The state backed down only after a public outcry over the plan.

Even if one can get to a DMV office this doesn’t solve the problem for people who lack the proper paperwork to obtain the required ID, e.g. birth certificates and Social Security cards, as well as people who are homeless or itinerant and who may not be able to prove residency in the state where they are trying to get their ID.

Curbing early voting

Many black churches take part in “Souls to the Polls” voting drives, in which parishioners vote on the Sunday before Election Day. This is particularly helpful for older church members, as well as those who lack transportation and may not be able to get to the polls on their own. Church members can get rides from their fellow parishioners, or pile onto a charter bus and head to the polls together. In response  to this many Republican-controlled states have started trying to limit early-voting access.

One glaring example of anti-early voting efforts is Ohio. In 2012 Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted found himself at the center of controversy. Each county had a seemingly fair method of determining which counties would allow expanded voting hours, such as the Sunday before the election, and evening hours when it would be more convenient for working-class people to vote. Each county had a four-member board of elections, made up of two Republicans and two Democrats, and they would vote on whether or not to expand voting hours. So what’s the problem?  Whenever the four members on a board were deadlocked Husted got to break the tie. Naturally he chose time and again to limit expanded hours. In the case of  Montgomery County the four board members unanimously approved expanded weekday and weekend early voting hours. Then the two Republicans on the board reversed their decisions, and they found themselves deadlocked. Husted broke the tie, but not before ordering the two Democrats on the board to change their votes and suspending them when they refused.

Not convinced this all has anything to do with race?  Ohio GOP Chair Doug Preisse told the Columbus Dispatch, “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban voter-turnout machine.”

I wonder who he considers to be “urban” voters?

Purging the voter rolls

This method is particularity popular in Florida. Thousands of people are purged from the voter rolls prior to an election. The reason (supposedly) is to weed out ineligible voters, e.g. they are convicted felons (denying people convicted of a felony the right to vote for the rest of their lives being yet another method to disenfranchise minorities) or because they are non-citizens. When people have looked into it they have found that many of the affected people were thrown off the rolls erroneously,  sometimes simply because their name is similar to someone else who is ineligible to vote. The burden is then on the person who has been wrongly taken off the rolls (assuming they are even aware this has happened) to prove that they are eligible to vote.

Guess which racial group is affected most by these purges? In the 2000 Florida purge African-Americans accounted for 88% of those removed from the rolls, though they made up ~11% of Florida's voters. Keep in mind that this was under Gov. Jeb Bush’s watch, and Jeb’s brother George W. would go on to win Florida (and thereby the Presidential election) by a mere 537 votes. What would have been the outcome if thousands of minority voters who had their votes taken away had been allowed to cast a vote?

In 2012 the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals deemed an attempt by Republican Florida Gov. Rick Scott to purge the state’s voter rolls of non-citizens and other ineligible voters to be illegal. The Court found that two plaintiffs, both of whom were foreign-born but were naturalized citizens, were directly injured by the purge after their names were thrown out by mistake.

Curbing same-day voter registration

Last year Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (remember him?) found himself on the receiving end of a lawsuit by the ACLU on behalf of the NAACP, the League of Women Voters of Ohio and several African-American churches. The suit was filed in response to changes enacted by the Republican-controlled legislature and signed into law by Republican Gov. John Kasich that eliminated the “Golden Week”, during which voters could both register to vote and cast an absentee ballot in person through early voting.

Elsewhere the Kansas Black Leadership Council is calling for the state to allow people to register to vote on the day of the election. Kansas currently requires that voters register 21 days ahead of time. The Council contends that “allowing people to register to vote on Election Day would eliminate an extra step for those who don’t have the proper documentation when trying to register before the election”. Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach isn’t having it. I guess he just can’t risk that Kansas might become a hotbed of voter fraud that may sully the integrity of our elections.

There are other methods as well, such as not allowing college students to vote on campus or use campus ID’s to vote, limiting resources to urban polling sites so that people have to wait up to 8 hours in line to vote (and in some cases fail to make it to the front of the line before the polls close), as well as efforts to make sure the polls close early in the evening. Heaven forbid working-class voters, who have the least power when it comes to taking time off from work to vote, should have time to get to a polling place and cast their vote after they leave their job for the day.

It seems to me there is one thing that Republicans fear even more than well-known  Kenyan anti-imperialist President Barack HUSSEIN Obama (which sounds an awful lot like Osama). What is it that they fear most? They fear an informed voter heading out to the polls.

The truth is that they do not represent the silent majority, but rather a screeching minority, a group of people who are angry that the nation has moved on while they have stood in place, and are facing a future in which power and privilege may not come so easily to them. What we are seeing now across the nation are the death throes of the Old White Guard, which manifests itself in efforts to disenfranchise voters, to vilify the fact checkers (and even the facts themselves), and to raise ignorance, as well as paranoia, to a virtue.  The results of this are seen in the rise of venomous blowhards (like a certain man with a bad comb over) who use the age old method of convincing angry, confused people that all of their problems are because of “those people”, and that if we elect him he will put “those people” in their place and raise the nation again to its former glory.

sources:
http://www.thenation.com/article/ohio-gop-admits-early-voting-cutbacks-are-racially-motivated/
http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2015/04/aclu_secretary_of_state_jon_hu.html
https://www.brennancenter.org/press-release/study-500000-americans-could-face-significant-challenges-obtain-photo-id-vote
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-comprehensive-investigation-of-voter-impersonation-finds-31-credible-incidents-out-of-one-billion-ballots-cast/
https://web.archive.org/web/20041010061949/http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/news/election2000/election2000_felons2.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2014/0402/Court-rules-Florida-voter-purge-illegal-but-will-it-stop-GOP-voting-tweaks
https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/voter-suppression-how-bad-pretty-bad
https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/closing-drivers-license-offices-alabama
http://cjonline.com/news/2015-11-25/kansas-black-leaders-call-election-day-voter-registration
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/why-are-the-poor-and-minorities-less-likely-to-vote/282896/