Top 10 Stupidest Comments on Israel 2014

  I'm often the recipient of stupid comments on Israel and Judaism. As there are only a few days left to this year, so I'm hoping I'm safe in revealing the stupidest things I've heard this calender year from angry anti-Israel protesters. I won't even bother with run of the mill idiots like the Italian backpacker who told me "I hate Jews" before he realized I was Jewish. I'm specifically writing a note to irritating uninformed protesters. These protestors need a cause. Maybe they could become pro-Palestinian for a start. I would coincidentally label myself as both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli, because I actually want peace and prosperity for all but as we will see in the comments this confuses people.

 I've decided to help these anti-Israel protesters stop annoying me by publishing some of the stupidest things on Levantine politics I have heard from them all year. For so long as angry yet uninformed leftists continue to repeat stupid nonsense, intelligent people like myself will be less and less motivated to  engage you, inform you, debate with you or at some point even acknowledge you.

  Dear misinformed angry anti-Israel anglos- please don't come at me with this nonsense in 2015. If you care so much, you may want to stop screaming slogans, shut up and learn something.

10. "You don't look Jewish!" yelled at me by an anti-Israel protester in London when I revealed I was Jewish... Yes, I had some surgeries to remove my horns and cloven hooves. Amazing what I can buy with my mountains and mountains of gold and money, eh? No seriously. Israel lies at the crossroads of Asia, Europe and Africa. If you had spent any time there you would realize there is a broad diversity to the way people from there look whether they are Jewish, Muslim, Christian or Druze. Additionally Judaism had a diaspora over 2000 years in which converts were added to her people. All I really have to say to the multiple people who have said this to me is that luckily for them, they don't look as stupid as they are. 

9. "You speak Arabic?" usually uttered in disbelief. I'm Jewish, enough of a reason right there. Additionally I lived in Haifa for some years. Arabs all know why I speak some Arabic even if they sometimes make fun of my accent. Why the hell is this so confusing for Westerners? Just FYI the two official languages of Israel are Hebrew and Arabic. An argument against Arabic as a national language I have actually heard from an Israeli is that Jews speak too many different dialects of Arabic to standardize a national language from them...however there is a somewhat standard Arabic in which local Muslims, Druze, Christians and even some Jews receive education and other services.   

8. "There are Arabs in Israel?" This leads to some serious confusion for some people....Christian and Muslim Arabs make up a significant percentage of the (inside the green line) Israeli population. Additionally, many Jews in Israel are descendants of Jews from countries around the middle east (Mizrachim). Added together Mizrachim and Arab/Palestinian citizens of Israel would constitute a majority of the people there. For people who spend so much time hating a country, you know remarkably little about it...

7. "Which side are you on?" Is this a sports rivalry gone bad? Be real. Either we can all win by coming to some kind of just peace or we can all lose by spiraling down into the hell of continued war and conflict together. Or something else...but more or less we are all going to go through this conflict together due to geography. Have you looked at any maps recently?

6. "Imagine how awful it is for the Palestinians to be bombed!" This was yelled at me by protesters when I identified myself as having lived in Israel. I've survived two bombings in my life. I don't have to imagine, I only have to remember. Where the fuck do you, comfortable Westerner assuaging your guilt by projecting your own cultural psychosis onto the state of Israel, get off yelling at me as if I liked bombings? I could tell you a thing or two about bombings...

5. "The state of Israel is racist" also yelled at me by New York protesters when I identified myself as having lived in Israel. OK, and the state you live in is a post-racial utopia right? No racial issues here at all...I wonder what all those "Black lives matter" protesters are protesting?  Turns out there is no utopia on earth. Except possibly Canada, but even in that case only for the non-native population. The first peoples of Canada have been getting the shaft for hundreds of years...

4. "ISIS- The New Israel" title of an article by Chris Hedges. I don't think this sincere although delusional Christian simpleton could be employing a complex rhetorical device like sarcasm. He thinks this is real. He is really comparing a country that literally enslaves captured women to rape them, kills non-Muslims and is  shamelessly running an attempt at genocide to the middle east's only democracy. With intellectuals like this, who needs the stupidity of the masses to laugh at...

3. "I'm against bombing poor children!" Yeah, me too. Whaddya know. We have something in common crazy stupid anglo protester. Do you seriously think anyone is for bombing poor children? Oh whoops...guess I momentarily forgot about the US and UK governments and their permanent war against the various parts of the middle east. Wait a second, why aren't you protesting them? Could it be that it is harder to look yourself in the mirror than point out problems in other peoples? 2014 has seen a spike in violent deaths of Iraqui civilians, and that isn't even counting the number of people whose lives have been cut short by bombed out infrastructure, food shortages or any of the other "collateral" damage from the United States. Research in 2014 suggests that U.S. drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan have had an unknown person to target casualty ratio of 28:1 with one attack in the study having a ratio of 128:1 with 13 children being killed. If you are against bombing children, please begin with the bombing of children done in your name...you have a functioning democracy, right? So basically your democratic will seems to kill these poor kids...

2. "Arabs have 22 countries..." OK, I think some Jews got jealous of all the stupid statements being made, and had to get in on the action. Pro-Israel activists often resort to some twisted arguments. I personally don't care if Arabs have 49 countries and all the shellfish products in the world. I'm not trying to live in Syria these days anyways, and I don't eat shellfish. There is a completely separate question of how Arabs will run their countries...and unfortunately recent history has shown a trend towards running them in a way extremely inhospitable to religious minorities. I think this unfortunate reality of religious persecution is where the counting countries argument really comes from. Since the 1940s Jews have been persecuted, targeted for murder and in some cases like Egypt outright expelled in mass as their property was looted from Arab countries.

1. "Academic Freedom Encompasses the Right to Boycott [Israeli academics]" well just any old person can make stupid statements, but it usually takes an academic to get downright moronic in word and deed. Rima Kapitan is the author of an article with the above name...but there are about a hundred variations of this roaming around the hallowed halls of academia. Academics boycotting Israel claim they are all about academic freedom, with the glaring exception of Israelis. Academia claims to embrace the free exchange of ideas, apparently unless they are somehow related to one particular unpopular state. Why can't these people just be honest and admit they are against academic freedom?

  And now, because I understand Murphy's law, I'm just waiting for someone to hit me with an even stupider comment in the next 48 hours...but here's hoping the uninformed take up a new object of protest in 2015. Believe it or not, the world is an incredibly large place. The one argument about Israel I never hear, but wish I would, is that it has occupied too much of the global geopolitical discussion. That would be the intelligent criticism.

A New Business from Poverty: Voluntourism

  Apparently poverty is a business like any other. It might not be very profitable for those who have to suffer through it; but there is still money to be made. For decades many people have known about those who skim off of money meant for charity. But now as the number of poor people around seems to expand since the financial crisis of 2007, business leaders have found more and more ways to make a buck off of those without one. These practices are all along the food chain from mom-and-pop businesses right up to the financial titans that run the world.
  At the top you can consider the big bank JPMorgan. Since the crisis they have made billions of the financial service of food stamps for Americans. Literally billions each year were made off of American people who couldn't afford to feed themselves. As to this windfall improving things for American workers...well not so much. A lot of the jobs from these types of project are done by low wage workers in India.
  If one carefully considers every step and product involved in the process of this service, it is apparent that it is not only poverty servicing but poverty creating. Yet from the crude oil that made the plastic that food stamp recipients have in their cards, down to the cash registers ringing them up at the grocery store there is production and profit. In most steps globalism has worked like a curtain to separate the two...and many sides involved are ignorant of the full picture. Food stamps are just a particularly interesting case study, and perhaps even a positive on one balance.
  Ignorance of how globalization works for most involved is psychologically easier. As long as each person involved in production is isolated from a larger picture, they can feel that what they are doing is morally neutral. The business class claims workers are not in fact ignorant, and they could work at something else if they ever had objections: they assume democracy and freedom. But the appearance of democracy is maintained by a dictatorship of ignorance. With enough manipulation people can even become ignorant of what is right in front of their faces every day. In this world of easy ignorance I am impressed by the number of relatively privileged young people I meet who want to do something to make the world a better place or at least understand what the heck really goes on. Unfortunately, their impulses are often hijacked by an ever expanding industry that profits off misery in quite a different way than JPMorgan.
  Thousands of young privileged folk fan out from the first world all over the globe to volunteer. A few commit to doing substantial work with reputable organizations like Peace Corps. Others, perhaps guilty about their ability to take lavish vacations look for shorter projects. An entire industry has sprung up around these sometimes naive younger folks. Not every young person is naive. Many pay to volunteer as a way to pad their resumes or education applications. In the case of such self aggrandizing volunteers, they are fully aware they are paying for a service. But what of the volunteer who actually sought to make the world a better place? They will likely experience anger and frustration. They may in fact be scared away from ever reaching out again.
  More and more voluntourist organizations seem to be operating with less and less concern for any actual poor people. Over my time in Africa I met many young Westerners who had been sucked into the schemes of such organizations only to realize that they themselves were one of the mechanisms through which such organizations profit. Not only are poor children used for profit as they become living advertising jingles to milk donations from wealthy donors, but middle class Western kids are used for profit as well. One woman I spoke to volunteered in a Township in South Africa. She paid an embarrassing amount supposedly for her own accommodation, and improvement of the local school. When she got there her accommodations were so poor she privately paid upgrade her situation by joining a backpackers hostel nearby. The children at the local school didn't even get soap in the bathrooms and neither did she. When she made some off the cuff calculations on how much money the organization made per volunteer she was astounded. She furiously decided to trail the money, but hit a wall of silence. She was informed that the organization did not have to disclose any financial information to the public including it's volunteers. In spite of misleading information she had received, the organization was in fact for profit, and therefore supposedly had every right to make as much profit as possible...even if it meant keeping a local African school as decrepit as possible presumably to inspire even more donations.
  Another volunteer I met stayed at the accommodations his organization provided him. he described it as a four bedroom house holding 25 volunteers who all paid to be there. There was no security, and given the presumable demographics of the group it isn't surprising that the place was the target of frequent break-ins. The man mentioned that no one who worked for the organization actually stayed there. The resident volunteers were really being robbed twice over: by the local thieves, and also by the organization they worked for. He was like many young volunteers naive. He found out about the opportunity over the internet. Without having set foot in Africa he had set up an experience for himself there. But if he had simply set foot in Africa he might have saved himself a lot of trouble. There is a genuine need in Africa, just as in the USA for volunteers. It's impossible not to find people who could use some help. It's heartbreaking. I considered putting a picture of myself sharing my birthday party with some orphans in here, but then I realized I didn't want to publish up a picture of these kids being served food by me. No one needs to know they were hungry orphans for ever and ever verifiable by internet search engine. But voluntourist organizations have no such consideration for kids. Some even grab kids unknown to volunteers for photo-ops.
  Not every voluntourist is convinced of their own benevolence...but few seem to understand all the ways that they are feeding a for-profit machine. Charity gives the facade of redemption to the cruelest forms of globalized capitalism. Westerners are encouraged to see themselves as saviors of the world's poor as opposed to the ones who perpetrate a system that impoverishes them. It's an easy sell. In looking at situations of conflict almost all humans see themselves as victims or bystanders. Few understand themselves as the perpetrators of any problem. Oddly though, many people see a good deed done by anything less than pure altruism as so tainted by bad intentions as to be negative. I submit this blog to the world in the hopes of exposing the less than altruistic reasons behind many voluntourist organizations...I hope young people find other ways to volunteer.

Bachelor Bubble: Humans of the Future?

  Last night I hit the town with a pair of European bachelors. I was extremely curious, in an armchair anthropologist sort of way, about this curious species I have often poked fun of...in perhaps an ethnocentric and uncalled for kind of way. Now, I know two subjects are not exactly the makings of a rigorous study...but I was very curious nonetheless. I figured it could only serve to cut down on my snide remarks about Western Europeans men and their lifestyle...but I was wrong.
  Unfortuntely, these men confirmed most of the stereotypes I had cooked up in my mind. At one point a woman about 25 years younger than them brushed by, and they tried to pick her up. I was so amazed at their confidence. I want to see their psychologists. Good for them...but unfortunately, BAAAD for them...the rest of the room was laughing at them. The woman was laughing at them. The woman's friend was laughing at them. I was laughing at them. I think even stray dogs were laughing at them. They were too busy trying to look cool to notice why everyone was so suddenly jolly. People who try to look cool even in their thirties often end up looking like sad losers who can't let go of adolescence. People who try to look cool after fourty are usually just downright pathetic. The people who are in fact very cool at any age are those who are actually comfortable in their skin, even if it is wrinkled. The more the pair I watched tried to assert that they were young, hip and vivacious; the more they seemed old, boring and tired. Likewise the more they asserted they really understood women, the more it became apparent they knew too little to even keep long term relationships.
  I began to feel badly for these chaps. But I wondered if this was based on false assumptions. I assume they must be miserable deep down inside; but probably they are happier than I know. For them life is a big bachelor party, and they are living each day to the fullest. I do wonder how they will deal when they wake up with a health problem, and no one is there to care for them...but anyone could find themselves in this situation.
  This situation seems extremely relevant in light of recent promising advances in fertility treatment. We are probably 10 years away from being able to make eggs and sperm from anyone's stem cells. So the famous female biological clock will be not just altered, but shattered to pieces if everything goes well in some sort of  femenist fantasy sort of way...though it probably will not. But the thought experiment is engaging. What if everyone wanted to push parenthood off until retirement? What of the poor children...and what of us if we can't catch them as they run away from our hairy wrinkled selves? Just because we can work towards this change- should we? Or will we all become like those two delusional bachelors, keeping hope of capturing one young half for a pair in spite of the improbability of this reality plainly in sight of even their ever decreasing vision?

The Truth on America's Economy in Seven Sad Facts

  I usually scan papers to try and figure out what is going on in the economy. Over the past few years I've started to suspect something is missing in the mainstream press coverage of the economy. Stuff just did not add up. Every time I have looked at employment numbers this past year, it was up, up ,up and away. You would think the economy is booming. Many foreign people do. I am always shocked at the number of otherwise realistic people all over the world who somehow got convinced that in the US the streets are paved in gold, and social mobility is the norm. There is of course plenty of social mobility: all of it downward.
  Today I decided to dig up some facts to help the rest of the world understand what is really going on. Here are seven of the most important facts that summarize the issue:

1. Most Americans are not working full time

2. Half of Americans are poor

3. The USA is number ONE.. in imprisoning people- any way you count it- by a huge margin; while we are also number one in reported rapes, illegal drug use, car thefts and murders, our prison population exceeds even all that!!! We are number ONE!!!

4. Americans have and take fewer days off than anyone in the developed world

5. American women are not garunteed any maternity leave...placing them behing most nations on earth

6. Social mobility is lower in the US than many countries like France, Japan...or PAKISTAN

7. The majority of US children live in poverty or low income households

Compounding the issue is the fact that this is no scenic organic poverty under coconut trees. I'm talking about a brand of white bread eating, wife beating smack snorting insanity I've never seen anywhere else. And no, there are no gold paved streets either...

The Bitter End: Kim Kardishian's Ass

 Just when I thought American culture could get no more vulgar and vapid...Kim Kardishian has released a new book. Or actually it will happen sometime in 2015..but has already generated close to a million mentions on the internet.  Selfish, that contains contains 2,000 selfies composed by a woman who got famous of a sex tape. Not to be topped the American media has weighed in with deep analysis. The following are headlines and qoutes actually copy pasted from "news" sources like FOX:

Kim Kardashian's book of selfies isn't about her [www.fox411.com]

It's time for everyone to acknowledge that Kim Kardashian, 33, is a genius. [www.hollywoodlife.com]

Kim Kardashian's Author Description for 'Selfish' is a Must-Read. [www.washingtonexaminer.com/]

Well, I'm just waiting for the return of orgies and vomitoriums to usher in a new dark age...except in terms of American public discourse, I guess we are already there. It's worth noting that at the height of the Roman empire most people were excluded from any political power. Much like early Greek democracies which had more non-voters than voters, the empire was for the few not the many. 

 Unfortunately, I fear that in the decline of the American empire, we the people will be the first people thrown under the wagon...by ourselves. People at the edge of the empire are much better equipped to cope with our fall. Most never had any illusions about our benevolence. Further they are perfectly capable of functioning in pretty dysfunctional environments. If you watch, for example, doctors who have trained in resource poor circumstances, many can take the tools around them and accomplish a lot whatever the tools may be. 

 We Americans, by contrast, seem to want to live in some kind of delusion that the real tools of our redemption are coming...so we will just wait here without changing the way we do anything. The medical system throws almost half of us into debt at some point...but no one will back off of total misallocation of resources. The university system is throwing millions of people into debt...but NYTimes editorials try to convince us it's for our own good. Half the country is poor, but we still want to cling to our system...we delude ourselves into believing ISIS is a major threat to American lives. To put it into perspective over the last decade the number of American civilians American police killed is higher than the number of our soldiers killed in the apparently endless Iraq wars. But somehow both mounting death tolls have been nearly erased from public debate to endlessly discuss issues like Renee Zelwegger's face or now Kim K's ass. Celebrity culture is the new opiate of the masses. And I, for one, am worried they are going to overdose themselves right into a coma...

Revolutionizing Science for Ourselves

   Protesters all over the US are putting up a great effort aimed at the ending police brutality targeted at blacks. I'm thrilled to see such efforts, but I only wish there was more attention to the uneasy role of science in this mess. For most of science's history, it was on the side of racism. I'm afraid that may still be true today.

    Gone are the days of phrenology (the psuedoscience that asserted the superiority of European races based on mostly imagined differences in head shape). The scientific community's recent embarrassment over James Watson is evidence we are moving beyond all of that. What we unfortunately have not moved beyond is a radically different prioritization of human lives. We are entering an era of euthanasia by neglect. The shape of research funding assures only diseases of the well to do matter. Diseases of the masses are viewed as sad tragedies, but are often much more simple than those of the well healed. In every category of disease, there are diseases which are essentially of the poor. Everyone knows many infectious diseases fall into this category. Therefore rich people have an easy out of claiming the poor have essentially infected themselves due to differing lifestyles they deem inferior. But consider a disease like sickle cell which affects predominantly African Americans and to a lesser extent Latinos. The disease is a simple genetic disease which maps to one single point mutation one one single gene. One in twelve of us African Americans are carriers for sickle cell trait. I assure you that if one in twelve senators were carriers of this genetic trait; research, screening and prevention would be amplified up to the point where sickle cell started dropping out of the American population.

    The recent University of Chicago trauma center protests illustrate our problems perfectly. For decades academic medical centers have been shutting down public hospitals and building up fancy research buildings to capture grant money from the NIH and private donors. Private donors can be such a significant source of money sometimes films are produced to educate them. I should know, I appeared in one such film about Parkinson's disease as myself- a young scientist. The film was shot in the lab I worked at in Columbia University blocks away from an epidemic of poverty and violence. I believe I was doing important research. I believe we must continue to look for a cure for Parkinson's disease and every other awful disease that causes suffering in patients...but I refuse to remain silent about the creepy priorities of academic science. These priorities reflect the heavy influence of an older generation peopled by scientists who thought nothing of running experiments on prisoners without consent and who still can't understand why the Tuskegee incident was not good science. They also reflect the priorities of big time donors. Such well healed donors aren't particularly concerned that they may be shot on their way to work (if they work at all). Anyone who has worked in an inner city hospital feels differently...that's one of the reasons you will see trauma surgeons , emergency doctors and medical students joining neighborhood youth in organizing for a Southside Chicago trauma center.

     At the end of the day, science is both a problem and a solution. Science is therefore the best tool that can be used to take a racist and classist regime apart in an objective way. It's also a tool that has always been easier for the wealthier to access and understand. The rise of the citizen scientist provides us with a unique opportunity...there is very little democracy about the way science funding flies around, and in the past that may have been a good thing. After all our past produced popularly supported eugenics programs among other horrors...but maybe we are ready to start a new kinder science; a science that is democratic in the sense that it weighs all human lives the same...a science that addresses the true needs of humans to support them instead of subvert them to support a profit motive...a science that embraces all of us in our diversity. Such a science would allow us to see we have hit a total crisis of Western science by our own measurements. Life expectancy has begun to fall in places where we have applied the full force of science to our existence....so we can no longer justify our methods by our ends. We need to do things very differently.

The American Left: Lost in Space

   I recently sat at a table with young queer people discussing politics. I was moved by the honesty of this brave group of people. I gave them the respect of being honest back. I told them I think there are at least three problems with many leftists. The first problem is that they aren't particularly interested in equality, the second is that they are highly disorganized in a specific and problematic way by their antihierarchical nature and the third is that no matter how well intentioned, a lot of these people are clueless about the people they want to help.
   A surprising number of leftists are rather wealthy and interested in living well. These types tend to hang out in academia, the home of the left. Their decadence makes for a pretty embarrassing problem in their supposed support of poor people. Never the types to worry about reality they plod ahead in support of whatever oppressed people might need them...except that oppressed people may not need them because they are often just a counterproductive problem. Norman Finkelstein summed up the problem well when discussing BDS types. "..'Let's strike a more radical pose, let's try to be really radical and more chic' especially if you've got tenure..And so they start striking all these radical poses which have no connection with reality and they are so defeatist of the cause.'" While Finkelstein was speaking about the issue of Israel/Palestine this analysis could be applied to many issues of the day. Perhaps these academics would argue that they are moving the conversation to the left. There is a certain, albeit flawed, logic to this stance. This what I personally call the Miri Regev approach. Years ago when I was working with refugees in Israel from the horn of Africa, a debate broiled about them. Miri Regev, then a prominent Israeli politician of Morrocan descent, called refugees from Africa "cancer." When she later stood by her remark, and went further by apologizing to people with cancer she was so ridiculous and hypocritical that even mainstream Israelis were pretty embarrased. Unfortunately, her remarks were politically smarter than anyone would have guessed at the time. The national conversation shifted to the point where calling for indefinite detention of African asylum seekers became a nearly moderate position. I suppose the radicals of academia hope for the same effect if in the reverse direction. The most obvious problem this idea overlooks is that in America there is really no national conversation to begin with. Anyone curious about how totally vapid the American culture is has only to look at our universities. The increasing internationalization of Universities has led to students from all over the world competing head to head. And as a friend of mine who is a professor in a rather prestigeous institution told me, there are very, very few surprises. Basicallly Western European students tend to be on average brighter than Ivy leaguers like myself who in turn tend to be sharper than state school kids on average, and at the absolute bottom of the barrel are those who attend any type of retail college whether it be down-market i.e. for profit institution or upscale which is to say those quaint small private liberal arts institutions that are mostly the preserve of the lazy children of money. Being the product of public education himself, the good professor tries to blind himself to student origins when doing the grudge work of grading papers...but unfortunately, it seems that even this exercise over many years has produced so few surprises he can count them on one hand. Sadly if American academia is the zenith of our intellectual achievement, our cultural production may be the bottom. Perhaps so many professors were too busy dipping into the cess pool of popular culture by studying porn and pop music they lost track of reality. It's probably pretty easy to do if one believes that the sociology of Miley Cyrus is worthy of even an entire undergraduate course. Keeping things in perspective Beyonce and Maddona have inspired much more academic work. Unfortunately, none of this work seems particularly informed by empiricism, statistical analysis, logic or perhaps most importantly any concern for the common people these academics hope to analize by analyzing cultural production. Perhaps it is actually in moments of insight about the frivolous drivel they produce, that professors adopt radical poses.
   Let's take  for example the borderless world lovefest many radical leftists advocate. Many really radical leftists want no borders anywhere which would reflect the universal brotherhood of man. Never mind that globalization brought the world three separate slave trades, and now working conditions so brutal that workers are committing suicide conveniently out of sight of Western consumers. The borderless lovefest was never rooted in empirical evidence about what might help people, it is rooted entirely in ideology. In seeking to embrace universalism, academics conveniently forget what exactly the results will be for everyone except them. This discourse of universalism has become embedded even in mundane conservative thought. This is how you get the WSJ stating that a surge in international students is a bright spot for American higher education. A report by edububble.com points out a few of the problems with this. I think the problems are actually even worse than they write. I believe this based on actual experience as opposed to ideological "theories." I spent some time on the pipette wielding chain gang that is academic science before I left for medicine. While I do not have a good statistical analysis of all scientists as a whole, a stastical analysis of my second lab, and the ones down the hall from it- rather large ones- yields a few fascinating results. About 90% of the PhDs under 55 had married money probably in part to stave off the pain of trying to live in New York City on under $40,000 a year. Imagine the calamity of September 11th in my lab considering that just about everyone was married to a Wall Street lawyer or accountant. A nonzero percent of these people actually had sexual affairs with other people, presumably the ones they would have married if they had higher earnings...or more correctly they might have not married along with not marrying their current boring high earning spouse. Among the lowest on the lab totem pole were people like myself having conversations with each other about the impossibility of paying student loans not because we were unemployed, but because we were working in science. I had so much to look forward to- if I stayed on the laboratory technician route one day my pay might have hit $24,687 a year, and if I went to grad school I might hope to score a stipend of almost as much. According to my sister my family at the time was shocked by the state of my refridgerator. I guess they expected more from the first person in the family to ever attend a prestigeos University. They deeply dissaproved of the fact that I kept my refridgerator extremely empty except an ample supply of hard liquor. What I realize now looking back was that I wasn't unlike a proletariat of lore as described by Karl Marx. And I still am not today.
   I recently spoke with a fellow traveller who asserted we needed more equality in society. he said that garbage collectors should be more equal to doctors for example. I just couldn't agree more. Garbage collectors have pretty bright financial pictures compared to myself. Unionization and indespensability have worked out well for this work force. Garbage collectors are pretty much by definition local people. When I peruse ads for scientists, I understand why a lot of scientists are almost by definition foreign. The State University of New York's open positions near New York City offer a fascinating example. Midcareer specialized PhDs and medical doctors are offered under $40,000 and no overtime pay with the implicit understanding that they will work overtime every single week. This sad salary is actually in line with market results. These kinds of salaries are probably why my limited statistical survey of all the scientists I have worked with yields that most are foreign born, and partially foreign educated. Specifically foreign educated in  countries where science education is free. There is a word for the work these foreign scientists do in service of capitalism: Scabbing. Foreign and local scientists are pitted against each other in really sad race towards the bottom that ends near a point where they pay to work. Many American doctors I know have confessed to me that they worked unpaid for a year or more in order to get into the American medical system. A system that would then hand them shifts of up to 24 hours and expect them to be grateful the shifts were not 48 hours like the bad old days. I honestly thought things could get no worse, but recently I noticed all kinds of pay-to-work schemes cropping up. Even if you ignore this nonsense as the lunatic fringe of a weird hyper-capitalistic world, you can't ignore the facts that 9 out of 10 American doctors would discourage anyone from entering the profession, and more and more of us seem to be killing ourselves every year. Even if you gloss over the fact that about 10% of us have a substance abuse if not addiction issue, you can't ignore numbers like the female physician suicide rate (multiples of that of the general population).
  My best guess is that physicians are not in fact so special. It may hurt my ego but on some basic level I'm just another worker. We are in the same squeeze as every other American trying to slay the dragon of raising a family in relative safety or alternatively at least not be a financial drain on the family we were born into. Whether you are taking about surgeons or auto mechanics, you are talking about lots of sensible people who's work is directly tied to reality. Few people come up with lunatic theories in medicine or auto repair because they just won't work. There is unfortunately no such stop on the academic left. The delusional theories of leftist academics may work well to convince 19 year olds that their professor is really hip; but they aren't yielding results in the real world. Perhaps most embarrassingly, when those spouting such theories come in contact with people outside of the hallowed halls of the ivory tower, conflict ensues.
  I first started to catch on to the quiet conflict years ago after I befriended an elderly gay and lesbian brother sister duo. The pair were die hard progressives. They taught me about what is was like for them to be gay before it was hip or cool and mostly involved dire poverty in New York City punctuated by nasty ostracism and even condemnation by the medical community who dismissed them as mentally diseased. And then one day they talked about something even more interesting than that: they hate academics. At first I protested mentioning that I hold a terminatory degree, and I'm not that bad. "No...that's totally different...your a scientist..we hate academics..."Sadly, I realized the begining of the problem was the academic left's problems with science. For "real academics" science is just another discourse. One my ex-husband, who wanted to be an academic,  used to look down on me for working in even though he noticed I could do his work efficieintly even if it wasn't remotely close to my field. Editing his work introduced me to to the people he idolized up close and personal through their writing.  Consider the following commentary  " The Einsteinian constant [c] is not a constant, not a center. It is the very concept of variability-it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of some thing-of a center from which an observer could master the field-but the very concept of the game." Lest you think C is an esoteric concept of quantum mechanics, I'll brush you up on the fact that C is a constant related to the Newtonian laws of gravitation as they apply in an updated understanding of space-time. Einstein's constant - THE Einstein contant ....
You could be forgiven for thinking the above drivel about c being the" concept of the game" was written by an undergraduate who smoked a lot of marijuana. It's actually written in the published work of Jacques Derrida. I guess I'm just bitter I can't become a world acclaimed academic by making claims that imply, among other things, that there is no gravity anymore. I actually want to knock my books off the table and watch them float into outerspace; but they keep falling down and hitting my feet.
   Unfortunately, so do the half-baked ideas of many academics. As academics strike more and more radical poses, they seem to do less and less of the boring quantitative work it would take to overpower the blatant stupidity of conservative idiots convinced there are no problems in our current economic and political systems. Sometimes the work is as simple as subtraction. I recently read yet another moronic David Leonhardt column about how student loans just aren't so bad. His reasoning was that the premium made by people with college degrees has never been higher. Of course, I thought, and that fact probably almost entirely reflects just how many people in the lower class are making just about $0 a year. Am I supposed to be glad I'm making infinite percentages of that $0 salary; or might reality dim my mood when I realize that my educational debt will effect every major life decision I ever make quite possibly until the day I die? At the last I checked NYTimes had not published my admittedly sarcastic equation laden talkback about this, and no one else had pointed out what I consider to be a mathematically obvious truth. Liberals frequently forget that one of the best tools for progress is as simple as documenting reality. You can argue opinions, but you can't argue facts. There is no reason simple citizens like myself can not accumulate data and use it to challenge government's official (and utterly nonsensical) narratives. Europeans, Indians, Israelis and Africans have all caught on to this. Citizen audits of issues as diverse as housing stock and sanitation issues have probably been the most powerful tool normal people have taken up to fight government negligence and de-development. While many professors were off striking radical poses for undergraduates, slum dwellers were carefully tallying up the functional toilets in their slums, and painstakingly amassing and analyzing data often teaching themselves statistical analysis along the way. In my own formerly impoverished now gentrifying neighborhood in Haifa people powered neighborhood groups found important satisfying roles for even people who claimed they just "couldn't do math." For example some headed ad-hoc committees which would visit neighbors when they went to the hospital. Such committees not only brought cheer to bed bound patients, they gathered extremely important qualitative data, that later informed our quantitative analysis on the effects of the smog producing mess of an oil refinery put smack in our city by our ecologically illiterate government. But in truth, I discovered that many people can do math if you patiently teach them. Some of my own research, which hinted that Haifa's babies may be born pre-polluted and therefore endocrinologically altered, was aided by the newly developed data skills of an unemployed historian and a part time cashier without whom I never could have crunched through the data on hundreds of prenatal ultrasounds in the city (at least not while working). They did such a good job I received a special honor for my work from my academic medical system.  Lest our Haifa Hadarist agendas get sucked into the ethnocratic policies of the day tearing our co-existance community apart, we actively, purposefully sought to include every subculture of our neighborhood from Ethiopian to Palestinian to Mizrachi to Russian to Ashkenazi. We were Haifaists protecting ourselves, and as to the Professors, we knew where to find them for some expert opinions because some were fighting right alongside of us. After all, they had to survive the city as well. I'm afraid American professors aren't living in the same cities or even the same planet as us the people.
  I recently tried to start a sort of citizen audit of childhood debt. I was keen on learning from groups beyond Israeli ones how this stuff gets done. Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to because some academic types actively sought to disinclude me. I'll save the story for a future blog perhaps not even written by myself. After all, I'm a humble stupid worker who according to some more radical people "know[s] nothing" at least according to one email I started reading on a Strike Debt listserv. I didn't bother to finish reading it, because I couldn't be bothered as I was busy figuring out when I would get paid for editing a paper about myocardial infarctions. I'll never fit into the lunatic left. It's rather ironic, and might even be understood under Freud's ideas about the narcicism of small differences; except that there is an unfortunate large difference. I actually suffer from the issues this lunatic left claims to care so much about, and many of their loudest voices do not. Maybe most people already figured out this weird scheme of radical pose striking out, and this is why they are quietly defending themselves in many corners of the earth.

This is not what feminism should look like!

I consider myself a sort of feminist. I'm the kind of feminist hanging my head in embarrassment over what feminism looks like right now. Feminism looks like Emma Watson, a 24 year old actress and clothing model,  posing in Elle to celebrate her UN appointment to promote feminism. Feminism looks like skinny blond women taking their tops off to expose their breasts while wearing wreaths of flowers and make-up. Feminism looks like upper class cis-gendered straight white women living in palaces talking about how difficult it is to balance ordering around their servants, and time with their doting husbands. Feminism looks like an endless discussion of the potential rape of one single college student at UVA, when rape has been used as a war crime on a mass scale for the last 5000 years. In short feminism looks like a bunch of narcissistic navel gazing of approximately two to three percent of earth's population; not a fight for the rights of the 51% of us that are female. 

A lot of the #Himforher campaign is the kind of sad drivel that has many women of very different perspectives all pretty uncomfortable. There is no reason on earth men shouldn't be overjoyed about this kind of feminism. They are really the only people who have been liberated by it. They can now enjoy less pressure to support families financially, a lot more available sex with fewer requirements, and; perhaps most importantly, a sense of moral superiority for being "feminists" due to looking at Emma Watson modeling clothing smaller than my underwear even when she is not in fact modelling underwear on that particular day.

See this image?

That's UK politician Nick Clegg who admitted to sleeping with "no more than 30" women in an interview with the press. To his credit he didn't then beat his chest and declare it a victory for England over France, and the entire middle east. Also to his credit, he's exactly correct. This is what a feminist looks like, and that's a big part of the problem.

Feminism actually could be about making the world a better place for everyone: men, women, children, elderly, Latino, Native American, Asian, straight, gay, trans, differently-abled and so on and on. In the end we are all in this together; except me...I'm planning on moving to Mars. Beam me up Scottie?

A New War?

    Shots have just been fired at the Israeli embassy in Greece. Last night one of my Israeli friends noted that recently a Palestinian politician died in a protest, and one way or another we will probably pay for it in yet another war. It's as predictable as the annual Macy's white sale at this point. We have a semi-annual war.
     Sitting in Cape Town today, I'm a bit insulated from the day to day grind of the middle east. I'm able to imagine a new middle east. Like South African society, if we ever get to peace in the middle east, there is going to be a lot of truth and reconciliation that needs to go on. At the end of the day we may never even get onto the same narratives. The middle east is a patchwork of intermixed tribes and groups in conflict. Our current alliances are comical if you think about them logically. Kurds and Hezbolla. Orthodox Jews and Wahabi Muslims. Alewites and Druze. None of the alliances being built currently are stable or based on true common interests. Every human is a unique person with similarities and common interests that cut many different ways. The armed tribalism of the east is a recipe for an unsustainable mess. It seems as if there is an obvious solution: building peaceful societies based on our common human goals...but taking a bad society apart is the easy part. Breaking up things is easy. The question is how do you put them back together again.
     Everyone could agree we want peace although peace in and of itself is a pretty hollow word. Peace prevailed at times in many slave societies. Even at the most extreme level of opression and human misery peace is possible. But what kind of peace? Peace, in and of itself, is not really a worthwhile goal. Sustainable peace must be our mission. Human history shows peace will not be sustained under conditions of dramatic inequality whether it is of wealth, political rights or access to resources. I fear we may be headed to an additional war. Sadly, I don't know how we can be more at war. The US has been bombing the middle east for the last decade. The whole region simmers...and to the South  on the African continent wars in Africa produce more refugees than the entire world seems able to absorb. The world currently has 15 million refugees and about twice as many internally displaced people. For most of them the world already has come apart. The only positive I see in a coming war is that maybe the rest of us can develop a higher level of empathy.

Eric Garner Protests

I am happy to see there has been press coverage of the reaction to the murder of Eric Garner. Kudos to my amigos at JREJ and all other organizers of protests. A clip from JREF:  http://vimeo.com/11372

A special shout-out to the future doctors of America...you made me proud to wear the white coat again http://www.pnhp.org/news/2014/december/whitecoats4blacklives-health-care-workers-stage-nationwide-protests-against-polic

The Eco-village Organic Fruit Loops

On the bus to Cape Town I sat next to the whitest African I have ever seen. He was day-glow white with blonde hair. So fair that at 17 he was already beginning to wrinkle up. I wanted to get back to Western culture based conversation after the disappointment of having met a Sangoma (a witch doctor). But Sangomas, I have now begun to understand are among the saner folk in this land. My blonde cultural cousin spent the entire ride telling me about his spiritual visions, talking to the dead and other worlds. His mother had been thrown out of the local church, but it wasn’t a problem because he had a self taught spiritual guide he met at an electronic gaming store. After a day in the mountain listening to a tribal witch doctor talk about drinking the blood of a slaughtered goat and throwing bones to heal, I was now talking to an educated Westerner about healing with energy and spirituality. At least the witch doctor had a bunch of bones he threw around, so in some way his diagnostic method was related to the real world.

I couldn’t get off the bus fast enough. I thought it I went to a hostel inside an eco-village I would meet interesting intelligent concerned citizens of the world. As it turned out the village hosts the same bunch of wierdos many very cheap hostels have. A bunch of drifter men, social misfits sometimes painfully unaware of how they apparently have earned no place in society. They all imagine themselves to be leaders of something. Let me explain by walking you down the hall. Names have been changed to protect the innocent. Namely me.

Room number twelve is Richard. I met him in the kitchen and he asked me what I did. After admitting I was a medical doctor he informed me that I knew nothing about nutrition. He then proceeded to lecture me on how based on one paper written by a dentist he knew more about nutrition than I did. His nose lifted so high I could literally see into his nostrils, he told me he had been in charge of many doctors in an NGO. “Which NGO?” “A highly, highly influential one.” So why was the head of an NGO at this backpackers eco-lodge I wondered…”What is the NGO called?” “Well, it no longer exists…” I wondered if his superiority complex was informed by being a white South African.

Across from him lives Brianna, one of the few female residents. She is 32 and has already survived throat cancer and gangrene of which there is no medical evidence because Jesus has healed her. She has no need for doctors because G-d heals everyone who just prays for it, or so she says. She also notes that South Africa was better under Apartheid without adding one important phrase: for white people like me.

Down the hall lives Professor Chapel. Professor Chapel is only here because it’s difficult to concentrate on his work when he is in fancy four star hotels. Or so he tells me. He is a visiting professor at the most elite science universities in America. He prefers to be a visiting professor so he can take time with his research you see. Perhaps this is why he has not bothered with a wife or husband or children…more time for his important research no one has ever heard of.

Next door to Professor Chapel lives Sandy. According to the front desk woman Sandy came in and explained he was living on his trust fund and needed somewhere to stay for the moment. Sandy is however not just a trust fund baby. He did at one point have a real job. He was a paramedic. According to the front desk lady everything was going well with his visit until his brother Dan showed up and started living in the same room. Dan is a track marked skinny guy with a sense of fashion that can most charitably be described as ironic. Soon after Dan came money started going missing from the front desk. Perhaps to throw everyone off his scent Dan is constantly mentioning how he comes from a rich well placed family of doctors.

Across the way lives Jack who wants to learn Hebrew from me because he is Jewish or Christian depending upon who and when is speaking. He came for a Hebrew lesson and spent the entire time complaining in English to me about how he suffers from a disease that has turned him into a rock in a river, tumbling, tumbling down the stream. The disease has no name, but everyone has it. He’s convinced the cure is in the bible.

Yesterday the Professor invited me to coffee. I thought perhaps we would discuss science. Apparently he is an expert in the lost “sciences” of the Nazis. When I told him I was Jewish he said he didn’t realize, but now looking at my nose he could see it. He then went on to ask me questions about Jews and intelligence.

Over a beer last night the front desk woman and I pondered if we were inside a mental institution, but just hadn’t been told about it. What we are actually inside is the froth of our system, or the run off depending upon how you look at it. Either our society is so decadent it frees people to be as crazy as they can or it is so impoverished it has no use for many men. These men, and they are mostly men, have detached from anything approaching a normal lifestyle…but are somehow unable to simply go find a shed in the country and plant some food. Instead they have taken up a sort of parasitic lifestyle strangely free from the society they depend upon. But perhaps the same could be said of me. None of these people seem to want a scientist around. Perhaps I need to just go find some land, and start farming. 

Gerontophilia Rejected; Sisters Move On Alone

  In my travels I keep running into single women over forty. As I am facing a thirtysomething birthday, alone and single, in eleven days, this is very interesting to me. What all of these women have told me is that they are alone because the reject what one calls "gerontophilia." The possibility of dating men as old as their fathers. Evolution or society or some combination of the two tend to favor age disparate relations for many women. But many women would prefer to be alone than slip into bed with someone worried about having (another) heart attack in the process.
  If you look around at thirtysomething women dating men you see some pretty disparate relationships. You see a lot of highly accomplished competent women dating men who are barely hanging on. When one friend of mine who was a brilliant university researcher began dating a part time drummer with a drug problem and a son he could never afford the 40$ bus ticket to visit, I openly questioned what was going on. 'On what planet do these two people even meet each other?!' I kept asking. Apparently, all over this one. The Chinese call the phenomenon A1 women and D4 men. If you are a leftover single it is usually because you are an awesome woman or a sucky man.
  I often wish someone had explained how to negotiate these realities to me. I  recently have been having nightmares and fits of stress when aawake at the prospect of growing old alone. I must note I have found one website interesting and helpful. Gateway-women.com focuses specifically on childlessness, and the woman who founded and runs it, Jody Day, claims she has moved on to happily ever after all by herself. Women who have managed to do this are heroic. The nasty way society treats us is not apparent to those without partners and children. It is the assault of a thousand details from nasty comments, and social exclusion to legal marginalization.
  What I have discovered in my conversations with many single women, is that actually we got that way because we were true and honorable. Ironically, it is married women who often took the easy dishonest way out. Obviously, not all married women are guilty of anything less than true love. But many are. Some faked pregnancies. Some faked attraction to richer men. Some just wanted someone else to support them, or fix their problems. Some pretended they were perfect until the ring went on. Some got pregnant on purpose then claimed it was accidental in order to get married. Some stole their husbands from other women. Some claimed doing a few hours of housework was so draining they needed a man to make most of the money. And so on and so on...Speaking to my older single sisters, I'm getting a much more realistic take on what really happens, as opposed to the myth of crazy defective women ending up alone. I am actually starting to be proud to be a single woman.

(Almost) Live from the Mountain Kingdom!

I'll be updating my photography website tonight with photos from the mountain kingdom of Lesotho!

Thoughts on Ferguson From South Africa

        If I were back in New York City I would be blocking a street in support of the Ferguson protests demands. I've simply had it with a system that refuses to treat me as an equal human being. Because I am both a medical doctor and a patient, I am often made acutely aware of how little people think of me because of my race. The day I flew out of the US, I had some prescriptions to fill. My normal pharmacy had run out of one drug, so my pharmacist called in the drug to another pharmacy. The other pharmacy, a Rite Aid, decided that since they would replace my drug with another one, however the dosages were not equivalent. I pointed this out to the Rite Aid pharmacist, a redheaded young white woman. For some minutes I stood there arguing as she spoke to me as if I were an illiterate five year old. At some point, I interrupted her, and told her "Look, I think you should know I'm a physician and I prescribe these drugs myself, I'm going to show you my package, and have you read the dosage out loud, then take your drug and read the dosage  out loud. You will see the number of milligrams in one is about 60% of the number of milligrams in the other..." At that point the pharmacist rolled her eyes and examined the boxes. Then she started to panic. She realized I was correct. She probably also realized it isn't a good idea to assume every black person is borderline illliterate, and speak to them as such.
   
     This tiny incident brought back innumerable memories where other medical professionals have assumed I was a stupid, and definitely not a doctor even if I was wearing a white coat and an ID. It also brought back memories of how certain doctors had treated me as a patient: essentially as some sort of inferior person who didn't deserve decent medical care. Not every doctor has treated me this way, but enough so that I now think dealing with most American doctors is hopeless; a pretty sad statement considering that I am one of them.

     Here in South Africa, I am not considered black. I'm considered an American. People can't understand why I think I am black. But being black in America is fundamentally a political situation. Our political situation goes right back to the founding of the country in which we were counted as 3/5ths of person. In fact it goes back further to when the UK was moving towards abolition and wealthy whites in the colonies panicked, founding a country at least in part to avoid setting my ancestors free from slavery. Hundreds of years later we are now stuck in some kind of miserable existential political crisis. We have only succeeded in putting black faces on a system that is white supremacist. Yet, we are constantly reminded we will not be considered a deserving equal human rights. Whether it is drone bombing hundreds of brown people at wedding parties or drone bombing US American children in the middle East without any trial or shutting of people's water in Detroit; most of us get the message. Brown lives somehow just don't matter as much as white ones. Some of us will be killed by acts of police or military aggression, but it is important to understand that others of us will be killed by acts of total indifference. I remember the shock and horror of a German anesthesiologist I know about some time she spent as a medical student in the US. She told me of patients who had cancer, but lacked money, who were simply diagnosed and discharged...for many reasons, those kinds of patients, sent off to quietly die for lack of funds are disproportionally us. What shocked my German colleague the most was that the other doctors didn't seem to care. Even after a lifetime of being black I am hit with the same sense of shock as I watch most American's indifference to the Detroit water shut-offs. My best friend, who is white, reminds me a lot of people just don't like black people; people are still racist.
     
      Racial hatred goes in all directions except away but the damage of racism is not equally distributed. Just yesterday at the hostel I am staying at I met a thirtyish Italian backpacker who told me he "hated Jews". I continued to talk to him, and told him I was Jewish. Moments like this are inconvenient and embarrassing, but I do not have the same political situation on my hands over being a semi-semite that I do over being black. I don't think I'll see the day where some other doctor has me as a patient and treats me like a moron because I'm Jewish. Jews are well represented in American medicine. Blacks make up under 5% of American doctors, with a significant percentage of those being non-African-American blacks (Africans, Afro-Caribbeans etc.). The bizarre underprevalance of African-Americans in medicine particular is not strange seen from the perspective that being a black American is a political situation. I've read that years ago when African dignitaries would come to the area near the US capital they were given pins to distinguish them from other blacks, and therefore allow them to dine with whites. Apparently the discrimination wasn't about color. It wasn't about culture either given the melting pot mentality that absorbed and assimilated all kinds of people every generation. It was about keeping a particular group of people in a certain situation.

    I am not delusional enough to think white people will wake up tomorrow and understand the political situation of blacks. Nor am I crazy enough to think all white people are evil or out to get me. My own guidechildren are white, and I'm actually quite happy about it. I've noticed that usually when I meet a white person who "gets it", they had a positive black role model early in life. I think these kinds of white people people hit some sort of cognitive dissonance between the popular understanding (or more precisely imagination) of blacks, and those really nice psychologists or physicians or whoever down the street who happened to be black. At some point they realized the official story of blacks as a problem is oh so much bullshit. The problem, unfortunately, is the entire situation.

    My guidekids were adopted. It takes a whole lot of problems for the social service system to take white kids away from their parents. Working through some of these issues with my guidekids has taught me that yes, white American people suffer too. There is a white underclass in the US and it's problems are as real as those of black folks. Social class remains the elephant in the room almost no one is talking about in the US. We can talk about blacks, and we can talk about inequality, either of which become an imperfect proxy for the lower class at times.

    I do believe that one day, probably after I am dead, Americans will reach reconciliation. I think of how young voters black and white elected Obama; and I vaguely remember his campaign message. Hope.

UK Occupied Again

Occupy is back in London!...I was laid over today, and walked by Parliament Square. I spoke with a young man about their issues. I explained to him that believe it or not, most of the problems of neoliberalism-gone-wild they have here are much better than in the US. He insisted like many Europeans that everything we get in the US, eventually comes there. Poor them.

Dahlheim on Debt: Part I

The liberty bell, one of the most iconic objects of the United States, carries a message still relevant today. But isn't what we were told. Nick Dahlheim explains...

The Shredding of the Social Contract: Revisiting the Moral Positioning of Debtor-Creditor in Light of the U.S. Student Loan Debt Crisis

By Nicholas T. Dahlheim

“If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you.  If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the banks.”  ~American proverb

    I apologize to readers for the one week delay in completing the first of a series of posts that are as much autobiographical as they are analytical.  Their overrunning theme is the shredding of the U.S. social contract which promised the prospect of upward mobility.  Perhaps the most egregious violation of this implicit social contract comes with the mounting U.S. student debt crisis.  Back in 2012, a paper authored by economists working at the NY Fed reported that the outstanding student loan debt (at $870 billion) surpassed the nation’s outstanding auto loan debt ($730 billion) and credit card debt ($693 billion) for the first time.[1]  Arguably, that 2012 paper would have gone unnoticed, maybe eve unwritten had it not been for the autumn 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement where frustrated indebted college students and recent college graduates played leading roles.  Millennials, the generational cohort most burdened by student loan debt, has lived most or all of their entire lives under a rising tide of tuition and school fees that has—rather than lifted all boats—sunk all of them.  Tuition and fees have risen over 538% since 1985, easily outpacing the CPI inflation index by over 400%.[2]  The continued “recovery” of the U.S. economy has sadly been mostly a recovery in stock prices and corporate profits, unemployment and underemployment remain brutally persistent.  Moreover, more recent 2014 news stories which have been attempting to say that Congress and/or the Obama Administration have somehow contributed to unemployment rates dropping below 7% nationwide have played fast and loose with numbers. The Democratic Obama Administration uses “fuzzy” math similar to that used by it’s predecessor.  A much more accurate statistical proxy for the on-the-ground situation re: unemployment, incidentally which does not exempt most college graduates, is the labor force participation rate shown in the graph below.

Chart 1

Source: Damon, Andre.  “Mounting Unemployment in America, Hundreds of Thousands Drop out of the Workforce.” GlobalResearch.ca.  (Reposted from World Socialist Website).  April 6, 2013.  http://www.globalresearch.ca/mounting-unemployment-in-america-hundreds-of-thousands-drop-out-of-the-workforce/5330086/  (accessed November 15, 2014).

    The trend, which has been especially pronounced since the 2008 credit crunch and global economic meltdown, has been unmistakable. The reality is probably worse than it looks given how many of the 63% of Americans with a job can only find a part-time one. There is some “recovery,” but only if you are in the top 1%.  How are college graduates supposed to collectively make enough income to pay back their surging student loan debts with such clear secular trends in employment, not to mention continued wage stagnation, working against them?  Sadly, the mainstream press which is completely devoted to the dominant neoliberal ideology has been slow to connect the dots between the economic struggles of the Millennial generation and the crushing realities of student debt.  This oft-read and commented upon October 2012 piece from The Atlantic entitled “The Cheapest Generation: Why Millennials aren’t buying cars or houses, and what that means for the economy” is an illustrative case.  The article makes only passing reference to the student debt crisis, and instead tries to paint the brutal economic conditions facing the Millennial generational cohort as a product of their exhaustion with consumerist values. 

    As a Millennial struggling with a crappy job market and having dealt with crushing student loan debt myself, I find articles like this piece from The Atlantic offensive to the common sense I’ve derived from the experience and observation of spending my late 20s in the midst of this awful economy.  Even worse, the post-2008 recession advice many Millennials, and even older professionals received, about the value of going back to school because “education is always the way up the socio-economic ladder towards achieving the American Dream” has been wooly-headed at best, downright maliciously stupid at worst.  With student debt trending upwards, wages and employment trending downwards do not make for economic security for my generation.

    But for a country whose prevailing ideologies about work, employment, debt, family, and their relationship to the broader society are still more firmly planted in the Puritan days of the 17^th century than the globalized Digital Age society of the 21^st; the student debt crisis should serve as a wakeup call.  I cannot tell you how many times I have run into uninformed and unthinking Americans, most of them conservatives, who quickly default to a position of “it’s honorable and morally required of a person to pay his/her debts because nobody forced you to take out the money for school” when discussing the student debt crisis.  Furthermore, most of these conservatives and their ilk fail to mention, lest they even know, that student debt is NOT dischargeable but in the most extreme of circumstances.  This punitive moralism from the right-wing regressives and other conventional moralists misses the mark—the historical, and even Biblical, understanding of debt shows that BOTH debtors and creditors have moral responsibility in the forging of the debtor-creditor relationship. 

    First of all, debt in the neoliberal economy founded in large part on the fiction uttered by that reprobate British P.M. Thatcher that “there is no society, only individuals” (paraphrase) actually conceals debt as a vehicle of elite social control rather than a mutually beneficent instrument of social good.  As anthropologist David Graeber argues, the very nebulousness of debt as a concept—particularly to student debtors who usually hold positions lower on the social ladder and have less insider knowledge about the state of the economy—works inherently to the disadvantage of the debtor.  For,

“If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.  Mafiosi understand.  So do the commanders of conquering armies.  For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something.  If nothing else, they ‘owe them their lives’ (a telling phrase) [quotes and parentheses are Graeber’s] because they haven’t been killed.”[3]

   And given the underlying Puritanical attitudes from the 17^th century behind stifling American middle class morality, it’s not always the case that student debt relations are founded on overt violence.  Rather, they are founded on more subtle forms of coercion of a more thaumaturgical bent practiced through the dissemination of mass media consumerist propaganda and institutional programming in schools, churches, and communities.  In this sense, the violence that has been promised to those individuals who have not opted to enter the student debt game in order to receive a college diploma is the violence of exclusion and of anomie.  In other words, the oft-repeated conventional message says, “if you don’t go to college the road to the middle class will be closed off for you.”  Given that the American Dream of a middle class lifestyle is axiomatically at the foundation of the post-WWII American social contract, the role of student debt invariably plays a role in the shaping of the public morality binding BOTH creditors and debtors. 

    Indeed, official Biblical morality dating back to the Bronze Age directly stipulated more moral responsibility for creditors than social convention has presently with respect to the Sallie Mae, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. financial industry, and universities who share that moral burden as creditors to students attending American universities.  Like today’s over-indebted students, the Axial Age Jews of ancient times had to rediscover the lost wisdom from Bronze Mesopotamian kings of the social value of periodic debt cancellations after the usurious landlordism of King Josiah.[4]  In protest to the exploitative aristocracies which emerged after the end of the Bronze Age in 1200 B.C.E., the revived Judaism of the Pentateuch represented a populism which sought to protect rural peoples from predatory financiers and absentee landlords.  Indeed, the underlying theme uniting the tradition of the Hebrew prophets is the overarching concern God felt for His People.  This concern was expressed in terms of a covenantal relationship that the Hebrew Prophets reformulated in terms of powerful apocalyptic imagery of the necessity of continued national economic renewal through regular debt cancellations to prevent high inequality.  Yet, ironically, Biblical scholarship has neglected the importance of regular debt cancellations in Axial Age Near Eastern society inspiring the social revolution of the Hebrew prophets.  For,

“Indeed, what turns out to be ironic in studying the history of Near Eastern legal practices is that precisely those parts of the Biblical narratives that hitherto have been most in doubt—the laws cancelling debts, freeing debt servants and redistributing the land to its traditional users—turn out to be the most clearly documented Bronze Age legacy…Indeed, the Babylonian experience survives today primarily in the transmuted form that has come down to us through the Bible.”[5] (Emphasis is the author’s)

   Indeed, a key Biblical text from Leviticus 25:10 likely antedating the Hebrew Prophets appears on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.  The verse reads, “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof.”  But what the Liberty Bell inscription from Leviticus leaves out is the context.  What is being discussed in the longer Leviticus passage is not political liberty to “vote” in a “democracy.”  Rather, the passage speaks of the moral necessity to free debt bondsmen when their debts become unpayable.  Moreover, Leviticus, in a passage to which undoubtedly influenced the later Hebrew Prophets, exhorts a massive debt cancellation during the Jubilee celebrations that occurred every fiftieth year.

   Recognizing that the current U.S. student loan debt situation is patently unsustainable and that colleges, the federal government, and lenders have not shared any risk for overburdening unsuspecting students with debt—students who have been told of the absolute necessity of a college degree for their entire lives—it is time to revisit a student loan Jubilee as necessary for restoring the shredded American social compact between society, creditors, and its student population promised but increasingly denied the standard of living promised them.

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[1] Daniel de Vise, "Student loans surpass auto, credit card debt," College, Inc. - The Washington Post, March 6, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/college-inc/post/student-loans-surpass-auto-credit-card-debt/2012/03/06/gIQARFQnuR_blog.html (accessed November 15, 2014).

[2] Chase Peterson-Withorn, "How Today's Student Loan Debt is Failing Future Generations," Forbes, July 30, 2014.  http://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2014/07/30/how-todays-student-loan-debt-is-failing-future-generations/.  (accessed November 15, 2014).

[3] David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2011).  Pages 19-20.

[4] Michael Hudson, "The Lost Tradition of Biblical Debt Cancellations," Michael Hudson, March 2010, http://michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/HudsonLostTradition.pdf  (accessed November 15, 2014).

[5] Michael Hudson, "The Lost Tradition of Biblical Debt Cancellations," Michael Hudson, March 2010, http://michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/HudsonLostTradition.pdf  (accessed November 15, 2014).