Political Animals

5 Craziest Bills Already Filed With the Texas Legislature

By Dianna Wray Tue., Jan. 13 2015 at 8:00 AM

Categories: Political Animals, Texas, Whatever

Photo from the Texas Legislature

The 84th biennial Texas Legislature convenes on Tuesday, and based on recent developments -- namely the sweeping Republican victories in the midterms -- this session is going to see one of the most conservative crews ever to sit down and legislate in Austin. But never fear, all is not lost.

A tightly held Republican state legislature (a.k.a. the best every-other-year reality show around) will feature the usual focus on abortion rights (and how to get rid of them) and education funding (and what else can be cut after the budget was already scraped to the bone back in 2013.) But there are also going to be some extra-special ridiculous bills being looked at over the next few months. We've rounded up some of our favorites so far ("favorites" translates to "the ones that made us want to smack our head on the desk") of the more than 700 bills already filed since back in November. Keep in mind that state legislators will be able to file bills until March, so what follows is by no means the last word on that which some (a.k.a. we) see as just this side of crazy-pants crazy.

5. The one where everybody gets all the guns. HB 195: Relating to the carrying of handguns; providing for the open carrying of handguns; and removing the requirement that a person who may lawfully possess handguns obtain a Concealed Handgun License in order to carry a handgun lawfully in the state of Texas.

There are lots of Open Carry bills that have been filed, but the one by Rep. John Strickland is a real honey of a creation. See, Strickland not only wants to allow people to openly carry pistols and the other smaller firearms, he wants to make it so that all the people can carry all the guns all the time. HB 195 even proposes getting rid of concealed handgun licenses entirely. It's practically impossible to see how this one could, you know, backfire. Despite what you'd expect, this being shoot-em'-up Texas and all, the Lone Star State has had a 140-year ban on openly carrying firearms. If this or any of the other bills filed actually get through the Lege, Texas will become the largest state to allow this type of pistol packing.

4. The one that's trying to quash gay marriage just in case it becomes legal in Texas. HB 623: Relating to the funding, issuing, and litigation of certain marriage licenses.

It's hard to believe it, but as of right now, gay marriage has been recognized in 36 states that contain roughly 70 percent of the country's population. It's quite possible that Texas may become one of the next states to be legally on board with same-sex marriage judging from the response of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals last Friday. But of course, Texas lawmakers can't just go quietly and get along on this issue.

Last week Rep. Cecil Bell filed HB 623, a bill that will, among other things, prohibit the use of taxpayer funds for the licensing and support of same-sex marriage. It will also bar any government employee who recognizes gay marriage from being paid. Gay marriage is such a hot-button issue right now, this is only one of a slew of bills filed touching on the subject. However, considering where things stand and the fact that Texas may well be on the brink of becoming the next state to recognize same-sex marriages, the timing of and calculation behind this bill make it particularly exasperating.

3. The one where Texas wants to build its own Fort Knox. HB 483: Relating to the establishment and administration of a state bullion depository; authorizing fees.

Despite the fact that this idea didn't gain any legislative traction during the 2013 session, Rep. Giovanni Capriglione is once again hoping to create the Texas Bullion Depository. Basically this bill would allow Texas to set up its very own Fort Knox. Outside of Texas once again trying to wing it as its very own independent country -- and keep in mind that whole secession thing went so well for us last time -- there doesn't seem to be any actual reason to create such a thing, unless scientists have figured out a way to allow people to swim through piles of gold just like Scrooge McDuck. But despite the fact that this bill doesn't have much of a point, Capriglione is heading once more into the breach. Fingers crossed that it's the last time.

2. The one that's trying to make the cowboy hat the official hat of Texas.HCR 35: Designating the cowboy hat as the official State Hat of Texas

This one, cooked up by Rep. Marsha Farney, is pretty self-explanatory, but the mind-boggling part is that lawmakers are going to spend actual time, actual taxpayer dollars and actual effort on deciding once and for all that the cowboy hat is hands-down the quintessential hat of Texas. Because somehow that is a thing that needs to be conclusively decided and put down for the record so that everyone for time immemorial will know we are all about the cowboy hat versus, let's say, the ski cap.

1.The one that's trying to legalize discrimination. SJR 10: Proposing a constitutional amendment relating to an individual's or religious organization's freedom of religion.

The summary sounds innocuous enough, but state Sen. Donna Campbell's second attempt to legalize gay discrimination is anything but harmless. If passed, the law will allow Texas business owners to discriminate against LGBT customers if they feel that serving them would violate their religious beliefs. Aside from the tiny fact that it's arguable that any religion that would sanction, let alone command, such behavior must be pretty horrid, this isn't even the first time Campbell has tried this shtick. She filed a nearly identical bill back in 2013 and nothing came of it, but despite the fact that there could be all kinds of problems triggered by such broad legislation, she's going for it again

How the Gun Lobby Became a Threat to Public Safety

March 4, 2014

by Joshua Holland

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  Nearly 100 confiscated illegal firearms rests on a table before a press conference with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and New York City District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Friday, Oct. 12, 2012 in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

  Just a generation ago, the NRA was a nonpartisan and relatively non-ideological organization that advocated for responsible and safe gun ownership in addition to defending gun rights. But in its 20 years under the leadership of chief executive Wayne LaPierre the organization has become another cog in the broader conservative advocacy machine.

  At the same time, with gun ownership declining, the organization has come to rely less on its members’ dues and more on firearm manufacturers, which now account for over half of the NRA’s revenues according to Walter Hickey at Business Insider.

  The gun lobby also lost a key element of what had long been its defining mission: Guns remain a hot-button topic for political debate, but in the courts the issue has largely been settled. Gun rights won.
  
  In 2010, the Supreme Court settled a long-standing debate about whether the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to bear arms or only applied to, as the Constitution reads, “a well-regulated militia.” The court ruled that the right to own firearms, while not without limits, is as integral as the right to free speech or the free exercise of religion. Since then, a number of municipal bans on firearm ownership have been overturned — most recently when a federal court struck down a California law that allowed counties to restrict the concealed carry of guns.

  But the gun makers’ lobby remains strong and well-financed, and it has an institutional imperative to keep lobbying. It is now in the business of selling guns by promoting the idea that we can never have too many, nor should there be any public places where firearms aren’t welcome — and by spinning conspiracy theories about various imagined plots to disarm law-abiding Americans.

  Today, the NRA and its political allies promote such policies as allowing concealed weapons in bars, allowing the blind to carry firearms (“Blind gun user Michael Barber said: ‘When you shoot a gun, you take it out and point and shoot, and I don’t necessarily think eyesight is necessary’”), making it a felony for doctors to discuss gun safety with their patients (never mind the First Amendment) andbarring private firms from telling their employees to keep their guns at home.

  Pro-gun lawmakers have gotten the message. Last month, five Republican legislators in Washington State introduced a bill that would exempt all firearms and ammunition from the state’s sales tax. Now in theory at least, one reason for tax breaks is to encourage some social good. For example, 20 years of tax credits have played a role in the exponential increase of wind energy production in the US. Yet here was a proposed tax break that would only encourage the sale of more guns in a country that’s already bristling with them.

  These laws are predicated on the belief that more guns make a society safer. One of the cosponsors of the Washington State bill, Matt Shea (R-Spokane Valley) told a local conservative talk radio host, “It’s beyond a shadow of a doubt: More firearms in a society cuts crime in that society.” (In fact, according to the UN, the US is believed to lead the world in private gun ownership and has the highest total crime rate among wealthy countries.)

  Kentucky lawmakers proposed a similar measure back in December, and in Kansas, the belief that more guns mean more safety forms the basis of a law thatonly permits local officials to bar firearms from public buildings if they install costly metal detectors or hire security guards. In South Carolina, Governor Nikki Haley is backing a law that would allow people to carry concealed guns without a permit or any safety training.

  The problem is that this faith in guns for security, like global warming denialism, flies in the face of a mountain of serious, peer-reviewed research.

  Last month, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a study conducted by epidemiologists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) finding that access to a firearm makes an individual almost twice as likely to become the victim of a homicide and three times more likely to commit suicide.

  Previous studies had found that countries with higher rates of gun ownership also have higher rates of gun deaths and that states with more guns have higher homicide rates. But gun advocates dismissed those studies because they didn’t account for illegal gun sales. (The National Rifle Association’s side of the scholarly debate rests largely on the discredited and allegedly fraudulent work of economist John Lott.)

  The UCSF study took a different approach, starting with a dead body and working backwards to see whether that person owned or had access to a firearm, legal or illegal. The study was a meta-analysis combining data from 15 previous, peer-reviewed papers.

  It also found a significant gender gap in terms of homicide: Men with access to a gun were 29 percent more likely to be a victim of homicide, while women with a gun close at hand were almost three times more likely to be murdered. The report cited previous studies that found that most female murder victims knew their assailant, and three-quarters of women killed with a gun died in their own homes. Researchers concluded that the presence of guns may make impulsive killings during domestic disputes more common.

  Another soon-to-be-published study may provide the most compelling evidence to date that looser gun laws lead to more bloodshed. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health were able to conduct a natural experiment in Missouri after the state repealed a law requiring handgun purchasers to get a license and pass a background check in 2007. According to the study’s authors, repealing the law “contributed to a sixteen percent increase in Missouri’s murder rate.”

  That translated into 55 to 63 more murders per year in Missouri between 2008 and 2012, despite the fact that during the same period, “none of the states bordering Missouri experienced significant increases in murder rates and the U.S. murder rate actually declined by over five percent.” The increase in murders began in the first full year after the state’s licensing requirement was repealed, and the researchers “controlled for changes in policing, incarceration, burglaries, unemployment, poverty, and other state laws adopted during the study period that could affect violent crime.”

  The conclusions presented in these studies, along with previous research, fly in the face of the persistent claim that more guns make a society safer. But this is as much a story of money influencing politics as anything else. With supporters like Springfield Armory, Inc, Pierce Bullet, Seal Target Systems, Beretta USA Corporation, Sturm Rugar & Co and Smith & Wesson, public safety simply isn’t a high priority for the gun lobby.
  

  Joshua Holland is a senior digital producer for BillMoyers.com. He’s the author of The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything Else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America) (Wiley: 2010), and host of Politics and Reality Radio. Follow him on Twitter or drop him an email at hollandj [at] moyersmedia [dot] com.
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Beck: Our Founding Principles Require That Christianity Receive Preferential Treatment

SUBMITTED BY Kyle Mantyla on Friday, 1/16/2015 12:23 pm

For the last three years, right-wing Christian groups have been distributing Bibles to students in the Orange County, Florida, public schools system every January on "National Freedom of Religion Day." This year, after atheist groups and Satanists sought to likewise distribute materials to students, the school system suspended the program and Glenn Beck is predictably furious.

On his television program last night, Beck insisted that not allowing Christianity to have a preferred place in American society is a violation of the very principles upon which this nation was founded.

"We are clearly a Judeo-Christian nation," he said while warning that society has now begun to "coddle those who disagree with Judeo-Christian values."

"We are becoming openly hostile to our own foundation," Beck said. "We have tolerated and excused and embraced the ideals that are in direct opposition to our founding principles."

After slamming the Florida school system for not even having "enough spine left to stand up to Satanists," Beck insisted that this is not an issue of equal treatment or free speech. 

"We lie to ourselves and we say it's our principles, we believe in free speech," he said. "It's not our principles of free speech. This is national suicide":

- See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/beck-our-founding-principles-require-christianity-receive-preferential-treatment#sthash.vjC4EPq7.dpuf

Sandy Rios: House Should Expel Muslim Congressman For 'Islamic Terrorist Connections'

SUBMITTED BY Brian Tashman on Friday, 1/16/2015 1:00 pm

On her radio program yesterday, the American Family Association’s Sandy Rios alleged that President Obama, whom she believes is a secret Muslim, is trying to bring more Muslim immigrants into the U.S. as part of his plan of “radically transforming the United States of America.”

According to Rios, “the president prefers, defers to the Islamic world, he defers to the Islamic extremists in the Muslim world.”

Rios then launched into a tirade against Rep. André Carson, repeating her contention that the House should ban the Indiana Democrat from serving on the House Intelligence Committee for the serious crime of being Muslim. After false claiming that two groups that donated to Carson, the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, are tied to terrorists, Rios said that Carson should be booted out of Congress for “his terrorist connections, his Islamic terrorist connections.”

“This man, André Carson, does not belong on the House Intelligence Committee, he doesn’t even belong in Congress, this is disgraceful,” she said. “André Carson is a dangerous person.”

An incensed Rios then returned to attacking Obama for “radically transforming the United States of America” through immigration.

Watch Neil deGrasse Tyson explain the meaning of life to a curious 6-year-old

Watch Neil deGrasse Tyson explain the meaning of life to a curious 6-year-old

You Won’t Believe The Appalling Amount We Spend On Social Security (INFOGRAPHIC)

You Won’t Believe The Appalling Amount We Spend On Social Security (INFOGRAPHIC)

Elisabeth Parker

We just ran through the numbers for Congress’ wretched 2015 budget deal, and can’t believe how much we’re spending on Social Security. Even more appalling are our outlays for education, health care, food stamps, and other government programs.

We’re not spending nearly enough.

Take a look at the pie chart below to see what’s wrong with this picture. We’re not spending nearly enough on Social Security and other safety net programs. Nor can this paltry budget — which doesn’t even accurately account for the rising cost of living — do anything towards rebuilding our nation’s crumbling infrastructure or spurring innovation and economic growth.

The National Priorities Project reports that out of the US government’s entire $1.16 trillion pot of “discretionary spending” money for the upcoming year, a whopping $640 billion goes to the military. Whoa. let that sink in for a second. $640 billion for the military. That’s 55.2 percent of all federal funds not already committed. Even Social Security — which we all pay into — doesn’t get that much.

2015 US discretionary spending for Social Security and other government programs. Infographic byElisabeth Parker.

Republicans love saying we don’t have enough money to cover the essential public functions shown on this pie charts, but that’s a lie. Back in mid-twentieth century America, our higher (but still comparatively modest) tax rates on corporations and one percenters fueled innovation and a broadly-shared prosperity never known to mankind before, or since.

During the prosperous years of the mid-twentieth century (1950-1970), we also spent way too much money on our military. But at least other spending helped balance it out. Now, we lavish money on a military that commits humanitarian outrages around the world while failing to care for its own soldiers, and have little left for anything else.

Meanwhile, the following essential programs remain underfunded for the third decade in a row:

(10) Social Security, unemployment, and labor ($56.1 billion): Social Security, unemployment, and labor only gets a scant 4.8 percent from this budget in a time of high (albeit dwindling) unemployment (assuming you count crappy low-wage jobs at McDonalds and Walmart as “employment”). Americans pay directly into federal funds for social security, disability, and unemployment insurance, yet Republicans in Congress sneeringly call them “entitlements,” as though we aren’t actually entitled to them.

(9) Medicare and health ($56.7 billion): Medicare and Obamacare (aka the ACA)  are two other programs that Republicans love to attack because they hate anything that improves the quality of life for their fellow Americans, no matter how efficient, well-run, and cost-effective these programs are. And the heck with flu vaccines and other public health initiatives. The GOP would rather just cast sick and elderly people away on an ice floe to die in some quiet, invisible way that doesn’t annoy them.

(8) Food & Agriculture ($12.8 billion): Conservatives in Congress love bashing food stamp recipients as “lazy” even though a lot of them actually do work, and simply don’t get paid enough. And despite the horrifying fact that 25 percent of US children now live in poverty — a record level here, and a much higher rate than in other developed nations — the GOP apparently wants them to starve. “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

(7) Veterans benefits ($65.5 billion): This seems generous, until you consider that a quick stroll through your local homeless encampment will swiftly reveal how badly our nation for our veterans. Alas, the skills our soldiers gain while serving in the military don’t translate well to the outside world, regardless of what all those ads and campus recruiters promise. Alas, Walmart doesn’t need as many armored tank drivers and ballistics specialists as you’d think.

(6) Science ($29.2 billion): Forget about the days when America led the world in technology and innovation. The pathetic $29.2 billion we spend on science not only won’t spawn the next Internet, we’ll be lucky if that level of funding allows us to keep up with the latest flu virus mutations.

(5) Energy & the Environment ($38.4 billion): Once you subtract all those fossil fuel incentives and subsidies, there’s very little left to develop renewable energy sources and promote an environment that’s actually habitable for humans in the near future. Then again, the world is barely habitable for humans now.

(4) Government ($63.9 billion): Since we’re cutting back on government programs, we won’t need government employees to keep them running. Except for the ones who process unemployment applications. We’ll need more of those.

(3) Transportation ($26.1 billion): Who needs roads, trains, and public transit? Once the US government lays everyone off and corporations ship all the jobs overseas, nobody will need to go anywhere anyway. But that’s okay, we can just hunker down in our bunkers and breed our New World Army.

(2) Housing & Community ($60.9 billion): Like food stamps, federal programs that help low-to-middle-income folks afford to rent or purchase homes  are under attack, even though 30 years of conservative policies have caused more people to need help in the first place.

(1) International Affairs ($38.2 billion):When military intervention doesn’t do the job, or causes bad PR, our leaders can schmooze the right people or make a thoughtful gesture. Perhaps we should fold this into the military budget, but we can’t, because it’s already so bloated.

Social Security has always been solvent and can continue meeting its obligations if we continue supporting the program as a nation. Even if we don’t agree with a government-run insurance system for retirement and disability, it’s what we’ve got, and we need to honor our promises.

When you look at the US government’s total 2015 budget of $3.9 trillion, Social Security accounts for $1.33 trillion (33.6 percent) and Medicare accounts for $1.05 trillion (26.6 percent). But that spending is far less lavish than it seems, when you consider that all working Americans pay for — or have paid for — Medicare, Social Security, and unemployment insurance.

Total US Government budget for 2015 with $3.9 trillion, and $1.33 trillion for Social Security, unemployment, and labor. Pie chart: National Priorities Project.

But despite the fact that we’ve all bought and paid into this federally-run insurance system that provides a safety net of last resort for when we get laid off or get too old or too sick to work, these programs are constantly under assault by Republicans. In fact, the GOP attacks and chips away at nearly all government programs that once made America among the best places in the world to live, and then manages to convince Americans that education and other programs aren’t working.

The only program Republicans want to fund is the military: But, of course not the programs that help bring soldiers from low income backgrounds into the middle class, and not the programs that care for the veterans we’ve destroyed.

More from Addicting Info on Social Security:

• Why Do Republicans Hate Social Security? Because It’s A Government Program That Works
• Everyone Is Lying To You About Social Security – Here Is The Truth (IMAGE)
• Financial Suicide – Privatizing Social Security
• The Solvency Of Social Security

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H/T: Jenna B. Pope | Featured image: Elisabeth Parker.

Muslim Man Who Saved Lives at Kosher Market Siege Awarded French Citizenship

by Tina Nguyen | 10:43 am, January 15th, 2015

Lassana Bathily, the Muslim man who saved 15 lives during last week’s terror attacks in France, will be naturalized in a public ceremony next week after nearly 300,000 people signed a petition demanding he be given citizenship.

In addition, he will be given the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest award of merit.

Bathily, an immigrant from Mali and an employee of Paris’s Hypercache market, managed to hide a dozen people — seven Jews among them — in the supermarket’s walk-in freezer when Amedy Coulibaly stormed the market last Friday, killing four people and holding dozens hostage in exchange for the freedom of his associates, Cherif and Said Kouachi, wanted for the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

What’s more, Bathily managed to escape the building using a fire escape and, after convincing the police he wasn’t an accomplice, gave them crucial logistical information about the building that eventually helped them storm the market, kill Coulibaly, and rescue the hostages.

His quick thinking was praised by French President Francois Hollande and Israeli Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu, who publicly thanked him by name during a speech in a Parisian synagogue.

According to RTL, Bathily had filed for naturalization in July of 2014, and the Ministry of the Interior fast-tracked his request. A massive petition circulating on Change.org certainly helped: within days of being posted, the petition garnered nearly 300,000 signatures.

Bathily, noted in the media for his humility, will be given the award in a naturalization ceremony on Tuesday, January 20th in Paris.

[RTL]
[Image via screenshot/BFMTV]

MAY THE EYES HAVE IT!

The Senate will vote to decide if climate change is real

By Ted Alvarez on 14 Jan 2015 

Senate Majority Leader and honorary fifth ninja turtle Mitch McConnell announced yesterday that he will graciously allow the Senate to vote on climate change. Specifically: thing or not a thing?

Here at Grist, we understand that plenty of things that seem real might not bereal (Drake, cake pops), and vice versa (ghosts). And we agree with our nation’s House of Lords: The most important part of fighting existential threats is determining if they are real, preferably by simple majority. “Evidence” means jack until you put it to a vote.

Like climate change, there are lots of other societal bugaboos we’re just not sure we buy. Since we can’t DO anything about them until we decide, let’s look at the evidence for and against a few of the big ones — and then vote on them, Senate, we beg of you.

Shutterstock

1. Time

For: The inexorable ravages of age; sand.

Against: The Rolling Stones; this broken Swatch; Interstellar; R.E.M.

Shutterstock

2. The Moon

For: Neil Armstrong; R.E.M.; werewolves; tides.

Against: Investigative journalism; clouds.

YouTube

3. Adnan Syed

For: Sarah Koenig.

Against: Sarah Koenig.

Shutterstock

4. Vegetables

For: Your mom’s lying word; lying farmers.

Against: Fruits.

YouTube

5. Jean Claude Van Damme

For: Footage of devastation via roundhouses and crotch punches; the 90s.

Against: This CGI nightmare fever dream; the 2000s.

Honestly, I see where Mitch is coming from: You don’t want to deal with a thing? Pretend it doesn’t exist; get your friends to agree with you. In that vein, I have one more item for this list:

Pete Souza/White House

6. Mitch McConnell himself

For: This disappointed hare; this empty pizza box.

Against: There were only ever four teenage mutant ninja turtles, and you know it.

Here are 5 times Muslim guests denounced terrorism on Fox itself, despite being yelled at and interrupted:

Here are 5 times Muslim guests denounced terrorism on Fox itself, despite being yelled at and interrupted:

Post by Media Matters for America.

“Has America gone crazy?”

It's a question that dogs me wherever I travel abroad -- and one for which I increasingly have no easy answer

ANN JONES, TOMDISPATCH.COM

EnlargeJoni Ernst (Credit: AP/Charlie Neibergall)

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

Americans who live abroad — more than six million of us worldwide (not counting those who work for the U.S. government) — often face hard questions about our country from people we live among. Europeans, Asians, and Africans ask us to explain everything that baffles them about the increasingly odd and troubling conduct of the United States.  Polite people, normally reluctant to risk offending a guest, complain that America’s trigger-happiness, cutthroat free-marketeering, and “exceptionality” have gone on for too long to be considered just an adolescent phase. Which means that we Americans abroad are regularly asked to account for the behavior of our rebranded “homeland,” now conspicuously in decline and increasingly out of step with the rest of the world.

In my long nomadic life, I’ve had the good fortune to live, work, or travel in all but a handful of countries on this planet.  I’ve been to both poles and a great many places in between, and nosy as I am, I’ve talked with people all along the way. I still remember a time when to be an American was to be envied. The country where I grew up after World War II seemed to be respected and admired around the world for way too many reasons to go into here.

That’s changed, of course. Even after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I still met people — in the Middle East, no less — willing to withhold judgment on the U.S.  Many thought that the Supreme Court’s installation of George W. Bush as president was a blunder American voters would correct in the election of 2004. His return to office truly spelled the end of America as the world had known it.  Bush had started a war, opposed by the entire world, because he wanted to and he could. A majority of Americans supported him.  And that was when all the uncomfortable questions really began.

In the early fall of 2014, I traveled from my home in Oslo, Norway, through much of Eastern and Central Europe. Everywhere I went in those two months, moments after locals realized I was an American the questions started and, polite as they usually were, most of them had a single underlying theme: Have Americans gone over the edge? Are you crazy? Please explain.

Then recently, I traveled back to the “homeland.”  It struck me there that most Americans have no idea just how strange we now seem to much of the world. In my experience, foreign observers are far better informed about us than the average American is about them. This is partly because the “news” in the American media is so parochial and so limited in its views both of how we act and how other countries think — even countries with which we were recently, are currently, or threaten soon to be at war. America’s belligerence alone, not to mention its financial acrobatics, compels the rest of the world to keep close track of us.  Who knows, after all, what conflict the Americans may drag you into next, as target or reluctant ally?

So wherever we expatriates settle on the planet, we find someone who wants to talk about the latest American events, large and small: another country bombed in the name of our “national security,” another peaceful protest march attacked by our increasingly militarized police, another diatribe against “big government” by yet another wannabe candidate who hopes to head that very government in Washington.  Such news leaves foreign audiences puzzled and full of trepidation.

Question Time

Take the questions stumping Europeans in the Obama years (which 1.6 million Americans residing in Europe regularly find thrown our way).  At the absolute top of the list: “Why would anyone oppose national health care?” European and other industrialized countries have had some form of national health care since the 1930s or 1940s, Germany since 1880.  Some versions, as in France and Great Britain, have devolved into two-tier public and private systems.  Yet even the privileged who pay for a faster track would not begrudge their fellow citizens government-funded comprehensive health care. That so many Americans do strikes Europeans as baffling, if not frankly brutal.

In the Scandinavian countries, long considered to be the most socially advanced in the world, a national (physical and mental) health program, funded by the state, is a big part — but only a part — of a more general social welfare system.  In Norway, where I live, all citizens also have an equal right to education (state subsidized preschool from age one, and free schools from age six through specialty training or university education and beyond), unemployment benefits, job-placement and paid retraining services, paid parental leave, old age pensions, and more.  These benefits are not merely an emergency “safety net”; that is, charitable payments grudgingly bestowed upon the needy.  They are universal: equally available to all citizens as human rights encouraging social harmony — or as our own U.S. constitution would put it, “domestic tranquility.”  It’s no wonder that, for many years, international evaluators have ranked Norway as the best place to grow old, to be a woman, and to raise a child. The title of “best” or “happiest” place to live on Earth comes down to a neighborly contest among Norway and the other Nordic social democracies, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland.

In Norway, all benefits are paid for mainly by high taxation. Compared to the mind-numbing enigma of the U.S. tax code, Norway’s is remarkably straightforward, taxing income from labor and pensions progressively, so that those with higher incomes pay more. The tax department does the calculations, sends an annual bill, and taxpayers, though free to dispute the sum, willingly pay up, knowing what they and their children get in return. And because government policies effectively redistribute wealth and tend to narrow the country’s slim income gap, most Norwegians sail pretty comfortably in the same boat. (Think about that!)

Life and Liberty

This system didn’t just happen. It was planned. Sweden led the way in the 1930s, and all five Nordic countries pitched in during the postwar period to develop their own variations of what came to be called the Nordic Model: a balance of regulated capitalism, universal social welfare, political democracy, and the highest levels of gender and economic equality on the planet. It’s their system. They invented it. They like it. Despite the efforts of an occasional conservative government to muck it up, they maintain it. Why?

In all the Nordic countries, there is broad general agreement across the political spectrum that only when people’s basic needs are met — when they can cease to worry about their jobs, their incomes, their housing, their transportation, their health care, their kids’ education, and their aging parents — only then can they be free to do as they like. While the U.S. settles for the fantasy that, from birth, every kid has an equal shot at the American dream, Nordic social welfare systems lay the foundations for a more authentic equality and individualism.

These ideas are not novel. They are implied in the preamble to our own Constitution. You know, the part about “we the People” forming  “a more perfect Union” to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”  Even as he prepared the nation for war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt memorably specified components of what that general welfare should be in his State of the Union address in 1941. Among the “simple basic things that must never be lost sight of,” he listed“equality of opportunity for youth and others, jobs for those who can work, security for those who need it, the ending of special privileges for the few, the preservation of civil liberties for all,” and oh yes, higher taxes to pay for those things and for the cost of defensive armaments.

Knowing that Americans used to support such ideas, a Norwegian today is appalled to learn that a CEO of a major American corporation makes between 300 and 400 times as much as its average employee. Or that governors Sam Brownback of Kansas and Chris Christie of New Jersey, having run up their state’s debts by cutting taxes for the rich, now plan to cover the loss with money snatched from the pension funds of workers in the public sector. To a Norwegian, the job of government is to distribute the country’s good fortune reasonably equally, not send it zooming upward, as in America today, to a sticky-fingered one percent.

In their planning, Norwegians tend to do things slowly, always thinking of the long term, envisioning what a better life might be for their children, their posterity.  That’s why a Norwegian, or any northern European, is aghast to learn that two-thirds of American college students finish their education in the red, some owing $100,000 or more. Or that in the U.S., still the world’s richest country, one in three children lives in poverty, along with one in fiveyoung people between the ages of 18 and 34. Or that America’s recent multi-trillion-dollar wars were fought on a credit card to be paid off by our kids. Which brings us back to that word: brutal.

Implications of brutality, or of a kind of uncivilized inhumanity, seem to lurk in so many other questions foreign observers ask about America like: How could you set up that concentration camp in Cuba, and why can’t you shut it down?  Or: How can you pretend to be a Christian country and still carry out the death penalty? The follow-up to which often is: How could you pick as president a man proud of executing his fellow citizens at the fastest raterecorded in Texas history?  (Europeans will not soon forget George W. Bush.)

Other things I’ve had to answer for include:

* Why can’t you Americans stop interfering with women’s health care?

* Why can’t you understand science?

* How can you still be so blind to the reality of climate change?

* How can you speak of the rule of law when your presidents break international laws to make war whenever they want?

* How can you hand over the power to blow up the planet to one lone, ordinary man?

* How can you throw away the Geneva Conventions and your principles to advocate torture?

* Why do you Americans like guns so much?  Why do you kill each other at such a rate?

To many, the most baffling and important question of all is: Why do you send your military all over the world to stir up more and more trouble for all of us?

That last question is particularly pressing because countries historically friendly to the United States, from Australia to Finland, are struggling to keep up with an influx of refugees from America’s wars and interventions. Throughout Western Europe and Scandinavia, right-wing parties that have scarcely or never played a role in government are now rising rapidly on a wave of opposition to long-established immigration policies. Only last month, such a party almost toppled the sitting social democratic government of Sweden, a generous country that has absorbed more than its fair share of asylum seekers fleeing the shock waves of “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.”

The Way We Are

Europeans understand, as it seems Americans do not, the intimate connection between a country’s domestic and foreign policies. They often trace America’s reckless conduct abroad to its refusal to put its own house in order.  They’ve watched the United States unravel its flimsy safety net, fail to replace its decaying infrastructure, disempower most of its organized labor, diminish its schools, bring its national legislature to a standstill, and create the greatest degree of economic and social inequality in almost a century. They understand why Americans, who have ever less personal security and next to no social welfare system, are becoming more anxious and fearful. They understand as well why so many Americans have lost trust in a government that has done so little new for them over the past three decades or more, except for Obama’s endlessly embattled health care effort, which seems to most Europeans a pathetically modest proposal.

What baffles so many of them, though, is how ordinary Americans in startling numbers have been persuaded to dislike “big government” and yet support its new representatives, bought and paid for by the rich. How to explain that? In Norway’s capital, where a statue of a contemplative President Roosevelt overlooks the harbor, many America-watchers think he may have been the last U.S. president who understood and could explain to the citizenry what government might do for all of them. Struggling Americans, having forgotten all that, take aim at unknown enemies far away — or on the far side of their own towns.

It’s hard to know why we are the way we are, and — believe me — even harder to explain it to others. Crazy may be too strong a word, too broad and vague to pin down the problem. Some people who question me say that the U.S. is “paranoid,” “backward,” “behind the times,” “vain,” “greedy,” “self-absorbed,” or simply “dumb.”  Others, more charitably, imply that Americans are merely “ill-informed,” “misguided,” “misled,” or “asleep,” and could still recover sanity.  But wherever I travel, the questions follow, suggesting that the United States, if not exactly crazy, is decidedly a danger to itself and others. It’s past time to wake up, America, and look around.  There’s another world out here, an old and friendly one across the ocean, and it’s full of good ideas, tried and true.

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Ann Jones has a new book published today: They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars -- the Untold Story, a Dispatch Books project in cooperation with Haymarket Books. Andrew Bacevich has already had this to say about it: “Read this unsparing, scathingly direct, and gut-wrenching account -- the war Washington doesn’t want you to see. Then see if you still believe that Americans ‘support the troops.’” Jones, who has reported from Afghanistan since 2002, is also the author of two books about the impact of war on civilians: Kabul in Winter and War Is Not Over When It’s Over.