After the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade and returned the regulation of abortion to the states, many liberals and progressives thought that culture warriors would move on to other hot-button issues such as same-sex marriage, gender-affirming care for transgender people, and banning library books that offend their religious sensibilities. As someone who was an Evangelical pastor for twenty-five years, I warned my fellow progressives that Evangelicals, conservative Catholics, and Mormons were not finished on the abortion front; that their true objective is to pass total abortion bans. No exceptions for rape and incest. No exceptions for the life of the mother or fatal fetal abnormalities. From the moment the sperm fertilizes the egg — no abortion. Period.
Eighty-eight percent of abortions take place in the first trimester. Late-term abortions are rare, and usually the result of fatal fetal abnormalities or threats to the lives of mothers. Yet, forced-birth groups, including those in rural Northwest Ohio, almost always use gruesome photos of late-term aborted fetuses to inflame the passions of supporters. Why is that? I suspect a photo of a zygote or a four-week-old blastocyst doesn’t stir people to open their checkbooks to give money to forced birth groups as a bloody fetus does.
Currently, signatures are being collected for a ballot initiative that will legalize abortion in Ohio. Hopefully, this initiative will be on the ballot in November. Ohio Republican legislators are doing everything in their power to derail the ballot initiative, including upping vote percentage for an amendment to pass.. It is likely Republican attempts to hinder the democratic process will fail and Ohioans will be able to put an end to the religious rights frontal assault on reproductive rights.
The good news is that the majority of voters support reproductive rights. While they may want certain restrictions on post-viability abortions, most Ohioans support a woman’s right to choose. This is especially the case for younger adults who generally oppose the religious right’s culture war. If younger adults turn out to vote, that will put an end to forced birth laws.
We mustn’t underestimate the goal of Evangelicals and conservative Catholics; not only in banning abortion but also banning many forms of birth control. Their goal is to return Ohio and the United States to the good old days of the 1950s. We must not let this happen.
Bruce Gerencser Ney, Ohio
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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The United States is increasingly split – so is Israel. This is the first time Israeli leadership has openly broken with US leadership … when Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and sometimes Netanyahu say: ‘We’re just going to disregard what you want,’ openly and brazenly to American leadership, that’s new.
Recently, Israel may not have liked US policies, but when the United States demanded that it do something, it would do it. That was true of every US president up until Obama. Trump, of course, went all out to offer Israel anything it wanted, in love with Israeli power, violence and repression. Recognised the Golan Heights annexation, Jerusalem annexation, supported settlement policies all in violation not only of international law but of US policy. US had supported the Security Council resolutions that banned the Israeli takeover of Golan Heights and of Jerusalem. Trump reversed all that. … He did the same thing with Morocco, recognising Moroccan takeover of Western Sahara, which is somewhat analogous to the Palestinian situation.
But the new administration, especially the leading figures like Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, are simply telling the United States: ‘Get lost.’ Netanyahu has made pretty strong statements, saying: ‘We’re a sovereign country, we’ll do what we want.’ It’s the first time the confrontation has been this clear and it’s not clear how the United States will respond.
Two or three years ago … a US representative in the House of Representatives, Betty McCollum, introduced legislation calling for the United States to reconsider US military aid to Israel in light of US law [which] has been regularly violated by US aid to Israel. Didn’t get very far.
Just a couple of days ago, Bernie Sanders introduced legislation calling for prohibition of US aid to Israel … asking for inquiry into its possible conflict with US laws which ban US military aid to any country which is involved in human rights violations. The IDF [Israeli army] is involved … so if there’s an inquiry into this, it might lead to a debate about the legality of the US aid to Israel.
Well, I think all of these things could lead to big changes in the future … It is based to a large extent on substantial shifts in public opinion. I can tell this just from personal experience, I’ve been giving talks, writing and so on about Israel-Palestine issues. Up until pretty recently, I used to have to have police protection if I gave a talk on a campus because of the violent antagonism of the pro-Israel forces. Police insisted on walking me to my car after a talk because of the threat. Even on my own campus, city police and campus police would be there if I was giving a talk. That changed radically.
The point at which it changed is easily identifiable: Operation Cast Lead. That was so brutal, violent, young people just weren’t going to take it any more. I think that was a real tipping point. You could see it very clearly in things like talks on campuses, even strongly pro-Israel campuses like Brandeis University …changed very sharply. These are attitudes of younger people that are going to have a big effect on all of us in the future. So there are conflicts brewing. You don’t see it yet in policy, but I think you can see the beginnings of it.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Let’s start with the obvious. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It’s now been moved forward to 90 seconds to midnight.
Midnight as the termination of the human experience on Earth, racing towards the threat of nuclear war. The threat of imminent climate disaster is increasing – Israel will be one of the major victims.
And our leaders, their major sin is that they’re racing towards disaster. We’re just now commemorating the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq … worst crime of the century, it’s being commemorated here. The US Navy just commissioned its most recent assault vessel and named it the USS Fallujah in memory of one of the worst atrocities of the US attack. Fallujah had been … a beautiful city. Marines invaded, destroyed it, killed thousands of people … People are still dying from the weapons that were used with phosphorus, depleted uranium.
It’s more than atrocious, it’s symbolic. Look over the past 20 years, see if you can find one sentence anywhere near the mainstream that says that the invasion of Iraq was a crime – it was the worst crime of the 20th century. The worst criticism you can make is it was a ‘mistake’. It’s been reconfigured, reshaped to be presented – even by liberal commentators – as a failed effort to save the Iraqi people from an evil dictator, which has absolutely nothing to do with why the war began.
And furthermore, it overlooks a small fact the United States strongly supported Saddam Hussein during the period in which he carried out his most horrible crimes, including things like the poisoning of Iraqis and the Halabja massacre, chemical weapons, killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians. The US was delighted, supported him right through.
So now, history is reconstructed so that we were trying to ‘save Iraqis’ from the person we were strongly supporting. Iraqis were not exactly clamouring for rescue from the country that had imposed sanctions in the 1990s that were so vicious and murderous that there were leading international diplomats who resigned because they regarded them as genocidal. But that’s the way the intellectual classes managed to reconstruct crimes of state. There are people who object around the periphery. You don’t hear their voice, they’re marginalised. You want to learn about the USS Fallujah? You’re not going to read it in the American press. You can read it in critical commentary around the edges where people like me were able to find out about it, not from the American press, but from Al Jazeera.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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I turned on the news this afternoon to find out that the People’s Republic of China is conducting military training exercises in the Taiwan Strait — an international body of water separating China and Taiwan (officially the Republic of China). One hundred and ten miles wide, the Taiwan Strait is considered internal territorial waters by China.
China considers Taiwan part of its sovereign territory. Few Americans know much about Taiwan’s history and why China considers the 168 islands that make up Taiwan part of the mainland. All Americans hear is that Taiwan is a democracy and China is a communist state. Once the word “communist” is invoked, most Americans immediately think China is an existential threat. The great red-baiter Joseph McCarthy lives on. Sure enough, the news show I was watching made certain that viewers knew that China was communist. This, of course, had nothing to do with the story. It was an attempt by a Sinclair-owned news station to poison the news.
Sinclair’s “news” story included interviews with two right-wing Republican congressmen, one of whom was Lindsey Graham, the senior senator from South Carolina. Graham, known for getting the vapors and crying on TV, said it was imperative for the United States to immediately send additional troops to Japan and South Korea, and place nuclear weapons near China. Another Republican said the US needed to immediately send massive amounts of weapons to Taiwan so they can defend themselves. No Democrats were interviewed; neither were any anti-war congresspeople.
The majority of our political leaders in Washington D.C. are warmongers, including many Democrats. Fueled by fantasies such as American exceptionalism and manifest destiny, many of our leaders at all levels of government think the United States is a beacon of freedom (except for having the largest incarceration rate in the world) and democracy (except for gerrymandering, laws meant to restrict voting rights for people of color, and the recent expulsion of two Black representatives from the Tennessee House); that the God of the Christian Bible is on our side, and he will lead us to victory in every war we fight (even though we haven’t won a military conflict since 1945). With minds filled with American grandeur and supremacy, virtually everyone, from Democratic president Joe Biden to Republican lunatics too numerous to count, thinks the United States is an unassailable, impregnable fortress of good.
Even people who live in other Western countries have been charmed by America’s rhetoric and press releases. Recently, a commenter on a post titled The United States Advances “Democracy” One Bloody, Violent War at a Time had this to say: The USA has done bad things, but generally with the intention of trying to do good. Is the American prime directive try to do good? Is the United States a do-gooder on the world stage? Do our political leaders really put “good” above all else?
A cursory reading of American history suggests that we have never been a nation primarily motivated by good. Most people would agree that peace is good. So how do we square this ideal with the fact that the United States has been at war somewhere in the world for most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; that the US has troops and contractors deployed in virtually every corner of the world? War does not bring peace. All war does is bring a cessation of hostilities. Bloodshed and destruction happen until both sides agree to stop killing each other. Is this cessation “peace?” Of course not. The reasons for the hostilities remain, festering until coming to a head once again in the future. This is exactly what is happening in Ukraine. The United States (and NATO) is fighting a proxy war against Russia. Saber-rattling warmongers want to do the same with Taiwan, delusionally thinking that Taiwan can fight a war with China and win. All the United has to do is provide Taiwan with billions of dollars of fancy weaponry, just as we are currently doing in Ukraine. Further, many Americans think we can willy-nilly threaten sovereign states such as Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China with nuclear war without challenge. What happens when a country we have backed into a corner economically with embargoes, tariffs, and other punishments that only hurt the people in the street, decides that its only hope is the use of nuclear weapons against the US? What happens if these countries band together, much as Western nations have done with NATO? When economic and political survival is at stake, nation-states can and do use extreme measures to allegedly protect themselves. This is exactly what the United States did in World War II with the bombing of Dresden, the bombing of Tokyo, and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If and when the United States finds itself in a conventional war with a major world power; one where boots must be put on the ground, it is doubtful that the US would win such a conflict. As with all such wars, the willingness to use extreme measures to win only increases as time goes on. The unthinkable becomes possible, as was the case at the end of World War II. The US is losing its primacy in the world, and instead of evolving with the times, America is determined to use violence and death to maintain its power and economic superiority. And when the whole world is on fire someday? Americans will proudly wave foam fingers in the air, saying “We’re #1, we’re #1!” Finally, they will be right.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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My use of transgendered pronouns was not a mistake; it was sin.
Public sin requires public repentance, not course correction.
I have publicly sinned on the issue of transgender pronouns, which I have carelessly used in books and articles.
I have publicly sinned by advocating for the use of transgender pronouns in interviews and public Q&As.
Why did I do this? I have a bunch of lame and backside-covering excuses. Here are a few. It was a carry-over from my gay activist days. I wanted to meet everyone where they were and do nothing to provoke insult.
When the Supreme Court decided in favor of gay marriage, the danger of my position started to come into focus. The codification of gay marriage and LGBTQ+ civil rights launched a collision course between LGBTQ+ and the Christian faith.
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Is LGBTQ+ a normal option in the ever-expanding menu of sexual orientation and gender identity, needing a little Jesus to aid human flourishing? Or does LGBTQ+ come from Satan as a reflection of the world, the flesh, and the devil? Is it part of God’s creational design or rebellion against the creation ordinance? It’s one or the other because the Christian faith is inherently binary, not non-binary.
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How is using transgender pronouns sinful, you might ask?
Using transgendered pronouns is a sin against the ninth commandment and encourages people to sin against the tenth commandment.
Using transgendered pronouns is a sin against the creation ordinance.
Using transgendered pronouns is a sin against image-bearing.
Using transgendered pronouns discourages a believer’s progressive sanctification and falsifies the gospel.
Using transgendered pronouns cheapens redemption, and it tramples on the blood of Christ.
Using transgendered pronouns fails to love my neighbor as myself.
Using transgendered pronouns fails to offer genuine Christian hospitality and instead yields the definition of hospitality to liberal communitarianism, identity politics, and “human flourishing.”
Using transgendered pronouns isn’t a sin because the times have changed, and therefore, using transgendered pronouns isn’t sinful today but a morally acceptable option in 2012. Sin is sin. The Bible defines this as sin. Sin does not lose its evil because of our good intentions or the personal sensibilities of others. Changing cultural forces can bring sin into fresh light (as the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision did for me). But a renewed focus is no excuse for sin and no dodge for repentance, not for a real Christian.
I repent.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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What drives the Republican Party? What is the singular tool used by Republican politicians to raise money and drive voters to the polls? One word: fear. Spend time listening to Donald Trump, Fox News, ONN, and NewsMax, and you will quickly learn that fear is the fuel that drives the right-wing engine.
Fear the Mexicans. Fear the Blacks. Fear LGBTQ people. Fear the atheists. Fear the secularists. Fear the Democrats. Fear the socialists. Fear Black Lives Matter. Fear ANTIFA. Fear China. Every night, right-wing media serves up that day’s boogeyman that must be feared; that must be slain by voting for the “right” kind of people; right meaning white, libertarian, heterosexual Christian politicians.
Republicans are not stupid. They know that their days are numbered. The United States is becoming browner and less religious by the day. It won’t be long before Whites are a minority race. It won’t be long before the nonreligious outnumber the largest American sect, evangelicalism. There’s coming a day when the eighty million people who don’t vote — many of whom are younger adults with progressive values — realize that they can effect immediate change by voting; that they have the power to put an end to the rule of anti-democratic, misogynistic, racist, and bigoted politicians.
Until that day comes, we must continue to combat Republican fearmongering with facts, passionate protests, and political activism. Unlike Republicans, we must not turn to violence to advance our cause. This battle is one that will be won with words and votes. We must not give in to fear, even when it seems there is no hope in sight.
Ohioans will have an opportunity in November to put an end to the immoral Republican war on women’s reproductive rights. Right now, signatures are being gathered to put this issue on the ballot. If you care about reproductive rights, access to abortion, and birth control, please sign one of the petitions that are circulating in our area. Don’t leave it for someone else to do.
I realize the Ohio Democratic Party has largely been ineffective and out of touch with Ohio voters. On the local level, I know the Party is dominated by old people; people who are often out of touch with younger voters. As an aged Democrat, I know we must do better to attract and engage younger voters, many of whom have progressive ideals. If we don’t, Republicans win.
Bruce Gerencser Ney, Ohio
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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“The US is the most warlike nation in the history of the world.”
— Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter
Exporting wars, launching “color revolutions,” fomenting extremist ideologies, and promoting economic instability…the US has left countless trails of bloodshed and turmoil around the world.
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“War is the American way of life,” said US historian Paul Atwood, noting that the US was born, grew, and became a superpower out of war, slavery, and human slaughter.
In its more than 240-year-long history since declaring independence on July 4, 1776, there have only been 16 years in which the US was not at war. From the end of World War II (WWII) to 2001, the US has initiated 201 of the 248 armed conflicts in 153 locations, accounting for over 80 percent of total wars fought. Since 2001, wars and military operations by the US have claimed more than 800,000 lives and displaced tens of millions of people.
Experts and observers reached by the Global Times said that the US, ignoring the objective reality of its own shambolic democratic record, instead attempts to use “democracy” as a pretext to wage war and as a cover for its numerous crimes such as causing humanitarian disasters and destroying sovereign order, is the real culprit threatening the world.
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For a long time, the US war machine has rumbled across the world, leaving countries in disarray, and people’s livelihoods decimated.
The Korean War (1950-53) resulted in the deaths of more than 3 million civilians and approximately 3 million refugees. During the war, US forces strafed hordes of refugees due to fears that North Korean intelligence agents had infiltrated the refugees, and carried out notorious No Gun Ri and Sinchon Massacres resulting in the deaths of more than 30,000 innocent civilians.
The Vietnam War, which took place from the 1950s to the 1970s, was equally bloody and brutal. The Vietnamese government estimates that as many as two million civilians died in the war, many of whom were systematically slaughtered by US forces in the name of fighting Viet Cong communists.
Data show that US forces dropped more than three times as many bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as were dropped by all sides during WWII.
According to the New York Times, since the war officially ended in 1975, nearly 40,000 Vietnamese have been killed by land mines, cluster bombs, and other ordnances, and 67,000 have been maimed.
Worse still, 20 million gallons of Agent Orange which contained the deadly chemical dioxin, were dropped by the US army during the war, causing cancer or other diseases in much of the local population.
In the Middle East, the US’ flames of war also lasted for decades.
In 1991, US-led coalition forces attacked Iraq to start the Gulf War, directly leading to about 2,500 to 3,500 civilian deaths and the destruction of approximately 9,000 civilian homes in air strikes. The war-inflicted famine and damage to local infrastructure and medical facilities has caused a huge humanitarian crisis, even resulting in the deaths of about 500,000 children, according to United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates.
In 2001, the US sent troops to Afghanistan in the name of fighting terrorism. The war has not only killed at least 100,000 civilians and led to 2 million people becoming refugees, but has also left the country with difficulties in rebuilding its economy and political system.
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In 2003, the US invaded Iraq on trumped-up charges, despite widespread international opposition, resulting in an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 civilian deaths, of which more than 16,000 were directly caused by US forces.
The US-led coalition also extensively used depleted uranium bombs, cluster bombs, and white phosphorus bombs in Iraq, and did nothing to reduce harm to civilians, Sun Degang, professor and director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Fudan University, told the Global Times.
The United Nations estimates that Iraq still has about 25 million landmines and other explosive ordnances that need to be removed today.
Since 2001, the US has declared at least 91,340 strikes, including operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, which may have directly killed at least 22,679 civilians and possibly as many as 48,308, according to a September report by a British investigative organization Airwars.
“War is one of the key means by which the US executes its foreign strategy and achieves global hegemony,” Li Haidong, a professor at the Institute of International Relations of China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times, noting that in the historical process of its rise, the US has always adhered to a militarization mentality and attached great importance to the joint machinations of military alliances in the diplomatic field, repeatedly relying on war to achieve the strategic need to consolidate the country’s sphere of influence.
“The US is the most warlike nation in the history of the world,” former US president Jimmy Carter once confessed. The Global Times found that, since WWII, almost all US presidents have waged or intervened in foreign wars during their terms of office, with a variety of reasons for waging wars.
Many countries believe that war is highly destructive and should be avoided, but in the US’ view, war can bring prosperity, and a war can sweep away the inertia of American society, thus keeping the US vital and dynamic, which is an inherent concept and tradition of the elite group formulated in the 240-year development history of the country, Li said.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. – Matthew 5:9
In a brilliant op-ed published in the New York Times, the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi explained how China, with help from Iraq, was able to mediate and resolve the deeply-rooted conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, whereas the United States was in no position to do so after siding with the Saudi kingdom against Iran for decades. The title of Parsi’s article, “The U.S. Is Not an Indispensable Peacemaker,” refers to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s use of the term “indispensable nation” to describe the U.S. role in the post-Cold War world.
The irony in Parsi’s use of Albright’s term is that she generally used it to refer to U.S. war-making, not peacemaking. In 1998, Albright toured the Middle East and then the United States to rally support for President Clinton’s threat to bomb Iraq. After failing to win support in the Middle East, she wasconfronted by heckling and critical questions during a televised event at Ohio State University, and she appeared on the Today Show the next morning to respond to public opposition in a more controlled setting. Albright claimed, “if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see here the danger to all of us. I know that the American men and women in uniform are always prepared to sacrifice for freedom, democracy, and the American way of life.”
Albright’s readiness to take the sacrifices of American troops for granted had already got her into trouble when she famously asked General Colin Powell, “What’s the use of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Powell wrote in his memoirs, “I thought I would have an aneurysm.”
But Powell himself later caved to the neocons, or the “fucking crazies” as he called them in private, and dutifully read the lies they made up to try to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq to the UN Security Council in February 2003.
For the past 25 years, administrations of both parties have caved to the “crazies” at every turn. Albright and the neocons’ exceptionalist rhetoric, now standard fare across the U.S. political spectrum, leads the United States into conflicts all over the world, in an unequivocal, Manichean way that defines the side it supports as the side of good and the other side as evil, foreclosing any chance that the United States can later play the role of an impartial or credible mediator.
Today, this is true in the war in Yemen, where the U.S. chose to join a Saudi-led alliance that committed systematic war crimes, instead of remaining neutral and preserving its credibility as a potential mediator. It also applies, most notoriously, to the U.S. blank check for endless Israeli aggression against the Palestinians, which doom its mediation efforts to failure. For China, however, it is precisely its policy of neutrality that has enabled it to mediate a peace agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the same applies to the African Union’s successful peace negotiations in Ethiopia, and to Turkey’s promising mediation between Russia and Ukraine, which might have ended the slaughter in Ukraine in its first two months but for American and British determination to keep trying to pressure and weaken Russia.
But neutrality has become anathema to U.S. policymakers. George W. Bush’s threat, “You are either with us or against us,” has become an established, if unspoken, core assumption of 21st-century U.S. foreign policy. The response of the American public to the cognitive dissonance between our wrong assumptions about the world and the real world they keep colliding with has been to turn inward and embrace an ethos of individualism. This can range from New Age spiritual disengagement to a chauvinistic America First attitude. Whatever form it takes for each of us, it allows us to persuade ourselves that the distant rumble of bombs, albeit mostly American ones, is not our problem.
The U.S. corporate media has validated and increased our ignorance by drastically reducing foreign news coverage and turning TV news into a profit-driven echo chamber peopled by pundits in studios who seem to know even less about the world than the rest of us.
Most U.S. politicians now rise through the legal bribery system from local to state to national politics, and arrive in Washington knowing next to nothing about foreign policy. This leaves them as vulnerable as the public to neocon cliches like the ten or twelve packed into Albright’s vague justification for bombing Iraq: freedom, democracy, the American way of life, stand tall, the danger to all of us, we are America, indispensable nation, sacrifice, American men and women in uniform, and “we have to use force.”
Faced with such a solid wall of nationalistic drivel, Republicans and Democrats alike have left foreign policy firmly in the experienced but deadly hands of the neocons, who have brought the world only chaos and violence for 25 years.
All but the most principled progressive or libertarian members of Congress go along to get along with policies so at odds with the real world that they risk destroying it, whether by ever-escalating warfare or by suicidal inaction on the climate crisis and other real-world problems that we must cooperate with other countries to solve if we are to survive.
It is no wonder that Americans think the world’s problems are insoluble and that peace is unattainable, because our country has so totally abused its unipolar moment of global dominance to persuade us that that is the case. But these policies are choices, and there are alternatives, as China and other countries are dramatically demonstrating. President Lula da Silva of Brazil is proposing to form a “peace club” of peacemaking nations to mediate an end to the war in Ukraine, and this offers new hope for peace.
During his election campaign and his first year in office, President Biden repeatedly promised to usher in a new era of American diplomacy, after decades of war and record military spending. Zach Vertin, now a senior adviser to UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, wrote in 2020 that Biden’s effort to “rebuild a decimated State Department” should include setting up a “mediation support unit… staffed by experts whose sole mandate is to ensure our diplomats have the tools they need to succeed in waging peace.”
Biden’s meager response to this call from Vertin and others was finally unveiled in March 2022, after he dismissed Russia’s diplomatic initiatives and Russia invaded Ukraine. The State Department’s new Negotiations Support Unit consists of three junior staffers quartered within the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. This is the extent of Biden’s token commitment to peacemaking, as the barn door swings in the wind and the four horsemen of the apocalypse – War, Famine, Conquest and Death – run wild across the Earth.
As Zach Vertin wrote, “It is often assumed that mediation and negotiation are skills readily available to anyone engaged in politics or diplomacy, especially veteran diplomats and senior government appointees. But that is not the case: Professional mediation is a specialized, often highly technical, tradecraft in its own right.”
The mass destruction of war is also specialized and technical, and the United States now invests close to a trillion dollars per year in it. The appointment of three junior State Department staffers to try to make peace in a world threatened and intimidated by their own country’s trillion-dollar war machine only reaffirms that peace is not a priority for the U.S. government.
By contrast, the European Union created its Mediation Support Team in 2009 and now has 20 team members working with other teams from individual EU countries. The UN’s Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs has a staff of 4,500, spread all across the world.
The tragedy of American diplomacy today is that it is diplomacy for war, not for peace. The State Department’s top priorities are not to make peace, nor even to actually win wars, which the United States has failed to do since 1945, apart from the reconquest of small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama, and Kuwait. Its actual priorities are to bully other countries to join U.S.-led war coalitions and buy U.S. weapons, to mute calls for peace in international fora, to enforce illegal and deadly coercive sanctions, and to manipulate other countries into sacrificing their people in U.S. proxy wars.
The result is to keep spreading violence and chaos across the world. If we want to stop our rulers from marching us toward nuclear war, climate catastrophe, and mass extinction, we had better take off our blinders and start insisting on policies that reflect our best instincts and our common interests, instead of the interests of the warmongers and merchants of death who profit from war.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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I could write a screed against the “gun culture” of this country, where there are five guns for every four people. I could also rail against the inefficacy and indifference of public officials and, most importantly, the people who elected them. And the same people would sigh and nod; others would go on a rant about “the price of freedom—as if there were some sort of equivalence between the right to own as many guns as one wants and the right of another person to lose his or her life because said gun owner “lost it” after having a bad day.
But, as with every other mass shooting—or mass murder of any kind—the pundits, politicos, and too many ordinary citizens miss another important point. Yes, gun regulations need to be stricter. Even more to the point, though, we need more and better mental health screening and treatment—supported by an actual system that truly supports its practitioners as well as its patients.
Oh, and we need ways to keep schools and other institutions from barring such services, or parents from keeping their kids away from them—or, worse yet, enabling conditions deleterious to kids’ mental health–on “religious” grounds.
I don’t know all of the particulars of Audrey Elizabeth Hale’s experience as a pupil of The Covenant School, a conservative Christian institution in Nashville, Tennessee. (The Covent School is a ministry of Covenant Presbyterian Church, an Evangelical institution.) But I can make a very educated guess about at least one thing because, well, it probably paralleled something I experienced.
At the time Hale stormed the school, he was referring to himself with male pronouns, on his LinkedIn page and in personal interactions. Nashville Police Chief John Drake, on the other hand, referred to Audrey with female pronouns in discussing the incident.
Now, Chief Drake may have made an honest mistake: If I had seen “Audrey Elizabeth Hale” on a piece of paper or screen, with no corroborating information, I would have assumed it to be the name of a girl or woman. And, I am sure that Mr. Hale has been misgendered more than once—what trans person isn’t?
But I can only imagine how many times he had been deliberately misidentified. Worse yet, I know all too well what he must have experienced in a school that, I imagine, some parents send their kids to in order to keep them away from “influences” that include people like me—and him—who knew that we aren’t the gender to which we are assigned at birth.
Even if Mr. Hale didn’t experience the bullying too many kids endure—from adults as well as other kids—for not conforming to the gender he was assigned at birth, he almost surely bore the emotional and, at times, physical burdens of moving through the hallways, the playground, the day and life itself in a body that didn’t align with the ways in which he understood himself—and, worse, having to make that body, and his very being, conform to the expectations his teachers and other adults placed on him in the name of the God they claimed as their guide.
Please understand that I am not trying to excuse or condone a mass shooting by Audrey Elizabeth Hale or anyone else. Nor am I trying to imply that the children or even, for that matter, the staff members he killed “had it coming to them” or were collateral damage. Rather, I want to point out that being bullied for what one is—whether that bullying comes from one’s peers or authority figures—leaves indelible scars. The bullying itself is just part of the emotional violence inflicted on someone like him, or me. Another and, perhaps more pernicious, “prong” of what impales us is the fact that the tormentors justify their actions with a higher authority. Folks who run schools like Covenant believe that their faith—or, more precisely, their interpretation of it—authorizes them to “fix” someone who doesn’t conform, if not to beat the non-conformity out of them. And, even if they can’t articulate it, kids who bully other kids who aren’t like them do so when they know the adults who are supposed to be in charge won’t hold them to account or will even enable them.
Chief Drake said investigators believe the shooting may have stemmed from “some resentment” Hale harbored over having to attend that school as a young person. Anyone who plans such an attack, even if the victims are random, and writes a manifesto as to why he is doing it, is dealing with more than just “resentment.” To me, it’s more like the residue of dried blood from a thousand cuts authorized, in the minds of the cutters, by their belief in a God who doesn’t create trans people or anyone else who doesn’t conform to their ideas about masculinity, femininity or, more importantly, humanity—and who let the peers of the victim inflict still other wounds.
Oh, and it was just too damn easy for someone in Hale’s state of mind to get, not just one weapon, but a mini-arsenal—and too fucking hard to get the support he so desperately needed, not to change who he is, but to move away from a life he couldn’t live into one he could have.
Now I have to wonder how many little versions of Audrey Elizabeth Hale (or the author of this piece) were among the young victims or other kids in that school—or could have grown up to be people who love and accept themselves, and others, as they are. If an educational system, a religious institution or a culture can’t or won’t help young people in that way, it fails them and leaves them vulnerable, not only in an attack on the schools or churches they attend, but to harm they inflict on themselves without understanding why. In short, such institutions, guided by interpretations of mythology and outright fiction, inevitably turn out people like Mr. Hale and his victims.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Over the weekend, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, putting billions of dollars in customer deposits at risk. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insures deposits up to $250,000. This means that deposits over $250,000 could be lost, causing harm to depositors. All of a sudden, libertarian venture capitalists and entrepreneurs — people who despise regulation and handouts/bailouts — are pleading for the Biden Administration to come to the rescue and bail out SVB.
Derek Thompson, a writer for Current Affairs, had this to say:
Silicon Valley Bank was widely used, as you might expect, by tech industry startups (as well as a bunch of California winegrowers), and startup types are not generally known for their belief in generous government handouts to those screwed by the free market. But libertarians quickly become socialists when they’re the ones who end up on the losing end of one of capitalism’s frequent crises. Billionaire Mark Cuban swiftly went from denouncing regulators to asking “Where were the regulators?” Tech industry leaders immediately started calling for the FDIC to ditch its $250,000 cap on guaranteed deposits and guarantee everything including the nearly $500 million that Roku held at SVB. Venture capitalist David Sacks said it was unfair for depositors to be punished for opening a bank account at an institution that failed, and that he wasn’t asking for a bailout but merely for the government to “ensure the integrity of the system.” CNBC reported on those noting “the irony as some VCs with notoriously libertarian free-market attitudes are now calling for a bailout.” (At Slate, Edward Ongweso Jr. has more on the “tantrum” thrown by venture capitalists who demanded that the government step in when SVB went under.)
One of those notorious for his “free-market attitudes” is Larry Summers, the former Clinton treasury secretary and Jeffrey Epstein associate. Summers has previously had harsh words for those advocating a bailout for underwater student loan debtors. But when it came to Silicon Valley Bank, Summers said that the government should step in and “this is not the time for moral hazard lectures or for lesson administering or for alarm about the political consequences of ‘bailouts.’”
If the technological innovation coming out of Silicon Valley is as important as venture capitalists insist, the past few days suggest they haven’t been very responsible stewards of it. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank late last week may have resulted from a perfect storm of ugly events. But it was also emblematic of a startup ecosystem and venture-capital apparatus that are too unstable, too risky, and too unmoored from reality to be left in charge of something as important as the direction of our technological development.
As the startups that make up Silicon Valley Bank’s customer base scrambled to figure out whether they would be able to make payroll, a group of extremely online venture capitalists spent four days emoting on Twitter, ginning up confusion and hysteria about the threat of a systemic risk if depositors didn’t get all their money back, pronto. All weekend, they screamed that there would be an economic collapse, that they were concerned about the workers, that the Federal Reserve was responsible, that-that-that … until finally, on Sunday evening, they got what they wanted: the government promising full account access to all Silicon Valley Bank depositors.
By now, it is relatively clear what happened at Silicon Valley Bank. A pandemic bull run inflated the value of tech startups and the funds of investors, resulting in a tripling of deposits at the regional bank that specializes in the industry’s fledgling companies, from $62 billion at the end of 2019 to $189 billion at the end of 2021. SVB wanted to put that money to work, so it bought up U.S. Treasury and mortgage bonds that would take years to mature but serve as a relatively safe place to park its cash—as long as interest rates didn’t rise. They did rise, however, multiple times.
For over a decade, low interest rates have allowed venture capitalists to accumulate huge funds to give increasingly unprofitable firms with unrealistic business models increasingly larger valuations—one 2021 analysis found that not only were 90 percent of U.S. startups that were valued over $1 billion unprofitable, but that most would remain so. Give metens of billions of dollars and a $120 billion valuation and someday, somehow, I will replace every taxi driver with gig workers paid subminimum wages—or robot taxis paid no wages—while charging exorbitant fares for rides, increasing pollution, and adding to traffic. Or not, and I will sell off all the science-fiction projects I’ve promised, but still fail to make a profit.
Over the last year, rising interest rates to combat inflation have meant less free money for science-fiction projects, pressuring investors to change their entire approach and actually fund realistic ventures at realistic valuations with realistically sized funds and deals. Drops in valuations meant smaller checks, which meant smaller deposits at Silicon Valley Bank, and more and more withdrawals as startups ran out of cash themselves. It also meant the bonds SVB bought were now worth less than when purchased, so they’d have to be sold at a loss to generate some liquidity, so that clients could withdraw their deposits.
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This was dramatic, but in fact it should have calmed down everyone who had money there—SVB serviced every level of the tech ecosystem, from venture capitalists who stashed their Smaugian hoards there to startups that kept operational cash or payroll or reserves there. The FDIC, after all, has a clear protocol for this that it reiterated in a statement Friday morning: Get all the federally insured depositors their money by Monday, search for a buyer of the bank over the weekend, and if none was found, then auction off the bank’s assets and segments of operation.
And yet what followed were increasingly baffling online tantrums from prominent investors who either didn’t seem to understand the well-established process or were trying to shift blame for the momentary crisis onto anyone they could.
Early Saturday morning, the famous activist investor Bill Ackman used his Twitter Blue subscription to pen a 649-word rant predicting an economic apocalypse if every single depositor was not made completely whole. Mark Cuban expressed frustration with the FDIC insurance cap that guarantees up to $250,000 in a bank account as being “too low”; he also insisted the Federal Reserve buy up all of SVB’s assets and liabilities. Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat, joined the chorus, tweeting that “We must make sure all deposits exceeding the FDIC $250k limit are honored.”
That’s what federal regulators spent the weekend doing, invoking something called the “systemic risk exception” in order to get every depositor their money. (Stockholders in SVB will take a bath, and the institution’s leadership were all fired.)
And yet you still saw famous venture capitalists like PayPal co-founder and Elon Musk buddy David Sacks begging the Federal Reserve to force a merger or a bailout, then insisting he was not asking for a bailout while again asking for a bailout. This may have seemed a bit strange considering Sacks’ previous disparaging of handouts (specifically to Ukraine) and reactionary vitriol for liberalism itself. But then again, Sacks is a longtime associate of investor Peter Thiel, who believes in free markets but not in competition—in capitalism so long as the rules are attuned to satisfy his own interests first and foremost. It was Thiel’s Founders Fund, by the way, that helped kick off the bank run that sank SVB in the first place.
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Venture capitalists tout themselves as investors who take on big risks by finding value—they provide capital to entrepreneurs lacking the revenue or credit to get traditional financing, but whose big ideas promise to change the world (and make some money along the way). In their self-conception, they would be entitled to white-glove service from the federal government in the wake of this massively inconveniencing event.
The reality, however, is that VCs are herd animals. The industry is overconcetrated—enmeshed, as Geri Kirilova at venture capital firm Laconia Group puts it—and structurally drives capital into a few well-connected hands who pile it into larger funds, cut it into larger checks, and hand it off to a tightly knit network of entrepreneurs and startups. This overreliance on established actors or social networks may seem like a shortcut when you’re risk-averse or unable (and unwilling) to vet every single prospective investment, but it has at times left venture capitalists unable to weed out well-connected or charismatic charlatans.
In a comprehensive case study of the VC industry, UC Davis law professor Peter Lee argues that these are structural deficits that fundamentally undercut venture capital’s ability to actually provide social utility. But venture capital isn’t just wearing blinders. It uses capital as a weapon to crush the competition and corner a market. It works to rewrite laws and regulations, as VC-backed firms tried to do for the gig economy and the crypto industry. Sometimes that means lobbying, as the industry did in the 1970s and 1980s to achieve reforms that cut capital gains taxes, made stock-based compensation attractive, and loosened pension regulations that give VCs access to new funds (and secure a massive subsidy from the government). Being loud and emphasizing their role in creating value has worked for VCs in the past. This past weekend was another example.
What does all of this have to do with SVB? By all accounts, SVB was the beating heart of the valley. In 2015, the New York Times reported that it serviced 65 percent of “all existing start-ups and many of the most prominent venture capital firms.” The bank’s collapse came out of a panic and a bad bet on interest rates, but it got into this situation because everyone involved seems to have helped build a risky system. VCs required portfolio companies to bank with SVB, SVB offered mortgages and wealth management services to VCs, and if SVB offered services similar to other banks serving Silicon Valley, then it likely made the terms of those deals incredibly attractive. First Republic Bank, for example, gave Mark Zuckerberg a mortgage at an interest rate that was below inflation—essentially offering a loan for free.
The risk introduced to SVB by overreliance on low interest rates in both its depositor base and portfolio investments is the same risk embedded in the core of the venture capital model. Profligate fundraising and investment have operated on the assumption that money would be cheap, allowing it to make increasingly exotic bets. Venture capitalists have had a decade of negative to zero real interest rates to build the future through their intrepid noses for value, so what did they give us? We got benefits largely limited to the realm of consumer goods and services, like cheap on-demand delivery and ride-hail (so long as you ignored the exploitation that powered them) and cheap streaming services (until they began hiking prices), namely. But what were the costs? Startups that revolutionized the militarization of our border and our migrant deportation operations, helped weaponize robots, offered A.I. services that exploit invisible underpaid workers in the Global South, and roiled urban transit, rental, and restaurant markets. These projects and others generated billions for investors who got in on an early fundraising round, but they also degraded the quality of life for people across the world.
Here’s the title for the Current Affairs article: Every Libertarian Becomes a Socialist The Moment The Free Market Screws Them. Ain’t that the truth?
Biden, of course, plans to make SVC whole, adamant that it is not a bailout. Sure, Joe, sure. And when more banks fail, as they most certainly will, their bailouts will deplete the FDIC fund. Then what? Biden will be forced to use taxpayer money to rescue failed banks.
Perhaps, we should be asking why SVB failed to start with. The very libertarians demanding socialistic remedies for SVB’s failure are the very same people who promoted and facilitated the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the gutting of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Both Republicans and Democrats are complicit in the current spate of bank failures. They removed the regulatory guardrails meant to keep banks from failing. Will capitalists and the political class learn anything from SVB’s failure? Of course not. Regulation is the only solution to financial mismanagement. Congress should immediately restore the Glass-Steagall Act and restore Dodd-Frank to health. They won’t, because way too many of them are suckling on the corporate teat.
In the real world, libertarianism is a failed political philosophy. It fails the moment corporations fuck up and need taxpayers to bail them out. SVB will be made whole because not doing so would harm far more people than rich venture capitalists, bankers, stock brokers, and entrepreneurs. That’s what happened in 2008, and will continue to happen until we realize the financial sector will only do what they are made to do.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
