Monthly Archives: March 2022

Every year the whos who of the real conservative America meets at the Conservative Political Action Conference organized by the American Conservative Union. Over the Trump administration, the faces of CPAC have changed from a more traditional conservative (tax cuts, pro-corporation) to an odd mixture of libertarian isolationism and cultural dog-whistling so loud that my labradoodle back at home started howling.

Back in 2017, I wrote for Nationofchange a piece titled You should be frightened, CPAC drifts even more right where I discussed the speeches from Wayne LaPierre, Dana Loesch and of course Donald Trump. They were terrifying, and meant to be sothey laid out a future of liberals running the future, forcing your kids to be gay, and cops knocking down your doors to get your guns.

Obviously, none of that has come to passbut we did in the proceeding years see a global pandemic that has killed one million Americans and an attempted and ongoing insurrection. There is a new type of fear to be had at CPAC 2022its masks, mandates, critical race theory, voter fraud, and to a lesser extent, immigrants.

Turning Point USAs Charlie Kirk, who has been drifting more and more right for years gave what was likely the best-received speech (outside of Trumps of course)told the audience that they need not worry about Ukraine and Russia. The U.S. southern border matters a lot more than the Ukrainian border, Im more worried about how the cartels are deliberately trying to infiltrate our country than a dispute 5,000 miles away in cities we cant pronounce, in places that most Americans cant find on a map. Former Trump official KT McFarland later in the day attempted to make people care about Russian expansionism and it fell on deaf earsisolationism and nationalism has taken over CPAC.

The cheerleaders for the pandemicanti-maskers anti-vaxxers and medical disinformation purveyors were among the main speakers at CPAC 2022. Sunday, Dr. Robert Malone sat on a panel with Senatorial candidate Dr. Oz (Ill get to him in a minute) called The Government is Dangerous to Your Health and continued spreading his disinformation. Dr. Malone has been the lead horse in the apocalyptic charge amongst right-wing media punching disinformation about vaccines and the virus. He was Joe Rogans guest that prompted the large outcry against the MMA commentator and reality show hosts podcast.

Dr. Oz who has been at the head of medical misinformation for decades, used his wildly popular and long-running tv show to stow doubt in his viewers about trusted medicineand push them towards his miracle cures. Hes now running for U.S. Senate in the Pennsylvania Republican primary and hasnt stopped. Current polling has him in second placebut Oz is well funded by his own millions hes sold selling snake oil.

The insurrectionists were also at CPAC in force (this time no Oath Keepers were seen) all on stage with prominent speaking times. Sen. Josh Hawley, Representatives Andy Biggs, Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn, and Matt Gaetz were all cheered and greeted at martyrs to the cause. All had been canceledand they were there to speak about it.

Sen. Hawley in his speech specifically cited his heroic fight to stop the count and defend election integrity. He was cheered for it. Pillow magnate Mike Lindell was not on stage but still had his own speaking time in the exhibition room. Friend of Ali Alexander and Stop the Steal campaigner and grassroots activist Scott Pressler did make it to the stage and the line for selfies with him was around the hall.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, joined by CPAC speaker and pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio also attended the America First PAC conference on the other side of Orlando. She shared a stage with AFPAC organizer, the racist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Fuentes leads a troop of young Christian fascists nick-named the groypers. Also in attendance at this event were Arizona Republican State Senator Wendy Rogers, Congressman Steve King, and Gab founder Andrew Torbaall people known for embracing white nationalism.

Wandering the halls, identified as America Firsters by their hats were also a small number of Fuentes groypers. Arizona Neo-Nazi and groyper Greyson Arnold was in attendance for at least Thursday and Friday.

While Im doubtful well be seeing Nick Fuentes and his groypers speaking on panels in the next year or twotheres no need. His message of fear and nationalism has been heard by the conservatives in Washington D.C. and at the American Conservative Union. Embrace it or get buried. Thats how Trump won in 2016theyre using his fascist trailblazing but getting rid of the dog-whistles.

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CPAC 2022no war, but the culture war - NationofChange

Two years ago this month, as the COVID-19 virus spread uncontrollably through large swaths of the country, much of our society shut down. Church services were suspended. We all learned about "spiritual communion" and how to attend Mass via Zoom. We Catholics also learned that we have not done a very good job explaining what the church teaches about conscience.

No one is better at turning church teaching into gibberish than Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas. He repeatedly encouraged people to not get vaccinated and that a well-formed Catholic conscience was grounds for anexemption from any vaccine mandates. Poor thing, now he is posting dumb tweets about the convoys of fake truckers protesting in Canada and the U.S.: "The freedom convoy is deeply rooted in the basic values that have built the world we take for granted,"he tweeted. "We must be free to make choices for our own lives." Where is the balance? Where is the "both/and" that has always characterized the Catholic intellectual tradition?

Strickland was not alone. Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese for the Military Services argued that soldiers who are Catholic could refuse the vaccine.In a statementthat noted the Vatican said the vaccines were morally permissible, yet some soldiers still claimed a conscientious objection to receiving the vaccine, Broglio said, "This circumstance raises the question of whether the vaccine's moral permissibility precludes an individual from forming a sincerely held religious belief that receiving the vaccine would violate his conscience. It does not."

The bishops of Coloradoissued a statementthat sounded like it had been written with help from the libertarian Acton Institute, or maybe from the Republican National Committee. "We always remain vigilant when any bureaucracy seeks to impose uniform and sweeping requirements on a group of people in areas of personal conscience," they wrote, without explaining how public health measures during a pandemic can be anything but "uniform and sweeping" or whether their sweeping claim about bureaucracies applies to, say, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Let's be clear. Conscience is not the right to do whatever you want. Conscience is the opposite of self-will. Conscience is the voice of God in our hearts, helping us to apply the divine law to the moral choices we make. The caricature of conscience as a person with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other is just that, a caricature, but it is closer to the mark than the three statements cited above. Conscience is God's voice telling us to follow his law in a specific situation, thereby creating or strengthening the disposition to make virtuous choices.

No Catholic is more associated with the idea of conscience than St. John Henry Newman, and no comment of his about conscience is more famous than the quip with which he ended the fifth section of his famous "Letter to the Duke of Norfolk": "Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, (which indeed does not seem quite the thing) I shall drink to the Pope, if you please, still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards." Indeed, it is black letter Catholic theology that a person is always bound to follow their conscience, even if it is in error. Just so, the obligation to form one's conscience is grave indeed.

It is an earlier passage in the famous letter of Newman's that almost seems to reach through the ages and speak to us today:

The rule and measure of duty is not utility, nor expedience, nor the happiness of the greatest number, nor State convenience, nor fitness, order, and thepulchrum. Conscience is not a long-sighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself; but it is a messenger from Him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by His representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas, and, even though the eternal priesthood throughout the Church could cease to be, in it the sacerdotal principle would remain and would have a sway.

If the great Newman had written nothing else, if he had not written the sermon "The Second Spring," nor the poem "The Dream of Gerontius," nor his "Apologia Pro Vita Sua," the phrase "Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ" would have earned him a place in the pantheon of great English writers.

The divine law contains many dictates, and during a pandemic, none have greater claim upon our decisions than the common good. It is the nature of a public health emergency that bad decisions by any one individual can have disastrous consequences on others, often people they do not even know. As we discovered, overburdened hospitals had to postpone important and needed surgeries for others becausethere was no room for non-COVID patients. As San Diego Bishop Robert McElroytold U.S. Catholic last year, "[People] do not have a right to go against the common good. That's not Catholic teaching."

It is astonishing to me that the anti-vaxxers used the exact same logic and language as the supporters of abortion rights "My body, my choice" yet, so far as I know, no prominent personage in either camp found in this strange commonality a reason to reconsider their position. Libertarian ideologues prate on about conscience but they are allergic to moral scruples. There is nothing liberal or Catholic about libertarianism. I repeat: There is nothing liberal or Catholic about libertarianism.

Conscience is not something lightly asserted. One wrestles with one's conscience. Conscience challenges us to act in ways that go against our interest. Conscience often exacts a high price for following it. I submit that no one in this great free country of ours should be tied to a gurney and vaccinated against their will, to be sure. The right to bodily integrity, a right that is foundational to so many legal and moral maxims, demands as much. But, the refusal to get vaccinated allows society to protect itself and demand that the unvaccinated no longer participate in, say, a church service or the military or any communal activity at which they risk spreading the virus to others.

One of the worst abuses of the idea of conscience in recent years came in 2015 when Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigan, the papal nuncio in Washington, introduced Pope Francis to Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses and went to jail after she refused to let another clerk issue the licenses. The now-disgraced former nuncio told the pope that Davis was a conscientious objector. But, as I observed at the time:

If the pope wanted to show support for the right of conscientious objection, it would have been better to have him meet with a conscientious objector. Davis lost her right to consider herself a conscientious objector when she forbade other people from issuing the marriage licenses she did not wish to issue herself. Davis was not jailed for practicing her religion. She was jailed for forcing others to practice her religion. She is a public official with a sworn duty. If she cannot carry out that duty, she should seek a work-around or an accommodation, which is what she ended up accepting, or she could have done what a real person of conscience would do: quit.

Conscience, like faith, makes demands and there is nothing that is more damaging to both than people who try and invoke it on the cheap. As we heard this week in the Gospels, people who wish to follow Jesus must take up their cross, not wave it in other people's faces.

We have learned a great deal about our society during this pandemic. The Holy Father addressed many of the challenges the pandemic highlighted in his encyclical Fratelli Tutti. The fact that the church in America has been unable to articulate a Catholic understanding of conscience in our hyper-individualistic society is one of the challenges we knew existed before the pandemic but which has been shown to be even worse than feared because of COVID-19. Especially as the bishops begin to rewrite their quadrennial document on voting, "Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship," it is vital that the bishops, with the assistance of theologians, search for better ways to teach what the church believes about conscience.

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What two years of COVID-19 have taught us about the abuse of conscience - National Catholic Reporter

Along with millions across the globe, I have watched with horror as the Russian military invaded Ukraine. Its clear that Russias intervention in Syria on behalf of Bashar al-Assad, with its lack of restraint against civilians and bombing of medical facilities, was a dry run for the Ukraine operation. The difference is that in Syria, Russian troops act at the invitation of Assad, so their presence there is not considered illegal under international law, even if some of their actions have been.

Ukraine, however, is a sovereign country, and with this invasion, Vladimir Putin is now directly contesting the legitimacy of any post-WWII rules-based international order. When the U.S. launched its illegal invasion of Iraq, it recognized that its infringement of Iraqi domestic sovereignty would at least require some semblance of international legitimacy; thats what brought us Colin Powells shameful appearance at the U.N. falsely claiming evidence of Saddam Husseins possession of weapons of mass destruction. This was a pretense for imperialist invasion, one accompanied by a worldwide program of secret detentions, torture, massive civilian casualties, and immense war-profiteering. Putin has certainly recognized American hypocrisy when it comes to the defense of human rights and the rule of law, and so no amount of moral outrage or argument is likely to have any effect upon his actions in Ukraine, even if the principle of sovereignty is constantly invoked.

More from Kelly Grotke

It also clearly underscores the present limitations of sovereignty, too, when it comes to protecting people. Imposing sanctions on the wealth of Russias so-called oligarchs, presumably in order that they might exert pressure on Putin to back down, is symptomatic of a very serious weakness within the present international order: the increasing sovereignty of private wealth and private interests at the expense of people everywhere. If such wealth is effectively sovereign, operating at the root of decisions about states domestic and foreign policies, then most people are left without real representation.

In the U.S., neither political party has done anything about the immense influence of private money upon our domestic affairs. We have nurtured an anti-democratic oligarchic class of our own, one that now has far more influence over the conditions of citizens lives than those citizens themselves.

In the U.K., private finance dedicated around two-thirds of its political spending in support of Brexit. Within the alternative investment industry like private equity and hedge fundsa strong presence in Boris Johnsons governmentsupport was even higher, as much as 94 percent. Marlne Benquet and Tho Bourgeron have written that these Brexiteer financiers sought to transform the City [of London] into a kind of offshore investment platform, free from EU rules and operating as a fiscal asylum zone, akin to Singapore-on-Thames.

Thanks to our current global financial system, heads of state and their close associates can easily operate like private, for-profit corporations.

Within this widely shared libertarian vision, unregulated wealth generation is the highest value against which all others shrink. Freedom is for markets, not people; in classic Friedmanesque neoliberal fashion, the citizen is a mere consumer, and all are subordinate to the hierarchical governance of private corporate power.

But protests across the world against Russias brutal incursion, including within Russia itself, are proof of the absurdity of such a view. Ukrainians are not fighting for such a distorted and impoverished view of freedom. And while watching oligarch yachts being seized may be satisfying, it in a sense upholds a separate order that values private wealth and its sovereignty over democracy. Breaking this power and distributing it back to the people will require us to come to terms with the distorting lens of financialization.

THESE DAYS, THE U.S. can hardly be said to export democracy (arguably it does not have one to export). Our chief export is a highly financialized neoliberal ideology. Our culture continues to worship the business acumen of the wealthy even as income inequality has reached unprecedented heights. In practice, this means that the talents of most working Americans are considered inferior to those for whom wealth accumulation is the highest individual moral achievement.

The secretive world of alternative investments like private equity and hedge funds is perhaps the epitome of this worldview. That the head of Blackstone, Steve Schwarzman, can make over a billion dollars in a single year is not proof of his elect status or of some crazed libertarian notion of natural hierarchy; rather, it reflects a dysfunctional, deeply anti-democratic system designed to serve and protect the interests and preferences of its biggest beneficiaries.

Privacy and secrecy are at the center of this ideology of finance, and are an important part of its power.

The scale of Russian oligarchic wealth is similarly astonishing. According to benchmark estimates by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the oligarchs offshore wealth held in assets and private bank accounts abroad is three times larger than Russias net foreign reserves, and roughly equal in size to the total assets of the entire domestic Russian population.

As the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) put it in an important white paper, governments in theory do not operate according to principles of profitability and the maximization of shareholder value. Rather, they ensure the maintenance of public goods for citizens via taxpayer revenues. They must also handle their affairs in a manner that is amenable to public scrutiny and accountability, not least because taxation is a form of involuntary contribution that we cannot simply withdraw at will, as a shareholder in an investment could, except by moving to another local, national, or international jurisdiction. Sovereignty, especially in its liberal democratic and representational forms, has long been understood as something quite different from a private corporation that exists to benefit its investors.

And yet, thanks to our current global financial system, heads of state and their close associates can easily operate far more like private, for-profit corporations. The recent Credit Suisse leaks along with ICIJ investigations like the Pandora Papers, Luxembourg Leaks, Paradise Papers, the FinCEN Files, and the Panama Papers have exposed how many government leaders and their associates have stashed away enormous wealth outside of public scrutiny and often at the expense of their own citizens. The secrecy and lack of regulations both at home and abroad have made it nearly impossible to follow the money. Even the FBI has trouble obtaining information from the secretive private investment fund industry when investigating global money-laundering schemes. This does not bode well for the confiscation of Russian assets.

With the invasion of Ukraine, Putin has confronted the world with a clear vision of privatized, unapologetic sovereignty, one that is not conjured into being via constitutions, but rather emanates from the royalist control central to his personalized, neo-monarchical conception of power. In Syria, he helped Assad brutally maintain power as if the Syrian state and its people were merely a private company. With Ukraine, which he seems to view as his personal property, hes taken that model of governance global.

With the invasion of Ukraine, Putin has confronted the world with a clear vision of privatized, unapologetic sovereignty.

In this context, sanctions against oligarchs have emerged as a key avenue for pressuring Putin to reverse course and stop his illegal invasion. As Sen. Bernie Sanders put it, Incredibly, the 500 richest people in Russia with a net worth of at least $100 million now own more wealth than the bottom 99.8% of Russias population145 million people. This is the type of inequality that exists not just in Russia, but throughout the world. He is correct. This is an enormous global problem, no less relevant in the U.S. than in Russia.

Offshore vehicles used by corporations and the wealthy have (often quite legally) siphoned billions in revenue from jurisdictions all across the globe, rendering the matter of taxation as an involuntary contribution moot. The Tax Justice Network estimated in 2014 that the amount stashed abroad could easily total between $21 trillion and $32 trillion. Banks, financiers, accounting and consulting firms, and lawyers have been and remain complicit in these efforts, operating with a transnational ease and efficacy that youd think would be the envy of the U.N., which has been largely ineffective in resolving global conflicts because of continual clashes within the Security Council.

Sovereignty remains important for the agents of our financialized global system, but not chiefly as protection from outside interferences and the rights of citizens. Rather, sovereignty carries significance chiefly as a means of tax evasion and regulatory arbitrage. Should a global tycoon park assets in a U.S. jurisdiction, like Delaware, Wyoming, or South Dakota, or one offshore, like Cayman, Jersey, or Cyprus? At which countrys banks and financial institutions can the most secrecy and the most advantageous terms be found, and which armies of lawyers, accountants and consultants can best help keep money out of sight, or launder criminally gotten gains?

Contrast this with Ukraine today, where it is clear that sovereignty is something many of its citizens are willing to risk death to preserve. It could well be that the invasion has potentially disrupted the mystique of private finance and the hold it has on us.

Perhaps putting pressure and sanctions on Russias oligarchs will provide a path forward for de-escalation of Putins war. It sounds like a good idea, certainly in comparison with a third world war, and it also has a populist appeal. But without acknowledging and dealing with the underlying problems presented by financialization and its entrenched regimes of secrecy all across the world, I fear that the model of power now presented by Putin will continue to hold peace hostage, something especially dangerous because of the global need for cooperation in confronting climate change. Factually speaking, power today rests disproportionately upon the side of anti-democratic, oligarchically concentrated money and power, aided and abetted by the secretive world of finance. Do we have the will to stand with Ukraine and change course?

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Putin's Invasion and the Privatization of Political Power - The American Prospect