Joe Krause for Congress

The Good, the bad and the ugly are all lining up to run for Congress from South Texas. I'm informed by someone who should know that Cameron County will pretty well have its own Congressional district, with the county intact and a little chunk of Willancy and Hidalgo in the district. This will come about for several reasons. The Republicans with about 2/3 of the House of Representatives seats will want it, because they can isolate a lot of the Democratic (their euphemism for Hispanic) votes in one district. The Cameron County movers and shakers want it because so many look in the mirror and see a Congressman, rather like looking at the picture of Dorian Gray.

Nueces voted almost completely on racist lines this election. Hispanics lost whether running as Democrats as Republicans with the Republicans voting in high numbers. Whether Farenthold can be elected again out of Corpus Christi is questionable (apparently he's even too weird for the teabaggers). But Cameron County will almost certainly elect someone besides Farenthold and in a presidential election year, almost certainly a Democrat.

As these things go, the worst rise to the top, because they are willing to do things, say things and accept money from groups that will nauseate the slightly less-awful candidate. It is to be accepted that the Democratic candidate will be semi-literate and wildly unqualified for the job, but cunning and ruthless in getting a vote or a contribution. We can expect someone with long experience in squeezing vendors for contributions and digging up and slinging the most mud, real or invented. The campaign will be slick and professional and the candidate will only be in public with air-brushing or on television with someone who can read reading the commercials.

Then, I'll almost inevitably vote for this cretin. If it looks like he could lose to a Republican, I might even give a little money if I happen to have some.

That is why I think Joe Krause should run for Congress as a Catholic Candidate to give me a choice. I would support Dorothy Day if she would move here and run, but since that won't happen, Joe is my next best choice.

Defining the Catholic platform is pretty easy because Leo XIII and others wrote it. Then Dorothy Day wrote a lot about it as it applies to United States issues of the 20th Century. (see the enclosure link for other links to the writings of Dorothy Day). Joe lives it. The quote by Pope Paul VI,"If you want peace, work for justice" is the theme of the campaign. Valley Interfaith is the kitchen cabinet. We look to GK Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc and John Ruskin for guidance.

Some of the positions:

No death penalty. In fact, pro-life from conception to the grave, so
no abortion and no euthanasia either. Prisons will become rare as well
because punishment will no longer be a moral or legal basis for regulating
society. Inmates, felons and illegal aliens should get the vote.

A living wage based on universal ownership of property, guilds and other
protections. Capitalism is replaced by Distributism. Every child
upon conception will be given his or her fair share of the national bounty, so
every child becomes a financial boon for the mother, who of course has her own
share of the national bounty.

Profit is made up of unfairly withheld wages. As Ruskin says, the responsibility of the businessman is to bring prosperity to the community. The responsibility of the lawyer is to bring justice to the community. The responsibility of the doctor is to bring health to the community.

Accumulated wealth is a form of violence. And shows a lack of faith. Anyone who accepts stewardship over wealth or power must also accept personal poverty and precarity.

No usury. All debts are cancelled every seven years. All property is redistributed equally every fifty years. (We're way overdue, so we can start that now).

No borders. Borders are a form of violence created to allow the
wealthy to protect their wealth. Strangers are welcome.

No wars, no nuclear weapons.

Quick, tell me Solomon Ortiz' and Blake Farenthold's campaign slogans. Now tell me Joe's wouldn't be better. Run Joe Run.

Replacing Capitalism

This is a red alert post. That is, an idea that came to me in the wee hours of the morning that I want to run up the flag pole. It is also wildly outside my area of knowledge, much less expertise: economics.

I did have an economics class once in 1969. I made a good grade, but it was one of the classes that the University of Texas set up to make sure the football team kept its grades up. It was me and the National Champion Longhorns and we all made A's. Texas fight.

Nonetheless, you don't have to be a physician to notice that the surgeon cut off your healthy leg and left the one with gangrene.

This evening, allow me to restate the obvious: capitalism has failed to create a humane, even livable society for most people, and has produced a truly wretched society for many. Socialism has its own problems. Let's move to something that worked for a thousand years in Europe.

Let's discuss "distributism."

Belloc, Chesterton and Day are the most important proponents of distributism. Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton were two English Catholic writers of the early 20th Century. Dorothy Day was the American founder of the Catholic Worker of around the same time who supported distributism.

Belloc wrote that distributism was the system of private and collective ownership of land that had developed to support a just distribution of wealth during a 1000 years of Catholic influence in Europe. He did not view it as a new system, but rather, a return to a just system that had been replaced by the Servile State (the name of his book) that capitalism had produced. The introductory quotation in his book is:

". . . If we do not restore the Institution

of Property we cannot escape restoring
the Institution of Slavery; there
is no third course."

Chesterton in What's Wrong with the World describes the problems with capitalism by arguing the capitalists are against property:

I am well aware that the word "property" has been defied in our time by the corruption of the great capitalists. One would think, to hear people talk, that the Rothchilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they are the enemies of their own limitations. They do not want their own land; but other people's.

Distributists, then, are defenders of property. But there is no right to have as much property as you want. The metaphor is marriage. Just because you are in favor of marriage does not mean you defend the right of a man to have as many wives as he wants. Nor should he have as many houses as he wants.

If King Solomon has a thousand wives, there must be nearly as many men without wives. Similarly, every billionaire has monopolized the wealth to sustain thousands. So people starve.

To modernize the argument. Saying Gates should be able to have all the wealth he can accumulate does not defend property any more than allowing him to round up a million women into a personal harem would defend the institution of marriage.

Dorothy Day endorsed the distributist society and in the Catholic Worker mission statement argued how to get there:

A complete rejection of the present social order and a non-violent revolution to establish an order more in accord with Christian values. This can only be done by direct action since political means have failed as a method for bringing about this society.

The distributist economy would be a combination of private property and community property. It would be a return to the Christian economy of the Middle Ages. Belloc describes that earlier society like this:

There was common land, but it was common land
jealously guarded by men who were also personal proprietors
of other land. Common property in the village
was but one of the forms of property, and was
used rather as the fly-wheel to preserve the regularity
of the co-operative machine than as a type of holding
in any way peculiarly sacred. The Guilds had property
in common, but that property was the property
necessary to their co-operative life, their Halls, their
Funds for Relief, their Religious Endowments. As
for the instruments of their trades, those instruments
were owned by the individual members, not by the
guild, save where they were of so expensive a kind as
to necessitate a corporate control.

Thomas Storck argues (cited in the link under the title) that following the teachings of justice of the Church leads inexorably to distributism:

The justification of private property that the popes have made is always tied, at least as an ideal, to ownership and work being joined. Thus Leo XIII: "The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many people as possible to become owners" (Rerum Novarum, no. 35), and this teaching is repeated by Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno (nos. 59-62, 65), by John XXIII in Mater et Magistra (nos. 85-89, 91-93, 111-115), and by John Paul II in Laborem Exercens (no. 14). If "as many people as possible...become owners," then that fatal separation of ownership and work will be, if not removed, at least its extent and influence will be lessened.

The invisible hand snatches away food, housing and health care from those who need it. The traditional economies of Catholic Europe offered a better way.

Three Things No District Attorney Should Do, But That All District Attorneys Will Always Do, For All The Wrong Reasons

Before we begin, and in hopes of establishing some meager credentials, let's drag one of my skeletons out of the closet for all of the paraclete to see.

(Paraclete here is used in the obsolete form, second definition in the OED2, meaning advocate or intercessor. It is not meant so broadly as to mean all lawyers, oh no, readers true, most lawyers are not paraclete, but satans; Satans, not meaning the Devil, but in the etymological sense of 'adversary' with allusion to Matt. xvi 23. Nor is it so narrow as to include only criminal defense lawyers, but would include other "advocates" and "comforters" such as Tolstoy, Gandhi and Jimmy Odabashian, and Gail Hanson, that is those who advocate and comfort without setting foot in the courtroom. It is not capitalized so as not to mistake it with the Holy Spirit on this Good Friday. Nor is the form changed for the plural, because I cannot find a single usage in which it has been changed for the plural. I find reference to "paracletes" as the plural, but I am unwilling to be the first to actually use that ugly form.

Roughly stated, "paraclete," here means defense attorneys and preachers for accused criminals and '"satan," here means prosecutors. This is not intended as an insult, but just an etymological inevitability. Please do not be offended dear, dear friends in the various offices of prosecution; I am not responsible for penning the Gospels.

While I am digressing may I say, on this Good Friday, that Dorothy Day who is, or should be a saint, uses the word "precarity." In 1952 writing for the Catholic Worker Movement:

"True poverty is rare," a saintly priest writes to us from Martinique. "Nowadays communities are good, I am sure, but they are mistaken about poverty. They accept, admit on principle, poverty, but everything must be good and strong, buildings must be fireproof, Precarity is rejected everywhere, and precarity is an essential element of poverty. That has been forgotten. Here we want precarity in everything except the church. (...) Precarity enables us to help very much the poor. When a community is always building, and enlarging, and embellishing, which is good in itself, there is nothing left over for the poor. We have no right to do this as long as there are slums and breadlines somewhere.

No one else seems to use it and OED2 does not describe the word, so much more elegant than the awkward "precariousness."

In summary, "paraclete" should mean , when we do our jobs, defense lawyers, "satans" means prosecutors, and "precarity" is my Good Friday prayer.

I add "precarity" because all good things come in groups of three.

Please pardon me, Uncle Toby.)

Now for the skeleton: I ran for District Attorney in Denton County in 1976. The shame of it. Fortunately, I lost.

Nonetheless, about the things I am about to say, I know of what I speak.

No District Attorney should do the following:

1. Prosecute food stamp fraud.
2. Prosecute hot checks.
3. Prosecute dope cases.

1. Food Stamp Fraud. Food stamp fraud is the worst. It always jails a welfare mom who is struggling to hold things together. It puts her in jail. The kids go hungry. She loses her job at Whataburger. If she happened to have a house at a nickel down and umpteen dollars a month on a contract for deed, she loses that. When she gets out, her life is a shambles, her children are at risk and she can't dig out. Instead of just taking the overpayment out of her future stamps. The Texas Department of Human Racehorses (or whatever euphemism they use these days) sends it over to the DA for prosecution.

Instead of telling TDHR to go back to the hell from whence they came, DA's offices love these cases. Why? a. They are easy to prove because TDHR extorts a confession on the false promise of future food stamps. b. The accused is always too broke to hire a lawyer. c. TDHR gives a kickback of $500 for each case.

2. Hot checks. This is a poverty crime. Merchants should verify the checks before they accept them. Hot check courtrooms are filled with the poor and not criminals. DA offices and the majesty of the law should not be a collection agency for sloppy merchants. Most people who write hot checks are not really guilty of theft, as they are charged, but with not balancing their check books, but they cannot afford the defense and the public defenders don't have the time to defend them.

But DA's love these cases. Why? Merchants like them and they are more likely to contribute to a campaign than poor people are. Also, DA's get to print up those nifty signs so all the merchants can stick them in their windows that say, "We prosecute hot checks!" with the campaign logo on the bottom.

Another skeleton: I printed one of those signs when I ran for DA in 1976. I hope by now they are all clogging up solid waste deposits so no one will ever see one again. The shame of it.

3. Dope cases. They corrupt the police forces (and sheriff's office as we saw a few years back). The feds have more resources and can do it better. If the case is too small for the feds, it's not worth handling. They clog up the courts. Many of the people accused are not criminals or even particularly anti-social.

Why do DAs handle them? Forfeiture money and property is a lot of fun. Anyone want a Escalade with tinted windows? The photo opportunities to claim that a zillion dollars have been taken off the street with pictures, yes, just like Tony Montana, with a mountain of dope, money and guns, is just too exciting.

What should a DA prosecute? Murder. Rape. Robbery. Assault. Burglary. The rest are civil matters.

Think how the backlog of cases, overcrowded jails, beleaguered jailers, overworked prosecutors, harried judges, exhausted probation officers, nervous bailiffs, nearsighted clerks and frazzled public defenders would be helped by this change. Also think about how many poor and harmless people you would let out of jail.