Morning Fog

Health Care For Infidels

There has been a huge outcry from churches, religious groups, and right-wing columnists about the Obama administration's proposed plan that non-religious institutions being run by religious organizations must provide their employees the same healthcare that other Americans are entitled to.

Sorry, I just don't see the problem with such a proposal.  The only problem is that churches naturally don't wish to pay more money if they can escape doing so.  Yet the crux of the matter, to me, is that all Americans should have the same access to services.  

Churches themselves are exempt.  But the many linked institutions they spawn, ranging from schools to clinics to charitable organizations, are not.   These institutions employ thousands upon thousands of people who are not of the same faith as the sponsoring religious organization.   The churches say, in effect, they would like to disenfranchise those people, offering them second-class benefits compared to the rest of the population.  That seems uncharitable, to say the least. 

It cuts no ice, in my opinion, to argue that they forbid family planning and should not need to provide it.  In fact, they may forbid family planning if they want, but that can only apply to their own flock. They can't impose their religious doctrine on the population at large. 

Thus, t's hard to consider that the government proposal presents an ethical or moral dilemma; it seems to me far less ethical to deny a civil right to someone who's not of your religion.   Further, churches won't be paying the costs of these benefits themselves; there are insurance companies for that, so the church is not directly funding the activities it bans for its members.  As for cost, it seems only fair that a church, like any other employer, pick up the costs of standard benefits for its employees.  If they don't, the rest of us pay for them, and enrich the church in the process.  At any rate, churches can bargain for lower rates from insurers, since they can guarantee (?) that a certain percentage of the insured won't be seeking those benefits.

There is talk now that a compromise solution may be reached before the law goes into effect more than a year from now.  There is lots of room for that, so long as churches in one way or another can live up to the national ideal of equality of opportunity.

 

Members Of Congress Wealthy... So What Else Is New?

A couple of days ago the Washington Post published one of those "expose"-type articles that really exposed nothing, and which always remind me greatly of the "scientific" studies commonly done by sociologists.  What both genres have in common is devoting a lot of energy to demonstrating something that we all know, either from common sense or from our intuitive understanding of human behavior.  

The Post's front-page effort in this case was "Growing Wealth Widens Distance Between Lawmakers and Constituents," focusing in on the disparity between the incomes of ordinary citizens and those they elect to Congress.  It seems, you see, that most members of Congress have assets and incomes considerably greater than the typical voters in their district.   Well, Q.E.D.  and OMG!  

I think most of us already know that that's always been the case.   Haven't the great majority of our nationally elected officials throughout history - at least through the twentieth century - been largely from either the professional or business classes?  It makes good sense, because these are the people who have tended to have the time, the ideas, the community contacts, and above all the money, to be able to run for office.  And if there is a growing disparity between Congressional and "average" incomes, that only stands to reason also, since the rapidly expanding income gap between richest and middling is by now well-documented.

The writer, Peter Whoriskey, like a good sociologist, sets up a false premise by beginning with the story of a guy who ran for office in the 1980s directly from his job at a steel mill, and won.  It may be true, as Whoriskey suggests, that this kind of rags-to-representative tale can't be enacted any longer in the first decade of the 21st century, because the costs of running for office have increased.   But that kind of success story has been rare in U.S. politics, and I don't really believe it's any less rare in 2011 than it was in 1911.

The article suggests also another self-evident proposition:  That a Congressperson's income and status partly determine his/her view of the country's problems and the best ways of solving them.  The steel-mill Congressman (now retired and living in Florida) "understands the need for a safety net," while his successor from the same district, whose father built a successful car dealership, is described thus:

[He] focuses on the hard work he and his family have done to build the dealership. He thinks that the government should be run more like a business, and that laws must be fair to people who strive and succeed. He opposes the estate tax, the inheritance tax levied on the wealthy, because, among other things, he feels he has been overtaxed already. He says unemployment checks make some less willing to go back to work. And asked about tax breaks for oil companies, he notes that when corporations profit, people with pensions and portfolios do, too.

Again, I don't believe there is anything too unusual about this.  

What has really changed, I think, isn't the incomes or the social classes or the fields of endeavor of members of Congress.  It's the willingness and capability of seeing the other side of things, empathizing with a different situation, and comprehending that government, including Congress, must address the needs of all.   The Congressman quoted above shows no sign of understanding that we can't all be car dealers; he views his success as deriving entirely from his own (or in this case, his father's) efforts.  He gives no hint of appreciating that his success depends heavily on many factors beyond his control:  from the mechanics who staff his service department to the multifarious benefits that government provides to his business - and to many, many businesses -  in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, puffball fuel pollution targets, and a stable business environment.   This man came to Congress to represent .... other car dealers, I guess.

That's what has changed.  That's what needs to change back.

 

The Cellphone Ban

In the space of just a few days, the NTSB's December 12 call for an enforced ban on the use of cell phones by drivers generated an immense amount of reaction.

It's certainly true that drivers using cell phones are almost invariably distracted from their driving, and thus become dangerous.   Personally, I don't need an NTSB study to tell me this; it's observable in countless ways even in my shortest trip to the supermarket.  Weaving, slowing to a crawl, suddenly turning without signal, stopping dead in moving traffic, failure to move when the light turns green - it's all on display, every day.

After the news story above was published in the Washington Post, the newspaper's traffic columnist ("Dr. Gridlock") offered a poll on the subject, asking whether people use their phones while driving.   It's worth a look for two reasons.  First, because rather incredibly the poll omits the one choice that I feel sure would be accurate for at least 50% of us: "Yes [I do use my phone while driving], even though I'm aware it affects my driving."  Personally, I try not to use my phone when I'm driving, especially not if I have to dial the number; I try to keep any such calls short, and to do them at a stoplight.  Mostly, I don't initiate calls, but will answer incoming ones if I'm expecting an answer.  I suspect that applies to a lot of us.

Second, the poll is worth a look for the insight provided by readers' comments.  Hardly anyone admits to using his/her phone while driving, and those who do say they only do so with a hands-free device, so it's not distracting.   The degree of self-delusion here is incredible.  One person suggests drivers should be able to do whatever they want behind the wheel, and shouldn't even be licensed because driving is no different from walking along the sidewalk.  (When was the last time an individual on foot killed someone else by walking into him?)   A second suggests talking on the phone is no different from talking to someone in the seat next to you (which sounds superficially right, except that your passenger can warn you when you're about to splatter yourself under a semi, and a cell phone can't).  Another argues he can drive all the way across the country with his phone at his ear, "without weaving once."  That gent is delusional.  The whole point the NTSB is making, of course, is that most people may think talking doesn't affect their concentration, but they're wrong.  

So is a ban the answer?  I'm not so sure.  The boastful ones may be wrong to say their driving isn't affected; but they're partly right -- if we focus just on the "talking" part and not on dialing or texting -- to say the problem is just an extension of all other forms of distraction - talking to your passenger, reading a map, listening to the radio, disciplining your kids, having breakfast at the wheel.   Will employers stop expecting to reach their mobile employees wherever and whenever?  Then there is the enforcement problem.  How are police to decide when someone is using the phone?  And the escape clause problem:  If referring to your smart phone's GPS directions is to be permissible, won't every driver just claim he was using GPS?   And really, what's the rationale for allowing GPS use (except for convenience and necessity when printed maps are no longer published a few years from now)?  It's just as distracting as texting. 

Finally, Americans or their legislators, I'm not sure which, have generally seemed averse to prevention.  We'd rather fix things once they're broken, than try to prevent them from getting broken in the first place.  There are voices that oppose preventive health care, those that oppose simple safety standards for various products, those that won't deal with looming problems like social security meltdown or Medicare costs until they crash under their own weight, and numerous others.  Here is where the industry groups that promote cell phone use throw their weight around:  Cell phones aren't at all dangerous when used responsibly (and of course, neither is liquor). 

For all these reasons, I suspect it will be a very long time before total cell phone bans will be widespread.   More likely is that technology will take over, as automobile manufacturers, I'm told, are working out details of systems that would simply disable the telephone function inside a moving car.  Meanwhile, probably our best bet is continuing education on how distracting phoning can be.  It couldn't hurt to put more deterrent into traffic regulations, either; drivers involved in accidents should face strong penalties for contributory negligence when it can be shown they were on the phone, texting, or even painting their nails. 

Flag-Waving

School is a complicated place these days, especially in complicated California.  In Morgan Hill, in that state (where?), there has been a bit of a kerfuffle over what to wear to school on Cinco de Mayo.  It seems kids of Mexican heritage and/or nationality sport Mexican flags in observance of the day; some Anglo kids evidently decided to wear American flags.  There has been violence on this day in the past, so the school banned the wearing of the U.S. flag on the grounds students who wore it were endangering themselves.  A U.S. court agreed and let the ban stand.  

Multiculturalism?  Sure.  All nationalities have tended to celebrate their own holidays in the U.S.  But there are differences.  I don't recall German-Americans or Chinese-Americans making much of a deal of observing their special days in school; and while it's true Italian flags get waved on Columbus Day, and Irish ones on St. Patrick's, the focus is more on the national colors than on the flag qua flag.  In those St. Pat's parades, you'll see as many American flags as you do Irish - often both being carried by the same people.

That apparently isn't the case in Morgan Hill.  It seems fairly evident that those wearing U.S. flags were reacting to something - specifically, to the wearing of Mexican flags.   Are the Mexican aficionados sporting both Mexican and U.S. flags?  I would guess not. Would a student wearing both flags be attacked?  Would it make a difference if that student were a Latino or an Anglo? 

I can understand the court's thinking on this.  But not its decision. If the American flag was a danger to its wearers, it could only have been because the Mexican flag is an equally dangerous - and I suspect purposeful - provocation.  If danger is the concern, the school should ban the use of both flags.  The court ought to have been able to incorporate this simple reality into its decision. 

Education For Everyman; Democratizing The University Degree

Kathleen Parker writes recently of the failure of U.S. higher education to deliver graduates who are truly ready to enter the work force.   She relies on a recent study by some education-oriented organization, but who needs a study?   It's common knowledge that too many grads are deficient in math skills, English language skills, or even just plain critical/analytical thinking which is supposed to be the objective of a college degree.  But if we had any doubt, we can look at these two astounding statements from the study Parker quotes:

●Gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills are either “exceedingly small or nonexistent for a larger proportion of students.”

●Thirty-six percent of students experience no significant improvement in learning (as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment) over four years of higher education.

Parker examines some of the reasons for the failure, but I think she overlooks one big one:  University is the new high school.   

As the university degree has gradually become the essential credential for nearly any white-collar job, the system has adjusted to ensure that only a relative few who enter college will fail to come out with that critical sheepskin in their hand.   Standards inevitably have been lowered.   Of course there are still better schools and worse schools, yet I can't help but point out that Yale produced a U.S. President who seemed to have a lot of difficulty with standard formal English.

It's not colleges that should be blamed, it's us.  The credential is the important thing, whether there's anything behind it or not.  (We did the same thing with drivers' licenses a couple of decades ago; everybody has to be able to drive, so we make sure 99% can do so by teaching them less.)  This has been going on for some time now in education, as evidenced by the fact that we are even talking about basic math and language skills as a college accomplishment.  At the time when I finished high school, it was generally supposed the average freshman came equipped with those skills, and would only polish them a bit during his/her first year. 

We pay a price for valuing the symbolic achievement over the real.  It may have some bearing on such weird phenomena as the head of the Martin Luther King monument commission having been willing to "paraphrase" a quote from a King speech, to be set literally in stone on the memorial -- and seeing nothing wrong with that.

 

Jousting With State Immigration Laws

For the Justice Department to be challenging various new state immigration laws in court is an unusual step. 

Undoubtedly the decision to do so has political roots.  The Obama administration would like to reinforce its credentials as the chief defender of the rights of immigrants (and it must be stressed, of all immigrants - not just "illegals" but the many more numerous legals).  Certainly the current challenges should do that, demonstrating a clear distinction between our two major parties.  And the political motivation, even if brazen, is unassailable since most of the laws in question are being passed by mostly Republican state legislators for the purpose of political pandering to their pasty constituents.

Yet while the legal challenge may serve the administration's political ends, it does so by serving its stated policy goals and philosophy of government.  Its first strength is to remind us what our heritage is.  Politicians have long loved to describe us as a "nation of immigrants," which is certainly true, or a "melting pot," which is far less honest. 

A digression: "Cookie dough" is a more apt metaphor - ethnic groups have usually remained in clusters or lumps, like the bits in a chocolate chip cookie, melting only slightly on the edges at first, perhaps dissolving entirely over many years (we don't know what cookies do over longer periods, since they seldom survive that long). 

Far from dragging down the economy, our nation's ability to attract those huddled masses has always served to rejuvenate our population and bolster our economy. That is no different today, and we need to keep in mind how many in our country are either naturalized citizens, or first-generation natives, who can nolens volens be detrimentally affected by restrictions supposedly intended only for "illegal" aliens.

The second strength is that what the DoJ is doing should also serve to reinforce our common sense of what we want the country to be.   Other common tropes we have long used to describe ourselves are "a nation of laws" and "a nation of equality."  I would not argue that immigrants, especially illegal ones, ought to have all the same rights as citizens - there can be some legitimate differences in status.

But surely one of the places where there can't be differences is in the equal application of the law to everyone.  This is an important international principle of human rights.  Further, if we fail to provide it, we contribute to the breakdown of society; those who see that the law discriminates against them, those who must fear any encounter with law-enforcement officials even if they haven't "done" anything, won't develop the habits of good citizenship that we (used to) expect.

"Used to" is a key phrase because the third strength of this legal jousting over immigration is to help clarify our thinking about whether we want America looking forward, or whether we want to reverse the progress of a century or more and return to the mid-1950s for our models of immigration, assimilation, and social and legal justice.    

 

FEMA Disaster Relief Budget Running On Empty

The current situation with the Federal Emergency Management Agency budget throws the whole debate about cutting costs of government into sharp relief.  FEMA could run low on funds, even as the nation has faced more than its share of natural disasters this year (the two most recent were damage on the East coast from Hurricane Irene, and the flooding taking place this week in the South).  

Money will probably be found, but the insistence of cost-cutters that additional funds for FEMA must be offset by cuts elsewhere is foolish.  Those of the same age as the average Republican lawmaker may recall the old saying, "Robbing Peter to pay Paul."  Swapping money around in the budget requires political agreement that could make it very difficult - not to mention slow - to free up additional funds for FEMA. 

It makes no sense, because although those who insist on offsets have persuaded themselves that most government spending is just waste, the fact is that waste accounts for a tiny fraction, but most programs serve real purposes.  Will those who think we can cut both costs and revenue wake up and heed state governors who seem to find it very convenient to have disaster relief funds available? 

 

The Right To Bear Arms - The Cosmic/Historic View

Yesterday I noted how issues of guns, gun control, and the right to bear arms had become politicized... no surprise there, right?

What is surprising, though, is the extent to which the politicization of the issue over time has completely turned the historical record on its ear.  Adam Winkler, a UCLA professor of Constitutional law, writing recently in The Atlantic ("The Secret History of Guns") makes this clear. 

(Note: the article is based on Winkler's new book, Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, appearing soon.  You can order the book from the right margin.)>>>>>>>>>

Winkler points out that - contrary to what many of us might suppose in the context of the contemporary heated debate - not so long ago, the NRA and Ronald Reagan and the Ku Klux Klan all supported restrictions on gun ownership in varying degree, while the Black Panthers were zealous advocates of the unrestricted possession of loaded weapons.  As the professor also argues, until recently in the U.S. (about 1977), the right to bear arms for self-defense (in addition to service in a "militia") has never been challenged, yet on the other hand, neither has the general understanding that some controls, such as registration, were not only fitting, but necessary. 

To some degree, Winkler may be channeling some of the same thoughts that color Justice Clarence Thomas's approach to the Second Amendment here ... (see the interesting piece in this week's New Yorker regarding Thomas), but at least from this summary piece of Winkler's book, it appears to go deeper and broader than that.

In any case, there is a pendulum effect swinging through the history on this issue, as on others where balance has historically characterized our approach to an issue, and where balance has been lost.  To quote Winkler:

The Fourteenth Amendment illustrates a common dynamic in America’s gun culture: extremism stirs a strong reaction. The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights. A hundred years later, the Black Panthers’ brazen insistence on the right to bear arms led whites, including conservative Republicans, to support new gun control. Then the pendulum swung back. The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative.

 How times change! 

 

 

The Right To Bear Arms - A Microcosmic Story

Recently Congressman Leonard Boswell and his family fought off an intruder on their Iowa farm.  It's an interesting story that presents in microcosm almost all the Second Amendment issues that fester in the body politic today.  It has:

• An intruder who was eventually driven away by the threat of a loaded shotgun. (NRAnians can rejoice over this "proof" that guns save lives and everybody ought to own a couple of assault rifles.)
• An intruder, however, who could have been shot and wasn't.  (Those who know and use guns will suggest he should have been killed - "don't pull a loaded gun if you don't intend to use it.")
• A family of several people who acted incautiously and incoherently, clearly endangering themselves as they grappled with the intruder, if his gun had been real.  (Those who fear guns and think nobody should ever own one can point to the dangers of attempting to resist an armed intruder.)
• Just plain foolishness, such as having two rottweiler guard dogs who were regularly locked up at night.  (Citizens of common sense may ask, why have the dogs at all, then?)

Commentary on this Washington Post article brings out all these threads of the "gun debate."  I'd agree with the fellow who suggests it wouldn't have been a bad thing if the intruder had been shot and killed, but who also concedes this whole incident proves nothing about the desirability or legality of having some reasonable controls on who can obtain them.  E.g., the intruder in this case lived to become a -- let us hope -- convicted felon; should he be able to arm himself, after serving a short term being supported by the state, so that his next attempt will be more successful?

Commentary also demonstrates how politicized the right to bear arms has become, with one angry reader assuming that because Congressman Boswell is a Democrat, he must be "anti-gun," and needs to learn a lesson from his experience.  Actually, though Boswell is a Democrat, he's a rural one, and sports an A rating from the NRA. 

(More soon on the politics and legal issues of guns.)

Checks And Balances Part Two - Income Disparity

A few days ago I mentioned the hoary concept of checks and balances in the way our government is set up.   That's the formal part of it, but a much more informal check-and-balance system has long been a part of our social fabric - the pendulum of power has shifted among opposing interests, ebbed and flowed as competing groups gain an edge and then lose it again, either because conditions change or their opponents develop a new strategy.  Sometimes, it's taken a wrenching adjustment like the Great Depression to restore balances.

There are unfortunately many areas in which balance currently seems lost.  I think this situation partly accounts for our political paralysis --  as groups or their representatives come to feel that they can't get a fair shake, or that they are "out of balance" vis-a-vis their competing groups, they become increasingly recalcitrant.  It's especially true where economic power and benefits are concerned; but those often stem from relative political power, so that's affected too.  Where do we have imbalances?  Well, for starters: 

Income:  the haves and the have-nots.   You may have heard recently that the top 1% of incomes in the U.S. take home as much as the lowest 60%.  We've always had people in this country of great - some might say "obscene" - wealth in this country.  I suspect it's true in other countries too.  They are at the pinnacle, and more often than not, they become the Carnegies and Nobels of the world, leaving properties, collections, or charitable foundations to the commonweal that others couldn't possibly afford to amass -- think the relatively modest Hillwood Museum in Washington DC, or Hearst's San Simeon.  Still, doesn't that 1%/60% figure seem more than just a little extreme?  And of more concern, as Don Peck pointed out in The Atlantic ("Can the Middle Class Be Saved?"), the gap between the überwealthy and the rest of us continues to grow. 

Workers/Employers:  With a Constitution heavily focused on property rights, it's no wonder that it's usually the business and corporate interests that have the upper hand in this eternal struggle.  Again, though, the situation now seems due for a correction.  This echoes, to a degree, the imbalance in income distribution, but it's a matter of political power too.  Union membership is historically low; it may in part be because during the 40s and 50s, unions were ascendant and tended to overreach; but it's hard to look at the current situation and think that management isn't overreaching far more.   

Religion/Science: These two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, or the opposite ends of a scale, yet far too many people these days (mainly, I think, on the "religion" side of the balance) believe that they are, and seek to deny the fundamental realities of science.  See yesterday's Morning Fog entry. 

Urban/Rural:  There seems to be an increasing split of attitude between the urban and rural parts of the country.  People often shorthand this as the "coasts" and "between the coasts," but it's much more of a mosaic than that (in Virginia, there's NoVA - northern Virginia - and RoVA -the rest of Virginia).  There are plenty of small towns in California or New York, and big cities in Ohio, or Texas.  But the towns and countryside have increasingly different problems and perspectives from the cities -- beginning with population density, but ranging on to prices of goods and services, economic need, jobs, environmental issues, crime, and many others. 

In all these instances of competing interests, politicans at the federal level need to recognize that solutions are needed for both sets of issues, without disparaging the needs of one or the other.  Only compromise can lead that direction, but it's discouraging how little compromise seems to be in the air.