Saturday, December 28, 2013

ELOQUENT ERRORS

ELOQUENT ERRORS

As the year ends, conservatives are awash in smug resurgence.

This is the product of Obamacare's faulty roll-out, the President's less than precise messaging on his signature accomplishment, and the right wing's ever present capacity for delusion.

No one captures this resurgence, either as a matter of attitude or for its sheer exuberance, better than George Will.  His ability to string together immeasurably silky sentences in the service of ostensibly substantive points knows no equal, and in today's Washington Post, he offers up  "2013's lesson for conservatives." Rather, however, than a set of policies that might credibly attack the problem he purports to analyze, Will's "lesson" turns out to be nothing more than a resurrected faith in market orthodoxy, underlined by a near-Churchillian penchant for cute ad hominems.

Thus,  we get the captain of conservative eloquence telling us that, on the Affordable Care Act,  progressives have been:
  • "tone deaf in expressing bottomless condescension toward the public and limitless faith in their own cleverness"; 
  • "convinced . . . that Pajama Boy", "the supercilious, semi-smirking, hot-chocolate-sipping faux adult who embodies progressives belief that life should be all politics all the time", "would be a potent persuader, getting young people to sign up for the hash that progressives are making of health care"; and
  • oblivious to the ostensible reality that "events" have "ever so swiftly and thoroughly refuted [the] law's title", the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act."
The only problem with this fusillade is that . . .

It is demonstrably false.

Though folks like Will seem never to remember exactly who birthed Obamacare, it was not the liberals . . . or the progressives . . . or even the Democrats.  Frankly, it was not even Obama.  Instead, the individual mandate -- the cornerstone of Obamacare -- was invented by the Heritage Foundation -- the poster child for conservative think tanks -- in the mid-1990s.  It was then taken up by a Republican, Mitt Romney, and turned into actual policy in Massachusetts.

In the 2008 campaign, Obama actually opposed the mandate.  He and the Democrats in Congress only came around to accepting it in 2010, bowing to reality by realizing that neither a single-payer national health plan -- or "Medicare for all" in the parlance of the day --  nor one with even the so-called public option -- where patients could have chosen to be covered by an enlarged Medicare system -- was possible. Though Will obsequiously derides the progressives for their "limitless faith in their own cleverness", whatever faith they had was not in their cleverness.

It was in Governor Romney's.

A similar ignorance of the actual facts infects Will's claim that "events" have somehow  "refuted" the notion that Obamacare will either protect patients or be affordable.

The supposed proof of this proposition is the by now universally known fact that not all insurance policies previously offered in the market will meet the minimal standards imposed by the law and that, as a consequence, "patients" with those policies will have to upgrade and spend a little more.  While Obama is being roundly criticized for having promised that anyone who liked what they had would be able to keep it, the truth is that the number of policy holders who fall into this category is relatively small, as are the premium increases that will be necessary to buy the new policies that meet the law's minimal standards.  Though Obama was sloppy in his messaging, there is no proof that this was intentional.

Nor is there any empirical evidence for the claim by Will that a Presidential qualifier -- by for example, altering the campaign stump speech to say that "virtually everyone" who liked what they had would indeed be able to keep it -- would have made Obama's reelection "unlikely."  In fact, one might even call that claim an example of Will's . . .

"[L]imitless faith in [his] own cleverness."

Finally, there is "Pajama Boy."  In Will's world, their  "condescension" and self-cleverness "convinced" progressives that "Pajama Boy would be a potent persuader, getting young people to sign up for the hash [they] are making of health care."

In the week before Christmas, Organizing for America, which is Obama's grass roots advocacy operation, sent a tweet with the question:  "How do you plan to spend the cold days of December?" As Chris Cillizza described it, the answer came from a "a 20-something guy with hipster glasses, wearing a black and white onesie and cradling a mug",  who tells his audience to  "Wear pajamas. Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance."

This apparently drove New Jersey's Chris Christie around the bend. Dispensing with all pretense to the kinder and gentler Governor recently unearthed as a prelude to a Presidential run, Christie, in a soup kitchen,  told the tweeter to "Get out of your pajamas.  Put on an apron. And get Volunteering", the latter being, in Christie's mind, much better than any talk that might make Obamacare a success in resolving the tragedy that is our nation's now close to 50 million uninsured, and -- apparently -- something impossible for any 20-something to do after or before -- and in any case while -- he or she joined the Gov in the kitchen.

Thus was born "Pajama Boy," Will's "supercilious, semi-smirking, hot chocolate sipping, faux adult who embodies the progressives belief that life should be all politics all the time."

Wow!

And they wonder why they are losing the young.

There doesn't appear to be anything "haughtily disdainful" -- which is how the dictionary defines "supercilious" -- about encouraging a conversation about health insurance, and there certainly is nothing "faux adult" in being old enough to go to war.  

One of the 20-somethings I know who talks to his friends about Obamacare is my son.  When he does so, he recounts how he fell off a roof in the year after college but was able to go to the hospital because he was still covered under my health insurance policy.  He does this while also working full time at a non-profit that matches itinerant day laborers with jobs in the area.  And once a week he runs a town's homeless shelter.  He has done more "volunteering" in a year than Chris Christie has done in a life.

The fact is that Obamacare is still in its infancy but is, by and large, working.  The state exchanges that exist -- many states run by Republican governors or legislatures have refused to set them up -- are functioning well, the initial glitches in the federal government's web site are being ironed out, people are enrolling at rates sufficient to predict that the 2015 targets will be met , and premium costs have not been as high as was expected.  

It hasn't been perfect. 

But it also hasn't been the "hash"  Will claims "progressives" are making of it.

He can ask my son.

There is nothing "faux" about him.

Thursday, November 28, 2013

THANKSGIVING 2013 -- HEMINGWAY AT HOME

THANKSGIVING 2013 -- HEMINGWAY AT HOME

Lots of married men hate their in-laws.

In fact, generations of comedians have made a living pointing this out. 

I am lucky.

I love mine.

So, this Thanksgiving, I give thanks for . . .

Mothers-in-law.

When I first met my mother-in-law, it was at a birthday party she was throwing for her oldest daughter, then turning thirty, who later became my wife.  I remember thinking that my future wife's mother was very smart, very determined, and very pretty.  She had become a young widow, her husband passing away just before he turned sixty and only a year after she turned fifty.  It was one of the many tragedies she had constantly dealt with in her life and would unfortunately continue to experience ever after. Her sister had died in her forties from breast cancer.  Later, her brother would pass away, also in his forties, and also from cancer.

Death never took a holiday in her family.

And it also always seemed to come early.

But I never heard her complain . . . or whine . . . or bemoan her fate.

She wasn't rich and she always worked. For years, she was an elected Councilwoman in her town, a trustee of the local library, and a volunteer for her local Republican Committee and her church's Mothers' Guild. On her beloved Great Sacandaga Lake, she served on the board of her breach club.

Though she never put it quite this way, my impression is that she pretty much kept her husband's law practice afloat, at least financially. He knew everyone in town, and saved all the Friday night revelers from some of their darkest destinies in New York's up-state night courts. Unfortunately, however, he apparently lost track -- from time to time -- of the need to actually bill people for his work.   He was Irish, and the Irish often refuse to allow money to stand in the way of nobility . . .

Or poverty.

She reminded him that billing wasn't optional.

And the girls graduated from college.

After he died, she continued to work.  She sold real estate, flipped houses, and worked for a nursery.   She ran Thanksgiving and Christmas. She was so good at it that her daughter volunteered her to throw Christmas Eve for my kids at her house during my divorce. From then on, I knew our planned blended family would work in ways better than I had ever expected.  In 2000, she was late for our wedding, but still cut a mean rug on the dance floor.   Later on, she moved in with us for the winter months, spending summers in the Adirondacks.  

I loved it . . .

She never let me do the dinner dishes.

But then she fell in love again.

And moved out.   

And I had to start cleaning again.

Last year, she was diagnosed with cancer.  She went through chemo and radiation and bought some time for herself.  There were trips to the grandchildren and my sister and brother in law in California. She sat down with my son, and they had a long talk about how he was feeling about her diagnosis.  She told the doctors that she did not want to die in December because she didn't want to ruin the girls' Christmas. Everyone reminded her that this was not about them.  A nurse told her she was thinking like a mother and, on this one, didn't have to.  

But she did anyway . . . 

Because she couldn't help herself.

She got through the winter. And the spring.  And remission.

And then it came back. 

She still never complained.  

She was overheard one night a month or so ago, on the phone with one of her girlfriends. "Everyone has to go sometime," she said, "I'm just going a little sooner."   Two weeks ago, she left the Adirondacks, her favorite place on earth, with Glen, her favorite guy (and one of mine too; I kinda like doing the dishes), undoubtedly for the last time.  But she still reminded us that, if all the sheets weren't cleaned before we left, she would do them next spring.

And she will. 

We’ll have clean sheets from heaven.

Hemingway defined courage as "grace under pressure."   And our Hemingway at home died this week, as she had lived . . .

With grace.

As I write this, my wife and sister in law are downstairs, laughing and preparing our Thanksgiving feast. They were worried yesterday about “getting the stuffing right” because somebody “forgot to ask Mommy” how to do it.  

But Mommy is part of their DNA.

So the stuffing is doing pretty well this Thanksgiving . . .

And so are we.









Thursday, October 10, 2013

WANTED: SQUIRRELS

WANTED: SQUIRRELS

The federal government has been shut down now for almost two weeks.  

The immediate cause was the failure of Congress to agree to a continuing resolution that paid the bills already incurred.  A faction of the Republican House of Representatives -- the so-called Tea Party elected in 2010 and re-elected in 2012's gerrymandered red districts -- insisted that any CR -- which is beltway-speak for the "Continuing Resolution" needed  to fund the government in the absence of a legislatively approved and Presidentially-signed real budget -- include provisions that would have delayed the individual mandate that was about to take effect under the Affordable Care Act, a/k/a Obamacare, and repeal the medical devices tax, which the Act also authorized to in part fund it.  

Obama and the Democrats, to their everlasting credit, refused to be party to this extortion.  The individual mandate took effect on October 1. The Tea Party then shut down the government.

So the poor and the near poor can now start to get health insurance.

Which is good.

Because, as the shut down continues and the states begin to run out of funds,  they soon will not be getting food stamps or any other parts of America's increasingly frayed safety net.

John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, has taken on the aspect of a balloon losing air.

He has  moved erratically from one position to another, forever announcing new deals his caucus in the House will (or may) agree to in exchange for reopening the government.  One day it was delay the mandate and repeal the device tax. Another it was open the government in exchange for a laundry list of worn our GOP demands -- delay Obamacare, repeal the device tax,  fast-track authority to overhaul the tax code to lower taxes on corporations, approve the Keystone pipeline, more off-shore oil and gas production, and more energy permits to drill on federal land.

Lately, as we have approached the point in October when the debt ceiling will have to be raised, lest a defunded government also become a defaulting one, they have suggested they may agree to reopen in exchange for an unspecified amount of deficit reduction.

The House has also passed a series of bills to fund selective portions of the federal government -- the military, national parks, and a lot of the other stuff even their own constituents like.  This, of course, is more or less an a la carte approach to government.  If it ever takes hold, watch out.  The next time the Democrats own the House, they can shut things down in exchange for immigration reform, real curbs on climate change, or liberal judges.

I can't wait.

The parties' menus here are rather large.

Throughout this debacle, the GOP has been apoplectic in insisting that Obama and the Democrats "negotiate" with them. In truth, however, there is nothing to negotiate.  It is more than arguably the case that every demand made by the Tea Party in the course of the last month has been soundly defeated at the polls. Whatever else it was, the 2012 Presidential election was clearly  a referendum on Obamacare, and Obama won.

The same is true with the deficit, which in any case has been dropping like a rock for much of the last year and does not need any more assistance from Congress.  In fact, further deficit reduction can only imperil our shaky economic recovery, which itself is being kept in place largely by the Fed's quantitative easing in the face of Washington's inability to even contemplate, let alone fashion, effective (and expansionary) fiscal policy (like clean energy and infrastructure repair and development).  

Though Big Oil wants Keystone, the project is an environmental killer, helping to enlarge a fossil-fuel induced carbon footprint at precisely the point we need to reduce it.  And, in any case, the project will produce none of the benefits its proponents are claiming -- the bulk of the oil will be exported, the construction jobs are short term, and there is no local economic multiplier effect  from a pipe in the plains states.

Supporters claim extracting oil from the Alberta tar-sands for export abroad will happen anyway, via a transcontinental pipeline to the Pacific in the event Keystone is killed.   But tell that to the people in British Columbia,  who apparently haven't read the memo.  They oppose it.  And so, apparently, does President Obama.

But I digress.

On the shut down, none of what the GOP instantly demands is at all possible for them to even eventually get. Bills could be proposed. Committee hearings could occur.  But, at the end of the day, the Tea Party doesn't have the votes to dictate their agenda, or even all  that much of it, in the regular order of things. 

So, not to put too fine a point on it, they have become . . .

Irregular.

This is more than dangerous.  On the debt ceiling, Boehner and the Tea-Partiers are  flirting with another economic meltdown that has even their most committed financial backers on Wall Street frothing at the mouth.  In fact, Wall Street is starting to have a pretty bad case of buyer's remorse.  Though it funded the GOP House into existence, it can't herd the conservative cats now reeking havoc.

Still, however,  there is no real end game in sight. 

Q: When do squirrels gather nuts?

A:  When they are available.

Q:  When is that?

A:  Usually in the Fall.

Bring on the squirrels.

We have plenty of nuts.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

OVERHEATED

OVERHEATED

July has been hot.

The economy has been not.

Contrary to the predictions of austerians worldwide, Paul Ryan, everyone else in the Republican party, the right wing blogosphere, and Germany on the whole, inflation these days is thin to non-existent and in no danger of rearing its ugly head anytime soon. The data is unimpeachable.  Apart from some commodity spikes largely a function of the volatile energy sector, basic inflation remains at a standstill across the globe.

The current US rate of inflation is 1.8%.  Last year it was .1% lower. In Europe, the rate as of this June was 1.6%.  As of this past May, the latest period for which there was data, the rate was actually negative in Japan, and has been for the entire year. Even China, where GDP is expected to grow by 7-8%, only had an inflation rate of 2.7% as of June.  Everywhere else, the inflation story is the same.  Here is some of the global data:
  • Canada -- 1.2%
  • Mexico --  4.09%
  • Brazil --  6.7%
  • Chile --  1.9%
  • Israel --  2.0%
  • Saudi Arabia --  3.5%
  • India --  4.86%
  • Russia --  6.9%
  • South Africa --  5.5%
  • Australia -- 2.4%
  • New Zealand -- 0.7
  • Indonesia -- 5.9%
These are historically low rates, all of which can be confirmed at www.tradingeconomics.com/country-list/inflation-rate.

So why all the sturm und drang from the right wing?

Some say it's the combined effect of ignorance and arrogance. This appears to be the view of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who for the last few years has regularly berated the academics who refused to acknowledge the errors of their un-met inflation predictions and the politicians who quoted them.  It's not the ignorance that bothers Krugman, who is quick to note that everyone, himself included, has made economic predictions that turned out to be wrong.  Rather, it's the arrogance of those who refuse to admit their errors; those who behave as if, any day now, they will turn out to be right . . .

When for years they have not been.

Krugman is clearly on to something when it comes to the academics. My experience with professors across the board is that, in a world like theirs where ideas are the coin of the realm, being right really matters, at least to them.  The consequence  is that they become loathe to admit it when they are wrong.  The problem with this view, however, especially in the case of the current inflation-less world we now inhabit, is that the data is so overwhelmingly clear, and so obviously incriminating, that arrogance alone cannot explain continued adherence.

Something else is going on.

Here's my take on what that is.  

We have turned economics into a morality play.  Most, if not all, of the austerians share a visceral contempt for government deficits. They do not just think deficits are bad as a natter of policy.  They think deficits are bad, period.  In their world, "thou shalt not spend money you don't have" is the Eleventh Commandment. Governments are like families, so the morality play goes.  Neither can go into hock forever.  And debt is like sin.  When you commit it, there are consequences.

Adam and Eve had to leave the garden.

And all us deficit-spenders will have to suffer the ills of inflation.

Even if there is none. 

Anyone with a cursory knowledge of economic history rejects this narrative -- along with its false analogies -- out of hand.  Ben Bernanke, for example, has spent his life studying the Great Depression of the '30s and understands that, in the world as it now exists, where interest rates are at or near zero and monetary policy is running out of stimulative tools, deficits are largely irrelevant and deflation -- not inflation -- is the real risk. Governments should borrow and spend and not worry about price hikes that will not occur until all the available capacity has been utilized. 

For this, however, Bernanke is now being vilified as an apostate by conservatives and the GOP . . .

Who forgot that he was appointed by the most conservative President we have had in the last seventy years . . .

And is himself a Republican.  

Oh well.

Hell hath no furry  . . .

Like a scorned austerian.











Sunday, June 23, 2013

META-DATA

META-DATA

It's a weird word.

For over two weeks now, the news is that the National Security Agency (or NSA) has for years been vacuuming "meta-data" from AT&T,  Verizon and  all our computer servers with the willing assistance of the Silicon Valley's best and brightest -- Google, Apple, Microsoft,  Skype, YouTube,  AOL, Paypal, etc. -- and then storing it on  government servers.  

According to the government, they haven't looked at the actual content of any conversation or email without first obtaining a warrant (from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court). So the "meta-data" just sits there all by its lonesome, as it were, until some patriot armed with the proper clearance mines it to foil a terrorist plot.  Also according to the government, this "meta-data" has been instrumental in stopping a number of terrorist acts, though no one can tell us any of the particulars, all of which are classified.  

So, what is "meta-data"?

One of my majors at Dartmouth College in the '70s was philosophy. As part of that major, I probably took a course in "metaphysics," though I can't remember doing so.  In any case, it was assuredly part of the core curriculum of courses offered to philosophy majors; then, as now, Dartmouth called it one of the "systematic fields of philosophy."  

Unfortunately, the field is very hard to define.  The term literally means "after" (meta) "physics" or the "physical."   According to Aristotle, it was what you studied after you mastered the sciences. I suppose the idea was that one had to be first firmly rooted in (and knowledgeable of) reality before tackling the abstract universe of first principles -- the "why is there something rather than nothing?" or "what's it all about, Alfie?" stuff of late nights in Greenwich Village bars.    The reality, however, is that reality is often the last thing touched upon in those late night   rap   sessions . . . 

Or in those college seminars on "metaphysics." 

Which is more or less the same thing now going on with "meta-data".

Like the philosopher's world of metaphysics, the NSA's world of meta-data clothes reality in an abstract lingo that suggests nothing all that personal -- or real -- is being examined.   In fact, the word itself has become part of the government's public defense. As Sen. Feinstein put it, "This is just meta-data, there is no content involved." 

Nothing, however,  could be further from the truth.

There is nothing abstract about meta-data. It is data that discloses the time, length and place of individual communications, the participants respective phone or digital IDs, and their respective locations. Companies have become enamored of the profit-making potential inherent in such data because, as the Guardian recently explained, it has "revelatory power." Quoting U. Penn. researcher Matt Blaze, the paper continued, "Meta -data is our context. [It] can reveal far more about us -- both individually and as groups -- than the words we speak. Context yields insights into who we are and the implicit, hidden relationships between us. A complete set of all the calling records for an entire country is . . . a record not just of how the phone is used, but, coupled with powerful software, of our importance to each other, our interests, values, and the various roles we play."

The government asserts it needs and gets individual warrants from the FISA court every time it lifts the veil and examines the contents of any actual communication.  It also asserts it does this solely to combat terrorism.  

But who knows?

The proof is as classified as the program Edward  Snowden illegally disclosed two weeks ago. 

We are not just being asked to trust the government here.  We are being asked to trust the government now and in the foreseeable future.  

We are also being asked to assume that no government -- either now or in the future -- will do with this information what all government has eventually done with information like it in the past, namely, look at it -- either at the "meta" or content level -- and, at some point, abuse it. This is what the CIA did with COINTELPRO before the Church committee blew the lid off its clandestine operations in the '70s. It is what J. Edgar Hoover -- who was especially good at blackmailing politicians and other personal enemies with knowledge of their secret relationships -- did for years as head of the FBI.

It not only can happen again.

It will.

And when it does, there will be nothing abstract, or impersonal or unreal about . . .

Meta-data.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

COMMENCEMENT 2013 -- THE APOLOGY TOUR

COMMENCEMENT 2013 -- THE APOLOGY TOUR

We are in the season of graduations.

And the ubiquitous Commencement address.

This year, Harvard has Oprah and Ohio State already had Obama.  

The rest of the pack reads like a Who's Who among the rich, famous and otherwise accomplished.  

There are actors and actresses (Julie Andrews at the University of Colorado, Martin Sheen at LaRoche College, Bill Cosby at the University of Baltimore); athletes (Cal Ripken at the University of Maryland, Terry Bradshaw at the New England Institute of Technology); authors (Liz Murray of From Homeless to Harvard fame, at the University of Utah, the poet Rita Dove at Emory, Judith Viorst at Goucher); and, of course, politicians (President Clinton at Howard,  Vice President Biden at U. Penn., Newark Mayor Corey Booker at Yale).

There are CEOs, singers and songwriters (Avon's Sheri McCoy at U. Mass., Annie Lenox at the Berkeley College of Music, Hootie & the Blowfish's Darius Rucker at the University of South Carolina); anchors, entrepreneurs and economists (Tom Brokaw at Loyola, Brian Williams at Elon, AOL's Steve Case at UNC, Jeffrey Sacks at Fieldston); and pundits and pranksters (David Brooks of the New York Times at Sewanee, Steven Colbert at U. Va.).

There are the anomalously appropriate (Haley Scott DeMaria at Seton Hall, the only  "Motivational Speaker" on the list, which strikes me as odd given the task the occasion calls for).

This is a long and varied list, a sort of covering of the waterfront that begs the obvious question.  Which is . . .

What should all these people say?

How about this:

"We're sorry.

We apologize for giving you an economy without sufficient jobs and a politics that cannot pass what 90% of you want.

We're sorry for calling you special during all those years you were growing up.  We apologize for giving all of you a trophy when the soccer or little league season came to a close.

We really didn't mean it.

In the real world, the one you are about to enter,  there are winners and losers.  And many more of the latter than the former.

So, the sad fact is that many of you will lose.   And we never told you that.

We're sorry.

We apologize for creating all those bubbles -- in the internet and in the housing market.  We apologize for creating a culture where the cheaters got ahead on Wall Street, where they invented products like mortgage backed securities, lied to you about their safety, and then left you holding the bag after they had walked away with billions.

You won't be able to buy a home as easily as we  could.  And for that we are sorry.

We apologize for how badly we handled things after the meltdown, the lesser Depression, of 2008.  We knew what to do to resurrect the economy.  

Which was to stimulate and spend and ignore the deficit.

But we didn't do it.  Or at least not enough of it here in the United States, and none of it in Europe, where unemployment is over 10% on the continent as a whole and north of 20% in some countries.  

We listened to the false prophets who told us the deficit would kill us right away.  All those old guys, like Simpson and Bowles, and the protectors of the creditor class in the Senate, where the average age is  60 and the mean wealth is in the multi- millions.  None of them were right.  Austerity is killing the world.

Your world.

We apologize for all those Senators and elites who didn't know what they were doing.  Or knew but did it anyway.  Our parents gave us giants -- Dirksen and Hart and Javits and Church.  Our grandparents gave us even greater men -- Keynes and Roosevelt and Marshall -- who taught us all we have seen fit to ignore.  We -- unfortunately -- gave you mostly midgets.

And we are sorry for that.

We apologize for all the whining we are now doing.  

For pretending that this is your fault, that you are a coddled generation that never knew adversity, that on day one you can can walk into the CEO's office -- or better yet, text him or her -- with your ideas, that you are entitled to succeed.  

You were and are all of these things.  We know.  Because we made you this way.

It's our fault.

Most of all, we're sorry for being so selfish.

Especially now.

Because we need you not to be."

OK.  Not all of this year's Commencement speakers have to apologize.

The Dalai Lama is speaking this Saturday.  

At Tulane.

He can say whatever he wants.









Sunday, April 28, 2013

ELIOT'S REVENGE

ELIOT'S  REVENGE

April 2013.

It started good enough.

With baseball. 

Then it was all downhill.

The Boston Marathon bombing was book ended by two Senate votes on what now passes for gun control in this country -- a bill expanding background checks to gun shows and internet sales so as to close a loophole and  tighten the prohibitions on sales to convicted felons and the mentally ill.  The first was just a vote to actually have a debate on the bill.  Though there was a real danger that it would not pass the Senate,  a phalanx of parents of the Newtown victims went to Washington and more or less embarrassed them into at least talking about it.  

This in turn created a sort of false dawn in which we imagined for a moment that mass tragedy could actually shock federal legislators into ignoring the paper tiger that is the NRA and voting for something, however meager,  that 90% of the country supports.

Alas, it was not to be.

A week later, the full Senate voted against the actual bill by supporting a filibuster on it.  The 54-46 vote in "favor"  failed to cross the 60 vote margin  necessary to end debate and pass the bill, effectively killing it. 

In between these two votes, two wannabe jihadis -- one an American citizen, the other a legal resident -- blew up the  Boston Marathon  at the finish line with home made pressure cooker bombs assembled, apparently, from instructions readily available on-line.  The older of the two, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and his mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, attracted the attention of the Russians a few years back and were investigated by the FBI in 2011, which determined they had no ties to terrorism but added their names to the so-called TECS (for "Treasury Enforcement Communications System") database. 

The Russians later requested that the CIA also investigate the Tsarnaev mother and elder son.  This resulted in their names being added to a terrorism database known as TIDE (for "Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment").  That's a list of 700,00 names used by federal agencies to come up with more specific watch lists.  Neither of the two, however, were moved to any of those more specific lists.  In addition,  the entries in the TIDE database were inaccurate -- the Russians had apparently misspelled mother and son's name.  For their part, the entries in the TECS system expire in a year.

There is considerable interest in Congress now about why the FBI closed or did not re-open its investigation of Tamerlan.  Republican Senator Lindsey Graham claims that "The ball was dropped in one of two ways --  [either]the FBI missed a lot of things, [or] . . . our laws do not allow . . . follow up in a sound solid way."  According to Graham, "There was a lot to be learned from this guy. He was on websites talking about killing Americans. He went overseas ... he was clearly talking about radical ideas. He was visiting radical areas." 

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) believes the problem is  "outdated guidelines."   He says the FBI couldn't re-open its investigation of Tamerlan after  Homeland Security (via the TECS entry) was "pinged" when he left to visit Russia in January 2012.  It is unclear whether Homeland Security was even allowed to inform the FBI of the overseas travel, and it apparently never did so.  Though the Joint Terrorism Task Force was notified at that point, it is not clear what they did with the information or which federal agency they gave it to.  

By the time Tamerlan returned in June, the TECS entry had expired (and would only have indicated that the FBI's investigation had closed, even if it hadn't expired),  so there was no additional "ping."  In the meantime, TIDE didn't light up on either his exit or return because the misspelled names provided by the Russians didn't match Tamerlan's travel documents. If, however, accurate information had been provided, the TIDE data in June 2012 also would have indicated that the FBI had closed its investigation.

So, in a nutshell,  the feds have some 'splainin to do.

The first issue is whether the FBI knew or should have known of Tsarnaev's trip to Russia in January 2012, and if so, what the agency did or should have done with that information.  The second is to which specific agency  the Joint Terrorism Task Force reported the trip,  and what that agency did or should have done with that information.  The third is whether Sen. Graham has the time line right.  His statement suggests that Tamerlan's radical web surfing might have occurred before the FBI investigated. The agency, however, says it checked his web usage before concluding the investigation.  The fourth is what the Russians knew, what they told us, and why they did not tell us any more, if more there was to tell. 

Congress will leave no stone unturned in attempting to answer these questions.  

As it should.

This is about terrorism.  Perhaps of the so-called lone wolf variety, which is the hardest to discover and stop.  Three people died and hundreds were injured.  As we all know, more than  three thousand have died at the hands of terrorists over the course of the last decade and a half, and our response has been swift. In the wake of 9/11, we passed the Patriot Act with record speed, sacrificing liberty for security in a bargain with the devil that will haunt us for decades.  Years later, we renewed that Act with equal dispatch.  That's what we do when 3,000 plus victims die at the hands of terrorists.

On gun violence, however, it's been a different story, as Chris Hayes recently pointed out on MSNBC.

30,000.

That's the approximate number of people who die from gun violence each year.

364,483.

That's the number who died from gun violence during the period 1999-2010.

Question: What has Congress done in the last decade to combat this epidemic?

Answer: Nothing.

In January,  PBS commentator Mark Shields pointed out that,  if you go back to 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, more Americans have died from gun violence than have been killed in all of the country's twelve wars.  The count is . . .

War - 1,171,177.

Guns -  1,364,483.

For the record,  five Democrats  voted against the background check bill earlier this month.  One, the majority leader, did so merely to preserve the possibility that the measure could be brought up again and otherwise would have voted for it.  Of the remaining four, however,  three  of them were from states where more than 80% of the public supported the bill.  So was Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a New Hampshire Republican who also voted to kill the bill.  When asked why they ignored the views of such super-majorities in their own states, the Senators either said nothing . . . or claimed those figures were wrong   . . . or asserted that the anti-gun control forces were louder and vote on that issue alone.

By the way, Lindsey Graham voted against the background check bill as well.  So did Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker.   When reporters caught up to him last Friday,  he was at Reagan National Airport,  on his way home, bemoaning sequestration cuts that furloughed air traffic controllers and created delays at major city airports throughout the country . . .

But praising the House of Representatives  for eliminating those cuts.

Which -- in what may be a new legislative land speed record in Washington.-- it did in about forty eight hours last week.

For the 70,000 kids who won't get into Head Start because of  sequestration, the cuts remain.  The same goes for those out in the cold seniors who won't get their  meals on wheels.

T.S. Eliot was right  . . .

"April is the cruelest month."










Sunday, March 31, 2013

THE GAY MARRIAGE CASE

THE GAY MARRIAGE CASE

Should gay men and lesbian women be permitted to enter into state-sanctioned  marriages?

This question -- which is now the subject of two Supreme Court cases, numerous state referenda, evolving state laws, and kitchen table conversations throughout the country -- is much easier to answer as a matter of policy than as a matter of constitutional law.

As a matter of policy, the arguments against gay and lesbian marriage are universally bad.  Same-sex marriage does not make opposite sex marriage less likely, nor does it weaken (or really have any effect at all on) heterosexual unions or the institution of heterosexual marriage.  The empirical reality is that sexual orientation is a matter of birth, not choice, and all our various attractions will remain as they were regardless of whether the pool of state sanctioned marriage licenses expands to accept same sex couples.  No heterosexual couple will join or split on account of the legality of gay and lesbian unions.  The children of traditional marriages will, of course, see examples of non-traditional arrangements and will process the information they get from those families as they do with others; some of the examples will be good, some bad.

But there is no evolutionary or existential threat in the offing here. 

Neither to heterosexual coupling nor to the so-called "traditional" family.

In fact, such an outcome is not even possible. 

Another canard is that same sex unions will harm children.  This is false.  On the one hand, the assumption that heterosexual unions must be the preferred arrangement when it comes to child-rearing is itself suspect in the extreme.  There is no evidence that children raised by gay or lesbian couples turn out worse than those raised by their hetero counterparts.  Nor is there any evidence that the mere existence of same sex families has some powerful -- and adverse -- spillover effect  on the families, and children, of their opposite sex neighbors.   

There is, of course, abundant evidence that in tact families are better for children, on average, than those that are broken.   

Roughly half the marriages in this country still end in divorce, and the evidence is that we still have a long way to go in getting marriage (and divorce) right for the kids (and for the grown-ups too).  To date, however, gays and lesbians have had nothing to do with this reality; we heterosexuals have created it all on our own.   When all the evidence is in, I suspect the results will be the same for gays and lesbians.  If their families break up, their children will suffer too.

Because, as the song goes, breaking up is hard to do.

Not because Mommies and Daddies are always better parents.
 
Nevertheless, when you scratch the surface of the policy debate on same sex marriage, it is hard not to get the impression that opponents are blaming the LGBTs for the break up of the family.    A number of the amici briefs filed in Hollingsworth v. Perry --  the gay marriage case heard by the Supreme Court last week --  were explicit in making this claim.  

Here are three  examples.

The Westboro Baptist Church filed a brief telling the Court that "America has erred in making fornication, adultery, divorce, remarriage, abortion-for-convenience-on-demand and sodomy standard fare in this country."  It continued: "It is time to reverse that course, and for the Court to squarely hold that the governments of America have a compelling interest in upholding traditional opposite sex marriage, and further in protecting the people from the devastating effects of same-sex marriage."

In its amicus brief, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops was less strident but no less insistent.  It claimed the following:  "Societal ills that flow from the dissolution of marriage and family would not be addressed -- indeed, they would only be aggravated -- were the government to fail to reinforce  the union of one man and one woman with the unique encouragement and support it deserves." 

Then there was the Thomas More Law CenterIts amicus brief argued that: "Declaring that adherence to the traditional definition of marriage is irrational and illegitimate would profoundly delegitimize those who subscribe to such a position, facilitating the imposition of a species of ideological totalitarianism upon objectors to a regime of redefined marriage."

There are a number of disturbing trends in these positions.  The worst, however, is the more or less straight line each draws between homosexuality and the  perceived sexual or moral lapses of the last century. In this world, being gay or lesbian is not inherent; rather, it follows from government's failure to marshall the state's police power to declare war on fornication, adultery, divorce and re-marriage.  Whatever bad outcomes attend "the dissolution of the family," banning gays and lesbians from marrying somehow emerges as a credible means to reverse that trend, even though gays and lesbians had nothing to do with it and will never be able to stop it.  Finally, having raised their Sodom and Gomorrah world to the level of the culturally accepted, and having helped ruin the family in the process,  gays and lesbians then get to brand their opponents as illegitimate, imposing their own "ideological totalitarianism" on erstwhile defenders of the heterosexual realm.

Wow.  

Who knew?

It's as if we marched from Stonewall to the new Soviet in forty or so short years

It is an understatement to call this sort of stuff nonsense.  But it would be foolish not to take it seriously. 

So constitutional law does.

Which is why gay marriage as a constitutional right is so much harder to get to than gay marriage as a socially desirable policy.

The issue for the Supreme Court is whether excluding gay and lesbian couples from state sanctioned marriages in California -- but pretty much nothing else, given that state's aggressive panoply of civil union and equal benefits statutes -- violates either the equal protection or due process clauses of the 14th Amendment to the federal Constitution.  This amendment was passed in the wake of the Civil War and was designed to insure equal rights for former slaves.  Much to the chagrin of conservative jurisprudes, who claim that the amendment should be construed only to give effect to the original intent of its framers, it has since then been used to fashion a right to privacy (ultimately precluding state bans at least on early term abortions) and to bar gender discrimination absent some reasonably ascertainable state interest.  

For years, no one contemplated the possibility that the 14th Amendment could be used to strike down laws barring gay or lesbian marriages or laws that defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman.  That was, afterall, how all the dictionaries defined the word.  The issue, moreover, was certainly on no one's radar screen in the 1860s, when the 14th Amendment was drafted and ratified.  In fairness, courts can't construe amendments until they get cases requiring a construction, and no one in the wake of the Civil War was filing cases claiming equal rights for gays and lesbians.  This did not happen until quite recently.  But here we are.  

In 2013.

What to do?

In law school, my first Professor of Constitional Law, Joseph Goldstein,  made us all write Supreme Court opinions.  When I first took a class from him, Prof. Goldstein was himself new to the subject; in fact, I do not think he had ever before taught it.  His expertise -- in fact, his fame -- was in family law in general and how that law effected children, in particular.  Along with two others, he authored the famous "Beyond", "Before" and "Beside" the "Best Interests of the Child" treatises.  If there is a seminar in heaven on Hollingsworth, he is definitely running it.  

And telling all his students to be "Tenth Justices."

So here is what Tenth Justice Me would say:

"There are three principles which decide this case.  

First, marriage is fundamental.  This is  a proposition the Court has recognized on more occasions, and in more contexts, than it can count.  The institution, moreover, has been held fundamental regardless of whether a couple could or even intended to have children.  It therefore must be held to be fundamental for gays and lesbians.

Second,  a 14th Amendment broad enough to support a right to privacy and bar gender discrimination is broad enough to support a right to gay marriage.   Constitutional principles emerge in concrete settings but are phrased in abstract language. There is a reason for this.  Those principles are meant to survive and govern in contexts other than those in which they emerge.  No one in the 1860s could have predicted all the circumstances in which equal protection of the laws or due process could or would in the future be violated.  So no one did so.  Instead, the drafters of the 14th Amendment fulfilled their responsibility by amending the Constitution to guarantee those protections to all.

And today, we are merely fulfilling our responsibility to guarantee those rights to gays and lesbians.

Third, we cannot ignore the thirty states that have passed laws defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.  Or that a majority of Californians have sought to so do in this case.  The Constitution commits us to representative government and that means we must respect the decisions made by our representatives.

Unless those decisions have no basis in reason or fact.

California's proposition barring gays from marriage is such a decision.
There is no evidence -- none -- that gay or lesbian marriage will hurt children, harm heterosexual marriages, accelerate the dissolution of the family, or otherwise imperil moral prerogatives or religious liberties.  No religion that does not want to sanction gay or lesbian marriage will be forced to do so, and while officers of the state (e.g., Justices of the Peace, Notaries) may be required to perform weddings they might otherwise oppose, public officials are routinely called upon to check their private views at the door when those views conflict with their public functions.  Similarly, no law that precludes marriage on the basis of reason and fact (e.g., laws banning polygamy or laws establishing age requirements for marriage licenses) will fail in the future.

California has, in truth, reduced this issue to its essentials. Under state law, gays and lesbians can form domestic partnerships, raise children, distribute their estates to their partners, and otherwise enjoy all the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.  Except one.  They cannot be "married."  If we lived in an "Alice in Wonderland" world, this might not matter.  What's in a word, afterall?

But we do not live in that world.

In our world, as the Court noted almost sixty years ago, "separate but equal is inherently unequal."  It creates stigma.  It assigns badges of inferiority, usually to groups -- like gays and lesbians -- that have been historically vilified.  

We do not decide today that marriage matters.  We have known that for some time now.What we decide today is that marriage matters . . .

For gays and lesbians . . .

And for their kids too."





Wednesday, March 13, 2013

A PRAYER FOR FRANCIS

A PRAYER FOR FRANCIS

When I was a kid, I went to church a lot.

I went to a Catholic parochial school in Brooklyn in the '60s.  It was then called Our Lady Help of Christians. There were two classes, A and B,  for each of eight grades.  There were slightly more than fifty (50) students in each class, so more than eight hundred of us in the school.  The parish was the center of everyone's social life.  We played baseball and basketball for the parish team and joined the parish Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.  The fathers were in the Holy Name Society.  The mothers were in the sodality and the PTA.

There was a 9 am Mass each Sunday, just for the kids.  Attendance was not optional.  The nuns watched all eight hundred of us fidget in our seats.  If you spoke to the friend next to you, and you were seen, the ushers removed you to the back pew, a sort of march to perdition.  It was also all spit and polish.  We dressed for church even better than we dressed for school -- collared shirt, tie, blazer, creased slacks and shined shoes.

Vatican II started when I was three and ended when I was nine.  While it was going on, none of us kids knew anything about it.  But when it was over, the parish erupted in change.  We altar boys had painstakingly learned the Mass in Latin; we re-learned it in English.  The priest had previously always had his back to us.  Now he was turned around.  Soon, the old ornate altar was gone, replaced by a marble table and a multi-colored resurrection mosaic on the back wall.  As the tumult of the '60s was broadcast on the nightly news, Mass became more hip and, we thought, more relevant.  Guitars replaced the organ and folk songs replaced hymns. The hippest priest -- Father Duffy -- quoted Simon and Garfunkel in one of his homilies. We all had to be that bridge over troubled water for the poor and the possessed.

In 1970, I went to a Catholic high school -- Xavier in Manhattan.  The Jesuits taught there, and there were lots of them.  In fact, Jesuit scholastics -- members of that religious order who were in training to become priests and who, as part of that training, did mandatory years of service as teachers -- made those schools. They were intellectual evangelists who grabbed the minds of outer-borough teens and convinced them that they could be -- in fact, had to be -- something.  And that the something had to combine success and ethics in at least equal measures.  The one to whom I became closest, now a Jesuit psychologist and professor at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, NY -- taught me the most important lesson of my life -- "to pray as if everything depends on God but act as if everything depends on me."

So I did.

And in doing that, I questioned where my church was going over the course of the next three decades.  I didn't get it.

And still don't.

I don't understand the whole anti-gay thing.  The higher-ups say it isn't that, but c'mon.  Being gay is not an "objective disorder" any more than being left or right handed.   Gay marriage, adoption and child -rearing are not  "‘move[s]’ of the Father of Lies who seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God."  They are about love and embrace all the problems and possibilities of other families.   But the Catholic hierarchy routinely trots out the first canard and the new pope has proclaimed the second.

I don't understand the assault on reason.  If Thomas Aquinas did one thing, it was to put the Catholic church firmly in the camp of requiring that faith comport with reason rather than being at war with it.  But the hierarchy's position on reproductive rights is a mass of contradiction.  They are for natural family planning but against artificial birth control on the theory that all intercourse must be open to procreation.  But no one who practices the "rhythm" method of birth control is open to that result; in fact, they are actively seeking to avoid it.

They claim that person hood begins at conception, but this is a position that two of the most renowned fathers of the church -- St. Augustine and Aquinas -- opposed.  Neither thought early term abortion the killing of an ensouled person and both have contemporary science on their side given what we now know about embryological and neurological development.  This does not make abortion an issue without ethical consequence, but it does make it one where the black and white of curial absolutism should have no place.

I don't understand the obstinacy, the secrecy, the hypocrisy of Rome.  Even if you grant them some good faith in confronting the scandal of abusing children, and they are due more of that than their critics allow even on the best of days, the bungling brought on by these sins of pride has been breathtaking.  That they ostensibly answered to God did not excuse them from answering to man in the case of criminal conduct with utterly tragic consequences.  Zero tolerance should not have become the new policy.  It should have been the policy all along.  This, moreover, is something the Jesuits knew from the outset, which is why they were way ahead of other religious orders in psychological testing of candidates for the priesthood and have had the lowest incidence of priestly abuse cases within the institution as a whole.

And finally, here in the United States, I do not understand the politics.  A church that proclaims a "preferential option for the poor" really should be careful to avoid the appearance that it favors a party or set of positions that, over the course of the last decade or so, has created more of them. But the Catholic hierarchy has done just that, praising the supposed courage of political conservatives on right to life issues while downplaying the larger consequences of conservative ideology.  You can't simultaneously be against poverty, unemployment, hunger and a whole host of economic and distributional ills brought on by this generation's love affair with Mammon,  and for the very people whose policies generated those problems in the first place.

What is wrong?

The problem is not that the Catholic church is not "liberal" enough.

The problem is that it isn't holy enough.

Holiness is about many things, but charity and love and compassion and openness to the other are among them.

We Catholics now have a new pope.  He is an Argentinian Jesuit.  He has done some great things and said some dumb things, the latter of which probably explains why a lot of Jesuits in Argentina reportedly did not like him.  He will be the first to admit that he is very human.  He is, as one of my friends who knows put it, "genuinely anti-pomp." As a cardinal, he gave up a palace and rode the bus.   He is the first non-European pope, the first South American pope, the first Francis, and . . .

He only has one lung.

He will need it.

Because he has to breathe a new spirit of holiness into a church that needs it.

Today, he asked us to pray for him.  And I did.  I offered up  my own version of the prayer of his namesake, St. Francis: 

Lord, make him an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let him sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Master,
grant that he may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
Amen.