Author Archives: weeklysift

Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

What Abortion Means to Me

February 13, 2012 – 12:52 pm

I’m a guy. So I’ve never been pregnant, never worried about being pregnant, and never had to decide whether I should have an abortion.

But I’ve also been married for … it’ll be 28 years next month. So it annoys me when reproductive rights gets consigned (along with breast cancer, day care, and equal pay) to the special ghetto of “women’s issues”. If you take marriage seriously, you live in the same ghetto your wife does — especially when it comes to reproduction. Because if your wife has a child, you have a child. That’s how it works.

Here’s how it worked for us: In the early years of our marriage, we figured we would become parents eventually, but not yet. In the short run, we wanted to focus on establishing ourselves in the world, so that later, as more mature parents, we could give our children a better life.

Later, as we began to wonder whether eventually would ever be now, we went through a more focused decision process: Were we going to have children or not?

We decided not. (Being a writer, I described that process here and revisited it here when our friends’ kids started graduating from high school.) Children are wonderful and we were glad that so many of our friends were having them, but we liked the lives we were living. We still do.

Even if we had chosen to have a child, we’d have faced another decision about having a second one, or a third, because each child is a new roll of the dice. You can’t predict who this little person is going to turn out to be or how s/he will change your household. (If you think your brilliant parenting will determine the matter, you’re kidding yourself.)

Children arrive with no warranty and no return policy. Downs syndrome is on my wife’s family tree, and autism is something you always have to think about. One of the bridesmaids at our wedding had a perfectly healthy child, who was then killed by a drunk driver. My parents lived next to a family whose teen-age son suffered a brain-damaging accident. They will have to care for him for the rest of their lives, and what happens if he outlives them is unclear.

In short, having a child means risking whatever you thought you were going to do with your life. And each additional child risks not just your own life, but the life you can provide for your other children. That’s why any responsible couple — no matter how satisfying they find parenthood to be — is eventually going to say, “No. It’s time to quit while we’re ahead.”

[I suppose I need to address the people who “trust in the Lord” to decide how many children they will raise. To me, that makes as much sense as snake-handling or strolling through a lion’s den because Daniel got away with it. Look around: People who trust in the Lord get slammed by disaster at the same rate as anybody else who takes similar risks. So I’ll repeat: Any responsible couple …]

Those two reasons — wanting to delay having children until you can provide a better life for them, and wanting to protect the life you have already made — are why almost every couple practices birth control at some point in their marriage. (The only people who can’t see the logic here are priests who can’t get married. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.)

Once you’ve made that decision, you quickly realize that no form of birth control is foolproof. Surgery isn’t an option if you just want to delay parenthood, and is a gamble in general, because your circumstances may change. Even celibacy fails, because you can’t rule out rape.

So we came to this strategy: We practiced birth control faithfully, and planned to get an abortion if it failed. As it happened, we lucked out and never had to get that abortion.

Would we have followed through? I don’t know. I think that’s a situation you can’t fully imagine until you get there. But in any case, the decision would have been ours to make, and not the government’s to make for us. If we had changed our minds and decided to have the baby, our decision would have transformed an “accident” into a wanted child. Having chosen to raise him or her, I believe we would have been better, more loving parents than if we had felt trapped.

Are there moral consequences to choosing abortion? Yes, I believe there are. But I imagine them differently than anti-abortion extremists do. I hold a newly fertilized ovum in very light regard (as Nature — which spontaneously aborts so many of them — seems to). I believe that a fetus’ moral value grows with time, which gives a couple a responsibility to decide about abortion promptly, and steadily raises the decision bar as the pregnancy continues. Eventually, as birth approaches, only the life of the mother is a good enough reason to abort.

These are my own moral intuitions (which my wife largely shares) and yours may be different. But if we had taken action based on them, I would have expected everyone else to mind their own business. I see no justification for any outsider’s morality to have trumped ours.

So that’s what abortion has meant to me as a married man. My wife and I took responsibility for our childbearing. Without the possibility of abortion, we could not have done so.

We are now past the childbearing age. But I hope that those couples who are fertile today will also take responsibility for their childbearing. I believe that collectively they will raise saner, healthier children if they do, and that our society will be better for it. I also want today’s couples to have at least as much control over their lives as we had. And so, for both social and personal reasons, I want abortion to remain legal.

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Religious Corporate Personhood

February 13, 2012 – 12:44 pm

Cable-news shows the last two weeks (especially on Fox) have been dominated by the Catholic bishops’ objection to including contraception in the minimum healthcare plan employers must provide under the Affordable Care Act, and the compromise the Obama administration offered.

In brief: Churches could already claim an exemption to the rule, so the issue centered on other church-run institutions like hospitals or universities. By making a Catholic institution provide contraception to its employees, despite the fact that Catholic doctrine objects to contraception, “the Obama administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty” — according to one version of the letter which the bishops had read in every Catholic church.

The administration compromised: Church-run institutions also would not have to offer contraception in their healthcare plans, but if they didn’t, the insurance companies providing the plans must offer individual employees a separate, no-fee, no-co-payment contraception policy. (This works financially, because contraception doesn’t cost the insurance company money, it saves money by preventing pregnancies. So the employer is not subsidizing contraception, even indirectly.) But the bishops announced that they would not be satisfied until contraception was withdrawn from the minimum healthcare plan for everyone.

Most of the problems with the bishops’ claims have been dealt with in detail elsewhere:

But one point is not getting nearly the attention it deserves: The bishops are not defending the religious liberty of individual Catholics (who remain free not to use contraceptives). They are claiming “religious liberty” as an institutional right of the Catholic Church.

It’s corporate personhood all over again.

The Founders must be spinning in their graves. The whole point of separating church from state is that we should not have to run our laws past a council of unelected bishops.

The United States has a long history of making room for individual conscience, most notably in allowing conscientious exemption to a military draft. But recognizing the institutional conscience of a church would be something new and strange.

In the American legal tradition, a church’s rights are derived from the right of its members to believe as they will, to worship as they will, and to freely assemble. Any “institutional right” that can’t be so derived is alien to us.

I found this spelled out quite clearly in the 1949 book Cornerstones of Religious Freedom in America by Joseph Blau (which also provided this week’s Sift quote):

Much as business corporations in the United States have battened on their fictitious legal status as corporate persons entitled to individual rights under the “due process” clause, churches — religious corporations — are able to grow overweening and oppressive if their claim to legal status as corporate persons under the First Amendment is granted. “Due process” for corporate persons has produced the legal anomaly of violation of the rights of the very individuals whom the due process clause was intended to protect. Religious freedom for religious corporations, if it is allowed, will end in the trampling of the religious freedom of the individual under the marching feet of a remorseless and self-aggrandizing hierarchy.

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Appeals Court: Prop 8 is Still Irrational

February 13, 2012 – 12:36 pm

If you’ve read any of my posts on previous same-sex marriage decisions — going all the way back to the 2003 ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Court — you know the basic legal landscape. All same-sex marriage decisions revolve around two questions: How fundamental a right is a same-sex couple’s right to marry? And how much reason does the state have to deny that right?

Most pro-SSM decisions emphasize the second question, claiming that bans on SSM are not rationally related to any legitimate government purpose. And so, implicitly, the court is saying that SSM bans come from the majority acting out its spite against an unpopular minority.

A federal appeals court took that course Tuesday in upholding a lower court’s decision to strike down California’s Proposition 8. By 2-1, the judges said that Prop 8 fails the rational-basis test, the lowest legal standard.

The ruling rips one-by-one through the rationales given for taking away same-sex couples’ right to marry and finds them without any support in fact or logic: Prop 8 can’t be about the state’s interest in providing the best setting for child-raising, because it doesn’t change any of California’s rules about child-raising. Plus

It is implausible to think that denying two men or two women the right to call themselves married could somehow bolster the stability of families headed by one man and one woman.

It can’t arise out of a general prudence in deciding the definition of marriage, because it locks in a definition without further study.

Such a permanent ban cannot be rationally related to an interest in proceeding with caution.

It can’t be about protecting religious institutions from anti-discrimination laws, because Prop 8 doesn’t change those laws.

To the extent that California’s anti-discrimination laws apply to various activities of religious organizations, their protections apply in the same way as before.

It can’t be justified by what children will be taught about homosexuality in public schools, because that also didn’t change, other than the usual way that instruction changes as the world changes.

To protest the teaching of these facts is little different from protesting their very existence. … The prospect of children learning about the laws of the State and society’s assessment of the legal rights of its members does not provide an independent reason for stripping members of a disfavored group of rights they presently enjoy.

With all proposed rationales dismissed, the remaining conclusion is:

Proposition 8 is a classification of gays and lesbians undertaken for its own sake. … Proposition 8 operates with no apparent purpose but to impose on gays and lesbians, through the public law, a majority’s private disapproval of them and their relationships by taking away from them the official designation of “marriage” with its societally recognized status.

The opinion of the dissenting judge, N. R. Smith, is in some ways more damaging to Prop 8 than the court’s majority opinion, because it shows just how far you have to go to find some rational basis for the law. Atlantic’s Andrew Cohen summarizes:

Thus, as his language grew more specious and abstract, the “rational basis” test became the “rational relation to some legitimate end” test, which became the “reasonably conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis” test, which became the “have arguable assumptions underlying its plausible rationales” test.

This damning-with-faint-praise opinion leaves the impression that Prop 8’s rationales were not crappy enough to throw out, but just barely. Dahlia Lithwick calls Judge Smith’s dissent: “the death rattle of a movement that has no legal argument or empirical evidence.”

From here the case probably goes to the Supreme Court, where eight votes seem locked in. Justice Kennedy will make the decision.

In general, given the perspective of more than eight years, the comment that ended my analysis of the 2003 Massachusetts case is holding up pretty well:

Personally, I expect the same-sex marriage issue to follow the same course as interracial marriage. After a few years of Chicken-Little panic, the vast majority of Americans will recognize that the sky has not fallen, and that the new rights of homosexuals have come at the expense of no one.

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The Sifted Bookshelf: The Myth of Choice

February 13, 2012 – 12:29 pm

So many social issues hinge on choice and individual responsibility. To what extent do our choices shape our lives, and how much choice did we really have? A struggling family pays its rent and buys the kids school clothes rather than sign up for health insurance. Should we regard that as a “choice” to be uninsured?

The poor often make bad choices. They may eat badly, handle money badly, or fail to invest enough time developing marketable skills. Is that because they lack character, or because poverty is a high-stress environment in which it’s hard to make good choices?

In another view, nothing is anybody’s fault. We’re all just automata, determined by forces beyond our control: genetics, peer pressure, advertising, culture, economic forces, childhood trauma, and so on. If one child goes to college and another to prison, it’s just the breaks.

The Myth of Choice by Kent Greenfield is the beginning of a more meaningful dialog about choice. He presents a variety of real-life examples and scientific studies that point in a more sensible direction: We do all make choices, but our options are limited by external forces. And even when the external world isn’t constraining us, we are limited by what he calls our “choice muscles”. If we have to make too many stressful decisions or apply too much willpower, they wear out and we begin to act like the kind of automata pictured by determinists.

In one experiment, people were asked to remember a number and then offered a snack. The longer the number, the more likely they were to take the cake rather than the fruit. The stress of the longer number left fewer mental resources to apply toward healthy eating.

The metaphor of “choice muscles” is a valuable addition to the discussion. As individuals, it points us toward exercising them and building them up, as well as towards avoiding needless temptations. And as a society, how do we create choice-friendly environments that make it easy to choose the things we really want, rather than overwhelming environments that make us more manipulable?

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Culture Wars Rise with the Economy and other short notes

February 13, 2012 – 12:17 pm

A simple reason why Rick Santorum and the culture wars are on the upswing in Republican primaries: As the economy improves, the rationale of the Romney campaign falls apart. Social issues were supposed to stay on the sidelines so that Mitt the Financial Wizard could pound Obama the Economic Failure.

Salon’s Alex Parene asks: “Would it be conspiratorial to note that these divisive cultural issues began attracting a great deal of right-wing attention very soon after the release of a positive jobs report?”

Not at all, Alex.

Purple cow? No. Purple squirrel? Here.

The difference between liberal nonsense and conservative nonsense is that liberals let the audience in on the joke.

It looks like another surge of global-warming denial is building. A couple weeks ago the Wall Street Journal printed a letter from 16 scientists and engineers saying “There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy.” They compared global warming to Lysenkoism and presented a picture of scientific community heavy-handedly enforcing a rigid dogma.

If you look at the list of signers, most of them have no connection to climate science, so their opinion is no more significant than mine or any other educated person’s. Skeptical Science finds them “worth noting for their lack of noteworthiness”. Only two have “published climate research in the past three decades” while 7 have received funding from the fossil fuel industry. Skeptical Science also debunks the letter’s claims, and includes a wonderful graph explaining how an energy-industry flack can make a warming trend look like a cooling trend.

At the same time, the WSJ refused to print a letter from 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences defending the scientific process and claiming:

Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence.

Forbes called the WSJ’s actions “remarkable editorial bias“, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, now that it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Some of the same misinformation appeared simultaneously in a British tabloid, from which it migrated to the Washington Times and other right-wing publications. Kevin Drum debunks.

New re-election plan: Surround Obama with kids and gadgets, and he’s irresistible.

James Fallows writes an insightful analysis of what we’ve learned about Obama during his first term.

When I wrote last week’s article on Komen and Planned Parenthood, it wasn’t clear yet whether Komen had really reversed itself or the right-wingers inside Komen had just stepped back until public outrage faded a little. “[Karen] Handel is still on the job, after all.”

Not any more. Tuesday morning Handel resigned. So maybe Komen is serious about de-politicizing itself and getting back to its mission.

The anti-public-employee jihad that is getting Wisconsin’s Scott Walker recalled has spread to Utah and Arizona.

Just for the cuteness of it: Video of a wolf pup playing with a bear cub.

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Authority and Belief

February 6, 2012 – 1:32 pm

I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don’t have as many people who believe it.

— George Carlin

In this week’s sift:

  • Five Take-Aways from the Komen Fiasco. This last week has been a minefield of rumor and misdirection. I try to sort it out and see what there is to learn.
  • Scary Guys Named Saul and other short notes. Why Gingrich doesn’t care who the real Saul Alinsky was. Mitt’s gaffes are bad, just not as bad as they sound. Fox can’t win against the Muppets. Should unresponsive adolescents be euthanized? And the Republican presidential candidates take a 3-hour cruise.
  • Last week’s most popular post. Where the Jobs Are and Why had had 190 views.
  • Book recommendation of the week: Flunking Sainthood by Jana Reiss. Reiss tries to master one new spiritual discipline a month for a year — and fails completely. But the result is a fascinating meditation on everyday life and what we want out of spirituality.
  • This week’s challenge. Go over to the web site of Planned Parenthood, which does a lot of work no one else is doing. Whether you feel like doing anything after you get there is up to you.
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Five Take-Aways From the Komen Fiasco

February 6, 2012 – 12:53 pm

Now that the dust from the Susan Komen/Planned Parenthood mess is starting to settle, it’s time to ask: What should we learn from all this?

Background. I’m sure many of you have already heard more about this story than you wanted to know, but it came out in (sometimes deceptive) dribs and drabs. So before we start drawing conclusions, let’s get our facts straight. (Feel free to skip ahead.)

The context for this week’s events is a long-term campaign to annihilate Planned Parenthood that has been fought at the federal and state government level, as well as in the board rooms of private organizations like Komen. (If you want an even longer context, the attack on Planned Parenthood is part of a defund-the-Left campaign that has already taken down ACORN and is working on the public employees unions and NPR.)

The Susan Komen for the Cure Foundation has been under pressure from anti-abortion* groups for years now, and it began crumbling well before this week. Last April, Komen hired Karen Handel as their VP for Public Policy. Handel was a Sarah-Palin-endorsed candidate for Governor of Georgia who pledged to defund Planned Parenthood if elected. Jezebel comments:

How curious! A person with what looks like a personal vendetta against Planned Parenthood joins the ranks of an organization that provides funding to Planned Parenthood, and soon, that organization “defunds” Planned Parenthood.

LifeNews.com claimed that Komen had also given in on another abortion-related issue: embryonic stem cells. But the press release they link to has since vanished from the Komen site and nobody is sure what’s going on.

Tuesday, Planned Parenthood announced that Komen had told it that it would not be eligible for future grants because a new rule prevented grants to organizations that are under local, state, or federal investigation. Planned Parenthood is being investigated by Rep. Cliff Stearns, but a congressional investigation doesn’t have to be based on anything more than a committee chair’s whim, and this one seems not to be.

Critics have since pointed to Komen’s continuing relationships with other investigated organizations, like Penn State, so this all has the appearance of an elaborate rationalization. Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported:

three sources with direct knowledge of the Komen decision-making process told me that the rule was adopted in order to create an excuse to cut off Planned Parenthood.

The public backlash started immediately, and everyone agrees that Komen handled it badly. (I’m guessing they expected Planned Parenthood to slink away quietly rather than take the dispute public.) A communications specialist for nonprofits summed up: Komen had “accidentally rebranded” itself.

Komen for the Cure, it seems, is no longer a breast cancer charity, but a pro-life breast cancer charity.

Komen didn’t start getting its message out until late Wednesday, and it was garbled. Jay Rosen described Komen CEO and Founder Nancy Brinker’s interview with Andrea Mitchell on Thursday as “a train wreck”. Brinker didn’t say anything about investigations, but tried to turn attention to other policy changes that, once again, seemed to apply to no one other than Planned Parenthood.

Friday Brinker issued an apology to the public for “recent decisions” and said that “disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political”. Most people are taking that as capitulation. But it may not be. Maybe when new Planned Parenthood grant proposals come in, Komen will find new excuses to reject them. Handel is still on the job, after all.

OK, now some observations.

1. Be hopeful but not cocky. Twice in the last few weeks we’ve seen an outrageous attack get beaten back by public outrage. The corporatists had to retreat on SOPA and the theocrats on Planned Parenthood. Events like these are energizing, and it’s tempting to think that right-wing forces are on the run.

They’re not. The big media companies already have a new plan to control the Internet, and the campaign against Planned Parenthood will continue as well. When these forces operate in full public view and underestimate their opposition, they get beat. That’s encouraging, but you have to figure they’ll learn to be more careful.

2. The Christian Right continues to move towards apartheid. The whole premise of Komen is that “cure breast cancer” is such a simple and obviously good goal that we should all be able to unite around it, despite our other differences. The Christian Right is saying no to this. If Komen won’t define itself as an anti-abortion breast cancer charity, they won’t support it.

(Somebody is bound to comment that the Left is doing the same thing if Komen won’t fund Planned Parenthood. Not at all. If Komen had identified somebody else who would provide the same services better — no problem. Instead, Komen made a political decision to appease right-wingers and gave a series of bogus after-the-fact rationalizations. That’s what was outrageous.)

You can see the same thing happening all around us. At my local baseball stadium I have heard between-innings announcements for a Christian taxi service. God forbid a Muslim or an atheist should drive me somewhere.

3. There are other reasons not to like Komen. Komen had managed to identify itself as THE anti-breast-cancer charity, and no one wants to be pro-breast-cancer. So lots of people had been sitting on their criticism.

The Planned Parenthood mess gave them permission to come out of the closet and gave the general public permission to listen. These are the main points.

  • Less than half of Komen’s budget is spent on research, screening, or treatment. Overhead and marketing take up 22%, and education 36%. Of the education chunk, much is worthwhile, but a certain amount of marketing and overhead seems hidden there as well.
  • Komen is litigious. Komen spends almost $1 million a year making sure that no other anti-cancer charity uses its trademarked “for the cure” phrase. I don’t think anyone has totalled up what these suits cost the small charities Komen sues.
  • Corporations get a big marketing bang for a small charitable buck. Think Before You Pink asks some skeptical questions about those pink-ribbon products. BTW, the pink handgun looks like a hoax. But the KFC pink bucket is real.
  • Pinkwashing. Corporations whose products increase breast cancer risk can hide behind a pink ribbon. (BTW, anti-abortion groups try to turn this around by saying that abortion causes breast cancer. This is long-debunked nonsense repeated only by anti-science types like Rick Santorum.) Komen gets so much corporate cooperation precisely because it soft-pedals environmental causes and regulatory solutions, and instead focuses breast-cancer awareness on individual actions like mammograms and treatment. There’s a subtle victim-blaming vibe there. Pay no attention to that corporate carcinogen behind the curtain.

4. Charity has its limits. A common conservative/libertarian fantasy is that private charity can replace the functions of government. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all that good-deed-doing stuff could happen through voluntary generosity, with no taxes or audits or anything?

When you look at the big McCharities like United Way and a handful of others — a stratosphere Komen has recently entered — you see what’s wrong with that idea. All of them end up doing an enormous amount of marketing, image-building, and other rah-rah stuff to keep both themselves and their issues from slipping people’s minds. (My wife, a 15-year breast cancer survivor, hit her limit when football teams started wearing pink accessories that clash with their uniforms.)

The amount that shows up as overhead on a McCharity’s annual report is just a fraction of the true overhead. How much time and effort do participating corporations put into their United Way drives? How much money do individuals waste buying merchandise they don’t need and wouldn’t have bought without the charity tie-in? If you total up not just what the McCharity takes in, but what the donors and volunteers actually put out, you see that the true overhead is astronomical.

Mass-market private charity is a really, really inefficient way to do just about anything.

Like cure breast cancer. Almost every woman is at risk to some degree. Almost every man has a mother, wife, sister, daughter, or friend at risk. So curing breast cancer is in the general interest.

And breast cancer is not going away this year or next, and maybe not for a long time. So we may be facing decades of wide receivers wearing pink gloves just to keep our interest and awareness sufficiently high.

Imagine: Wouldn’t it be great if there were some way to decide once and for all that we as a people want to beat breast cancer? We wouldn’t have to stay perpetually amped-up about it, we could just commit to finding a cure and get on with our lives.

Amazingly, there is a way! We could elect representatives who could all meet somewhere and decide what each person’s fair share is. Then we could have that amount deducted from our paychecks automatically, without all the hoopla and overhead and waste.

Government — that’s what it’s called. Whenever we want to do something in the general interest and to keep doing it year after year, the right tool for the job is government.

5. Supporters of abortion rights need to take the initiative. All we accomplished with Komen this week was to preserve the status quo. The other side continues to pick the battlefields and hammer away. Sometimes we stop them and sometimes we don’t. That’s not recipe for victory.

Daily Kos’ Meteor Blades says “So, clearly, self-defense is crucial. But we need offense as well.” He then outlines steps to advance the family-planning* cause, including the repeal of TRAP laws, opening new women’s-health clinics, and ending government funding of abstinence-only sex education “which amounts, in many cases, to no education at all.”

Blades doesn’t go far enough. We also need to take the intellectual, moral, and religious initiative.

Here’s a place to start: The  anti-abortion movement’s most extreme positions (opposition to embryonic stem cell research and to post-conception forms of birth control like IUDs and the morning-after pill) follow from the belief that a one-celled organism, the newly fertilized ovum, has the full moral value of an infant.

Anti-abortion advocates usually get away with presenting this as a principled religious conviction, part of that old-time religion.

We need to point out loudly and often that in fact this is a nutty idea that has no historical, traditional, or scriptural basis. People don’t oppose abortion because they believe on religious principle that a zygote has the moral value of a child. Quite the opposite: This an ad hoc belief invented for the purpose of opposing abortion, and the faithful simply ignore many of its inconvenient consequences.

The Wikipedia article on ensoulment is worth reading in this regard. Aristotle, the Talmud, and all early Christian sources agreed that the soul entered the body well after conception — 40 days at the earliest. Nobody dreamed up ensoulment-at-conception until the Middle Ages, and even then the infallible popes went back and forth about it for centuries.

The very idea of a “moment” of ensoulment is one of those theological contrivances rejected by every folk culture that has ever existed, including ours. Intuitively, we all understand that the moral value of the fetus (like everything else about it) develops gradually, beginning somewhere around zero at conception and becoming immeasurable by the time of birth. In actual practice everyone — even a conservative Christian who “believes” in ensoulment-at-conception — understands that late miscarriages are more tragic than early miscarriages, and that the death of an infant is more tragic yet.

Consider, for example, that the majority of fertilized ova fail to implant in the uterus and abort spontaneously without the woman even being aware of her pregnancy. Anyone who honestly believed these were full-fledged human souls would regard failure-to-implant as the greatest health problem and greatest human tragedy of all time. But where is the religious monument to these billions of souls? Where is the big research program to do something about this holocaust?

Nowhere, because deep down no one really believes that a fertilized ovum has the moral value of a baby. The whole idea has been trumped up to justify opposition to abortion. It does not deserve the respect it is typically granted.

*I am sick of the jockeying over labels on both sides. Pro-life and pro-choice both sound good to focus groups, but they are neither precise nor accurate. So I’ll call you “pro-life” only if you have an across-the-board life agenda: not just anti-abortion, but anti-death-penalty, anti-war, pro-universal-healthcare, and maybe even vegetarian. If you’re just against abortion, I’ll call you “anti-abortion” or maybe “pro-fetus-rights”.

Similarly, I could imagine an across-the-board pro-choice agenda — not just abortion rights but drug legalization, anti-gun-control, right to die, open borders, and so on — but I don’t see many people pushing that either. So if you’re just in favor of a woman’s right to choose an abortion, I’ll describe your position as “abortion rights” or “pro-family-planning”.

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Scary Guys Named Saul and other short notes

February 6, 2012 – 12:48 pm

Last week I linked to Bill Mahr’s rant about the Republican aggrandizement and demonization of Saul Alinsky. (“The centerpiece of this campaign,” Newt Gingrich said in a televised debate, “is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky.”) Tuesday, Media Matters explained why most of what is said about him is pure fantasy.

But as I explained in Propaganda Lessons From the Religious Right, the real Saul Alinsky doesn’t matter. To rally an audience that believes in the Devil’s dark conspiracy against all that is Good, you only have to identify his agents and trace their connections. It goes without saying that they are united in seeking all manner of Evil; no evidence is necessary.

If you want to see this technique in action, watch any Glenn Beck chalkboard presentation. Beck loves to identify left-wing “leaders” that most liberals have never heard of, like Frances Fox Piven. In Beck’s world, the Left is like some enormous system of Masonry, where you won’t be told who the real masterminds are until you get initiated into the 33rd level.

One reason Saul Alinsky fits so snugly into this demonic role is his name, which sounds both Jewish and foreign, like Trotsky. This might explain why Gingrich’s pitch worked in South Carolina but fell flat in Florida, where guys named Saul don’t seem all that scary.

Via the Other 98%, this historical analysis:

After “I’m not concerned about the very poor” I was planning to collect the various Mitt Romney gaffes, but Zoltan already did.

To be fairer to Mitt than President Obama’s critics typically are, the headlines Mitt makes are usually worse than what he was trying to say — even though what he meant was bad enough.

  • “Corporations are people, my friend” had nothing to do with corporate personhood. He was just claiming that corporate profits ultimately get distributed to people. The fact that it’s mainly to rich people like himself isn’t a problem for Mitt, and even with that proviso I’m not convinced. Apple is sitting on $100 billion, for example, and doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to either distribute it.
  • “I like being able to fire people” was about being able to change health insurance companies rather than being stuck in government monopoly. A fair point, except that (1) Like RomneyCare, ObamaCare isn’t organized as a government monopoly. Most people will continue to choose among private insurance plans. (2) Would Mitt raise a finger to stop health insurance companies merging into a private monopoly? (3) Saying “fire people” with a smile indicates that Mitt identifies mainly with the powerful.
  • “I’m not concerned about the very poor” was a clumsy way of repeating Gingrich’s food stamps vs. paychecks point: the lazy poor get enough government help already. Either guy would be more convincing if his policies didn’t sum up to cutting taxes for the rich and cutting benefits for the poor. And I’m still waiting for anybody to explain why supply-side economics didn’t create jobs during the eight years when Bush tried it. I like Joan Walsh’s response: “The safety net is not a hammock.”

On the other hand, commenting on all discussions of inequality with “I think it’s about envy” is just as bad in context as you would have imagined from the headline.

Fox News really shouldn’t mess with the Muppets.

Atlantic’s Elizabeth Wurtzel makes it into this week’s short notes on the strength of good writing. As an unmarried person who seems wistful but not very hopeful about marriage, Wurtzel sees Newt Gingrich’s marital history as an island of reality in the plastic world of too-perfect political marriages.

Marriage is like Churchill’s description of democracy: the worst relationship, except for all the others. Men hate monogamy, women are pretty wayward too, being alone is absolutely awful, no one can imagine spending the rest of their lives trying to decide how to spend Saturday night after about age 36, kids seem logical, no one will love us when we’re old, we all need reunion dates, and of course, 50 years down the road, even discounting the ten or so years (hopefully not in tandem, but maybe) that were awful and that we spent making and canceling an appointment with a family lawyer almost every day at times, looking back, we had a life, and it meant something. Even though…. Even though there was a lot of even though. From the outside that looks like a happy marriage, and even happiness.

Onion News Network reports the heart-breaking story of Caitlin, a “brain dead” adolescent. Completely unresponsive to her parents, she could do little more than roll her eyes and type texts into her phone. While making the difficult decision to euthanize her, her mother says, “We just keep reminding ourselves that the real Caitlin is already gone.”

Who really writes your laws? When a Florida representative proposed a bill written by the corporate-sponsored American Legislative Exchange Council, she forgot to remove the ALEC mission statement.

If government can force abortion-seeking women to get an unnecessary ultrasound, why can’t it force men seeking Viagra to get a rectal exam?

I knew I’d seen these candidates somewhere before:

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Obligations

January 30, 2012 – 1:45 pm

We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.

— unnamed Apple executive

I’ll bet that guy … does strongly believe that Uncle Sam has an obligation to stop foreign pirating of Apple’s intellectual property and to maintain the deployments of the U.S. Seventh Fleet and of the 100,000 U.S. troops in the Asia-Pacific region that make it safe for Apple to use [long] supply chains.

— Clyde Prestowitz

In this week’s sift:

  • Where the Jobs Are and Why. Suddenly in the last two weeks, we’ve seen an amazing run of articles about manufacturing, sparking lots of insightful commentary. Fulfilling the President’s pledge to bring manufacturing jobs home will be even more complicated than it looks.
  • Barack X, the Fictional President. Bill Mahr, Jay Rosen, and the New Yorker explain what Obama is up against, and the challenge Mitt Romney has so far dodged.
  • The Return of Death Panels and other Short Notes. No, the ACA doesn’t say old people can’t have brain surgery. Poor English boots a candidate off an Arizona ballot. Do Newt’s infidelities predict a strong presidency? The world’s cutest car. What’s wrong with corporate raiding? Occupy didn’t invent the 1%. Dead people didn’t vote in SC. And Elizabeth Warren explains what’s wrong with Mitt’s taxes.
  • Last week’s most popular post. Property vs. Freedom had 245 views. The most-clicked link was to Democracy Now’s episode on the McDonalds’ coffee case.
  • This week’s challenge. If I’m feeling too challenged to think of a challenge, maybe we all could use a week off.
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Where the Jobs Are and Why

January 30, 2012 – 1:41 pm

In the State of the Union, President Obama emphasized manufacturing, committing his administration to “bring jobs back home”. Perhaps coincidentally, the last two weeks have given us an amazing run of revealing articles about manufacturing: what gets made where and why, who gets a job making it, and how they are treated.

The New York Times focused two articles (Wednesday and January 21) on Apple’s manufacturing in China. This American Life centered an episode on Mike Daisey, whose recently-opened one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” includes much material from his interviews with the iPhone assembly workers in Shenzhen. The current issue of Atlantic includes “Making it in America“, an article that starts with two South Carolina factory workers and goes all the way up the chain to the global pressures on their CEO.

These articles became the raw material for insightful comment from Paul Krugman, the New Yorker’s Nicholas Thompson, Slate’s Matt Yglesias, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Alternet’s Robert Cruickshank, Foreign Policy’s Clyde Prestowitz,  and many others.

Background. Instead of trying to reproduce all those ideas, I’m going to assume that you’ve either picked up the buzz or are willing to chase some of the links I’ve provided. Doubtlessly you know the general picture: While America continues to create market-dominating companies like Apple or Google, the number of American jobs they provide doesn’t compare with market-dominating American companies of the past like General Electric or Ford.

The reason why is simple: While much of the design and management happens in America, most of the physical products are manufactured in low-wage economies like China. Those factories that remain in America are highly automated, so that our manufacturing employment plummets even as our manufacturing output continues to rise. America still makes a lot of stuff, it’s just not made by people.

The following graphs come by way of the bonddad blog:

Why? The most interesting fact to glean from the articles is that it’s not just the wages. Yes, workers in Shenzhen are cheap, but two other factors are also important.

First, what the NYT article calls “flexibility”. That’s a euphemism for domination. Chinese workers are completely under the thumb of employers like Foxconn, which assembles products for Apple and most of Apple’s competitors.

Almost every commenting article repeated the story of Foxconn workers being rousted out of their dorms in the middle of the night to make a last-minute change to the iPhone. Try to imagine doing that in an American factory.

“Flexibility” also isn’t inhibited by worker safety. If the factory managers come up with a new process, nobody has to analyze it or approve it. They just do it. If it later turns out that workers have been inhaling disabling neurotoxins — one of Mike Daisey’s examples — that’s a shame.

Second,

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

The overall result is that Apple gets exactly the product it wants faster — not just cheaper — than if it manufactured in America.

Everything we’ve been told is wrong. Again and again, I’ve read about “the death of distance”. It’s not supposed to matter where things are done now. But in fact it does. Once industries get clustered in a particular place, it’s not easy to move them.

And once they’ve moved away, it’s not easy to move them back. It’s not just the supply chain. Worker skill is a chicken-and-egg problem. No company is going to open a factory someplace where they can’t find the skilled workers they need, but no worker is going to get training on the off-chance that a factory will open someplace that doesn’t have any working factories now.

Free-market economists have encouraged us to look at every job in every factory as an individual issue. If Mexicans or Indonesians can do a job cheaper, move it there. We weren’t supposed to ask what all those individual decisions added up to. That would be “industrial policy“, which was supposed to be bad, because government shouldn’t pick winners and losers.

But the Chinese did worry about the big picture, and now they have all the manufacturing jobs. Prestowitz says:

Asia didn’t always have these supply chains. They were initially all in the United States. Asia got them because its governments and corporations worked hand in glove to get them. There is no reason why the United States government can’t work hand in glove with corporations to get at least some of them back. It’s not rocket science.

Ignorance is Bliss. Bliss has market value. The NYT and Mike Daisey have done a great job cataloging worker abuses in the Foxconn plants in Shenzhen. It’s obvious how to fix this: Consumers put pressure on Apple (and its rivals, who are no better); Apple puts pressure on Foxconn; and Foxconn changes how it treats its workers.

Why doesn’t that happen? Again, it’s not because there’s not enough money. The NYT says:

various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense. Since Apple’s profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward.

Cruickshank (a self-confessed Apple fan) comments, “I would personally pay $65 more per iPhone if I knew it was going to American workers.”

Lots of people would, I imagine. But picture how that would work: Apple offers an alternative all-American iPhone or even a no-workers-abused Chinese iPhone, and sells it right next to the current iPhone for a bit more money.

Now everyone who buys the original feels like a scumbag. Worse, as you stand there dithering about whether workers’ rights or American jobs are worth $65 to you, you’re not having the retail experience the Apple Store is trying to create. The whole joy of Apple products is that they are magic. Picturing the real process that creates them breaks the spell.

Up and down the supply chain, everyone is happier not knowing the extent to which they benefit from the mistreatment of Chinese workers. The market — which just wants to make consumers happy — has been very efficient at providing that ignorance.

“Until now,” you might be thinking. Yes, the recent publicity has brought attention back to the responsibility we shoulder when we buy things: Everyone in the supply chain justifies their actions by claiming that they just want to please the consumer. So when you plunk down your Visa, you’re signing your name to the whole process. If enough of us now decide we want to deal with that responsibility, surely the market will provide some way for us to do it. Won’t it?

Here’s the problem: The market responds to consumers’ true desires, the ones that motivate our purchases, not the desires we claim to have or wish we had. And in our heart-of-hearts, don’t we really just want this responsibility to go away? Don’t we want the Apple Store to go back to being a high-tech Eden, where everything appears by magic?

If that’s what we really want, that’s what the market will provide. Some tiny improvements will happen in the factories, and each link of the chain will exaggerate that change, until the nerd at the Genius Bar can swear up-and-down that it’s all fine now. The workers in Shenzhen are all happy little Oompa-Loompas.

The mechanisms are already in place. Apple already has a shiny code of conduct for its suppliers. Foxconn already has a statement of workers’ rights that satisfies Apple. Supervisors on the factory floor already claim they adhere to that statement. And still workers are maimed or die or commit suicide. The NYT covers it:

“We’ve spent years telling Apple there are serious problems and recommending changes,” said a consultant at BSR — also known as Business for Social Responsibility — which has been twice retained by Apple to provide advice on labor issues. “They don’t want to pre-empt problems, they just want to avoid embarrassments.”

And like all global manufacturers, Apple is constantly squeezing its suppliers’ profit margins.

“You can set all the rules you want, but they’re meaningless if you don’t give suppliers enough profit to treat workers well,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “If you squeeze margins, you’re forcing them to cut safety.”

How exactly is that going to stop?

Degrees of moral separation. Atlantic’s Making It In America by Adam Davidson starts by comparing Maddy and Luke, two workers making fuel injectors in a Standard Motor Parts factory in South Carolina. Both are dedicated and hard-working, but Luke is skilled and Maddy is not.

Luke’s job, the article claims, is relatively secure, but Maddy will be let go as soon as machinery costs drop far enough to make replacing her worthwhile. In the meantime, machine costs put a lid on her wages, and she has nowhere to go.

A decade ago, a smart, hard-working Level 1 might have persuaded management to provide on-the-job training in Level-2 skills. But these days, the gap between a Level 1 and a 2 is so wide that it doesn’t make financial sense for Standard to spend years training someone who might not be able to pick up the skills or might take that training to a competing factory.

But Standard is profitable, so Davidson raises the same question Apple faces: Why couldn’t the company charge a little more or make a little less money and show some loyalty to its people and to America?

(NYT quotes an Apple executive saying: “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.” To which Foreign Policy’s Clyde Prestowitz replies: “Apple’s products still have a large U.S. government R&D content and I’ll bet that the guy who says Apple has no obligation to help Uncle Sam does strongly believe that Uncle Sam has an obligation to stop foreign pirating of Apple’s intellectual property and to maintain the deployments of the U.S. Seventh Fleet and of the 100,000 U.S. troops in the Asia-Pacific region that make it safe for Apple to use supply chains that stretch through a number of countries such as China and Japan between which there are long standing and bitter animosities.”)

So Davidson talks to the guy he thinks could make that decision: Standard’s CEO Larry Sills, grandson of the founder.

It turns out that Sills doesn’t believe he has the power to do Maddy any favors. Sills sees himself as the slave of two masters: the consumer, who looks for price and quality, but doesn’t seem to know or care how the auto parts are made; and the stockholder, who likewise just wants earnings to rise and doesn’t seem to care how it happens.

Once again, we’re seeing one of the major structural problems of the modern economy: We all live many degrees of separation away from the moral consequences of our decisions.

If you had to go down to a Shenzhen-style sweatshop to buy your iPhone, or if owning mutual fund shares meant that you occasionally had to fire somebody like Maddy face-to-face, you might think twice about it. But instead you are wowed at the Apple Store and every month you get a nice clean IRA statement in the mail.

You’re happier that way, and the Powers That Be are happier. And that’s why nothing changes.

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