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The Republic of Babel

March 5, 2012 – 1:36 pm

I owe a debt to this year’s crop of presidential candidates. Time and again, one of them says something so outrageous that it brings my thoughts into focus.

First it was Herman Cain saying, “If you’re not rich, blame yourself!” Until that moment, I had vaguely wondered about the role of shame in keeping the 99% down, but it took Herman to crystalize it for me.

More recently, Rick Santorum has been my teacher:

When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left? The French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.

Yep. Secular government inevitably leads to the Reign of Terror. (If you don’t believe it, go visit some secular hellhole like … just about anyplace in Europe, where mobs roam the streets beheading people at will.) Blue Texan has already exposed Santorum’s ignorance of the actual French Revolution, but I want to go somewhere else with the quote: What the heck is Santorum talking about? What could be burning so brightly in his mind that he needs this mangled French Revolution analogy to express it?

I think Santorum has mushed two ideas together: One is an important insight that I wish everyone would think about, and the other is totally wrong. Here’s how I pull it apart:

  • Important insight: American democracy is losing its language of discourse.
  • Wrong: Until recently, conservative Christianity provided that language.

Put them together and you get Santorum’s point: Unless we get back to God, our democracy is going to fall apart.

But let’s not put them together. Let’s discuss the insightful part first, and then step around the Evangelical rabbit hole Santorum has fallen down.

Language in the broad sense. By “losing our language” I don’t mean English. I’m thinking about all the social and intellectual infrastructure that allows us to talk through our differences: taken-for-granted assumptions, shared frames, common concepts, a portfolio of shared heroes to emulate, and so on.

Sharing a language of discourse with somebody doesn’t mean that you necessarily agree. But it does mean that you can explain your problems to each other and empathize with each other’s difficulties. It means that you have some basis on which you can construct a compromise.

Dictatorships can get along without that kind of language. A master-slave relationship functions just fine with grunts and gestures and maybe a few words of pidgin-speak. Common understanding? Just show the slave what to do and beat him until he does it.

But democracies need to be able to talk. I have to know more than just what you want to do or want me to do. I need to understand why you want what you want, and I need to be able to explain why I want something different. We have to be able to discuss the nuances of our hopes and fears and plans — what’s absolutely essential and what isn’t — so that we can cobble together a solution that we can all live with.

A democracy that can’t do that devolves into mob rule or military coup or Potemkin elections that rubber-stamp decisions already made by a governing elite. That’s when the French Revolution analogy starts to make sense: Without a language of discourse, you can have Robespierre or you can have Napoleon, but you can’t really achieve Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

Consensus and compromise. The Bible doesn’t tell us what kind of government developed in post-Tower Babel. But we can be pretty sure it wasn’t a democracy.

As I’ve described in more detail elsewhere, democracy only works when the issues worth killing and dying for — genocide, slavery, the legitimacy of the property system, and a few others — have already been decided by consensus. Otherwise you’ll have civil war, because the 49% will not march meekly to their fate.

In that essay, though, I treated consensus as a static thing — as it is in the short term. But any lasting democracy has to be able to evolve consensus on new issues as they come up. That can happen if you have a language of discourse. You can make temporary compromises and tinker with them over time until they acquire the prestige of tradition.

Think about pacifism, which is as stark a moral issue as any: To one side, war is humankind’s greatest evil. To the other, it’s essential to defending our way of life. What room is there for compromise?

And yet, we have compromised: The nation continues to defend itself, but pacifists who don’t interfere with the military aren’t jailed or considered traitors. They’re allowed to claim conscientious objector status in a draft, but their taxes support the military just like everyone else’s.

No simple principle would lay down that boundary, but each part of it has become time-honored.

Now think about abortion, where the argument has not really changed since Roe vs. Wade. Either you want to kill babies or you want to subjugate women. It’s been that way for 40 years.

What the Culture War is about. When you grasp the Babel problem, you see the Culture War in a whole new light. What we’re fighting about isn’t abortion or homosexuality or traditional values or even religion. We’re fighting about what the language of American democracy is going to be. What worldview is going to frame the issues that we will then debate and vote on?

One candidate is a secular worldview of reason and science. Another is the worldview of conservative Christianity.

Either one could work, up to a point, if we could reach consensus on it. And neither would require that everyone convert to that worldview completely, only that everyone learn to speak that language in the public square.

Other religious worldviews could work as well as Christianity. There’s no inherent reason we couldn’t have an Islamic Republic or a Jewish Republic or a Hindu Republic, if that’s what we decided we wanted.

But what we can’t have is a Republic of Babel. Not for long.

The Language of the Founders. You know whose language of discourse really worked? The Founders.

The Constitution is a masterwork of compromise. Effective government vs. individual rights; state power vs. federal power; the mob vs. the propertied elite — they worked out a series of good-enough solutions that let the country move forward. Only slavery was too much for them, and even then their band-aids held things together for most of a century, giving their children and grandchildren a chance to avert disaster.

You think abortion or same-sex marriage would have stumped the Founders? No way.

That’s why there’s so much Founder-nostalgia today. At the Constitutional Convention, problems didn’t just sit there, and factions didn’t move further and further apart forever. Whatever came up, they figured out how to keep the process moving.

One frustrating part of Founder-nostalgia is the unending clash of examples “proving” that they were either for or against religion: Franklin calling for prayer at the Constitutional Convention (and invoking the threat of Babel), or Adams signing the Treaty of Tripoli declaring that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion”.

It goes round and round. If you’re selective, you can quote Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin on either side. Washington was a lifelong Anglican, but he didn’t take communion. No one knows why.

The reason we keep arguing about this is that we’re asking the wrong question. It doesn’t really matter what theology the Founders believed in their private hearts. What matters is how religion influenced their public language of discourse.

God in the Declaration. The most quoted phrase of the Declaration of Independence is

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights

This mention of “the Creator” is supposed to back up the claim that the Founders’ worldview was fundamentally religious, and to counter the observation that God was completely left out of the Constitution.

God is mentioned exactly two other times in the Declaration: “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in the first paragraph and “a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence” in the last.

Interestingly, these phrases were altered from Jefferson’s original draft. The edits cut both ways. “Self-evident” (an Enlightenment philosophical term) was originally “sacred and undeniable” (a religious term). Rights originally came “from that equal creation” with no personification of the Creator. And “Divine Providence” did not appear at all.

Notice what you don’t find in any version of the Declaration: Jesus Christ, the God of Abraham, or any other sectarian name of God. God is given purely functional names that any monotheistic religion would recognize. (Even a polytheistic Hindu would understand: “Creator” means Brahma, and “Divine Providence” refers to Vishnu the Preserver.) The Declaration finds God in the Laws of Nature, but it makes no no reference to any sect’s scripture.

Now think about the era: 18th-century science provided no well-founded theories of origin — no big bang, no primordial soup in which proteins could randomly develop, no evolution by natural selection. If you talked about origins and foundations at all, you ended up talking in religious terms, because there was nothing else. (David Hume was as close to an atheist as the 18th century allowed. The participants in his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” eventually converge on a theory of intelligent design.)

So here’s what you (and Rick Santorum) should notice about the Founders’ most important products: The Declaration and the Constitution were written in the most secular language that existed in that era.

But weren’t the Founders religious? Individually, yes. But they didn’t all have the same religion, and they knew it. Patrick Henry would fit right in at a fundamentalist megachurch in Virginia today. If he brought Franklin along, old Ben would probably keep his objections to himself and leave everyone charmed. But Jefferson and Madison would get themselves ejected in short order, and an outspoken New England Universalist like Ethan Allen would be completely beyond the pale.

What’s more, the Founders could see the bad example of England, where Anglicans, Catholics, and Puritans had been hanging each other since Henry VIII. That, they knew, is where sectarian government leads.

But unlike the worst excesses of the later French Revolution, the Founders didn’t attempt to eliminate religion or create a new one. Instead, their public gatherings worked in secular language, because that was a language that everyone could understand. If you needed sectarian language to justify what you wanted to do, they figured, the government probably shouldn’t be doing it.

The Secular Tribe. Something important has changed between the 18th century and today: Secularism has developed into a more complete worldview. It has a theory of origins, a psychology, and humanistic ethics. 18th-century secularism did not threaten sectarian worldviews any more than medieval Latin threatened vernacular French or Spanish. One was a rich, earthly language of everyday life and the other a more philosophically subtle language for widespread professional communities.

In the 18th century, essentially no one spoke Secular at home, so it was not involved in the tribal rivalries of the individual sects. But today, many people do speak Secular at home. And so, while I think it’s a mistake to talk about Secularism as if it were a rival religion, it is a rival tribe. Today, secularism is part of many people’s individual identity. And so, demanding that other people express themselves in secular terms in public can mean that I want them to adopt my tribal identity and abandon their own.

More and more, then, the sects are digging in their heels against this threat to their identity. They are building their own parallel institutions and becoming separatist. As they do this, they are developing their own set of acceptable “facts” and establishing defenses against any non-sectarian evidence or logic. (The idea that the Founders established a Christian Republic is one those false “facts” they are rallying around.)

If that trend continues, it will kill democracy. Elections will give one side or the other a temporary advantage, but will solve nothing for the long term. When the options on the ballot are Kill Babies and Subjugate Women, the losing side just reloads and tries again.

How do we save democracy? First, we have to realize what we’re doing. Whether you speak Secular or Evangelical or something else entirely at home, you need to stop trying to use the public square to validate your identity. That’s not what the public square is for.

Second, all sides need to examine themselves for tribalism — secularists most of all, perhaps, because many of us are unaware of the possibility of secular tribalism. We may need to construct a meta-secular language that purges the tribalism out of secularism. Religious people need to keep asking what is really essential to their religion and what is simply a tradition that has become a comfortable habit and a source of tribal identity.

Third, we all need to understand that a compromise that allows us to live together is an achievement and not a corruption.

Finally, we all need to stretch our understanding and strain to hear each other’s deepest meanings rather than react reflexively against whatever we can perceive as an insult. The Republic of Babel cannot last, but it can move in either direction: towards the war of all against all, or towards the struggle of all to understand all.

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When the Priests’ Scandal Becomes Relevant

February 20, 2012 – 10:06 am

In previous posts about the Catholic hierarchy’s War on Obama, I have restrained myself from bringing up the Church’s sexual-abuse scandal. A lot of people do, and most of the time I wince, because it’s a cheap shot.

But there is one situation in which it’s not a cheap shot, and that’s when the clergy is striking poses of great moral courage in face of this “War on Religion” that they’ve made up. (Is the War on Christmas over yet? Who won?) As a Catholic priest said during Sean Hannity’s “Faith in America” segment:

If I’m asked to do something that goes against my conscience, I’d better be willing to die for that.

Brave words. I’m hearing a lot of brave words from priests these days. But it’s easy to be brave during a completely fabricated metaphorical “war”.

Think it through: When in course of the current healthcare proposals will a Catholic priest have to take some specific action that will go against his conscience? Or look at it from the other side: What can he refuse to do that will get him arrested — or punished in any way — for his a Gandhi-style resistance?

Nothing.

Churches were always exempt from the rule that they must provide contraception in their healthcare plans. And under the administration’s new compromise proposal, Catholic institutions like hospitals and universities don’t have to cover contraception either; their insurance carriers have to provide a separate policy for free — which they can do without any subsidy from the premiums paid by the institutions, because contraception saves them money. Matt Yglesias explains:

The point here is simple. While birth control costs more than nothing, it costs less than an abortion and much less than having a baby. From a social point of view, unless we’re not going to subsidize consumption of health care services at all (which would be a really drastic change from the status quo) then it makes a ton of sense to heavily subsidize contraceptives.

The absence of any place to take a stand becomes obvious if you read the lawsuit Belmont Abbey College has filed against the contraception mandate. It is full of vague assertions that the College is being coerced to “violate its deeply-held religious beliefs”, but does not specify any particular belief-violating act that it or its employees will be forced to perform. As the suit progresses towards trial, the College will have a hard time proving that it has standing to sue.

In short, unlike Gandhi or Martin Luther King, priests and bishops can strike heroic poses anywhere they want, and police will never feel obligated to haul them away. The system is already set up to walk around them.

That raises this question: How believable are those poses of great moral courage? And then this one: Didn’t the Catholic clergy just face a moral crisis? How much courage did they display then?

OK, most priests didn’t sexually abuse children or anybody else. But how many knew about some particular sexual abuse and did nothing? How many knew their diocese was just shuffling abusive priests around and letting them rape children somewhere else — and did nothing? How many suspected something and decided they didn’t want to know?

A priest with moral courage would have investigated his suspicions, then gone to his superiors and said, “I’m not going to let you do this. Do the right thing or I’m blowing the whistle.”

That would have been courageous.

How many priests did anything remotely similar? Anybody? That situation wasn’t metaphoric. It was a real moral crisis that required real moral courage.

If you didn’t have it then, don’t posture to me now about how brave you are.

Like the congressional hearing on this issue, Sean Hannity’s panel was all men. Jon Stewart had something to say about about “the world’s holiest sausage-fest”.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

(If you’re not hearing any sound, click on the video box and check that it’s not muted.)

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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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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”.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (19)

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.

By weeklysift | Comments (10)

Barack X, the Fictional President

January 30, 2012 – 1:01 pm

One of the most surprising things The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza learned from the Obama administration’s unreleased memos was this: President Obama really believed he could get Republican support if he based his programs on Republican programs, like Romney’s healthcare plan or Bush Sr.’s cap-and-trade.

Obama did not anticipate how effectively his political opponents would cast him as a polarizing figure.

So how did they do it? Bill Mahr explains:

Republicans have created this completely fictional president. His name is Barack X, and he’s an Islamo-socialist revolutionary who’s coming for your guns, raising your taxes, slashing the military, apologizing to other countries, and taking his cues from Europe, or worse yet Saul Alinsky.

And this is how politics has changed. You used to have to run against an actual candidate. But now you just recreate him inside the bubble and run against your new fictional candidate.

In the end, Obama couldn’t even get Mitt Romney’s support for Mitt Romney’s healthcare plan, or John McCain’s support for the cap-and-trade system resembling the one in the McCain-Lieberman bill of 2003.

Jay Rosen explains why not:

the [Republican] party decided not to have the fight it needed to have between reality-based Republicans and the other kind. …

When I say “reality-based Republicans” I mean those who recognize the danger in trying to make descriptions of the world conform to their wishes. … [T]he tendency toward wish fulfillment, selective memory, ideological blindness, truth-busting demagoguery and denial of the inconvenient fact remains within normal trouble-making bounds for the Democratic coalition. But it has broken through the normal limits on the Republican side, an historical development that we don’t understand very well. …

Mitt Romney, the favorite to win the Republican nomination for president in 2012, is a reality-based Republican who cannot run as a reality-based Republican because he thinks he cannot win that way. Jon Huntsman’s campaign is the proof of that calculation. All the candidates, including Romney, have to make gestures toward the alternative knowledge system, with its own facts.

If those “facts” include that the Romney-inspired healthcare plan is an unconstitutional government takeover of the entire system and a step towards socialism, then Romney has to go along if he wants to win. He also has to pretend global warming is dubious, austerity will create jobs, and that we need to get our troops back into Iraq.

If I could raise one off-the-record issue with Mitt and count on getting honest answers, this is what it would be: What’s your Bizarro-world exit strategy? Do you picture bringing your campaign back to reality at some point, say, after the convention? Or if you run a fantasy-based fall campaign and win, do you plan to govern realistically? If so, how do you plan to get your base to put up with it?

Or if not, how do you plan to get Reality to put up with it?

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Property vs. Freedom

January 23, 2012 – 1:47 pm

If you strip it down to its essence, the battle over SOPA/PIPA is Property vs. Freedom: the media companies want to defend their intellectual property, while Internet-users want to defend their freedom.

You won’t often hear it characterized that way in the corporate media, though, because Property and Freedom are supposed to be inseparable, like Love and Marriage. Sing it, Frank:

This I tell you, brother:
You can’t have one without the other.

Or, as Ron Paul more prosaically put it in 2004:

The rights of all private property owners … must be respected if we are to maintain a free society.

Simply saying the phrase “Property vs. Freedom” marks you as some kind of extreme Leftist. All right-thinking people know that Property can’t possibly oppose Freedom.

Last summer I wrote Six True Things Politicians Can’t Say. Well, here’s another one: The relationship between Property and Freedom is highly contentious. (On second thought, the Love-and-Marriage parallel isn’t that bad.)

Get off my lawn. Why is that relationship so contentious? It’s simple: The essence of Property is the right to tell people to get off your lawn, and to sic the police on them if they don’t. If you can’t do that, it’s not really your lawn.

So naturally Property increases Freedom for the owner. Once you have the right to sic the police on trespassers, your lawn becomes available for cookouts, gardening, minimally supervised children, and all sorts of other expressions of freedom.

But look at it from the other side. What if you’re constantly being forced off other people’s lawns and own no property you can retreat to? How free is that?

Free to be Jim Crow. Now read the Ron Paul quote in its full context. On the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Wikipedia entry, text of bill), which banned racial discrimination in “any place of public accommodation” (like the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro) and in hiring, Paul portrayed the law in this light:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government unprecedented power over the hiring, employee relations, and customer service practices of every business in the country. The result was a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society.

In other words, business owners lost some of their right to tell black people to get off their lawns. Definitely it was a diminishment of Property. But was Paul right that it was a net loss of Freedom, or did the freedom gained by blacks more than make up for the freedom lost by businesses?

Why is it your lawn anyway? Post-slavery America may look like an exceptional case, but actually it was just a particularly egregious example of a general rule: Never in the history of humankind has private property been fairly distributed. By the time American blacks stopped being property themselves, all the good stuff was already owned by whites.

Welcome to Freedom, suckers! Now get off my lawn.

One standard pro-property response to this point is that in a free economy property tends to move to the people who earn it through hard work and ingenuity, so mal-distributions even out over time. Maybe the newly-freed slaves did get a raw deal, but that was a long time ago. According to this point of view, by now their great-great-grandchildren must be pretty much where they deserve to be.

But far from an exception, the race problem is a convenient color-coding that makes the general historical pattern easier to see. Michael Hudson described that pattern like this:

The tendency for debts to grow faster than the population’s ability to pay has been a basic constant throughout all recorded history. Debts mount up exponentially, absorbing the surplus and reducing much of the population to the equivalent of debt peonage.

In other words, the typical trend is not for things to even out after a few generations, but for unfair distributions of property to get moreso. Sing it, Billie:

Them that’s got shall have.
Them that’s not shall lose.

The only exception I can think of is post-World-War-II America and Europe, where property tended for decades to become more evenly distributed. But far from the natural workings of a free economy, that outcome required inheritance taxes, progressive income taxes, public education, laws to break up monopolies and protect unions, a significant social safety net, and many other government interventions.

Freedom and public property. America’s two greatest symbols of freedom are the Cowboy and the Indian, both of whom own little, but live in a vast public common where they can hunt in the forests, drink in the streams, and swim in the lakes without worrying about ownership.

Contrast that freedom with economic blogger Noah Smith‘s account of downtown Tokyo.

there are relatively few free city parks. Many green spaces are private and gated off (admission is usually around $5). … outside your house or office, there is basically nowhere to sit down that will not cost you a little bit of money. Public buildings generally have no drinking fountains; you must buy or bring your own water. Free wireless? Good luck finding that!

Does all this private property make me feel free? Absolutely not! Quite the opposite – the lack of a “commons” makes me feel constrained.

To me the lesson is clear: For all but the fabulously wealthy, freedom is maximized by balancing public and private property. It’s nice to have your own lawn, but public property you can’t be chased off of — roads, parks, sidewalks — is even more important. It’s also nice to have public access to water and sanitation, and not to be at the proprietor’s mercy whenever you enter a store, restaurant, or theater.

Intellectual property. Applying that logic to intellectual property gets you to the kind of public/private balance we used to have: Copyrights and patents grant creators and inventors valuable temporary rights, while producing a rich public common allowing fair use of recent creations. And since everything eventually becomes public, a balanced copyright law increases the value of the public domain by encouraging the creation of works that otherwise might be impractical.

Protests of SOPA and PIPA make no sense until you understand that we have lost that balance.

Consider how the music-downloading problem arose: By controlling distribution, media corporations inserted themselves as toll-collectors between creators and users. You’d pay $20 for a CD you could easily copy for $1, knowing that precious little of the difference made it back to the artist. Napster-users had few moral scruples against “stealing” music because the system was already amoral. (Call it the Leverage Principle: “The rich and powerful take what they want. We steal it back for you.”)

Also, endless copyrights have dammed the flow of material into the public domain. When Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse in 1928, he was granted a 28-year copyright with the prospect of renewing for another 28 years. Evidently, the prospect of Mickey entering the public domain in 1984 didn’t deter Walt from creating him.

But every time that expiration date approaches, the Disney Corporation leans on Congress to extend the length of existing copyrights. Tom Bell illustrates how copyrights lengthen as Mickey ages.

Unless corporate money loses its primacy in our political system, nothing created after 1928 will ever enter the public domain. Unlike Mickey, the vast majority of that cultural treasure-trove will be orphan works that no one has the right to use. (For a book-length treatment of these issues, see The Public Domain, which the author has graciously put in the public domain.)

As Lawrence Lessig has pointed out, extending an existing copyright does nothing to promote creativity or otherwise advance the public interest:

No matter what the US Congress does with current law, George Gershwin is not going to produce anything more.

In short, the Infosphere is slouching towards Tokyo. Gradually the public common is shrinking towards the day when almost everything of value will be corporately owned.

SOPA/PIPA. The Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the equivalent Protect Intellectual Property Act in the Senate are two more corporate attempts to buy laws that serve the private interest but not the public interest. (Interestingly, Politico covers the SOPA protests as a battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, as if the public were not involved.)

These laws would make search engines, internet-service providers, and other middlemen responsible for blocking access to web sites that copyright-holders claim are pirating their works. Since they bear no comparable responsibility for defending fair use, their safest course will be to block any site Disney or Time-Warner complains about.

Consider the quotes and images in this article. Traditionally, they would be considered fair use. But what if somebody complains? Is WordPress really going to pay a lawyer to read this article and write an opinion? Or are they just going to shut the Weekly Sift down?

The protests worked, for now. Websites like Wikipedia went dark on Wednesday to protest SOPA/PIPA, and a massive public response forced many lawmakers to change their positions.

But it’s naive to think that’s the end of the story. Corporate money is relentless. When public outrage dies down, we’ll soon see the basic ideas of SOPA/PIPA back in some other form.

In addition to protests, we need a fundamental rethinking of intellectual property. As long as we’re just talking about theft and how to prevent it, we’re missing the point. The right question is how we restore the public/private balance to intellectual property.

We need intellectual property lines that are widely seen as legitimate. When we have that, the problems of trespassing and theft will become much, much smaller and easier to police.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , , , | Comments (7)

Four Fantasy Issues of the Right

January 16, 2012 – 12:30 pm

In 2012, the two parties differ on a number of issues that voters really should be thinking about: the role of government in the economy, inequality of wealth and income, climate change, what to do about the 50 million Americans without health insurance, how to handle the 11 million undocumented immigrants, and so on.

It’s hard to have any of those debates, though, because in addition to the legitimate issues that divide Republicans from Democrats, conservatives have trumped up a number of issues that are pure fantasies — they are based on nothing that is really happening.

The construction of pure fantasy issues is a tactic so outrageous that most Americans have trouble grasping it. Voters are used to hearing exaggerations, rhetoric that makes mountains out of molehills. But making a mountain out of the pure flat plain is something totally different and relatively new. “Surely,” the average voter thinks, “there is some fire under all that smoke.”

But these four issues are pure smoke. There is absolutely no fire under there anywhere.

1. Creeping Sharia.

Supposedly, Islamic law (i.e. Sharia) is being surreptitiously introduced into the American justice system “with the goal of transforming American society from within”. This is sometimes called a stealth jihad.

At first, this fake issue was confined to a fringe represented by Pamela Geller, Chuck Norris, or the American Family Association’s talkradio host Brian Fischer. But like Birtherism and other fringe issues, it has crept into the Republican mainstream, with endorsements by Republican presidential candidates like Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann. A constitutional amendment against Sharia passed in Oklahoma, and similar amendments have been proposed in other states.

The reality? In a decision denying Oklahoma’s appeal of a lower court’s injunction against the Oklahoma law, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote:

Appellants do not identify any actual problem the challenged amendment seeks to solve.  Indeed, they admitted at the preliminary injunction hearing that they did not know of even a single instance where an Oklahoma court had applied Sharia law or used the legal precepts of other nations or cultures, let alone that such applications or uses had resulted in concrete problems in Oklahoma.

In examining instances where “creeping Sharia” is alleged outside Oklahoma, I haven’t found a single one that stands up to scrutiny. (The “halal turkey” is no more creeping Sharia than kosher franks are creeping Judaism.) Typically, the cases involve Muslims demanding the same respect that Christians and Jews take for granted, and say nothing at all about Sharia.

In this case, for example, a small-college adjunct professor cherry-picked offensive quotes out of the Quran and presented them as representative of all Islam. When Muslim students objected and the college administration refused to discipline them, he resigned. Brian Fischer then presented him as “a victim of Sharia law“.

In truth, there is no court in America where Sharia is being granted the force of law, and neither party is proposing that there should be.

2. Things Obama never said.

Mitt Romney’s New Hampshire Primary victory speech was full of references to things President Obama has “said”.  For example:

this President wakes up every morning, looks out across America and is proud to announce, “It could be worse.”

I went looking for this quote. Several Republican blogs and radio hosts attribute “It could be worse” to this event, where the words “It could be worse” actually don’t appear. In spite of the quotation marks, it’s a paraphrase. Obama was actually saying that, while unemployment was still too high, it would have been higher without the stimulus.

So a paraphrase of something that Obama almost sort-of said a year and half ago has become a verbatim quote that he says “every morning”.

What else? Obama “believes America’s role as leader in the world is a thing of the past.” That’s a quote from a right-wing book about Obama, not Obama himself.

“He apologizes for America.” Back in February, the Washington Post fact-checker awarded this claim its lowest truth rating — four Pinocchios, reserved for “whoppers”. But Romney keeps repeating it because … well, he’s running a post-truth campaign.

When caught misquoting Obama in an ad, the Romney campaign admitted the deception, but defended doing it.

The Romney campaign was forthcoming about the entire context of the quote in its press release and in its comments to the press Monday night. And indeed, they seemed to be reveling in the fact that we were now talking about that particular part of the ad.

And then Romney said Obama had called Americans “lazy” — another four Pinocchios.

So in general, if you think President Obama has said something that makes you angry — especially if you heard it from Mitt Romney — look for the YouTube or the transcript. (The transcript of every official Obama speech is on the whitehouse.gov site.) If you can’t find it, chances are excellent he actually said nothing of the kind.

3. Voter fraud.

No one denies that America has a colorful history of vote fraud. Election officials have been known to lose or find ballot boxes, mis-program voting machines, fake absentee ballots, or otherwise misrepresent electoral results.

What we don’t have, though, is a history of widespread voter fraud. Americans do not often show up at polling places claiming to be someone else. Why would we? It’s time consuming, and there’s always a risk that somebody at the precinct knows either you or whoever you’re impersonating. (One conservative trying to prove how easy voter fraud is recently got caught this way.)

Even if you get away with it, all you’ve done is steal one vote. If you’re that committed, you can probably change more votes through legitimate campaigning. Go work a phone bank or something.

Nonetheless, it has become a truism on the Right that this kind of fraud is so widespread that we need a whole new system of voter-ID laws to prevent it. But even advocates of these laws can’t provide examples of actual voter fraud. When Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach claimed illegal immigrants were voting by impersonating dead people, he gave one example. The Wichita Eagle then found the “dead” guy raking leaves in his yard. Another allegedly dead voter turned up right here in Nashua this week.

If these laws were just useless, we might shake our heads at the waste. (Wisconsin’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimates their new voter-ID bill will cost $5.7 million.) But they’re actually sinister. People who don’t already have drivers’ licenses, passports, or other recognized photo-IDs are mostly in groups that vote Democratic: the poor, the disabled, the very old, students, and recently naturalized citizens. Discouraging them from voting is the real point.

4. Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Marxist.

The Birther lie has been widely debunked, but it still gets winked at by folks like Donald Trump, one of the Romney sons, Rick Perry, and Fox News. In the 2010 cycle, most Republican congressional wouldn’t go full-on Birther, but would instead call on Obama to settle the “legitimate questions” that the Birthers raised. John Boehner expressed his personal belief that Obama was American, but wouldn’t rein in the Birthers in his caucus.

All that, in spite of the fact that there was never any reason to doubt that Obama was born where and when he said he was. Not one.

Muslim? Again, no reason at all to raise that question. Obama and his long-time church agreed that he was a Christian.

Marxist? Other than gay rights (where he has been following public opinion, not leading it), Obama’s program is what moderate Republicanism used to look like. Is it Marxist to roll out RomneyCare nationwide? to attack global warming by the same cap-and-trade system Bush Sr. used to fight acid rain? to want to restore the tax rates Bill Clinton negotiated with Newt Gingrich?

It’s tempting to say, “That’s politics.” But it isn’t. There are no comparable lies in the mainstream of the Left. Obscure liberal blogs might have promoted the fact-free tabloid rumors that 9-11 was an inside job, or that Bush had started drinking again, but high-ranking Democrats never pandered to them.

All these charges are attempts to give substance to the vague feeling that there’s something “not right” about Barack Obama. But you know what the substance really is? He’s black. That vague sense that there’s something “wrong” with him that you just can’t put your finger on — that’s what subconscious racism feels like. Deal with it.

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