Demonizing the Girl Scouts

An outrageous part of the culture war that isn’t getting enough press is the Religious Right’s demonization the Girl Scouts. The gist of the attack (found here) is typical guilt-by-association stuff: If there’s some reason to name the Girl Scouts in the same sentence as Person X or Organization Y, then the Scouts are responsible for anything X or Y can be accused of doing.

Last month, Catholic bishops joined in by starting an investigation. Like Americans in general, about 1/4 of Girl Scouts are Catholic, and many Scout troops are associated with Catholic parishes. What are the bishops worried about? The WaPo explains:

Critics of the Girl Scouts contend their materials shouldn’t have any links to groups like the Sierra Club, Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam, or other groups that support family planning and contraception. Other critics are unhappy that the American Girl Scouting organization is a member of an international scouting association that supports contraception access.

Some parents have reported that when their daughters go out to sell Girl Scout cookies, they have had doors slammed in their faces by people refusing to buy their treats because they think the profits go to support abortion and birth control.

Why would people think that? Because the Right has been linking the Girl Scouts to that demon of demons, Planned Parenthood. (Indiana Congressman Bob Morris called the Scouts “a tactical arm of Planned Parenthood”, and his regional Girl Scout organization responded.) How can anyone argue with logic like this from the Washington Times?

The best evidence that the Girl Scouts have not actually severed ties with Planned Parenthood is that Planned Parenthood has not tried to destroy them.

(Weirdly, the guilt-by-association thing doesn’t apply to the Washington Times itself, which was founded by the Moonies in 1982 and has been owned and operated by them ever since. The Religious Right is fine with the WT being America’s flagship conservative newspaper.)

A good overview of the actual Girl Scouts and why they enrage the Right was published last September on Slate.  From the beginning, Amanda Marcotte argues, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts were set on different paths.

While scouting for boys was about preserving the tradition of rugged, outdoorsy masculinity, scouting girls looked to the future, shucking off Victorian models of women as delicate flowers and replacing them with physically capable and adventurous women. …

These origins set the two organizations on strikingly different paths, despite their common emphasis on physical activity and volunteerism. The Boy Scouts still employ a nostalgic worldview, while the Girl Scouts focus more on keeping with the times.  …

It’s telling that Christian right critics avoid dealing directly with the group’s “go girl!” brand of empowerment, choosing instead to promote lurid tall tales. Maybe their tactic amounts to a tacit acknowledgement of just how mainstream the Girl Scouts’ feminism is, and just how far from the mainstream the anti-feminist views of the Scouts’ Christian right critics have become. The Girl Scouts focus on building self-esteem, teaching girls to care for their health, and promoting educational opportunities that help the girls’ economic futures. Its Christian right critics cling to a tradition where women exist primarily to serve.

This is part of a larger pattern: Increasingly, the Christian Right is rejecting the traditional American model of a melting pot and embracing a kosher-kitchen view of society, in which everything must be in its proper cabinet, safe from contamination.

Any organization founded on the view that we can put aside doctrinal differences to pursue common goals — Girl Scouts, public schools, public universities, umbrella charities like the United Way, and so on — is targeted either for takeover, destruction, or replacement by a group that has been cleansed and purged. (The most absurd replacement is Conservapedia, which is necessary because Wikipedia is unclean.) The attack is always the same: These groups mix us. They expose us to the views of others. They stir our time, money, and effort into the same pot with the time, money, and effort of people who might disagree with us on other issues.

For example, the Right’s problem with the Susan Komen Foundation wasn’t that Komen funded abortions. (It’s an anti-cancer organization that has nothing to do with abortion.) But by mixing with the anti-cancer activities of Planned Parenthood, Komen became unclean. It has to be purified, destroyed, or pushed beyond the pale before it in turn contaminates the righteous women who want to cure breast cancer.

Girl Scouts is a melting-pot organization. Girls who might have different beliefs or goals or heroines mix together around the common goal of maturity, empowerment, and making the world a better place. But as they color their visions of a better world, girls might discover outside-the-lines groups like the Sierra Club or Doctors Without Borders.

Contamination! Unclean! Unclean!

June 11, 2012 – 10:26 am Categories: Short Notes | Comments (3)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

I’ve noticed that traffic on the Weekly Sift home page increases on Monday mornings, as people wonder when the week’s articles will come out. Some weeks take me longer than others, and I can never guess when some last-minute detail or glitch will hang me up for an hour or so. So I’ve decided to add a new feature for the early arrivers: “The Monday Morning Teaser”, which will go up first thing in the morning and tell you what articles to expect later in the day. (I intend for the Teaser to be brief. This Teaser is unusually long because I’m explaining what it is.)

This week’s Sift will have some other changes, which I’ll explain in the summary post: The usual Short Notes post is renamed “This Week’s Nuggets” and will come out last rather than first, so that when the day’s postings are complete it will sit right under the summary, rather than coming out first and sitting at the opposite end from the summary.

Rather than beginning with its own lead article, I plan for each week’s Nuggets to start with a “What Everybody Was Talking About” segment that will quickly link to the best articles I’ve found about stories you’ve undoubtedly already seen a headline about. (If the story was over-hyped, the best article about it might be a satire or a cartoon.) What was everybody talking about this week? Wisconsin, the death of Ray Bradbury, and the transit of Venus.

In addition to the Nuggets, this week’s Sift will have two longer articles:

  • What Happened in Wisconsin? will examine the various spins people are putting on Scott Walker’s victory in Tuesday’s recall election. What does this result say about the strengths and weaknesses of the liberal grass-roots movement that was the prototype for Occupy? What does it mean for the Obama/Romney race in November?
  • Demonizing the Girl Scouts. I want to throw a little light on a corner of the culture wars that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: In May the Catholic bishops started an investigation of the Girl Scouts, for the purpose of determining whether Catholic parishes should continue to sponsor troops or otherwise cooperate. The bishops may be joining Protestant right-wingers, who for years have been demonizing the Girl Scouts as a radical-feminist, anti-traditional-values organization.

I still haven’t named the weekly summary or chosen a quote for it.

June 11, 2012 – 7:45 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

The Authority of Women

The authority of women’s speech does not come, finally, from political roles or
ecclesial position, but from the truth of words spoken, the authenticity of the
speaker, and the relationship of trust and genuine concern that allows one to speak
not only words of encouragement, but also words of challenge.

– Mary Katherine Hilkert,
Speaking with Authority (2001)

In this week’s sift:

  • Challenging the Inquisition. The Inquisition never died, it just changed its name to the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith. Today the CDF is attacking the Leadership Council of Women Religious, which represents most American nuns. But rather than meekly submitting, the nuns are demanding a meeting with the Grand Inquisitor, as if he were the one with something to fear. As American Catholics rally around the sisters, maybe he is.
  • Who Can Obama Kill? If you want to kill American citizens, at the absolute minimum you should have to convince somebody who doesn’t work for you.
  • Carolina Rules the Waves and other short notes. North Carolina considers ordering planners to ignore rising seas. Adopt a uterus. Indiana charges a suicide-survivor with murdering her fetus. Everything is about race now. Who’s worth talking to about women’s health? Men. The spending increase that never happened. And more.
  • Book recommendation of the week. Evolving in Monkey Town by Rachel Held Evans. Evans grew up in Dayton, Tennessee, site of the Scopes Monkey Trial. She went to William Jennings Bryan College and learned how to defend a “Biblical worldview”. Then she had an unexpected attack of compassion for the people who are going to Hell, and everything started to change.
  • Last week’s most popular post. Food-eaters are not a special interest group got 166 views. The most-clicked link was to the blog Food Politics.
  • What you can do. It’s get-out-the-vote time in Wisconsin. The Scott Walker recall election is tomorrow and it’s close. You can still help phone bank.
June 4, 2012 – 1:53 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

Challenging the Inquisition

In April I linked to a Religious News Service article about the Vatican’s attempt to rein in American nuns. Boiled down, Rome’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (or, as it was called in its glory days, the Inquisition) complained that the nuns were thinking for themselves rather than letting the bishops think for them, and letting human suffering distract them from fighting the culture wars.

Rome’s solution was to put a man in charge of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious*, which represents 45,000 American nuns. Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain, will (in his own words) “review, guide and approve, where necessary, the work of the L.C.W.R.”

Picking up the gauntlet. Apparently, LCWR will not take this meekly. After a three-day meeting, LCWR’s board released a statement saying (more or less) that the Inquisitors don’t know what the Hell they’re talking about:

[LCWR] board members raised concerns about both the content of the doctrinal assessment and the process by which it was prepared. Board members concluded that the assessment was based on unsubstantiated accusations and the result of a flawed process that lacked transparency. Moreover, the sanctions imposed were disproportionate to the concerns raised and could compromise their ability to fulfill their mission. The report has furthermore caused scandal and pain throughout the church community, and created greater polarization.

Unsubstantiated accusations, lack of transparency, and a flawed process, leading to disproportionate sanctions that cause scandal and pain … who would expect this from the Inquisition, given its sterling historical reputation?

LCWR’s president and executive director plan to go to Rome on June 12 to “raise and discuss the board’s concerns” with Sartain and his boss, Prefect (or, as the office used to be called, Grand Inquisitor) Cardinal William Levada.

Even after meeting the Grand Inquisitor face-to-face, the LCWR does not promise to obey, but only to “gather its members both in regional meetings and in its August assembly to determine its response”.

Conscience vs. obedience. So far, the Inquisition show no signs of being worried about the nuns’ response. Sartain’s recent article in the Catholic weekly America reads like the kind of flattery you shower on subordinates you expect to have no trouble with. (“That’s a good girl. Daddy’s proud of you.”**) He refers only obliquely and abstractly to his new role and mission, while effusively praising the obedient nuns of the past.

But in spite of having all the institutional power on its side, perhaps the Inquisition should be worried. A responding America article from Fordham University ethics professor Christine Firer Hines (not a nun) paints a more challenging picture:

Catholics sometimes compare the church to a corporation or a military organization, with clergy, religious, and laity answerable to bishops and pope as their top executives and CEO. From this (ecclesiologically dubious) vantagepoint, “wayward” behavior of L.C.W.R. members or their affiliates endangers the church’s discipline, and requires firm correction …

As Vatican II affirms, the episcopal office uniquely serves the revealed truth of the gospel. But that truth resides in and with the whole church. Beholden to military or business organizational models, pundits who deride L.C.W.R. sisters for posturing falsely as a “magisterium of nuns” disrespect the authentic authority not only of religious communities, but of the laity in their various charisms and vocations. Because the official magisterium does not have a monopoly on gospel truth, office-holders must constantly listen for that truth in the whole church …

From this point of view, the Vatican intervention, intended to “assist the L.C.W.R. in implementing necessary reforms” to bring it more fully in line with “an ecclesiology of communion,” cannot be properly understood as a one-way street. The very meaning of “communion” forbids this. … If bridges toward communion are to be strengthened in this process, what John Paul II calls the “dialogue that leads to repentance” must work in both directions.

In addition to implying that Rome’s treatment of women might have left it with something to repent, Hines’ implicit framing (“the magisterium” vs. “the whole church”) invites lay Catholics to interpret the hierarchy’s disrespect for the nuns as disrespect for them as well: Only the conscience of a bishop is valid; all others must simply get in line.

On the blog Catholic Moral Theology, St. John’s University theology professor Christopher Vogt uses similar framing:

It seems to me that one of the questions at the heart of this controversy is whether acting in conscience is primarily about being obedient to authority or about conscientious discernment.

He quotes the Inquisition’s assessment of LCWR:

Some speakers claim that dissent from the doctrine of the Church is justified as an exercise of the prophetic office.  But this is based upon a mistaken understanding of the dynamic of prophecy in the Church: it justifies dissent by positing the possibility of divergence between the Church’s magisterium and a ‘legitimate’ theological intuition of some of the faithful.

The assessment denies that possibility, leading Vogt to comment:

According to this framework, there is no possibility for the bishops ever to learn anything from the laity.  The bishops are never wrong; they don’t need any help.  Such a view collapses the tension we find in the [Second Vatican] Council documents which try to balance an affirmation of the importance and legitimacy of magisterial authority with the recognition that sometimes the Holy Spirit speaks authentically to the faithful in a manner that doesn’t pass through Rome – in the depths of their hearts.

It’s not just lay Catholic intellectuals who have taken up the nuns cause. The NYT reports:

Catholics in more than 50 cities held vigils and more than 52,000 have signed a petition in support of the sisters, organized by the Nun Justice Project, a coalition of liberal Catholic groups. The project is telling Catholics to withhold their donations to Peter’s Pence, a special collection sent to the Vatican, and give the money instead to local nuns’ groups.

Whose religious freedom? This argument comes at a time when the hierarchy is invoking “religious freedom” against the contraception provisions of Obamacare. But they defend an odd kind of religious freedom that America’s Founders would barely recognize: the freedom of religious institutions, a right virtually unrelated to (and sometimes at odds with) the consciences of individuals who are not bishops.

Meanwhile, Sister Carol Keehan, head of the Catholic Health Association — a consortium of organizations more directly affected by the contraception mandate — was happy with the compromise the Obama administration offered:

We are pleased and grateful that the religious liberty and conscience protection needs of so many ministries that serve our country were appreciated enough that an early resolution of this issue was accomplished.

Commonweal, a left-leaning Catholic political journal, described the bishops’ argument as “hyperbolic” and warned:

If defending religious freedom becomes a partisan issue or, worse, an electoral ploy, it will engender enormous cynicism in an electorate in which a significant majority of voters already think religion is too politicized. … In their simplistic rhetoric, the bishops sound more like politicians than pastors.

Catholic Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne commented: “Many bishops seem to want this fight.” And on the NYT Opinionator blog, Notre Dame philosophy professor Gary Gutting first dissects the bishops’ arguments, then says:

their often demagogic reaction suggests political rather than religious concerns. There is, first, the internal politics of the Church, where the bishops find themselves, especially on matters of sexuality, increasingly isolated from most Church members; they seem desperate to rally at least a fervid core of supporters around their fading authority. But the timing of their outbursts also suggests a grasp for secular political power.

The wider issue. The Commonweal editorial quotes research from sociologists David Campbell and Robert Putnam showing that the politicization of churches is causing young adults to disengage from organized religion, a message similar to the one David Kinnaman (president of the evangelical Protestant research organization the Barna Group) put forward in the 2007 book unChristian. 

A similar message based on personal experience was in the blog post “How to win a culture war and lose a generation” I linked to two weeks ago, in which Rachel Held Evans described her 20-something generation as “ready to stop waging war and start washing feet”.

This is an issue that crosses denominational lines. In one sense, it is Christianity’s perennial doctrinal purity vs. good works conflict. But it seems to be striking this generation with particular force. More and more young adults want to know not which religion is winning or even which religion is right, but whether any religion does any good.

Through their lives of service, the nuns are showing one way to answer that question. The bishops seem deaf to it.***

* Translation from the Catholic: religious in this context comes from the Latin religata, meaning bound. In other words, these are not just women who have “got religion”, but women bound by their vows to the Church; i.e., nuns.

** Not a direct quote.

*** Probably you’ve already run into the story of Cardinal Dolan’s threat that Catholic organizations will halt their charitable work rather than comply with the contraception mandate. I’m not linking to that claim because I still haven’t found an unedited tape or transcript of enough of Dolan’s remarks to convince me he wasn’t taken out of context.

June 4, 2012 – 1:40 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (1)

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Who Can Obama Kill?

Anwar al-Awlaki

The most talked-about story of the week was the NYT’s report of President Obama’s “kill list” of presumed Al Qaeda members who can become the targets of drone strikes.

In some sense we already knew the basics: The United States launches drone attacks that kill people in countries where we are not officially at war. There must be some process that chooses those people, and since it doesn’t include any judicial or legislative process, everyone involved must ultimately report to one person, the President.

Being an American citizen is no protection from this kind of death. We’ve known that since Kamal Derwish was killed in Yemen in 2002 because he was in a car with Qaed Salim Sinana al-Harethi, the suspected planner of the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. President Obama ratified that part of the Bush worldview when he ordered the death of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Islamic cleric who supported Al Qaeda ideologically, and was alleged to have become active in planning operations against America.

What was new in the article was, on the surface, the amount of detail we got about the process and how personally involved in it President Obama is. No one goes on the list without his personal approval, and he does not simply sign off on the recommendations of his subordinates.

But the subtext of the story was, in some ways, even more disturbing: The only way such a story could be written was with the cooperation of the White House. Numerous current and former administration sources are quoted; they didn’t all go rogue simultaneously. So the White House wanted us to know this stuff.

It’s an election year, so you have to assume the purpose is political. Presumably, the Obama campaign believes that ordering people’s deaths looks presidential. Presumably, getting a more detailed picture of Obama ordering deaths will assuage independent voters who might worry that Obama isn’t tough enough to defend the country.

Possibly, people like me are supposed to be comforted by the seriousness of the process. Actually, I’m not. I had always assumed the process was serious, at least in this administration. I’m sure they go to great lengths to make sure we’re not firing missiles at just anybody.

The problem, which is unchanged from the Bush years, is the lack of checks and balances. Maybe we’ll be lucky, and all future presidents will use this power conscientiously. But as long as the process is secret and unchecked, we are depending on the virtue of the president. All it will take to abuse this power is for one man to become corrupt or sloppy. Any secret executive-branch process that can be established by a president can be disestablished just as easily, without public notice.

President Obama owes us something better than this.

I recognize that the situation is not simple. If all these people were on a battlefield wearing the uniform of an enemy, ordering someone or something to shoot at them would be a normal part of war. The fact that Al Qaeda scatters its members across many countries and mixes with the civilian population does not make them less of an enemy or less deadly.

Yes, the battlefield could be anywhere and the enemy could be anyone. But the Bush formula, in which a battlefield commander’s prerogatives extend to all places and coalesce around the president, is a recipe for an eventual dictatorship and a reign of terror. In the long run, I am more afraid of such an omni-empowered president than I am of the terrorists.

And while I respect President Obama’s desire to take personal responsibility for these deadly decisions, if such decisions are made in the White House, eventually, in somebody’s White House, they will be made for political reasons. Dip in the polls? Let’s kill somebody.

The Founders did not envision this kind of war, and the Constitution was not written for it. But the overall principle of checks-and-balances should still apply. If you want to kill people who aren’t in a Congressionally-approved war zone, especially if they are American citizens, you ought to have to convince someone who doesn’t work for you. And ultimately, you should be held accountable for your decisions by somebody else who doesn’t work for you.

It should never be legal for one person, checked only by his subordinates, to order your death. That seems like an absolute minimum.

June 4, 2012 – 1:24 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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Carolina Rules the Waves and other short notes

Mindful of the warning from Cracked, I try not to get too excited about proposed state laws that haven’t passed at least one house. The 50 states have around ten thousand legislators, so one is bound to be proposing something crazy whenever you happen to look. That shouldn’t be news.

King Canute orders the tide not to come in

Still, this might pass if sane people don’t pay attention: North Carolina is trying to regulate the rise in sea level.

OK, that’s not exactly true. Scientists say sea level is rising at a slow-but-exponentially-increasing rate. So by the end of the century it will most likely be 1-to-2 meters higher. That’s important if you’re building coastal infrastructure that’s supposed to last a long time, like a bridge or a highway. You don’t want it to be underwater in 50 years.

But North Carolina’s 20 coastal counties (and the beachfront developers who dominate politics there) want to reject that reality and substitute their own. So Replacement House Bill 819 says:

Rates of seas-level rise may be extrapolated linearly to estimate future rates of rise but shall not include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise.

As Grist’s Jesse Zimmerman explains, linear estimation

will lead to predictions that are much less catastrophic, and much more reassuring for people building resorts in the Outer Banks. The predictions will also be flat-out wrong, but that’s nothing new for North Carolina.

So North Carolina’s planners could consider seas rising 8 inches, but would be legally bound to ignore science’s 1-2 meter best guess. Any sane North Carolinians might want to notice RHB-819 and do something about it before it becomes law.

Help a befuddled female make good decisions for her uterus. Join SponsorAUterus.com

So imagine you’re a pregnant woman and your boyfriend deserts you. You get so depressed you attempt suicide. The ER doctors save you, but not your fetus. What should happen next?

Well, in Indiana you get charged with murder.

An unexpected consequence of having an African-American president: People’s opinions on race are starting to affect their opinions on everything, even the president’s dog.

At the end of a fascinating New York Magazine story about turmoil at the top of the New York Times Corporation, we find this:

That has led to speculation, and not for the first time, that Mayor Bloomberg, a long-fabled white knight for beleaguered Times staffers, could swoop in and save the paper from itself

According to the story, the current market capitalization of NYT-corp (which also owns the Boston Globe) is about $1 billion. So if you’ve got a billion dollars jangling around in your pocket (as Mayor Bloomberg does) you can remake two of the most prestigious newspapers in the country however you want.

Komen continues to suffer from its dip into partisan politics. Participation in the Race for the Cure is down.

The unconstitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act is working its way up the ladder. A 3-judge panel of the Court of Appeals in Boston unanimously upheld a lower court’s ruling in favor of legally married same-sex couples who are being denied federal benefits. Next stop: Supreme Court.

Insurance mandates have been part of the healthcare reform debate since the early 90s, when they were a conservative alternative to single-payer proposals for achieving universal health care. So when did the idea that mandates might be unconstitutional surface for the very first time? July of 2009, a few months after President Obama proposed his plan. Until Obama got involved, nobody published any doubts about a mandate’s constitutionality.

Nicholas Kristof is also interested in Michael Sandel’s “What Money Can’t Buy” (book, article), which gave me the Sift quote two weeks ago, and I discussed in “Citizen of the Highest Bidder“.

Follow-up to last week’s “Food-eaters Are Not a Special Interest Group“: John Robbins asks “Why are twinkies cheaper than carrots?“.

24 states have considered taxing sugary drinks. In the face of massive lobbying by Coke and Pepsi, only one proposal passed (in Washington state). It was repealed after an expensive and deceptive referendum campaign financed by the big beverage companies.

What if we taxed unhealthy foods and subsidized healthy ones? Nobody would be forced to eat brocoli, but the incentives would change a little.

About that big increase in federal spending under Obama … it never actually happened.

The list of former Republican senators critical of their party’s radical turn is getting longer: Alan Simpson, Chuck Hagel, and John Danforth, in addition to the recently defeated Dick Lugar.

Glenn Beck never went away. He’s just behind a paywall.

You know who are uniquely qualified to discuss women’s health issues? Men.

June 4, 2012 – 10:38 am Categories: Short Notes | Comments (1)

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Enemies of Capitalism

Capitalism’s biggest political enemies are not the firebrand trade unionists spewing vitriol against the system, but the executives in pin-striped suits extolling the virtues of competitive markets with every breath while attempting to extinguish them with every action.

– Raghuram G. Rajan and Luigi Zingales
Saving Capitalism From the Capitalists (2003)

In this week’s sift:

  • Food-eaters are not a special interest group. Nothing the government does affects you as often and as directly as food policy. So in a democracy, you would expect either that food policy is a perennial campaign issue, or that a pro-consumer consensus takes food out of partisan politics completely. That’s not what has happened.
  • The Sifted Bookshelf: Republic, Lost by Lawrence Lessig. The last three elections have all been calls for sweeping change, and neither party has been able to deliver it. Why doesn’t democracy work any more? And what can be done about it?
  • Tagg, You’re It. Tagg Romney is getting rich on his own, by running an equity capital firm financed by the big-money contributors to his father’s political campaign. See? You’d be rich too if only you were smart enough to think of something like that.
  • Slinging Mud at Clean Energy and other short notes. As wind and solar power become more feasible, attacks from dirty-energy industries become more aggressive. Biden’s moving Memorial Day message. Obama moves black opinion on same-sex marriage. How the fracking industry puts a university imprimatur on its propaganda. And more.
  • Last week’s most popular post. If you can’t hear it from me … got 247 view. The most-clicked link was 6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America.
May 28, 2012 – 1:25 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

Food-eaters are not a special interest group

You probably don’t think much about government as you push your shopping cart down the aisle of your local supermarket. But nothing the government does affects your life more often and more directly than food policy. What food is available, what it costs, what’s in it, what you can find out about it, and whether it’s safe — the government has a hand in all of that.

Naively, you might expect a democratic government’s food policy to work out one of two ways: Either food would be hotly debated in every election, or our common interest as eaters would produce a completely non-partisan pro-consumer consensus.

Strangely, though, our government has a pro-food-industry policy which is often anti-consumer, and that policy is hardly ever a major issue. Candidates constantly try to make hay out of invisible threats like Iran’s nuclear weapons program or even completely imaginary ones like the death panels of Obamacare. But when was the last time you heard a politician pledge to do something about the growing rate of salmonella infections?

Obesity and policy. Everybody knows that America has a obesity problem. Because of it, we spend more on healthcare and die younger anyway. But to the extent this issue gets public attention at all, it is framed as an individual character problem — we don’t have the discipline to eat carrots instead of carrot cake — rather than as a problem with the way our food is produced and marketed.

But isn’t it strange how the American character degraded so suddenly since the mid-1970s (when the average American was 18 pounds lighter)? Shouldn’t a major cultural change take longer than that?

The media inundates us with stories about how to diet, but seldom touches the government’s role in subsidizing fats and sugars over healthier fruits and vegetables. Here’s the exception that proves the rule: Peter Jennings’ “How to Get Fat Without Really Trying” from 2003. (Here are the ad-free links for parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.) Would I have to go back to 2003 to find a major-network piece about dieting?

Free enterprise? Any threat to our current food system is quickly labeled as an attack on free enterprise: If industry produces something and people want to buy it, what’s the problem? If it’s bad for them, that’s their own fault. They should eat something else.

But the current food system has little to do with free enterprise. Michael Pollan explains:

So much of our food system is the result of policy choices made in Washington. The reason we’re eating from these huge monocultures of corn and soybeans is that that’s the kind of farming that the government has supported, in the form of subsidies, in the form of agricultural research. All the work is going to produce more of  those so-called commodity crops that are the building blocks of fast food.

GMOs. As an example, ask yourself: When did you decide to start eating genetically-modified organisms (GMOs)?  Probably you didn’t. Probably you ate products made from genetically modified corn and soybeans for a long time before you realized that you were eating them at all. Maybe you still don’t realize you eat GMOs; but unless you’re totally obsessive about where your food comes from, you do eat them.

That also is due to government policy: Kellogg’s doesn’t have to tell you whether their corn flakes have GMOs. They like it that way, whether you like it or not.

The basic research behind GMOs was funded by governments; the profit goes to corporations like Monsanto. The risks have been passed on to the consumer without anyone asking the consumer. That’s not how free enterprise is supposed to work.

And who knows? Maybe there are no risks. Maybe eating GMOs is as harmless as Monsanto claims. Maybe GMOs aren’t responsible for systemic effects like the collapse of bee colonies.

None of the claims against GMOs have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Nor will they be, most likely, because neither government nor industry has much interest in funding that research. (You can bet the research being done at Beeologics won’t implicate Monsanto, because Monsanto just bought them.)

The Farm Bill is a Food Bill. Your power as a consumer is not going to change the food system until your power as a voter makes it changeable. To change food policy, Pollan says, we need to change the Farm Bill that goes through Congress every five years.

But it isn’t really just a bill for farmers. It really should be called the Food Bill, because it is the rules for the system we all eat by. And those rules are really lousy right now, and they need to be changed.

That 5-year process is almost complete now, so the positive changes that are still possible are minimal. Absent a vocal popular movement, food is a perfect issue for lobbyists: The affected industries have a lot of money to spend, and the general public isn’t paying attention.

We’re not going to raise a vocal popular movement in the next few weeks. Most people don’t care and don’t know why anyone thinks they should care. And that’s what needs to change between now and 2017.

I’m still in the process of raising my own consciousness about this stuff, so I can just point in a general direction. (If you’ve got better advice, make a comment.) I’ve just added Food Politics to the list of blogs I cruise regularly. (Worthwhile recent posts pointed me to the report How Washington went soft on childhood obesity and explained where that supermarket sushi comes from.) Suggestions of other blogs/authors/websites are welcome.

May 28, 2012 – 1:13 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (17)

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The Sifted Bookshelf: Republic, Lost by Lawrence Lessig

In each of our last three elections — 2006, 2008, and 2010 — the electorate called for sweeping change. 2006 was a rejection of the Iraq War, which President Bush then escalated and President Obama only recently managed to end. 2008 was a more general rejection of Bush policies, many of which President Obama has continued. 2010 was a sweep in the other direction, in favor of Tea Party candidates who wanted to slash government spending. That also has not happened, except in fairly small, symbolic ways.

The lesson seems clear: Whether voters look right or left for change, they don’t get it. While it’s wrong to say that there’s no difference between the two major parties, either party’s ability to deliver the change it promises is limited.

Democracy doesn’t seem to work any more. But why?

The problem. Lessig’s book Republic, Lost frames the problem brilliantly. Its essence, he claims, is that our laws ban one kind of corruption, but we actually have a different kind. Obvious as that corruption might be to any reasonable observer, it is invisible to the law.

Our laws aim — and mostly succeed — at stopping quid pro quo corruption. Rod Blagojevich, for example. If you’re explicitly selling political favors for money, you’re clearly breaking the law and stand a good chance of getting caught.

If all quid-pro-quo corruption ended tomorrow, though, you’d barely notice the difference, because a completely different kind of corruption dominates our system: dependence corruption. Politicians can’t get re-elected without big contributions from the same special interests that are asking for favors. They do those favors not in exchange for an explicit pay-off, but to stay on the contributors’ good side. Rather than an explicit I’ll-do-this-if-you-do-that, politicians and lobbyists work on maintaining mutually beneficial relationships.

Lessig describes this by borrowing a term from the anthropologists: Washington isn’t an exchange economy, it’s a gift economy. He quotes 20th-century Senator Paul Douglas:

The enticer does not generally pay money directly to the public representative. He tries instead by a series of favors to put the public official under such a feeling of personal obligation that the latter gradually loses his sense of mission to the public and comes to feel that his first loyalties are to his private benefactors and patrons.

Nothing about that is illegal, and the politicians may not even feel corrupt, because over time their points of view align (like needles in a magnetic field) with the special interests that support them. Who can say whether Senator Inhofe blocks action against global warming out of conviction or because the fossil fuel industry supports his campaign? The Senator himself may not know.

But the effect is identical to quid-pro-quo corruption: Politicians come to represent the Funders rather than the People, and government revolves around their needs rather than ours.

Nicholas Kristof had a tremendous example a week ago: Furniture has toxic fire-retardant chemicals in it, not because they will do any good in case of fire, but because three companies get richer. For another example, see the discussions of food policy and of Tagg Romney’s business career elsewhere in today’s Sift.

Solutions. Lessig recognizes that you can’t solve this problem by enacting stricter rules and putting rule-breakers in jail. It’s systemic; the problem isn’t bad people. People with high ideals are either corrupted or flushed out of the system, and the path of their corruption starts with actions that aren’t that different from what politicians are supposed to do: help constituents and then ask for their help at election time.

But once you have the problem framed correctly — politicians have become dependent on the Funders rather than the People — the possible answers are clear: Either you get the big money out of politics completely, or you find some way for the People to become the Funders.

The first path, where you ban both large political contributions to candidates and large “independent” expenditures like Super-PACs or “issue-oriented” spending by organizations like the Chamber of Commerce or big unions, goes against Lessig’s libertarian/anarchist streak. (He considers himself a liberal now, but was a young Reagan delegate to the Republican Convention of 1980. That younger-self voice still resounds inside his head.)

The problem is that (bad as it sounds to the liberal ear) “Money is speech” is not entirely wrong. If you control money too tightly, you’re going to stop some kinds of speech from getting out. Worse, in a pure public-funding scheme, it’s easy to wind up with a system that institutionalizes the two major parties, gives incumbents a built-in advantage, and makes radical change more difficult rather than less.

Instead, Lessig favors changing the incentives rather than banning spending outright. His Grant and Franklin proposal (named after the figures on the $50 and $100 bills) calls for the government to give each voter a voucher (he suggests $50) that they can contribute to congressional campaigns.

Campaigns can only use the vouchers, though, if they are committed to a fairly low cap on additional individual contributions. (He suggests $100.) But there is no cap on overall expenditures — if you can collect a vast war-chest from small donors, good for you.

In this way, government funding would make small-contribution campaigns competitive while still allowing individual contributors to decide where the money goes. But candidates who want to take larger donations and individuals who want to give them are not criminalized.

At a recent League of Women Voters forum in Concord, MA, Lessig stated the goal like this:

We’re aiming for a world where it’s the broad range of Americans who are contributing.

In other words, the Funders become more representative of the People rather than the special interests.

In addition, he wants to limit (but not eliminate) spending by groups that work outside the candidates’ campaigns. Given the current Supreme Court rulings, that will require a constitutional amendment.

Walking While Chewing Gum. Interestingly, he does not focus on an amendment to undo the Citizens United ruling.

The day before Citizens United was decided, our democracy was already broken. Citizens United may have shocked the body, but the body was already cold.

Because it neither bans contributions nor involves the government in setting spending limits or choosing who gets the money, Lessig believes Grant and Franklin gets around recent Supreme Court decisions, and so it doesn’t put all the eggs into one constitutional-amendment basket.

I think this is wise, and that the examples of the Equal Rights Amendment and Human Life Amendment apply. Constitutional amendments are good devices for galvanizing popular movements, but often the real work gets done in legislation that spins out of the movement, even if the amendment itself doesn’t pass.

Bipartisanship. Often to the annoyance of his fellow liberals, Lessig frames the issue in a bipartisan way: Whatever kind of change your movement wants, liberal or conservative, you won’t get it in the current system.

As the desire for reform grows, the Powers That Be will undoubtedly try to keep it split between liberal reform and conservative reform. But Left and Right recognize a common problem: Concentration of power. The Left sees it as corporate power and the Right as government power. But both sides see the concentration and the corrupt practices that maintain it. The challenge is to come together to fix that corruption, without being divided by fights that would be decided better afterwards, on a playing field more like the republic the Founders envisioned.

May 28, 2012 – 12:51 pm Categories: The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (5)

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Tagg, you’re it

An April NYT story about Tagg Romney’s private equity firm illustrates two points:

  • How the 1% becomes an entrenched aristocracy.
  • How subtly political corruption works.

Tagg is Mitt’s oldest son. Right after Mitt’s 2008 presidential campaign folded its tent, Tagg, a lawyer, and Romney-for-President finance director Spencer Zwick used the campaign’s rolodex of big-money contributors to start Solamere Capital — which describes itself as

A small number of families with broad networks joined together to aggregate their access to top-tier private equity firms, proprietary deal flow, and unparalleled management resources and expertise.

The strategy page of Solamere’s web site has seven bullet points, six of which begin with the word access. The gist: We know the right people, so we get offered deals that ordinary Joes never hear about.

Only the lawyer had any previous experience in private equity, but between the Romney name, the campaign donor list, and an early $10 million investment from Mitt himself, they have raised $244 million from 64 investors and made $16.8 million in fees.

Zwick was simultaneously raising capital for Solamere and PAC money for Mitt Romney’s Free and Strong America — often from the same people. All perfectly legal. Did any of those investors see the son’s company as a way to get in good with the father, a possible future president? Was anybody looking down the road far enough to anticipate Tagg continuing the Romney political dynasty? We’ll probably never know.

George W. Bush’s pre-politics career is a similar story: Contributors to his father’s campaigns repeatedly opened doors for him and invested in his businesses. Was that corruption? Or just helping out a nice young man from a good family?

It seems not to have been classic quid-pro-quo corruption. Nobody has identified any particular favor that the Bushes, senior or junior, did in exchange for junior’s opportunities. But this is one more example of the Washington gift economy. Lobbyist A doesn’t buy the vote of Congressman B; he just does nice things for B, thereby establishing a lasting relationship in which A and B will continue to be nice to each other without breaking any laws. Win/win.

So far, both Solamere and its investors seem to be winning. The firm has made 20% per year for the last two years. (Investments in general have also been up these last two years, though, so it’s hard to say how impressive that is without knowing more. Solamere might get those returns via a high risk/high reward strategy that will burn them in down years.)

But that raises another question: Did Solamere make money because they were cut in on lucrative deals, again, by people who wanted to get in good with a possible future president? Similar suspicions dogged George W. Bush. (The most controversial incident was when Bush Jr.’s company Harken Energy got a surprising contract from Bahrain while Bush Sr. was president, though a WaPo reporter called implications of influence-peddling  “baseless”.) Questions were also raised about the profit Hillary Clinton made in commodity-trading while her husband was governor. (Like everything else about the Clintons, this was investigated to the Nth degree and no charges were brought.)

But even if you assume that everything in Tagg Romney’s career is above board and 100% honest, this is still a story about how the aristocracy reproduces. Tagg hasn’t inherited any of his parents’ hundreds of millions yet. And maybe he never will. Mitt claims he gave away his inheritance from his millionaire/auto-executive/governor father because he and Ann already had “enough of our own”. (Though he did get through school by selling stock his father had given him.)

Tagg is getting rich “on his own” too. Someday he also may claim to be a self-made man, and dismiss his critics as just “envious” of his “success“.

May 28, 2012 – 12:32 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (3)

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