I used to shrug off as cynical the recurring accusations about the influence of money in politics. Now I don’t.
I am not referring to the corrupting influence of campaign contributions, of which the recent (and growing) Abramoff scandal is the most recent example. I’m talking about more subtle forms of dishonesty, prompted by lawmakers’ desire to be re-elected and enabled by voters’ belief that we can—and should—get something for nothing.
Recently, the Indianapolis City-County Council authorized borrowing up to $35 million dollars against anticipated County Option Income Tax (COIT) revenues to help “fill the gap” in the 2007 city budget. The funds are presumably to be repaid in 2008 from reserves that the state has withheld. (The state says the withholding is intended to guard against “swings” in COIT collections; local officials say the real reason is so that the state will get the interest earned on those funds in the interim.)
Indianapolis isn’t the only municipality borrowing to meet current obligations. Cook County recently borrowed $200 million dollars to meet operating expenses. The 18-month line of credit carries an above-market interest rate of 10%.
Evidently, lawmakers would rather pay millions in interest later than face the need to cut services or raise taxes now.
Government borrowing is not the problem—the problem is government borrowing to meet current operating expenses. Well-managed businesses will often borrow in order to invest in capital improvements—to amortize the costs of new facilities or to upgrade manufacturing equipment. Borrowing to make payroll, or to pay the rent, is a far dicier proposition.
You can reasonably argue that government should borrow in appropriate circumstances. The question is: what circumstances are appropriate?
Unfortunately, political game-playing frequently trumps good public policy. Much has been written about Governor Daniel’s seventy-five year lease of the Indiana Toll Road. Whatever the merits of that decision, it was clearly prompted by the unwillingness of members of the Indiana General Assembly to raise tolls. After all, the State could have issued bonds to be repaid from future tolls, retained control of the asset, and realized more money than a lessee—who needs to make a profit—could pay. But then it would be obvious who raised the tolls, and some lawmakers might suffer at the polls. The Governor and General Assembly essentially “outsourced” authority to levy taxes (which is what tolls are), hoping they would thereby escape responsibility.
We see this privatization of taxing authority in other contexts. Homeowners’ associations are given responsibility for local streets, garbage collection and other services that were once public responsibility. The homeowner pays for those services through fees collected by the association, allowing the local government to claim it didn’t “raise taxes.”
Ultimately, We the People are responsible for all these evasions of responsibility. Until we are willing to pay for the services we receive, until we stop thinking we can get something for nothing, we are just electing people to lie to us. And we are paying extra for the delusions.
When I was a young girl growing up in the not-so-metropolitan town of Anderson, Indiana, the few Jewish families living in the area were acutely aware of their minority status. One of the most feared accusations Jews faced back then was that of “dual loyalty”—the suspicion that our support for the new state of Israel might be as strong or stronger than our loyalty to America and American values.
I hadn’t thought about dual loyalty accusations in a long time, although there were certainly echoes of it in the hostility with which Latino demonstrations over immigration reform were received. Displays of the Mexican flag, especially, seemed to engender resentment from people who proudly characterized themselves in letters to the editor and similar forums as “real Americans.”
In my experience, Americans have historically tended to be pretty insular, even jingoist, likely to think of themselves as “real Americans” and “Americans First.” So I was really unprepared for the recent Pew Research poll showing that forty-two percent of Americans consider themselves Christian first, and American second. According to Pew,
“The 2006 Pew Global Attitudes Poll finds American adults are closely split between those who see themselves as Christians first (42%) and those who see themselves as Americans first (48%); an additional 7% say they see themselves as both equally. By contrast, only a third of German Christians (33%) and fewer than a quarter of British, French and Spanish Christians self-identify primarily with their religion. In this regard, the views of Americans closely parallel those of French Muslims, 46% of whom think of themselves first in terms of their religion rather than their nationality.”
Pew doesn’t tell us, of course, what kind of Christian these folks are, so we can take some solace from even more recently released research from Baylor University that debunks the notion that the more devout the Christian, the more conservative the politics. According to Baylor, equal numbers of political liberals and political conservatives are comitted churchgoers.Nevertheless, there is something disquieting about these numbers. My own worry is that the people most likely to respond that they are “Christian first” are also most likely to believe that their theological beliefs should trump America’s constitutional values.
Case in point: Recently, I got a call at the office from an elderly-sounding man who wanted my mailing address. He said he read my columns in the Star, and wanted to send me something. “How nice!” I said—to which he responded, “You may not think so when you get it.” He was right; he sent me a book by a self-professed Christian “psychologist” that explained why homosexuality is an immoral choice, and how gays can “choose” not to be gay. An accompanying note suggested that I share it with my misguided son. It was a good example of someone whose “Christian” values conflict rather sharply with American values of civic equality, not to mention the quintessentially American “live and let live” ethic.
Don’t get me wrong: just as Christians in Germany who placed religious and moral teachings above the Fatherland were right, Americans absolutely must bring moral precepts—grounded for the most part in religious belief—to questions of officially condoning torture, the conduct of war and the erosion of civil liberties. “My country right or wrong” is wrong. For that matter, many of us who support gay civil rights do so because we believe our religion or morality requires it. But in these situations, most of us would not see our religious or ethical beliefs at odds with American values. Rather, we see our ethical or religious beliefs requiring us to work for an America that lives up to its own constitutional and civic values.
Maybe that’s all the Pew poll signifies. Maybe my own history as a member of a minority religion has made me too sensitive, has caused me to over-react to these numbers. But I can’t shake the feeling that these self-professed “Christian first” folks are really the fundamentalists who have done so much to divide Americans, and set us against each other. I can’t avoid the nagging suspicion that what these folks are saying is “My kind of Christian first.”
Ever wonder why freedom of the press was singled out for specific protection in the First Amendment? After all, the Free Speech clause obviously protected the press as well as other citizens. Why include a specific provision about freedom of the press?
The answer is that the architects of our constitution believed that self-government requires the free and uninhibited flow of information. They wanted to be extra-certain the government kept its hands off that information. So while the First Amendment protects all expression, the free press provision emphasizes the importance of protecting the specific kind of expression we call “journalism.”
Note that the constitution doesn’t protect persons called “journalists.” It protects the act of journalism. (It’s a distinction contemporary media mavens don’t seem to recognize—but that’s a subject for a different talk.) The activity of “journalism” ensures the availability of information that is in the public interest. Anyone who provides that kind of information, that kind of reporting—whether for newspapers, magazines, radio, television or blogs—deserves to be protected against government supression, intimidation or reprisal. People engaged in the act of journalism are entitled to that protection whether the news is being delivered with a quill pen or a computer.
The Founders were anything but naïve. They recognized that what they called the press and we call the media got it wrong a lot of the time. The newspapers of their own time, called the “penny press” were partisan rags that make Fox News and Air America look positively statesmanlike by comparison. But the founders also knew that only from the freest, most robust exchange of argument, information and gossip would truth ultimately emerge. They were comitted to free markets for goods and services, and they believed that only an equally free marketplace of ideas could ultimately protect individual liberties.
Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press don’t rest on the notion that ideas are unimportant, that “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words won’t hurt me.” The Founders knew that ideas can be both powerful and dangerous. But they believed that giving the government power to determine which ideas may be transmitted or expressed was infinitely more dangerous.
The Founders were could hardly have forseen the evolution of the press and the contours of our contemporary media landscape. Today, threats to the free exchange of information are very different than they were in Revolutionary times. And the greatest threats, ironically, grow out of the expansion and changing nature of the marketplace itself.
The availability of hundreds of cable channels and a vastly expanded “newshole” has led to intense competition for readers and viewers. That competition has encouraged news coverage that is more properly labelled “infotainment”—a new twist on the old newspaper adage “if it bleeds, it leads.” Today, sensationalism rules: we get endless coverage of missing blonds in Aruba, Brangelina and Tom Cruise; we get panels of so-called “commentators” screaming at each other, and pundits who sell their books by saying outrageous and self-evidently ridiculous things in an accelerating effort to grab headlines and increase sales. “Faux news” doesn’t just describe the Daily Show—which is often a lot less “faux” than some of the supposedly straight news programs.
Far more insidious is the fact that ownership of all our media—newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations—has become concentrated. Five international mega-corporations now control most of the American media—most of what we read, hear and see. The government doesn’t control the news—Rudolph Murdoch, Viacom and Disney do. The concerns this raises for accurate public information can be seen in the recent airing of a “docu-drama” by ABC—owned by Disney—that had been condemned as totally fabricated by Republicans and Democrats alike, despite protests and petitions to correct what appeared to be a politically motivated effort to revise the history of 9-ll.
The medium with the most obvious ability to counter these trends is the internet—it gives each of us access to mountains of uncensored, uncontrolled, unfiltered information. The internet carries its own set of challenges: credibility of sources, sheer volume of information available, the further enabling of our ability to tailor the information we receive to our political preconceptions—but its utility and promise far outstrip those challenges. The Net lowers barriers to participation in public discussion. Talk about “power to the people”—the internet is an unbelievably powerful threat to concentrated power, whether that power is being exercised by the government, as the founders feared, or by private monopolies.
That promise is why, right now, I think the biggest threat to our constitutionally protected right to receive and disseminate information is contained in a Senate Telecommunications bill sponsored by Alaska Senator Ted Stevens—he of “bridge to nowhere” fame. Buried in the technical jargon of that bill is a provision that would have profound effects on all of us who participate in the marketplace of ideas, but especially on the less powerful—and members of more marginalized communities.
Currently, most web sites are able to be accessed at a fairly fast speed. Any person can create a blog or web site, and it will be just as available to people all over the world as the sites of the largest companies. The large cable and telephone companies are proposing regulations that would change that. This proposal would let Internet providers charge content providers money for faster access. Corporations or wealthier individuals could pay to have their web sites load faster. (One person I know calls this “protection money,” because the telecom giants currently have a monopoly on the telephone and cable lines that the Internet runs through. It would be like someone owning the streets, and letting Hummers use them for free, while charging Yugos to drive on them.)
The bottom line is that some web sites would become Yugos on that road we call the World Wide Web–relegated to the Internet’s bike lane if the companies that own the road are successful in getting this measure passed. The proposal would let ISPs and other web businesses pay extra to receive preferential treatment for their data packets carrying everything from video to music to text over the Internet. Such “packet prioritization” would deliver a more responsive Web to visitors to those sites–an especially valuable perk for high-bandwidth services like streaming video, but important to others as well.
Think about it—how patient are you with slow-loading sites? I’m not. If something is taking too long to load, unless it’s something I really, really want, I don’t wait. I go elsewhere. It’s not a phenomenon limited to the web—how often do you return to restaurants or retail stores with poor service?
Until now, one of the great benefits of the internet has been its equal accessibility. Before the internet, the costs of being heard—the “entry costs” of having a meaningful voice in public debate—were prohibitive. Want to start a newspaper? It’ll cost you millions. What to get a book published? Not easy—as I can attest from experience. But want to start a web site? All you need is a computer, web access and time. Your only limit your persuasiveness, whether you have a message that others want to hear.
The Web is the ideal “marketplace of ideas,” where those expressing ideas that may not be “mainstream” or “popular” or sufficiently in line with majority beliefs can compete on an equal footing. The web has been an enormous boon to minority opinions and voices.
That’s what “net neutrality” is: equal access to the marketplace of ideas. An ability to penetrate the official “echo chamber.” And that’s what is under assault.
If you care about equality, about journalism, about the First Amendment, you should care about preserving net neutrality.
One of the few television shows I follow is a science-fiction thriller called “The 4400.” The premise is simple: over a period of fifty-plus years, people have inexplicably disappeared, one by one. Then—suddenly—they are all returned. They have no memory of where they have been, and most face a world that is vastly changed; new social mores, new technologies, new national alliances. They are also different. They have been given new powers, and some don’t cope very well with the challenge those powers represent.
The returnees encounter fear and stigma. Relatives shun them; government agencies monitor them. These dynamics give the show its dramatic tension, as does the suspense of wondering how it will all turn out.
Coincidentally, 4400 is also the number of people who return to Indianapolis annually after “disappearing.”
Of the 650,000 incarcerated individuals who are released from penal institutions in America each year, approximately 4,400 return here. Their initial disappearance from our streets was due to their own misbehavior rather than a plot device, of course, but in other ways, these ex-offenders have more in common with the television returnees than we might think.
Depending on the length of time served, many will find the world a different place. Computers, cell-phones, ATMs, transportation—all the technology that morphs with dizzying speed—has changed the everyday environment. Family members have moved, married or remarried, died or written them off.Just as in the TV show, returnees’ movements are monitored, and they face persistent stigma and suspicion and a host of perverse incentives that seem designed to make re-offending easier than going straight.
The greatest problem these ex-felons will face is getting a job. Employment has been shown to significantly decrease recidivism, but for many reasons (some sound, some not), up to 70% of private-sector employers refuse to hire ex-felons, period—irrespective of the nature of the underlying crime or its relevance to the workplace in question.
No sane person wants child molesters working at a day-care center, but as a local judge recently noted, every ex-con isn’t Charles Manson. Some are truly bad actors, but many were kids who got into bad company and made serious mistakes. Others ran afoul of our draconian drug policies. It was appropriate that they pay for breaking the rules, but we all benefit by helping those who genuinely want a fresh start.
America imprisons a greater proportion of its population than any other western nation. Most of those prisoners will eventually be returned to our communities. If we choose to slam every door, foreclose every opportunity, Indianapolis will have to deal with our own 4400—4400 people every single year who have nothing to lose by returning to lives outside the law.
There are no simple answers, no pat policy prescriptions. Sometimes, hiring an ex-offender presents an unacceptable risk; other times, refusing to give someone a second chance is the greater risk.
Television shows can wrap up problems tidily in an hour. Real life is a lot harder.
One of the few television shows I follow is a science-fiction thriller called “The 4400.” The premise is simple: over a period of fifty-plus years, people have inexplicably disappeared, one by one. Then—suddenly—they are all returned. They have no memory of where they have been, and most face a world that is vastly changed; new social mores, new technologies, new national alliances. They are also different. They have been given new powers, and some don’t cope very well with the challenge those powers represent.
The returnees encounter fear and stigma. Relatives shun them; government agencies monitor them. These dynamics give the show its dramatic tension, as does the suspense of wondering how it will all turn out.
Coincidentally, 4400 is also the number of people who return to Indianapolis annually after “disappearing.”
Of the 650,000 incarcerated individuals who are released from penal institutions in America each year, approximately 4,400 return here. Their initial disappearance from our streets was due to their own misbehavior rather than a plot device, of course, but in other ways, these ex-offenders have more in common with the television returnees than we might think.
Depending on the length of time served, many will find the world a different place. Computers, cell-phones, ATMs, transportation—all the technology that morphs with dizzying speed—has changed the everyday environment. Family members have moved, married or remarried, died or written them off.Just as in the TV show, returnees’ movements are monitored, and they face persistent stigma and suspicion and a host of perverse incentives that seem designed to make re-offending easier than going straight.
The greatest problem these ex-felons will face is getting a job. Employment has been shown to significantly decrease recidivism, but for many reasons (some sound, some not), up to 70% of private-sector employers refuse to hire ex-felons, period—irrespective of the nature of the underlying crime or its relevance to the workplace in question.
No sane person wants child molesters working at a day-care center, but as a local judge recently noted, every ex-con isn’t Charles Manson. Some are truly bad actors, but many were kids who got into bad company and made serious mistakes. Others ran afoul of our draconian drug policies. It was appropriate that they pay for breaking the rules, but we all benefit by helping those who genuinely want a fresh start.
America imprisons a greater proportion of its population than any other western nation. Most of those prisoners will eventually be returned to our communities. If we choose to slam every door, foreclose every opportunity, Indianapolis will have to deal with our own 4400—4400 people every single year who have nothing to lose by returning to lives outside the law.
There are no simple answers, no pat policy prescriptions. Sometimes, hiring an ex-offender presents an unacceptable risk; other times, refusing to give someone a second chance is the greater risk.
Television shows can wrap up problems tidily in an hour. Real life is a lot harder.
