January 2019 – Page 6 – Sheila Kennedy

Reich’s Rules

What American politicians call privatization has been a focus of much my academic work.(If you go to the “Academic papers” section of this blog and search for privatization, you’ll find a lot of entries.)

I phrase it as “what American politicians call privatization” because–as Morton Marcus pointed out to me years ago– genuine privatization is what Margaret Thatcher did in England. She sold off government-owned assets like railroads and steel mills to the private sector, after which they were private. They paid taxes, and either prospered or failed, but government no longer had much to do with them.

What Americans call “privatization” is very different. The accurate term is “contracting out” –and it refers to the decision by government agencies to provide government services through for-profit or non-profit surrogates. That process should not be confused with procurement–no one expects city hall to manufacture its own computers or the myriad other items it requires in order to function. (Admittedly, the line can get blurry: contracting with a private paving company to fill potholes, for example. But few privatization critics are troubled by those long-standing practices.)

It is important to recognize that when a government agency contracts with a surrogate to provide services that the agency is legally required to provide, government remains legally responsible for the proper delivery of those services.

Robert Reich recently enumerated five rules that should govern these decisions. His rules are very similar to those on my class lecture on the subject. It should be obvious, for example, that government shouldn’t contract out when keeping a service in-house will be more efficient and cost-effective.

Other rules are less obvious, but no less important.

Don’t privatize when the purpose of the service is to bring us together – reinforcing our communities, helping us connect with one another across class and race, linking up Americans who’d otherwise be isolated or marginalized.

This is why we have a public postal service that serves everyone, even small rural communities where for-profit private carriers often won’t go. This is why we value public education and need to be very careful that charter schools and other forms of so-called school choice don’t end up dividing our children and our communities rather than pulling them together.

Don’t privatize when the people who are supposed to get the service have no power to complain when services are poor.

This is why for-profit prison corporations have proven again and again to violate the constitutional rights of prisoners, and why for-profit detention centers for refugee children at the border pose such grave risks.

Don’t privatize when those who are getting the service have no way to know they’re receiving poor quality.

The marketers of for-profit colleges, for example, have every incentive to exploit young people and their parents because the value of the degrees they’re offering can’t easily be known. Which is why non-profit colleges and universities have proven far more trustworthy.

Don’t privatize where for-profit corporations face insufficient competition to keep prices under control.

Giant for-profit defense contractors with power over how contracts are awarded generate notorious cost overruns because they’re accountable mainly to their shareholders, not to the public.

Perhaps the most troubling contracting practices involve the military; contract soldiers are uncomfortably similar to mercenaries, and the growing use of private companies in America’s various wars and military actions generates a number of very thorny issues, a topic I’ve explored elsewhere.

One of America’s many overdue conversations should address what services we expect our various levels of government to provide and the nature and extent of the evidence needed to support a decision to outsource service delivery.

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About Those Right-Wing Judges…

As most of you know by now, a conservative judge in Texas struck down the entire Affordable Care Act, ruling it unconstitutional.

The decision is a reminder that when judges are appointed on the basis of party loyalty rather than legal acumen, the results can hurt a lot of innocent people.

Legal scholars who have reviewed the decision believe it is badly flawed and will be overturned, but Daily Kos recently enumerated the consequences should it be upheld.

The most obvious loss would be that part of the law that forbids insurance companies from excluding coverage of pre-existing conditions. But as the author noted, if the law were really to disappear, that’s just a part of what would be lost.

As many as 17 million people could lose their coverage in a single year. The 15 million people covered under Medicaid expansion could lose their coverage. The improvements to Medicare that have saved the program billions of dollars—and reduced prescription drug costs for seniors—would be erased. Young people wouldn’t be able to stay on their parents’ insurance until they’re 26. The ban on annual and lifetime caps would be gone, and medical bankruptcies would escalate. Having lady parts would again cost women more than men, and being over age 50 would cost everyone more again. Limits on out-of-pocket costs would be gone. The tax credits that 9 million people are receiving to help them pay premiums would be gone.

The post focused on the political fallout of the threatened losses. (Even Republicans concede that the issue hurts them.) But the real lessons aren’t partisan.

There are two obvious “take-aways” here.

First is the incredible amount of damage that can be done by elevating ideologues to the bench. This sort of “smash and burn” judging is a direct result of viewing the federal courts as a partisan political prize rather than a constitutional safeguard to be protected by the appointment of dispassionate, knowledgable and qualified legal scholars.

The second is equally obvious. As important as the ACA is, as much of a step forward that it represents, it falls far short of what Americans need and most other wealthy countries have long had. Not only is it vulnerable to the sort of judicial assassination we’ve just experienced, it is simply insufficient.

It would be poetic justice–not to mention actual justice–if this effort by a radical judge prompted Congress to pass Medicare for All, or at least a “public option” allowing citizens of all ages to “opt in” to the program.

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Wow

The title of a recent article by Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine was eye-catching: “I”ve seen the future of a Republican Party that is not insane.”

Chait’s essay focused on a relatively unknown think tank: the Niskanen Center. The Center was named for a now-deceased economist who served in the Reagan Administration and then worked for the libertarian Cato Institute. Toward the end of his life, he began to question libertarianism’s rigid ideological lens. He developed– and expressed– doubts about supply-side economics, based upon–gasp!–evidence that those theories hadn’t worked.

Niskanen’s observation that tax rates needed to reflect actual rather than desired spending levels is banal to right-of-center economists in almost any country. But it was (and is) absolute heresy on the Republican right, which has elevated anti-tax absolutism into a theological principle.

The Center has developed a research agenda that is detached from what Chait calls the “theological certainties” of the current GOP. Its scholars begin with the audacious assumption–scorned by fringe political activists on the left and pretty much all of the right– that policy should be based upon empirical evidence rather than ideology-cum-theology.

Center scholars have argued against “small-government monomania” and in favor of a social safety net to “increase the public’s tolerance for the dislocations of a dynamic free-market economy.” They have accused libertarianism of hostility to democracy and attributed persistent Republican efforts “to find ways to keep Democrats from voting” to that hostility.

Center scholars have compared libertarian political theories to empirical data, and concluded that the data rebuts “the notion that downward redistribution picks the pockets of makers and doles it out to layabout takers.” They have acknowledged that countries with more generous social safety nets have more robust market economies and more individual freedom.

The Center recently issued a paper conceding that an oversimplified small-government vision fails to come to terms with important facts about political and economic life, including the persistence of structural racism. The libertarian belief that capitalism’s rewards are based almost exclusively on merit and hard work ignores the massive inequality that was originally produced by brute force.

Although the paper argues convincingly that market forces do a better job than central planners, it also notes that most of the regulations movement conservatives target are those that advance legitimate social objectives — protecting health, safety and the environment — and impose costs on existing firms. The regulations they believe do need to be scaled back are rules imposed by state and local governments to protect owners of businesses and land.

That is, they recognize that regulations can be either good or bad–and they argue that Republicans are attacking the wrong ones. To oppose regulation per se is to ignore the realities of 21st Century economies.

Chait’s reference to ideology as “theology” illuminates the central problem of our times: “true believers” of all sorts who elevate fact-free belief over evidence, who reject the complexities of the real world in favor of a simple one defined by bright lines and moral absolutes, and who are profoundly uncomfortable with ambiguity.

It’s a short step from “true believer” to cult member–and today’s GOP looks more and more like a cult. If insanity is the rejection of evidence-based decision-making, Chait’s title makes perfect sense.

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Speaking Of Thought Crimes…

Or, in this case, a crime against thought.

A couple of readers alerted me to a rambling, incoherent and profoundly inaccurate “op ed”opposing hate crimes legislation that was sent to a number of smaller Indiana newspapers by four members of the Indiana House of Representatives: Bruce Borders, Matt Hostettler, Christopher Judy and Curt Nisly. I don’t know any of them, but I do know that if students of mine displayed so profound a disconnect from reality, they’d get failing grades.

The letter began by asserting that the proposed hate crimes bill is “an attack on Western Civilization,” and they ramp up the hysteria from there.

They do make one valid point: in our legal system, we punish behavior, not ideas. If the legislation proposed to sanction hate speech, they’d be correct to oppose it. But that isn’t what a hate crimes bill does–and contrary to their assertion that passage would usher in an Orwellian world of thought control (and no, I am not making that up, that’s part of their screed), that thought control has yet to emerge in the 45 states that have had similar laws on their books for a number of years.

Indiana’s version has yet to be finalized, but here’s the general way these measures operate: let’s say person X beats up person Y. Let’s further assume that the crime of battery carries a statutory sentence of 2-4 years. The judge must decide what portion of that time X will serve, and will make that determination after weighing what lawyers call mitigating and aggravating circumstances.

Let’s say X had previously been law-abiding, had too much to drink, and Y insulted his wife. Those are mitigating circumstances, and the Judge is likely to give him the minimum sentence called for by the statute.

But what if X had previous arrests or convictions, showed no remorse, and attacked Y out of the blue? The judge would consider those facts to be “aggravating,” and would undoubtedly hand down a sentence at the high end of the statutory range.

The judicial system recognizes a number of specific elements that are considered mitigating or aggravating, and that Judges should take into account in determining the punishment for a criminal act. Currently, in Indiana, motivation due to bigotry is not one of those standard elements. A hate crimes bill will add it.

Battery is a crime, a criminal act. In my hypothetical, it carries a sentence of 2 to 4 years. (I have no idea what the statutory range really is, this is for illustration.) If Indiana passes a hate crimes act, and X beats the you-know-what out of Y while shouting racist or anti-semitic or homophobic epithets, the Judge will be required to take that evidence into account when determining the length of X’s sentence.

In all probability, some judges would consider the hateful motivation even in the absence of a law, but there is no requirement that they do so. Having such a law on the books is recognition that criminal acts prompted by bigotry are not only unAmerican, but cause fear and anxiety in members of the victim’s targeted group.

Please note, we are talking about criminal acts. If Representatives Borders, Hostettler, Judy and Nisly want to tell the world they hate gay people or Jewish people or black people, they remain free to do so. If they want to “hold beliefs contrary to governing authorities,” this measure will not unleash the “Thought Police,” despite their hysterical assertions to the contrary.

They just can’t communicate those thoughts through anti-semitic graffiti on a synagogue wall–because that would be an act— the crime of vandalism.

I don’t know whether the letter is evidence of a lack of candor or a lack of basic understanding of the legal system, but if its authors are representative of our representatives, it explains a lot about the Indiana General Assembly.

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An Excellent Rant

My youngest son introduced me to Gin and Tacos a year or so ago, and it has become one of my favorite blogs, mostly because the blogger lets fly with whatever has most recently pissed him off, and I can really, really relate. The blogger has a name, of course, Ed Bermila, and has helpfully included a description of himself, written in third person and sarcasm.

Ed is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Midwestern Liberal Arts University after receiving his Ph.D. in political science from Giant Midwestern Public University and teaching for three years at Giant Southern Public University. He teaches Intro to American Government, Public Opinion, Elections, and The Presidency to a select group of very lucky boys and girls each semester. His academic research studies the spatial and geographic context of political behavior – partisanship, turnout, and public opinion. He also performs stand-up comedy on the regular and plays/played drums in a band called Tremendous Fucking. Like every band on the planet, they have a MySpace. It is highly recommended that you buy their latest album off of iTunes in order to get into heaven. Sometimes he stands on a stage and tells jokes as well, inasmuch as scathing social criticism can be described as a joke.

There’s more, but you get the tone.

I particularly liked his post–rant?– from mid-December, titled “Who is ‘we’?”which he introduced as follows:

My least favorite genre of journalism is the retrospective “How did we miss this?” piece that comes after years of the profession sticking its head in the sand and refusing to see something inconvenient. The New York Times actually had the balls to print a headline like “The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, and How We Missed It.”

Who missed it? That’s a serious question. Who makes up the demographic “Did not see a disturbing rise in explicitly racist and xenophobic politics” and where were these people during the eight years Obama was president? It seems unlikely that an even mildly observant person could have failed to notice that about 20% of the people in this country came psychologically unmoored over the idea of having a black president.

I think the answer to “who missed it?” is: people who were intentionally obtuse. I still recall a conversation with the husband of one of my many cousins, not long after Obama was elected. I said something about how dispiriting I’d found the emergence of racist rhetoric, especially on line, and he looked at me blankly and said “Really? I haven’t noticed anything like that.”

This guy is a high-priced lawyer, and there really was no way he could have avoided coverage of the phenomenon, even if he had somehow escaped the online onslaught. During our conversation, it became clear that he wanted to attribute the growing concerns about racism to “Democrats playing the race card.”

As Bermila notes, the self-identified “centrists”in the media are obsessed with what he calls “Decorum and playing nice.” People will chastise you if you point out that the king really does seem to be naked.

“It’s rude and unproductive to call people you disagree with politically racists or Nazis, tut-tut!” Yes, well, these people are really racist and some of them are taking that to the logical extreme of becoming actual Nazis. Like, with swastikas and stuff….

Add to that the seriously misplaced priorities of the establishment media, which values blaming nobody and everybody equally (Both sides are wrong!) over identifying problems and assigning responsibility even when it’s patently obvious. The only way to miss right-wing extremism’s rise is to operate your media outlet while more afraid of being chided by right-wingers than of totally missing a crucial story.

And for those “retrospective” stories, the ones where you can almost picture the reporter wringing his hands in dismay while asking how “we” missed this, Ed has an appropriate response:

“We” didn’t miss it. You did.

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