Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Mayor Pete

I have never voted for a candidate with whom I agreed 100% on specific policies.

Instead, I think I do what most people do; we vote for candidates who share our values, candidates we feel we can trust, who possess personal characteristics we deem admirable. If the Trump presidency has taught us anything, it is the supreme importance of those characteristics–sound judgment, integrity, intellect, diligence, respect for the institutions of government and the rule of law, and a genuine desire to work for the common good. A little humility helps a lot.

Trump possesses none of those qualities– I doubt he is even able to recognize them.

Character does count, and it counts far more than this or that specific policy prescription. (Which is  why Democrats’ predictable “circular firing squads” and insistence on total purity drives me nuts.)

There are a lot of talented people running for the Democratic Presidential nomination. I like several of them, dislike others, and worry that still others would not be as competitive as necessary. That said, I will obviously vote for anyone who emerges as the party’s choice. (Hell, I’d probably vote for Beelzebub if he was running against Trump and his cabal.)

But my top choice so far is Mayor Pete, for a number of reasons.

As I have previously written, I am convinced that it is time for younger leadership. Mayor Pete’s performance thus far–and his rise from obscurity to third place in national polls in a matter of months–bodes well for a general election. His obvious intellect, extensive knowledge and thoughtful demeanor are all reassuring and would be a welcome change from the embarrassing ignorance bloviating daily from Trump’s White House.

Above all, I appreciate his authenticity; everything I’ve seen or read, and everyone from South Bend I’ve talked with, says this guy is the “real deal.”

I think a recent article by Ezra Klein at Vox best captures why Pete’s message so attracts me. 

Some excerpts:

There was a word missing from the speech Pete Buttigieg gave in South Bend, Indiana, announcing his presidential campaign. It’s a word you heard twice in Bernie Sanders’s and Beto O’Rourke’s announcement speeches, nine times in Cory Booker’s, 21 times in Kirsten Gillibrand’s, 23 times in Kamala Harris’s, and 25 times in Elizabeth Warren’s.

That word? “Fight.”

Instead, Buttigieg returned to a word those speeches shied away from, a word whose relative absence from the Democratic primary is all the stranger given its potency in past Democratic campaigns.

That word? “Hope,” which Buttigieg said eight times, Gillibrand said three times, O’Rourke uttered once, and Sanders, Harris, Warren, and Booker avoided entirely.

Klein cites to 70 years of research confirming that fear motivates conservatives and hope motivates liberals.

At the core of this worldview divide is hope, in its most basic, literal form. Are you hopeful about new things, new people, new places? Does change excite you? Does difference? If it does, you are more likely to be liberal. If you look at the new, the different, and feel a spike of fear, you’re more likely to be a conservative….

Obama and Trump, in their respective campaigns, took this subtext of American politics and made it into bumper stickers. A black man with a strange name won the presidency tying together the words “change” and “hope.” He was succeeded by a white man who won the presidency promising to turn back the clock, who built a campaign around the word “again.”…

A lot of liberals, temperamentally and psychologically, don’t want a fight. They don’t want politics to be an endless war; they believe that mutual understanding is possible, that the country will respond to someone willing to believe and call forth the best of it. That’s not just their view of politics; it’s their view of life. It’s the view that Obama spoke to in the speech that made him a star:

Even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

Klein compared aspects of Buttigieg’s announcement speech to Obama’s messaging, and then quoted Pete saying :“It’s time to walk away from the politics of the past and toward something totally different.”

I don’t know about other people, but I am so ready for something totally different. I am so ready to hope again.

There’s an old political maxim to the effect that Republicans fall in line and Democrats fall in love. I think I’m in love.

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Those “Mexican” Countries

It’s no wonder Donald Trump loves Fox News. In the annals of stupidity, they are fellow over-achievers.

Paul Krugman’s recent newsletter referenced the most recent evidence (as if we needed any) that Fox is not a legitimate news outlet:

Social media had a field day after “Fox & Friends Weekend” opened its show with a banner reading “Trump cuts off aid to three Mexican countries.” It was a stupid error, but also revealing: Clearly, a lot of the staff at Fox think all them brown people are the same.

And meanwhile, Trump is trying to cut off aid to a fourth Mexican country — one that happens to be part of the United States, home to three million U.S. citizens.

What that Fox banner was about was Trump’s order to the State Department to cut off all aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, countries that have recently been the source of many would-be migrants to the U.S. Leaving aside the reality that the “border crisis” is a figment of Trump’s imagination, what, exactly, is this aid cutoff supposed to accomplish?

The cutoff will, after all, make the conditions that have led some central Americans to flee their homes even worse, increasing their incentive to try to move north. So what are the governments of these nations supposed to do? Erect barriers to keep their people in?

The insanity of Trump’s approach was highlighted by an email I received from a friend. Dick Patterson is a  retired academic who used to live in Indiana, and who wrote about his recent trip to those “Mexican” countries.

In January, 2018 I joined an Indiana Audubon Society birding trip to northern Honduras. We flew in to San Pedro Sula, a small city in the north. I had never before heard of San Pedro Sula, but it was an attractive small city. Little did I know that it was a hotbed for gang violence and was soon going be the starting point for columns of migration north.

The view from the airplane of the ground below was of square miles of banana plantations, followed by more square miles of what I learned were pineapple plantations…  I was told that the plantation hires local people as laborers, but don’t provide permanent jobs because the company does not want to pay benefits. The jobs are in the tropical sun and the workers are exposed to toxic chemicals.

Honduras has more than bananas and pineapple plantations. Palm oil, cacao, sugar cane and coffee are also grown. The plantations take up most of the good farmland, with Chiquita and Dole taking up 60%.

In 2018 president Hernandez ran for a second term. Despite the fact that the constitution allows only one term, he won. Our birding guide, an extremely intelligent civic-minded man, just shrugged his shoulders, and said he just had to get on with his life.

In summary, a corrupt banana republic.

Is it any wonder that the best job available is to join a gang that extorts money from local businesses? Or that hordes of people see no future there? And now Trump wants to cut off foreign aid because they can’t keep everybody home in these conditions.

We could help by pressuring the American fruit corporations to clean up their act. Cutting off foreign aid will only make a bad situation worse.

Making a bad situation worse might just be the mantra of American foreign policy. How many times, in how many situations, have we pursued what State Department naifs conceived of as our short-term advantage only to find that we had undermined our long-term interests?

With the “election” of a man who has zero understanding of geopolitics, who sees every interaction as a zero-sum game and every country other than Russia as either a competitor or an enemy, we have abandoned even the pretense of a rational foreign policy. We now have a “Christian warrior” as Secretary of State, a President who is incapable of understanding cause and effect, and a Republican propaganda machine that labels all countries south of the border as “Mexican.”

It’s an embarrassing time to be an American.

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Taxes, Trump And 2020

In an introduction to his daily newsletter, the New York Times’ David Leonhardt recently commented on the most recent effort to obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns, and the continued refusal of Trump and his Treasury Department to provide them.

The most innocent possibility is that he isn’t nearly as wealthy as he has long boasted, and he’s embarrassed by the truth. A less innocent possibility is that he has financial ties that could create political problems for him if those ties became public — for example, ties to Russia or other countries to which his foreign policy has been suspiciously friendly.

The release of the returns would let “Americans decide whether the president is making decisions that benefit his businesses at the expense of American taxpayers,” Aaron Scherb of Common Cause, the government watchdog group, has written in USA Today. “If Trump has significant debt to banks and/or individuals in certain countries, some of which might be adversaries of the United States, we must know because his foreign policy decisions might be compromised.”

Whatever the reason, it is obvious that Trump is hiding something. And it isn’t only his tax situation. We’re also supposed to believe his repeated bragging that he is smart (despite copious evidence to the contrary), and ignore the fact that he has threatened to sue his high school and college if they release his grades.

His stubborn refusal to release his taxes, however, suggests a relatively simple strategy to prevent his earning a second term in office. Bear with me here.

There is a lot wrong with our current electoral system, and one of the “wrongest” is that each state has the authority to administer election contests within that state. That allows for a lot of mischief (if you don’t believe me, look at Georgia’s last, arguably stolen,  gubernatorial contest), but mischief is as mischief does…

States can make  rules governing candidates access to the state’s ballot. Last year, legislation was introduced in some twenty-six states to make disclosure of five years of tax returns a condition of accessing that state’s ballot, but none has yet passed.

There is hope from Washington State, however, as The Stranger pointed out a couple of weeks ago.

On Tuesday evening a bill requiring all presidential and vice presidential candidates to disclose the last 5 years of their tax returns in order to appear on Washington state ballots passed the Senate floor. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Patty Kuderer (D-Bellevue), passed 28 to 21 along party lines, because of course it did.

If Gov. Inslee ends up signing this bill, Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and Joe Bernie Sanders Warren Harris would have to show us the money if they want to get a vote from a single Washingtonian.

Twenty-six other states have introduced similar legislation, but so far none have taken. Two years ago, California’s Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a similar bill that passed through both chambers there.

Over the phone, Sen. Kuderer said she was “optimistic” Inslee would see “the wisdom in this bill” and sign it if it gets to him, making Washington state the first to force candidates to disclose returns to get on the ballot.

“Voters have a right to know what a candidate’s conflict of interests are, they have a right to know their businesses’ ties, their obligations, who they’re beholden to,” Kuderer said. “We’ve come to expect presidents and vice presidents to release their tax returns. It’s become a vital piece of information when making a decision for the office,” she added.

Last week, the Illinois legislature also took steps toward passing such a requirement.

If just a couple of states were to require disclosure as a condition of appearing on the ballot of that state, we could assure The Donald’s defeat in 2020. Either he would finally make his returns public–allowing us to see whatever highly damaging information he has been hiding–or he would lose enough votes, both popular and electoral, to deny him a second term.

Because allowing him to remain in office beyond the term we are already suffering through would be very taxing…

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How Shall Trump Kill Us? Let Us Count The Ways…

Just in the past week, I’ve come across several accounts of the Trump Administration’s war on regulation–you know, those pesky rules that impede commerce by denying businesses the “liberty” of selling shoddy and dangerous goods to an unwary public.

First, the Washington Post has reported on changes at the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The crashes were brutal. With no warning, the front wheel on the three-wheeled BOB jogging strollers fell off, causing the carriages to careen and even flip over. Adults shattered bones. They tore ligaments. Children smashed their teeth. They gashed their faces. One child bled from his ear canal.

Staff members at the Consumer Product Safety Commission collected 200 consumer-submitted reports from 2012 to 2018 of spontaneous failure of the stroller wheel, which is secured to a front fork by a quick-release lever, like on a bicycle. Nearly 100 adults and children were injured, according to the commission. The agency’s staff members investigated for months before deciding in 2017 that one of the most popular jogging strollers on the market was unsafe and needed to be recalled.

The manufacturer refused to issue a voluntary recall of the nearly 500,000 strollers, insisting they were safe when used as instructed. The agency sued.

Then Trump was elected.

 According to a review of documents by The Washington Post and interviews with eight current and former senior agency officials, the agency’s Republican chairwoman kept Democratic commissioners in the dark about the stroller investigation and then helped end the case in court.

The settlement did not include a recall or formal correction plan.

Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times looks at food inspections.His column’s title– “Donald Trump is Trying to Kill You”–isn’t really an exaggeration. As Krugman notes, even if he’s a one-term president, Trump will have caused, directly or indirectly, the premature deaths of a large number of Americans.

Some of those deaths will come at the hands of right-wing, white nationalist extremists, who are a rapidly growing threat, partly because they feel empowered by a president who calls them “very fine people.”

Some will come from failures of governance, like the inadequate response to Hurricane Maria, which surely contributed to the high death toll in Puerto Rico. (Reminder: Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.)

Some will come from the administration’s continuing efforts to sabotage Obamacare..

But the biggest death toll is likely to come from Trump’s agenda of deregulation — or maybe we should call it “deregulation,” because his administration is curiously selective about which industries it wants to leave alone.

The administration recently announced plans to allow hog plants to take over a large part of what is currently federal responsibility for food safety inspections.

And why not? It’s not as if we’ve seen safety problems arise from self-regulation in, say, the aircraft industry, have we? Or as if we ever experience major outbreaks of food-borne illness? Or as if there was a reason the U.S. government stepped in to regulate meatpackingin the first place?

Krugman notes that the administration also wants to roll back rules that limit emissions of mercury from power plants, and has acted to prevent the EPA from explaining the benefits of reduced mercury emissions. But the Trump  Administration is very worried about supposed negative side effects of renewable energy, negatives which, as Krugman points out, “generally exist only in their imagination.”

Last year the administration floated a proposal that would have forced the operators of electricity grids to subsidize coal and nuclear energy. The supposed rationale was that new sources were threatening to destabilize those grids — but the grid operators themselves denied that this was the case.

An administration willing to “trust” pork producers insists that wind turbines cause cancer. This may just be because the President is monumentally ignorant (and clinically insane), but Krugman reminds us to follow the money.

Political contributions from the meat-processing industry overwhelmingly favor Republicans. Coal mining supports the G.O.P. almost exclusively. Alternative energy, on the other hand, generally favors Democrats.

Baby strollers, I assume, are manufactured by contributors to the GOP…one of the consolations of old age is no longer having a baby to stroll…

Thanks to growing up kosher, I still don’t eat pork. The rest of you might rethink that too.

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Indiana–Ignoring Law, Pursing Bad Policy

The current push by the Trump Administration to add work requirements to Medicaid is stupid and unworkable–not that Trump understands or cares. It is also likely to be costly–adding another condition to receipt of health care is yet another bureaucratic task, another box to be checked off by someone who must be paid to do the checking.

People knowledgable about the program point out that virtually all Medicaid recipients fall into one of three categories. They are elderly, disabled or children. (This is an administration that doesn’t listen to experts, of course. The President’s “gut” is the basis of policy, not evidence or fact.) The consensus of opinion from experts is that it would cost far more to administer the requirement than it would save by throwing a very few people off the program (unless, of course, the requirement is applied more broadly than justified).

And that brings me to my own State of Indiana, where ideology consistently defeats both facts and common sense. Indiana is continuing to pursue work requirements despite the overwhelming evidence that it’s a stupid policy and despite the fact that recent federal court decisions hold that it violates federal law.

On Wednesday, a judge struck down Arkansas and Kentucky’s Medicaid work requirement programs, throwing the future of the conservative health policy — and Medicaid expansion at large — into question.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s ruling blocks Kentucky from implementing its program — which was the first approved by the Trump administration in January 2018 — and puts an end to Arkansas’ program, which has been running since June and has led to the loss of health care for tens of thousands of people.

In a case expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Boasberg ruled that “Medicaid is an entitlement” and that the defendants “did not address … how the project would implicate the ‘core’ objective of Medicaid: the provision of medical coverage to the needy.”

A number of Republicans echo the position taken by (increasingly unpopular) Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin. Bevin has vowed to end Kentucky’s entire Medicaid expansion program if he can’t implement the work requirements. That  would mean 400,000 people would lose their health insurance–but punitive ideology is clearly more important to Bevin than the health care of 400,000 citizens of his state.

Gives “my way or the highway” a whole new emphasis….

What makes this position especially egregious is that it isn’t prompted by cost concerns; it is entirely motivated by opposition to government-provided health care even when the federal government is paying for it.

Work requirements for Medicaid, the nation’s health insurance for the poor, sprang up after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature legislation. The law allows and helps states offer Medicaid to more low-income people. The federal government initially pays 100 percent — and eventually 90 percent — of the costs of expanding eligibility to people earning 138 percent of the federal poverty line.

Most of the early adopters of Medicaid expansion were Democratic-led states. Some Republican-led states have slowly expanded coverage, but most of them have added a work requirement for nondisabled people — a policy that the Obama administration repeatedly rejected. Under the Trump administration, CMS has approved work requirement waivers for Arkansas, Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio and Wisconsin.

I will never understand the Republican animus toward the poor. Whatever happened to the Christian admonition about caring for “the least of us”?

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