Public Policy and Governance – Page 232

Health and That Chinese “Hoax”

One of the unfortunate aspects of this bizarre Presidential campaign has been the lack of attention to the truly important issues America faces. Not that sexual assault, bigotry and massive ignorance are unimportant, but between disclosures about Trump’s “groping,” his “scorched earth” attacks on pretty much everyone, and his increasingly obvious mental health issues, the Orange One has sucked up all the oxygen in the room, with the result that issues of enormous consequence have received little attention, and even less thoughtful discussion.

Earlier this month, I posted about Trump’s selection of “environmental experts” for his transition team–a group of denialists about the reality of climate change.

We are already experiencing the severe weather that we’ve been warned will accompany our new climate reality; hurricanes that pick up power from warming oceans, flooding in some regions, droughts in others. But it isn’t only weather and agriculture that should concern us.

I often quote my cousin, an eminent cardiologist whose own blog is devoted to providing accurate medical information and debunking what he aptly calls “snake oil.” He recently reminded me that there is a health dimension to climate change that is too often overlooked:

At this time, most thoughtful people acknowledge the reality of humanly generated climate change on our environment, but they often fail to understand the real threat this poses to human health in general.

Now, the American College of Physicians (ACP), one of our most respected medical institutions, has issued a sobering position paper on climate change and it effects on human health, including higher rates of respiratory and heat-related illness, increased prevalence of vector-borne and waterborne diseases, food and water insecurity, and malnutrition. Persons who are elderly, sick, or poor are especially vulnerable to these potential consequences, according to this group. The ACP also states its belief that it’s incumbent on all those in the health industry to play an active role in protecting human health and averting dire environmental outcomes.

This ACP publication emphasizes that climate change presents a “catastrophic risk” to human health over the next hundred years that may wipe out all of the health advances made over the previous 100 years. The average temperature on Earth has increased by almost 1 degree since 1889, and greenhouse gas emissions have increased by almost 50% from 2005 to 2011. It is predicted that by the end of the century, the Earth’s temperature may increase by 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit. Ice in the Arctic and Antarctic seas has melted at unprecedented rates and the water levels worldwide have risen by almost 7 inches over the last 100 years. The World Health Organization has predicted that climate change will cause an additional 250,000 deaths per year from 2030 to 2050 due to malnutrition, increased malaria, increased respiratory illness, heat-related illness, food issues due to crop losses, and increases in waterborne infectious diseases and vector-borne illness:

Their current recommendations include the following:

The entire health care community throughout the world must engage in environmentally sustainable practices that reduce carbon emissions.
Support efforts to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change.
Educate the public, their colleagues, their community, and lawmakers about the health risks posed by climate change

As guardians of human health, we must assume a more active role in avoiding these disastrous consequences—if not for our own well-being, but for that for our children and all future generations! These efforts could well begin with how we all vote in the coming election!

My concern is not simply with the efforts of fossil fuel companies to stave off changes so that they can continue to profit, or with the fundamentalists (too many of whom are in Congress) who piously insist that God will take care of us.

My concern is that far too many of us arguably normal folks will react just like patients whose doctors tell them to quit smoking or start exercising– patients who know the doctor is right, but who lack the will to follow through.

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Speaking of Jerks We’ve Elected….

Todd Rokita.

I knew Rokita was a partisan hack when he introduced Indiana’s Voter ID law, which he sanctimoniously declared was a “good government” measure intended to stop all that nasty in-person “voter fraud” that doesn’t really happen, rather than an effort to prevent “those people” from voting. But in a year when his party’s Presidential ticket is composed of a megalomaniac and a Christian Warrior, I’d sort of forgotten about him.

Last week, however, Rokita had a column in the Indianapolis Business Journal that reminded me why he shouldn’t be in public office.

Rokita was on a rant against the federal Department of Education for its “assault on profit-making.” Translation: how dare the department move against ITT. It hasn’t taken similar action against public institutions! (Rockita also threw in a snide criticism of the IBJ’s editorial board, which had blamed the federal action on ITT’s management.)

Boiled down to its disingenuous basics, Rokita’s argument was that the federal government, motivated solely by liberal animosity to for-profit ventures–had overstepped its authority.

Missing from his diatribe were those pesky little things called “facts.” For years, ITT overcharged students for a shoddy product (its credits wouldn’t even transfer to most other institutions).It enrolled students without regard for their ability to benefit from higher education, because We the Taxpayers were paying the very hefty freight.

State and federal agencies have been investigating ITT since 2002, and it currently faces fraud charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission and a lawsuit from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It has been under investigation by at least 19 state attorneys general.

When U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. issued the Department’s decision to impose increased sanctions upon ITT, he emphasized that the move was not made lightly.

“Ultimately, we made a difficult choice to pursue additional oversight in order to protect you, other students, and taxpayers from potentially worse educational and financial damage in the future if ITT was allowed to continue operating without increased oversight and assurances to better serve students,” King wrote.

ITT was one of several for-profit “educational” endeavors ripping off both taxpayers and the students who left with substandard educations and huge loans to repay. Legitimate institutions of higher education, public and private, have been calling for more oversight of for-profit colleges for a long time.

To label this overdue regulatory action “liberal overreach” is (pardon my language) bullshit.

I can only assume that ITT or its shareholders are among Todd Rokita’s donors. Or his relatives. Or something. The only other explanation for so dishonest a column is abject ignorance.

I am grateful for one thing, though. The column reminded me why I have no use for Todd Rokita.

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If Only Idiocy Was Confined to Texas

One of my favorite blogs, as I’ve noted here before, is “Juanita Jean’s, the World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc.” In a recent post, Juanita Jean takes Texas’ Lt. Governor Dan Patrick to task for being, as she delicately puts it, “a damn fool.”

Juanita is too restrained.

We have a few minor problems in Texas. We are next to last in education. We are first in uninsured children. Our maternal death rate has doubled, making it twice what it is in Turkey and Chile. Our roads and bridges are crumbling. A quarter of Texas children live in poverty.

And what is Dan Patrick concerned about?

Keeping men out of ladies’ rooms.

screen-shot-2016-09-26-at-9-39-33-am There ya go. This man is burning rocket fuel to Crazyville.

You can write this on the barn with waterproof paint: Dan Patrick thinks about sex waaaaay too much.

If this idiocy was confined to Texas (a state which sometimes seems to have invented embarrassingly bad public policy), that would be one thing, but this fixation on who uses what bathroom is hardly unique to Texas.

Given the real issues America faces, it seems incomprehensible. But I do have a theory. (Yes, I always have a theory…cockamamie as some of them may be.)

We have a cohort of Americans–mostly older Americans, and mostly but not exclusively men–who wake up every morning to a world they no longer understand. Technology is complicated. Their position in society is no longer secure. Minorities are asserting legal rights. Change is constant. Media outlets looking for “clicks” and eyeballs tell them that terrorists and criminals are everywhere, just waiting to pounce.

They are convinced that they are losing America–and it’s true that they are losing the America they imagine they used to occupy. So they support Patrick and Trump and others like them. They desperately want to put black people back on the other side of the tracks and gay people back in the closet. Those efforts aren’t going so well–so they’ve shifted the focus to transgender folks. After all, transgender equality is a “Johnny-come-lately” civil rights movement–and fewer people actually know transgender people.

They may not understand climate change or economic policy or what’s happening in Aleppo or what the hell Snapchat is, but they do know what restrooms are.

On the other hand, most of them definitely do not know what irony is.

As a number of people have pointed out in the wake of the “grab her by the p—y” tape, the same men who have been absolutely horrified at the thought of a transgender person urinating in the same restroom with their wives and daughters–the same men who are hellbent to protect the “sanctity of the stall”– are the ones dismissing Trump’s braggadocio about his sexual assaults as “locker room talk.”

This isn’t about transgender folks. This is about the loss of male privilege. If anyone is going to assault their women, it had better be (their version of) a real man!

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Voter Frauds

One of the most pernicious tactics employed by Republican political operatives is voter suppression masquerading as protection against “voter fraud.” As proponents of Voter ID are well aware, such fraud as exists almost never happens during the in-person vote process that Voter ID laws target.

Virtually all of the “Voter ID” measures being pushed by Republicans are thinly-veiled efforts to intimidate poor and minority voters, who are more likely to vote Democratic. This year, the suspicions fostered by these ungrounded accusations of voter fraud have been further inflamed by Donald Trump’s insistence that, if he doesn’t win, it will be proof that the election is “rigged.”

Here in central Indiana, the media has been reporting on an investigation that newspaper and broadcast outlets have labeled “voter fraud”–but that should be called “registration fraud.”

Interestingly–at least from the somewhat garbled news reports–they are investigating what appears to be an effort to disenfranchise legitimate voters, rather than provide phony credentials to illegitimate ones. Easily detectable inaccurate information is apparently being coupled with the names of actual voters, who may not check to be sure they are properly registered, and won’t realize they aren’t until they appear at their precinct voting place and are rejected.

Until more details are released, it’s hard to tell precisely what scheme is being alleged. Whatever the actual scam turns out to be, the labeling of any dishonesty focused on the franchise as “vote fraud” simply confirms the public’s belief that there’s justification for Voter ID laws–even though people getting hit by lightning occurs more frequently than in-person vote fraud.

Illegal voting behaviors include such things as double voting (ballot stuffing), where one individual casts more than one ballot in the same election; dead voting, where the name of a deceased person remains on a state’s official list of registered voters and a living person casts a ballot using that name; felon voter fraud, where a convicted felon who is for that reason not eligible to vote does so; vote-buying, where someone pays voters to vote a certain way; and fraud by election officials: where dishonest officials toss out ballots or cast ballots using the names of registered voters who didn’t show up at the polls.

As anyone who has worked at the polls can tell you, the best guarantee against these efforts to “rig” the system is competent management of the state’s voter rolls–purging dead and otherwise ineligible voters, ensuring that poll watchers from both major parties are present and similar safeguards. Vote buying is by far the most difficult to detect, and Voter ID would do nothing to prevent it.

The election fraud we see most frequently, ironically, is voter suppression, defined by Ballotpedia as “A variety of tactics aimed at lowering or suppressing the number of voters who might otherwise vote in a particular election.”

During this election cycle, a new concern has arisen: the possibility that an election dependent upon electronic voting machines might be hacked. As the Brennan Center has noted, however,

There are over 10,000 election jurisdictions in the United States. This means in a federal election, there are essentially more than 10,000 separate elections being run, with different voting machines, ballots, rules, and security measures. One clear benefit of this system is that it is not possible to attack the nation’s voting machines in one location, as might be possible with a statewide voter registration database or campaign email server.

Bottom line: no one is going to “steal” or “rig” this election. If the results are–to coin a word–“deplorable,” American voters will have only ourselves to blame.

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And for the Department of Head in the Sand….

Another day, another reason to view Donald Trump as a threat not just to the United States and the rule of law, but to the entire globe.

As has been widely reported, Trump has called global warming “bullshit” and he has said that, if elected, he would “cancel” the Paris climate accord and reverse President Obama’s executive actions on climate change. Now, he has announced that Myron Ebell will head up his climate transition team, should he be elected President.

And who is Myron Ebell?

Ebell certainly is not a climate scientist. He is instead a disinformation specialist on global warming, working out of the D.C. offices of the right-wing, Koch-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute as chief of the Center for Energy and Environment. He is also chairman of Cooler Heads Coalition, a collection of propagandists that “question[s] global warming alarmism and oppose energy-rationing policies.” And now he’s been picked to head Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team.

The rest of this “environmental team” are equally frightening.

Also appointed by Trump: Mike McKenna to guide the Department of Energy transition team. He’s worked in the energy field for former Virginia Republican Gov. George Allen and in the George H.W. Bush administration. He’s currently a lobbyist for Koch Companies Public Sector LLC, Southern Company Services, Dow Chemical Co. and Competitive Power Ventures Inc. David Bernhardt, formerly with the U.S. Department of Interior, will be heading the DOI transition team. Bernhardt works the Natural Resources Department of the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Faber Shreck. Among other things, he has represented clients involved in energy development on American Indian lands and businesses accused of violating the Department of the Interior’s regulations.

There are two main categories of science deniers: those who place their immediate financial interests above the common good and their children and grandchildren’s futures; and people like Donald Trump, who live in a reality of their own construction.

As with other aspects of the real world, Trump and his ilk apparently believe that it is possible to ignore facts, science and empirical evidence if you simply put your fingers in your ears and go “la la la, I can’t hear you.”

The problem with childish responses to complex, adult problems isn’t simply that they don’t solve those problems. It’s that they make them much worse.

Whether the Donalds of the world want to believe it or not, climate change is not only occurring, it’s accelerating. The consequences–even if we begin to act responsibly–will be enormously costly, and will reshape global population patterns and politics.

If we don’t act responsibly, they will be catastrophic.

Another reason–as if we needed one– to reject the Orange Buffoon.

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