Category Archives: Random Blogging

My Very Own, Home-Hatched Conspiracy Theory

Maybe I’ve been drinking too much of the seasonal eggnog.

Yesterday, I began to hear reports that Brian Bosma and David Long had decided to reject Common Core. Now, in the real world, that makes no sense–Indiana is well along the trajectory of implementing Common Core, some 75% of teachers endorse it, and most of the opposition comes from folks who automatically resist anything promoted by the federal government (because, you know, it’s being promoted by the federal government), and others who don’t know the difference between standards and curriculum.

Changing back to state-specific standards now will be very costly. So why would a couple of fiscal watchdogs who supported Common Core when Tony Bennett was in office take this sudden U-Turn?

Here’s where my eggnog addled conspiracy theory kicks in: Bosma and Long really, really want to extricate themselves from the no-win mess they’ve gotten themselves into over HJR6. They want to change that second sentence and kick that can down the road. But there’s Eric Miller, with his mega-church primary voters, and he needs to be appeased by winning something. There must be some bone to throw him. The media has turned up the heat on the negligent and/or abusive “Church ministries” daycare operations he’s intent upon protecting. So–let’s let him “win” the battle against those awful feds and their Common Core!

LIke I say, maybe it’s the eggnog.

Maybe it isn’t.

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Myths We Live By

Recently, New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote a compelling reflection on achievement as an act of defiance. Life, he tells us, is like a hill, and when you are born at the bottom of that hill, you have a choice between climbing or staying at the bottom.

But this was no “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps” harangue.

The article began with a forthright acknowledgment of the outsized role played by luck and favor in our society–with Blow’s recognition that what separates the comfortable from the needy is rarely as simple as hard work and diligence. As he prefaces his discussion:

I don’t buy into the mythology that most poor people are willfully and contentedly poor, happy to live with the help of handouts from a benevolent big government that is equally happy to keep them dependent.

These are all arguments based on shame, meant to distance traditional power structures from emerging ones, to allow for draconian policy arguments from supposedly caring people. These arguments require faith in personal failure as justification for calling our fellow citizens feckless or doctrinally disfavored.

Those who espouse such arguments must root for failures so that they’re proved right. They need their worst convictions to be affirmed: that other people’s woes are due solely to their bad choices and bad behaviors; that there are no systematic suppressors at play; that the way to success is wide open to all those who would only choose it.

Blow endorses effort and hard work for their own sake, with eyes wide open to the hard facts of life–that is, that although effort and hard work cannot guarantee reward, not working hard will pretty much guarantee failure. He accepts life on its own terms (as Jimmy Carter once said, fundamentally unfair) without using those terms as an excuse for giving up.

We are obligated to play the hand we’re dealt, even when the deck is stacked against us. And the deck is stacked against a lot of people.

I don’t think I am the only person who is incredibly tired of those self-satisfied folks who–having been born on or near the top of the hill–not only brag about their prowess as climbers, but sneer at the “losers” stuck below. (My grandmother used to describe them as “born on 3d base and think they’ve hit a triple.”)

I’m tired of the self-proclaimed, “self-made” businessman (almost always a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heterosexual male) who is incapable of recognizing his dependence on the social infrastructure that privileged him over more marginalized folks, and unwilling or unable to experience gratitude for his good fortune.

I’m especially tired of the self-congratulatory “smart businessman” who takes advantage of tax loopholes (excuse me, “incentives”) to drive his effective tax rate below that of his secretary, but who nevertheless considers himself morally superior to the “takers” who don’t make enough money to owe federal income taxes.

I’m tired of self-deception and double standards and people who prefer not to see the hill that Charles Blow so eloquently describes. 

And I’m really, really tired of the ideologues with vested interests who are spreading the mythology.

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A Candid Cashier

Saturday, my husband and I made our “oh-my-god-Thanksgiving-is-Thursday-and-the-cupboard-is-bare” Costco run.

As we were checking out (with more wine than two elderly citizens ought to be purchasing), the pleasant and chatty young man putting our purchases into the basket noted some purchase (I didn’t notice which one) and said “You are obviously smart shoppers.”

I laughed and responded that at least we were smart enough to shop at Costco, rather than Walmart or Sam’s Club.

At that, the cashier looked up and said, “You can say that again! I worked at Sam’s Club for 13 years, and it was terrible. I hated it. I’m so glad to be here. You can’t imagine the difference.”

I’ve read plenty of comparisons between Costco and Walmart, and their treatment of employees, but this was qualitatively different: heartfelt testimony volunteered by someone who clearly had a basis for comparison.

Later in the day, I came across this paragraph in a story about the widening gap between rich and poor in America:

Few companies are as emblematic of the New American System as is Walmart. The company that in 2011 generated more revenues than any other, the company that is now the largest food retailer in the world is the same company that recently encouraged donations of food to its own employees. It’s also a company that, putting aside any losses generated when it replaces smaller, local stores, causes a net loss to every community it enters in the form of increased tax revenues needed to support its underpaid employees. Walnart not only counts on taxpayer dollars to subsidize its “low cost” stores, it counts on those same taxpayer dollars to drive its business. Walmart employees not only need food stamps to get by, Walmart is the largest place where those food stamps are redeemed. It’s a cycle that grinds employees (and communities) relentlessly down, while driving Walmart revenues just as consistently up.

In principle, I don’t mind having my tax dollars used for welfare. But I do object–strenuously–to the use of my tax dollars to subsidize Walmart’s (outsized) profits. If Walmart insists on screwing over thousands of people like the cashier I met yesterday, the company needs to do so on its own dime, rather than on the back of taxpayers. (But of course, that wouldn’t work. Walmart needs public assistance in order to continue paying the below-living wages that generate its generous profit margins.)

Ironically, as I’ve previously noted, Costco’s profits per square foot exceed Walmart’s by a significant percentage, even though Costco pays its employees far more, treats them better and provides health insurance.

Costco will be closed on Thanksgiving, so that its employees can spend time with their families. Walmart–of course–will be open.

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Exceptionalism, Corporate Edition

Only in America. No other nation gives its corporations as many rights as we do.

Before you launch into a knowing and cynical “sure–big business bought our lawmakers,” consider the fact (highlighted in a recent article in the Journal of Law and Courts) that these expansive rights are almost all the result of federal court decisions, not legislation.

The privileges currently enjoyed by the fictitious “persons” we call corporations weren’t a result of our Constitution, either.  According to David Ciepley, author of the referenced article,

“the framers were so concerned about the possibility of privileged monopolies squeezing out ordinary citizens that they did not endow Congress with the traditional right of Parliament to charter corporations, let alone expressly extend constitutional rights to corporations.”

There are three theories about corporations and their rights: the associational theory (corporations are constituted by their members and thus deserve the same rights as those members); the “real entity” theory (a corporation is distinct from its members–a separate, albeit fictional, “person” entitled to the rights accorded to “persons” under the 14th Amendment); and the grant theory (corporations exist because government has created them, and they have only the powers with which their creator endowed them).

The legal problem with the associational theory is that in the U.S., rights are individual. My family doesn’t have a right to free speech–although each member of my family does. The practical problem with basing a corporate right to free speech on the First Amendment rights of its shareholders is obvious: those shareholders are likely to have different opinions (especially on public policy issues) and to want to say different things.

The notion that a corporation is somehow an organic “person” separate from both government and its shareholders and entitled to 14th Amendment protections is so historically and logically flawed as to require little rebuttal–especially in an era where Justice Scalia remains ambivalent about including living, breathing women within that Amendment’s protections.

The only theory that accords with both history and logic is the grant theory. Governments  created corporations in order to encourage commerce–in large part by limiting the liability of individuals. (We are more likely to innovate if a failure won’t entirely wipe us out.) Corporations should have all of the rights that are required to fulfill their purpose, which is to do business–the right to own property, to contract and to engage in commercial speech.

The Supreme Court has gotten two things very wrong: money is not speech, and corporations are not people. (I have to agree with a popular Facebook slogan: I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.) Those two errors have massively distorted our politics and corrupted our governing institutions.

The Court failed to recognize the contemporary operation of the golden rule: He who has the gold, rules.

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The Death of Language….

One of my constant complaints–one that undoubtedly gets tiresome–is that the words we use in political discourse no longer mean what they used to. Or for that matter, much of anything.

Thanks to Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, “liberal”–which used to refer to 18th Century libertarian Enlightenment thinkers and later was used to mean “open minded”– was twisted into an epithet and replaced by “progressive.” (“Progressive” gets applied to pretty much anyone who doesn’t hate government and gay people, and send racist emails.)

I used to consider myself something of a cross between an Eighteenth-Century liberal and an Edmund Burke conservative, back before the term “conservative” didn’t call up the image of an angry old white guy in a tricorner hat demanding the return of “his” country. So I was nostalgic reading this recent post about Burke by Andrew Sullivan. I really encourage you to read it in its entirety, but here’s a taste:

For a conservative should not be implacably hostile to liberalism (let alone demonize it), but should be alert to its insights, and deeply aware of the need to change laws and government in response to unstoppable change in human society. Equally, a liberal can learn a lot from conservatism’s doubts about utopia, from the conservative concern with history, tradition and the centrality of culture in making human beings, and from conservatism’s love and enjoyment of the world as-it-is, even as it challenges the statesman or woman to nudge it toward the future. The goal should not be some new country or a new world order or even a return to a pristine past that never existed: but to adapt to necessary social and cultural change by trying as hard as one can to make it coherent with what the country has long been; to recognize, as Orwell did, that a country, even if it is to change quite markedly, should always be trying somehow to remain the same.

……..

This means a true conservative – who is, above all, an anti-ideologue – will often be attacked for alleged inconsistency, for changing positions, for promising change but not a radical break with the past, for pursuing two objectives – like liberty and authority, or change and continuity  – that seem to all ideologues as completely contradictory.

I miss the days when labels had content.

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