Category Archives: Random Blogging

Mom and Pop and Skin in the Game

A 2006 study by sociologists Stephan Goetz and Anil Rupasingha documented a decline in civic participation, including voter turnout and the number of active nonprofit organizations, after Walmart moves into a community. Those behaviors are markers for social capital, the connections citizens have to each other, characterized by what scholars call “norms of trust and reciprocity.” The importance of social capital had been studied by others, but was most prominently  highlighted by Robert Putnam, the Harvard political scientist, in Bowling Alone, published in 2001.

The Goetz and Rupasingha study also showed that with each Walmart store that opens in a city, social capital further erodes.

I was intrigued when I came across this study, so I did a bit more research.

It’s not just that cities with more social capital are better able to foster local enterprises and resist corporate consolidation, although they are. According to the research, the causality may actually go the other way as well. Where economic power is diffused, political power is more widely and democratically exercised. As economic power becomes more concentrated, civic engagement slumps.

This research tends to support what most economic development professionals believe–a city or town with a widely diversified economic base is healthier. That belief is grounded in a very practical calculus: in cities where there are many employers, the failure of one business is far less consequential than in cities where a substantial percentage of the workforce depends on one or two large employers. That logic is persuasive (and pretty self-evident), but it turns out that there is a substantial body of research supporting the thesis that a diversified economy composed of many relatively small enterprises is not only better able to withstand downturns, but also better able to generate higher levels of civic engagement and a higher quality of life.

According to an article in Grist,

In 1946, Walter Goldschmidt, a USDA sociologist, produced a groundbreaking study comparing two farming towns in California that were almost identical in every respect but one: Dinuba’s economy was composed mainly of family farms, while Arvin’s was dominated by large agribusinesses. Goldschmidt found that Dinuba had a richer civic life, with twice the number of community organizations, twice the number of newspapers, and citizens who were much more engaged than those in Arvin. Not surprisingly, Dinuba also had far superior public infrastructure: In both quality and quantity, the town’s schools, parks, sidewalks, paved streets, and garbage services far surpassed those of Arvin.

At about the same time, two other sociologists, C. Wright Mills and Melville J. Ulmer, were undertaking a similar study of several pairs of manufacturing cities in the Midwest. Their research, conducted on behalf of a congressional committee, found that communities comprised primarily of small, locally owned businesses took much better care of themselves. They beat cities dominated by large, absentee-owned firms on more than 30 measures of well-being,including such things as literacy, acreage of public parks, extent of poverty, and the share of residents who belonged to civic organizations.

……

Residents of communities with highly concentrated economies tend to vote less and are less likely to keep up with local affairs, participate in associations, engage in reform efforts or participate in protest activities at the same levels as their counterparts in economically dispersed environments,” sociologists Troy Blanchard and Todd L. Matthews concluded in a 2006 study published in the journal Social Forces. In studies of both agricultural (2001) and manufacturing (2006) communities, the late Cornell sociologist Thomas Lyson also found that those places with a diversity of small-scale enterprises had higher levels of civic participation and better social outcomes than those controlled by a few outside corporations.

When you think about it, this makes sense. Here in Indianapolis, many of us have expressed concern at the loss of the traditional business and banking headquarters from which so many of our civic leaders were drawn. Even our major law firms are merging with others to form “national” enterprises; their lawyers are likely to be less involved in the civic life of Indianapolis when it is just one of their many locations.

At some point, we need to consider the “big box” stores headquartered who-knows-where, and ask ourselves whether those cheap tube socks are really such a bargain.

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Remember the One About the Frog…?

There is an old story–a fable, actually–about the most effective way to kill a frog. You just put that little creature in a pot of water and slowly but steadily increase the temperature of the water. Eventually, the frog is boiled to death, but because of the slow, incremental elevation of the heat, it doesn’t realize the danger until it’s too late.

I think that story is an uncomfortable analogy to contemporary America’s political situation.

Yesterday, several news outlets and blogs carried this story:

Republicans want to limit the number of bullets federal agencies can purchase so American gun owners can buy more.  Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe and Rep. Frank Lucas have introduced a bill that would prohibit every government agency — except the military — from buying more ammunition each month, than the monthly average it purchased from 2001 to 2009.

The purpose of this bill, according to the reports, is to prevent President Obama from making good on his plan to have government agencies buy up all the bullets so that patriotic gun-owning Americans won’t be able to buy them.

Think about that for a minute. And then think about that frog.

When I ran for Congress in 1980, I was pro-choice and pro-gay-rights, and I not only won a Republican primary in very Red Indiana, I was accused on several occasions of being far too conservative. In the years since, the GOP has moved steadily–to the Right, then to the far Right ,and then to the far far Right–and finally to paranoid conspiracy fantasy-land. The party of Bill Hudnut and Dick Lugar is now the party of James Inhofe and Ted Cruz.

In 1980, if any political figure had made the sorts of statements that our elected officials–mostly but not exclusively Republican–routinely issue these days, the media would have called for the men in the white coats. But the progression into delusion has been relatively incremental. Lawmakers have slowly but steadily progressed through the stages from ideological rigidity, to extremism, to bat-shit crazy.

The media and the electorate are the frogs who haven’t noticed that the water has gone from warm, to uncomfortably hot, to boiling.

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Why I’m Losing Faith in the Human Race

The Guardian recently reported on a speech in which a senior Iranian cleric blamed “women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously” for earthquakes.

If that sort of crazy were a feature only of theocratic or third-world countries, we might chuckle and ignore it. Unfortunately, however, the amount of lunacy right here at home suggests a wider problem.

A few examples:

A conspiracy theorist named Larry Klaymon insists that the fertilizer factory explosion in West, Texas, was an act of Islamic terrorism, and that the government under Obama (“the Other”) is engaged in a wide-ranging cover-up.

Speaking of Obama, in the wake of his re-election, Matt Barber of the Liberty Counsel explained that that the election result was a “communist takeover” of the United States, and that the IRS will start throwing pastors in jail, invading churches and shooting parishioners.

Then there was the Republican candidate for the Arkansas legislature who wrote a book about the proper biblical approach to child-rearing. And I quote:

“The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellioius children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21:
…

This passage does not give parents blanket authority to kill their children. They must follow the proper procedure in order to have the death penalty executed against their children.”

Well, yes, I think procedural safeguards before killing one’s children as God decreed are probably appropriate…

Just this month, in the year 2013, the Missouri legislature voted to ban a sustainability program because sustainability is part of the nefarious plot that is Agenda 21!

The Missouri House of Representatives on Monday passed a ban on the United Nations sustainability plan Agenda 21 after a spirited discussion of space aliens and how Walmart could avoid zoning laws to build more stores.

The Republican-controlled House voted 110-40 to ban local governments from adopting the Agenda 21, a broad outline of planning goals and sustainability targets. Agenda 21 was passed by the U.N. in 1992, but has not been ratified by the U.S. Senate and does not contain the force of law in the U.S.

…

Agenda 21 opponents argue the U.N. document would seize private property and force people to live in walkable communities with a potential end to golf and scuba diving.

Your elected representatives at work, protecting your nine-iron….

I assume psychiatrists have theories to explain what seems to be a vastly increased prevalence of paranoia, hysteria and irrationality. Or perhaps there has always been a significant percentage of lunatics in our population, and the Internet has simply brought them to our attention–although I don’t recall a time when we have had so many elected officials who either inhabit an alternate reality or keep going off their meds.

How do you talk to someone who thinks short skirts cause earthquakes? How do you get lawmakers who actually believe that President Obama is a covert Muslim Communist and the Anti-Christ to focus on solving the nation’s problems? How do you get people who think Adam and Eve saddled up dinosaurs to understand climate change? How do you get lawmakers who think women’s bodies can “shut down” rapist sperm to respect women’s right to equality and autonomy?

More important: how do we get the sane folks who have thrown up their hands and withdrawn from the political process to wake up and reclaim the country?

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Media Malpractice

Who can Americans trust to report news accurately? Yesterday, I blogged about a recent survey that showed increasing skepticism about Fox News. Barely a half-hour after I posted, my husband mentioned that he’d been listening to a newscast on the radio in which the reporter interviewed lawmakers who are calling for the use of military tribunals for the Boston bombing suspects. According to my husband, the newscaster then reported–as fact–that such tribunals have proved to be more effective than the regular criminal courts. “I didn’t know that,” he said.

He didn’t know it, because that superior effectiveness is not even remotely a “fact.”

The facts are these: after 9-11, the Bush administration initiated prosecutions of 828 people on terrorism charges in civilian courts. Last year, according to a report from the Center on Law and Security, NYU School of Law, trials were still pending against 235 of them. That leaves 593 resolved cases. Of that number, 523 were convicted, for a conviction rate of 88%.

In addition, the Bush administration pursued 20 cases in military tribunals. So far, there have been exactly three convictions. The highest-profile was the case involving Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver. Hamdan was convicted, but he was sentenced  by a military jury to a mere five and half years–and the tribunal judge, a US Navy captain, gave him credit for time served, which was five years. So Hamdan served only six months after conviction.

Furthermore, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld–the case that grew out of this particular trial–the Supreme Court held that the Military Tribunals as constituted at the time violated both the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The propriety of using a Military Tribunal in any given case is, of course, open to debate. What is not debatable is the history of their past performance. It is perfectly legitimate to argue about the pros and cons of using such tribunals; I have my opinion, and others are entitled to theirs. But that debate needs to be grounded in fact, not propaganda.

If we cannot depend upon the media to provide accurate information and to separate opinion from fact– if we have lost what used to be called “the journalism of verification”– we are reduced to exchanging opinions anchored to nothing but our individual biases.

We live in a complicated world. We desperately need a competent and trustworthy media.

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Out-Foxed?

Several recent reports have traced a significant decline in Fox News’ audience. There are a couple of reasons. One is the average age of Fox viewers (65); another is a rather significant erosion in the number of “true believers.”

in a survey of public attitudes toward a variety of media outlets, Public Policy Polling found a marked drop in Fox News’s credibility. A record-high
46 percent of Americans said they put no trust in the network, a nine-point increase over 2010, and 39 percent named Fox News as their least-trusted news source, a percentage that dwarfed all other news channels. (MSNBC, which came in second, was distrusted by only 14 percent.)

As might be expected, Fox News’s credibility barely budged among liberals and moderates (roughly three-quarters of whom still distrust the network) and very conservative viewers (three-quarters of whom still trust it). However, among those who identified themselves as “somewhat conservative,” the level of trust fell by an eye-opening 27 percentage points during the previous twelve months (from a net plus–47 percent  “trust” rating in 2012 to plus–20 percent now). Only a bare majority of center-right conservatives surveyed by PPP say that Fox News is trustworthy.

 The base audience that Fox set out to capture is quite literally dying off. Meanwhile, the strategy the network employed–becoming a “news” source that could be relied upon to pander to the prejudices and beliefs of the most conservative elements of the Republican base–is preventing the network from replacing the True Believers as they die.

More and more, the network is being seen for what it is: a partisan mouthpiece, not a genuine news outlet. It’s about time.

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