A couple of days ago, I got an email from Periods for Politicians (formerly Periods for Pence), announcing a pre-election rally focused on women’s issues in Indiana. The aim is to highlight all of the measures that caused harm to Hoosier women during the last four years–years that, not at all coincidentally, coincided with Mike Pence’s term as Governor.
“Governor Pence’s policies have done untold damage to Indiana, and this trend cannot continue if Indiana is to remain a healthy place for families and women,” said Sue Magina, Periods for Politicians (P4P) founder. “Pence was not alone in his decision making. Many state politicians supported his policies and their disastrous effects on all women living in Indiana, regardless of political affiliation. We need to revisit these policies and determine together how we can make progress moving forward.” Sue Magina is an anonymous woman resident of Indiana who goes by that fake name for reasons of personal safety.
The rally will be held at 5:30 p.m. on November 2d at the Indiana Statehouse.
If you attend–and if at all possible, I hope you will–here are some of the things you will hear about:
· HEA 1337, called the “most restrictive anti-abortion law in the country.”
· Continued attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, which provides essential health care to thousands of low-income Indiana women.
· RFRA, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (“protecting” discrimination ostensibly based upon religion.)
· The undermining and effective removal of Glena Ritz as School Superintendent, and the diversion of monies meant for public schools to the Governor’s pet voucher program favoring parochial, religious education.
National and local speakers will discuss these and other issues.
Speakers include: Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, named one of the nation’s “badass menstrual activists” by Bustle, and the “architect of the U.S. policy campaign to squash the tampon tax” by Newsweek; Dana Marlowe, founder of the national organization, Support the Girls; Cheryl Laux, local activist from Indiana Moral Mondays; a representative from Planned Parenthood; local singer/songwriter Jen Edds, and more.
The night will close with the first ever public appearance by Sue Magina, who created the brilliant “Periods for Pence” grassroots campaign.
In case you missed hearing about it (despite the fact that the campaign has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, CNN, Yahoo, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post, among others), Periods for Pence was a response to Indiana’s restrictive and ridiculous abortion law, which the Governor said he “signed with a prayer.”
Among other things, that law required women to “cremate or inter” aborted or miscarried fetuses. Since fertilized eggs can be expelled during every menstrual period without the woman even knowing, the campaign urged women to call or tweet the Governor’s office to inform His Piety of the monthly “visit.”
My favorite tweet: @periodsforpence. Started my cycle today. When will you be by to check my used pads for HB1337 compliance so I know to be home?
The campaign brought national attention to–and censure of– our retrograde Governor and legislature. It became Periods for Politicians when he joined Trump’s ticket.
Women planning to attend the November 2d rally are encouraged to bring sealed menstrual hygiene products and bras for distribution to homeless women and girls throughout Indiana.
Men attendees are encouraged to bring socially responsible attitudes.
For those unfamiliar with the term, copyeditors are the people hired by newspapers and magazines tomakethecopy“clear,correct,concise,comprehensible,andconsistent.” According to the Free Dictionary, copyeditorsshould ensure that a story “sayswhat it means,andmeanswhat it says.”
Typically,copyeditinginvolvescorrectingspelling, punctuation, grammar, terminology, jargon, and semantics.
A number of us who inexplicably continue to subscribe to the Indianapolis Star have remarked on the increased number of spelling and grammar errors that have escaped a copy editor’s notice over the past couple of years. (As a former High School English teacher, these errors affect me like nails on a blackboard.)
However annoying the obvious reduction in, or absence of, copy editing, that problem pales in importance beside the much more consequential reduction in the reporting of actual news,and especially the absence of government oversight. Coverage of City Hall and the Statehouse are virtually non-existent; the absence of reporters with institutional memory, investigative instincts and the time to do more than superficial reports on such issues as do surface leaves citizens without any reliable way to evaluate the performance of our government officials and agencies.
The most recent example (and by no means the worst) has been the coverage of Secretary of State Connie Lawson’s attribution of mistakes found on multiple voter registration forms to fraud, ostensibly by an organization focused upon registering African-American voters.
I have no idea whether Lawson’s claims are well-founded or politically motivated.(She was, after all, a co-sponsor of Indiana’s Voter ID law, which aimed to solve a nonexistent problem.) What’s worse, however, is the fact that until the third or fourth story about the controversy, I had no idea what she was alleging. The articles were so badly written that I couldn’t make heads or tails of what the issue was–nor could several friends who’d also read it. And when a follow-up story did clarify the nature of the controversy, it was presented as “she said”/”he said.” There was no indication that reporters had made any effort to independently assess the validity of the competing assertions.
If you are wondering what triggered this particular post, it was the Star’s recent announcement that it is once again trimming its editorial staff (i.e. reporters), and moving what is left of its pitifully inadequate copyediting out-of-state. (I wonder how an out-of-state copy editor would make the Lawson story, which depends upon a basic understanding of Indiana law and practice “clear, correct, concise, comprehensible, and consistent.”)
Ever since Gannett acquired the Star, the quality–and more importantly, the scope– of its reporting has declined. The paper was never a shining beacon of journalism, but it did employ actual reporters, it did cover state and local government, it did report on something other than sports, entertainment and the opening of new bars.
If there’s an entrepreneur out there who wants to find a currently unserved market, Indianapolis could really use a credible newspaper. (Online is fine.)
Last night, I spoke to the student Economic Club at Ball State. Since numbers aren’t my thing, I focused on theory….Here (slightly condensed)are my remarks.
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Terms like conservative, liberal, socialist, progressive get used these days as accusations and insults rather than ways of defining a political or economic philosophy.
On today’s political spectrum, I consider myself liberal, but given the state of current discourse, it might be worth explaining what I mean by that term—and why my kind of liberalism is compatible with genuine market capitalism, although not necessarily with what passes for capitalism in today’s America.
I am basically an 18th Century liberal, by which I mean a product of Enlightenment values like empirical inquiry, science, and the importance of facts—including facts I may find inconvenient.
It also means I place a high value on both individual autonomy and the common good. And that means I tend to analyze government’s activities through the hypothetical of Locke’s Social Contract.
The United States’ Constitution was crafted by men heavily influenced by Enlightenment ideas. Their belief in protecting a marketplace of ideas owed a debt to Adam Smith’s description of economic markets, a description supported by the experience of the colonists, many of whom were small merchants. Good ideas would win out over bad, in much the same way as that better mousetrap would win market share.
I believe market principles remain sound, but they have to be applied to “facts on the ground” that the Founders could never have anticipated.
There were around 4 million people scattered along the east coast when America won independence; there are now over 300 million. Technology, diversity, and globalization have changed the national landscape. Our job is to craft policies that protect the essential values of the Constitution and Bill Of Rights in new and very different environments. People of good will can disagree about how to do that –but I would argue that in order to disagree productively and civilly, we have to begin with a common basis in fact and history, and we have to agree on the definitions of the words we use.
For example, I consider myself a capitalist; I believe in markets—in those areas where markets can work properly.
Economists often define a free trade as a transaction between a willing buyer and a willing seller, both of whom are in possession of all information relevant to that transaction.
Understanding how markets work is important, because it defines the proper role of government in a capitalist system—as an “umpire” or referee, ensuring that everyone plays by the rules.
Teddy Roosevelt reminded us that monopolies distort markets; if one company can dominate a market, that company can dictate prices and other terms with the result that transactions will no longer be truly voluntary. There are other behaviors that undermine markets: If Manufacturer A can avoid the cost of disposing of the waste produced by his factory by dumping it into the nearest river, he will be able to compete unfairly with Manufacturer B, who is following the rules governing proper waste disposal. If Chicken Farmer A is able to control his costs and gain market share by failing to keep his coops clean and his chickens free of disease, unwary consumers will become ill.
Most economists agree that in order for markets to operate properly, government must act as an “umpire,” assuring a level playing field.
Government also responds to what economists call “market failure.” There are three situations in which Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” simply doesn’t work: when monopolies or corrupt practices replace competition; when so-called “externalities” like pollution harm people who aren’t party to the transaction (who are neither buyer nor seller); and when there are “information asymmetries,” that is, when buyers don’t have access to information they need to bargain in their own interest. (Health care is an example.)
Since markets don’t have built-in mechanisms for dealing with these situations, most economists argue that regulation is needed.
Economists and policymakers can and do disagree about the need for particular regulations, but they agree that the absence of appropriate regulatory activity undermines capitalism. Unregulated markets lead to corporatism, where special interests can “buy” government regulations favoring them. You might think of it as a football game where one side has paid the umpire to make calls favorable to that team.
Socialism refers to the collective provision of goods and services, usually through government. There are some goods that free markets cannot or will not produce. Economists call them public goods, and define them as both “non-excludable” –meaning that individuals who haven’t paid for them cannot be effectively kept from using them—and “non-rivalrous,” meaning that use by one person does not reduce the availability of that good to others. Examples of public goods include fresh air, knowledge, lighthouses, national defense, flood control systems and street lighting. If we are to have these things, they must be supplied or protected by the whole society, usually through government.
Obviously, not all goods and services that we socialize meet the definition of public goods. We socialize police and fire protection because doing so is generally more efficient and cost-effective, and because most of us believe that limiting such services to people who can afford to pay for them would be immoral. We socialize garbage collection in more densely populated urban areas in order to enhance the livability of our cities and to prevent disease transmission.
Getting the “mix” right between goods that we provide collectively and those we leave to the free market is important, because too much socialism hampers economic health. Just as unrestrained capitalism can turn into corporatism, socializing the provision of goods that the market can supply can reduce innovation and incentives to produce. During the 20th Century, many countries experimented with efforts to socialize major areas of their economies, and even implement socialism’s extreme, communism, with uniformly poor results. Not only did economic productivity suffer, so did political freedom. (When governments have too much control over the means of production and distribution, they tend to become authoritarian.)
Virtually all countries today have mixed economies. The challenge is getting the right balance between socialized and free market provision of goods and services.
There’s lots of room for disagreement about things like how much regulation is too much, what level of national debt slows economic growth, what the tax burden should be and who should pay what. But in today’s America, these discussions tend to be all ideology and no understanding—all heat, no light. I wish I had a dollar for every TV pundit who clearly did not understand the difference between the deficit and the debt, or the difference between marginal and effective tax rates. We have people in Congress who quite obviously don’t understand what the debt ceiling is and isn’t.
It’s actually a good thing that Americans disagree—thoughtful disagreements often lead to better results. But it is really, really important that parties to a debate know what they are talking about. That is a lot harder today, thanks to the Internet and the collapse of that quaint exercise we used to call journalism. We live in an era of cherry-picking and confirmation bias—and our preferred realities are only a click away.
At the end of the day, policies based on ideology or wishful thinking just make things worse. And arguing about economics without agreeing on the meanings of the words we use is worse than useless.
In two weeks, Americans will finally go to the polls. The fat lady hasn’t sung, but she’s humming, and unless every reputable pollster in the U.S. is monumentally wrong, Donald Trump will lose by a very substantial margin.
What we don’t yet know is how much damage the Orange Disaster will do to the “down ticket” races. For the sake of the republic, I’d like to see the Democrats take both the Senate (likely) and the House (not so likely), because otherwise, we are likely to continue the partisan gridlock that has prevented the federal government from functioning at anything but a bare minimum.
When the only thing Republicans can agree on is the need to block anything and everything proposed by a Democratic President, it’s no wonder judicial vacancies (at all levels) go unfilled, only stopgap budgets get passed, decaying infrastructure goes unattended and even urgently needed responses to public health crises are months late.
Whatever the contours of the next Congress, however, the GOP will face an immediate quandary. Can the party be stitched back together? Can its three distinct elements–the white nationalists, the Religious Right and the business/”country club”/establishment wing–continue to coexist in the same political organization?
An article by the Brookings organization suggests that the Republicans take a lesson from British Prime Minister Theresa May, who recently laid out what Brookings described as “a bold plan to reform her country—and her party.”
Prime Minister May framed her party’s task as creating what she calls a “Great Meritocracy”—a country “built on the values of fairness and opportunity, where everyone plays by the same rules and where every single person—regardless of their background, or that of their parents—is given the chance to be all they want to be.” It shouldn’t matter, she said, “where you were born, who your parents are, where you went to school, what your accent sounds like, what god you worship, whether you’re a man or a woman, or black or white.” But if we are honest, she concluded, we will admit that this is not the case today.
Back when I was a member of a very different GOP, those sentiments may not have been universally embraced by the party’s rank and file, but the commitment to meritocracy and the rule of law were at least Republican talking points.
Working-class conservatism can be nationalist without being nativist or isolationist, Mrs. May insisted. It can reassert Britain’s control over immigration without endorsing prejudice against immigrations. It can reassert sovereignty over Britain’s laws and regulations without withdrawing from Europe or the world. And it can respect success in the market while insisting that the successful members of society have commensurate responsibilities to their fellow citizens.
I was particularly struck by the following quote from her speech, because it echoed populist themes that tend, in the U.S., to come from the Democrats:
So if you’re a boss who earns a fortune but doesn’t look after your staff, an international company that treats tax laws as an optional extra . . . a director who takes out massive dividends while knowing the company pension is about to go bust, I’m putting you on notice: This can’t go on anymore. A change has got to come. And . . . the Conservative Party is going to make that change.
As I’ve noted repeatedly, the United States desperately needs two adult, responsible political parties. We don’t have a parliamentary system; there is very little likelihood of a third party–new or existing–emerging to fill the void that is the current GOP.
That said, I don’t see how the Chamber of Commerce members coexist with the David Dukes and the Roy Moores. I don’t see how a party that sneers at the very enterprise of government and views large (and growing) segments of its fellow citizens with disdain and explicit bigotry can expect to win elections.
Americans have very hazy notions of how government actually works. As a result, they tend to embrace “reforms” that sound superficially attractive but would actually make things worse. I call them “bumper sticker” solutions because they are usually short and simple enough to slap on your car’s bumper.
Vox recently addressed one of those “solutions,” term limits, and did a very good job of explaining why this particular “fix” is a terrible idea.
In one recent survey, 75 percent of Americans said they supported term limits, including 65 percent of Democrats.
For that reason, it’s worth spending a few minutes on this point, because it does get to a fundamental problem with how the public views Washington. There is a perennial myth that the problem with Washington is that the longer people spend there, the more corrupt they become. Therefore, the only way to ensure good judgment in politics is to constantly have a bunch of fresh-faced lawmakers who are total rookies and don’t understand how anything in Washington works.
Since 15 states do have term limits, we actually can know something about their effects. And the political science literature here is pretty unequivocal. Term limits are the surest way to weaken the legislative branch and empower the executive branch. Term limits are also a great way to empower special interests and lobbyists. Basically, what term limits do is shift power toward those who are there for the long haul.
For example, here’s the conclusion from a 50-state survey published in 2006: “Term limits weaken the legislative branch relative to the executive. Governors and the executive bureaucracy are reported to be more influential over legislative outcomes in states where term limits are on the books than where they are not.”
This result has been replicated multiple times. In one study, a post-term-limits respondent said that after term limits, “agencies [do] what they want to. [One bureaucrat told me] we were here when you got here, and we’ll be here when you’re gone.” As the authors of this study note, “Legislative oversight is the venue of specialists. A term-limited legislature tends to be populated by generalists, who lack the accumulated knowledge to exercise oversight effectively, if they even recognize it as their responsibility.”
Term limits also strengthen the power of lobbyists and interest groups for the same reason…. But like the executive agencies of the state government, lobbyists and interest groups are also there year after year. They are the true repeat players building long-term relationships and the true keepers of the institutional knowledge. This gives them power.
The truth of the matter is that government operations are complicated, and competent policymaking requires significant substantive and procedural knowledge. At the federal level, congressional (House) terms are two years–just enough time for a neophyte to find the bathroom and figure out the arcane rules of procedure. The first thing every newly elected Representative does is hire staff from among the available pool of political and policy experts with relevant experience, and for at least the first term–and probably the second–a smart Congress-critter will be guided by those staff member, because they’ve been around long enough to know the ins and outs.
A significant percentage of the people who staff congressional offices are in Washington for the long haul serving consecutive committees and elected officials. If elected folks are term-limited, those faceless staff members will be the ones really making policy decisions. So much for accountability.
We already have a mechanism for limiting legislators’ terms. It’s called voting. The biggest impediments to its effective use are gerrymandering and civic ignorance.
