Depending on the Kindness of Oligarchs

A recent op-ed in the New York Times considered the implications of some impending philanthropy–a gift of a new park.

[The] park will be just offshore in the Hudson River, largely financed by the media mogul Barry Diller and situated, conveniently, a short walk from his office in Chelsea.

The new park will also be near the High Line, allowing for an easy tour of how private wealth is remaking the city’s public spaces. This trend isn’t unique to New York: Philanthropists are also busy reshaping the riverfront of Philadelphia and building a green corridor through Houston. In Tulsa, Okla., a vast new park system is being financed in part by the billionaire George B. Kaiser.

David Callahan, the author of the op-ed and the editor of Inside Philanthropy, readily acknowledges the admirable generosity of donors like Mr. Diller. But he also worries that the increasing reliance on private philanthropy to replace–rather than supplement–funding previously supplied through taxes and subject to democratic decision making is, in his words,  “more evidence of how a hollowed-out public sector is losing its critical role, and how private wealth is taking the wheel and having a growing say over basic parts of American life.”

In New York, while philanthropists have lavished money on parks adjacent to their neighborhoods, declining public revenues have left parks in poorer precincts in considerable disrepair.

The design, placement and maintenance of parks were once a function of democratic processes. Now, as a citizen, you feel like a spectator to largely privatized decision making. A declining public sector, burdened by budget cuts, creates a vacuum for imaginative civic leadership that is being filled by a new class of Medicis.

Medicis–an apt descriptor.

I have often explained to students the different functions of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The question answered by the Bill of Rights is procedural: it answers the fundamental question who decides? Who gets to decide issues of basic individual liberty–what religion you practice, what book you read, what street you can stroll down, who you marry? In our system, I explain, those personal decisions–good or bad– are supposed to be made by individual citizens, not by the state. The Constitution, on the other hand, sets out rules applicable to collective decision-making; it assumes wide participation in a democratically-shaped civic life.

Oligarchy, on the other hand, does not rely on wide participation. Its definition:  “A form of government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique; government by the few.”

Receipt of largesse–no matter how well-intended–is not a characteristic of a free and equal society. When you are the beneficiary of someone else’s charity, rather than a citizen entitled to enjoyment of public goods, you live in a feudal society.

Like Blanche in “Streetcar Named Desire” who always depended on the kindness of strangers, we peons increasingly depend upon the beneficence of oligarchs.

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Excuse Me? What’s a “For Profit” Church?

A couple of weeks ago, the local news reported on a gathering of anti-gay activists protesting Indiana’s recognition of same-sex marriage. It was a small crowd (probably since people who understand how court rulings operate realized that a protest couldn’t/wouldn’t change anything), and I just skimmed the description of attendees.

Then I stopped. Read it again.

Among the participants listed were “Pastors of several For Profit Churches.” My husband’s snark when I read that description to him was “Aren’t they all?” (Yes, I know that blanket condemnation is unfair.)

I’d never heard of churches established to be for-profit enterprises. When I consulted Doctor Google, there were links to a number of articles advising churches on methods for establishing for-profit subsidiaries, and many more detailing the financial shenanigans of churches from “Mega” to storefront–but nothing about churches actually established as “for profit” entities.

The classification of a church as “nonprofit” or “for profit” has obvious tax and constitutional consequences. Traditional churches can claim certain exemptions from civil rights laws, for example, under the Free Exercise Clause. Whether a “for profit” church could do so is–so far as I know–an unanswered question.

A couple of months ago, there was a case involving a wedding chapel in Las Vegas that wanted to refuse service to LGBT customers. The owners claimed a religious liberty exemption from applicable civil rights laws. As I recall, the fact that the wedding chapel was a for-profit business meant that the exemption didn’t apply.

When you think about it, admittedly for-profit churches sort of give “coming out” a whole new meaning….

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Energy and the Marketplace

Congressional critics made sure that Americans heard about the “scandal” of Solyndra, the green energy start-up that failed and defaulted on its government loan. But we haven’t heard much about the federal government’s renewable energy loan program since then–probably because there hasn’t been a subsequent opportunity to twist results in order to make political hay.

Since 2005, the Department of Energy has loaned $34.2 billion to a variety of businesses to spur development of clean-energy technology. A recent NPR report notes that– while there have indeed been defaults (amounting to $780 million, or 2.28 percent of the total)– DOE has also collected $810 million in interest payments, for a profit of $30 million.

The default rate on these loans is well below the rate of commercial loan defaults typically experienced by traditional banks, according to data maintained by the Federal Reserve. NPR went back to those who criticized the loan program three years ago, but none of the critics would comment for the record.

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz pointed out that the loan program had funded the first of five huge solar projects in the West. Before that, developers couldn’t get money from private lenders, but now they can.

“We have to be careful that we don’t walk away from risk, because otherwise we’re not really going to advance the marketplace,” Moniz told NPR.

This is precisely the way government loans are supposed to work: to “prime the pump.” When new technologies are deemed too risky for the private marketplace, when the rehabilitation of depressed neighborhoods makes it impossible to get traditional mortgages–in short, when the private sector is not willing to encourage the sort of entrepreneurial activity that benefits us all–governments can step in and jump-start the process.

Of course, once the pump has been primed–once a market has been established and risk moderated–government needs to withdraw and allow the private marketplace to operate. The problem in our (increasingly oligarchical) system is that industries are happy to continue (excuse my vulgarity) sucking at the public tit. So we end up continuing to subsidize companies that have enjoyed years of obscene profits, are sitting on huge cash reserves and have absolutely no problem obtaining necessary financing.

Fossil fuel companies, for example.

In the United States, credible estimates of annual fossil fuel subsidies range from $10 billion to $52 billion annually. These numbers do not include the significant costs attributable to externalities related to the climate, or to the other environmental and health impacts of the fossil fuel industry. We taxpayers also pay those costs, which are another form of subsidy.

Here’s my question to all the critics who screamed bloody murder about Solyndra and the DOE program generally: where’s your indignation about the immense and counterproductive costs of continued fossil fuel subsidies?

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Prescriptions from the Doctor

It’s interesting that most of the public opposition to the Affordable Care Act has come from politicians–not infrequently, from politicians whose most generous donors have a vested interest in the medical status quo–and not from providers of medical care.

Perhaps we should listen to the people on the front lines–the doctors. This is from my cousin, a cardiologist whom I often quote here:

As a physician who had been in practice for many years, I remember the hardships suffered by many of my elderly patients prior to the initiation of Medicare in 1965. During that time, I was forced to sit painfully by as many unfortunate sufferers lamented that, even though they desperately needed to be hospitalized or needed expensive tests and additional services, they had only received small monthly social security payments with or without a small pension that barely sustained them at a subsistence level. In short, that situation afforded not only insufficient medical care, but threatened their financial security during those so-called “golden years.”

Then, in 1965, something abruptly and miraculously changed the landscape—the advent of Medicare. Suddenly our elderly could receive a standard level of medical care, which included, among others, diagnostic tests and hospitalizations. The financial burden was lifted from both the patients and us physicians, because we were no longer confronted with agonizing daily decisions about how we could provide decent medical care on a shoestring budget without threatening our patients’ health or survival.

He writes that two other doctors have recently weighed in via the New England Journal of Medicine (November 20, 2014). In “Civil Disobedience and Physicians—Protesting the Blockade of Medicaid,” C. van der Horst, MD, wrote that, when he anticipated passage of the Affordable Care Act, he thought he would no longer need to worry about patients’ affording necessary medications, preventive care services and hospitalizations.

But then van der Horst’s home State of North Carolina (like Indiana) blocked Medicaid expansion (even though, as it bears repeating, the federal government would pay 100% of the costs for the first 3 years and 90% thereafter). Over the protests of health care workers, teachers, union workers, immigrants, environmentalists, and people of all races and religions, North Carolina lawmakers have stubbornly refused to expand coverage.

The second article–written by Michael Stillman, MD–detailed the very different experience of Kentucky. Kentucky approved Medicaid expansion and “fundamentally altered our medical practice, allowing us to provide data-driven and thorough care without first considering our patients’ ability to pay” and giving 650,000 Kentuckians access to decent, comprehensive medical care. Most had previously lacked health insurance, had avoided routine preventive care—and worried that a medical emergency would leave them bankrupt. Medicaid expansion lightened their financial and emotional burden–and as a bonus, provided better physician education.  (Previously, doctors in training had become accustomed to offering substandard and incomplete care to indigent populations.) Now they are able to provide appropriate, evidence-based care.

As my cousin concludes:

This country will eventually—and inevitably—support decent medical care for all its constituents. Perhaps the process would be enhanced if our politicians were forced to spend time on the “front lines” of medical care in our clinics and hospitals and actually have dialog with those patients who are most vulnerable and under-served.

Listen to the doctor.

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Let It (All Hang) Out

Our sorry excuse for a newspaper has a feature–common to many papers–called “Let It Out,” where readers can comment on the news of the day. I generally scan it, despite the relative absence of anything that might be considered insightful, since it is one of the few features (especially at this time of year) that isn’t an ad.

Yesterday, there was a particularly smug, utterly clueless sentiment about the mess in Ferguson: if African-American parents are concerned about what to tell their children about interactions with the police, the reader wrote, they should just tell their sons to obey the law, and then they won’t have any problems.

Really?

I guess all those statistics about disparate law enforcement are irrelevant. (Driving while black, anyone?) I guess the disclosures by Anonymous (the internet hackers who took over the Klan’s twitter account a couple of weeks ago, and found KKK members among police in several cities) are just evidence that cops are jolly joiners. And all those personal stories in the newspapers and on our Facebook feeds? Just anecdotal; ignore them.

Let’s get real, as the kids might say, and concede that none of us–on the left or right–knows what happened before Michael Brown was shot six times. The exoneration of the police officer in this particular case–irregular as the Grand Jury proceedings evidently were–may have been totally justified. And nothing excuses rioting and the destruction of the property of innocent shopkeepers.

Nothing excuses wholesale condemnation of the police, either. I teach a required course in a school with a well-regarded criminal justice program, so I teach a lot of police officers. Most of them are genuine public servants, trying to do a difficult but necessary job that sometimes requires them to make split-second decisions.

All that said, it takes a special kind of intentional blindness to ignore the fact that there are some very bad apples drawn to a line of work that confers power over others. (When I was in City Hall, we tried to weed those people out with psychological exams, with spotty success.) It takes a perverse and selective understanding of the American landscape to ignore the extent to which racism still characterizes the experience of the black community, and to ignore the reasons why some members of that community might periodically explode with anger.

And it takes an offensive and deliberate moral arrogance to lecture mothers who are desperate to protect their children from encounters that every sentient American knows are far from rare.

When you “Let it Out,” what comes out can sometimes be pretty horrifying.

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