Thoughts for the Holiday Weekend

This is the 4th of July holiday weekend, and most of us are planning cookouts, fireworks celebrations and the like. In my house, we’ve been getting ready for a long-planned European trip–giving instructions to the graduate student who has graciously agreed to “house sit,” making sure our packing list is complete, etc.

But it is also an appropriate time to think about the state of our country and its government. So as this celebratory weekend gets off to a start, allow me to share some random concerns.

  • One of America’s great assets has been the fact that, as a nation, we’ve never been particularly ideological.  We’ve been one of the newest and most pragmatic of countries, and as a result we’ve escaped some of the worst results of hereditary privilege, class resentment, and zealotry. That seems to be changing.
  • Checks and balances were meant to ensure that no branch of government got too powerful; is it possible that we have gone too far toward “checking” and lost our “balance”? The founders didn’t have political parties, and I doubt they envisioned a time when a political party in the legislative branch would close ranks and simply refuse to co-operate or negotiate with the administration. Whether this is due to ideology or politics hardly matters–it makes governing virtually impossible. (The Democrats would undoubtedly love to do the same thing if the situations were reversed, but they lack the ideological consistency and organizational discipline to pull it off.) Structures matter more than current punditry might suggest, and when lawmaking is structured to require a measure of participation and compromise from all sides, the absence of that co-operation is a very serious problem.
  • This country has given so much to its citizens, yet some of those who have benefited the most seem least willing to acknowledge that debt, and least willing to pull their own weight. The other day, a wealthy man of my acquaintance told me that he’d made his money without help from anyone, and didn’t see why he should pay taxes to support people who hadn’t worked as hard and been as successful. No one gave me anything, he said. Of course, his parents were able to raise him in a stable society, and could send him and his siblings to good public schools. Public agencies made sure his food was safe to eat. When he graduated from his (public) university and started his business, he didn’t have to pay off the local authorities. He had access to public roads that allowed him to receive raw materials and ship his goods.  Municipal police and firefighters ensured the safety of his home and business. Impartial courts decided his disputes with customers or suppliers. The existence of a stable, regulated economy meant he could borrow necessary capital. And on and on…..These are assets that people in many other countries lack. Good governments create the conditions that make free enterprise possible. It constantly amazes me that so many people fail or refuse to understand that.
  • Our governments–state and federal–are far from perfect, and some of our policies are positively insane. (We may or may not agree on which ones those are.) But dammit, patriotism isn’t wearing a flag pin on your lapel. Patriotism is civic involvement in the nitty-gritty of politics and governance–voting, attending public meetings, writing letters to elected officials. And paying taxes–so that America can continue to provide a social and physical infrastructure that allows people to succeed.

Happy Fourth of July.

Appearances of Impropriety

Yesterday, following the announcement of the Recount Commission’s finding that Charlie White had been eligible to run for Secretary of State (or, more accurately, their conclusion that they couldn’t conclusively prove otherwise), I got a call from a reporter. Her question was not about the Commission’s conclusion; instead, she wanted to know whether the chair should have recused himself from the deliberations, since he had hosted a fundraiser for White, and his firm had donated $5000 to White’s campaign.

My answer, of course, was yes.

It is perfectly possible that–as he claimed–the contribution and prior support did not influence the chairman’s decision. But that is irrelevant. The facts of the matter raised an appearance of impropriety, and that appearance alone was enough to require recusal. Citizens have to be able to trust that their public institutions are operating impartially and fairly; otherwise, suspicion and cynicism will undermine our faith in the legitimacy of government and erode respect for–and compliance with–the laws.

Instances of what we might call “ethical insensitivity” seem to be proliferating: recently, commentators have reported on activities of Clarence Thomas (and especially his wife) that raise serious questions about the Judge’s impartiality. A couple of years ago, Justice Scalia shrugged off criticism of his cozy vacation with Dick Cheney during a time when a lawsuit against Cheney was pending at the Supreme Court.  Closer to home, we have the President of the City-County Council insisting that his vote to award a lucrative city contract to a client of his law firm did not constitute a conflict of interest.

In each of these cases–and many others–the person accused of a conflict insisted that the relationship at issue didn’t affect his judgment. Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn’t. But that isn’t the point. The point is that such relationships inevitably cast doubt on the integrity of the proceeding.

Think about it: If you were a party in a lawsuit, and you knew that the opposing party regularly played poker with the judge, and had supported him politically, how confident would you be that the Judge’s ultimate ruling would be impartial?   Wouldn’t you ask for a change of venue, or a different judge? If you were a taxpayer whose elected representative was voting to spend your tax dollars on a deal that benefited his brother-in-law, or a big client, how confident would you be that he cast that vote based solely on policy considerations?

And how reassured would you be if such public servants pooh-poohed your reservations?

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Harder than It Looks

This morning, an acquaintance told me he’d recently been on the downtown Canal, and immediately thought of this post, in which I had bemoaned the city’s neglect of this important urban amenity. He was appalled–as we all should be.

That brief conversation made me ponder the current state of affairs in Indianapolis, and the importance–and difficulty–of civic leadership.

When Greg Ballard ran for Mayor, he talked a lot about leadership. Why, he’d written a (self-published) book about it! If elected, he would reduce crime, put more police on the streets, and reduce the budget. How hard could it be?

Reality is so messy and disappointing. It turns out that managing a city is significantly more complicated than giving orders to subordinates in a military unit. Not only do you have to deal with people elected to the City-County Council, who don’t think their job is to carry out your orders, you have to understand the inter-relationships of municipal issues and departments, and budget for a variety of services that are required by law or political necessity and constrained by reduced revenues. When Ballard ran, he displayed the sort of hubris that motivates citizens to write letters to the editor expressing amazement that elected officials can’t seem to grasp how simple the answer to climate change, gas prices, public safety, or the national debt really is. Americans tend to be ambivalent about credentials: we want our doctor or lawyer or CPA to be well-trained, but we think any well-meaning citizen has what it takes to run a city.

So three-and-a-half years later, we have a higher crime rate, fewer police on the streets, and no reduction in municipal expenditures. We are fixing streets and sidewalks with dollars “borrowed” from future utilities ratepayers, and we’ve sold off our parking meters for fifty years, presumably because the city is incapable of managing that infrastructure. Important civic assets like the Canal are falling into disrepair, and Indianapolis’ once-sterling reputation as a City that Works has become a punch line.

I think Ballard is beginning to realize that running a city is harder than it looks.

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A Seemingly Simple Question

The job of the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, where I teach, is to produce thoughtful public and nonprofit managers—people who can deal with the increasing complexities of public and regulatory policy. That requires spending a good deal of time analyzing what rules government should and should not enact.

Rulemaking is an especially important task of the various agencies set up to regulate highly technical industries like telecommunications. Too little regulation and the strong will take advantage of the weak; too much, and it can stifle competitiveness. In highly specialized, technical areas, corporate interests can—and do—lobby in relative secrecy for sweetheart deals, or—even worse—to prevent passage of regulations that would benefit the general public.

Case in point: mobile phones and broadcast radio.

Around the world, over 1.1 billion phones contain chips that allow them to receive radio broadcasts. Although it is estimated that 33% of phones here in the U.S. have those same chips (which cost approximately 30 cents each), in our phones they’ve been turned off. So people living elsewhere can and do listen to radio on their cell phones, but we Americans can’t.

That leads to two questions: why not, and why does it matter?

Cell phone users in the U.S. can’t choose to have radio on our phones because when the ability to download first threatened the music industry’s business model, the carriers—AT&T, Verizon, etc.—thought including broadcast radio would undermine their ability to sell music packages. With the passage of time, and development of free services like Pandora, it became obvious that there wasn’t going to be a market for such sales, but carriers continue to block radio from cellphones.

That refusal mystifies me. When you download news or music to your Blackberry or IPhone, you are using a lot of bandwidth, and bandwidth costs carriers a lot of money. (Granted, they pass along the cost to users when they can.) Turning on that 30 cent chip would free up badly needed bandwidth and save carriers money. As an observer with—admittedly—a very minimal understanding of the industry, I find their continued resistance to offering radio puzzling.

If the issue was just that carriers are making a seemingly dumb business decision, it wouldn’t make much difference to most of us. (I’m certainly not going to lose sleep over AT&T’s profit margins!) The reason this matters to the rest of us is that it significantly affects public safety.

When natural disasters occur—think Joplin, Missouri—the government needs to be able to issue immediate alerts, and those alerts need to reach the widest possible audience in the shortest possible time. It is literally a matter of life and death. In 2006, the federal government passed the Warn Act, requiring wireless providers to develop the capacity to issue those emergency alerts. Thus far, the industry has done very little to build the widespread text-messaging system that it is developing to satisfy the Act.

Adding radio to cell phones would allow government to use the existing emergency broadcast system, which has proven much more reliable than cell phone towers. (When electricity goes, so does the cell system.) Furthermore, texting may get the attention of young people, but many of the older Americans most vulnerable to natural disasters are unlikely to check regularly for text messages.

The lack of an emergency notification system is a problem government can solve tomorrow by passing a simple regulation requiring carriers to use that 30 cent chip. Experts insist that there are no technical impediments, and costs would be far less than building out a text-based notification system.

Why doesn’t the government require this? What am I missing?

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Selling Indiana: Update

This past weekend, the LA Times and the Northwest Indiana Times both had stories about Mitch Daniel’s privatization initiatives.

The Northwest Indiana article reported on the impending default of the private operator of the Indiana Toll Road. While a default would probably not cost Indiana taxpayers–the private operator paid us in advance–it might well cost us what little control we retained over the Toll Road, and depending upon how the default played out, might require some legal fees.

The LA Times article, on the other hand, was the sort of in-depth reporting that has become all too rare nationally, and virtually non-existent here in Indianapolis.  It traced the disaster that was Indiana’s effort to contract out welfare intake, and it is well worth reading in its entirety. High points include a description of ACS ties to Indiana political figures and “movers and shakers”–especially Stephen Goldsmith, Mitch Roob and the Barnes Thornburgh law firm–together with a list of associated campaign contributions, and several examples of the harm done to vulnerable elderly and disabled people who depended on the program.

The Star did do several stories early on, when the failures of IBM and ACS were at their most glaring, and again when Daniels admitted defeat and pulled IBM’s (but not ACS’) contract. And it ran a story when IBM sued the state. But there was no effort to “connect the dots” and nothing even close to the comprehensive investigation provided by the LA Times.

That lack of a full picture matters, because without it, reporters fail to recognize the context within which we must understand related information.

A couple of weeks ago, the Daniels Administration announced that it had received an award from the federal government for cutting the food stamp program’s negative error rate–how often cases are incorrectly closed or denied. The Administration bragged that Indiana’s error rate was below the national average.  The Star dutifully reported the (accurate) claim. What didn’t get reported was the fact that from 2001 to 2007–prior to welfare privatization–Indiana’s error rate had also been below the national average, but in 2008, one year after IBM and ACS took over, the error rate had more than doubled, to 13%.  It was the largest increase in the country, and the celebrated “improvement” was measured from that high point.

Context matters. So does journalism.