Click here to learn about my mind-bending epic mythological novel A Conspiracy of Wizards!!!
(The following is a series of post on the Denver Post comment board for a recent tangentially related column by Tina Griego. The column, and the entire exchange of comments, can be found at http://www.denverpost.com/ci_17811283?source=bb). This column brings to mind SB 126, Colorado ASSET. The students that Tina profiles here are similar to many that I encountered as an ELA (English Language Acquisition) social studies teacher in Denver Public Schools several years ago, most of whom were undocumented immigrants.SB 126 has no fiscal note (it costs taxpayers nothing; in fact, it brings in revenue for our state universities). We offer kids a path to productivity rather than to desperation and criminality, the latter choice having a much different fiscal and social note for us to pay.
To highlight the inhumanity of our current attitudes toward undocumented immigrants (people whose only crime, like humans throughout history, was to migrate from destitution toward opportunity), I could go into the horror stories I encountered while doing a legal internship with Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network and, briefly, with a private immigration lawyer, stories like that of a detainee in Park County who lost limbs due to a staff infection and inadequate conditions and treatment, or of a young diabetic deprived of his insulin by clueless guards while his mother was frantic and helpless over the fact that they were in effect killing her child just for having been taken across the border as a baby. There are others, as bad or worse, and it’s tempting to tell them, but my experience as an ELA teacher is more directly relevant.
Teaching ELA is an unbelievable experience. These are great kids. Most good teachers love their students, but there’s an extra innocence and sweetness about so many ELA students, that connection is really amplified, in both directions. I felt ready to do anything I could to help my ELA kids over the hurdles they’re facing. A few of them were among the very best students anywhere, in every way, the kinds of kids that excel both in terms of commitment and in terms of just plain good nature. Several of my ELA students, whose faces I can still see as I type this, were kids who I felt then, and feel now, simply deserved a chance to succeed in life. And, given that chance, they would pay back the society that provided it a thousand fold.
Tina Griego is right: These children, many of whom are the product of people who found there way here to give their children greater opportunities in life, offer us hope for the future. We, in turn, need to refrain from depriving them, and us, of that hope.
dlprobert wrote: It costs the taxpayers the money that is discounted giving illegals in-state tuition. It costs the schools those funds!! Don’t say it costs us nothing, how dare you!!No, it brings revenue into the schools. In-state tuition, minus the public subsidy that other state residents receive (which is how the bill is drafted), brings in more revenue to the schools than is spent on the students who are paying it. Since in almost all cases they wouldn’t have been able to pay out-of-state tuition, there is no “opportunity cost” of not having charged them the higher amount. This is simply an economic fact.
dlprobert wrote: All of those horror stories you mention could be avoided, had they stayed in their home country an applied to come here legally, waited their turn, like real LEGAL immigrants do. We, the TAX-PAYING AMERICAN CITIZENS, are tired of the coddling of illegals. We want current immigration laws enforced!! We don’t need any new rules!1) The waiting list for current citizens of Latin American countries is upward of 20 years, even with a close relative. There is no “turn” to be waited. The real alternaitve is between migrating toward opportunity, or not migrating toward opportunity. Humans, all through history, have migrated toward opportunity, the lines drawn in the sand by past conquests and wars notwithstanding.
2) Illegal immigrants pay more in taxes for fewer pay-backs than citizens and legal residents, on average. This is another economic fact.
dlprobert wrote:That is what this TAX-PAYING AMERICAN CITIZEN would like to see, not the same old blather your keep throwing at us about how unjust America treats illegals (it’s obviously not bad enough, they keep coming).My “blather” about a commitment to humanity rather than a mere self-serving antagonism to it is “blather” more of us should be “throwing” at each other, far more often and consistently.
dlprobert wrote: Then let them wait 20 years…their other countrymen did!Really? Do you know the history of North American migration and demographics, not to mention American immigration law? First of all, Texas and most of the American West and Southwest belonged to Mexico before it belonged to the United States, until the latter prosecuted a series of opportunistic wars and anexations in order to acquire it. A large portion of the Hispanic population of this part of the country is descended from those who resided here before it became a part of the United States; in other words, the border crossed them. The words “colorado, arizona, california, nevada, los angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, las vegas…” are all Spanish for a reason. (And the iconic American Cowboy is actually of Latin American derivation.)
More recently, we have utilized various immigration policies to bring in cheap labor when it served our purposes, and try to remove it when it didn’t, frequently dividing and disrupting families in the process. We created the flow of people from south of the border, cultivated it, trying to turn it on and off like a spigot at our convenience, another source of chattel for our exploitation.
Most of that population is predominantly indigenous in its ancestry, descendents of the Indians belonging to that larger population we conquered and displaced, and to a large extent simply massacred, to acquire the wealth we now enjoy (a fact that Hitler cited with admiration, as a justification for his own policy of “lebensraum”). That wealth, produced on stolen land, was produced for centuries with the assistance of imported and abused human chattel from Africa.
You’ll notice, also, that I had said that even those with close relatives have waiting times of over 20 years; those without close relatives can’t immigrate, period. And for those who are lucky enough to have a 20-some year waiting period, their main purpose, that of providing their children with better opportunities, is undermined by the wait, since those children will be adults, and will have to get in line themselves at that point!
America has many admirable qualities, and has, at times, strived to be a gift to humanity. But we are also burdened with our fair share of horrible acts of violence against others, and those you disparage now are both descended from our earlier victims, and are in many ways just the latest incarnation of the disposable labor we have so long cultivated and exploited.
dlprobert wrote: We have no more room in our budget for any more! I’m sorry, but the US can only handle so many immigrants. That is why we have immigration in the first place!Actual economic analyses, rather than arbitrary claims in service to blind inhumanity, tells a different story. Most analyses hover around the conclusion that illegal immigration is an economic wash nationally, though the geographical distribution of costs and benefits is uneven. Undocumented immigrants pay taxes, and are denied some of the services they pay for. They solve a fundamental demographic problem in America (the worker-to-retiree ratio), perform some jobs that there really are not American workers willing or able to do (primarily in the agricultural sector), keep consumer prices low and perform a vital function in our overall economy. This debate, which we have had throughout our history, has never been about our capacity to absorb newcomers; it has always been about the bigotry and xenophobia of those who are already here.
dlprobert wrote:Illegals cost the state of Colorado over $1.5B annually….that’s a fact.No, it’s not a fact. Those who have ever done any honest work in the field acknowledge first that we have no firm numbers, for a variety of reasons. Second, the range of conclusions tends toward zero. Third, you’ve obviously cherry picked a number that some propagandist generated for your convenience. It has absolutely no basis in reality.
dlprobert wrote: The money they earn is sent to their real home countries! In fact, the reason El Presidente came here cryin to Obama was, if we started enforcing our immigration laws, the loss of billions to the Mexican economy!They send a significant portion of their earnings to their home countries, where their wives and children and parents are struggling to survive, while they live spartan lives working long hours here generating wealth in our economy. Improving those foreign economies is also good for our own, in a variety of ways, but, more importantly, it is good for humanity, which is the responsibility of all human beings, even the exceedingly fortunate ones who live in the world’s wealthiest nations.
In your orgy of belligerence, you’re anxious to impose a lose-lose scenario on all of us, hurting ourselves in order to punish others for daring to do what humans have done throughout human history. Let’s focus on what my original post was all about: Providing undocumented teenagers with a chance to succeed in our society. The alternative is not, as you imagine, deporting them: The costs of doing so, even ignoring the astonishing inhumanity of it, are far, far greater than any estimation of the costs of not doing so.
The real question is how to manage the costs of a 12 million strong undocumented population in America. You have a choice between pushing them into destitution, even those who are most capable and dedicated to success, breeding predators rather than contributing members of society, or, more intelligently, offering roads for success, by which we all benefit.
There are those in America, as in many other times and places, that are lost in a fog of ignorance and belligerence, viewing the world through a lens of neatly separate nations and races, of “us” and “them” defined along a variety of dimensions. Such people are the authors of genocides, of enslavements, of brutal conquests and exploitations and oppressions. Then there are others, also in many times and places, who recognize that humanity is undivided except by the lines in our own imaginations, that we share a fate, an on-going endeavor, and fare better when we face it with reason and mutual goodwill rather than with irrational belligerence and hatred.
It’s time for people to start choosing which of those groups they wish to belong to with more wisdom and compassion than many here are doing now.
dlprobert wrote: You said…it was war…and to the victor go the spoils!Thank you for being so transparent about your orientation. You are steeped in the notion of violently despoiling others in service to yourself and your tribe; I am steeped in the notion of thriving, cooperatively, in service to humanity.
dlprobert wrote: I choose to be anti-illegal immigrant, like a majority of TAXPAYING AMERICAN CITIZENS are!
And I choose to be a reasonable person of goodwill, as all of us can and should choose to be.
dlprobert wrote: Look Steve, I am really not trying to be an a__
Fair enough. Then let’s have an informative discussion about all relevant considerations and factors.
First, it’s important to note that this conversation didn’t begin as a blanket defense of “illegal immigration.” My personal view, for a variety of reasons, is that the more open the borders (here and elsewhere), the better. This is beneficial to humanity on several levels: It leads to greater global wealth (by removing barriers to the free flow of the factors of production); it increases global distributional justice (by openning up opportunities to earn a larger piece of the pie for those currently with smaller pieces); it creates more cross-cutting ties among nations and peoples, thus preparing us to better deal with our proliferating global rather than national problems and challenges; it reduces the increasing disparity between the wealthy enclaves in the world and the impoverished mass of humanity, almost entirely by raising up those who are somewhat poorer rather than by bringing down those who are somewhat richer, which is not only more humane, but also helps avert a future that is otherwise guaranteed to be full of horrible violence aimed against those rich enclaves, which will be increasingly unable to stem the tide of humanity demanding global structural changes.
But one doesn’t have to agree with this view to agree that we have a practical problem concerning how to assimilate (or remove) the 12 million or so undocumented residents of this country. Removal, as I’ve already pointed out, is simply too expensive (even ignoring the inhumanity of it). By any calculation, the costs far, far, far exceed the benefits. Fiscally and economically, it is simply completely impractical. Added to that is the fact that you would witness something akin to the Nazi round-up of Jews in 1930s and 40s Germany if that were the path we choose to go down. We would, indeed, become a global villain, and would be historically remembered as such.
That’s what happens when people think primarily in terms of “nations” rather than in terms of “humanity.” The Germans of that epoch, you might recall, justified their actions by recourse to nationalism; they were concerned with the welfare of the German people, and with ridding Germany of a foreign element that they considered a burden on their national welfare. It was irrational of them; they couldn’t have been more wrong. And it is irrational of us; we couldn’t be more wrong today.
The reality is that we have a deep historical link to the people you misidentify as mere invaders. About a third of our contiguous territory was a part of Mexico before it was a part of the United States. Many Hispanic residents of that third are descendents of people whom the border crossed rather than of people who crossed the border. We have purposefully exploited the porous border to the south to our benefit, and have created a population that we consider inferior and disposable. “Legally” or “illegally,” they are a part of our nation and our society, and we have a moral oligation to them.
More importantly, for the purposes of this conversation, our own self-interest depends on assimilating those undocumented people. If we want to improve our control of the flow, so be it. But the notion that we should control it by punishing those who are here in order to make our country less attractive to those who aren’t is sheer folly, both because it turns us into something we should not be striving to be, and because it breeds an angry, rebellious, opportunity deprived shadow population that will only, as a result, impose a real cost and burden on our nation, rather than the imaginary one of today.
dlprobert wrote: America cannot continue with it’s handouts to people that are not in this country legally
The notion that those who come here illegally are greater recipients of “hand-outs” than other members of this society is not only mistaken, it is backwards. Yes, some social services (e.g., public education and emergency room treatment) are not withheld from undocumented residents of this country, but most are. They cannot collect on social welfare and economic security programs (e.g., medicaid, unemployment, welfare, social security, etc.). As a result, unlike American citizens and legal permanent residents, if they’re not working, they simply leave. There’s no point in being here, paying for a higher cost of living while receiving no income. So they are virtually all employed, always paying sales taxes and usually paying income taxes (since they generally need to use fake social security numbers to work) for programs that they can’t collect on. They make a vital contribution to the economy, which is why the labor market places such a strong demand on them.
dlprobert wrote: but it’s still ILLEGAL
There is legality, and there is morality, and there is reality. It was once illegal for a slave to escape from his or her master in this country, or for anyone, in any part of the country, to harbor such an escaped slave. In the name of that law, slave owners could send out slave hunters into non-slave states to recapture escaped slaves, and, abusing that law, those slave hunters often captured free African Americans living in free states and sold them into slavery in the south. Legality clearly is not the final word on “right” and “wrong.” So, those of us who recognize moral defects in current laws have a moral obligation to struggle to change those laws in order to cure those defects.
Beyond legality and morality, there is reality. The reality is that humans have always migrated away from destitution and toward opportunity, regardless of the nature or legal status of the invitation they may or may not have received. Jews ended up in Germany as a result of a diaspora, not a German invitation; does that justify the Holocaust?
We create our nations, give them geographic definition, and create laws by which to govern them, but we do not dictate the underlying dynamics of human existence. We live in a world of far greater global interdependence than nationalists would like to admit, in which the plight of others is and will be our own, and violently so tomorrow if we do not recognize it as morally so today.
dlprobert wrote: Those that won’t even try to assimilate…I have a real issue with that. I’m a veteran and when I went to a foreign country, I made it a point to learn the basics of the native language, not only to get along, but to also fit in.
Good for you. You are the exception among Americans, but not among those of other countries. I’ve lived and traveled abroad for over eight years of my adult life (including two stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army, and over two living in Mexico). I’ve known ex-pat Americans, and travelers and tourists, as well as those of other nations, and we are by far the most disrespectful, imperialistic sods out there. Many Americans abroad not only don’t know the language of the country they are in, but are downright offended when citizens of other countries, in their own countries, don’t know English. “The Ugly American” is a term that evolved in light of this dynamic.
As a veteran, I’m sure you recall the phrases “back in the world” and “going back to the world.” That’s how American service members refer to the United States, denegrating other countries (including European allies) by implying that they aren’t even a part of “the world.” America is the whole world in this formulation; other places are unreal, inferior, less worthy of recognition or acknowledgement. So, let’s not decry the imagined cultural insensitivity of those who come to this country and continue to speak their native language (or continue to speak the language established here before we forcefully anexed this region).
And, lets’ be honest: While some first-generation Hispanics who reside here don’t know much English, the impression that that is the norm is reinforced by selective perception. Most learn more than “the basics” of English. I detect a bit of an attribution and confirmation bias in your above characterization: You didn’t claim fluency; might it be that your “basics” of those other languages, of which you’re so proud, represents a comparable level of language proficiency to the failure to learn English you detect in others?
There are basically two ways to see the world: In terms of “us” v. “them,” or in terms of humanity. We will all benefit in the long run, enormously, the more we gravitate toward the latter orientation and leave the former one on the dust heap of history, where it belongs.
Click here to learn about my mind-bending epic mythological novel A Conspiracy of Wizards!!!
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(The following is my last post in an exchange on The Denver Post comment board for Tina Griego’s column on Sunday April 10. The discussion in its entirety might be more informative: http://neighbors.denverpost.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=17811283&p=1907166#p1907166)
dlprobert wrote: Look Steve, I am really not trying to be an a__
Fair enough. Then let’s have an informative discussion about all relevant considerations and factors.
First, it’s important to note that this conversation didn’t begin as a blanket defense of “illegal immigration.” My personal view, for a variety of reasons, is that the more open the borders (here and elsewhere), the better. This is beneficial to humanity on several levels: It leads to greater global wealth (by removing barriers to the free flow of the factors of production); it increases global distributional justice (by openning up opportunities to earn a larger piece of the pie for those currently with smaller pieces); it creates more cross-cutting ties among nations and peoples, thus preparing us to better deal with our proliferating global rather than national problems and challenges; it reduces the increasing disparity between the wealthy enclaves in the world and the impoverished mass of humanity, almost entirely by raising up those who are somewhat poorer rather than by bringing down those who are somewhat richer, which is not only more humane, but also helps avert a future that is otherwise guaranteed to be full of horrible violence aimed against those rich enclaves, which will be increasingly unable to stem the tide of humanity demanding global structural changes.
But one doesn’t have to agree with this view to agree that we have a practical problem concerning how to assimilate (or remove) the 12 million or so undocumented residents of this country. Removal, as I’ve already pointed out, is simply too expensive (even ignoring the inhumanity of it). By any calculation, the costs far, far, far exceed the benefits. Fiscally and economically, it is simply completely impractical. Added to that is the fact that you would witness something akin to the Nazi round-up of Jews in 1930s and 40s Germany if that were the path we choose to go down. We would, indeed, become a global villain, and would be historically remembered as such.
That’s what happens when people think primarily in terms of “nations” rather than in terms of “humanity.” The Germans of that epoch, you might recall, justified their actions by recourse to nationalism; they were concerned with the welfare of the German people, and with ridding Germany of a foreign element that they considered a burden on their national welfare. It was irrational of them; they couldn’t have been more wrong. And it is irrational of us; we couldn’t be more wrong today.
The reality is that we have a deep historical link to the people you misidentify as mere invaders. About a third of our contiguous territory was a part of Mexico before it was a part of the United States. Many Hispanic residents of that third are descendents of people whom the border crossed rather than of people who crossed the border. We have purposefully exploited the porous border to the south to our benefit, and have created a population that we consider inferior and disposable. “Legally” or “illegally,” they are a part of our nation and our society, and we have a moral oligation to them.
More importantly, for the purposes of this conversation, our own self-interest depends on assimilating those undocumented people. If we want to improve our control of the flow, so be it. But the notion that we should control it by punishing those who are here in order to make our country less attractive to those who aren’t is sheer folly, both because it turns us into something we should not be striving to be, and because it breeds an angry, rebellious, opportunity deprived shadow population that will only, as a result, impose a real cost and burden on our nation, rather than the imaginary one of today.
dlprobert wrote: America cannot continue with it’s handouts to people that are not in this country legally
The notion that those who come here illegally are greater recipients of “hand-outs” than other members of this society is not only mistaken, it is backwards. Yes, some social services (e.g., public education and emergency room treatment) are not withheld from undocumented residents of this country, but most are. They cannot collect on social welfare and economic security programs (e.g., medicaid, unemployment, welfare, social security, etc.). As a result, unlike American citizens and legal permanent residents, if they’re not working, they simply leave. There’s no point in being here, paying for a higher cost of living while receiving no income. So they are virtually all employed, always paying sales taxes and usually paying income taxes (since they generally need to use fake social security numbers to work) for programs that they can’t collect on. They make a vital contribution to the economy, which is why the labor market places such a strong demand on them.
dlprobert wrote: but it’s still ILLEGAL
There is legality, and there is morality, and there is reality. It was once illegal for a slave to escape from his or her master in this country, or for anyone, in any part of the country, to harbor such an escaped slave. In the name of that law, slave owners could send out slave hunters into non-slave states to recapture escaped slaves, and, abusing that law, those slave hunters often captured free African Americans living in free states and sold them into slavery in the south. Legality clearly is not the final word on “right” and “wrong.” So, those of us who recognize moral defects in current laws have a moral obligation to struggle to change those laws in order to cure those defects.
Beyond legality and morality, there is reality. The reality is that humans have always migrated away from destitution and toward opportunity, regardless of the nature or legal status of the invitation they may or may not have received. Jews ended up in Germany as a result of a diaspora, not a German invitation; does that justify the Holocaust?
We create our nations, give them geographic definition, and create laws by which to govern them, but we do not dictate the underlying dynamics of human existence. We live in a world of far greater global interdependence than nationalists would like to admit, in which the plight of others is and will be our own, and violently so tomorrow if we do not recognize it as morally so today.
dlprobert wrote: Those that won’t even try to assimilate…I have a real issue with that. I’m a veteran and when I went to a foreign country, I made it a point to learn the basics of the native language, not only to get along, but to also fit in.
Good for you. You are the exception among Americans, but not among those of other countries. I’ve lived and traveled abroad for over eight years of my adult life (including two stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army). I’ve known ex-pat Americans, and travelers and tourists, as well as those of other nations, and we are by far the most disrespectful, imperialistic sods out there. Many Americans abroad not only don’t know the language of the country they are in, but are downright offended when citizens of other countries, in their own countries, don’t know English. “The Ugly American” is a term that evolved in light of this dynamic.
As a veteran, I’m sure you recall the phrases “back in the world” and “going back to the world.” That’s how American service members refer to the United States, denegrating other countries (including European allies) by implying that they aren’t even a part of “the world.” America is the whole world in this formulation; other places are unreal, inferior, less worthy of recognition or acknowledgement. So, let’s not decry the imagined cultural insensitivity of those who come to this country and continue to speak their native language (or continue to speak the language established here before we forcefully anexed this region).
And, lets’ be honest: While some first-generation Hispanics who reside here don’t know much English, the impression that that is the norm is reinforced by selective perception. Most learn more than “the basics” of English. I detect a bit of an attribution and confirmation bias in your above characterization: You didn’t claim fluency; might it be that your “basics” of those other languages, of which you’re so proud, represents a comparable level of language proficiency to the failure to learn English you detect in others?
There are basically two ways to see the world: In terms of “us” v. “them,” or in terms of humanity. We will all benefit in the long run, enormously, the more we gravitate toward the latter orientation and leave the former one on the dust heap of history, where it belongs.
Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!
La “confluencia colorado” es una confluencia de culturas, de sueños y esperanzas. Es una confluencia de esfuerzos, todos ayudándose los unos a los otros. O así se espera. Es la confluencia de gente, de pueblos, de valores, de ideas. Es la confluencia de humanidad.
Quiero animar a los lectores (y escritores) hispanos a participar en este “blog,” o en español o inglés (o ambos idiomas). El nombre de nuestro estado es un nombre español, como todos ustedes saben. Refiere al color del Río Colorado, por el hierro en las rocas y, por la erosión, en el río también. El símbolo mas conocido del oeste, una parte grande de la mitología estadounidense -el vaquero- es mas hispano que norteamericano en sus orígenes, incluyendo el monte, el sombrero, y el pistolero. Debemos una deuda cultural a los hispanos que dominaron este hemisferio desde la conquista, y aún la sangre y las culturas de los conquistados está incorporada en las culturas hispanas, con tradiciones antiguas e indígenas.
La historia de nuestro continente y de nuestro país es una historia tanto de los hispanos (y gente indígena) que vivieron aqui antes de los gringos, como de los ingleses y otros europeos. La ciudad de San Agustino (St. Augustine) en Florida (establecido por los españoles en 1588) y Santa Fe, Nuevo México (1610) son entre nuestras primeras ciudades (ambas mas viejas que Plymouth Rock, establecido en 1620, y San Agustino es mas antigua que Jamestown, la primera colonia inglesa, establecida en 1607).
Los Estados Unidos nunca ha sido un país sin influencia hispana. Aún en sus raises mas profundas, es un país en gran parte hispano. Como dicen los hispanos del oeste frecuentemente, “la frontera nos ha cruzado.” La gente y el gobierno de los estados unidos se apoderaron de esta tercera parte del terreno del país por medio de una historia de mentiras y oportunismo. Los colonizadores estadounidenses los cuales colonizaron a Texas temprano en siglo XIX prometieron obedecer las leyes Mexicanas, pero después decidieron que preferían tener sus esclavos y su propia religión (ambos prohibidos por las leyes Mexicanas de esa época). La guerra de independencia de Texas, seguida por la anexion a los estados unidos, era un robo de terreno. Y la guerra Mexico-Americano siguiendo esa por un década era otro robo de terreno mucho mas grande.
Así es la historia: No es para quejarse ni para recuperar el terreno que debemos reconocer en la historia, sino para entender la relación histórica entre las culturas que constituyen a nuestro país, incluyendo las injusticias históricas. Porque el método de los conservadores aquí en este país y este estado es identificar a algunos grupos de personas como menos miembros de nuestra sociedad, como si pertenecieran a este terreno menos que los gringos. Y en muchas maneras, es completemente al revés.
Tenemos muchos desafíos en este país y este estado, no solamente la intolerancia en contra de los hispanos. Es mi deseo que todos nosotros, toda gente razonable y de buena voluntad, trabajen juntos como un pueblo, como una sociedad, mejorando la calidad de la vida para todos, y para todos nuestros niños y nietos y bisnietos. Por eso, los invito a todos ustedes que lean esto para juntarse conmigo en mi proyecto, que se llama “las políticas de razón y buena voluntad” (A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill). En cualquier idioma, tenemos que recordar que la meta de nuestros esfuerzos como miembros de una sociedad debe ser alimentar y facilitar a “la audacia de la esperanza.” En cualquier idioma, que siempre entonemos “¡si se puede!”
Un error de la izquierda estadounidense siempre ha sido dividir nuestros esfuerzos entre varios intereses, sin reconocer y desarrollar la unidad del movimiento, la idea sencilla en su centro: Vivimos juntos en este mundo, una humanidad. Somos interdependientes, los unos con los otros, y todos con la naturaleza. El desafío de ser un ser humano, un miembro de una sociedad, un miembro de humanidad, es trabajar juntos como gente razonable y de buena voluntad, intentando mejorar nuestra existencia compartida. Así todos ganan.
Si se puede.
Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!
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As part of A Proposal: The Politics of Kindness, I discussed the importance of organizing and acting in our communities, in non-partisan ways for non-political immediate purposes, in service to the ultimate social and political goal of deepening and broadening the shared commitment to reason and goodwill, in our private lives, in our communities, and in our public policies. I believe that doing so should become a social movement, akin to the Civil Rights Movement, but rather than dedicated to a single issue or set of issues, dedicated instead to a comprehensive attitude that implicates all social issues.
Clearly, the time is ripe for such a movement. Just as the Civil Rights Movement was blessed with a ready-made organizational infrastructure (the southern black church network), so too are all reasonable people of goodwill today blessed with an even more powerful and extensive organizational infrastructure: The Internet and Social Media. I’ve already written about the implications of this technological and social paradigm shift, the possibilities and potentials of which we have just barely begun to explore (se, e.g., A Major Historical Threshold or A Tragically Missed Opportunity?, Wikinomics: The Genius of the Many Unleashed, Tuesday Briefs: The Anti-Empathy Movement & “Crowdfunding”, Counterterrorism: A Model of Centralized Decentralization).
A Tea Partier told me on a Facebook thread recently, “just remember who’s better armed.” When it comes to the more powerful weapons of Social Media, it may be the progressives who are better armed. In any case, the implication of these particular arms is that they accelerate the sifting out of rational from irrational arguments, the lathe of public discourse and debate, which favors reason and goodwill in the long run. Certainly, when it comes to Reason and Goodwill, progressives are better armed, and will inevitably prevail. It is our job to expedite that eventuality, reducing the short-term detours into irrationality and belligerence constantly elongating that path.
The best way to do so is to change the game, the frame and the narrative. Right now, America is stuck in a tug-o-war between progressives and conservatives, both broadly perceived by the vast silent middle to be two opposing extreme camps (with perhaps slightly greater affinity for the conservative than progressive pole). But those same occupants of the vast silent majority would not perceive a movement of community volunteerism and community solidarity building to be either extreme or unattractive. And they would not find it offensive if such a movement included in its “mission” improving the civility and reasonableness of public discourse. But what is the progressive movement if not the commitment to mobilize reason and goodwill, and apply them to our public policies?
The most effective thing progressives could now do is to mobilize a network of Community Action Groups (CAGs) into a nationwide Community Action Network (CAN), dedicated to this component of the proposal linked to above. The only challenge is to create an emerging awareness of the power of such an effort, of the degree to which it can become a game changer if enough progressives were to commit themselves to it. Every local progressive group now in existence, every state house and senate district democratic party organization, every OFA chapter, every MoveOn chapter, every other local group with even moderately liberal leanings, can and should organize into a Community Action Group that seeks to do good works in their own communities, and to foster civil discourse based on no ideology other than a commitment to reason and mutual goodwill.
I ask everyone who reads this to please help me to promote this idea, because the way to become a nation of reasonable people of goodwill is for all who are committed to that end to strive to be reasonable people of goodwill in their own lives, and in their own communities, and to allow that to be a model to others, and to coalesce into a national level commitment. The reason why progressive advocacy is so much less effective than one might think it would be is because progressive advocates are so much less effective, permitting the frames and narratives of the far-right to take root and define the debate. Removing that power from them, and owning it ourselves, is not a function of better sloganeering, but rather of more compelling demonstration; we can and should, we must, demonstrate what it is we are advocating for, if we want our advocacy to become a truly powerful and transformative force in our national history.
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Given Douglas County’s move toward school vouchers (http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_16803779), now is a good time to cut through the rhetoric, the ideology, and the assumptions, and examine the idea thoroughly and fairly.
The logic behind school vouchers is that by providing parents with the ability to take the tax revenue allotted to their child(ren) to whatever public or private school they choose, competition for students will ensue, and the quality of education in all schools will improve (or some will simply “go out of business,” to be replaced by those that have a more successful business model, better competing for the revenue that follows students to the schools of their choice). The argument against school vouchers revolves around the notion that they undermine our commitment to public education.
On the plus side, school vouchers empower parents and students to make their own choices regarding what school they feel best serves their educational needs. They incorporate market forces and competitive pressures into our national struggle to improve our abysmally poorly performing public education system. They do not, inherently, reduce the public investment in education, but rather merely contract out for educational services to the private sector.
On the negative side, school voucher programs are likely to create a permanent underclass of the poorest performing students left isolated in the most underfunded schools. They undermine communities most in need of the benefits of strong community solidarity, by creating a vehicle for abandoning what is often the central cohesive force in our modern communities: The local school. They undermine our commitment to education as “the great equalizer” by, ironically, assigning to each student an equal share of the tax revenue dedicated to public education, thus disenabling increased spending on those with greater needs. And they do absolutely nothing to address the problems of education where they reside, in our homes and communities, in our norms and ideologies, in our cultural anti-intellectualism and preference for mindless distractions over disciplined engagement with the world.
Since private schools are able to accept or reject applicants at will, and acceptance of vouchers will be made on the basis of their school mission and their profit-motive, the students most in need of the most attention will tend to be declined, while the students who are easiest to teach and need the least investment of resources will be preferred. This means that those children most in need of improved educational services will be least able to get them, and, in fact, will see resources that have been dedicated to them siphoned off by the flight of the higher-performing students from their local schools. This is a recipe for abandoning and defunding those children most in need of our attention and resources. It is a retreat from a commitment to equality of opportunity, and toward the reincarnated “social Darwinist” tendencies of the modern far right in America.
Student success is predicated most on their family and community environments; those children who have parents or community members who frequently engage them in intellectually stimulating conversations and model for them the disciplines and attitudes most conducive to success of all kinds will almost inevitably achieve academic success. Our primary focus on educational reform should be on cultivating more of that social support infrastructure outside the schools and school hours, not on dismantling that social support infrastructure even more. Academic failure in America has more to do with the advance of extreme individualism, and the decline of communities, than it does with any defects in the schools themselves. Giving those students already rich in the ingredients for the success increased opportunities at the expense of those poorest in those ingredients will certainly benefit some people, but it will hurt those who are most vulnerable, and will hurt us collectively as a society (by breeding a more entrenched substratum of despair, and all of the social ills that ensue from it).
The projected market-disciplining benefits of vouchers are at best dubious. “Market success” does not, in fact, automatically mean “higher quality”. All it means is that people tended to choose that particular good or service over its competitors. The higher the information costs (i.e., difficulties and obstacles to consumer-assessment of quality), the lesser the degree to which competition improves quality. Parents and students can indeed look at how past graduates of a school have fared, and make assessments on that basis, but those outcomes are based as much or more on the quality of the students that were admitted to the school as on the quality of education they received at the school.
Higher quality students moving from poor performing schools to these more selective schools may indeed on average experience improved individual performance, but not because of any improvement in the quality of educational services delivered; rather, as a result of isolating and removing low performing students from the equation. We have to ask ourselves who and what we are as a people: Are we committed to the continuing march of extreme individualism, the resurrection of “social Darwinism,” or are we committed to being a people who works together to increase opportunities for all? If the former, vouchers are the way to go. If the latter, we need to go in the exact opposite direction: A greater commitment to improving the services offered to families to assist them in better supporting their children’s education, and to communities to help move them in the direction of better facilitators of better educational performance and better citizenship in general.
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Which party is really committed to fiscal responsibility?The debate over the proposal by President Obama’s blue-ribbon commission on how to cut the deficit is revealing of something most rational people of goodwill already knew: Reason has fled the Republican Party completely, and a combination of fanatical ideology and rampant hypocrisy is all that now defines it. Though Republicans made their recent electoral gains by pretending to be responsible fiscal conservatives, the Republican rank-and-file is, ironically, less willing than Democrats to support the commission’s proposals, which rely mostly on spending cuts and secondarily on tax hikes, due to their ideological refusal to acknowledge that fiscal responsibility includes any responsibility to actually pay for a functioning government (I’ve been unable to find the poll; I believe I saw it on The Chris Mathews Show today, 12/4/10).
Secrecy in International Diplmacy is a Vital Ingredient.There are many situations in which shedding some sunshine on political maneuvers that have been hidden from public view serves the public interest, but, as is so often the case, revealing all secrets is not a universal and absolute good. JFK negotiated a peaceful end to The Cuban Missile Crisis in part by making a secret promise to remove American missiles (equally threatening to Russia as Cuban missiles were to America) from Turkish soil. The nuances, subtleties, and practicalities of international negotiations sometimes require a level of candor among our agents than complete and universal transparency allows. The traditional press, though always (for the last half-century or so, at least) far more inclined toward public disclosure than toward helping government keep secrets, has exercised a bit of self-restraint when a good case could be made for the maintenance of some secrets in service to the public interest. Some are offended by such a notion, but I argue that such a reduction of all things to plebiscite would be crippling to international relations. We formed a representative democracy for a reason; their are functions that require agents to be able to act with some latitude on behalf of their principal, and if we strip all of our agents of all such latitude, we will collectively suffer for it. The difficult challenge of holding our agents accountable to our interests, while empowering them to act with some independent (and even occasionally secretive) latitude, is not a trivial one, and errors will be made of both too much and too little public vigilance, too much and too little government empowerment and authorization. But the worst error almost always is the embrace of an extreme and inflexible absolute rather than some acknowledgement of the demands of nuance and subtlety to strike a well-reasoned balance.
While the decentralization of information production and access is, overall, a very powerful tool for human progress, it also poses some serious challenges to our collective welfare on a variety of fronts. One such front is reliability; a great deal of very unreliable information flows very rapidly along virtual networks. Another front involves striking the balance between complete public transparency and some enclaves of confidentiality, a challenge which involves dimensions other than international diplomacy (e.g., decreased confidentiality of personal information of various kinds is another, very different, dimension of this same problem). While some might make a bright line distinction between “public” and “private” information, the more useful distinction is between productive and counterproductive secrecy.
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Coloradans, mistaking our state’s insane and ignorant Republican caucus for a rational partner to off-set what they perceived as Democratic excesses, got what they asked for: A push for insane and ignorant policy (http://www.denverpost.com/legislature/ci_16736807). Buying into (if not authoring) the xenophobic hysteria around the immigration issue, the Colorado Republican House Majority is now using an essentially falsified estimate of the costs of illegal immigration to the state of Colorado to push for an Arizona style draconian law, neglecting the fact that Arizona’s law has hurt, not helped, Arizona’s economy (http://blogs.denverpost.com/thespot/2010/12/01/immigration-law-would-hurt-colorado-says-gazette/19099/).
In A comprehensive overview of the immigration issue, I laid out a framework to inform public policy that takes into account the facts of how immigration (legal and otherwise) affects our economy, as well as other considerations. We don’t need blind ideologues in office, hurting the state economy in order to impose as public policy a lose-lose act of xenophobic belligerence. We need informed and thinking human beings, mobilizing reason and goodwill in service both to ourselves and to humanity.
In The Dream Act & The Battle Between Humane Reason & Belligerent Irrationality, I reiterated the nature of this struggle over our state and national identity, a struggle I discussed at more length in“A Choice Between Our Hopes and Our Fears”. The immigration issue is one of the most focused tests of our humanity, a test which we as a people are woefully failing. We serve neither ourselves, nor our ideals, when we treat an issue so much at the heart of what it means to be a humane people with such callous disregard for humanity. And, ironically, it is not only an act of generosity to pursue a more enlightened path, but also an act of enlightened self-interest, for we benefit more than we lose from the contribution made by these people coming here to improve their own lives.
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There are lots of reasons to pass the Dream Act in the lame duck session before the new (more irrational and belligerent) Congress is sworn in (see http://www.economist.com/node/17575113). The Dream Act provides a path to citizenship for those undocumented young people in America who have been here at least five years, arrived before the age of 16, have not had problems with the law, and have completed some years of college or military service. It serves the interests of humanity, of America, and of the Democratic Party. The opposition to it is blindly punitive, convinced that any gesture of humanity to the millions who migrated illegally toward opportunity would be an affront to all that is good and true, and so determined to punish such a heinous crime as fleeing destitution that they are eager to do so not just at the expense of those poor souls who were evil enough to be born on the wrong side of our southern border, but also at the expense of the American economy and American people. It is one more chapter in the epic story of the ongoing battle between humane reason and belligerent irrationality, a story in which the United States is now front and center.
I’ve already written A comprehensive overview of the immigration issue. Massive, orderly immigration is good for America, good for those who are immigrating, and good for the world. One major real challenge involves providing improved educational opportunities for those already living in the United States, so that they can occupy higher paying, more specialized positions in the economy rather than compete (to the marginal extent that they do) with new immigrants for unskilled jobs. The main obstacle, as has become the central theme of current American political discourse, is the robust force of Organized Ignorance vigilantly obstructing the implementation of intelligent and humane public policies.
It’s time for all reasonable people of goodwill to organize, communicate, and strive mightily to prevent our continuing slide into the belligerent “Fortress America” that some are insisting we become, and to enable us to be a force for reason and humanity in the world. It is, and continues to be, “A Choice Between Our Hopes and Our Fears”
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(Opening scene: Angels, represented by twinkling stars, are talking about a troubled soul on Earth. They review this soul’s life, and the circumstances that led to its present attempt to kill itself….)
It was conceived with great hopes in a simpler time, by a variety of generous parents, and a few original sins. England (via the British Empire), in which modern democracy developed; The Enlightenment, characterized by a fluorescence of rationalistic philosophy; a wide-open new land, with an easily displaced indigenous population; abundant imported and domestically bred slave labor. It developed a grandiose vision for itself, one comprised of the somewhat incompatible memes of ‘manifest destiny’ and champion of liberty, and an exaggerated faith in its own exceptionalism.
But, as often happens, life presented unforeseen challenges which diverted this soul, the sovereign American People, from its youthful dreams. It gradually was forced to confront its original sins, brutally divided by one of them. Innovations complicated the landscape in which its dreams had been formed. It had to cope with a world comprised of other people with interests of their own, people less convinced of the benevolence of this powerful and self-interested nation than its own populace persistently was (rather too conveniently).
But despite this diversion from its original dreams, it was the same soul, peforming many good deeds, more often born of pragmatism than idealism, that were not always part of the original plan. It grew to address a changing world, doing what needed to be done to increase the welfare of those who depended on it. It intervened in its parent-continent when brutality racked the latter’s fields and towns, and then watched that continent, unencumbered by youthful dreams, combine the best fruits of their child’s aspirations with the reduced purism that comes from maturity.
But something in the people clung to the purity of youthful dreams, sulking with resistance to adulthood’s demands, an error that sometimes characterizes idealistic youth. Just at the point when both the people and their government were on the verge of following the mature wisdom of moderation and adaptation, the oversimplistic idolater within, childish and narcissistic rather than noble and generous, rebelled, and rent this national soul in an internal conflict over whether mature moderation would prevail, or childish purism.
It rebelled in a moment of crisis, a large faction of the people chanting the mindless refrain, “Government is not the solution, it’s the problem! The world would be better off without this government we’ve allowed to grow and grow, displacing the purity we had believed in and tried to implement in our youth! We would be better off if we had not allowed the lessons of life to adapt those youthful dreams to the demands of reality!”
And so this soul’s guardian angel decided to show it what the world would have been like without that modern government it now wished dead….
“First,” the angel said, “let’s look at what your country and world would have been like had you not further amended the Constitution after the Bill of Rights.
“Slavery would not have been legally abolished by the 13th Amendment, nor Congress empowered to enforce its prohibition.
“The 14th Amendment’s transformation of the legal framework of the country would never have occurred. The Dred Scott Decision, which held that no African American, whether free or slave, was an American citizen, would have remained the law of the land. The states’ exemption from the Bill of Rights, a document originally interpreted to limit only the federal government’s intrusion on state and individual rights, would have persisted, and the protections of the Constitution would have continued not to apply to or restrain state and local governments in any way. African American slaves would have continued to be counted, legally, as 3/5 of a human being.
“The 15th Amendment’s legal guarantee, not to be effectively enforced for a century more, that all citizens, regardless of race, have the right to vote, would not have come into existence.
“The 17th Amendment’s increase in direct democracy, by shifting elections for U.S. Senators from the state legislatures to the people of the state, would not have happened.
“Women might still be denied the vote in some states.
“The increased tardiness and unevenness with which the United States would have dealt with these morally enervating issues would have reduced the human capital of the nation, delaying its fuller liberation and development longer, if not, in some places, indefinitely. It would have been a less innovative country, and a less inspiring one to other nations. Resentments would have grown even stronger, divisions even deeper, the problems bred by these defects even more inextricably embedded in the fabric of your society. Those who later depended on the United States as a beacon of liberty would see only a quagmire of exploitation and oppression, either lagging even farther behind the finally pacified continent across the Atlantic it continually claimed superiority to, or, by not being a strong enough nation to lead, leaving the world into a downward spiral from which it couldn’t escape.
“The world would have been a very different place indeed had the United States not become what it became. And while there are those in the world who think that would have been a good thing, sometimes with considerable justification, it most certainly wouldn’t have been a good thing for America, nor, all things considered, for global peace and prosperity.”
“Oh, Angel,” the suicidal faction groaned condescendingly. “First of all, most of us don’t object to Constitutional Amendments, but rather to other increased exercises of federal power without recourse to such amendments. And second of all, many of these things would have come to pass by the choice of individual states, without the federal government imposing them on the states.”
“Slavery wasn’t going anywhere, anytime in the foreseeable future, without the legal and military coercion of the federal government,” replied the angel. “The gradual incorporation of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment by successive Supreme Court decisions, which continued into very recent times (because state and local governments were not universally committed to protecting those rights), would not have occurred, and those states would remain free to disregard those protections. We see even today how fragile those protections are, at the hands of those who claim most respect for them, in the repetition of the refrain that granting due process to those suspected of certain crimes (e.g., terrorism) reduces the rule of law, a chant that is phenomenally ignorant of what the term ‘rule of law’ means in a Constitutional republic (hint: ignoring it out of convenience, in order to increase conviction rates, no matter how heinous the crime, is the exact opposite of what it means).
“As for your other concerns, about increased exercises of federal power not granted by Constitutional amendments, follow me….”
The angel then said, “let’s look at what your country and world would have been like had you not had a strong federal government to hold the country together, pursue its collective interests, and impose its core values on its constituent parts (leaving aside for the moment the issues of so-called ‘activist courts’ and of the rise of the ‘administrative state’).
“It took a strong federal government to end slavery and hold the union together during and after the Civil War. A century later, it took a strong federal government, complete with National Guard, to enforce court-ordered desegregation. And it took a strong federal government to pass The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which utilized attenuated Commerce Clause power to prohibit racial discrimination by private owners of commercial institutions.
“It took a strong federal government, captured by the will of the people in a series of populist and progressive movements in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, to rein in ‘the robber barons,’ and redress the biggest disparity of wealth in this country ever…, until today, when we have finally exceeded it. It took a strong federal government to give the country hope during The Great Depression, and, despite the revisionism popular with the far-right today, launch record-setting economic growth in its midst (from 1933-1937), until budget hawks managed to convince to FDR to compromise his policies to their concerns.
“It took a strong federal government to mobilize the country and lead the allies during World War II, and to lead NATO during the Cold War.
“Without these efforts, slavery might still be extant, and, certainly, Jim Crow (American ‘Apartheid’) would still be extant in some regions. The country would have fractured not just into two as a result of the southern cessation, but into multiple tiny republics, neither viable on their own nor of any import on the world stage.
“Mexico and Canada, our more politically, economically and militarily successful neighbors to the north and south (in this alternate reality), probably would have annexed large chunks of what would otherwise have been The United States. European and World History would have been different, possibly with fascism prevailing in Europe and, eventually, threatening the tiny, weak republics across the Atlantic, in what would otherwise have been The United States of America.
“There would have been nothing other than fascist Europe to check Soviet and Chinese expansion, and, it is more probable, given the lack of moral compass of both fascism and Sino-Soviet Communism, that they simply would have arrived at a mutually agreeable division of the world into competing but mutually accommodating and reinforcing tyrannies.
“Without a federal government as strong as this one has been, there would be no ‘United States’ today, certainly no liberties in some regions for those who were deprived them historically, and quite probably a more tyrannical world in general.”
“Next,” the angel said, “let’s look at what your country and world would look like if you had not had an ‘activist’ judiciary interpreting the Constitution in ways relevant to, and adapting to, changing circumstances.” (See http://www.law.emory.edu/fileadmin/journals/elj/58/58.5/Green.pdf for a comprehensive exploration of the concept, including a discussion of why it, appropriately applied, has nothing to do with boosting individual liberty or governmental power, but rather refers to whether the judiciary adheres to the norms of judicial conduct which are its only real restraint.)
“In the conventional, ideologically charged use of the term, all Supreme Court decisions involve ‘judicial activism,’ because those cases that the Supreme Court chooses to hear are precisely those cases that involve unresolved ambiguities, and require judicial interpretation. Therefore, a complete history of the evolution of Constitutional Law, as defined by Supreme Court decisions, is, in a sense, one important slice of the history of ‘judicial activism,’ as the term is commonly used. And without that fully institutionalized form of ‘judicial activism,’ which is coextensive with the doctrine of ‘judicial review’ established by Justice Marshall described below, there would be no enforceable Constitution, no established and coherent rule of law to the extent that there is today in the United States. But rather than write a Constitutional Law synopsis, I’ll just mention a few of the most important cases, that involved perhaps the greatest liberty of Constitutional interpretation on the Court’s part, but without which we would be a nation with far weaker protections of individual liberties and rights than we have today.
“Chief Justice John Marshall established the principle of ‘judicial review’ in Marbury v. Madison in 1803, the first and greatest act of judicial activism in U.S. History, without which there would have been no final authority on what was and was not Constitutional. the lack of such judicial authority would have inevitably undermined the rule of law that, more than anything else, has distinguished the United States. Without the judicially determined Constitutional last word that Marshall successfully instituted, questions of Constitutionality, and thus ultimate legality, would be political footballs to a far greater extent than they already are, overwhelmed by the bickering whims of conflicting ideologies and interests that characterize the rest of political discourse and decision-making. In other words, without this bold initial act of judicial activism, the Constitution would have been an empty promise, and would be referenced today for strictly rhetorical rather than legal support, a non-binding tool for political argumentation. Uninformed lay opinions about what does and does not constitute Constitutionality would be raised to a par with legal analyses and Supreme Court holdings, reducing the Constitution to a meaningless blank slate on which each interest group and ideological camp could impress its own preferred interpretation.
“In Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), the Supreme Court held that a facially neutral law that has the effect of discriminating (a selectively enforced San Francisco code restricting licensing for laundries to brick or stone buildings in order to target Chinese laundries which were built of wood) violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. This decision was not a foregone conclusion: The letter of the law itself didn’t violate the Equal Protection clause, and so the decision can be said to be one of ‘an activist judiciary.’ But had it been more literal in its Constitutional interpretation, the Court would have set the precedent that discrimination is Constitutionally permissible as long as it is done implicitly rather than explicitly.
“In Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon (1922), the Supreme Court held that a government regulation that essentially deprives a property owner of the value of its property is an unconstitutional ‘taking’ (violating the Fifth Amendment protection of property), and the government must compensate the owner for that loss of value. Again, this is not an automatic ‘strict constructionist’ interpretation of the Constitution, since there is no language in the Constitution which addresses loss of value due to government regulation. However, those most adamant about the ills of ‘judicial activism’ are generally also those most likely to concur with this holding. In the absence of the judicial activism of the Court in this case, private property rights would have been more, rather than less, vulnerable to government intrusion.
“Brown v. Board of Education (1954) would certainly rate as an act of judicial activism by the ideological definition of that term currently in vogue. It overturned the Stare Decisis of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which held that segregation was Constitutional (instituting the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine), holding that ‘separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.’ Brown essentially launched the Civil Rights Movement as we know it today (it gave it its first major victory), a movement whose progress would have been at least slower, and possibly undermined altogether, in the absence of this Court decision.
“The Court also declined to limit Congress’ power to pass The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which used the Commerce Clause to prohibit private owners of commercial establishments from discriminating against potential customers, employees, renters, and buyers on the basis of race. This could easily be considered ‘judicial activism by omission,’ without which we would not have Civil Rights laws protecting minorities against the entire range of private discrimination, such as employment discrimination and housing discrimination.
“In Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), the Court established that the state’s failure to provide counsel to an indigent defendant essentially deprived that defendant of his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The literal Constitutional right to counsel is not necessarily a right to be provided with counsel, at the people’s expense, but without interpreting it as such, this fundamental right would be accorded only to those who could afford it, and denied to those who cannot, reducing an essential protection of individual liberty to a commodity for sale rather than a guarantee to all citizens. In a world without this protection, the poor would receive even less justice than they do today.
“It’s worth noting here, again, that a series of Supreme Court decisions over the last century and a half have incorporated the Bill of Rights into the 14th Amendment Equal Protection clause, allowing those core protections to be applied to state and local governments as well as to the federal government, an act of ‘judicial activism’ without which states and counties and municipalities and school districts would be largely free to violate the Bill of Rights to whatever extent and in whatever ways they see fit. Hardly a boon to the protection individual liberty.
“Many other decisions could be included in this list, many other basic liberties that depended on an ‘activist judiciary.’ But the sampling above illustrates some of the ways in which our nation would be a very different, and in many ways far poorer place were it not for the role that the so-called ‘activist judiciary’ has played in our march toward increased equality of opportunity and rights, and increased protection of individual liberties.
“Finally,” said the angel, “let’s look at what your country and world would look like without the rise in America of the ‘Administrative State,’ through which to regulate the complex modern economy.
“Without the regulatory agencies that promulgate regulations, conduct hearings and inspections, license facilities, and engage in a complex web of tasks necessary to implement the laws passed by Congress, we would live in a far more insecure and unhealthy environment. Incidents such as the infamous ‘Love Canal’ toxic waste dump beneath a housing developing, causing an astronomical rise in cancer rates, would be the norm rather than the exception. The manipulation of markets, such as those by Enron which caused the California energy crisis of 2000-2001, would be constant and economically devastating. Confidence in investments would plummet, the economy would contract dramatically, and the financial system near-collapse of 2008 (resulting from underregulated financial markets) would be a constant and continuous event rather than a once-in-a-century crisis.
“The absence of the regulatory structure that has developed since the 1930s, and under the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, would be akin to removing the mortar from between the bricks of the modern economy. The entire edifice would be less securely bound together, more unstable, and more likely to collapse. Those sheltered within it would feel every cold wind that blows through, and storms would whip through it with discomfiting regularity. Market failures would dominate the economy, and health and safety violations would be constant and ubiquitous. Commercial enterprises would know that they could sell toxic and dangerous substances with impunity, recognizing that there is more profit in not paying the costs of avoiding doing so. A major, perhaps completely dominant, economic niche would emerge for those that compete by avoiding such costs, simply changing names and products whenever the slow dissemination of information of the health and safety risks make the old product unprofitable to produce and sell.
“The already underfunded Food and Drug Administration would leave even more food and drug safety responsibility to the companies that have a vested interest in overlooking foreseeable dangers. The New York Times reported (September 28, 2007) that due to defunding, the FDA audits less than 1% of clinical drug trials in the United States. As a direct result we have increasing known cases of pharmeceutical companies fudging results of drug trials, leading to waves of preventable deaths, such as occurred with Propulsid (Johnson and Johnson), Bextra and Celbrex (Pfizer), and Vioxx (Merck).
“Similar stories of the consequences of deregulation and defunding of regulatory agencies can be found in food safety (increasing salmonella and E. coli contamination, even after companies had been asked to address discovered dangers but simply chose not to, a luxury afforded by underregulation), and product safety (such as children’s toys, imported from China, containing lead in seriously toxic quantities, undetected due to underregulation of imports). The more we ‘shrink government’ by reducing regulatory oversight even more than we have already done, the greater the frequency of such incidents will become. In the unregulated paradise that some in America are striving for, life would be, literally, ‘nastier, more brutish, and shorter,’ for thousands if not millions of children, and families, and innocent people just going about their lives.
“While there are some dysfunctional dynamics that lead to the production of laws that are thousands of pages long (e.g., earmarks, and other porkbarrel spending provisions; and controversial riders designed to piggyback on necessary legislation), the main reason is the complexity of the social institutional landscape that those laws are addressing. And those laws, even with their tens of thousands of pages of qualifications and provisions, don’t even begin to anticipate all contingencies, all unexpected consequences, all complexities that will emerge as the law is implemented. For that reason, regulatory agencies are necessary to implement the laws, to address those complexities, to adapt the execution of the law passed in Congress to the realities of the world to which it will apply.
“It is a very information-intensive enterprise, with an amazing amount of very precise expertise embedded in these organizations, able, for instance, to research the precise cancer rates associated with each commercial chemical substance on the market, or incorporated into items on the market; the ways in which these substances move through the environment and contaminate human beings; the probabilities of contamination and of contracting associated diseases from contamination; the fatality rates of doing so; the costs of regulation at each level; the balancing of legitimate economic concerns with legitimate health and safety concerns. It is not a process which leaves the public out, but rather one which, by law, includes the public, and invites public input.
“The same kinds of calculations and processes are required to oversee the use of public lands, the mining of water from aquifers and of minerals from the Earth, the emissions and dumping of toxic substances into the air and water and land; the determination of where to build roads and interstates and how to balance all of the concerns and interests involved; the determination of where to allow coal plants and nuclear plants and other installations to be built; the determination of what kinds of safety devices and scrubbers they require; the oversight of all of these protections and provisions without which we would all be dramatically worse off.
“Our economy has been growing (and continues to grow) in complexity at an accelerating rate. For example, the use of supercomputers programmed with complex algorithms to buy and sell stocks in order to reap gains made in fractions of a second distort the market, caused a freefall several months ago that rattled investors and required shutting the stock market down, and creates a competition for locating the computers as close as possible to the stock market servers in order to receive the information milliseconds before competitors. The market collapse caused by a malfunctioning algorithm resulted in an enduring loss of perhaps billions of dollars to investors, as the market had to creep back up, in a context of diminished investor confidence, from the depths to which it had plummeted. We need regulatory agencies equipped with human and material resources capable of keeping up with the tens of thousands of similar demands on them, if we want our market economy to continue to function, and to do so in the interests of all rather than at the long-term expense of the many in the short-term interests of the few.
“Here’s one very compelling objective piece of evidence about the value of that administrative state you are so eager to dismantle: Its emergence immediately preceded the most dramatic rise in wealth production in the history of the world. That very expensive “big government” administrative state has existed in every single nation on Earth that has ever experienced that dramatic rise in wealth production, both immediately prior to experiencing it and from then on, without exception, and every single prosperous developed modern nation is still characterized by the presence of that very expensive “big government” administrative state today, again, without exception. There is not one single exception, and never has been. While it’s true that you can’t prove a counterfactual (we don’t know what would have happened in its absence), there is not one shred of evidence that any other governmental form is able to facilitate this feat and accommodate its end result. By all available evidence, our wealth, the wealth of each and every one of us, is completely dependent on the existence of the administrative state.
“Yes, many of the problems that would occur in the absence of such a regulatory structure still occur within it; the poor are still burdened more than the rich by undesirable facilities in their neighborhoods; acquiescence to economic necessity still often triumphs over public health and safety; the interests of corporations still work their way through the system, in a variety of manners, at the expense of the public without always being off-set by a commensurate economic benefit; ‘industry capture’ of regulatory agencies to some extent ‘puts the foxes in charge of the henhouse.’ All of these problems diminish the degree to which our regulatory infrastructure efficiently and effectively does what almost all of us implicitly recognize to be necessary and desirable. But the absence of our regulatory infrastructure would erase the performance of that function altogether. The significant shrinkage of it that periodically occurs under Republican administrations almost always results in catastrophic effects, with a regularity that is matched only by the public disregard of the repeated lesson.
“To be sure, throughout this tour of what ‘small government’ would really mean, I have ignored the ways in which a strong centralized federal government, an ‘activist judiciary,’ and the rise of the administrative state have led to negative rather than positive outcomes for both Americans and the rest of the world (perhaps more the latter than the former, since a strong America has been strong to its own citizens’ advantage; for the most part, only when it incidentally served the interests of American citizens have others in the world benefited from American power. See “Democracy IN America,” But Not BY America). But the danger in America today, the one that most needs remedy, is not an exaggerated belief in the virtues of centralization of governmental power and effective political coherence, but rather an exaggerated belief in something that does not and cannot exist in the oversimplistic form imagined, a Liberty Idolatry that counsels the destruction of the very social foundation which liberty requires for its existence. And so that is the imbalance that I have addressed.
“Those poetic aspirations of America’s national youth were what defined its spirit and channeled its energies. They still guide and inspire its people today. But meeting real responsibilities as they arose is what carved that spirit into the more-often-than-not admirable world citizen and leader, and reliable agent of its own people’s interests, that it has become. The world, and the people at home who give the federal government life and whose lives that government in turn embues with expanded opportunities, would be poorer for the partial death that some would now impose on this vital vehicle of the American spirit. The demands that the federal government has risen to meet were not optional, could not have been disregarded. And idolizing rather than respecting the guidance given by America’s founding leaders and documents is an insult to them, and a disservice to those alive today, as well as those who will be alive tomorrow.”
The United States of America was founded to be a progressive nation. As Thomas Jefferson himself wrote:
I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
Those who would strait-jacket us as a people with the ideological raiment that exists only in their own shrunken imaginations stand in opposition to this ideal, and to the very spirit of this nation. It’s time for George Bailey to come home, and bask in the fellowship of a society of people who strive to lift one another up, and help bear one another’s burdens.
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(Continued from “Wonderful Life,” Part II; see “It’s a Wonderful Life,” American Political Edition (Parts I-V) for all five parts combined and revised)
“Second,” the angel said, “let’s look at what your country and world would have been like had you not had a strong federal government to hold the country together, pursue its collective interests, and impose its core values on its constituent parts (leaving aside for the moment the issues of so-called ‘activist courts’ and of the rise of the ‘administrative state’).
“It took a strong federal government to end slavery and hold the union together during and after the Civil War. A century later, it took a strong federal government, complete with National Guard, to enforce court-ordered desegregation. And it took a strong federal government to pass The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which utilized attenuated Commerce Clause power to prohibit racial discrimination by private owners of commercial institutions.
“It took a strong federal government, captured by the will of the people in a series of populists and progressive movements in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, to rein in ‘the robber barons,’ and redress the biggest disparity of wealth in this country ever…, until today, when we have finally exceeded it. It took a strong federal government to give the country hope during The Great Depression, and, despite the revisionism popular with the right today, launch the record-setting economic growth in its midst (from 1933-1937), until budget hawks managed to convince to FDR to compromise his policies to their concerns.
“It took a strong federal government to mobilize the country and lead the allies during World War II, and to lead NATO during the Cold War.
“Without these efforts, slavery might still be extant, and, certainly, Jim Crow (American ‘Apartheid’) would still be in some regions. The country would have fractured not just into two as a result of the southern cessation, but into multiple tiny republics, neither viable on their own nor of any import on the world stage.
“Mexico and Canada, our more successful neighbors to the north and south (in this alternative reality), probably would have annexed large chunks of what would otherwise have been The United States. European and World History would have been different, possibly with fascism having prevailed in Europe and, eventually, having threatened the tiny, weak republics across the Atlantic, in what would otherwise have been The United States of America.
“There would have been nothing other than fascist Europe to check Soviet and Chinese expansion, and, it is more probable, given the lack of moral compass of both, that they simply would have arrived at a mutually agreeable division of the world into competing but mutually accommodating and reinforcing tyrannies.
“Without a federal government as strong as this one has been, there would be no ‘United States’ today, certainly no liberties in some regions for those who were deprived them historically, and quite probably a more tyrannical world in general.”
(Continued in “Wonderful Life,” Part IV)
