Author: hankkalet

The Fourth of July usually means a playlist of marshal tunes and the standard patriotic fare. It’s a mixed bag — some of it, like Johnny Cash’s “Ragged Old Song” or Irving Berlin’s catalogue, is quite amazing, some a bit maudlin.

But what of the other side of the coin? Hence, a playlist for dissenters. It is just a brief list. What else might we add?

• “Born in the USA,” Bruce Springsteen
• “This Land is Your Land,” Woodie Guthrie
• “America,” Simon & Garfunkle
• “Ashes of American Flags,” Wilco
• “Star-Spangled Banner,” Jimi Hendrix
• “Power and the Glory,” Pete Seeger or Phil Ochs
• “Democracy,” Leonard Cohen
• “Pithecanthropus Erectus,” Charles Mingus
• “Freedom Day,” Abbey Lincoln & Max Roach
• “Mississippi Goddamn,” Nina Simone

Add your choice in the comments.

Back when I was about 20, I can remember sitting in Annie’s living room watching the No Nukes concert on cable. Her dad was watching it with us. Bob was a conservative sort, politically, a staunch Republican, a Reagan man — my polar opposite on nearly every issue. (He also was one of the smartest and most humane men I have ever met.)

As we were watching, however, he made a comment that stuck with me.

He opposed nuclear power, he said, because he wouldn’t want it in his back yard, and if he didn’t want it in his yard, then he didn’t think anyone should have to have it in their’s.

Simple. To the point. It cut through so much of the noise. If you don’t want a nuke plant — or a power plant or a 2 million-square-foot warehouse — in your backyard or near your house, you shouldn’t be so eager to advocate its construction in someone else’s yard or on their street. Enter Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobile:

Tillerson has joined a lawsuit that cites fracking’s consequences in order to block the construction of a 160-foot water tower next to his and his wife’s Texas home.

The Wall Street Journal reports the tower would supply water to a nearby fracking site, and the plaintiffs argue the project would cause too much noise and traffic from hauling the water from the tower to the drilling site. The water tower, owned by Cross Timbers Water Supply Corporation, “will sell water to oil and gas explorers for fracing [sic] shale formations leading to traffic with heavy trucks on FM 407, creating a noise nuisance and traffic hazards,” the suit says.

Though Tillerson’s name is on the lawsuit, a lawyer representing him said his concern is about the devaluation of his property, not fracking specifically.

Tillerson is less concerned for others who might live in areas where gas companies are drilling and has “lashed out at fracking critics and proponents of regulation,” adding that “the risks are very manageable.”

I think my late-father-in-law would have something to say to Mr. Tillerson

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I am expected to be on WHYY radio tonight to discuss today’s NJ Spotlight story, by yours truly, on the issues facing undocumented immigrant children in New Jersey. We’ll be taping this afternoon. Wish me luck — I’m surprisingly nervous.

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Daniel Froomkin asks one of the right questions in the wake of yesterday’s ruling in the Hobby Lobby case: “Why should employers have anything to do with people’s health insurance anyway?”

I alluded to this argument on Facebook yesterday, but Emily Divito does a more thorough job than I did. Her argument: that the Hobby Lobby challenge and decision were, to some degree, set in motion by the passage of the Affordable Care Act’s short comings. The ACA, she says, “is fatally flawed” and it “is clear we now need a public, single-payer health care system.”

The Hobby Lobby case, she writes, “exposes the primary and unavoidable weakness of the ACA.”

Because it still requires that private companies enforce what should be considered public policy – health care – the ACA will always face potential legal contention with the personally held religious beliefs of employers.

And what kind of health “insurance” have Americans gotten under this strange arrangement? Once again, uniquely in the industrialized world, it has been ephemeral coverage that is lost with the job or changed at the employer’s whim. Citizens in any other industrialized country have permanent, portable insurance not tied to a particular job in a particular country.

Nor has this coverage been cheap by international standards. American employers can be said to have played a major role in driving up health spending per capita in the United States measured in internationally comparable purchasing power parity dollars, to roughly twice the level found in other industrialized populations. As a recent article in the health policy journal Health Affairs reported, a decade of health care cost growth wiped out real income gains for the average American family during the period from 1999 to 2009.

The ACA offers some improvement over what had existed — though its full impact is still difficult to gauge. But it still leaves most of what is wrong with the American health care system in place. In the end, that is the real problem with the contraception mandate and much of the rest of the ACA.

While this issue has been framed as a fight between women’s rights and religious freedoms — which it is, at least to a degree — and the outrage over the court’s decision is real and warranted, we should use the decision to put single-payer back on the table. If we don’t want our employers making these decisions, then we should cut them out of the process.

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This is a fascinating story on a study in Mexico that offers some evidence that distributing cash, rather than vouchers or food, does a better job of assisting the poor.

As the story makes clear, this is just one story and one study and drawing broad conclusions doesn’t make a lot of sense. But what the study does is “it adds to a growing pool of evidence that cash transfers actually aren’t ‘wasted’ on frivolous things and do improve poor peoples’ lives in observable ways.”

Studies like these are important, therefore, because they have the potential to move us away from a system of welfare (I use the term to describe the broad set of programs that include general assistance, food aid, housing, etc) constructed on a punitive, behavioral model toward one in which we acknowledge that assistance is needed and that it is in the best interests of both those being helped and the larger society to help without strings.

Let people who are receiving the aid make their own decisions about what to do with it. Let them set their own priorities.

Will they all make smart decisions all of the time? No. None of us do, and it does not stop us from receiving various forms of government aid, whether in the form of mortgage deductions and various tax right offs or direct outlays. No one checks to see that we have used the money in a “morally acceptable” manner. We just take the money and do what we want with it. Why should the poor be treated any differently?

Yes, some are going to buy drugs or drink, but many — maybe most — will use the money to keep their heads above water, making choices based upon what is required of them at the moment.

That’s how the rest of us live. We take our paychecks and the other money that comes in, and we balance the various interests in our lives. When money is tight, we might opt to cut back on food to make sure the rent is paid, or to keep the lights on. Or we might buy a six pack and watch baseball or buy porn or go out carousing.

The poor, however, are not afforded that leeway simply because they are poor. We have decided that they are morally or intellectually inferior, so we treat them as 10-year-olds, attaching strings to every bit of help we offer. It is worse in some states than others, though, even in relatively generous states, the application processes for receiving assistance is long and complicated and designed to intimidate. (Read both Jonathan Kozol and Michael Harrington on this.)

There is no evidence that our paternalistic approach to aid is more efficient or more effective than a more generous and open approach. But there are few efforts — and fewer studies of these efforts — being made to explore alternatives aside from finding new hoops for the poor to jump through as they attempt to get help.

It is part of a larger cultural/social mindset that assumes that the poor lack value, that their lack of resources somehow is evidence of a lack of humanity on their part, which then allows us to treat them like they were less than human. Isn’t it time this changed?

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