Hank Kalet

I saw this headline from The New York Times on a friend’s Facebook page (thanks Helene) and couldn’t resist — I asked if it may have been the presence of Bay City Roller albums that caused all of the opprobrium.

Poll Finds Disapproval of Record Collection, but Little Personal Concern

It is not about vinyl records, of course, but about the current scandal over the National Security Agency’s civil-liberties-wrecking data-mining program.

I’m adding this headline to my list of head-scratchers for when my news-writing class starts back up in the fall. It shows, I think, both a generational divide among copy editors and a blindered focus that allowed the desk to miss the possible multiple meanings.

Another headline on my list is this one from last week on NJ.com:

Body of man accused of attacking wife with hot oil pulled from Passaic River

Confusing, right? Was it the body of the man or the man who was accused? Was the wife attacked with hot oil pulled from the river or just hot oil?

This one, I think, is easily fixed:

Body pulled from Passaic ID’d as man accused of hot-oil attack on wife

I am not showcasing these to make fun of them (well, just a little), but to point out something that all young journalists need to understand. Clarity is key. The words you choose matter, as does the order in which they are written.

Bruce Bartlett concedes something today that left-leaning economists have been saying for quite some time: The financialization of the economy is not healthy.

Bartlett buries his argument in a sea of studies and engages in a seemingly reasonable, if unnecessary, set of caveats. But he also puts several important claims on the table that, because of his history with the Reagan and Bush administrations and as advisers to libertarian leaning politicians, may finally get the kind of hearing they should have been getting all along.

Bartlett notes the growth in the financial services industry — which now exceeds 8.3 percent — up from 2.8 percent in 1950 and 4.9 percent in 1980. That may not seem like a huge amount, but as Bartlett points out, citing Ozgur Orhangazi of Roosevelt University,

investment in the real sector of the economy falls when financialization rises. Moreover, rising fees paid by nonfinancial corporations to financial markets have reduced internal funds available for investment, shortened their planning horizon and increased uncertainty.

He also quotes Adair Turner, a former top financial regulator in Great Britain, who said

“There is no clear evidence that the growth in the scale and complexity of the financial system in the rich developed world over the last 20 to 30 years has driven increased growth or stability.”

He suggests, rather, that the financial sector’s gains have been more in the form of economic rents — basically something for nothing — than the return to greater economic value.

This is essentially the argument that Kevin Phillips made in his 2008 book Bad Money and that William Greider has been making for years.

Bartlett goes on to say that, as finance sucks up more and more resources, labor gets less. Its share of income has “fallen 12 percentage points since its recent peak in early 2001 and even more from its historical level from the 1950s through the 1970s.” There are a number of factors in play, he says, “including globalization, technology and institutional factors like declining unionization.”

But according to a new report from the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency, financialization is by far the largest contributor in developed economies (see Page 52).

The report estimates that 46 percent of labor’s falling share resulted from financialization, 19 percent from globalization, 10 percent from technological change and 25 percent from institutional factors.

The upshot? Bartlett acknowledges that financialization is “a major cause of rising income inequality, which itself is an important reason for inadequate growth.”

As the entrepreneur Nick Hanauer pointed out at a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing on June 6, the income of the middle class is critical to economic growth because of its buying power. Mr. Hanauer believes consumption is really what drives growth; business people like him invest and create jobs to take advantage of middle-class demands for goods and services, which must be supported by good-paying jobs and rising incomes.

Bartlett’s not sure what to do about it and it is hard to see why. We’ve spent the last 40 years dismantling the rules we had put in place to ensure some semblance of order in the economy and to protect workers and consumers. What this dangerous wave of bipartisan deregulation has wrought is a financial meltdown that wiped out billions in middle-class wealth and millions of jobs, followed by a stubborn stagnation that has hampered growth and directed what little improvement we’ve seen to the top 1 percent.

We need to be honest with ourselves. Deregulation was not an elimination of rules that acted as a brake on our economy, but a rewriting of rules designed to redistribute wealth upward and make it easy for those with cash to grab more of it.

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President Barack Obama, former constitutional law professor, has compiled quite the track record on issues of national security. He would point to the killing of Osama bin Laden and several other high-ranking members of al-Qaeda as proof that he has been a successful commander in chief. And he does deserve credit for getting us out of Iraq.

But the rest of his record makes it clear that his approach to national security has been to steer the course originally set out by President George W. Bush. The changes have mostly been rhetorical — he no longer uses the phrase “War on Terror” — but much of the content has remained in place.

Here is the Obama record on national security and civil liberties issues:

• He has approved targeted killings using unmanned drones, including the killing of American citizens. And he attempted to keep the program secret, not just from Americans but Congress, as well.
• He has begun more prosecutions of alleged leakers than all previous presidents combined.
• He subpoenaed the phone records of reporters at the Associated Press to chase a whistleblower.
• His Justice Department designated a reporter as a potential co-conspirator in a leak investigation.
• He has approved domestic surveillance and signed an extension of some of the more far-reaching and civil-rights-encroaching provisions of the USA Patriot Act.
• He has claimed a right of extra-judicial executions.

This is the context in which we need to judge the revelations, published by the Guardian (UK) yesterday, that

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

Does this make Obama worse than Bush, as some are claiming? Probably not. His administration has gotten court approval for its assault on civil liberties, something that the Bush administration saw as unnecessary. The upshot, however, is the same — an erosion of civil liberties that has the imprimatur of both parties and a presidency carrying far more power than is healthy for the kind of democratic republic under which we claim to live.

Obama, to paraphrase Billy Joel, didn’t start the fire. He didn’t, however, try to fight it — and we are going to pay for it in spades in the not-too-distant future.

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With the war on drugs, everyone loses.

Civil liberties go out the window, communities get turned into war zones and public money that could be used for more productive purposes get flushed down the toilet like a brick of dope at the first sign of a police raid.

The latest evidence that it is time to change the paradigm is an ACLU report issued yesterday that shows that

The aggressive enforcement of marijuana possession laws needlessly ensnares hundreds of thousands of people into the criminal justice system and wastes billions of taxpayers’ dollars. What’s more, it is carried out with staggering racial bias. Despite being a priority for police departments nationwide, the War on Marijuana has failed to reduce marijuana use and availability and diverted resources that could be better invested in our communities.

According to the ACLU, 8 million were arrested on pot charges between 2001 and 2010, or “one bust every 37 seconds and hundreds of thousands ensnared in the criminal justice system” at a cost of “about $3.6 billion a year.” Despite this, “Marijuana use has increased since 2007.“

In 2011, there were 18.1 million current (past-month) users—about 7.0 percent of people aged 12 or older—up from 14.4 million (5.8 percent) in 2007.

While pot use “is roughly equal among Blacks and whites,” the ACLU says, “Blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.”

The ACLU report calls for legalization of pot for “persons 21 or older through a system of taxation, licensing, and regulation.”

Legalization is the smartest and surest way to end targeted enforcement of marijuana laws in communities of color, and, moreover, would eliminate the costs of such enforcement while generating revenue for cash-strapped states. States could then reinvest the money saved and generated into public schools and public health programs, including substance abuse treatment. If legalization is not possible, the ACLU recommends depenalizing marijuana use and possession for persons 21 or older by removing all attendant civil and criminal penalties, or, if depenalization is unobtainable, decriminalizing marijuana use and possession for adults and youth by classifying such activities as civil, not criminal, offenses.

In the meantime, the ACLU says, police departments should back off their aggressive enforcement of marijuana laws, “end racial profiling and unconstitutional stop, frisk, and search practices, and no longer measure success and productivity by the number of arrests they make.”

The Star-Ledger is pushing this new paradigm, but stops short of calling for legalization, instead preferring the “reanimation of a legislative move to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use.”

That doesn’t mean legalization; possession would still be subject to a fine but, like a traffic ticket, it would not be a criminal offense that now carries a punishment of up to a $1,000 fine and six months in jail.

Gov. Chris Christie has taken the wise and compassionate step of directing those convicted of nonviolent drug offenses to treatment instead of a jail cell. Why not extend that sensible approach to the front end of the system, ending costly arrests for possessing small amounts of pot?

It’s a good question. The answer is that the politicians have yet to buy into the shift away from a law-enforcement model, one that brings with it impressive visuals (in this, the press is complicit, running photos of smiling law enforcement and their impressive looking catches), to the less visually alluring efforts to treat drug use as the health problem that it is.

My preference is legalization — and in states like Colorado and Washington, which have an initiative-and-referendum process, that remains a short-term possibility. In other states — like New Jersey — the process is going to have to be more incremental, proving at each step that the loosening of pot laws has not caused the sky to fall, so that fence-sitting politicians may eventually do the right thing.

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ESPN’s Outside the Lines is reporting that 20 ballplayers are about to face punishment from Major League Baseball because of their alleged connection to a “Miami-area clinic at the heart of an ongoing performance-enhancing drug scandal.” The players include former MVPs Alex Rodriguez and Ryan Braun and would be part of what ESPN said could be “the largest in American sports history.”

Tony Bosch, founder of the now-shuttered Biogenesis of America, reached an agreement this week to cooperate with MLB’s investigation, two sources told “Outside the Lines,” giving MLB the ammunition officials believe they need to suspend the players.

One source familiar with the case said the commissioner’s office might seek 100-game suspensions for Rodriguez, Braun and other players, the penalty for a second doping offense. The argument, the source said, is the players’ connection to Bosch constitutes one offense, and previous statements to MLB officials denying any such connection or the use of PEDs constitute another.

The news is a sad day for baseball, and not just because it gives the game another “steroid” scandal at a time when it appeared to be recovering from earlier ones. It also continues the selective approach the league has taken to justice as it makes its stars the bad guys when ownership has been as complicit, turning a blind eye during the height of the steroid era.

The history provides the context. Baseball’s owner-triggered 1994 shutdown was followed by a couple of leans attendance years even as fans were being given a chance to watch some outstanding baseball. Everyone talks about the Yankee teams of the late-90s, but the Braves and Indians fielded some outstanding ballclubs as well.

Then, in 1998, four years after the lock-out, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa traded homeruns, chasing and then erasing a 37-yearold homerun record that was supposed to be unbreakable. The homerun was king — as the Tom Glavine-Gregg Maddux TV commercial claimed, “Chicks dig the long ball.”

Homeruns made the owners money in attendance and through TV ratings and they made hitters rich, as well. And owners worked to ensure the trend would continue, with smaller parks, tighter strike zones and the tacit approval of whatever it was that these homerun hitters were doing.

Throughout, there was whispering and even loud shouting, but the league and the players did little more than nod and make empty promises — even as the whispers grew louder (a Sports Illustrated cover story on former MVP Ken Caminiti in 2002 detailed his steroid use and accusations that the use was widespread and Jose Canseco’s accusations in 2005). In 2006, the league acted undertaking an internal investigation into performance-enhancing drug use among players that stopped short of examining a larger league culture that, as I said, tacitly encouraged the drug-fueled power spree.

In the wake of the investigation, the league instituted a new testing regime and got religion on the drug issue. But in declaring its own war on performance-enhancing drugs, the league is making the same mistakes that local, state and federal authorities have made in attempting to curtail illegal drug use. It has made it about crime and punishment, which ensures failure.

This is why Dave Zirin’s suggestion is worth considering:

Steroids and all PEDs need to be seen as an issue of public health not crime and punishment. If seen as an issue of public health, the scandal here would not be that a group of players may have used PEDs. The scandal would be that they had to visit a skuzzy, unregulated “clinic” not run by medical professionals to get their drugs. Instead of criminalization, educate all players about the harmful effects of long-term PED use when not under a doctor’s supervision. Have medical officials make the policy and determine what PEDs help a person heal faster – an admirable quality in a medicine, no? – and what shouldn’t be a part of any training regimen. Centralize distribution under the umbrella of MLB so it doesn’t become an arms race of which teams get the best doctors and the best drugs. Then, players could take advantage of the most effective new medicines and MLB would be removing the process out of the shadows where the Tony Bosch-types of the world hold sway. They also then have an ethical basis for testing and rehabilitation when use crosses the line into abuse.

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