Nov 7 2014

Beyond the Media Hype: Immigrants

I wrote in Ignorance, Fear and Imaginary Facts that we imagine facts to support what we fear, and that one of the things we greatly exaggerate is the number of immigrants. I said that’s a problem because politicians tend to focus on what we believe, not the actual data.

So, what have they done based on our fear of immigrants? First, a reminder. We imagine that 32% of our population are immigrants while the actual number is 13%. This means we have 60 million imaginary immigrants in addition to the real 41 million.

Sixty million is a lot of imaginary people! It’s enough that we’d expect some big actions. And even though 60 million people are imaginary, we caught 1.6 million entering illegally in 2000 and we do not know how many are already here. There really is cause for concern.

But what do we mean by “immigrant”? Everyone was an immigrant when the Constitution was established in 1787.

Our first citizenship law was established in 1790. Any “free white person of good moral character” who lived here two years and in the same place for one could apply. The requirement was increased to five years in 1795 with a three year wait, and in 1798 to 14 years with five years notice of intent to apply.

All children born here have been considered citizens since 1868 and African Americans could become citizens since 1870. Asians could live here then, but not become citizens.

The first law restricting immigration was passed in 1875. It prohibited any Asian coming to be a forced laborer, any Asian woman who would be a prostitute, and anyone who was a convict. The labor provision was largely ignored but the ban on female Asians, especially Chinese, was heavily enforced.

Then the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers (it was only repealed at the end of 1943). Chinese immigration that started in the 1848-1855 California Gold Rush had continued for huge labor projects like the Transcontinental Railroad, but then came the 1870s post-Civil War economic slump. Chinese workers were blamed for depressed wage levels.

We began deporting those who entered the country illegally in 1891, a year after the Wounded Knee Massacre near the end of when our ancestor immigrants finished dispossessing the Native Americans.

Small-scale deportations began five years before we dedicated the Statue of Liberty with its poem, “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.” We did little to stop illegal immigration, however, until Congress established the Border Patrol in 1924.

Our main focus until the 1950s was Canada. The first large-scale deportation of illegal Mexican immigrants was Operation Wetback in 1954. It was not until the 1990s that illegal immigration became a big issue.

At the start of the Clinton administration, Border Patrol had 4,000 agents. That more than doubled to 9,000 by the end of his administration. Border Patrol’s enormous growth followed 9/11. It doubled again to 18,000 agents by the end of the Bush administration and to 21,000 in Obama’s first term.

When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was set up following 9/11, Border Patrol was reestablished as part of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with a $12.4 billion annual budget and a staff of 60,000 that includes 46,000 gun-carrying Customs officers and Border Patrol agents.

We have spent over $100B on border and immigration enforcement since 9/11.

CBP is by far our largest federal law enforcement agency. Its 250 planes, helicopters and drones make it the largest law enforcement air force in the world, as big as Brazil’s entire combat air force.

Border Patrol’s growth was far too rapid for quality hiring, and it has not been well led. Until March of this year, it went five years without a Senate-confirmed leader. An average of almost one CBP officer per day was arrested for misconduct between 2005 and 2012, and Border Patrol agents have shot and killed almost 50 people since 2004.

Not well led? In Obama’s first year, Border Patrol was ordered to change its definition of “corruption.” There would be “mission-compromising corruption,” e.g., bribery, narcotics- or human-smuggling, etc. and “non-mission-compromising corruption,” e.g., sexual or other assault of detainees or theft. Only “mission-compromising” incidents were to be reported to Congress. That did not cut corruption but it did cut the statistics by almost a third.

Border Patrol’s leader since March has his work cut out, and the October federal budget funds 2,000 more CBP officers, the largest single increase Congress has ever passed.

But no matter how successful BP’s new leader is, stopping people from entering illegally is only half the battle. We should also make it easy to identify illegal immigrants and promptly deport them.

The high likelihood of being promptly deported would be the greatest deterrent against attempting to enter illegally.

That would require some form of national ID, which advocates of civil liberties oppose. Because the Constitution grants all rights to the States that are not specifically granted to the Federal government, driver licenses and other identification cards are issued by each State separately.

The REAL ID Act of 2005 established standards for state-issued identification documents to make them acceptable for restricting entry to DHS headquarters, nuclear power plants, and other restricted federal facilities, and eventually to restrict boarding of federally regulated commercial aircraft. Only 21 States were compliant at the beginning of 2014.

The REAL ID Act is not aimed at identifying who is and is not eligible to live and work here. The State driver license and other such databases are neither uniform nor interoperable, and that is how State government officials and civil rights advocates want it to stay. The States want to retain their prerogatives. Civil rights advocates fear government abuse if we are all recorded in one big database.

There certainly is potential for abuse. Hoover’s FBI kept files on enormous numbers of people he considered suspect and all of us are now in the NSA’s database. Our emails, texts and phone calls are searched and stored. Our travels probably are, too, if we carry a smartphone. Our activities are captured by surveillance cameras and presumably searched with facial recognition software.

But civil rights advocates are misguided. We already have far less privacy than we imagine, and we are rapidly losing more. The protection we need is around the use of data. We need to protect ourselves directly against government abuse and corruption, not hobble its ability to protect us.

What we need is a dependable way for everyone who has the legal right to live and work here to prove that, and for the form of proof to be very hard to forge.

Our passport system may be a good starting point for the identification documents all legal residents should have. More than a third of Americans (35%) now have a passport. That is up from 6% twenty years ago and passports issued since 2007 contain chips that enable facial recognition.

We could establish a system for checking who has the document and deporting those who do not. We don’t consider it abusive that we must carry a driver license whenever we drive a car. It would be little more burdensome to carry an identification document at all times.

What have I left out? Stopping illegal immigration is not enough, we must also establish a just and effective way of deporting those who are here illegally… Oh, yes, we must also decide who we want to have immigrate and make it easier for them to do so.

We no longer want other nations’ “tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Actually, as well as not wanting them, we also want to get rid of those like them who are here legally.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops denounced Ryan’s proposed 2012 budget, which the GOP House passed, because it “fails to meet the moral criteria” of the Church, failing to help “the least of these as the Christian Bible requires: the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the jobless.”

Ryan is still chairman of the GOP’s House Budget Committee with more power now the GOP controls the Senate. We are not likely to get a more Christian budget or immigration policy any time soon.

Our fears will be used to legitimize more violence.

Oct 30 2014

Ignorance, Fear and Imaginary Facts

We imagine facts to support what we believe. That’s a problem because politicians tend to focus on what we believe, not the actual data.

It’s the same in every country. This global survey by Ipsos MORI, key findings of which are summarized here, highlights how wrong we are in 14 countries about the make-up of our population.

Emotional innumeracy is the root of the problem, a term from a research paper by Daniel Herda (UC Davis) who studied immigration innumeracy, the inability to reason about immigration.

Herda found that emotional factors create innumeracy: “Among the emotional predictors, perceived threat has a strong positive association with innumeracy. It does so net of social distance and political conservatism, which have their own significant positive and negative associations, respectively.”

So, if we believe immigrants pose a threat, we overestimate the immigrant population. Fear drives our overestimate; the overestimate increases our fear.

US respondents imagine that immigrants make up almost a third (32%) of our population, two and a half times the actual number, 13%.

Immigrants are perceived to be a threat in all nations surveyed, and the smaller the actual percentage of immigrants, the greater the overestimate. The miniscule 0.4% of Poland’s population who are immigrants are overestimated at 35 times that number, Hungary’s 8 times, Japan’s 4 times and so on. Australians with by far the highest percentage of immigrants (28%) overestimate by only a quarter.

The percentage of Muslims is also universally overestimated.

The overestimate of our Muslim population by US respondents is 15 times the 1% small reality. That is consistent with the overestimation in other countries with small (2% or less) Muslim populations – Hungary 18 times, South Korea and Poland 13 times, Canada and Japan 10 times, Australia 9 times, Spain 8 times. But even in countries with a more noticeable 4% – 8% Muslim population the overestimates are at least 3 times reality.

The percentage of Christians is correspondingly underestimated in most countries. Four of every five (78%) Americans report themselves to be Christian while we estimate it is less than three in five (56%). Even in Italy where 83% of the population is Christian, the estimate is only 69%. These underestimates result from perceived threat to that heritage.

The percentage of Christians in South Korea and Japan is hugely overestimated. These overestimates also result from perceived threat to their traditional culture.

Overestimates of immigrants and Muslims and underestimates of Christians all stem from the perception that traditional values, culture and identity are under threat.

We might question the “actual” count of Christians in the following chart because many who do not go to church consider themselves Christian, but the feeling of threat is to whatever respondents consider themselves to be.

Herda’s research result: “perceived threat has a strong positive association with innumeracy” suggests that the overall inaccuracy of a people’s knowledge of their society’s makeup is a measure of how threatened they feel. Ipsis Mori presents that metric as an “index of ignorance.”

Sadly, we in the US are almost the most ignorant and/or fearful of all nations. Only in Italy is there greater ignorance and/or fear of change.

Eighty years ago in his first inaugural address, our President spoke of his “firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” That, too, was a time to get real. “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment,” he went on.

But we can’t get real if we keep imagining the facts and getting confirmation of our fears from media whose interests are so different from ours.

So let’s stop deluding ourselves. Let’s question what we imagine to be facts.

Oct 28 2014

What to Do about Ebola

“Are you not in favor of quarantine?” I was asked in response to: http://martinsidwell.com/ebola-and-homo-politicus/ about how the media promotes fear.

I am in favor of helping us know when to quarantine ourselves and making it less difficult to do. I am against handing over more of our rights and responsibilities to our government.

What we have done so far to avert the risk of an Ebola epidemic is misguided. A few States have established mandatory quarantine of travelers from countries affected by Ebola in West Africa. Travelers from West Africa arriving at five US airports have their temperatures taken and are questioned about their possible exposure to Ebola. A 21-day quarantine was initially imposed on all travelers returning from West Africa whether or not they showed symptoms of the disease.

If the best approach were to quarantine all travelers from West Africa, it should be done at every international airport throughout the US.

But why only travelers from West Africa, and why not for other deadly diseases, too? If Ebola warrants such measures, shouldn’t we also close our borders to more deadly diseases? Those diseases are everywhere, so presumably we should quarantine all travelers from everywhere.

If we are willing to abandon more individual rights and responsibilities, we should temperature test all travelers, quarantine everyone returning from anywhere whose temperature is elevated and refuse entry to all non-natives with high temperatures.

Every passenger had their temperature taken and anyone with an elevated temperature was denied entry the last time I flew into China’s Tibet. We could do the same.

But Ebola is not in fact such a great risk for us in the USA. It has been contracted in this outbreak so far by around 10,000 people in West Africa since March and by around 400 health care workers from overseas, about 20 of whom have been treated in Europe and the US. That’s not many compared to other deadly diseases, but how contagious is Ebola?

Ebola spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids of someone who has symptoms of the disease. It can survive for a few hours on dry surfaces like doorknobs and counter-tops and several days in puddles of body fluid. Bleach solutions can kill it.

“Direct contact with bodily fluids of someone with symptoms of Ebola” means there is no risk of transmission from people who have been exposed to Ebola if they are not showing symptoms. No risk.

And the Ebola death rate is tiny so far compared to other contagious fatal diseases: fewer than 5,000 thousand Ebola deaths this year, hundreds of times more for other diseases. 1.6 million died from HIV/AIDS in 2012, 1.3 million from tuberculosis, 1.1 million from pneumonia, 760,000 from infectious diarrhea, and more than 600,000 from malaria.

The death rate from Ebola could greatly increase, but if closing our borders to it is wise, it is even more urgent to close them to HIV/AIDS and other diseases whose death rate is astronomically higher.

How much liberty and privacy are we willing to sacrifice, though?

Sacrificing our individual rights to our government is a slippery slope. Our fear of terrorists after 9/11 enabled passage of the Patriot Act, which severely restricted our traditional rights and made possible massive expansion of the NSA’s data gathering. Our fear after Pearl Harbor led us to incarcerate innocent people of Japanese heritage, which we eventually admitted was the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

Will we eventually reverse the excesses of the Patriot Act? Or will we abandon more of our liberty? Will we authorize the NSA to record everywhere we go using GPS data from our cellphones? They could then know who is at risk from contact with people who develop deadly diseases.

How much of our liberty and privacy are we willing to abandon in order to feel safer?

What have our politicians done so far? What they are always tempted to do, take more power. Is there a more effective possibility?

Yes. The risk of catching infectious diseases and their death rate is far greater in low- and middle-income countries where limited if any medical care is available. People travel, so disease travels with them. This means that by far the most effective way to cut our risk of contracting and dying from Ebola or other deadly diseases would be a universal health care system.

Everyone in the USA who contracts a contagious disease could then receive medical treatment and not infect others.

That is the best approach for our people, but what about those in West Africa? Should we do anything for them?

That’s a moral question. Facts and analysis cannot provide the answer, although there are practical aspects we can consider.

We currently feel obligated to act as the world’s policemen. We give our government several trillion dollars each year to destabilize cruel regimes. But those who survive the bombing fail to establish better government. That results in us being hated, despised and/or laughed at for our foolishness.

Killling and destruction do not make life in this world better. We could, however, build a happier world by instead acting as its humanitarian leader. We could, for example, do more than send 3,000 troops to Liberia to build 17 Ebola treatment facilities.

But we seem to have no compelling self-interest in West Africa as we do in the Middle East without whose oil our economy would collapse. If Ebola arrives in India’s slums, however, and sparks a widespread epidemic, our cancer, HIV-infected and other patients will not get their medicines because 40% of generic drugs in the US come from India.

We do have interests throughout the world, and our behavior is noticed. If we stop killing people to make their lives better and instead help them heal themselves, we will be more loved, less hated and therefore much safer.

It is hard to imagine us overcoming out feeling that we must rule the world, however, and almost impossible even to imagine our government building a better situation for our own people in our current political climate.

What does seem somewhat realistic is to avoid Ebola hysteria. Let’s instead of foolishly sacrificing more of our rights, require our government to educate us about Ebola and make it less difficult for anyone with symptoms to quarantine themselves and get treatment.

Oct 18 2014

Ebola and Homo Politicus

Here goes Homo Politicus again. Few of us really know anything about the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) but most of us have views about whoever is our President.

Homo Politicus says those views tell us all we need to know about the CDC’s effectiveness.

A recent survey finds 76% of Democrats and 54% of Republicans confident in the federal government’s ability to respond to Ebola while a 2006 survey about avian flu found 72% of Republicans and 52% of Democrats confident in the federal response.

The difference? A Democratic President now, a Republican President then.

We can see the swing taking place. At the H1N1 “swine flu” outbreak in President Obama’s first year, 81% of Democrats were confident and 70% of Republicans still remained so in the federal response.

But does it matter that our expectation about the performance of government agencies is formed not on the facts but on our political bias?

It matters very much. We panic about how we imagine our government will respond to Ebola but do little about diseases that we bring upon ourselves.

It makes no sense, for example, to panic about Ebola and at the same time smoke cigarettes.

And it is shameful for us to panic about Ebola being brought here from Africa when we’ve done so little to eradicate it there.

Malaria is estimated to have killed over 600,000 worldwide in 2012, 90% of them in sub-Saharan Africa. But that death rate is estimated to be down almost 50% since 2000.

The same success could have been achieved with Ebola. It still could.

And what is the single greatest real reason to fear an Ebola catastrophe here? Our healthcare system.

People without health insurance who have the disease will put off visiting a doctor until it gets worse. Of course they will. They will infect others before they get to medical care.

We could fix that, too, but we are distracted by Homo Politicus. How very sad it is that we listen to him.

Mar 17 2014

Our Sacrosanct Jobs Program

A news article this week brought to mind something British politician Tony Benn said, “I remember setting sail to South Africa for training [as a WW2 RAF pilot] and being part of a war aims meeting. It was the most brilliant political meeting I ever attended. One man spoke of the mass unemployment of the 1930s and said that if we could attain full employment by killing Germans, we could have full employment by building houses, schools and hospitals.”

The article is about a $643M contract with Bath Iron Works (BIW) for which Maine Senators Collins, a Republican, and King, an independent, got funding. They say it will “allow the Navy to send another DDG-51 to sea when the Navy’s fleet needs to preserve important combat capabilities in support of our national defense.” Democratic Representative Pingree said, “this is excellent news for the families who earn their living at BIW.” A shop steward who represents BIW workers said, “the contract brings more stability to the company, which employs about 5,400 people.”

So, my representatives in Washington, the BIW workers and their families, local business owners, everyone around here is happy we’re going to build more of these ships that were “originally designed to defend against Soviet aircraft, cruise missiles and nuclear attack submarines.”

What struck me is, although we don’t think of Defense that way, it has grown into an enormous jobs program. What’s more it’s a program whose rationale and scope we do not question.

President Reagan’s budget director David Stockman has points to make, however. In The Ukraine, The War Party and the Pentagon’s Swamp of Waste he writes, “the $625 billion allocated to DOD this year amounts to a colossal destruction of economic resources for no benefit whatsoever to the safety and security of the American people.”

Stockman is angry, perhaps because “About three decades ago I called the Pentagon a “swamp of waste” during an off-the-record interview that ended-up on the evening news. Presently I ended-up in President Reagan’s woodshed–explaining that, well, yes, I did say that because it was in fact true.” His article is excellent background reading.

I don’t feel emotional about this but I am equally determined to do what I can so we do question how we want to spend that $625B of tax revenue. The current program does have some benefit — it provides a lot of jobs — but as Tony Benn realized, some of them could be different jobs. Some could be jobs without the risk of being killed or maimed.

Defense spending has huge support. There was a bi-partisan agreement to cut (sequester) federal spending this year. Stockman notes that “Had every dime of the $55 billion sequester been implemented, this year’s DOD budget would have been roughly $600 billion … in 1989, the DOD budget was about $475 billion in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars.” Even though DOD spending would have been up 25% from 25 years earlier, when the time came to make the cuts, Congressman Paul Ryan and others said making them would be tantamount to surrender. So the cuts were not made.

What provoked Stockman’s article is, “Contrary to the bombast, jingoism, and shrill moralizing flowing from Washington and the mainstream media, America has no interest in the current spat between Putin and the mobs of Kiev.”

Echoing President Eisenhower’s famous warning when he left office sixty years ago, he says, “The source of the current calamity-howling about Russia is the Warfare State–that is, the existence of vast machinery of military, diplomatic and economic maneuver that is ever on the prowl for missions and mandates and that can mobilize a massive propaganda campaign on the slightest excitement.”

Stockman is outraged that we believe the propaganda and by our hypocrisy: “We have invaded every country to our South–from the Dominican Republic to Guatemala and Panama and assassinated or overthrown dozens of their leaders–all within the 60 year span since Nikita Khrushchev gifted Crimea to his minions in Kiev. So precisely which nearby borders are so sacrosanct and exactly who has done the more egregious violating?”

I’ve written before about our defense spending and military strategy over which “we the people” have no control. President Reagan greatly accelerated spending on what was in fact a spurious rationale, it dropped and stabilized in the next decade, then it was driven to extraordinary new heights by President Bush based on a new spurious rationale. The numbers below show our total defense spending, not just what is presented in the US budget defense line item but also the spending on “overseas contingency operations” i.e., the wars President Bush started in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We might be encouraged by Congress’ refusal to approve President Obama’s recent desire to take military action in Syria except that (A) Congress is currently of a mind to refuse everything he proposes and (B) everyone in Congress always wants more military spending in their district.

Important as it is to make rational changes to our defense spending and decide what kind and size jobs program we want to fund, however, we first need a government that functions, one that could debate such questions, arrive at decisions and take action.

I’m still absorbing research about how we could get such a government and, following a break where I’m hoping for sun and heat, I will report back next month.

Mar 12 2014

Surprised by the Antichrist

If you’re ever on I-84 near where it meets the Mass Pike, stop in at the Traveler Restaurant, be served a good diner-style meal by friendly waitresses and choose three free books. I’ve been going there every chance I get since 1985.

What I found there most recently is Kevin Phillips’ 2006 American Theocracy. In his 1967 book The Emerging Republican Majority Phillips showed how gaining Southern voters could propel the Republican Party’s revival. He is now horrified by the result.

American Theocracy has three sections. Phillips starts by reviewing how our dependence on oil led to our foreign policy and wars in the Middle East and ends by showing how our financial and business leaders got the Republican Party’s traditional principles of sound finance abandoned. What surprised me is the middle section. There he examines the rise of fundamentalist Christianity and apocalyptic expectations and shows how they shape our policies.

Phillips cites the statistics on Americans with a religious preference. From 17% in 1776 it rose to 34% in 1850, 45% in 1890, 56% in 1926, 62% in 1980 and 63% in 2000. We were established as a secular republic when fewer than one in five Americans had any religious preference. More than three in five of us now has a religious belief.

Almost half (46%) of Americans now identify themselves as “born again” Christians. And more than half (55%) in a 2004 Newsweek poll believe the Bible is literally accurate.

In the 2000 elections 87% of the “frequent-attending white religious right” voted for George W. Bush (GWB). Only 27% of secular voters favored him. I had no idea religious belief had such an impact. I did recognize that when GWB characterized his invasion of Iraq as a “crusade”, that really was his view. I should have realized, too, that a significant percentage of those who supported him also imagine we are now engaged in a holy war in the Abrahamic end time.

But I was entirely unprepared for this on page 260 “Some 40 percent of Americans believe that the antichrist is alive and already on the earth” even though I knew that under GWB, Saddam Hussein was identified as the antichrist. Who, I wondered, is the antichrist now Saddam Hussein is no more?

In this 2013 Public Policy Poll Report I discovered that 13% of voters in the 2012 election believed President Obama is the antichrist and a further 13% was “not sure.” Among voters for Romney 22% believed Obama is the antichrist while fewer than 3 in 5 believed he is not. It may be yet more alarming that 5% of voters for Obama believed him to be the antichrist.

In that report we also see 58% of Republican voters believed “global warming is a hoax”, 33% believed “Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11” and 73% did not believe “Bush misled on Iraq WMDs.”

What to make of all this? My assumption about the widespread lack of respect for facts and skeptical inquiry in America was mistaken. The great problem is not the mechanics of our educational system but the purpose many want it to serve – certainty in the literal truth of the Bible.

I’ve written before about fundamentalism. Our media tells us it’s a problem among Muslims, especially in the Middle East, where terrorists hope to kill us all. But some American fundamentalists are also eager for war, perhaps because they fear our nation is in decline.

Fundamentalism results from fear when social, economic or political trends look like a threat to existence. The desire for certainty in a way out grows overwhelming. Everyone else must then embrace the same faith because belief in something that cannot be proved is a lot easier to maintain if nobody is expressing doubts.

But we will inevitably do harm if we imagine we are fundamentally different and have mortal enemies. Only misery can result.

What to do? We must calm and clear away the fears.

Everything we do, say and think boosts or shrinks fear in the world. A butterfly could alter the path of a hurricane or prevent its occurrence — the flapping of wings is one of so many tiny forces on the atmosphere. It’s the same with human moments of love or hate.

Feb 18 2014

Campaign Finance and Corrupt Politicians

How did money become so important in our political system? How does it corrupt politicians? What can we do?

I’m considering the comment, “because money has become so important in our political system far too many politicians, at all levels of government, are corrupt” on the first post in this series.

State resources seem first to have been traded in an organized way by President Andrew Jackson. Appointees after his 1828 election had to contribute part of their pay to his political machine. By the 1850s political operatives were getting donations by threatening corporations with hostile legislation. In the 1860s, parties were getting donations from very wealthy individuals like the Astors as well as mandatory contributions of part of the pay of federal employees.

The first federal campaign finance law was the 1867 Naval Appropriations Bill which prohibited soliciting contributions from Navy yard workers.

After political appointments were largely replaced by a permanent civil service in 1883 and the parties lost that important source of funding, they relied more on corporate and individual donations. Vote buying became common and some donations were big enough to imply great rewards. One Ulysses S. Grant supporter contributed a quarter of his entire campaign expenses in 1872.

Fund-raising was systematized for the 1896 election of President McKinley. Banks were assessed by his campaign at 0.25% of their capital, corporations on profitability. Business owners were happy to contribute to defeat McKinley’s populist rival, William Jennings Bryan.

Public outcry prompted McKinley’s successor, Teddy Roosevelt, to oppose corporate influence but he was suspected in his 1904 campaign of promising an ambassadorial nomination to a large contributor. He then proposed, “contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law” but with no restriction on contributions from owners of corporations.

The 1907 Tilman Act prohibited corporations and interstate banks from making direct financial contributions to federal candidates but it was not enforced. Disclosure and spending rules for House and Senate candidates in 1910, contribution limits in the 1925 Federal Corrupt Practices Act, an annual ceiling of $3M for political party spending and $5K for contributions in the 1939 Hatch Act, and extension of the Tilman rules to unions by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act were all easily circumvented.

The 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act required broad disclosure of campaign finance and 1974 amendments established a central enforcement agency, the Federal Election Commission, as well as limits on contributions and spending but a 1976 Supreme Court decision struck down limits on spending as violations of free speech.

Further legislation was defeated until 2002 when the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act sought to limit spending by large enterprises and wealthy individuals. An Act proposed in 2010 to prohibit foreign agents and government contractors from election spending and require the sponsor of all political advertising to be disclosed was defeated.

The constitutionality of limits on election financing continues to be contested. The US Supreme court ruled in 2010 that corporations and unions can not be prohibited from promoting the election of a candidate, which a Washington Post-ABC News poll found 80% of Americans oppose (Democrats 85%, Republicans 76%, independents 81%).

Should we expect a Constitutional amendment about campaign finance since four of five Americans oppose the Supreme Court ruling? That depends on whether big spenders have enough control over who gets elected to defeat such an amendment.

Do big spenders have enough control? How much money are we talking about? Total spending on the 2008 federal election was $5.3B, of which $2.4B was on the presidential race alone. Obama spent $730M and McCain $333M. Obama’s top contributors included Goldman-Sachs $1,034K, JPMorgan Chase $848K, Citigroup $755K and Morgan Stanley $528K.

Spending on the 2010 midterm federal election totaled $3.6B with the average winner of a seat in the House spending $1.4M and in the Senate $9.8M.

Where does the money come from? In 2010 roughly half came from large individual contributors. Senate Republicans got only 42% from that contingent but were 20% self-financed. The total from candidates’ own resources and large individual contributors ranged from 50% for House Democrats and 60% House Republicans, to 65% Senate Democrats and 62% Senate Republicans.

	Small Individual Contributors	Large Individual Contributors	Political Action Committees	Self-Financing	Other
House Democrats	9%	47%	38%	3%	3%
House Republicans	14%	48%	24%	12%	3%
Senate Democrats	12%	53%	15%	12%	8%
Senate Republicans	18%	42%	12%	20%	8%

That makes campaign finance regulations extremely hard to change — half to two thirds of contributions are from very wealthy individuals and the cost to get elected is so great that those contributions are essential.

But is this corruption? Politicians no longer directly pay for votes. They pay for advertizing which, to be successful, depends on branding. That means positioning a candidate as the only one with a solution to issues that represent voters’ every distress.

Since branding is largely impervious to facts it encourages ignorance, which is why people may vote for candidates opposed to their interests, but disturbing as that is, the great corruption is more subtle.

President Obama’s campaign was given very large contributions by Goldman Sachs and other “too-big-to-fail” banks. Faced by our financial system’s meltdown, he would of course listen to executives of those banks. We need not imagine he felt any obligation nor that they recognized their counsel to be self-serving. Their experience led to their diagnosis and recommended solution.

All whose opinions were available to Obama came from essentially the same world, the world of finance. All therefore saw the overwhelming need to save the TBTF banks. As a side-effect, not necessarily something front of mind, that would also happen to restore their own wealth.

Of course, some politicians are corrupt. Moral degeneracy may not be more common among politicians than in other fields, but politicians are immersed in temptation. They are subject to constant, insidious and great pressure from the very wealthy.

So what should those who are not wealthy do? This is not like working to enfranchise those who could not vote because of gender, ethnicity or lack of property. There will be no end to the excessive impact of wealth at the center because power is inherently at the center, power is the source of wealth and wealth therefore inevitably flows toward the center.

Corruption can not be ended once and for all like not having the vote. Working to get representatives for all of society is more like breathing, something we cannot stop if we want to remain alive.

Feb 16 2014

The Appeal of Dishonesty and Bad News

Why are we content with dishonesty in the media, and why do we so avidly consume “news” about crime and tragedies?

I’ve been pondering the comment, “We no longer have news organizations dedicated to fair and balanced reporting that educates instead of indoctrinating the public” on the first post in this series.

The superficial answer is it’s what we’re accustomed to, what we grew up with. Maybe we realize “the news” is not to make us less ignorant but to stimulate our emotions so we will want to buy things, as I explored in this post, but how does it work?

Let’s start with “balanced reporting.” That means a balance between how things look from left and right in the sphere of domestic affairs. More specifically, it means things are not presented in a way to polish the Democratic or Republican Party brands.

How about “indoctrinating the public?” It is indoctrination when a proposed tax change is presented through the prism of a political party’s tax policy brand: when facts about the proposal are selected and highlighted based on how closely they align with ‘taxes bad,’ ‘soak the rich’ or some such slogan.

It is likely to be indoctrination when we see warfare and civil violence in other parts of the world. Why? Because the implication usually is that such things do not happen here, but they will if we don’t keep “those people” from coming here.

We have an idea of what makes us different: we are rugged individuals who take care of our own, we are freedom-lovers, we are can-do people. The problem with labeling ourselves as Americans and assigning such properties to the label is it means we also characterize un-Americans.

Un-Americans might be Canadians, Mexicans, or stateless Islamic terrorists. They might just have a funny accent and silly ideas about governance, they might sneak in and take our jobs, or they might come and blow us up. At best they are harmlessly inferior, at worst our mortal enemies.

The problem is branding in a sphere where it is not a helpful convenience but a stimulus of hatred. Branding saves us time when we buy things. We don’t have to look at every can of soup because we’ll be happy with the brand we trust.

But what if we’re a Marlboro man? That’s branding of a specific product, Marlboros, and a product category, cigarettes. The Marlboro branding leverages our self-concept of rugged individualism, freedom-loving and so on. It also leverages branding that makes us ignore tobacco’s impact on our health .

And the effects grow darker when we identify so strongly with the Democratic Party as to demonize Republicans or vice versa, or we become a crusading Christian or Muslim.

In fact, the problem begins when we become a partisan. Joining with others to promote policies favored by a political party or interest group is not a problem. That’s how democracy works, the least worst way we have yet found to govern.

Following the teachings of Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Muhammad (alphabetical order) or others who gained wisdom is good because they help us grow better.

The problem begins when we believe there is something wrong with those who do not follow our practice. That leads not to growing better but to hatred.

However, we’re still at a superficial level. Why do we become partisans? Why do we identify so strongly with our tribe, American, Democrat, Christian or whatever that we end up hating those we identify as members of a different tribe?

Why do we watch news that we know is less than honest, certainly not balanced, and that motivates us to hate (or envy) others?

Because we want our beliefs confirmed. We want to feel we are not alone. We want security.

Feeling our connection with others is good. Mistaking that feeling for an idea about our nature, however, that is not good. It gets us thinking, “I am one of those who are superior (or unfairly inferior) to others” and then we start thinking it’s OK for us to attack them.

The ultimate root of the problem is our desire for security.

I asked, “how [can we] encourage more people to WANT honesty [in the media?]” What each of us can do is speak up about harmful untruths and publicly debate legislative changes because that helps us recognize when we (ourself) don’t know or misinterpret some facts.

What I do not know is how we can educate ourselves to differentiate between facts and beliefs. According to a 2001 Gallup poll, for example, about 45% of Americans believe “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” Whether or not we believe in a Creator is a belief — we cannot know. We do know, however, that human beings were not created in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.

If we don’t see the difference between religious beliefs and facts we will also not see the difference between political or any other kind of beliefs and facts.

I will return to education in future posts. There must be a way to motivate making it more effective.

Returning to the root problem and what each of us can do about that, we can recognize that ultimately there is no security. We are both utterly alone and inextricably connected, not fundamentally different from those “over there.” Every single one of us will end up old, weak and dead. Unless we first grow sick. Which could happen at any moment.

Ultimate safety doesn’t lie in beliefs about the rightness of “people like me” and the wrongness of others. The only real security is being OK with the fact that there is no security and therefore nothing to worry about. Recognizing that requires re-training, which I can testify is long and initially hard work but which I’ve seen in others is ultimately fruitful.

So we must point out the harm untruths cause and even more important, eradicate our own false ideas. There is no silver bullet against poison in the media.

Feb 11 2014

We the (Easily Confused) People

We the people whose Constitution “promote[s] the general Welfare, and secure[s] the Blessings of Liberty” are easily confused. We have the habit of trusting ideas about what things are and how they work.

We must trust our ideas in everyday life: we’d be paralyzed if we always had to figure everything out from scratch. But we trust too far. We tend not to notice facts that conflict with our ideas.

Fairleigh Dickinson University recently surveyed 1,185 respondents on which news sources they used and what facts they knew about current events. The results are quite distressing.

On average, respondents correctly answered only 1.8 of 4 questions about international news, and 1.6 of 5 questions about domestic affairs. On average, we don’t know or are wrong about more than half the facts of what’s going on. Why?

Because news media do not aim to provide facts but entertaining opinions, especially about the stupidity of those with other opinions.

Media coverage of the survey was more eye-catching than analytical. Left-leaning commentators trumpeted that those who watch FOX News got only 1.04 correct answers to domestic questions while those with no exposure at all to the news got 1.22, and they got only 1.08 correct answers to international questions while those with no news exposure got 1.28.

But do these survey results mean watching FOX News makes you more ignorant? Do they mean watching MSNBC leaves you as ignorant as those who follow no news media? Not exactly.

What the survey demonstrates, since liberals watching FOX News and conservatives watching MSNBC are much less likely to know the facts than those who follow no news media, is that our opinions, our preconceptions, our ideas lead us to ignore the facts.

Facts presented on FOX News are much less likely to be noticed by liberals. Facts presented on MSNBC are much less likely to be noticed by conservatives.

How can we have a good future if the average American doesn’t know or is wrong about so much of what’s going on in the world? We’ll vote for candidates who also don’t know or who lie about what’s going on and we’ll support the wrong policies.

What to do? Why do news media leave us as ignorant as we would be without them, or more so? Well, since most of their revenue comes from advertisers, they must provide what advertisers want – people motivated to buy things – and since buying is motivated not by facts but by stimulating emotions, the media stimulates emotions and anesthetizes intellects that might say, “do I really need that?”

However, an excitingly large 27% of “we the easily confused” now gets news from blogs or political websites. Much of that content is also entertainment, it’s true, but this is a medium where we can contribute. We cannot increase the factual content of the mainstream media but we can use blogs to disseminate facts, stimulate analysis and promote fact-based proposals for change.

And we can encourage media businesses beginning to find ways to serve those who want facts. The Tampa Bay Times’ PolitiFact project, for example, notes that my State’s Governor’s assertion that “about 47 percent of able-bodied people in the state of Maine don’t work” is of “pants-on-fire” quality.

At the start of this topic I wrote: “Honesty in the media has always been problematic but the impact of today’s big media seems more powerful than in the past.” There are now, however, so many other sources of facts and analysis along with media where I can debate what the facts suggest with folks whose preconceptions are different from mine. That is a highly encouraging development.

How many of us must work at “disseminating facts, stimulating analysis and promoting fact-based proposals” to head us in a better direction? Speculating about that is a waste of time. Society’s direction will change for the better if every individual who cares about it does the work.

Oct 12 2013

Fundamentalists in the Mirror

Our media shows Muslim fundamentalists terrorizing the Middle East, shooting an Afghani schoolgirl, offering safety in Pakistan to those sworn to destroy us – a world we cannot understand whose people we have no choice but to fear.

What impression do they have of us?

An ongoing study, “The Republican Party Project”, offers a mirror where we can glimpse what they see. It is timely since our government is now shut down by the Republican Party. Muslims have seen us attack them with rhetoric, sanctions, drones, and armed forces. Now they see us at war with each other. They must have a theory about why we do these things.

Republican Party demographics suggest their idea may parallel ours about them.

The Project`s research finds the Party comprises 47% evangelical and religiously observant (30% evangelical), 22% libertarian-leaning Tea Party supporters and 25% moderates. The Christian half sees an America being destroyed by cultural rot from the outside. The libertarian quarter sees an America being destroyed by accelerating dependency on ever bigger government. Both groups are in a desperate fight to restore a deeply valued culture. The moderate quarter feels, and is unrepresented.

We see fundamentalist Muslims suppressing moderates “over there”. What the mirror shows is fundamentalist Christians and libertarians suppressing moderates “over here”.

We can imagine a response like this: “If American fundamentalists will risk plunging their economy into unfathomably deep depression, if they care so little for their people’s future, can there be any limit to the suffering they would wreak on us?” It`s a logical question.

Our media offers a worldview of Muslims “over there” who are our enemies unto death. It is logical to assume the media “over there” offers a worldview of Christians and other fanatics “over here” who are their enemies unto death. They will not have forgotten the “Crusade” President Bush said 9/11 compelled us to undertake, his “War on Terror” that would not end while a single terrorist remained alive.

The infection carried by these fantasies about those “over here” or “over there” whose symptoms are fear and hatred is highly contagious. We must reverse our rising fear and hatred of each other. We can counter the actions motivated by fear, hatred and greed without succumbing to the same infection.

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