George Weigel on Europe's Two Culture Wars: Is This the Future for America?

As America awaits the big May 1 protest parades, with their likely demands for an unconditional amnesty for illegal immigrants, it is worth noting that many protestors so far reject any requirement for assimilation to historical American principles. This is a non-trivial issue for which the trends in Europe offer a perspective on what the long-term price could be for the failure to educate Americans.

This concern was reinforced this week when my children's school - a fine school that has been a wonderful place for them - sent out a survey asking parents to judge the quality of their efforts at multiculturalism and diversity. There was a section for comments and I wrote these words:

I find the entire subject of multiculturalism to be fraught with definitional problems.

I do not know anyone that would suggest learning about world history is anything but an invaluable experience for our children.

But multiculturalism frequently sets a relativistic tone that values feelings and self-esteem over a rigorous differentiation between truly unique cultural traditions. Look at the definition of it in this survey: "bringing together and celebrating of many distinctive cultures..." Are those who promote multiculturalism willing to teach the superiority of some traditions over others and be able to offer reasoned arguments why? My experience is usually not.

As one writer said: "The foremost idea of multiculturism is the equal value of all cultures, or cultural relativism...Inherent in the idea of cultural relativism is the idea that culture, race, ancestry or gender determines our ideas."

Do we believe in reason and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong? Do we believe in and teach the uniqueness of the American tradition?

As [Mac Owens, a contributor to this blog site] said: "Before the American founding, all regimes were based on the principle of interest - the interest of the stronger. That principle was articulated by the Greek historian Thucydides: "Questions of justice arise only between equals. As for the rest, the strong do what they will."...It took the founding of the United States on the principle of equality to undermine the principle of inequality...it is the idea of equality in the Declaration of Independence, not race and blood, that establishes American nationhood."

Are we teaching those principles to our kids? Are we teaching them what Roger Pilon said: "Appealing to all mankind, the Declaration's seminal passage opens with perhaps the most important line in the document: "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Grounded in reason, "self-evident" truths invoke the long tradition of natural law, which holds that there is a "higher law" of right and wrong from which to derive human law...It is not our political will, then, but moral reasoning, accessible to all, that is the foundation of our political system. But if reason is the foundation of the Founders' vision, liberty is its aim...We are all created equal, as defined by our natural rights; thus, no one has rights superior to those of anyone else. Moreover, we are born with those rights, we do not get them from government..."

While we must be willing to acknowledge our failures to live up to the Founding standards, no other country in the history of the world was founded on such bold truths.

Are we teaching our children to be citizens capable of the self-government in the American tradition? Are we teaching them the uniqueness of the American tradition? Or, in the spirit of multiculturalism, do we treat our Founding as equivalent to others which can make no such claims? Are we teaching them about the killing fields in Cambodia, the gulags in the Soviet Union, the mass murders in the millions done by Mao, the gas chambers of Nazi Germany - all situations where a Nietzsche-like focus on power trumping all makes the only relevant issue be: who has the power to control?

And that does not even touch the frequently used but undefined phrase called "social justice." Michael Novak paraphrased Nobel Laureate Friederich Hayek in these words: "...whole books have been written about social justice without ever offering a definition of it..The vagueness seems indispensable. The minute one begins to define social justice, one runs into embarrassing intellectual difficulties. It becomes, most often, a term of art whose operational meaning is, "We need a law against that." In other words, it becomes an instrument of ideological intimidation, for the purpose of gaining the power of legal coercion."

So let us teach our children to be colorblind in the way Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke, where people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. But let's not let multiculturalism dumb it all down where there are no standards of excellence or truth discoverable by some combination of reason or faith.

What is the significance of these issues? What does it suggest could be our future? In the May 2006 edition of Commentary Magazine, George Weigel offers a view as he writes about Europe's Two Culture Wars.

...Earlier this year, five days short of the second anniversary of the Madrid bombings, the Zapatero government, which had already legalized marriage between and adoption by same-sex partners, and sought to restrict religious education in Spanish schools, announced that the words "father" and "mother" would no longer appear on Spanish birth certificates. Rather, according to the government's official bulletin, "the expression 'father' will be replaced by 'Progenitor A' and 'mother' will be replaced by 'Progenitor B.'"...

...For the events of the past two years in Spain are a microcosm of the two interrelated culture wars that beset Western Europe today.

The first of these wars...call[ed]..."Culture War A" - is a sharper form of the red state/blue state divide in America: a war between the post-modern forces of moral relativism and the defenders of traditional moral conviction. The second - "Culture War B" - is the struggle to define the nature of civil society, the meaning of tolerance and pluralism, and the limits of multiculturalism in an aging Europe whose below-replacement-level fertility rates have opened the door to rapidly growing and assertive Muslim populations.

The aggressors in Culture War A are radical secularists, motivated by what the legal scholar Joseph Weiler has dubbed "Christophobia." They aim to eliminate vestiges of Europe's Judeo-Christian culture from a post-Christian European Union by demanding same-sex marriage in the name of equality, by restricting free speech in the name of civility, and by abrogating core aspects of religious freedom in the name of tolerance. The aggressors in Culture War B are radical and jihadist Muslims who detest the West, who are determined to impose Islamic taboos on Western societies by violent protest and other forms of coercion if necessary, and who see such operations as the first stage toward the Islamification of Europe...

The question Europe must face, but which much of Europe seems reluctant to face, is whether the aggressors in Culture War A have not made it exceptionally difficult for the forces of true tolerance and authentic civil society to prevail in Culture War B.

Western Europe's descent into the languors of "depoliticization," as some analysts have called it, once seemed a matter of welfare-state politics, socialist economics, and protectionist trade policy, flavored by irritating EU regulations...indeed there has been no let-up in Europe's seeming determination to bind itself ever more tightly in the cords of bureaucratic regulation...

What does all this have to do with Culture War A? The plain fact is that even as Europe's regulatory passions continue to bear deleterious economic consequences, they have also been sharpened to a harder ideological edge, not least where religion is concerned...

...Culture War A represents a determined effort on the part of secularists, using both national and EU regulatory machinery, to marginalize the public presence and impact of Europe's dwindling numbers of practicing Christians...

Culture War A finds expression as well in efforts to coerce and impose behaviors deemed progressive, compassionate, non-judgmental, or politically correct in extreme feminist or multiculturalist terms. In recent years, this has typically taken the form of EU member-states legally regulating, and thus restricting, free speech...

...the most dramatic fact about the continent in the early 21st century: Europe is committing demographic suicide, and has been doing so for some time...

...Not a single EU member has a replacement-level fertility rate, i.e., the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a stable population. Moreover, eleven EU countries - including Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, and all three Baltic states - display "negative natural increase" (i.e., more annual deaths than births), a clear step down into a demographic death-spiral...

Over the next quarter-century, the number of workers in Europe will decline by 7 percent while the number of over-sixty-fives will increase by 50 percent, trends that will create intolerable fiscal difficulties for the welfare state across the continent. The resulting inter-generational strains will place great pressures on national politics...Demography is destiny, and Europe's demographics of decline - which are unparalleled in human history absent wars, plagues, and natural catastrophes - are creating enormous and unavoidable problems.

Even more ominously, Europe's demographic free-fall is the link between Culture War A and Culture War B.

History abhors vacuums, and the demographic vacuum created by Europe's self-destructive fertility rates has, for several generations now, been filled by a large-scale immigration from throughout the Islamic world...

Far more has changed than the physical appearance of European metropolitan areas, though. There are dozens of "ungovernable" areas in France: Muslim-dominated suburbs, mainly, where the writ of French law does not run and into which French police do not go. Similar extraterritorial enclaves, in which sharia law is enforced by local Muslim clerics, can be found in other European countries. Moreover, as Bruce Bawer details in a new book, While Europe Slept, European authorities pay little or no attention to practices among their Muslim populations that range from the physically cruel (female circumcision) through the morally cruel (arranged and forced marriages) to the socially disruptive (remanding Muslim children back to radical madrasses in the Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan for their primary and secondary education) and the illegal ("honor" killings in cases of adultery and rape - the rape victim being the one killed)...

Sixty years after the end of World War II, the European instinct for appeasement is alive and well. French public swimming pools have been segregated by sex because of Muslim protests. "Piglet" mugs have disappeared from certain British retailers after Muslim complaints that the A. A. Milne character was offensive to Islamic sensibilities. So have Burger King chocolate ice-cream swirls, which reminded some Muslims of Arabic script from the Koran. Bawer reports that the British Red Cross banished Christmas trees and nativity scenes from its charity stores for fear of offending Muslims. For similar reasons, the Dutch police in the wake of the van Gogh murder destroyed a piece of Amsterdam street art that proclaimed "Thou shalt not kill"; schoolchildren were forbidden to display Dutch flags on their backpacks because immigrants might think them "provocative."...

These patterns of sedition and appeasement finally came to global attention earlier this year in the Danish-cartoon jihad...

The response from Europe, in the main, was to intensify appeasement...the EU's justice minister, Franco Frattini, announced that the EU would establish a "media code" to encourage "prudence" - "prudence" being a synonym for "surrender"...

For all the blindness of the politicians who in the 1930's attempted to appease totalitarian aggression, they at least thought that they were thereby preserving their way of life. Bruce Bawer...suggests that 21-st century Europe's appeasement of Islamists amounts to a self-inflicted dhimmitude: in an attempt to slow the advance of a rising Islamist tide, many of Europe's national and transnational political leaders are surrendering core aspects of sovereignty and turning Europe's native populations into second- and third-class citizens in their own countries.

Bawer blames Europe's appeasement mentality and its consequences on multiculturalist political correctness run amok, and there is surely something to that. For, in a nice piece of intellectual irony, European multiculturalism, based on postmodern theories of the alleged incoherence of knowledge (and thus the relativity of all truth claims), has itself become utterly incoherent, not to say self-contradictory...

[You have to read some of the examples cited throughout the article to fully appreciate how extreme things have become.]

Yet to blame "multi-culti" p.c. for Europe's paralysis is to remain on the surface of things. Culture War A - the attempt to impose multiculturalism and "lifestyle" libertinism in Europe by limiting free speech, defining religious and moral conviction as bigotry, and using state power to enforce "inclusivity" and "sensitivity" - is a war over the very meaning of tolerance itself. What Bruce Bawer rightly deplores as out-of-control political correctness in Europe is rooted in a deeper malady: a rejection of the belief that human beings, however inadequately or incompletely, can grasp the truth of things - a belief that has, for almost two millennia, underwritten the European civilization that grew out of the interaction of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome.

Postmodern European high culture repudiates that belief. And because it can only conceive of "your truth" and "my truth" while determinedly rejecting any idea of "the truth," it can only conceive of tolerance as indifference to differences - an indifference to be enforced by coercive state power, if necessary. The idea of tolerance as engaging differences within the bond of civility...is itself regarded as, well, intolerant. Those who would defend the true tolerance of orderly public argument about contending truth claims (which include religious and moral convictions) risk being driven, and in many cases are driven, from the European public square by being branded as "bigots."

But the problem is deeper still. For one thing, however loudly European postmodernists may proclaim their devotion to the relativity of all truths, in practice this translates into something very different - namely, the deprecation of traditional Western truths, combined with a studied deference to non- or anti-Western ones. In the relativist mindset, it thus turns out, not all religious and moral conviction is bigotry that must be suppressed; only the Judeo-Christian variety is. In short, the moral relativism of Europe is often mere window-dressing for Western self-hatred...

A different and much more persuasive analysis of Europe's culture wars has emerged from a remarkable dialogue that took place in 2004. The partners in this conversation may seem an unlikely pair: Marcello Pera, an agnostic Italian academic turned politician (and president of the Italian Senate), and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger [now Pope Benedict XVI]...

Pera had given a lecture on "Relativism, Christianity, and the West" at Rome's Pontifical Lateran University; Ratzinger, at Pera's invitation, gave a lecture in the Italian Senate on "The Spiritual Roots of Europe." The two men then agreed to exchange letters exploring the striking convergence of analysis that had characterized their two lectures. Both the lectures and the letters were published in a small book in Italy in early 2005 and created something of a stir...The Ratzinger/Pera volume has now been published in the United States under the title Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam.

Long before becoming pope, Joseph Ratzinger...had been warning his fellow Europeans that their dalliance in the intellectual sandbox of postmodernism was going to cause severe problems for their societies and their polities. Those problems, he argues here, are at once intellectual, spiritual, and moral...

Europe's secularists have heard critiques like Ratzinger's before, and dismissed them as the special pleading of committed Christians. The welcome surprise in Without Roots is Marcello Pera's answer: in effect, a parallel critique from a self-described non-believer and philosopher of science. "Infected by an epidemic of relativism," Pera writes, Europeans believe "that to accept and defend their culture would be an act of hegemony, of intolerance, [betraying] an anti-democratic, anti-liberal, disrespectful attitude." But precisely this toxin has led them into "the prison house" of political correctness, a "cage" in which "Europe has locked itself...for fear of saying things that are not at all incorrect but rather ordinary truths, and to avoid facing its own responsibilities."

Pera is also blunt about Europe's unwillingness to defend itself against radical Islam. Do Europeans understand, he asks,

that their very existence is at stake, their civilization has been targeted, their culture is under attack? Do they understand that what they are being called on to defend is their own identity? Through culture, education, diplomatic negotiations, political relations, economic exchanges, dialogue, preaching, but also, if necessary, through force?

In his own essay in Without Roots, Ratzinger, adopting an idea from Toynbee, proposes that any renewal of Europe's civilizational morale can be effected only by "creative minorities" who will challenge secularism as the EU's de-facto ideology by means of a re-encounter with Europe's Judeo-Christian religious and moral heritage. For his part, Pera suggests that the needed "work of renewal...be done by Christians and secularists together." That work, he writes, will involve the development of a "civil religion that can instill its values throughout the long chain that goes from the individual to the family, groups, associations, the community, and civil society, without passing through the political parties, government programs, and the force of states, and therefore without affecting the separation, in the temporal sphere, of church and state."

Pera's proposal for this "civil religion" is left rather vague, but in February its contours came into somewhat clearer focus when he launched a new movement called "For the West, the Bearer of Civilization." The movement's manifesto begins by briskly describing Europe's two culture wars, goes on to affirm Western civilization as a "source of universal and inalienable principles," and commits its signatories...to a broad agenda of renewal to "deprive [terrorism] of every justification and support"; to integrate immigrants "in the name of shared values"; to support "the right to life from conception until natural death"; to dismantle unnecessary bureaucracy; to "affirm the value of the family as a natural partnership based on marriage"; to spread "liberty and democracy as universal values"; to maintain the institutional separation of church and state "without giving in to the secular temptation of relegating the religious dimension solely to the individual sphere"; and to promote a healthy pluralism in eudcation. The manifesto concludes with a call to arms and a warning: "People who forget their roots can be neither free nor respected."

It remains to be seen whether initiatives similar to Marcello Pera's...can begin to get a purchase on the cultural high ground in Europe. Some would argue that it is already too late, that the demographic tipping points has been reached and that...with the successor population [i.e., Islam] already in place,...the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be. But if Europe's two culture wars are not to result in the accelerated emergence of "Eurabia"...something resembling Pera's initiative will have to lead the way, and soon...

Nihilism rooted in skepticism, issuing in the bad faith of moral relativism and Western self-loathing, comforting itself with a vacuous humanitarianism: not only is this not marvelous, it has contributed to killing Europe demographically, and to paralzying Europe in the face of an aggressive ideology aimed at the eradication of Western humanism in the name of a lethally distorted understanding of God's will...

Related postings include:

Rediscovering Civility and Purpose in America's Public Discourse
Happy Birthday, America!
Becoming Americans

Liberal Fundamentalism, Revisited
More on the Religion of Liberal Fundamentalism
The Naked Public Square Revisited, Part I
The Naked Public Square Revisited, Part II
The Naked Public Square Revisited, Part III
The Meaning of Tolerance
Respectful Competition: A Basic Requirement for a Healthy Democracy
What Does "Social Justice" Mean?
Coerced Charity vs. Voluntary Charity
Discussing Justice, Rights & Moral Common Sense
We Are Paying Quite a Price for Our Historical Ignorance
Rediscovering Proper Judicial Reasoning
Countering the Intolerance of Left-Wing Secular Fundamentalists
"It Is Liberalism That Is Now Bookless And Dying"
To Nurture Greater Ethical Awareness, Students Need Practice in Moral Discernment
Religious Without Being Morally Serious Vs. Morally Serious Without Being Religious
Spreading Falsehoods in our Children's Education about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American Founding

John Paul II, Requiescat in pacem
Pope Benedict XVI: Proposing Faith as an Antidote to Relativism
Follow Me: John Paul II Roused Us From a Lethargic Faith
Pope Benedict XVI: "A Man With Great Humility & Gentlemanliness"
A Poignant Reflection on John Paul II
Pope Benedict XVI: Good Friday Reflections & More

Another Example of How Educational Bureaucrats Will Avoid Accountability & Hurt Children

In the latest report (available for a fee) of dishonest manipulation of reporting performance results required under No Child Left Behind, we get this report:

When the Associated Press reported last week that nearly two million mostly minority children "aren't counted when it comes to meeting the law's requirement that schools track how students of different races perform on standardized tests," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings's response was something less than urgent concern.

"Is it too many? You bet," said Ms. Spellings. "Are there things we need to do to batten down the hatches, make sure those kids are part of the system? You bet." Other than that, Ms. Spelling didn't have much to say about states' rampant noncompliance with the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act...

...Ms. Spellings...tenure has been marked by lax enforcement of NCLB. Last month we reported that parents and children in failing schools nationwide aren't being notified of their school-choice transfer and tutoring options, even though notification is a requirement under NCLB. The news that Ms. Spellings is also letting states slide on even reporting the math and reading test scores of minorities is especially disturbing because accountability is the heart of the federal law.

NCLB makes allowances for schools that have racial groups too small to be statistically significant. But states have been abusing their freedom under the law to determine when a group is too small to count. And Washington is letting them get away with it. According to the AP, nearly two dozen states have successfully petitioned the Education Department "for exemptions to exclude larger numbers of students in racial categories." Today about one in 14 test scores overall go uncounted. Minorities, whose test scores on average lag those of white students, are seven times as likely to have their test results ignored. That's an odd way to enforce a law called No Child Left Behind.

"The point of these testing requirements is to put pressure on schools to close their achievement gaps by making those gaps more transparent," says Michael Petrilli, who follows federal education policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. "If you're not going to enforce this, what are you going to enforce?"

Good question. We already know that schools would much rather report "average" scores, which let education bureaucrats hide the fact that large groups of mostly poor and minority students aren't learning...

School board associations, state boards of education, teachers unions and others have been demanding one type of exemption or another since the law was passed in 2002. Under Ms. Spellings's predecessor, Rod Paige, they were unable to make much progress. The current secretary, however, is herself a former associate executive director of the Texas Association of School Boards. We hope this history isn't the reason that the public education blob is having much more success in weakening NCLB now that Ms. Spellings is in charge.

NCLB's raison d'etre is to hold schools accountable for all of their students; otherwise, why not leave schools to be run by local officials, who pay most of the bills? In return for record amounts of new federal education spending, schools not only are required to test regularly, they are also required to disaggregate the data by race so that parents (and taxpayers) can see who's learning and who isn't.

That can't happen if Bush Administration officials won't enforce their own law...And it is hurting the system's most vulnerable children.

This kind of behavior is not surprising. It occurs because the government-mandated monopoly called public education means educational bureaucrats, politicians, and teachers' union pay no price for the failing status quo and, therefore, have no incentive to change their actions. It occurs because parents are not in charge of their childrens' education, as would occur under school choice. It also occurs because No Child Left Behind - however noble its stated overall goals - is a structurally flawed law.

All of society is appropriately outraged when children are physically abused. What I find appalling is that the very people who claim to care so much about children in other areas are stone-cold silent about the failings of our public schools. Talk about tolerating abuse.

Is This Rhode Island's Future? Educational Adequacy & Unsatiated Tax-Eaters

Andrew has written about state education aid to Rhode Island towns. He has also written how Mayor Cicilline of Providence thinks $188 million or $6,772/student is not enough state aid, aid largely paid for by the rest of us in the state to fund the ongoing non-performance of his city's schools.

The Mayor's brazen attitude is another example of how he is one major tax-eater. Why is he so certain he can get away with throwing a child-like tantrum and walking out of a meeting with the Governor - unless he was certain his demand for more state monies will be successful? Could it be he is counting on additional monies through a manipulation of the political system via the educational adequacy study being funded here in Rhode Island, as written about by Marc?

If you want to see where all of this could easily go in Rhode Island, consider this news story:

In Educating From the Bench: Judges order legislators to spend more on schools, and taxpayers see less in return, Jay Greene writes:

Spending on public schools nationwide has skyrocketed to $536 billion as of the 2004 school year, or more than $10,000 per pupil. That's more than double per pupil what we spent three decades ago, adjusted for inflation--and more than we currently spend on national defense ($494 billion as of 2005). But the argument behind lawsuits in 45 states is that we don't spend nearly enough on schools. Spending is so low, these litigants claim, that it is in violation of state constitutional provisions requiring an "adequate" education. And in almost half the states, the courts have agreed.

Arkansas is one such state, and its "adequacy" problem neatly illustrates the way courts have driven spending up and evidence out...Like courts in other states, Arkansas's court ordered that outside consultants be hired to determine how much extra funding would be required for an adequate education.

A firm led by two education professors, Lawrence Picus and Allan Odden, was paid $350,000 to put a price tag on what would be considered adequate. In September 2003 Messrs. Picus and Odden completed their report, concluding that Arkansas needed to add $847.3 million to existing school budgets...bringing the total to $4 billion, or $9,000 per pupil...

...To determine adequate spending [Picus and Odden] rely on what they immodestly call the "evidence-based" approach. This involves selectively embracing educational practices that some research finds beneficial and costing those policies out. Their method does not address whether their favored reforms would really result in an adequate education or are in fact the most cost-effective...

But the most obvious sign the Picus and Odden report is not really evidence-based is its neglect of empirical examination of the overall relationship between school spending and student achievement. If spending more is the answer to inadequate education, it should be the case that schools that spend more per pupil, all else being equal, have higher student achievement.

As it turns out, they don't. The vast majority of social science studies find no relationship between spending and student achievement...the fact that per pupil spending has doubled over the past three decades while student achievement has remained stagnant ought to give us a clue that simply spending more won't fix schools. The shortcomings of schools are not generally attributable to the lack of resources, but to a lack of incentives to use resources effectively.

By declaring that spending had to increase, the court foreclosed consideration of this relevant evidence...If legislators did not increase spending by roughly what Messrs. Picus and Odden asserted, they would be held in violation of the court order.

Yet even this wasn't enough. After the total amount provided to Arkansas schools increased by 25% in one year, the legislature slowed the pace of spending. For the 2005 school year...the minimum amount that school districts would receive for operating expenses...was left unchanged at $5,400. The plaintiff attorneys argued before the state high court that spending had to at least match inflation.

The court agreed and ordered the governor to call the Legislature in special session to remedy the situation. Legislators met in early April and in less than a week increased spending again. They were so eager to placate the court that they gave schools more for the current school year, even though it could hardly do any good with only a month remaining. They also increased spending without knowing how the last round of additional money was being used or whether it had any effect. Messrs. Picus and Odden were retained for another $450,000 to provide this information, but their report is not expected until August...

One legislative leader attempted to justify their haste by declaring, "Lack of information does not justify legislative procrastination." Doesn't it?...Unspent reserves as of October 2005 were $1.1 billion, more than 25% of the total budget. That is, schools can't even spend the additional money fast enough as the court orders more.

In Arkansas, as in too many other states, elected leaders have ceded control over the size of education budgets to unaccountable courts...As long as this continues, expect to spend more on education and see less in return.

Unsatiated tax-eaters, enabled by an engorged public sector which faces no constraints on its appetite for wasting your hard-earned monies. Will this be our future here in Rhode Island? What are you doing to change outcomes in your community?

Campaign Ads and Pork

A dueling round of political ads has appeared on the Rhode Island airwaves. The Chafee campaign's new TV ad can be seen here. The advertisement names "environmental cleanups paid for by polluters and not taxpayers", "ending deficits with a strict pay-as-you-go plan", being "named the most fiscally responsible Senator in the nation" (presumably by the Concord Coalition), and an endorsement "by the US Chamber of Commerce for his pro-growth agenda" as reasons to re-elect Senator Chafee.

The Club for Growth is also running an ad, which can be seen here. Citing three specific Senate votes (vote #170 from 2001, vote #196 from 2003, and vote #130 from 2004), the CfG ad says that $1,300,000,000,000 is "how much higher taxes would be if Lincoln Chafee had his way". The ad also claims that Senator Chafee "pushed for $48,000,000,000 dollars in wasteful spending", providing a reference to spending data from the National Taxpayers Union.

As noted below, Senator Chafee has made a recent stand against pork spending. The Senator voted to rescind some questionable appropriations attached to the Defense, Global War on Terror, and Hurricane Recovery Supplemental Appropriations Bill, displaying a fiscal conservatism that extends beyond mere deficit hawkishness (to understand the difference between true fiscal conservatism and mere deficit hawkishness, click here). Senator Chafee has also signed a letter to the President sent by 35 Republican Senators pledging to sustain a veto on the supplemental spending bill if the total amount appropriated exceeds what was requested by President Bush...

We are seriously concerned with the overall funding level in the Senate-reported bill, and the numerous items that are unrelated to the Global War on Terror or emergency hurricane relief needs. Should the final bill presented to you exceed the total amount you requested, forcing you to veto the bill, we will vote to sustain your veto.

These actions show a positive evolution in the Senator's position towards pork spending. Last October, Senator Chafee told the Projo that pork was not an important issue (h/t Patrick Casey)...

The day may come where all of us are going to say we are not going to add any more earmarks onto appropriations bills," Chafee said. "In the meantime, there are many worthwhile projects and in the grand scheme of things, it is not a significant part of the budget."

And the Laffey campaign has wasted no time in pointing out some of Senator Chafee's pork-friendly votes from the past, including his vote in support of the infamous bridge-to-nowhere...

Senator Chafee also has a long track record of voting for outrageous pork projects including $223 million for Alaska's "Bridge to Nowhere" (Senate Roll Call Vote #262) (10-20-05), $98 million for an animal disease center in Iowa (Senate Roll Call Vote #118) (04-03-03), and $1.85 million for Cornell University's viticulture consortium (Senate Roll Call Vote #215) (11-20-04).

Viticulture, for those unfamiliar with the term (like I was until I looked it up on dictionary.com) is the cultivation of grapes.

Supplemental Pork

Senator Tom Coburn has identified 19 items (see the table below) that he believes to be wasteful pork spending in the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Hurricane Recovery bill currently being debated in the United States Senate . The Senator has introduced amendments that would rescind the 19 items.

Determining if a spending earmark is truly pork generally requires a more complete project description than is provided in the text of legislation. For instance, the first of Senator Coburn's proposed rescissions would have cut funds earmarked for the relocation of a rail line in Mississippi. Superficially, this sounds as if it could be a reasonable Katrina cleanup project. However, according to the Washington Post, the $700,000,000 is being appropriated to relocate a railway that has already been rebuilt with Federal dollars within the past year...

Mississippi's two U.S. senators included $700 million in an emergency war spending bill to relocate a Gulf Coast rail line that has already been rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina at a cost of at least $250 million.

Republican Sens. Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, who have the backing of their state's economic development agencies and tourism industry, say the CSX freight line must be moved to save it from the next hurricane and to protect Mississippi's growing coastal population from rail accidents. But critics of the measure call it a gift to coastal developers and the casino industry that would be paid for with money carved out of tight Katrina relief funds and piggybacked onto funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Senate has already voted to "table" the amendment that would have eliminated this project, i.e. the $700,000,000 appropriation remains in the bill. A vote to table the second Coburn amendment, rescinding $15,000,000 allocated for "seafood promotion strategies", did not pass. The Senate could still vote to eliminate this earmark.

Senator Lincoln Chafee voted with the porkbusting side in both cases, voting against tabling either amendment. Senator Jack Reed voted to allow a vote on rescinding the railway spending, but to preserve the seafood promotion spending.

The toughest vote for the New England delegation will be the vote on $20,000,000 earmarked for assisting New England coastal communities that were impacted by a red tide outbreak (item 13).

I	Rail Line Relocation Capital Grant program (Federal Railroad Administration)	$700,000,000
II	Implement seafood promotion strategies (National Marine Fisheries Service)	$15,000,000

V	Projects listed in the Federal Highway Administration emergency relief backlog table (Federal Highway Administration)	$594,000,000
VI	Study for three years the profitability of shrimp and reef fish fisheries (National Marine Fisheries Service)	$20,000,000
VII	For the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps (Corporation for National and Community Service)	$20,000,000
VIII	Procurement of V-22 aircraft (Navy)	$230,000,000
IX	Acceleration of the American River (Common Features) project in California (Army Corps of Engineers)	$3,300,000
X	Equip fishing vessels with logbooks to record haul-by-haul catch data (National Marine Fisheries Service)	$10,000,000
XI	For the Armed Forces Retirement Home (Armed Forces Retirement Home)	$176,000,000
XII	Equip the off-shore shrimp and reef fishery with electronic vessel monitoring systems (National Marine Fisheries Service)	$10,000,000
XIII	To assist New England coastal communities that were impacted by a red tide outbreak (National Marine Fisheries Service)	$20,000,000
XIV	Acceleration of the South Sacramento Streams project in California (Army Corps of Engineers)	$6,250,000
XV	Develop temporary marine services centers (National Marine Fisheries Service)	$50,000,000
XVI	Replacement of private fisheries infrastructure (National Marine Fisheries Service)	$90,000,000
XVII	Employ fishers and vessel owners (National Marine Fisheries Service)	$25,000,000
XVIII	Replace damaged fishing gear (National Marine Fisheries Service)	$200,000,000
XIX	Acceleration of construction of the Sacramento Riverbank Protection Project in California (Army Corps of Engineers)	$11,300,000

Amendment III reads "Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, Sec. 7030(b) of this Act shall not take effect. Amendment IV reads "Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, Sec. 2303 of this Act shall not take effect."

Immigration Update

On Wednesday, the US Senate approved $1,900,000,000 in increased funding for border security (breakdown here). Two versions of the bill were proposed. One bill offset the new spending with a 2.8% cut from the Defense Department's supplemental appropriation, the other bill provided no offset. Senator Lincoln Chafee voted for the additional funding and the offsetting cut. Senator Jack Reed voted for additional funding, but no offsetting spending cut. Apparently, the Senate is aware of the polls showing that an overwhelming majority of the public believe that improving America's border security is a national priority.

Wedensday's votes were not on the "comprehensive" immigration bill that includes amnesty and guest worker programs as well as further border security enhancements; that bill is still before the Senate. At National Review Online, Senator Bill Frist's view of the comprehensive legislation is available here, Senator Jeff Sessions' less favorable view is available here.

There is a point-of-fact discrepancy between the articles by the two Senators. Senator Frist claims the current immigration bill before the Senate (the Hagel-Martinez compromise) would require immigrants who had been in the US for less than two years to return to their home country before entering a guest worker program. Senator Sessions says that the current legislation would not require immigrants here for less than two years to leave. It would be nice to know who's right.

Also in National Review Online, Newt Gingrich proposes a four-point plan for immigration reform...

First, control the borders with decisive legislation aggressively implemented with tight deadlines. Once we have stopped the illegal flow of people we will have demonstrated the seriousness necessary to gain both the credibility and the leverage needed to implement the next steps. Fortunately, a bipartisan consensus has emerged that securing the borders is indeed priority number one. Three national leaders have it right in their shared view that border control is the first step. Senator Frist is exactly right when he wrote recently that "to build confidence among Americans and Congress that the government takes border security seriously, we have to act to help get the border under control right now." Senator Clinton is also right when she recently recognized the need for a "smart fence" along the border to enhance security. And Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean is also correct when he said last week that "the first thing we want is tough border control."

It's pretty clear now that some version of point 1, beyond what is provided for in the supplemental defense appropriation, is going to pass. If not, someone is going to pay dearly at the polls in November. Here are Gingrich's points 2 through 4...

Second, establish patriotic integration and the primacy of English (English first, not English only) combined with a requirement that Americans can only vote in American elections and applicants for citizenship have to select where their loyalty is.

Third, establish real enforcement against unlawful employment by employers and especially against employers who are breaking both immigration and taxation laws. Make clear that the dishonest hiring and tax evasion of the last two decades are over and there will be expensive penalties for people who break American immigration law. Insist that cities enforce the law or lose their federal funding. All this can be done with the right incentives and without rounding up anyone.

Fourth, establish an outsourced worker visa program with a biometric identity card, a background check, and a 24/7 computerized real time verification capability so no business can claim ignorance. Permit businesses to send workers home to apply for their worker visa as a deductible business expense. Eliminate the fly-by-night subcontractor shams that are clearly set up to evade the law. Maximize the opportunity and the incentives for people who are here to return home and become legal.

It is not clear if the organizers of the immigration demonstrations planned for next week are interested in any of these aspects of an immigration policy, or if they are interested solely in establishing as broad an amnesty program as possible.

These are the appropriations provided for in Senate Amendment 3594 passed on Wednesday...

$2,000,000	Office of the secretary and executive management, for a contract with an independent non-Federal entity to conduct a needs assessment for comprehensive border security
$50,000,000	Office of the chief information officer, to replace and upgrade law enforcement communications
$60,000,000	United States Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology, to accelerate biometric database integration and conversion to 10-print enrollment
$80,000,000	Customs and Border Protection, for border patrol vehicle replacement
$100,000,000	Customs and Border Protection, for sensor and surveillance technology
$790,000,000	To replace Customs and Border Protection air assets and upgrade air operations facilities
$120,000,000	For Customs and Border Protection Construction'
$80,000,000	Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to replace vehicles
$600,000,000	United States Coast Guard, for acquisition, construction, renovation, and improvement of vessels, aircraft, and equipment
$18,000,000	For construction of the Federal law enforcement language training facility referenced in the Master Plan and information technology infrastructure improvements

Bill Harsch Wants to Know Where the Money from the DuPont Lead Paint "Understanding" Is

Relatively speaking, the DuPont Chemical Company got off lightly in the Rhode Island lead paint case. DuPont agreed to donate $12,500,000 to charity, while the other defendants could end up liable for damages totaling in the billions.

However, according to Attorney General candidate Bill Harsch, DuPont has yet to pay anything at all. This is from a Harsch campaign press release...

After being pressed by Attorney General Candidate Bill Harsch last week, [Current Attorney General] Patrick Lynch revealed that despite reaching an "understanding" with Dupont Chemical Co., Rhode Island has yet to receive any monetary compensation from the deal.

"It has been almost a full year since the so called 'understanding' was announced that got DuPont off the hook in the lead paint trial and yet they still have not paid a single penny towards satisfying their end of the deal" stated Harsch.

Part of the problem appears to be that "one of the law firms who represented the state's interests" has taken a direct financial interest in the money that DuPont agreed to pay to charity...

"This brings up serious questions and concerns surrounding the deal that DuPont struck. I recently called for the Attorney General to fully disclose all of the terms and conditions associated with the DuPont deal. He neglected to provide any details on the terms of the settlement and only said that none of the $12 million had been received due to there being a lien placed on the settlement by one of the law firms who represented the state's interests during those negotiations....

Harsch said that his campaign plans to file a Public Records Request to determine the specifics of the original contingency-fee agreement and the settlement with DuPont.

A lien has been placed despite the fact that, according to Peter B. Lord in the Projo, the primary law firm hired by the state to handle the lead paint case waived "any claim of the settlement reached by Lynch with DuPont".

Another Story in the RIC Poll

Anchor Rising commenter Oz points out the most obvious flaw in the results of yesterday’s Rhode Island College statewide political poll…

So they polled 364 registered voters and 107 said they would vote in the republican primary.

That's a 29% participation rate.

There are roughly 660,000 registered voters in RI.

Are we to believe that 191,000 people are going to vote in the republican primary?

To put it into context, that is nearly 150,000 more than the record for a republican primary.

How can the obviously nonsensical result be explained? The answer, I suspect, is that there are many people uncomfortable admitting to a stranger on the telephone that they are unlikely to vote.

Now, if I believe what everybody tells me about Rhode Island -- that the state has insurmountable Democratic sympathies -- when I ask people to quickly answer "what primary will you be voting in”, I should expect to hear “Democratic” most of the times that I get an answer, right? Yet, the RIC poll shows an answer of “Republican” almost as often as an answer of “Democratic” to this question.

If likely non-voters were just pulling a party name out of the air, then there should have been an overprojection of likely Democratic voters that was at least as large as the overprojection of likely Republican voters. This didn't occur. To an order of magnitude, the poll correctly estimates the number of likely Democratic voters. This means that as many Rhode Islanders identify with the Republicans as with the Democrats, but that the state party has been unable to engage about 150,000 voters who should be part of the Republican base.

To build a long-term coalition, the state party -- including the Chafee campaign -- should be focusing figuring out what those 150,000 Republican-leaning but disengaged voters feel they're not getting from either party, instead of focusing on turning Democrats into Republicans for just a day.

Matt Brown is Out

The ProJo 7-to-7 blog has picked up an Associated Press report saying that Matt Brown has officially dropped out of the Rhode Island Democratic Senate primary.

Beacon Mutual: Where We Are and How We Got Here, Part 3

The first two parts (part 1, part 2) focused on the how-we-got-here part of the Beacon Mutual story. This part will focus on the where-we-are and the what-we-should-do.

1. Without unnecessarily disparaging Beacon Mutual�s initial generation of leadership, it must be understood that the creation of Beacon Mutual was not the most important part of reforming the workers' compensation system in Rhode Island. There's no way any single insurance company could have driven the major reforms that Governor Sundlun reported as early as 1994, unless you assume that the insurers who had been previously operating in Rhode Island were really eager to give their money away.

It was changes applied directly to state government -- in the legal system and the bureaucracy, relating to claims processing and assessment -- that allowed the functioning of a reasonable workers' compensation system in Rhode Island. Beacon stepped into the reformed environment and performed, at least at the beginning, competently or better. But if Beacon were broken up, sold, liquidated, or otherwise changed in some way, other insurers could now step into the breech, and become as profitable as Beacon has been, minus the state subsidies. Beacon Mutual doesn't have magic powers.

2. The most obvious reform now needed is the repeal of the 1996 law that eliminated the concept of the "residual" market and subsidized all of Beacon Mutual's business through a tax break and an exemption from having to pay into the state�s insurance insolvency fund.

If this change occurred, one of two things would happen. We might see that the legal and bureaucratic reforms had completely eliminated the need for a residual workers' compensation market -- that a combination of Beacon Mutual and other insurers could now voluntarily cover everyone. Then we could move on to a discussion of whether Beacon should be fully privatized.

Alternatively, we might see some portion of employers still unable to enter into voluntary deals for workers' compensation insurance. In that case, Beacon would write the policies for these employers using its residual market subsidies to offset the higher risks it was taking on. And Beacon would continue to pay a "price" for its subsidies in the form of an additional layer of government oversight.

I suspect the second outcome is the more likely one, though hopefully we wouldn't see 90% of Rhode Island employers forced into the residual market as they were in the early 1990s.

3. I still can't quite figure out exactly who gets rich in a privatization deal, and how they would do it. I know that some people suspect that this was the master plan all along. However it works, if the state is separating itself from something of value, it should do so through a sale and not a giveaway.

4. Rhode Island's insurance insolvency fund is in trouble -- it is itself insolvent -- because of the exemption granted to Beacon Mutual. In essence, the insolvency fund has been raided to provide subsidies to Beacon. Now, according to the Projo, the non-Beacon 24% of the worker's compensation market paying into the insolvency fund cannot provide enough to cover current costs...

The state's insolvency fund was allowed to borrow up to $14 million a year from Rhode Island auto insurers to finance an anticipated shortfall of nearly $1 million in its workers' compensation account under the compromise bill. The provision would last until the end of 2005; the bill also sets up a study commission to look at the issue.

Insurance companies must contribute a portion of their annual premiums, up to a maximum of 2 percent, to the fund. But the state's largest insurer, Beacon Mutual Insurance Co., which has 76 percent of the Rhode Island workers' compensation insurance market, is not covered by the fund and therefore does not contribute.

There are a few questions about the insolvency fund in need of answering. If the fund was already short in 2004, and Beacon is still not contributing to it, where does the fund get the money to pay a "loan" back? Doesn't the current state of the fund mean that Rhode Island is just one small-time Joe Mollicone (a Molliclone?) away from a RISDIC-type disaster in workers' compensation insurance? And, with no backup to Beacon Mutual, isn't Rhode Island already back in the same position it was in 1991, where a single company could throw the entire system into chaos?

Chafee Looks Solid in RIC Poll

A new Rhode Island College poll indicates that Senator Chafee holds a comfortable lead in both the GOP primary and the general election:

Chafee would beat challenger and Cranston Mayor Stephen P. Laffey 56 percent to 28 percent in the Republican primary. For that question, the poll sampled 107 people who said they would vote in the Republican primary. Because the sample is smaller, the margin of error rises to 9 percentage points.

The results of the Democratic primary were not as clear cut, though former Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse leads a three-way field with 37 percent. He is followed by Secretary of State Matthew Brown, with 21 percent, and Carl Sheeler, 8 percent. The margin of error for the Democratic primary is also 9 percentage points, with 117 people who said they would vote in the Democratic primary sampled.

But the poll indicated the outcome of the Democratic primary may be academic: Chafee would beat Whitehouse 51 percent to 32 percent and would beat Brown 53 percent to 28 percent. That is based on the full sample, with the 5-percentage-point margin of error.

Similarly, Laffey would lose, regardless of his Democratic opponent. Brown would win 48 percent to 29 percent and Whitehouse would win 50 percent to 27 percent.

This is the first public poll that attempted to sample for the GOP primary and--in that light--it's interesting to note that the percentage of support for Senator Chafee and Mayor Laffey are consistent for both the GOP primary and the general election. This is good news and bad news for Mayor Laffey. Mayor Laffey has a solid 28-30% core both within the GOP and statewide, which means he is appealing to some independents out there. Nonetheless, the bad news far outweighs the good for Mayor Laffey. He still has some work to do to appeal to the GOP primary voters, whether they are Republican or not.

UPDATE: Here is a link to the actual poll document from the RIC Bureau of Government Research and Services (PDF).

Here are some of the interesting internals:

45% of the respondents were male
55% of the respondents were female

(For below, Dem=Democrat Primary Voter, Rep-Republican Primary Voter)

East Bay - 10% of total, 9% Dem, 10% Rep
Western RI - 5% of total, 2% Dem, 4% Rep
Blackstone Valley - 16% of total, 19% Dem, 16% Rep
Providence Metro - 34% of total, 32% Dem, 33% Rep
Providence - 11% of total, 22% Dem, 4% Rep
Washington County - 13% of total, 10% Dem, 19% Rep
Newport County - 10% of total, 6% Dem, 14% Rep

I report......

Oil Futures

At the behest of Congress, President Bush has offered a few solutions to the current gas crisis, including an investigation into whether the oil companies have engaged in price gouging. This last lays at the heart of the current debate. Bill O'Reilly certainly chalks it up to a sort-of-conspiracy and is particularly suspicious of the oil futures market, which he believes is probably the biggest factor in determining the price at the pump. Here's how the oil futures market works.

Gasoline retailers determine the prices they charge, but they often take their cue from the price of crude and gasoline that's reached at the New York Mercantile Exchange. Oil and gasoline producers sell their products at the exchange so they can lock in a price months before they're ready to deliver it. Speculators take the risk that prices will drop between the time the oil or gas is sold and when it is actually delivered, but reap the reward if prices rise. Through these active futures markets, benchmark prices are determined for crude, gasoline, heating oil, natural gas and other commodities.

O'Reilly explains:

Gasoline supplies are at an eight-year high according to OPEC. There is plenty of gas selling on the open market, more than enough to meet the worldwide demand.

So rising gas prices are not a supply-and-demand issue.

What the American oil companies are doing is exploiting the uncertainty in the world. Every time the nutty Iranian government threatens to kill the Jews or the Americans or whoever, speculators bid up the paper price of a barrel of oil.

These speculators operate in the so-called commodities markets. They gamble on where the price of oil and other tangible assets will be months from now. These Vegas-type people sit in front of their computers and bid on "futures" contracts.

Every time the oil company executives, guys like Lee Raymond, see these people bidding up oil "futures," they order their retail gas station owners to jack up prices to you. Supply and demand? -- my carburetor, this has nothing to do with the free market.

Mac Johnson counters O'Reilly and traces the real rise in price as being a rise in the price of crude oil due to normal supply-and-demand economics. The free-marketer in me is inclined to side with Owens.

But I do often marvel at how quickly gas stations raises prices on the news of an increase in price on the futures market and how slow they are to lower it when the price on the futures market decreases. When the price goes up, they explain, it's because, well, the price is going up and they need their prices to reflect that. But when the price goes down, well, you see, they have to sell the inventory at a price so they can still make a small profit.

That being said, in addition to the long term benefit of developing alternative energy sources, the real short-term solution is to expand the area in which we can drill domestically (ANWR and other federal lands), thus making us less dependent on foreign--and more unstable--sources of oil.

Beacon Mutual: Where We Are and How We Got Here, Part 2

The key event in the transformation of Beacon Mutual from the Rhode Island's workers' compensation insurer of last resort to a virtual monopoly occurred in 1996. That year, the state legislature acted to block private workers' compensation insurers from returning to Rhode Island. (For part 1 of the story, click here.)

In the early 1990s, Rhode Island reformed its workers' compensation system in two ways. First, the state reformed the administrative and legal practices governing worker's compensation claims. In a very short period of time, the amount of compensation awarded by Rhode Island, which had been amongst the highest in the nation, fell into line with national averages. Second, the state created the Beacon Mutual insurance company to fill the void left by several large insurance companies who had departed from Rhode Island because they were unable to do business under the strain of losses incurred under the old workers' comp system.

The success of Beacon Mutual showed that it was possible to turn a profit selling reasonably priced workers' compensation insurance in Rhode Island under the new rules. Private insurers who had left the state prepared to return.

The state legislature, however, wasn't overly keen on allowing back the insurers who had left the market. Legislators claimed they didn't want the state to find itself in the position it had found itself in at the end of 1991 when a decision by a single out-of-state company could -- and did -- throw the entire workers' compensation system into chaos. There was also probably a punitive attitude involved; legislators didn't feel compelled to roll out a red carpet for insurance companies who had abandoned Rhode Island in a time of crisis.

Whatever the reason, on May 29, 1996, the state legislature changed the nature of Beacon Mutual, insulating the company from competition. The original concept behind Beacon Mutual was that the state needed to provide some compensation to the insurer that would be taking on the employers that no private insurers were willing to take on. The competitive advantages granted by the state -- a tax break and an exemption from paying into Rhode Island's insurance insolvency fund -- would offset the higher costs of providing policies to high-risk employers.

The 1996 changes to the law erased the distinctions between Beacon Mutual's clients. Beacon's policyholders would no longer be divided into a "voluntary" pool of employers able to shop for insurance with other companies and a "residual" pool of employers unable to make a deal with a private insurer because their businesses were considered high-risk. The tax breaks and insolvency fund exemption, originally applied only to Beacon's residual pool policies, would now apply to all Beacon Mutual policies.

The 1996 changes virtually guaranteed that Beacon could always charge lower prices than its competitors for the same insurance product. Private insurers had to subtract taxes, insolvency fund payments, and administrative costs from their premiums before banking reserves. Beacon Mutual had only administrative costs to subtract. As a result, private insurers had to charge higher rates in order to offer coverage equal to Beacon's, restricting their ability to compete; what Rhode Island employer would want to pay a private insurer for the same coverage they could get from Beacon Mutual at a lower (because subsidized) rate?

Of course, we know now that Beacon Mutual didn't use its advantages purely to lower its rates. Beacon set its prices just low enough to discourage competition, while still building up more money than needed to run an honest insurance business. Beacon Mutual used its advantages in state subsidies to pay for things like a sweetheart insurance deal for former Beacon board chairman Sheldon Sollosy and granite countertops installed in the home of former Beacon President Joseph Solomon. But the problems with Beacon Mutual extend beyond just the usual corruption...

Coming in Part 3: The big-picture problems with Beacon Mutual...

The Problems with the Indeglia Letter

The Associated Press has a report on a problematic independent campaign expenditure in support of Steve Laffey…

Cranston Mayor Stephen Laffey yesterday distanced himself from a letter a supporter wrote to his employees asking them to aid Laffey's Senate campaign…

The letter, written last week by Vincent Indeglia, president of [a] Providence employment agency, criticizes Laffey's opponents for their positions on immigration and asks employees to turn over names and contact information of every U.S. citizen they know. Indeglia said he left 50 to 100 copies on the desk where as many as 200 workers pick up their paychecks on Fridays…

We had no idea about this letter," said Nachama Soloveichik, spokeswoman for Laffey's campaign. "Had he asked us, we would have told him, 'Don't do this. Please don't do this.' We encourage him to take whatever steps needed to fix this."

It is a reasonable to assume that Mr. Indeglia didn't contact the Laffey campaign for fear of running afoul of the current campaign finance laws. Had Mr. Indeglia contacted the Laffey campaign before sending out his letter, the answer that Ms. Soloveichik would have given is the only answer that would not turn an independent expenditure into a coordinated in-kind contribution subject to campaign speech regulations.

Campaign finance laws that discourage people from talking directly to candidates before issuing public support need, at the very least, to be rethought.

Coordination issue aside, Mr. Indeglia may also be in violation of the “no corporate contributions” provisions of campaign finance regulations…

The letter, written on American Labor Services, Inc., letterhead by its president, asks workers to help register Hispanic citizens to vote in the Republican primary. It could violate laws that prohibit corporations from telling hourly workers which candidates to support, according to former and current Federal Elections Commission officials.

But whatever the camapign speech restrictions, Mr. Indeglia should have taken the time to get the policy positions of all of the candidates that he mentioned in his letter correct. Instead, he appears to have inaccurately portrayed the positions of both Lincoln Chafee and Sheldon Whitehouse on the issue of immigration…

Spokespeople for the candidates mentioned in the letter said Indeglia did not accurately express their views on the issue.

The letter said Chafee and Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic candidate, want to deport illegal immigrants and make it harder for legal immigrants to become citizens, while Laffey supports allowing people to become legal residents and citizens if they choose.

However, Chafee and Whitehouse support legislation that would give illegal immigrants a chance at citizenship if they paid a fine and met other conditions. Laffey wants to secure the nation's border with Mexico, crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants and create a strict guest worker policy.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

In today’s Projo, Katherine Gregg has an extensive article on the direct mail letters that both Republican Senate candidates have been sending out.

Beacon Mutual: Where We Are and How We Got Here, Part 1

The story of how Beacon Mutual began is a familiar one -- Rhode Island paying too much into a broken, unsustainable system, in this case, the workers' compensation system.

At the start of the 1990s, there were about eight private insurers providing workers' compensation insurance to Rhode Island, the largest being Liberty Mutual with about 25% of the total market share. Workers' compensation was divided into two categories. There was a "voluntary" market where insurance companies directly entered into contracts with employers. There was also an "assigned-risk" pool, comprised of companies deemed too risky to insure. The state would assign insurance companies operating in Rhode Island the task of writing insurance policies for the employers in the assigned-risk pool. Insurers regularly lost money on their assigned-risk pool commitments while beneficiaries complained that benefits paid on assigned-risk policies weren't enough to live on.

By 1990, the ratio of employers in the voluntary pool to employers in the assigned-risk pool was seriously out of balance. Liberty Mutual, for instance, was insuring only 155 companies through the voluntary market, while insuring about 2,900 through the assigned-risk pool. The assigned risk pool had become this large because, statistically speaking, Rhode Island had become a very risky place to work. Rhode Islanders were getting injured more often than workers in the rest of the country and staying out of work for longer when injured. They were also paid more for their injuries than the national average.

To cover the costs of Rhode Island's assigned risk pool, the National Council on Compensation Insurance asked for a 123% rate increase in the state. When it was not granted, Liberty Mutual announced it would pull out of Rhode Island on December 31, 1991. The pullout would have required the remaining insurers to assume responsibility for Liberty's 2,900 assigned risk policies. Instead, most remaining insurers also left Rhode Island to avoid incurring huge financial losses.

The creation of Beacon Mutual was part of the response to this. Beacon took over insuring the assigned risk pool (now called the "residual market"). Because it would be taking on the entire burden of the high-risk residual market, the state granted Beacon some competitive advantages. Beacon was given a tax-break and an exemption from paying into the state's insolvency fund. The insolvency fund is insurance on insurance, a pool of money that insurers contribute to so that there will still be money available to pay claims if an individual insurance company goes under. Since Beacon Mutual didn't have to pass insolvency fund or taxation expenses along to its customers, it could offer lower premiums than it otherwise would. Beacon would also be allowed to compete in the voluntary market, but its tax breaks and exemptions applied -- on paper -- only to its residual market policies.

Creating Beacon Mutual wasn't the only workers' compensation reform measure. The state streamlined the administrative and legal procedures associated with workers' comp. In just a couple of years, Rhode Island became a much safer place to work. Here's Governor Bruce Sundlun touting some of the successes in a 1994 Projo op-ed...

The state's costs are down $ 4 million - 17 percent just between fiscal 1992 and fiscal 1993. The state's workers' compensation rolls have already been reduced 25 percent from 1200 to 900 employees....

Workers' compensation injuries that occurred in December 1990 cost Rhode Island more than 50,000 days of work lost in the first six months of 1991, at a cost of over $ 2,000 per injury. Last December's injuries caused only 35,000 work days lost in the first six months of 1993.

Not only did we save 15,000 productive work days, the average cost per claim fell from over $2,000 to $1,510. The annual number of claims involving time lost from work has dropped from an average of 15,000 claims between 1987 and 1990, to 10,000 claims a year today.

Even when related to changing statewide employment levels, the frequency of workers' compensation claims is down 25 percent....

Particular credit must go to the Workers' Compensation Court. The court has seen 9,355 petitions filed in the first three quarters of 1993. This is down from 11,860 petitions in the like period of last year. Of these 9,355 petitions, the court has made a final disposition of and closed more than 8,000 petitions within 50 days of filing.

Until recently, it took an average of five months before petitions even got their first hearing. The court's speed in disposing of these cases saves employers millions of dollars in unnecessary costs, and eliminates unfair gamesmanship both by employees and employers taking advantage of delays.

Here's the weird and amazing part -- the state government of Rhode Island did something right! Rhode Island employers were able to afford workers' compensation isurance AND the process reforms once again made worker's comp insurance a profitable business, so much so that private insurers made plans to return to the state. In 1994, Liberty Mutual announced its intention to return to the Rhode Island workers' comp market. In 1995, ITT Hartford, at the time the 3rd largest workers' comp insurer in the country, also announced its intention to start doing business in Rhode Island.

Yet we know that the private insurers never came back, and Beacon Mutual maintained its near monopoly in the now-profitable workers' comp business in Rhode Island. What happened?

Coming in part 2: What did happen...

Reflections on the Meaning of Inequality

Among the weighty phrases thrown around in our public discourse, few are as provocative or poorly understood as "social justice" and "inequality." A perspective on social justice was previously offered here.

With a H/T to Cafe Hayek, David Schmidtz's article When Inequality Matters offers a philosophical perspective on the issue of inequality. (Note: His definition of "liberal" is the classical definition going back to prior centuries, not today's definition.) This is not a casual read, but is one worth re-reading several times.

Everyone cares about inequality. Caring about inequality, though, is not enough to make inequality matter. Unless we have the right sorts of reasons to care, equality does not matter, at least not in the way justice matters. So, why care about inequality?

If the question has no simple answer, part of the reason is that equality is multi-dimensional...

Of the many dimensions along which people can be unequal, presumably some do not matter. Moreover, not all dimensions can call for amelioration, given that to ameliorate along one dimension is to exacerbate along another. The dimensions that do matter, though, may turn out to matter for the same reason, so even given that inequality is multi-dimensional, the reason to care about it may yet be relatively simple. Here are two possibilities.

1. The dimensions of equality that matter are dimensions where moving in one direction (letting wives have bank accounts, say) is liberating while moving in the other direction is oppressive.

2. The dimensions of equality that matter are dimensions where moving in one direction (toward equality of income, say) fosters prosperity while moving in the other fosters destitution.

My assumption here is that for an inequality to matter, it must make a difference...Simply calling a given inequality 'unjust' (some people paying more than others pay in taxes, say, or having more left after paying) is not a reason...we make good on the promise when we offer reasons why that particular inequality matters enough to warrant being called unjust.

Inequality That Matters: Toward Liberation

...The point of the liberal ideal of political equality is not to stop us from becoming more worthy along dimensions where our worth can be affected by our choices, but to facilitate our becoming more worthy.

Liberal political equality is not premised on the absurd hope that, under ideal conditions, we all turn out to be equally worthy. It presupposes only a traditionally liberal optimism regarding what kind of society results from giving people (all people, so far as we can) a chance to choose worthy ways of life. We do not see people's various contributions as equally valuable, but that was never the point of equal opportunity, and never could be. Why not? Because we do not see even our own contributions as equally worthy, let alone everyone's...In everyday life, genuine respect (to some extent) tracks how we distinguish ourselves as we develop our unique potentials in unique ways.

Traditional liberals wanted people - all people - to be as free as possible to pursue their dreams. Accordingly, the equal opportunity of liberal tradition put the emphasis on unleashing human potential, not equalizing it...

...Anderson suggests that when redistribution's purpose is to make up for bad luck, including the misfortune of being less capable than others, the result in practice is disrespect...

Political equality has no such consequence...

Liberal egalitarianism has a history of being, first and foremost, a concern about status, not stuff. Iris Marion Young calls it a mistake to try to reduce justice to a more specific idea of distributive justice...Young sees two problems with the "distributive paradigm." First, it leads us to focus on allocating material goods. Second, while the paradigm can be "metaphorically extended to nonmaterial social goods" such as power, opportunity, and self-respect, the paradigm represents such goods as though they were static quantities to be allocated rather than evolving properties of ongoing relationships.

...The proper function of our network of evolving relationships is not to keep us in our static place but to empower us to aspire to a better life. Even more fundamentally, the point is to empower us to become as worthy as we can be along dimensions where our worth is affected by the choices we make about what sort of life is worth living...

In a race, equal opportunity matters. In a race, people need to start on an equal footing. Why? Because a race's purpose is to measure relative performance. Measuring relative performance, though, is not a society's purpose. We form societies with the Joneses so that we may do well, period, not so that we may do well relative to the Joneses. To do well, period, people need a good footing, not an equal footing. No one needs to win, so no one needs a fair chance to win. No one needs to keep up with the Joneses, so no one needs a fair chance to keep up with the Joneses. No one needs to put the Joneses in their place or to stop them from pulling ahead. The Joneses are neighbors, not competitors.

Inequality That Matters: Toward Prosperity

Here is a truism about the wealth of nations: Zero-sum games do not increase it. Historically, the welfare of the poor always - always - depends on putting people in a position where their best shot at prosperity is to find a way of making other people better off. The key to long-run welfare never has been and never will be a matter of making sure the game's best players lose. When we insist on creating enough power to beat the best players in zero-sum games, it is just a matter of time before the best players capture the very power we created in the hope of using it against them. We are never so unequal, or so oppressed, as when we give a dictator the power to equalize us. By contrast, the kinds of equality we have reason to care about will be kinds that in some way facilitate society as a positive sum game...

One of the great sources of inequality (more precisely, inequalities of wealth and income) is the division of labor. If we truly were on our own, producing something as mundane as a slice of pizza would be out of the question. Even getting started...acquiring iron ore (with our bare hands) and turning it into an oven in which to bake the dough...would be out of the question. Without division of labor, the Joneses would go nowhere, so keeping up with them would be unavoidable. At the same time, the division of labor makes us many thousands of times more productive than we otherwise would have been. Compared to that, the income inequality that division of labor fosters is inconsequential. In summary, the kind of equality that is liberating is also the kind that historically has been a key to human prosperity...namely, acknowledging people's right to use their own judgment about how to employ their talents under prevailing circumstances, as free as possible from encumbrances of a race-, sex-, or caste-defined socioeconomic roles.

From the Goodness of Equality to the Rightness of Equalizing

David Miller notices a difference between saying equality is good and saying equality is required by justice...Not everything that matters is a matter of justice.

...In the real world, to take from one person and give to another does not only alter a distribution. It also alters the degree to which products are controlled by their producers. To redistribute under real-world conditions, we must alienate producers from their products. The alienation of producers from their products was identified as a problem by Karl Marx, and rightly so; it should be seen as a problem from any perspective.

...The liberal ideal is free association, not atomic isolation. Further, the actual history of free association is that we do not become hermits but instead freely organize ourselves into "thick" communities. Hutterites, Mennonites, and other groups moved to North America not because liberal society is where they can't form thick communities but because liberal society is where they can.

...We do not start from scratch. We weave our contribution into an existing tapestry of contributions, and within limits, are seen as owning our contributions, however humble they may be. That is why people contribute, and that in turn is why we have a system of production.

...When we do reflect on the history of any given ongoing enterprise, we feel grateful to Thomas Edison and all those who actually helped to make the enterprise possible. We could of course resist the urge to feel grateful, insisting that a person's character depends on "fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit" and therefore, at least theoretically, there is a form of respect we can have for people even while giving them no credit for the effort and talent they bring to the table. One problem: this sort of respect is not the kind that brings producers to the table. It is not the kind that makes communities work...

...What about inequalities?...Unless an inequality (of talent, say) is ours to arrange, theories about what would be fair are moot. A truly foundational theory about how inequalities ought to be arranged would not start by imagining us coming to a bargaining table with a right to distribute what other people have produced. A truly foundational theory would start by acknowledging that there is a prior moral question about which inequalities are ours to arrange.

Reflections on the Meaning of Inequality

Among the weighty phrases thrown around in our public discourse, few are as provocative or poorly understood as "social justice" and "inequality." A perspective on social justice was previously offered here.

With a H/T to Cafe Hayek, David Schmidtz's article When Inequality Matters offers a philosophical perspective on the issue of inequality. (Note: His definition of "liberal" is the classical definition going back to prior centuries, not today's definition.) This is not a casual read, but is one worth re-reading several times.

Everyone cares about inequality. Caring about inequality, though, is not enough to make inequality matter. Unless we have the right sorts of reasons to care, equality does not matter, at least not in the way justice matters. So, why care about inequality?

If the question has no simple answer, part of the reason is that equality is multi-dimensional...

Of the many dimensions along which people can be unequal, presumably some do not matter. Moreover, not all dimensions can call for amelioration, given that to ameliorate along one dimension is to exacerbate along another. The dimensions that do matter, though, may turn out to matter for the same reason, so even given that inequality is multi-dimensional, the reason to care about it may yet be relatively simple. Here are two possibilities.

1. The dimensions of equality that matter are dimensions where moving in one direction (letting wives have bank accounts, say) is liberating while moving in the other direction is oppressive.

2. The dimensions of equality that matter are dimensions where moving in one direction (toward equality of income, say) fosters prosperity while moving in the other fosters destitution.

My assumption here is that for an inequality to matter, it must make a difference...Simply calling a given inequality 'unjust' (some people paying more than others pay in taxes, say, or having more left after paying) is not a reason...we make good on the promise when we offer reasons why that particular inequality matters enough to warrant being called unjust.

Inequality That Matters: Toward Liberation

...The point of the liberal ideal of political equality is not to stop us from becoming more worthy along dimensions where our worth can be affected by our choices, but to facilitate our becoming more worthy.

Liberal political equality is not premised on the absurd hope that, under ideal conditions, we all turn out to be equally worthy. It presupposes only a traditionally liberal optimism regarding what kind of society results from giving people (all people, so far as we can) a chance to choose worthy ways of life. We do not see people’s various contributions as equally valuable, but that was never the point of equal opportunity, and never could be. Why not? Because we do not see even our own contributions as equally worthy, let alone everyone’s...In everyday life, genuine respect (to some extent) tracks how we distinguish ourselves as we develop our unique potentials in unique ways.

Traditional liberals wanted people—all people—to be as free as possible to pursue their dreams. Accordingly, the equal opportunity of liberal tradition put the emphasis on unleashing human potential, not equalizing it...

...Anderson suggests that when redistribution’s purpose is to make up for bad luck, including the misfortune of being less capable than others, the result in practice is disrespect...

Political equality has no such consequence...

Liberal egalitarianism has a history of being, first and foremost, a concern about status, not stuff. Iris Marion Young calls it a mistake to try to reduce justice to a more specific idea of distributive justice...Young sees two problems with the "distributive paradigm." First, it leads us to focus on allocating material goods. Second, while the paradigm can be "metaphorically extended to nonmaterial social goods" such as power, opportunity, and self-respect, the paradigm represents such goods as though they were static quantities to be allocated rather than evolving properties of ongoing relationships.

...The proper function of our network of evolving relationships is not to keep us in our static place but to empower us to aspire to a better life. Even more fundamentally, the point is to empower us to become as worthy as we can be along dimensions where our worth is affected by the choices we make about what sort of life is worth living...

In a race, equal opportunity matters. In a race, people need to start on an equal footing. Why? Because a race’s purpose is to measure relative performance. Measuring relative performance, though, is not a society’s purpose. We form societies with the Joneses so that we may do well, period, not so that we may do well relative to the Joneses. To do well, period, people need a good footing, not an equal footing. No one needs to win, so no one needs a fair chance to win. No one needs to keep up with the Joneses, so no one needs a fair chance to keep up with the Joneses. No one needs to put the Joneses in their place or to stop them from pulling ahead. The Joneses are neighbors, not competitors.

Inequality That Matters: Toward Prosperity

Here is a truism about the wealth of nations: Zero-sum games do not increase it. Historically, the welfare of the poor always—always—depends on putting people in a position where their best shot at prosperity is to find a way of making other people better off. The key to long-run welfare never has been and never will be a matter of making sure the game’s best players lose. When we insist on creating enough power to beat the best players in zero-sum games, it is just a matter of time before the best players capture the very power we created in the hope of using it against them. We are never so unequal, or so oppressed, as when we give a dictator the power to equalize us. By contrast, the kinds of equality we have reason to care about will be kinds that in some way facilitate society as a positive sum game...

One of the great sources of inequality (more precisely, inequalities of wealth and income) is the division of labor. If we truly were on our own, producing something as mundane as a slice of pizza would be out of the question. Even getting started—acquiring iron ore (with our bare hands) and turning it into an oven in which to bake the dough—would be out of the question. Without division of labor, the Joneses would go nowhere, so keeping up with them would be unavoidable. At the same time, the division of labor makes us many thousands of times more productive than we otherwise would have been. Compared to that, the income inequality that division of labor fosters is inconsequential. In summary, the kind of equality that is liberating is also the kind that historically has been a key to human prosperity—namely, acknowledging people’s right to use their own judgment about how to employ their talents under prevailing circumstances, as free as possible from encumbrances of a race-, sex-, or caste-defined socioeconomic roles.

From the Goodness of Equality to the Rightness of Equalizing

David Miller notices a difference between saying equality is good and saying equality is required by justice...Not everything that matters is a matter of justice.

...In the real world, to take from one person and give to another does not only alter a distribution. It also alters the degree to which products are controlled by their producers. To redistribute under real-world conditions, we must alienate producers from their products. The alienation of producers from their products was identified as a problem by Karl Marx, and rightly so; it should be seen as a problem from any perspective.

...The liberal ideal is free association, not atomic isolation. Further, the actual history of free association is that we do not become hermits but instead freely organize ourselves into "thick" communities. Hutterites, Mennonites, and other groups moved to North America not because liberal society is where they can’t form thick communities but because liberal society is where they can.

...We do not start from scratch. We weave our contribution into an existing tapestry of contributions, and within limits, are seen as owning our contributions, however humble they may be. That is why people contribute, and that in turn is why we have a system of production.

...When we do reflect on the history of any given ongoing enterprise, we feel grateful to Thomas Edison and all those who actually helped to make the enterprise possible. We could of course resist the urge to feel grateful, insisting that a person’s character depends on "fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit" and therefore, at least theoretically, there is a form of respect we can have for people even while giving them no credit for the effort and talent they bring to the table. One problem: this sort of respect is not the kind that brings producers to the table. It is not the kind that makes communities work...

...What about inequalities?...Unless an inequality (of talent, say) is ours to arrange, theories about what would be fair are moot. A truly foundational theory about how inequalities ought to be arranged would not start by imagining us coming to a bargaining table with a right to distribute what other people have produced. A truly foundational theory would start by acknowledging that there is a prior moral question about which inequalities are ours to arrange.

Ruth Simmons Gets It Wrong

Earlier this week, Brown University President Ruth Simmons discussed education in a lecture before the Urban League of Rhode Island. Here is a part of her remarks, as reported by Tom Mooney in the Projo...

"How often do you talk to people who just can't bear the thought that their tax dollars are going to help children across town? It's appalling and we must call it what it is. The notion that we can request the resources in society for the privileged few and leave everybody else behind is a notion that must be called to account."

President Simmons is far too quick to assume that sinister motives must lie behind a public unwillingness to send their money "across town". America's experience with public education over the past 40 years has made people, quite reasonably, wary of surrendering ever increasing amounts of money to the control of rigid, underperforming bureaucracies.

There are better ways to deliver education than through the current system dominated by local-government monopolies, but the alternatives are blocked by people who cannot bear the thought of trying them. How often do you talk to people who can't bear the thought that tax dollars will be spent in the form of vouchers? How about people who can't bear the thought that that parents, and not bureaucrats, will decide where to spend tax dollars through a public school choice program? And how often do you talk to people who can't bear the thought that tax dollars might help create a network of charter schools?

The answer to all of these questions, if you are talking to the school committees and interest groups that control public education, is quite often.

Don't confuse a lack of support for a rigid, government-knows-what's-best-for-you (when it clearly doesn't) system of education with a lack of support for public education in general. And before accusing people of being unwilling to pay for education, allow them a full range of funding options to choose from. That is, if you can bear the thought of it.

Becoming Americans

As an alumnus of one of The Claremont Colleges, it is with pride that I highlight the mission of the Claremont Institute:

The mission of the Claremont Institute is to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.

The Claremont Institute finds the answers to America's problems in the principles on which our nation was founded. These principles are expressed most eloquently in the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that "all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights...."

To recover the Founding principles in our political life means recovering a limited and accountable government that respects private property, promotes stable family life and maintains a strong defense...

The Claremont Institute believes that informed citizens can and will make the right choices for America's future...the Institute engages Americans in an informed discussion of the principles and policies necessary to rebuild our civic institutions...

America's Founders endowed our Republic with sound principles and a framework for governing that is unmatched in the history of mankind. The prosperity and freedom of America can only be made secure if they are guided by a return to these basic principles as our country enters the 21st Century.

Toward that end, the Institute is reprinting three classic essays by Claremont scholars on "Becoming Americans" as the nation debates immigration, American culture and principles, and the nature of citizenship. A version of the first essay - Educating Citizens - addresses multiculturalism and originally appeared in Moral Ideas for America, edited by Larry P. Arnn and Douglas A. Jeffrey and published in 1993. Here are some excerpts:

Democracy requires more of its citizens than any other form of government. It depends on the capacity of the citizens to govern themselves. But the habits and dispositions of self government are difficult to acquire and to sustain. They are rooted in moral and political principles in which each new generation must be educated. It is no accident that history provides so few examples of successful and enduring democracies. In the American democracy today, we have largely lost sight of those moral and political principles which provide the common ground of American political community and inform the civic character required of American citizens. There is widespread recognition of the necessity to restore that private morality which is the source of the public good and to strengthen the common bonds of civility among the diverse citizens of America. Educating citizens in the principles, rights, duties, and capacities of citizenship is the primary purpose of public education in America, and our institutions of higher learning play a critical part in making our public schools capable or incapable of fulfilling their purpose. That America is failing miserably in accomplishing this purpose is apparent to all who have eyes to see and ears to hear...

...To the extent that a single cause may be identified as the primary source of our failure at the task of educating citizens, it can be summed up simply: bad ideas.

Education in America today, at every level, is dominated by doctrines that openly repudiate the principles on which America is founded; indeed, they deny the very capacity of men to distinguish freedom from tyranny, justice from injustice, right from wrong. These doctrines have wholly discredited the perspective of the democratic citizen: they have made self government itself unintelligible as a political phenomenon...The consequence has been a corruption of the political language through which the nation conducts its public deliberations, a citizenry increasingly confused or uncertain about the ground and substance of its rights and duties, and political and educational leaders capable for the most part only of deepening the crisis. These bad ideas are rooted in a profound assault upon human reason and human nature as grounds of human morality, an assault waged over the past two centuries culminating in explicit and assertive nihilism. The popular expressions of these ideas in our time take a wide variety of forms. But as they are professed and practiced in the world of American education today, they converge most faddishly under the banners of "Multiculturalism" and "Diversity."

The multicultural movement and the diversity movement are distinct political and intellectual movements which frequently overlap and reinforce one another. Their stronghold is in the academies of higher learning, whence they have sallied forth into practically every nook and cranny of American life...

The foremost idea of multiculturalism is the equal value of all cultures, or cultural relativism...

This is not just the view of zealots or extremists but of the mainstream, supposedly responsible public officials making policy at the highest levels...

This reigning dogma among professional educators who shape the curriculum of American public schools requires a non-chauvinistic, non-ethnocentric, balanced treatment of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Jefferson or Lincoln. Moral relativism prohibits preferring freedom to despotism or believing that there can be a rational ground for preferring one over the other. With Lincolnian firmness, our civics instruction is dedicated to the proposition that "the concept of freedom can mean different things to different people in different circumstances."...

Inherent in the idea of cultural relativism is the idea that culture, race, or ancestry (feminist multiculturalists throw in gender) determines our ideas. Our minds, that is, are locked inside our skins, and the gulf between races or cultures is unbridgeable. There is no such thing as human reason capable of grasping any part of objective moral truth (which also doesn't exist) which is worthy of imparting to a student...Education itself is thus understood to be merely the imposition of one's own ethnically or culturally determined prejudices on others. The relation between teacher and student can be understood only in terms of power.

Multiculturalists loudly denounce the emphasis in American schools on American history and culture and western civilization. Everyone has read about this. Perpetuating the American heritage in American public schools falls under the heading of "Eurocentrism," one of the worst forms of cultural or ethnic chauvinism. It discriminates against other cultures by denying them an equal "voice" in the classroom or the textbooks. One might think that it would be a rational and non-controversial approach to teach American students about the American Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. This is naive. And, again, it is not just the "fringe elements" who protest...American taxpayers are thus required to support the inculcation among American citizens of non-American cultural heritages however antipathetic these cultures may be to democracy or to American institutions...

Bilingualism springs from this fount of multiculturalism...In fact, the animating idea of the bilingual movement today is to preserve the sanctity of the students' "native" language and culture against the imperialistic efforts to force the "foreign" tongue of English upon them...

...The more ardent multiculturalists not only denounce the emphasis on Western civilization as bad but denounce Western civilization and its American variety as uniquely evil in themselves. The very ideas of "humanity" and "reason" are seen in this view as Eurocentric (and for the feminists, patriarchal) prejudices contrived to exploit "oppressed" cultures. This is the real driving force of the multicultural movement.

Multiculturalism has no patience for objective academic standards of excellence. These are merely other means by which the "dominant culture" oppresses "minority cultures." Therefore demonstrably objective tests are denounced as racist...

The multiculturalist replaces education with therapy, insisting that supporting the students' "self-esteem" is the governing object of education. Self-esteem is achieved by teaching the students of "oppressed cultures" to be proud of their particular race or ancestry. Some argue that this should be done by revealing the true greatness of these oppressed cultures which has been systematically repressed by a dominant white, male, European culture. But the more candid or incautious multiculturalists admit or even insist that the self worth of the oppressed must be cultivated by myths where facts will not do the trick...

...But truth must not get in the way of therapy...

The teachers who teach our public school children are graduates of American colleges where such doctrines of multiculturalism are rampant...

Social critic Rita Kramer recently spent a year visiting and studying representative schools of education across the country. Her conclusion: "At present, our teacher-training institutions, the schools, colleges, and departments of education on campuses across the country, are producing for the classrooms of America experts in methods of teaching with nothing to apply those methods to. Their technique is abundant, their knowledge practically nonexistent. A mastery of instructional strategies, an emphasis on educational psychology, a familiarity with pedagogical philosophies have gradually taken the place of a knowledge of history, literature, science, and mathematics."...What matters is not to teach any particular subject or skill, not to preserve past accomplishments or stimulate future achievements, but to give to all that stamp of approval that will make them 'feel good about themselves.' Self-esteem has replaced understanding as the goal of education."...

Educational therapy apparently works. We have succeeded perhaps beyond our expectations in replacing knowledge and skills with self-esteem in our students. American students and even their parents "feel good" about their educations...around 80% of American mothers think their child's school is doing a good or excellent job even as one national study after another headlines the declining academic performance of the nation's students. The prospect in civics, one supposes, is that Americans will feel good about their country as their civic freedoms continue to erode and they turn to tribal warfare.

The not surprising tendency of the multicultural therapy inflicted on America's students at all levels is to produce adult citizens who cannot distinguish between right and wrong; who are ignorant of their rights and duties as citizens and of the foundations and conditions of their political freedom; who have been taught to identify themselves through the skin color or surnames of their ancestors; who are ignorant of American history and the principles of American democracy or have been taught to despise America; who are lacking in basic intellectual accomplishments; and who believe that they should feel good about all this.

Perhaps the most tragic injustice perpetrated against the innocent student by teachers animated by these bad ideas is that he will have been denied his greatest birthright as an American. He will have been intellectually and therefore politically exiled from that community bound together by what Abraham Lincoln called "the principles and axioms of free society": the community originating in 1776 with the bold proclamation of the inalienable rights of man as the foundation of American political existence. Indeed, today's student is in a sense divested of his very humanity insofar as he is taught to understand himself not as a being possessed of the "rights of human nature," but as a member of one tribe asserting his atavistic will against other tribes, while possessing no capacity of distinguishing or choosing between good and evil.

Intelligent liberal critics of such multiculturalism see the problem more or less clearly. As the respected historian of education Diane Ravitch says, American schools should say to students from other cultures "that wherever they have come from, wherever their parents have come from, they are now preparing to be American citizens� They must learn about American history, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, because this is now part of their precious heritage as American citizens."...

America began with a ringing affirmation of a fundamental moral and political truth: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights." Certainly, here was no appeal to skin color or ethnicity. The truth of human equality and liberty was asserted against all despotisms of race, class, or religion. Neither is this an appeal to "history" or an invocation of "Anglo-Saxon" roots. America is distinguished by being founded on an idea, the idea of the equal rights of human nature. We do not "live and die" for this idea because "it works for us" or because it is "our own." We make it our own because it is true. And having been elevated by making it our own, we pledge "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" to its vindication. No nation or people in history had ever established its political institutions on such principles...

Proclaiming that all men everywhere and at all times possess by nature equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the American Founders undertook the historic effort to secure these rights, so far as they thought they could then be secured, to a small people at a particular place and time. They were acutely conscious of the limits of their ability to secure these rights. When they were able to establish a "more perfect union" they understood full well how far from perfection they remained...

In the course of its history, the American people have many times fallen beneath the high standards they set for themselves at the beginning. They have strayed from those principles, and they have forgotten them, and become confused about them, and allowed misunderstood self-interest to obscure them. The reason that Abraham Lincoln is rightly regarded as the greatest democratic statesman is that he kept America from abandoning those principles as the foundation of American democracy. His statesmanship preserved for future generations of Americans the moral truth of human equality as the pole star of their political life...

To begin to restore American education today, it is necessary to restore the moral and intellectual horizons within which the self evident truths on which America was founded can command the respect and allegiance they deserve...

The "genius" of the American people at the time of the American revolution and founding made it both possible and necessary to establish a regime based on the republican principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. As Jefferson said in explaining the genesis of the Declaration of Independence, the ideas expressed in it were "the common sense of the subject" in America. He was merely expressing "the American mind." It was only because the American people had learned to embrace republican principles that it was possible to establish an American republic. The founders were animated by "that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government." But they understood that this was a capacity that Americans would have to demonstrate for themselves, and continue to demonstrate each generation. As the Declaration proclaims, the just powers of government are derived from "the consent of the governed." Only a people prepared to consent to a republic are capable of establishing one. This means a people prepared to recognize their own humanity and that of their fellow citizens; who will neither aspire to be masters nor submit to be slaves; who are prepared to rule and be ruled in turn; who are prepared to abide by the laws they claim the right to make for themselves. A people that means to be free must have the virtues necessary to sustain their freedom. Do we?

It is up to this generation, as it has been up to each generation that preceded us and will be up to each generation that succeeds us, to demonstrate our capacity for self government...

At the end of the American War of Independence James Madison wrote an Address to the States, endorsed by Congress and by George Washington, recommending measures to secure the fragile independence that had just been won. He concluded with a reflection that sheds light on what is at stake in the education of American citizens in our own day: "[T]he citizens of the United States are responsible for the greatest trust ever confided to a political society. If justice, good faith, honor, gratitude and all the other qualities which enoble the character of a nation and fulfill the ends of government be the fruits of our establishments, the cause of liberty will acquire a dignity and lustre, which it has never yet enjoyed, and an example will be set, which cannot but have the most favourable influence on the rights of Mankind. If in the other side, our governments should be unfortunately blotted with the reverse of these cardinal and essential virtues, the great cause which we have engaged to vindicate, will be dishonored and betrayed; the last and fairest experiment in favor of the rights of human nature will be turned against them; and their patrons and friends exposed to be insulted and silenced by the votaries of tyranny and usurpation."

Steven Hayward - a Claremont alumnus - writes about the uniqueness of the American Founding in the Spring 2006 issue of the Claremont Review of Books:

...the idea of American exceptionalism - the idea, as old as the founding itself, that America is a special, even providential nation because it is, in Leo Strauss's words, "the only country in the world which was founded in explicit opposition to Machiavellian principles..."

The posting, Happy Birthday, America!, elaborates on Hayward's argument by further discussing the unique principles guiding the American Founding.

Other related postings include:

We Are Paying Quite a Price for Our Historical Ignorance
To Nurture Greater Ethical Awareness, Students Need Practice in Moral Discernment
Spreading Falsehoods in our Children's Education about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American Founding

Becoming Americans

As an alumnus of one of The Claremont Colleges, it is with pride that I highlight the mission of the Claremont Institute:

The mission of the Claremont Institute is to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.

The Claremont Institute finds the answers to America's problems in the principles on which our nation was founded. These principles are expressed most eloquently in the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that "all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights...."

To recover the Founding principles in our political life means recovering a limited and accountable government that respects private property, promotes stable family life and maintains a strong defense...

The Claremont Institute believes that informed citizens can and will make the right choices for America's future...the Institute engages Americans in an informed discussion of the principles and policies necessary to rebuild our civic institutions...

America's Founders endowed our Republic with sound principles and a framework for governing that is unmatched in the history of mankind. The prosperity and freedom of America can only be made secure if they are guided by a return to these basic principles as our country enters the 21st Century.

Toward that end, the Institute is reprinting three classic essays by Claremont scholars on "Becoming Americans" as the nation debates immigration, American culture and principles, and the nature of citizenship. A version of the first essay - Educating Citizens - addresses multiculturalism and originally appeared in Moral Ideas for America, edited by Larry P. Arnn and Douglas A. Jeffrey and published in 1993. Here are some excerpts:

Democracy requires more of its citizens than any other form of government. It depends on the capacity of the citizens to govern themselves. But the habits and dispositions of self government are difficult to acquire and to sustain. They are rooted in moral and political principles in which each new generation must be educated. It is no accident that history provides so few examples of successful and enduring democracies. In the American democracy today, we have largely lost sight of those moral and political principles which provide the common ground of American political community and inform the civic character required of American citizens. There is widespread recognition of the necessity to restore that private morality which is the source of the public good and to strengthen the common bonds of civility among the diverse citizens of America. Educating citizens in the principles, rights, duties, and capacities of citizenship is the primary purpose of public education in America, and our institutions of higher learning play a critical part in making our public schools capable or incapable of fulfilling their purpose. That America is failing miserably in accomplishing this purpose is apparent to all who have eyes to see and ears to hear...

...To the extent that a single cause may be identified as the primary source of our failure at the task of educating citizens, it can be summed up simply: bad ideas.

Education in America today, at every level, is dominated by doctrines that openly repudiate the principles on which America is founded; indeed, they deny the very capacity of men to distinguish freedom from tyranny, justice from injustice, right from wrong. These doctrines have wholly discredited the perspective of the democratic citizen: they have made self government itself unintelligible as a political phenomenon...The consequence has been a corruption of the political language through which the nation conducts its public deliberations, a citizenry increasingly confused or uncertain about the ground and substance of its rights and duties, and political and educational leaders capable for the most part only of deepening the crisis. These bad ideas are rooted in a profound assault upon human reason and human nature as grounds of human morality, an assault waged over the past two centuries culminating in explicit and assertive nihilism. The popular expressions of these ideas in our time take a wide variety of forms. But as they are professed and practiced in the world of American education today, they converge most faddishly under the banners of "Multiculturalism" and "Diversity."

The multicultural movement and the diversity movement are distinct political and intellectual movements which frequently overlap and reinforce one another. Their stronghold is in the academies of higher learning, whence they have sallied forth into practically every nook and cranny of American life...

The foremost idea of multiculturalism is the equal value of all cultures, or cultural relativism...

This is not just the view of zealots or extremists but of the mainstream, supposedly responsible public officials making policy at the highest levels...

This reigning dogma among professional educators who shape the curriculum of American public schools requires a non-chauvinistic, non-ethnocentric, balanced treatment of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Jefferson or Lincoln. Moral relativism prohibits preferring freedom to despotism or believing that there can be a rational ground for preferring one over the other. With Lincolnian firmness, our civics instruction is dedicated to the proposition that "the concept of freedom can mean different things to different people in different circumstances."...

Inherent in the idea of cultural relativism is the idea that culture, race, or ancestry (feminist multiculturalists throw in gender) determines our ideas. Our minds, that is, are locked inside our skins, and the gulf between races or cultures is unbridgeable. There is no such thing as human reason capable of grasping any part of objective moral truth (which also doesn't exist) which is worthy of imparting to a student...Education itself is thus understood to be merely the imposition of one's own ethnically or culturally determined prejudices on others. The relation between teacher and student can be understood only in terms of power.

Multiculturalists loudly denounce the emphasis in American schools on American history and culture and western civilization. Everyone has read about this. Perpetuating the American heritage in American public schools falls under the heading of "Eurocentrism," one of the worst forms of cultural or ethnic chauvinism. It discriminates against other cultures by denying them an equal "voice" in the classroom or the textbooks. One might think that it would be a rational and non-controversial approach to teach American students about the American Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. This is naive. And, again, it is not just the "fringe elements" who protest...American taxpayers are thus required to support the inculcation among American citizens of non-American cultural heritages however antipathetic these cultures may be to democracy or to American institutions...

Bilingualism springs from this fount of multiculturalism...In fact, the animating idea of the bilingual movement today is to preserve the sanctity of the students' "native" language and culture against the imperialistic efforts to force the "foreign" tongue of English upon them...

...The more ardent multiculturalists not only denounce the emphasis on Western civilization as bad but denounce Western civilization and its American variety as uniquely evil in themselves. The very ideas of "humanity" and "reason" are seen in this view as Eurocentric (and for the feminists, patriarchal) prejudices contrived to exploit "oppressed" cultures. This is the real driving force of the multicultural movement.

Multiculturalism has no patience for objective academic standards of excellence. These are merely other means by which the "dominant culture" oppresses "minority cultures." Therefore demonstrably objective tests are denounced as racist...

The multiculturalist replaces education with therapy, insisting that supporting the students' "self-esteem" is the governing object of education. Self-esteem is achieved by teaching the students of "oppressed cultures" to be proud of their particular race or ancestry. Some argue that this should be done by revealing the true greatness of these oppressed cultures which has been systematically repressed by a dominant white, male, European culture. But the more candid or incautious multiculturalists admit or even insist that the self worth of the oppressed must be cultivated by myths where facts will not do the trick...

...But truth must not get in the way of therapy...

The teachers who teach our public school children are graduates of American colleges where such doctrines of multiculturalism are rampant...

Social critic Rita Kramer recently spent a year visiting and studying representative schools of education across the country. Her conclusion: "At present, our teacher-training institutions, the schools, colleges, and departments of education on campuses across the country, are producing for the classrooms of America experts in methods of teaching with nothing to apply those methods to. Their technique is abundant, their knowledge practically nonexistent. A mastery of instructional strategies, an emphasis on educational psychology, a familiarity with pedagogical philosophies have gradually taken the place of a knowledge of history, literature, science, and mathematics."...What matters is not to teach any particular subject or skill, not to preserve past accomplishments or stimulate future achievements, but to give to all that stamp of approval that will make them 'feel good about themselves.' Self-esteem has replaced understanding as the goal of education."...

Educational therapy apparently works. We have succeeded perhaps beyond our expectations in replacing knowledge and skills with self-esteem in our students. American students and even their parents "feel good" about their educations...around 80% of American mothers think their child's school is doing a good or excellent job even as one national study after another headlines the declining academic performance of the nation's students. The prospect in civics, one supposes, is that Americans will feel good about their country as their civic freedoms continue to erode and they turn to tribal warfare.

The not surprising tendency of the multicultural therapy inflicted on America's students at all levels is to produce adult citizens who cannot distinguish between right and wrong; who are ignorant of their rights and duties as citizens and of the foundations and conditions of their political freedom; who have been taught to identify themselves through the skin color or surnames of their ancestors; who are ignorant of American history and the principles of American democracy or have been taught to despise America; who are lacking in basic intellectual accomplishments; and who believe that they should feel good about all this.

Perhaps the most tragic injustice perpetrated against the innocent student by teachers animated by these bad ideas is that he will have been denied his greatest birthright as an American. He will have been intellectually and therefore politically exiled from that community bound together by what Abraham Lincoln called "the principles and axioms of free society": the community originating in 1776 with the bold proclamation of the inalienable rights of man as the foundation of American political existence. Indeed, today's student is in a sense divested of his very humanity insofar as he is taught to understand himself not as a being possessed of the "rights of human nature," but as a member of one tribe asserting his atavistic will against other tribes, while possessing no capacity of distinguishing or choosing between good and evil.

Intelligent liberal critics of such multiculturalism see the problem more or less clearly. As the respected historian of education Diane Ravitch says, American schools should say to students from other cultures "that wherever they have come from, wherever their parents have come from, they are now preparing to be American citizens… They must learn about American history, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, because this is now part of their precious heritage as American citizens."...

America began with a ringing affirmation of a fundamental moral and political truth: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights." Certainly, here was no appeal to skin color or ethnicity. The truth of human equality and liberty was asserted against all despotisms of race, class, or religion. Neither is this an appeal to "history" or an invocation of "Anglo-Saxon" roots. America is distinguished by being founded on an idea, the idea of the equal rights of human nature. We do not "live and die" for this idea because "it works for us" or because it is "our own." We make it our own because it is true. And having been elevated by making it our own, we pledge "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" to its vindication. No nation or people in history had ever established its political institutions on such principles...

Proclaiming that all men everywhere and at all times possess by nature equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the American Founders undertook the historic effort to secure these rights, so far as they thought they could then be secured, to a small people at a particular place and time. They were acutely conscious of the limits of their ability to secure these rights. When they were able to establish a "more perfect union" they understood full well how far from perfection they remained...

In the course of its history, the American people have many times fallen beneath the high standards they set for themselves at the beginning. They have strayed from those principles, and they have forgotten them, and become confused about them, and allowed misunderstood self-interest to obscure them. The reason that Abraham Lincoln is rightly regarded as the greatest democratic statesman is that he kept America from abandoning those principles as the foundation of American democracy. His statesmanship preserved for future generations of Americans the moral truth of human equality as the pole star of their political life...

To begin to restore American education today, it is necessary to restore the moral and intellectual horizons within which the self evident truths on which America was founded can command the respect and allegiance they deserve...

The "genius" of the American people at the time of the American revolution and founding made it both possible and necessary to establish a regime based on the republican principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. As Jefferson said in explaining the genesis of the Declaration of Independence, the ideas expressed in it were "the common sense of the subject" in America. He was merely expressing "the American mind." It was only because the American people had learned to embrace republican principles that it was possible to establish an American republic. The founders were animated by "that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government." But they understood that this was a capacity that Americans would have to demonstrate for themselves, and continue to demonstrate each generation. As the Declaration proclaims, the just powers of government are derived from "the consent of the governed." Only a people prepared to consent to a republic are capable of establishing one. This means a people prepared to recognize their own humanity and that of their fellow citizens; who will neither aspire to be masters nor submit to be slaves; who are prepared to rule and be ruled in turn; who are prepared to abide by the laws they claim the right to make for themselves. A people that means to be free must have the virtues necessary to sustain their freedom. Do we?

It is up to this generation, as it has been up to each generation that preceded us and will be up to each generation that succeeds us, to demonstrate our capacity for self government...

At the end of the American War of Independence James Madison wrote an Address to the States, endorsed by Congress and by George Washington, recommending measures to secure the fragile independence that had just been won. He concluded with a reflection that sheds light on what is at stake in the education of American citizens in our own day: "[T]he citizens of the United States are responsible for the greatest trust ever confided to a political society. If justice, good faith, honor, gratitude and all the other qualities which enoble the character of a nation and fulfill the ends of government be the fruits of our establishments, the cause of liberty will acquire a dignity and lustre, which it has never yet enjoyed, and an example will be set, which cannot but have the most favourable influence on the rights of Mankind. If in the other side, our governments should be unfortunately blotted with the reverse of these cardinal and essential virtues, the great cause which we have engaged to vindicate, will be dishonored and betrayed; the last and fairest experiment in favor of the rights of human nature will be turned against them; and their patrons and friends exposed to be insulted and silenced by the votaries of tyranny and usurpation."

Steven Hayward - a Claremont alumnus - writes about the uniqueness of the American Founding in the Spring 2006 issue of the Claremont Review of Books (not yet online):

...the idea of American exceptionalism - the idea, as old as the founding itself, that America is a special, even providential nation because it is, in Leo Strauss's words, "the only country in the world which was founded in explicit opposition to Machiavellian principles..."

The posting, Happy Birthday, America!, elaborates on Hayward's argument by further discussing the unique principles guiding the American Founding.

Other related postings include:

We Are Paying Quite a Price for Our Historical Ignorance
To Nurture Greater Ethical Awareness, Students Need Practice in Moral Discernment
Spreading Falsehoods in our Children's Education about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American Founding

Further Commentary on the Rhode Island Lead Paint Trial

To add some additional color commentary to Andrew's coverage of the Rhode Island lead paint trial in Today's Lead Paint Filing and The Lead Paint Trial Continues, here are excerpts from the February 27 Wall Street Journal editorial Motley Legal Crew (available for a fee):

Even as its asbestos and silicosis scams are unraveling, the trial bar is looking for its next industry to loot. It may have found it last week in a state court in Providence, Rhode Island, where a jury found three paint companies liable for creating a "public nuisance" by selling lead paint many decades ago. The mere presence of lead paint -- whether or not it was safely contained -- was deemed a danger to public health.

There are so many screwy aspects to this case that it's hard to know where to begin. The jurors heard no evidence about an injured party, nor were they informed of any specific house or building that constituted the "nuisance." As for the defendants, Judge Michael Silverstein instructed the jury that it wasn't necessary to find that Sherwin-Williams, NL Industries and Millennium Holdings had actually manufactured the paint present in Rhode Island or that they had even sold it there.

Oh, and did we mention that at the time the companies may or may not have sold lead paint in Rhode Island it was an entirely lawful product? "The fact that the conduct that caused the nuisance is lawful does not preclude liability," Judge Silverstein said. Lead paint was banned for residential use in 1978.

The legal "reasoning" at work in Rhode Island comes courtesy of Motley Rice, the South Carolina law firm that won hundreds of millions of dollars in contingency fees for its litigation against tobacco companies and is now seeking new deep pockets. It marketed its lead-paint strategy to the state government, which agreed to pay the trial lawyers 16 2/3% of whatever settlement is reached. Sheldon Whitehouse, who was attorney general at the time, is already trumpeting the verdict as part of his campaign for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate.

The potential Rhode Island jackpot looks to be enormous. Judge Silverstein could order the paint companies to fork over millions, or even billions, of dollars in clean-up costs. That's not including the possibility of punitive damages...

There is also the not-so-little matter of public policy, and who has the authority to make decisions about the 300,000 or so buildings in Rhode Island that contain lead paint. Judge Silverstein's abatement orders are likely to be in direct conflict with the guidelines set down by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency and the state Health Department.

The recommended and sensible maintenance policy of all these agencies stresses painting over lead paint to keep it from peeling or flaking. Maintenance works, as can be seen by the dramatic drop in the prevalence of lead poisoning among children in Rhode Island. The state department of health reports only about 1,600 cases a year, mostly in low-income families. The state knows their addresses. A better way to help these children would be to go after landlords who don't maintain their properties properly...

The bizarre tort theory in Rhode Island is terrible news for the paint business and the thousands of people it employs, and it has potential ramifications for other industries that make lawful products that years later turn out to have health or safety problems. It also demonstrates once again that "liability" in America has become completely untethered to either legal precedent or basic fairness.

Today's Lead Paint Filing

According to both the Projo's 7-to-7 blog and NBC-10, the three paint manufacturers found liable for what could amount to billions of dollars in damages in the Rhode Island lead paint trial have filed suit in Rhode Island Superior Court asking for either a dismissal of the case or for a new trial to be held. This is a separate filing from the filing based on contingency fee issues reported earlier this month.

A joint press release issued by NL Industries, Millennium Holdings, and Sherwin-Williams details what they believe to be grounds for overturning last month's verdict. The most compelling arguments are the defendants' claims that the state never proved how much lead paint, if any amount at all, was sold by each company in Rhode Island...

Each defendant should have had a separate trial. The state consistently blurred evidence among defendants, resulting in an unfair trial to each;

The state evaded a dispositive motion by asserting that it was not relying on a "market share" liability theory. At trial, however, the state presented national "market share" data rather than any proof that the defendants' lead pigments are present in Rhode Island today and contributing to an alleged public nuisance. The use of market share data conflicts with Rhode Island Supreme Court precedent and doesn't show that any company was a substantial factor contributing to the alleged nuisance;

The state defeated numerous summary judgment motions and succeeded in striking defendants' affirmative defenses by assuring the court that this was not a product liability case. The state then turned around at trial and presented a product liability case, stripped free from any product-related defenses;

The state defeated summary judgment on the Manufacturer Immunity Act by contending that this case was not about the manufacture or sale of a product. But the state presented a case at trial premised solely and exclusively on evidence concerning manufacture and sale of a product;

The state failed to connect the evidence it promised -- such as defendants' advertising, marketing or sales activity -- to the state of Rhode Island.

The other arguments are concerned with the basic premise of the case...

The jury did not have to find that the defendants had done anything wrong;

By presenting a fictitious public nuisance theory, the state defeated defendants' efforts to join property owners, conduct property-specific discovery, and hold property owners responsible for not maintaining their properties. The court compounded the error by failing to instruct the jury about the responsibility of property owners to properly maintain their property,

...and with assorted technical legal errors that may have been made...

Opening and closing arguments given by counsel for the state were so inflammatory and prejudicial that a new trial is necessary;

The State impermissibly sought to hold defendants liable for exercising their First Amendment rights to belong to trade associations, express their opinions and communicate with public officials;

The state convinced the court to delay its agency ruling for almost a year, promising additional evidence to legitimize the state's use of Lead Industries Association (LIA) evidence. No such evidence ever materialized at trial. It was only after the LIA information had been conditionally admitted that the state conceded that it had no further evidence, and the court finally ruled in defendants' favor. The incurable evidentiary damage, however, already had been done. The state then compounded this error by arguing "LIA" and agency issues during its closing arguments

Stephanie Chafee: "If you are a registered Democrat, I am strongly encouraging you to disaffiliate and to become an unaffiliated voter"

Stephanie Chafee, wife of Senator Lincoln Chafee, has sent out an e-mail encouraging registered Democrats to disaffiliate from their party so that they can vote for Senator Chafee in the Republican primary…

Dear Friend,

This is an important election for Rhode Island’s future. My husband, Linc Chafee, is engaged in the fight of his political life. His commitment to honest, independent leadership has put him under attack from extremist on both sides of the ideological divide.

I believe that you agree with me that Linc’s centrist views are good for Rhode Island. They allow him to work with colleagues in a bipartisan manner to ensure that our state receives its fair share of federal funding, to expand access to healthcare and education, and to safeguard our beautiful forests and coastlines for this and future generations.

Linc has stood up for Rhode Island time and again. In a contentious atmosphere, he has stood firm by refusing to engage in partisan politics. Now it’s time for all of us who want more independent minded thinkers in Washington to show our support for Linc. If you are a registered Democrat, I am strongly encouraging you to disaffiliate and to become an unaffiliated voter.

If you support my husband, it is absolutely imperative that you vote for him in both the September 12th primary and in the general election on November 7th. But to be eligible to vote for him in the Republican primary you must be registered as either an unaffiliated or a Republican voter. I want to urge you to please check your affiliation and consider voting in the September primary. If you are a registered Democrat you must disaffiliate by June 14th in order to vote in Linc’s September primary.

Changing your affiliation is easy. I have enclosed a copy of a voter registration card, which will allow you to disaffiliate. This form can also be found on the board of elections website at www.elections.ri.gov and is available at your local board of canvassers located at your Town or City Hall. Enclosed, please find a listing of five easy steps to guide you through the disaffiliation process. For more information on voter registration call the campaign at (401) 921-1920 and ask for Brent Lang or email him at blang@chafeeforsenate.com.

Thank you and I hope you will join me in supporting Linc in this upcoming election.

Sincerely,
Stephanie Chafee

P.S. If you need further information, please let us know. If you are planning to be out of state during the primary, please remember to get an absentee ballot. Above all, exercise what our forefathers fought for – the right to vote.

Attachments to the e-mail included a five-step instruction sheet on how to disaffiliate, a RI disaffiliation form, and a list of city and town halls in Rhode Island.

Anchor Rising has confirmed the authenticity of the e-mail with the Chafee campaign. Campaign manager Ian Lang describes the e-mail as a message from Mrs. Chafee to friends and acquaintances sent out to help insure that the broad base of support that the Senator has developed across Rhode Island while serving as Mayor and as Senator will be eligible to vote for him on election day.

Spending Caps Won't Solve the Unfunded Public Sector Liability Problems Caused by the Tax-Eaters

Ed Achorn's latest editorial A cap won't solve R.I.'s tax troubles states:

It is encouraging that Rhode Island politicians -- in an election year, anyway -- are awakening to the public's agonized cries over sky-high property taxes.

Senate President Joseph Montalbano (D.-North Providence), Majority Leader Teresa Paiva-Weed (D.-Newport), and Minority Leader Dennis Algiere (R.-Westerly) last week rolled out their proposal to lower the current ceiling on city and town spending increases to 4 percent, from 5.5 percent, of the tax levy, starting in fiscal 2008. Exceeding the new cap would require the majority of voters in a special election, instead of an act of the General Assembly...

That would be nice! But if a 5.5-percent cap served as the backdrop for today's rampaging property taxes, it's fair to wonder how much good a 4-percent cap would do...

...simply capping spending and calling that a break for taxpayers is not responsible government or courageous leadership. The question is how the money is being spent...

Leaders who were serious about restraining property taxes would act quickly to:

Limit inordinately generous pensions, early retirements and health-care benefits for public employees, which threaten to bankrupt local communities...

Restore management rights to local communities, so that they may spend money more carefully and demand accountability from employees.

Encourage the creation of a more robust economy, by drawing in wealthy taxpayers who could help pay for government, give to charity and create the jobs that generate tax revenues...

House Speaker William Murphy and his leadership team have done the risky work of addressing part of the problem, by proposing to bring Rhode Island's income taxes in line with those in Massachusetts. That is the only real hope of drawing in well-to-do enterpreneurs to boost the economy.

But the Senate's leaders, sadly, lack such courage.

None of this is theoretical anymore...

...Residents of other communities face enormous tax hikes to cover pension and health benefits, many of them going to retirees who have moved away to enjoy them in lower-tax locales.

As long as Rhode Island's political leaders ignore these well-documented trends -- and the voters let them do so -- the taxpayers will get pounded.

If towns and cities were simply forced to live with a lower cap, what would be squeezed? Road repairs, no doubt. Textbooks and school sports. Parks, libraries and other services that make communities pleasant. Communities would, essentially, be further hollowed out. Meanwhile, obligations to public employees, postponed year after year, would build up toward their inevitable explosion.

Unfortunately, there is no politically painless way out of this mess, which is why Ocean State property taxes continue to soar, despite politicians' bi-annual expressions of sympathy and concern. Making serious changes in Rhode Island would pit lawmakers against some very powerful and well-vested interests.

If they truly wanted to serve the public, politicians would have to say no to their "friends."...

It's certainly much easier to set a spending cap...

Achorn's view about the exploding public sector costs resulting from years of contractual giveaways is reinforced by a Standard & Poor's public pension study released in February, as discussed in a Wall Street Journal article (available for a fee) entitled S&P Study Notes Shortfall and Warns That Stresses Threaten Creditworthiness:

Underfunded public-employee pension plans are straining state budgets just as states face other rising expenses and steep debt levels, according to a Standard & Poor's Corp. analysis to be released today.

The report said state pension plans fell short by about $284 billion nationwide in 2004, the latest year for which data are available, leaving the plans in need of hefty contributions. The budgetary stress could ultimately hurt states' creditworthiness, leading to higher borrowing costs for some governments, which sell debt to finance all types of projects, such as roads and schools...

While state revenue growth is stronger than it has been in the past five years, states face a "double-whammy" of declining pension fund assets and rising liabilities, which means they must contribute more money, according to the report.

As of June 30, 2004, the value of public pension fund assets fell to 84% of projected liabilities from 100% or more in the late 1990s, according to the report. The drop stems from several factors, including the bursting of the stock-market bubble, the promise of enhanced benefits and weak financial contributions by state and local governments...

When the stock-market bubble burst early this decade, pension funds saw their funding levels sink, and state and local governments were on the hook to make up the difference. As a result, states have had to boost their contribution rates.

But many still have large holes to fill before their pension plans are fully funded. Among the most underfunded plans in fiscal 2004 were West Virginia, Oklahoma and Rhode Island.

The need to contribute more money comes as states face other budgetary pressures, including skyrocketing costs for Medicaid, the federal-state health-care program for the poor. Costs are rising at about 7% a year. State and local governments will also have to start setting aside money to pay for retiree health benefits as the result of a pending accounting change; for the first time, governments will be required to disclose these obligations. States are also carrying an enormous debt load of $288 billion, which they must finance in both the long and short term.

Because of the rising budget pressures, ratings firms such as S&P want to see pension asset-to-liability ratios reach 90% or more so that contribution rates can level off...

A late January ProJo article Bankrupt or not, pension boards rarely cap outside pay: Few communities enforce rules that limit how much outside money police and firefighters on disability pensions can earn before benefits are reduced provides yet another example of how public sector pensions are out-of-control:

Kevin Salvaggio is too disabled to work as a North Providence police lieutenant, but he's healthy enough to practice law.

The former North Providence police officer has a disability pension that provides more than $3,000 a month for life -- tax free.

The same type of disability benefit is available to the majority of firefighters and police officers who receive pension benefits through local plans, instead of through the state's retirement system.

A Journal investigation has found that 15 of the 22 communities with their own pension plans have not drafted rules that would allow them to cap supplemental income. Of the 7 pension authorities that have such rules, only 4 enforce them.

As a result, taxpayer-financed retirement programs are paying full disability pensions to former police officers or firefighters who retain plenty of earning potential, despite their disabilities...

Many communities have rules that allow them to cut or eliminate a pension if a former police officer or firefighter is doing the same job someplace else. In some communities, officials can order a medical examination if they suspect that someone is no longer disabled.

But pension cuts based strictly on outside earnings remain rare. Although there has been some movement in Rhode Island toward vigorous enforcement of income rules for disability pensions, the majority of communities with their own pension programs haven't even taken the first step -- adopting the regulations...

Providence has a pension system mired in a financial crisis. The system's unfunded liability -- the difference between the cost of the pension programs and the money the city has set aside to cover that cost -- jumped from $300 million in 2002 to more than $600 million last year.

Still, the city's pension ordinances do not describe any protocol for monitoring earnings and reducing disability pensions...

The rules for granting disability pensions, which are tax free, often reflect the special challenges faced by police officers and firefighters.

For example, state law says that any time a firefighter gets cancer, it is a job-related condition and the person qualifies for a disability pension. Some police officers, such as the ones in Cranston, have a provision in their contract that says that any police officer's heart attack or hypertension is "conclusively presumed" to be job-related.

Things are generally different in the private sector, and even in the federal government...

Related postings include:

The Radically Different Visions of Tax-Eaters Versus Taxpayers
Will The Voter Initiative Change The Status Quo If Our Core Problem Is The Large Size Of Government?
RI Democrats Promise Spending Cuts....but where?
Wealthy Liberals Cause the Rich/Poor Gap

Mitt Romney on Reforming Education

In a Washington Times editorial, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney writes about Reforming Education:

I was in high school when Sputnik happened. Russia's lead in space frightened us. It also woke us up...

One could argue that there have been quite a few Sputniks lately, but that we haven't noticed... It's time we get moving, starting with education. First, close the Excellence Gap. American 15-year-olds rank 24th out of 29 OECD countries in math literacy and 19th in science. Fifteen years ago, the United States and Asia produced about the same number of Ph.D.'s in math and physical science: 4,700 a year. Today, we graduate 4,400; Asia graduates 24,900. Second, close the Achievement Gap. Failing urban schools are a dead end for too many minority children. This is the civil rights issue of our generation.

How to close the education gaps? The teacher's unions have their answers: simply spend more money and hire more teachers for smaller classroom size. But the data show that those are not the answers at all. Massachusetts tests our kids regularly; when studentproficiencyis matched with classroom size and per-pupil spending, there is absolutely no relationship...

We found our education prescription by interviewing parents, teachers and principals, studying actual data, mining lessons from successful districts and charter schools, and digesting the recommendations from commissions and experts. Here are some of the real answers:

1) Make teaching a true profession. The 19th-century industrial labor-union model doesn't make sense for educating children. Teachers aren't manufacturing widgets. Better teachers should have better pay, advancement opportunities and mentoring responsibilities. Better pay should also accompany the most challenging assignments -- needed specialties like math and science, advanced placement skills and extra effort.

2) Let the leaders lead. Superintendents and principals must have authority to hire, deploy resources, assign mentors and training, and remove nonperformers. Seniority cannot trump the needs of our children.

3) Measure up. Over union objections, Massachusetts implemented standardized testing and a mandatory graduation exam. With measurement, we finally see our successes and failures and can take corrective action. Without measurement, we were blind.

4) Let freedom ring. When parents, teachers and kids are free to choose their school, everyone benefits. Charter schools free of union restraints and, yes, even home schools, teach lessons we can apply to improve standard public schools.

5) Pull in the parents. Teachers tell us that the best predictor of student success is parental involvement. For our lowest-performing schools, I've proposed mandatory parental preparation courses. Over two days, parents learn about America's education culture, homework, school discipline, available after-school programs, what TV is harmful or helpful and so on. And for parents who don't speak English, help them understand why their child's English immersion in school is a key to a bright future.

6) Raise the bar. Our kids need to be pushed harder. Less about self-esteem; more about learning. I have proposed advanced math and science schools for the very brightest (the one we have is a huge success, but we need more); advanced placement in every high school, more teachers with serious science and math credentials, and laptop computers for every middle- and high-school student. We've also added science as a graduation exam requirement, in addition to math and English.

These ideas should sound familiar -- they turn up in virtually every unbiased look at education. The opposition comes from some teachers unions. They fight better pay for better teachers, principal authority, testing and standards, school choice and English immersion. With their focus on themselves and their members, they have failed to see how we have failed our children. But that will change as testing produces data and data debunks the myth that more and more spending is the answer.

A continuing failure to close the excellence and achievement gaps would have catastrophic consequences, for individual human lives left short of their potential, and for our nation. Students around the world are racing ahead of ours. If we don't move, we'll become the France of the 21st century, starting as a superpower and exiting as something far less. Education must be one of our first priorities...

For more on the problems with public education today and how school choice is the solution, read The Moral Imperative for School Choice.

Dave Talan for Mayor of Providence

Republican Dave Talan kicks off his campaign for Mayor of Providence tonight. Here are the issues motivating Mr. Talan to run as described in his official campaign announcement...

On education, Talan wants every child to be able to attend a good school, close to home, of their parents' choosing. If that choice is a private or parochial school, Talan would provide vouchers to ease the financial burden - both for the 8,000 children who have already fled the public schools, and for the 10,000 more he believes would leave if they could afford to. Talan's plan would save taxpayers about $25 million. It would also benefit children who stay in public schools, by relieving overcrowding; ending cross-town forced busing; and providing competition that would force the teachers unions to relax their stranglehold on needed reforms. Talan, who attended public schools (Lexington Ave. Elementary; Reservoir Ave. Elementary; George J. West Jr. High; Classical High; URI & CCRI), would fight for an unlimited number of public charter schools; and would ease the way for experts to teach math and science.

On taxes & spending, Talan would balance the budget by reducing spending; rather than by raising taxes and relying on unlikely increases in state aid. As already mentioned, his school voucher plan would save $25 million. Talan would also fight to end all unfunded state mandates, that require spending on unnecessary things of little value. He endorses Mayor Steve Laffey's "Taxpayers Relief Act", that would clarify management rights, and lower pension and health care costs.

On ethics & honest government, Talan will continue the practice of refusing all contributions from city workers or people who do business with the city. He would expand this to the City Council, and push for an ethics ordinance, in order to promote more economic development in the city. Investors want to know they will not have to pay bribes, kickbacks, or campaign donations, in order to do business.

Talan is putting together a team of 35 Republican running mates to campaign together with him (15 City Council; 7 State Senate; 13 State Representative).

Immigration Update

In yesterday's National Review Online, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama gave a detailed list of his concerns about the Hagel-Martinez immigration compromise currently before the US Senate.

Hagel-Martinez would break illegal immigrants presently in the US into three groups. Illegal immigrants who have been in the US for more than 5 years would be immediately eligible to pay for amnesty with back taxes and fines. Illegal immigrants who have been in the US for between 2 and 5 years would be able to enter the pay-for-amnesty program after returning to a valid point of entry into the US. Illegal immigrants who have been in the US for less than 2 years would be eligible to become "guest workers". The defining characterisctic of "guest workers" versus other categories of non-citizens legally in America is that "guest workers" are only allowed to stay in the US for as long as they are employed.

Among other concerns, Senator Sessions has qualms about the details of the guest worker program (officially referred to as the "essential worker visa program”)...

• Illegal aliens who do not qualify for the mass amnesty (because they have been here for less than two years) can qualify for the bill's new low-skilled "essential worker" program without ever leaving the U.S. In other words, no illegal alien will be left behind.

• New "essential workers" do not have to be "essential" to stay in the United States. Once here, an alien simply can not be unemployed for "60 or more consecutive days." Therefore, "essential" workers have a legal right to remain in the U.S. if they are working as little as one or two days out of every two months.

• The "essential worker" program is not a temporary-worker program. The bill contains no economic trigger allowing workers to be sent home when the U.S. economy dips. Because these workers are eligible for green cards as soon as they enter the United States, once they are here, they will not have to ever leave, and, possessors of green cards are on a direct path to citizenship.

• The "essential worker" program is essentially uncapped. The 325,000 annual numerical cap automatically adjusts each time the cap is reached, providing 65,000 additional visas in the first year, and an additional 20-percent increase the next year. An additional 3.9 million low-skilled workers could enter the U.S. in the first 6 years. All will be eligible for green cards.

Senate Minority leader Harry Reid refused to allow amendments addressing Senator Sessions' concerns to be voted on.

At the end of the article, Senator Sessions provided an overview of his immigration philosophy...

If the Senate wants to be successful in passing immigration reform, its first priority should be to approve a bill to secure the borders and increase interior-enforcement infrastructure. Then we can move on to discussions about fair and humane treatment of the illegal-alien population and the future flow of immigrants across our borders.

According to a series of Rasmussen polls released this month, the Senator is where most of America is. A poll released on April 1 found overwhelming support for the position of securing the borders before deciding on a policy towards the illegal immigrants currently in the US...

Before debating new laws, first control borders/enforce existing laws.

• Agree 66%
• Disagree 21%

Another Rasmussen poll released on April 11 showed a growing public preference for the Republican party’s handling of immigration issues...

In a political season when most of the news has been bad for Republicans, the Congressional debate over immigration has produced a bit of movement in favor of the GOP.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national opinion survey found that 37% of Americans now trust Republicans more than Democrats on the issue of immigration. Just 31% trust the Democrats more.

In late March, the two parties were perceived equally on the topic, with 38% favoring the GOP and 37% preferring the Democrats.

Finally, Senator Sessions brought up an issue that should be of special concern to any fiscal conservatives and/or deficit hawks involved with immigration policy...

Cost: The Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill will increase the deficit by $29 billion in just five years and more than that in the years to come.

Will Senators who voted in favor of this year’s PAYGO proposal also demand that the immigration bill be made budget neutral?

Rhode Island Statewide Education Aid, By Community, Per-Pupil

Providence Mayor David Cicilline says the only way to fix Providence's failing schools is for the rest of Rhode Island to give more money to the Providence school system. However, combining the Governor�s 2007 budget with the student population data from the Rhode Island Information Works website (results below) shows that Rhode Island is already very generous towards the state's capitol core. While accounting for only about 26% of RI students, Providence, Pawtucket, and Central Falls already receive about 44% of the total education aid given directly to cities and towns.

Since there is not much money in the form of state aid left to be taken from non-urban communities to fund urban school boards (some communities receive less than $1,000 per pupil compared to Providence's $6,772 per-pupil), Mayor Cicilline and "education adequacy" advocates are looking for new methods for raiding the non-urban tax base. Given the existing funding situation, "education adequacy" means using mostly statewide taxation to pay for urban core education while using a mixture of property taxes and state aid to pay for urban ring and suburban education. People in the urban areas will only be required to pay once -- for their school system, through statewide taxation. People not in urban areas will be required to pay twice -- for both their own community's schools and for urban schools.

School District	State Aid	Students	Aid-per-Student
Central Falls	$41,335,813	3734	$11,070
Providence	$188,940,591	27900	$6,772
Pawtucket	$64,874,304	9654	$6,720
Woonsocket	$45,937,020	6928	$6,631
Bristol/Warren	$20,024,144	3688	$5,430
Burrillville	$13,540,919	2590	$5,228
WestWarwick	$19,972,977	3838	$5,204
East Providence	$26,284,707	6386	$4,116
Newport	$11,581,802	2826	$4,098
Glocester	$3,159,848	793	$3,985
Chariho	$14,667,680	3863	$3,797
North Providence	$13,091,637	3473	$3,770
Middletown	$10,423,773	2769	$3,764
Foster	$1,378,500	369	$3,736
Exeter/W Greenwich	$7,511,299	2204	$3,408
Coventry	$19,903,170	5862	$3,395
Foster/Glocester	$5,641,416	1693	$3,332
Johnston	$10,903,894	3285	$3,319
Cranston	$35,253,290	11222	$3,141
Warwick	$37,365,858	11993	$3,116
Tiverton	$5,896,220	2224	$2,651
North Kingstown	$12,008,646	4626	$2,596
South Kingstown	$10,516,526	4174	$2,520
Cumberland	$13,206,064	5349	$2,469
North Smithfield	$4,806,225	2006	$2,396
Portsmouth	$6,574,703	3066	$2,144
Smithfield	$5,802,003	2710	$2,141
Lincoln	$7,545,267	3649	$2,068
Scituate	$3,474,634	1817	$1,912
Westerly	$7,060,711	3710	$1,903
Narragansett	$2,091,859	1673	$1,250
Little Compton	$396,888	327	$1,214
Jamestown	$587,030	545	$1,077
New Shoreham	$135,660	151	$898
East Greenwich	$2,178,616	2466	$883
Barrington	$2,906,626	3434	$846

Power to the People

This post isn't going to gain me friends in the minority community, but here goes nothing. Donna Fishman's column in today's Projo regarding voter initiative illustrates the reason I squint every time the words "affirmative" and "action" are phrased together.

First, understand my history. I'm an African American male who has excelled in areas where African Americans, much less African American males, have historically been on the outside looking in. I was usually the only brown face in my elementary and secondary school classes. Further, I have firsthand knowledge of implicit, explicit, and every other type of racism out there. Yet, when direct democracy is billed as an anti-ethnic tool of "the man," enough's enough.

Voter initiative gives regular Joes like you and me the power legislate change without having to pander to special interests, as often do the legislators whom we've recently seen being more interested in kickbacks than kick-starting the programs/policies constituents desire. But, Fishman says:

Although voter initiative is dressed up in politically correct slogans — such as "One vote per person," "Let your voice be heard," and "Majority rules" — voter-initiative referenda often result in the unequal treatment of minorities. … After affirmative action is lost, gay rights will be the next to go. English-only referenda have also been passed by majority voters who are against ethnic minorities' and immigrants' rights.

My goodness, is the sky falling as well? First of all, voter initiative would not take away anything that legislators can do now. Instead, questions will be presented to the public as they have for nonbinding and binding referenda as well as constitutional amendments — one of which, the re-enfranchisement of former felons, directly and positively affects minorities in Rhode Island. So it is the height of misinformation to espouse the idea that voter initiative will adversely affect any and all minorities.

Furthermore, as a member of a minority, I'm sick and tired of leaders playing to fears and to my ethnic affinity. Voter initiative isn't some bogeyman bent on destroying the civil liberties of minorities. Voter initiative will empower average Americans with an authority unlike they are able to exert today. Sounds much like the intent behind affirmative action: bestowing rights upon people who had been formerly barred from certain opportunities. The difference is that, whereas affirmative action sought to level the playing field with a temporary and imperfect solution resulting in new opportunities for some and new headaches for all, voter initiative can keep people engaged and empowered and encourage the utilization of our civic rights in a way differing from any means currently at our disposal — without any "ism" baggage.

So, if giving power to the people is anti-affirmative action, sign me up.

Blogging on the Radio

In case you — like me — missed it, here's an MP3 file of Addie Goss's radio piece on Rhode Island blogs for the Brown Student Radio show Off the Beat (which, for some reason, never found its way onto the show's archive page).

(I didn't realize how halting. my. speech. can. be. when I'm trying to make points extemporaneously. I'll have to work on it... or else stick to well-memorized talking points as others in the opine business do.)

A Note on Advertisements

With advertising on Anchor Rising beginning to... well, just beginning, I thought it worthwhile to offer readers some perspective on our advertising practices (such as they will be). Our acceptance of paid advertisements does not imply endorsement of the product, service, or stated position. In general, we will do a little bit of research to ensure that the advertisement is not an obvious scam, and we will accept most ads with messages that we do not find repulsive. Other than that, we'll reserve the right to comment on our advertisers — positively or negatively — as we see fit.

The Beginning of a Tax Revolt in East Greenwich: Senior Citizens Take the Lead

The East Greenwich Town Council held a public session on April 4 to discuss a tax freeze for seniors. The well-attended meeting was discussed in all local newspapers (here, here, here). Subsequent, related news can be found here and here. Additional information can be found in an earlier posting.

My own opinions on a tax freeze for seniors were contained in an editorial that was published the week before last in the local newspapers.

I had a chance to drop by for a small part of the April 4 meeting. Here is the gist of my informal public comments:

I am enthusiastically in favor of a tax freeze. I liked the idea so much that my first editorials published in the local newspapers back in 1999-2000 – before I ever served on the School Committee – were dedicated to this important topic. The difference, though, between what I wrote then and what is being discussed today is that I was and am in favor of a tax freeze for all town residents, not just for seniors. My comments here tonight will focus on some ideas that might allow us to achieve that end if we work together.

Property taxes are indeed high in Rhode Island. We moved here 9 years ago today from the San Francisco Bay Area, only to find property taxes here were roughly 3 times what we were paying on a similarly valued home in California. 3 times. It is no wonder Rhode Island has the fourth highest state and local taxation levels among the 50 states.

Why are the property taxes so high in our state? We saw a graph earlier tonight that highlighted what is driving the relentless increases in our property taxes: The school budget which, as a percentage of the total town budget, has risen from 64% in 1994 to 80% today. The financial terms of the NEA teachers' union contract are responsible for this outrageous change. That is why your taxes have been going up faster than your incomes, thereby lowering your standard of living.

Here are some specifics which explain the horrific economics of the teachers’ union contract: Under the current contract, 9 of the 10 job steps are receiving 9-12% annual salary increases for the 8th, 9th, and 10th consecutive years. Until last year, the teachers paid a zero co-payment on their health insurance premiums. Even now, they only pay a percentage in the single digits. We would save roughly $425,000/year if they had a 20% co-payment like town employees represented by the NEA. If teachers don't use health insurance provided by the school district, we pay them $5,000 per year. That benefit will cost us about $550,000 next year. Then there is the perpetual cost from having awarded retroactive pay last year to make the teachers financially whole - even after their work-to-rule actions hurt our kids.

I believe a selective tax freeze for seniors is bad policy for both practical and philosophical reasons. The practical concern - Few, if any, government programs have ever come in under original cost estimates. The philosophical concern - We will begin to balkanize our community into special interest groups who will have an increased incentive to fight among themselves for benefits. This is not a vision for East Greenwich that all of us aspire to.

What can we do about the problem of taxes increasing faster than our incomes? At the state level, we can support a Taxpayers' Bill of Rights, which puts a cap on the rate of increase for state government spending. At the town level, we can begin tonight with a tax deferral for seniors and then focus everyone's attention on the upcoming NEA teachers' union contract negotiations.

Working together, these initiatives offer all of us the chance to work for a tax freeze - for all East Greenwich residents.

I have had numerous people contact me at the meeting and after the meeting to ask how they can help build community support against further giveaways to the union.

On a separate, but related, issue: Right before I left the meeting, I had the honor of joining a growing list of East Greenwich residents who have received a public tongue lashing from School Committee member Merrill Friedemann. All because she thought my earlier posting was too critical of her. Talk about thin-skinned! The real problem here is that she appears not to tolerate any advice or criticism - even when offered in a constructive manner from a one-time supporter.

People see her behavior – storming out of meetings, telling people off - and realize that she has made herself the issue. Her behavior is having some adverse consequences: She is playing into the hands of the political opponents of reform-minded East Greenwich residents. (And I hope the rumor in town about her and Steve Gregson's possible effort on April 25 to toss out Vince Bradley as chairman of the School Committee turns out to be just that - a rumor. Proceeding down that path would reflect personal vendettas more than policy goals and only invite more unnecessary political turmoil. Plus Vince would then really clean their clocks, something he is more than capable of doing.)

Unfortunately, Ms. Friedemann seems to operate from the misguided notion that having lots of people upset with her is a sign of effectiveness. Such thinking means she is politically tone deaf as nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, her public behavior is now being used against the entire School Committee by teachers' union personnel who have written the following:

"...Could the stumbing block in negotiating the last teacher contract have been these same school committee members like the one who the editor of the Pendulum is now saying treats parents, teachers and administrators with harsh disdain? Could the teacher contract have been settled sooner without such people representing the town and School Committee?...The East Greenwich Teachers will not negotiate another contract with this current school committee. We will wait until after the elections to see who the citizens of East Greenwich want on their next school committee..." Connie McCormack, East Greenwich Education Association President in March 30, 2006 East Greenwich Pendulum (not available on web)

"...The present School Committee...has spawn[ed] hatred and malice toward any administrator, employee, parent or attorney that dares to disagree with them on any issue...many staff have left and applicants are not always of the caliber East Greenwich used to expect...thanks for the high performing schools goes to the teachers and staff who work so diligently even though the current School Committee attempted to take away their benefits and lower their salaries to the bottom half of the state during two years of protracted teacher negotiations...The current School Department is in need of a School Committee that can leave their personal issues out of the decisions being made for the School Department. The current School Committee members need to learn some decorum and stop swearing and yelling during...meetings..." Sue Verdon, President, East Greenwich Association of Educational Support Personnel in April 6, 2006 edition of the East Greenwich Pendulum (not available on the web)

Let us be clear: These union officials' comments contain numerous outright falsehoods. They are counting on people not paying enough attention and taking their words at face value. If successful, they then have a chance of getting away with the same devious actions in the future that they pulled in our town during 2004-2005.

But we will not let that happen and the numerous postings below provide a documented trail of evidence regarding their past disinformation campaigns. I don't expect them to change their behavior. I hope Merrill will change her behavior so all reform-minded people can join together with an exclusive focus on challenging the NEA's extortion-like contractual demands.

In summary, the April 4 message from 350 East Greenwich seniors is loud and clear: Nobody can afford the union's relentless focus on maximizing their own adult entitlements. That selfish focus - which does not advance our kids' education - has led to outrageous tax increases which have put many of our seniors at risk of losing their homes. The seniors get it. A lot of other East Greenwich residents get it. No more tolerance for union disinformation campaigns. No more reductions in the standard of living of residents.

There is a tax revolt brewing in East Greenwich, led by members of the Greatest Generation. And many of us will proudly stand with them in this noble cause.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

2004-2005 EAST GREENWICH NEA TEACHERS' UNION CONTRACT NEGOTIATIONS
In a nutshell, here was what I thought the negotiating position of the East Greenwich School Committee should have been on some of the key financial terms of the contract.

With *** representing the most important postings, the East Greenwich postings include:
***Background Information on the East Greenwich NEA Labor Dispute***
***The NEA's Disinformation Campaign***
East Greenwich Salary & Benefits Data
***More Bad Faith Behavior by the NEA***
The Debate About Retroactive Pay
Would You Hurt Our Children Just To Win Better Contract Terms?
The Question Remains Open & Unanswered: Are We/They Doing Right By Our Children?
Will The East Greenwich Teachers' Union Stop Their Attempts to Legally Extort Residents?
***You Have To Read This Posting To Believe It! The Delusional World of the NEA Teachers' Union***
So What Else is New? Teachers' Union Continues Non-Productive Behaviors in East Greenwich Labor Talks
"Bargaining Rights are Civil Rights"
***The NEA-Rhode Island's Pathetic Attempts to Manipulate East Greenwich Residents***
What's Wrong With This Picture: 800 Applicants for 14 Teaching Jobs & the NEA Says There is a Problem
East Greenwich Contract Settlement: Reflecting on the Many Lessons Learned

OTHER RHODE ISLAND PUBLIC EDUCATION/UNION ISSUES
In addition to financial issues, management rights are the other big teachers' union contract issue. "Work-to-rule" or "contract compliance" only can become an issue because of how management rights are defined in union contracts. The best reading on this subject is last year's report by The Education Partnership. It is must reading.

Other editorials and postings include:
ProJo editorial: Derailing the R.I. gravy train
ProJo editorial: RI public unions work to reduce your family's quality of life
ProJo editorial: Breaking the taxpayer: How R.I. teachers get 12% pay hikes
Selfish Focus of Teachers Unions: Everything But What Is Good For Our Kids
Tom Coyne - RI Schools: Big Bucks Have Not Brought Good Results
The NEA: There They Go, Again!
A Response: Why Teachers' Unions (Not Teachers!) Are Bad For Education
"A Girl From The Projects" Gets an Opportunity to Live the American Dream
Doing Right By Our Children in Public Education Requires Thinking Outside The Box
Debating Rhode Island Public Education Issues
The Cocoon in which Entitled State Employees Live
Are Teachers Fairly Compensated?
Warwick Teachers' Union Throws Public Tantrum
Blocking More Charter Schools Means Hurting Our Children
RI Educational Establishment: Your Days of No Vigorous Public Oversight & No Accountability Are Ending
Two Local Examples Reinforce Why Today's Public Education System Will Never Achieve Excellence
Charter School Legislation Introduced to the Rhode Island House
Gary S. Ezovski: Better schools -- Tie teacher pay to family income
Steve Laffey Wants a Voluntary Pilot School Choice Program for Rhode Island
Reasons for a Voluntary Pilot School Choice Program Between Cranston and Providence
Urban Arrogance & Fixing Education
Proposed Rhode Island Legislation on Education
Education "Adequacy"
The Urban and Political Arrogance of David Cicilline
Rhode Island Statewide Education Aid, By Community, Per-Pupil

BROADER PUBLIC EDUCATION ISSUES:
American education is failing to keep up with other countries around the world. This has long-term consequences for our country's economic strength and our standard of living. It also has serious consequences for the ability of all American citizens to have a clean shot at living the American Dream.

This mega-posting on school choice pulls together many educational policy themes into one posting:
The Moral Imperative for School Choice

Here are some other specific postings on broader public education themes:
The Deep Performance Problems with American Public Education
Freedom, Hard Work & Quality Education: Making The American Dream Possible For ALL Americans
Parents or Government/Unions: Who Should Control Our Children's Educational Decisions?
Now Here is a Good Idea
Milton Friedman on School Choice
Issuing a Call for a Higher Quality Public Debate About Education
Is Merit Pay for Teachers a 'Crazy Idea'?
Reporting False Performance Data Under No Child Left Behind: Why Are We Surprised At Dishonest Behavior By The Educational Bureaucracy?
Lack of Merit Pay Reduces the Quality of Teachers & Our Schools
Will We Measure Educational Performance by Inputs or Outputs?
Paycheck Protection: Allowing You to Keep Your Own Hard-Earned Monies
"Shut Up & Teach"
Spreading Falsehoods in our Children's Education about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American Founding
No Educational Bureaucrat Left Behind
Congressman John Conyers: Another Liberal Pursues School Choice For His Kids While Blocking Needy Children From Having The Same Opportunities

Lincoln Chafee and Steve Laffey on Israel

John E. Mulligan had a report in Sunday’s Projo on Rhode Island’s Republican Senate candidates' postions on “the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians”. Starting with what the candidates agree on and working outward…

1. Both Lincoln Chafee and Steve Laffey support construction of the Israeli security fence to protect Israel from terrorist attacks. Senator Chafee does have objections to the current positioning of the fence…

Chafee objects to a crucial aspect of the security barrier that Israel is building to protect certain lands: the route that barrier would take through Palestinian areas.

He argues that the proposed pathway would split the Palestinian population and block Palestinian access to Jerusalem in ways that would make a Palestinian state economically and culturally unworkable. Chafee suggested during a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last year that the barrier's path would "jeopardize the vision of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state."

2. In the ideal, both candidates support the concept of “land-for-peace”. Here is Mulligan’s description of Mayor Laffey’s position…

Laffey said he has no objection to a deal that would swap land -- including occupied lands on the West Bank -- for peace, provided that the Palestinian leadership recognizes Israel's right to exist and renounces violence.

…and of Senator Chafee’s position…

Chafee argued that a "land for peace" deal is the key to the creation of a Palestinian state that would respect Israel's right to exist. More specifically, he said the Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank are lands that must be negotiable under the terms of the road map.

3. Senator Chafee talks about the obstacles to “land for peace” mostly in terms of the United States not putting enough pressure on Israel…

Chafee was an early critic of what he has called the Bush administration's lack of sufficient engagement in the peace process. Chafee applauds the administration's embrace of the road map process but has charged that the United States has not done enough to get Israel to follow it.

Chafee has argued that the death of longtime Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat in 2004 and the succession of Mahmoud Abbas were opportunities for peace that Israel failed to exploit. Chafee said the United States shared the responsibility for the failure to help Abbas win enough concessions for his people to consolidate his Fatah Party's power.

Mayor Laffey questions the assumption that impasses in the peace-process automatically imply that the US should step-up pressure on Israel…

Laffey said the peace process has failed over the course of many years because American leaders took the mistaken view that Arafat "was the man to deal with" and "if we could get these people to the table, we could do something reasonable."

In fact, "Arafat wouldn't take a deal" when a favorable settlement was on the table during the waning days of Bill Clinton's presidency, he said. Laffey rejected the Chafee view that the flaw in the U.S. position has been a failure to push Israel toward peace. Rather, the problem is the policy of treating "both sides as being equal when one was terrorists who kind of invented the suicide bomber," according to Laffey.

4. Distressingly, Senator Chafee again expresses skepticism that anyone can oppose his policy preferences for rational reasons. The Senator attributes American reluctance to apply increased pressure to Israel to a rather odd source…

For these Senate Republicans of the Christian right, "the West Bank being Biblically designated as the Promised Land is an issue," Chafee said, citing the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy. "I'm not going to name names," he said of his colleagues, "but there's no doubt in my mind”…

Chafee said Biblical influence on Israel policy is a problem for the country "because the whole premise of peace between the Israelis and Palestinians is the West Bank and trading land for peace." The Biblically inspired Republicans "would never trade land for peace, so we're going to have eternal conflict if that position prevails," Chafee said.

That’s an awfully big charge – that American leaders are pursuing a foreign policy for reasons not in the national interest of the United States – to make without naming names, especially since the differences between Senator Chafee’s and Mayor Laffey’s positions are both easily explained in terms of conventional foreign policy worldviews.

Senator Chafee operates from the assumption that the perception of American power is so threatening to the rest of the world, American interests are best served when the United States refrains from supporting its allies and from pressuring its enemies as strongly as it could. Steve Laffey views the national interest in more traditional terms, believing that the United States should support its allies, with no obligation to hold allies to a higher standard of conduct than enemies because of what other governments think.

Wealthy Liberals Cause the Rich/Poor Gap

Last week, Justin noted the strange alliance between "Old-Money Populists and the Working-Class/New-Money Elite" here in Rhode Island. Michael Barone writes that the dynamic is not unique to the Ocean State and can be seen in many "blue" states here in the northeast. In his post, Barone excerpts the conclusion to Michael Malanga's piece about the public sector unions in New Jersey. Malanga writes:

Aided by the courts and the vast expansion of budgets during the flush 1990s, New Jersey's tax eaters have little by little created a full-fledged example of the kind of regional government that the Left touts these days—a government that forces businesses and residents who have fled the dysfunction of the cities to pay the tab for those urban problems, whether they like it or not.

Further, Jersey is part of a cultural shift that is changing politics in many northeastern areas, as some high earners abandon traditional middle- and upper-class fiscally conservative values and vote liberal instead. In national elections, Jersey today is now reliably in the "blue" column...Jersey may soon resemble its neighbor, New York City, as a place where the rich who tolerate high taxes or consider them a social obligation live side by side with the poor, but with a shrinking middle class.

In short, it may be that New Jersey, having for years enthusiastically welcomed New York's residents and jobs, is now watching the Empire State take a measure of revenge as its neighbor settles into a familiar high-tax, low-growth inertia. Jersey has caught a bad case of the blue-state blues.

Barone doesn't think New Jersey is quite as "blue," but adds an interesting observation about that "gap between rich and poor" that the left tells us is growing larger.

. . .one of Malanga's most important points is that taxpayers aren't getting much value from the huge spending increases, and neither are the intended beneficiaries of the huge transfers from affluent suburbs to decaying central cities. Huge increases in spending on central city public schools have resulted in virtually no improvement in test scores. They have resulted instead in bloated salaries, benefits, and pensions for teachers and other public employees. And of course for public-sector union officials. And, through the unions, large flows of money have gone to the Democratic Party. All this is, evidently, gratifying to the upper-income liberals who vote Democratic in order to preserve the right to abort fetuses.

But it does nothing to help the kids who grow up in crime-ridden central cities with rotten schools. And by pillaging the private-sector economy, it strangles the goose that lays the golden eggs. Fortunately, not all state governments are run, as New Jersey's seems to be, by the public-sector unions, and the private sector can migrate elsewhere. Which of course is what is happening in New Jersey and has been happening in New York state for many years. The financial sector can continue to thrive, generating high incomes for people who don't mind paying high taxes, but less favored places—most of upstate New York, lower-middle-class towns in New Jersey—are left with declining economies.

Third, many on the political left complain about the disappearance of the middle class, the alleged tendency of our economy to produce hefty income growth for those at the upper end of the economic scale and relatively little income growth for the large number at the lower end. Interestingly, this tendency toward income inequality is most pronounced in states that have been voting Democratic in presidential elections—especially New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California. Income inequality tends to be much less in many states that vote heavily Republican. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California have imported many high-income earners and low-income immigrants and have been exporting many more middle-income earners. This process is accelerated when, as in these four states, high-income earners have been eager to vote for Democrats backed by public-employee unions: The same people who have been complaining about this trend have been causing it.

UPDATE: Don Hawthorne has previously mentioned Malanga's most recent book, The New New Left: How American Politics Works Today, and excerpted both a review and portions of the book's introduction. (Thanks Don!)

Increasing Gasoline Prices & Misguided Energy Policies

I paid $2.77/gallon for gasoline this morning, a noticeable increase over prior days. This upward trend in prices is reflected in many media reports, like this Washington Post article.

Seeing the price increase this morning reminded me of a Wall Street Journal editorial (available for a fee) from last week entitled The Ethanol Tax:

Rising gas prices…are the result of the rising price of crude oil, as well as lingering hurricane damage. But even the government is admitting that some of the price increases and regional shortages are the result of the ethanol love-fest that Congress engaged in last summer as part of its energy bill.

Congress has long required the use of such "oxygenates" as ethanol and MTBE in gasoline. Midwest drivers have tended to rely on locally produced and corn-based ethanol, while places where ethanol is expensive to ship -- such as the East Coast and Texas -- have used petroleum-based MTBE. But the ethanol lobby wanted more market share, and so last year's energy bill included a giant new ethanol mandate, while at the same time denying liability protection for rival MTBE makers that are getting sued for having sold a product that Congress had once mandated.

MTBE makers are now fleeing the market; most oil companies will drop the additive entirely on May 5. So bye-bye to a significant portion of the domestic fuel supply, which already stretched ethanol producers have no hope of replacing any time soon…

One eminently sensible short-term solution would be for the feds to drop the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff on imported ethanol, which would particularly help coastal areas. But eager to show the Bush Administration's own deference to the ethanol lobby, Energy Secretary Sam Bodman defended the tariff last week, saying it was necessary so that foreign producers "can have no advantage over American companies."

Heaven forbid foreigners should be able to compete with a heavily subsidized domestic ethanol industry that is getting rich off U.S. drivers. Politicians in Washington are blaming high gas prices in part for their low approval ratings, and as usual the voters are right.

The posting, Rancid Pork Leaves a Bad Taste in Your Mouth, includes a link to Energy-Bill Follies, a Cato Institute analysis of last year's energy bill, in which the authors state that "virtually every section of the bill represents a rejection of free markets and limited government." Read the report for specific details.

How can such wrong-headed policies be implemented to the detriment of consumers? One primary explanation is that politicians - aided and abetted by a misguided public debate - have very limited understanding of microeconomics as well as an inability to grasp how additional energy sources, economic growth and jobs are created only by the private sector, not by the public sector. Their ignorance leads to a misinterpretation of economic events and deeply flawed public policies based on the false belief - to paraphrase Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren of the Cato Institute - that capital is best allocated by vote-maximizing politicians who are unlikely to know what they are doing rather than by market actors disciplined by profit and loss.

This behavior pattern is nothing new as Taylor and Van Doren provide a litany of historical examples of costly government misadventures in the energy sector, while also making these comments on 2005 energy bill:

...The [1,724 page energy] legislation is premised upon the idea that energy markets are different from other markets and that they require political micromanagement. But price signals play the same role in the energy sector that they play in the rest of the economy. Unfortunately, neither Congress nor the public is content to leave energy choices to producers and consumers. Tax subsidies and regulations create investment and consumption patterns that would not exist if decisions were made by market actors...

How Government Makes Us Pay Higher Gasoline Prices provides another example of how consumers are paying higher gasoline prices due to misguided energy policies.

Backing up to the basics about gas prices, an article entitled Gas prices around the world: Think you pay a lot for gas? notes how gas prices are even higher elsewhere in the world:

...Drivers in some European cities...are paying nearly 3 times more than those in the U.S.

The main factor in price disparities between countries is government policy, according to AirInc, a company that tracks the cost of living in various places around the world. Many European nations tax gasoline heavily, with taxes making up as much as 75 percent of the cost of a gallon of gasoline...

One of the regular public complaints is that the oil companies are gouging consumers. If so, you would expect to see disparate prices across different markets, something that doesn't show up in this ExxonMobil data on international fuel prices before and after government taxes. The opinion piece explains why:

...Crude oil is a global commodity, publicly traded on world markets. Refined gasoline is also a widely-traded commodity, strongly linked to the price of crude oil but often reacting sharply to other short-term factors such as hurricanes, unplanned refinery outages or sudden rises in local demand - recent changes to fuel specifications are a good example...

On average, crude oil alone accounted for 53% of the U.S. pump price last year, with refining and marketing costs accounting for a further 25-30%...

Pump prices in many other countries are significantly higher, mainly because gasoline taxes are so much higher. As a result, U.S. consumers pay a lower price and that price is heavily influenced by the price of crude oil.

Or, as Taylor and Van Doren state:

World crude prices - and thus retail gasoline prices - are established in commodity spot markets. Exxon Mobil executives do not plot in back rooms to decide what to charge at the pump...

Furthermore, oil companies are facing growing geopolitical risks to their businesses as more governments, who are unfriendly to the free world, take increasing control over oil and gas resources.

Another common complaint is that the oil companies are compiling so-called windfall profits. Yet this Exxon commentary on oil profits, based on third-party data compiled by BusinessWeek and Oil Daily, notes:

Our earnings are indeed at a record high, driven largely by the price of the commodities we sell...

...[the] oil and gas industry earnings averaged 7.7 cents per dollar of revenue during the second quarter [of 2005] compared with the overall industry average of 7.9 cents. ExxonMobil earned 8.6 cents for every dollar of revenue...

Last year [2004] alone, our new capital investments approached $15 billion...

While earnings rise and fall with oil prices, our investments do not. That $15 billion was invested in a year when the oil price averaged just below $40 and earnings were high. But we also invested $15 billion in 1998, when oil dipped to $10 a barrel and annual earnings - at $8 billion - were far lower...averaged over the last ten years our annual capital expenditures for the future of the company exceed our earnings.

Ours is a capital intensive business where investments can take many years to develop...

A review of Exxon's 2005 financial report shows they spent an additional $18 billion on capital expenditures in 2005.

As many politicians and media people hyper-ventilate on "windfall profits," do you think they understand that basic accounting principles mean that Exxon's annual capital expenditures of $15-18 billion represent actual cash outlays which are not reflected as offsets to the current year's accounting earnings?

Using Business Week data, Q3 2005 oil and gas industry profits report a similar story: The industry profitability of 8.2 cents on the sales dollar was both not radically higher than the American industry average of 6.8 cents on the dollar and was below the profitability rates for 9 other major industries.

Taylor and Van Doren offer further thoughts on the meaning of Q4 2005 Exxon profits and the potential for government intervention:

...in the fourth quarter 2005...[Exxon] reported a 10.7% profit margin...it is hardly remarkable...

If you are after big earners, check out Yahoo (a 45.5% profit margin), Citigroup (33.4%), Intel (24%) or Apple (22.7%).

Returns on invested capital over a longer time frame are even more telling. Analysts at [the investment banking firm] Goldman Sachs found that returns on invested capital in the oil and gas sector form 1970-2003 were less than the U.S. industrial average over that same period...

Political threats to impose windfall profit taxes are counterproductive for two reasons.

First, they threaten to institutionalize a form of one-way capitalism in which investors are allowed meager profits, but more robust earnings are punished. Who would want to park their money in an industry like that?...

Second, the U.S. already has a corporate income tax in place to harvest a share of those windfall profits regardless of which sector produces them. Any policy that subjects income from particular industrial sector to more onerous taxation because they are the villain de jure is bad public policy. In essence, it gets the government in the business of allocating capital to different sectors of the economy...

The entire conversation [about government intervention] is misguided. Whether ExxonMobil is making good or bad decisions with its operating capital is not the government's business. Even if it were, politicians are not in a position to intelligently discuss the matter...

If consumers were better served by lower corporate earnings, we'd all be visiting Zimbabwe for economic advice.

The posting, entitled Finding New Sources of Energy: Contrasting How Free Markets Allocate Economic Resources Without the Perverse Outcomes Generated by Government Meddling in the Marketplace, adds these thoughts to the debate:

...Over the past quarter century, oil companies directly sent more then $2.2 trillion in taxes...to state and federal governments - three times what they collectively earned in profits...

...corporations don't pay taxes, people do. Folks like us will really pay those new taxes, either through higher prices at the gas pump or through lower returns in our 401(k)s. Small profits for companies means smaller returns for our retirement funds...

...taxes [paid by oil companies] pumped more than $63 billion into federal and state coffers last year alone...

The history of the '70s and early '80s also explains the advantages of the price mechanism to both energy efficiency and the environment. The most rapid gains in energy efficiency in the U.S. took place when prices were very high...

Today, we are again seeing the positive incentive effects of high oil prices. The recent run-up has encouraged a new class of entrepreneurs and scientists to search for technological solutions...

Ironically, the best way to cap the upside to the oil price is to encourage new energy producing technologies by limiting the potential downside to the price...this incentive-laden approach eliminates any reason for politicians and government bureaucrats to attempt to identify the best energy solutions independent of market forces...

Last week amid rising oil prices, some heat was generated when it was publicly disclosed that Exxon's recently retired CEO, Lee Raymond, had received a retirement package valued at $400 million. Now, I am not going to defend whether $400 million is the right magnitude for a retirement package but, since it is annual meeting season and that means corporate proxy statements are filed with the SEC, I thought it might be useful to read the Exxon proxy statement and get the particulars. How many people will believe Mr. Raymond is getting cash now valued at $400 million? The details don't tell such a juicy story. Here are the three major components of his retirement package:

$183 million is from Restricted Stock Awards: These awards come with restrictions on their sale. If awarded prior to 2001, they cannot be sold until after retirement. If awarded in 2002 or later, only one-half of them can be sold 5 years after the award with the balance only available for sale after 10 years following the award. Most importantly, the estimated value of these Restricted Stock Awards is based on the current Exxon stock price. Should it decline at any time over the next decade - a real possibility given the volatility of the price of oil - the value of these awards could decline modestly or substantially. (See page 21 of the proxy statement for details.)

$98 million is the net present value of Mr. Raymond's company pension after 43 years of service. The pension appears to have been paid out in a lump sum manner with the value determined by his compensation in the last 3 years and actuarial estimates of how long he is expected to live. Importantly, the core pension plan for the company upon which this calcuation is done is the same for all 86,000 Exxon employees. (See page 25 of the proxy statement for details.)

$69 million is the current value of stock options. Again, this estimated value is based on current Exxon stock prices and could change prior to any sale. (See page 23 of the proxy statement for details.)

Finally, the posting entitled Inviting a More Balanced Debate About America's Energy Policy highlights some challenging questions for politicians and citizens about tradeoffs, with these concluding comments:

We cannot complain about prices or our lack of energy independence unless we first agree to make the hard choices necessary to increase our available supply of energy resources...

Instead of simplistically blaming the oil industry, true leaders would engage in a reasoned and substantive public debate about the various alternatives so support can begin to coalesce around choices which represent an informed consensus for our society.

How We Phrase the Taxation

I have to admit that Froma Harrop's rhetoric, in the following single instance, does resonate a bit for me:

The centerpiece is the lowered tax on investment income, which Republicans are trying to keep at 15 percent. As a result, the idle rich living off their stock portfolios are taxed at 15 percent, while the working husband and wife, each earning $40,000, pay a marginal tax rate of 25 percent. Even Ronald Reagan was content to have dividends and capital gains treated like "sweat" income.

Of course, she fails to leaven her attack with another perspective: Harrop would have that working husband and wife (hardly sweating their bills with a household income of $80,000 a year), as they seek to get ahead and to plan for increasingly investment-based retirements, taxed to earn the money and then taxed again to grow it. The fair rates for either round of taxation are certainly arguable, but the Harrops of the world too often gloss over the reality that life's inequities are more fundamental than the tax code.

Those who do not work for a living (a group in which some might be tempted to include professional opinionists) will find themselves in better circumstances no matter the socio-economic scheme under which they live. What progressives too often fail to see — beyond their narrow-eyed focus on "progress" — is that the rich will overstep new obstacles with ease, while those attempting to emulate their strategies, in a small way, will stumble and fall.

The Urban and Political Arrogance of David Cicilline

Yesterday, Providence Mayor David Cicilline walked out of meeting with Rhode Island Governor Donald Carcieri on the subject of improving education in Rhode Island's urban core of Providence/Pawtucket/Central Falls. Both John Castellucci of the Providence Journal and Jim Baron of the Pawtucket Times have reports in their respective newspapers.

Governor Carcieri wanted to discuss increased cooperation between the school districts. This is from the Times article...

"There was never talk about an urban school district," Carcieri told reporters after the meeting. "What I wanted to do was get together with the mayors and see if this idea of more collaboration, finding ways of looking at what could be done between the three cities had any merit. I suggested that we look at it because of all the things you've heard me say in terms of curriculum alignment, in terms of transportation, they all have building issues, all of that.

Mayor Cicilline walked out of the meeting because the only "reform" he is willing to consider is increased state funding for the Providence school system...

"My sense is that both Pawtucket and Central Falls are willing to look at it," the governor said. "Unfortunately, Mayor Cicilline wanted to talk about funding formulas and that's all he wanted to talk about. That's not what I was here trying to get at. That would all fall out of any discussion as you go forward."

This is what Mayor Cicilline had to say...

Any "serious conversation" about public education, Cicilline asserted, should focus on Rhode Island's "over-reliance on the property tax" to pay for schools. "We still don't have a funding formula" to finance education costs in the state's 39 cities and towns.

"Property taxes in every city and town are too high," Cicilline insisted, and in every budget the governor has proposed "he has shifted a greater percentage of the burden to the property tax.

The state government already is and will continue to be very generous towards the City of Providence. According to the Governor's proposed 2007 budget (see page 456), Providence will receive about $3,900,000 more in state aid this year than it did last year. This is, by far, the largest increase in state education funding that any single community will receive. The only other communities budgeted for an increase of more than a million dollars are Warwick ($1,500,000 increase), Cranston ($1,300,000 increase) and Pawtucket ($1,100,000 increase).

But a disproportionate increase in aid-per-student is not enough for Mayor Cicilline. He wants either tax increases or service cuts in the rest of Rhode Island to pay for even more funding for Providence schools. This is hypocritical. The Mayor won't consider working with neighboring communities to improve education, either through the Governor's proposals, or through the Cranston school choice proposal, but expects people in all of Rhode Island's other communities to send additional money to the Providence school system.

Part of Mayor Cicilline's attitude comes from the urban arrogance that tends to infect city officials. They fall into the trap of believing that city problems are the only problems big enough to matter, that urban pols are the only ones sophisticated enough to deal with the problems big enough to matter, and that smaller cities and towns exist solely for the purpose of supporting big cities.

But there is also a political arrogance behind Mayor Cicilline's walkout. The Mayor feels comfortable snubbing the Governor because he must feel confident that Providence's education funding will be increased at the expense of the rest of the state via the "education adequacy" proposal currently being sought by the legislature. How much more of your community's tax revenue your legislator supports sending to the Providence school system is something you may want to inquire about before voting in the fall elections.

Chafee Meets Silence in Scituate II

Senator Lincoln Chafee’s description of Scituate Republicans in the Washington Post's short feature on the Rhode Island Senate race that Marc linked to provides a subtle yet clear illustration of why the Senator is in danger of losing the Republican primary. Here is a quote from Senator Chafee, formatted using Justin’s technique of highlighting reckless absolutes…

Chafee, 53, once could count on voters in Rhode Island to tolerate his maverick ways, but this time the response [in Scituate] was blank stares. "Nobody listened to my reasoning," Chafee recounted as he piled hay into a wheelbarrow. "They support the president on everything."

With all due respect, if Senator Chafee believes what he is saying here, then he hasn’t been paying close enough attention.

Republicans don't support the President on everything. Take two recent examples. Republicans didn’t fall into line and support the President on the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Significant numbers of Republicans consider the President soft on immigration reform. And the President has listened to his party's voters on these issues -- he withdrew the Miers nomination, and has placed more emphasis on securing the borders as part of immigration reform.

Senator Chafee could also listen to Republican voters when they express their dissatisfaction with him, but has chosen a different response. In public statements like the quote from the Post, he writes off Republican voters as unreasonably closed-minded for disagreeing with him. Is it any surprise that the Senator unwilling to listen to the rank and file of his own party faces a serious challenge in a party primary?

Chafee Meets Silence in Scituate

In today's Washington Post:

Lincoln Chafee was cleaning a horse stall on his well-manicured farm one recent early morning, describing his latest encounter with hostile home-state Republicans.

The GOP senator had appeared the previous night before the Scituate Republican Town Committee to seek the endorsement of the small but influential group. In his halting, soft-spoken way, Chafee defended his opposition to the war in Iraq, domestic wiretapping and the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. as the principled positions of an old-school conservative.

Chafee, 53, once could count on voters in Rhode Island to tolerate his maverick ways, but this time the response was blank stares. "Nobody listened to my reasoning," Chafee recounted as he piled hay into a wheelbarrow. "They support the president on everything."

Few paths to victory are more convoluted than the one Chafee must travel to win election to a second term this year in this strongly Democratic state. Chafee will face Cranston Mayor Stephen Laffey, a conservative, in the Sept. 12 GOP primary, and he must convince voters that he is "Republican enough," despite his numerous defections from the party and President Bush. If he survives the primary, Chafee then must hope that he can hold the Republican vote while wooing moderate Democrats and independents to stave off what is sure to be a strong Democratic challenge.

"I'm running for opposite constituencies," Chafee said. "It's impossible."

. . . [Cranston Mayor Steve] Laffey, 43, energetic and ebullient, is Chafee's political opposite. Although he became wealthy working for a Memphis-based financial services company, he grew up as a lower-middle-class Cranston kid...Although Laffey raised taxes as Cranston mayor -- a heretical act for a conservative Republican in Washington -- he is admired for having turned around a troubled city, including by bucking powerful unions and even a platoon of highly paid school crossing guards. State and national Republican leaders strongly urged him to run for lieutenant governor, but Laffey believes his financial management skills can be put to better use in Washington. "I'm not into that," Laffey said of the intraparty pressure. "I'm an outsider. I'm running against what's going on down there."

At least some Rhode Island Republicans agree: the Scituate Republican Town Committee. The group decided to back Laffey the morning after Chafee's appearance.

Imagine that, Republicans supporting a Republican President on such issues as War and Supreme Court nominations. Whoda thunk?

The Unprincipled and Politically Tone Deaf Congressional Republicans

A Wall Street Journal article entitled The Minority Maker: The clever GOP strategy for defeat in November provides yet another example of how the Congressional Republicans are hopelessly out-of-touch with economic and political realities:

If Republicans lose control of Congress in November, they might want to look back at last Thursday as the day it was lost. That's when the big spenders among House Republicans blew up a deal between the leadership and rank-in-file to impose some modest spending discipline.

Unlike the collapse of the immigration bill, this fiasco can't be blamed on Senate Democrats. This one is all about Republicans and their refusal to give up their power to spend money at will and pass out "earmarks" like a bartender offering drinks on the house. The chief culprits are the House Appropriators, led by Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis of California and his 13 subcommittee chairmen known as "cardinals." If Republicans lose the House--and they are well on their way--Mr. Lewis deserves the moniker of the minority maker.

For weeks, the Republican Study Committee, a group of fiscally conservative Members, had been negotiating a spending outline with the House leadership. But when they finally struck a deal last week, Mr. Lewis refused to go along and threatened to defeat the budget on the House floor if Speaker Denny Hastert brought it up. With Democrats opposing the budget as a matter of party unity, GOP leaders gave up and left town for Easter recess without a vote on their budget blueprint for 2007.

Political hardball isn't new to Congress, but what's especially notable here is the utter cluelessness by Mr. Lewis and his friends about how much trouble they're in and how to get out of it. The rank-and-file Members who haven't yet gone native in Washington realize that their biggest problem is the disappointment of Republican voters at Congress's free-spending ways. If those voters stay home in November, Mr. Lewis will soon be known as Mr. Ranking Member…

…he's hunkered down as one of the GOP's spenders-in-chief, presiding over multiplying earmarks and chopping to bits the party's reputation as fiscal conservatives. When President Bush recently asked Congress to pass a modified line-item veto, among the first to complain was Mr. Lewis. The spending baron told the Rules Committee last month that the line-item veto "could be a very serious error" that threatens the separation of powers. "We are the legislative branch of government."

Translation: Mr. Lewis is opposed to any budget reform that would give the President more leverage to limit his ability to spend tax dollars like there's no tomorrow. On the item veto, this puts him to the fiscal left of John Kerry, Al Gore…

The reforms that Mr. Lewis objected to can only be called modest in any case. In return for supporting President Bush's $873 billion discretionary spending limit for Fiscal 2007, the conservatives had sought a few budget "process" reforms. Kevin Brady of Texas wanted a floor vote to establish a commission to sunset federal agencies that have outlived their usefulness. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin asked for a floor vote on the line-item veto--just a vote. Mr. Lewis and his band of spenders would still have the chance to try and defeat it on the House floor.

Jeff Flake of Arizona wanted each spending "earmark" to be identified along with the Member who requested it, so perhaps lawmakers might be shamed into using tax dollars more responsibly. He assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that a legislative body that has allowed these pork projects to quadruple in the past five years is still capable of being embarrassed.

Another important reform would have addressed the "supplemental" spending shell game on Capitol Hill, whereby initial spending requests that fall within the limits of a budget blueprint are inevitably augmented by so-called "emergency" spending. And since this "emergency" spending falls outside the budget framework, the sky's the limit. The proposed reform would have set criteria for what constitutes an emergency, established a rainy day fund for when one occurs, and required a House Budget Committee vote to increase spending beyond the amount in the reserve.

All of this is a far cry from a wholesale and much-needed rewrite of the Democratic budget act of 1974, which Republicans once promised to redo if they ever won the House…

A category five political storm is building in GOP precincts around the country, and it is going to blow Republicans right out of the majority in November if they don't soon give their supporters some reason to re-elect them. So far this year they've passed limits on free speech that liberals love, but they haven't been able to extend the wildly successful 2003 tax cuts by even a mere two years. And now they won't even allow a vote on budget reforms that their own President and a majority of their own Members support…

An alternative approach to Congressman Lewis' view is articulated in the Contract With America: Renewed, proposed by the Republican Study Committee and highlighted in a recent posting by Andrew.

What Congressman Lewis and his ilk don't seem to grasp are the potentially profound consequences that their despicable actions here could have across a wide range of other foreign and domestic policy issues should the Left recapture the leadership of the Congress. Issues like the global war against Islamic terrorists, tax cuts that empower economic growth, and the return to a more modest judiciary.

All of this is not a new story. However, the despair for fiscal conservatives only grows deeper as the Congressional Republicans, with the implicit endorsement by President Bush, show a stunning level of fiscal irresponsibility. As I told one Democratic political operative last weekend: The Republicans have, after only 12 years in the leadership, done what it took the Democrats 40 years to do in Congress. Some previous and relevant postings include:

Misguided Incentives Drive Public Sector Taxation
Pigs at the Public Trough
Big Government Corrupts, Regardless of Party
More on the Misguided Incentives in the Public Sector
Pigs at the Public Trough, Revisited
Corporate Welfare Queens: Destructive Parasites Which Deserve to Die
Favors for Everyone Except the Taxpaying Masses
Tapscott: Has the GOP Lost Its Soul?
Rancid Pork Leaves a Bad Taste in Your Mouth, which links to numerous other postings on the highway bill, energy bill, etc.
Has the GOP Lost Its Soul? Part II
Drinking the Kool Aid
Senator Chafee: Is This How You Define Fiscal Conservatism?
Cutting the Fat: The New Porkbuster Site

Pope Benedict XVI: Good Friday Reflections & More

On this Holy Day of Good Friday, when Christians commemorate the crucification of Jesus, Pope Benedict XVI offered these reflections on the Stations of the Cross. They are worth reading.

This newspaper article highlights some of the reflections.

Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal adds his thoughts in a commentary entitled The Pope's Easter: Benedict XVI takes on the excesses of secularization and radical Islam:

If we still hold that the news reflects reality, we would be led to believe that Christians enter these final three days of Holy Week preoccupied with whether to credit the new Gospel of Judas that the hallowed National Geographic Society delivered unto the world this month, and whether to attend the imminent film version of "The Da Vinci Code," purporting that the Vatican has covered up Jesus' marriage to Mary Magdalene. My guess is that on this Easter Pope Benedict XVI, the new leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics, feels he has larger fish to fry than the marital status of Jesus...

To a surprising extent, the pope's world is our world. His problems are the same problems that bedevil the political life of the United States: violence against the innocent under the cloak of Islam, the disdain of Old Europe, establishing an acceptable price for doing business with China, the pain of Africa's genocides and epidemics. These issues inhabit the public square, and inevitably through history the world's largest, centrally organized religion has faced onto that square.

Now comes a new kind of mosque. And this pope knows it.

Each January the pope delivers a formal address to the diplomatic corps attached to the Holy See. This year Benedict gave his first. Read the following and watch the religious wheat separated from the terrorist chaff:

"Attention has rightly been drawn to the danger of a clash of civilizations," said Benedict. "The danger is made more acute by organized terrorism, which has already spread over the whole planet. Its causes are many and complex, not least those to do with political ideology, combined with aberrant religious ideas. Terrorism does not hesitate to strike defenseless people, without discrimination, or to impose inhuman blackmail, causing panic among entire populations, in order to force political leaders to support the designs of the terrorists. No situation can justify such criminal activity, which covers the perpetrators with infamy, and it is all the more deplorable when it hides behind religion, thereby bringing the pure truth of God down to the level of the terrorists' own blindness and moral perversion."

Moral perversion? We indeed have a pope, one, it appears, who won't pull his punches, and one who like the rest of us just now must contemplate the meaning of Flight 93's hijackers driving a passenger airliner to earth while chanting, "Allah is the greatest."

Any leader has to pick his fights, and my guess is that this pope will take his to the place he knows best--Europe. In the post-Soviet Europe that Pope John Paul II helped bring to life, there is already political tension between the more actively religious peoples of Eastern Europe--particularly Poland, Lithuania and Slovakia--and an assertively secular West. In February the European Union, the official arm of secular Europe, threw down the gauntlet; it effectively collapsed the government of Slovakia over a religious issue.

In 2003 the government of Slovakia signed a concordat with the Vatican to let doctors and health-care workers in Catholic hospitals decline to participate in abortions as a matter of conscience. This January the EU's Network of Independent Experts on Fundamental Rights (their real name, not an Orwellian satire) ruled Slovakia in violation of its EU "obligations." Translation: Tell those Catholic docs to do abortions or we will hammer you financially. The political tensions split Slovakia's government, and in February it fell.

We may assume the new pope noticed this re-invasion of Slovakia. George Weigel of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, probably our most astute analyst of the papacy as a political actor (his biography of John Paul was a bestseller), has just written an absorbing book-length commentary on the new pope's probable direction called God's Choice. "Ratzinger has been thinking about Europe for 25 years," Mr. Weigel told me. "He needs to address the problem of a Europe in which consciences are being coerced by transnational institutions. This is the cash-out of what he means by the dictatorship of relativism. It's a real issue with real world consequences." Mr. Weigel notes Benedict will go to Cologne in September, and this could be the venue for a large, Europe-directed statement on the place of religion in contemporary society.

Don't write off the effort as quixotic. In 2004 then-Cardinal Ratzinger, one of the world's eminent theologians, made his case in a debate with the famous German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, himself a kind of secular saint. Habermas emerged from what turned into a dialogue with Ratzinger to cause a mini-sensation by suggesting that religious communities deserve respect for having "preserved intact something which has elsewhere been lost." There are signs, small as mustard seeds, of revival: In a paper last month for the American Enterprise Institute, Christopher Levenick drew attention to the renewed interest in monastic life inside Italy. In the past year some 550 women, most college-educated Italians, entered cloistered convents, according to Italy's Union of Mother Superiors.

If the pope's problems in Europe are mainly a struggle over the life of the soul, in foreign policy it is often a death struggle. Amid Denmark's prophet Muhammad cartoon debacle, Muslims in Maiduguri, Nigeria burned 11 churches and murdered 15 minority Christians. "For a Nigerian Catholic prelate," says Mr. Weigel, "the pope is a lifeline to the outside world." No one knows that better than the estimated eight million Catholics in China's persecuted underground church. Last month Benedict announced his desire to visit the mainland. The political hurdles are high. What should be the price of a papal visit? A Chinese claim to name his new bishops? Throwing over Taiwan's Catholics? It makes Google's political problems there look, well, young...

Here are some additional thoughts from the Pope earlier in Holy Week:

"Despite all the darkness in the world, evil does not have the last word," said Benedict XVI, frequently changing his prepared text off the cuff. "For our part, let’s commit ourselves to create a more just world with more courage." The pope then invited the faithful to participate in celebrations of the Triduum starting tomorrow. "These days are intended to re-ignite in us an urgent desire to follow and to serve Christ, mindful of the fact that he loved us to the point of giving up his life for us."

For further reflections:

Pope Benedict XVI: Proposing Faith as an Antidote to Relativism
Follow Me: John Paul II Roused Us From a Lethargic Faith
Pope Benedict XVI: "A Man With Great Humility & Gentlemanliness"
Teaching Our Children Well: Rediscovering Moral Principles & History

A Poignant Reflection on John Paul II
John Paul II, Requiescat in pacem

Two Beacon Mutual Items

1. According to the Projo’s 7-to-7 blog, Governor Donald Carcieri has called for the resignations of Beacon Mutual CEO Joseph Solomon, vice president for underwriting David Clark, and asked board members who have served since 1994 and those “personally implicated” in any reported abuse to resign.

2. Lieutenant Governor Charles Fogarty is claiming that part of what should come out of the Guiliani firm's revelations about Beacon is less oversight by the Governor...

"Beacon is not a government agency. It is a private insurance company chartered by the state. The State Department of Business Regulation should have full authority to regulate and oversee the company, but there should not be governmental appointments on the board.

However, a direct reading of current law does not support Lt. Governor Fogarty's assertion that Beacon Mutual is a private company. This is from Chapter 410 of the 2003 Public Laws...

SECTION 2. Definitions…(2) “Fund” means the state compensation insurance fund known as The Beacon Mutual Insurance Company…

SECTION 3. Creation of fund. – The fund is created as a nonprofit independent public corporation for the purpose of insuring employers against liability for personal injuries for which their employees may be entitled to…

RI Democrats Promise Spending Cuts....but where?

RI Democrats have been promising some tax relief recently, and now they've apparently realized that spending reductions are a good idea, too:

Senate leaders yesterday offered what they hailed as a "property-tax reduction plan."

. . . Senate Democrats -- led by Senate President Joseph A. Montalbano and Senate Majority Leader M. Teresa Paiva Weed -- suggested the legislature instead take steps to rein in future growth in state and local spending. . .

The senators are proposing to lower, over six years, the current ceiling on annual city and town spending increases from 5.5 percent to 4 percent of the tax levy, starting in fiscal year 2008. . .Similarly, the senators are seeking to lower, by 2012, the cap on state spending increases from 5.5 percent of total appropriations, including federal funds, to 4.5 percent of all state taxes and fees.

After years of nudging from school superintendents across the state, they also pledged their support to a bill, introduced by Sen. Maryellen Goodwin on March 9, that would prohibit the state from imposing any new mandates on local school districts "without the provision of adequate and commensurate funding by and from the state to insure that the city or town is able to pay for such mandate."

...the senators pledged "to continue to work on reducing the property-tax burden of Rhode Islanders" by launching a new study of school financing, and accumulating information on all current tax treaties, exemptions and freezes granted across the state.

The story is devoid of any specifics as to what type of spending is going to be reduced. Instead, we are left with a promise to reduce unfunded mandates, to decrease the amount of annual budget increases via a new spending cap and the commissioning of various "studies."

This seems like a nice conceptual and structural change, but what exactly, pray tell, do the Democrats plan on cutting? Do they really need more time to "study" the problem? It's a bit disingenuous to lambaste the Governor for his proposed budget cuts and then--instead of countering with your own specific cuts--issue a vague, non-specific promise of reductions. Anyone can get behind the idea of cutting government spending, I'll take the Democrats seriously when they actually put forward some specific cuts.

Governor Was Right, Says Beacon's Own Auditors

Here is the meat and potatoes of what the Giuliani group found in their audit of Beacon Mutual [the whole report is here (PDF)]. First, we have the in house problems:

Beacon executives maintained a VIP list of about a dozen companies, some of which received favorable treatment resulting in lower workers' comp rates. Solomon denied the list's existence to Giuliani's investigators, but told another Beacon executive to delete it from his computer.

Beacon paid some insurance agents "significantly greater" commissions than required under their contracts -- about $2.5 million from 2001 to 2004.

Beacon's longtime chairman, Sheldon Sollosy, who resigned in February, misused his position by refusing to provide the insurer with payroll records for a company he owned, Temporary Manpower Services. His refusal, "ignored" by Beacon management even though it violated Beacon policy, made it impossible to determine whether Sollosy's company paid the rates it should have.

Beacon's president, Joseph A. Solomon, had granite countertops installed in the kitchen of his East Greenwich house by a company that received undocumented breaks on its workers' comp insurance. An executive of the stone-working company told investigators that the $10,000 Solomon paid for the kitchen work didn't cover the total cost. Solomon said in an interview that the cost was only slightly higher, but the contractor honored his original quote of $10,000. The report found no evidence of a "quid pro quo."

Solomon and three Beacon insurance agents used Beacon funds to help pay for a trip to the exclusive Carnegie Club at Skibo Castle in the Scottish highlands three years ago. Solomon said in an interview that Beacon spent $19,000 on the trip.

The report also found "weak or non-existent" policies at Beacon regarding corporate governance, ethics and internal auditing, as well as "inadequate" financial checks and balances that invited potential, and actual, abuse.

Controls are so lacking, and special deals so prevalent among the limited number of policies reviewed, the Giuliani review found, that several Beacon employees said that "two underwriters given the same information will come to two different conclusions" regarding the rate that a company should pay.

Then there's a bit more on those "special" deals:

The Giuliani report cites several instances in which companies may have paid lower rates as a result of misclassified workers.

The report cited evidence of "misclassifications of payroll" at Temporary Manpower Services. Over a nine-year period ending in 2002, just before Sollosy sold the company and canceled his policy, Beacon lost money on Manpower six years, paying out more in injury claims than it collected in premiums.

The report also quotes an internal Beacon analysis in 2002 highlighting "numerous areas" in which Manpower received "preferential treatment," including credits that normally go to companies (based on their safety records, and a lower volume of claims), but which Beacon didn't normally grant to temp agencies. But nothing changed.

Investigators expressed concern that while Sollosy's company received "special treatment," Sollosy, as head of Beacon's compensation committee, recommended board approval of "excessive" compensation packages for Beacon executives, including Solomon, who has a $490,000 salary and a $3-million severance package.

Sollosy was also the lone person to approve Solomon's travel expenses, and did so after the fact, including the trip to Scotland, the report said.

The Giuliani team tried to interview Sollosy, but he declined, on the advice of his lawyer, Peter A. DiBiase. (DiBiase could not be reached for comment.)

In the case of Paul Arpin Van Lines, the report found credits that were "unearned and unwarranted due to a history of losses," as well as "incorrect" classifications of workers.

During an overlapping period, from 2001 to 2005, Beacon reimbursed Arpin $450,000 for its use of a luxury box for New England Patriots football games. Solomon has said that Beacon used the box to entertain valued clients and insurance brokers, but discontinued the practice early this year to avoid controversy.

An Arpin official did not return a call seeking comment.

Investigators also found evidence that the Cardi Corp. did not have any employees classified as bridge workers, even though there is "ample evidence" that Cardi is involved in bridge construction, including the company's own Web site and "at least one claim" involving an injury related to bridge construction.

Beginning in 2003, the report says, Beacon loss-prevention employees "began to insist" that bridge workers be included in Cardi's policy, bolstering their case with an auditor's visit to a Cardi construction site and photos of Cardi employees performing bridge work. But to date, Cardi does not pay any premiums for bridge workers.

A Cardi spokesman did not return a call seeking comment.

The report also questioned Beacon's due diligence in checking the payrolls and job classifications at Lifespan, by far its largest policyholder, with nearly $5 million in premiums last year. Lifespan's three-year guaranteed rate was "highly unusual and not customary," the report said.

Jane Bruno, a spokeswoman for Lifespan, said the company was above-board in its dealings with Beacon, and would not have done business with the insurer without a multiyear guarantee.

And all of this even though the Beacon Mutual guys weren't that forthcoming. Imagine what will be found when the state insurance investigators--who have subpoena power--get in there. Of course, the fact that they can't look at those hard drives isn't very helpful, is it?

A Pro-Republican Senate Campaign Proposal

Judging from both Elizabeth Gudrais’ Projo coverage of last night’s Johnson and Wales' college Republican candidates' night and the comments section of this blog, Senator Lincoln Chafee and his supporters seem determined to make Steve Laffey’s campaign contributions from 10 years ago a central issue in the Rhode Island Senate campaign…

Chafee never mentioned Laffey by name. Instead, he said: "My primary opponent actually contributed to Democrats. I've never done that."

He was referring to contributions Laffey made to Tennessee Democrats' congressional campaigns during his time working for Morgan Keegan, a Memphis investment banking firm.

Since Senator Chafee and his supporters have become very concerned about party loyalty, I’d like to propose the following deal.

Steve Laffey agrees not to give any more money to Democratic candidates and Lincoln Chafee agrees a) to vote for the next Republican Presidential nominee (Senator Chafee voted against President Bush in 2004) and/or b) to vote for judicial nominees chosen by Republican Presidents when all the other Senate Republicans are voting in favor of confirmation.

Any takers?

Old-Money Populists and the Working-Class/New-Money Elite

I've been meaning to comment on RI Populist's apparent satisfaction over Sheldon Whitehouse's receipt of the carpenters union endorsement. As a non-union carpenter whose job site has recently been within sight of Whitehouse's Newport summer home castle — nestled between, I'm informed, his brother's mansion and his mother's chateau and a short drive from his grandparents' controversial estate — I'd suggest that Whitehouse's interests align with those of the average Rhode Island worker's in about the same degree as an ocean's with a puddle's on a hot day.

Somehow, through my dust-tinted work goggles, I can't help but observe cynical posturing in another of RI Populist's recent posts:

This letter to the editor is a testament to... the shame of politicians like Don Carcieri and Steve Laffey who made their millions at the top of the mountain of big corporations and who now use their elected office to chip away at the mole-hill of power that workers have won through unions. Without unions, only an exclusive few would have the quality of life that so many Americans now enjoy. It's as simple as that.

Personally, in my simplicity, I prefer to construct my mole-hill of satisfaction of the moments during which I'm privileged to enjoy scenery to which the ultrawealthy are privy, but of which, one suspects, they are rarely appreciative. It's all a matter of perspective, of course, but I find the daylight a bit more crisp out from under the shadows of Rhode Island's Everest of organized labor and those exclusive few who've never worked a "[bleep]ing day" in their lives, to quote another of our state's pampered supposed populists.

Beacon Mutual: The Governor’s Next Step

Mike Stanton and Steve Peoples of the Projo have an initial report on the “abuse, mismanagement, and preferential pricing practices” documented by the Giuliani Security Services investigation of Beacon Mutual.

Dan Yorke is reporting that, tomorrow, Governor Donald Carcieri will call for the resignation of all Beacon Mutual board members and for Beacon Mutual CEO Joseph Solomon to be fired for cause.

Rich Lowry Speaking at Brown TONIGHT!!!

PROEM:

Over at the Corner, Rich Lowry says that his appearance begins at 7:30 tonight.

---

According to the latest edition of the RI Republican Newsletter delivered to my inbox early this morning…

Wednesday April 12 - NATIONAL REVIEW magazine Editor RICH LOWRY speaks at BROWN UNIVERSITY - 8:00 P.M. - in Salomon Hall on the main campus green. Sponsored by the College Republicans. Mr. Lowry will talk about the war on terrorism.

And for those looking for a solid opening act to precede Mr. Lowry…

Wednesday April 12 - JOHNSON & WALES UNIVERSITY College Republicans Meet The Candidates Night - 6:30 P.M. - at the Harborside Campus (located on the Providence/Cranston line, off Allens Ave.). Most statewide GOP candidates are expected to come (Steve Laffey, Bill Harsch, Sue Stenhouse, Allan Fung & others). For more info, E-mail JWU CR Chairman Armand Cortellesso at: NauticaALC@netscape.net

Ramesh Ponnuru on the Mass Healthcare Plan

At National Review Online, Ramesh Ponnuru offers his analysis of the Massachusetts healthcare plan, and offers a few suggestions to Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney...

The governor has the ability to make modifications to this legislation through a line-item veto. He should use it to eliminate the mandates on coverage, strike the business taxes, and get rid of the individual mandate to buy insurance. (Or at least soften that mandate: His original proposal gave individuals more options in insuring themselves -- some of them pretty creative -- and did not rely on fines for enforcement.) Even if the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature rejects his changes, conservatives will appreciate his having made the effort.

Ponnuru notes that Governor Romney's original preference included a wider range of catastrophic insurance plans...

Romney proposed eliminating laws that made it hard to sell cheap, no-frills, high-deductible catastrophic insurance policies. (Make insurance more attractive to healthy young people, and you might not need to force them to buy it.) But the legislature refused to eliminate mandates on coverage, and required zero deductibles for the new plans for low-income people.

The legislature's refusal to create more insurance options should remind people that much of the source of our healthcare "crisis" is not implacable macroeconomic forces spiraling out of control, but bad government decisions that can be undone. We would face an "automobile ownership" crisis -- many people unable to buy cars -- if laws were passed making new BMW's the only type of car allowed to be sold. There's a place in the market for Ford Escorts as well as BMWs.

It's important for the citizens of Rhode Island to be aware of both this overriding principle and of the details of the Massachusetts plan, because Rhode Island may try to implement something similar in the near future. This is from a Felice J. Freyer article from Monday's Projo�

Rhode Island health-care leaders are watching with intense but wary interest as Massachusetts launches a landmark plan to provide health coverage for nearly everyone in the state...

"People have already approached me -- 'what would it take to do something like that here?' " said Christopher F. Koller, Rhode Island's health insurance commissioner. "There's an appetite for looking at this. There's a lot of potential applications for Rhode Island"...

Our goals are the same," said Lt. Gov. Charles J. Fogarty, a candidate for governor. "We want to see all our citizens have health insurance. . . . If we make it a priority in Rhode Island, I think we can do it. . . . We may not be able to do it in one giant step as they did in Massachusetts"...

[State Senator Elizabeth] Roberts, like others, said she wants every Rhode Islander to have health insurance and is eager to learn the details of the Massachusetts law. She pointed out that many Rhode Islanders work and obtain health insurance in Massachusetts, so there will be "a lot of transfer of information and experience."

Unfortunately, if history is any guide, our state legislature is likely to Rhode Islandize the Massachusetts plan, implementing the features that maximize revenues collected by the government, whether or not they lead to an effective health insurance program.

Taking a Local Stand Against the Government of Sudan

State Representatives Joseph Almeida (D-Providence), Edith Ajello (D-Providence), Anastasia Williams (D-Providence), James Davey (R-Cranston), and Thomas Slater (D-Providence) have introduced a bill to the legislature that would require the state government of Rhode Island to divest from the Sudan (House bill 7969). This action follows the recent and laudable decisions by the city of Providence and by Brown University to divest.

But how about also getting any money from lobbying firms that have represented the Sudan out of Rhode Island politics?

According to the Washington Post, the government of Sudan tried last year to hire a Washington consulting firm to represent its interests in the US…

[Robert] Cabelly, 55, is managing director of a Washington consulting firm called C/R International LLC…

Cabelly, who declined to speak publicly on the matter, reported to the Justice Department that his contract with Sudan paid his firm $530,000 a year plus transportation expenses.

The Post reports that C/R “dropped Sudan as a client last month” in response to pressure from Virginia Congressman Frank Wolf. According to Congressman Wolf, C/R reported their contract with the Sudan to the US government in August of 2005…

On August 12 of this year, Mr. Cabelly filed with the Foreign Agents Registration Unit at the Department of Justice, reporting a contract with the Government of the Republic of Sudan for $530,000 per year. The contract lists the agreed representation by Mr. Cabally for the Government of Sudan as providing “public relations, government relations and strategic counsel as they would relate to implementing the North-South peace agreement, cooperating in the war on terrorism, and addressing other issues....

Given these dates, according to Rhode Island campaign finance records, there was a single Rhode Island politician who accepted a campaign contribution from a C/R International employee while the firm was in the employ of the Sudan…

Candidate	Amount		Date	Donor
Patrick Lynch	$200		12/20/2005	Stephen F. Riley, C/R International

Revisiting Why Current Lobbyist Reforms Will Fail

David Boaz, the Executive Vice President of the Cato Institute, recently wrote these words about why lobbyist reform initiatives will fail:

When you spread food out on a picnic table, you can expect ants. When you put $3 trillion on the table, you can expect special interests, lobbyists and pork-barrel politicians.

That's the real lesson of the Abramoff scandal.

Jack Abramoff may have been the sleaziest of the Washington lobbyists but he's not unique. As the federal government accumulates more money and more power, it draws more lobbyists like honey draws flies.

People invest money to make money. In a free economy they invest in building homes and factories, inventing new products, finding oil, and other economic activities. That kind of investment benefits us all -- it's a positive-sum game, as economists say. People get rich by producing what other people want.

But you can also invest in Washington. You can organize an interest group, or hire a lobbyist, and try to get some taxpayers' money routed to you. That's what the farm lobbies, AARP, industry associations, and teachers unions do. And that kind of investment is zero-sum -- money is taken from some people and given to others, but no new wealth is created...

The number of companies with registered lobbyists is up 58 percent in six years. The amount of money lobbyists report spending has risen from $1.5 billion to $2.1 billion in that time...

And why not? After all, federal spending is up 39 percent in the same period. That means another $640 billion a year for interest groups to get their hands on.

With federal spending approaching $3 trillion a year -- and even more money moved around by regulations and the details of tax law -- getting a piece of that money can be worth a great deal of effort and expense...

Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek explained the process 60 years ago in his prophetic book The Road to Serfdom: "As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power."

The United States is not Russia or Nigeria, states where government power really is the only thing worth having. But when the government has more money and power, then more of society's resources will tend to be directed toward influencing government...

Abramoff specialized in manipulating regulations, especially the licensing of casinos. If gambling wasn't so tightly licensed and regulated, then it wouldn't produce extraordinary profits and lavish lobbying...But his efforts were small potatoes compared with the hugely expensive and complex programs of the federal government and the lobbying generated by all that spending and regulation.

During the 1970s, when Congress created massive new government regulations, businesses had to invest more heavily in lobbying. Some of it was defensive -- to try to minimize the cost and burden of regulation.

But of course some of the lobbying was more cynical, to ensure that costs fell more heavily on competitors. One study in 1980 showed that 65 percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies came to Washington at least every two weeks. That was up sharply from 1971, when only 15 percent of CEOs visited Washington even once a month...

Meanwhile, the taxpayers have little voice in the halls of Congress. The National Taxpayers Union spent less than $175,000 on lobbying in 2004. And the NTU is one of the very few organizations whose lobbying is aimed at decreasing the size and overall reach of government.

As long as the federal government has so much money and power to hand out, we'll never get rid of the Abramoffs. Restrictions on lobbying deal with symptoms, not causes.

Boaz' thoughts build on the thoughts of Walter Williams and Frederich Hayek, as highlighted in this posting. Follow the link in that posting to another posting with multiple examples of how both political parties are guilty of increasing the size of government at the expense of working families and retirees all across America.

The issue is the engorged size of government, which only benefits the powerful - be they corporations, unions or any other significant special interest.

Why do we tolerate this?

Revisiting Why Current Lobbyist Reforms Will Fail

David Boaz, the Executive Vice President of the Cato Institute, recently wrote these words about why lobbyist reform initiatives will fail:

When you spread food out on a picnic table, you can expect ants. When you put $3 trillion on the table, you can expect special interests, lobbyists and pork-barrel politicians.

That's the real lesson of the Abramoff scandal.

Jack Abramoff may have been the sleaziest of the Washington lobbyists but he's not unique. As the federal government accumulates more money and more power, it draws more lobbyists like honey draws flies.

People invest money to make money. In a free economy they invest in building homes and factories, inventing new products, finding oil, and other economic activities. That kind of investment benefits us all -- it's a positive-sum game, as economists say. People get rich by producing what other people want.

But you can also invest in Washington. You can organize an interest group, or hire a lobbyist, and try to get some taxpayers' money routed to you. That's what the farm lobbies, AARP, industry associations, and teachers unions do. And that kind of investment is zero-sum -- money is taken from some people and given to others, but no new wealth is created…

The number of companies with registered lobbyists is up 58 percent in six years. The amount of money lobbyists report spending has risen from $1.5 billion to $2.1 billion in that time…

And why not? After all, federal spending is up 39 percent in the same period. That means another $640 billion a year for interest groups to get their hands on.

With federal spending approaching $3 trillion a year -- and even more money moved around by regulations and the details of tax law -- getting a piece of that money can be worth a great deal of effort and expense…

Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek explained the process 60 years ago in his prophetic book The Road to Serfdom: "As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power."

The United States is not Russia or Nigeria, states where government power really is the only thing worth having. But when the government has more money and power, then more of society's resources will tend to be directed toward influencing government…

Abramoff specialized in manipulating regulations, especially the licensing of casinos. If gambling wasn't so tightly licensed and regulated, then it wouldn't produce extraordinary profits and lavish lobbying…But his efforts were small potatoes compared with the hugely expensive and complex programs of the federal government and the lobbying generated by all that spending and regulation.

During the 1970s, when Congress created massive new government regulations, businesses had to invest more heavily in lobbying. Some of it was defensive -- to try to minimize the cost and burden of regulation.

But of course some of the lobbying was more cynical, to ensure that costs fell more heavily on competitors. One study in 1980 showed that 65 percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies came to Washington at least every two weeks. That was up sharply from 1971, when only 15 percent of CEOs visited Washington even once a month…

Meanwhile, the taxpayers have little voice in the halls of Congress. The National Taxpayers Union spent less than $175,000 on lobbying in 2004. And the NTU is one of the very few organizations whose lobbying is aimed at decreasing the size and overall reach of government.

As long as the federal government has so much money and power to hand out, we'll never get rid of the Abramoffs. Restrictions on lobbying deal with symptoms, not causes.

Boaz' thoughts build on the thoughts of Walter Williams and Frederich Hayek, as highlighted in this posting. Follow the link in that posting to another posting with multiple examples of how both political parties are guilty of increasing the size of government at the expense of working families and retirees all across America.

The issue is the engorged size of government, which only benefits the powerful - be they corporations, unions or any other significant special interest.

Why do we tolerate this?

Where Were the Marxists for Open Borders when the Berlin Wall was Still Standing?

One question surrounding the current immigration debate is why Democrats and leftist activists have become so invested in maintaining a wage-depressing flow of immigrants into America. (It's pretty obvious why the Republican business class favors it).

The RI Future post on today’s immigration demonstration in Providence provides a clue. The title of the post is “March for the American Dream”. Here’s the lineup of the groups that were scheduled to march…

The coalition includes Council 94, AFSCME, ACORN, the Guatemalan Alliance, Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), English for Action, Immigrant Students in Action, ONA, New Dawn, Jobs with Justice, the International Socialist Organization, and the Mexican-American Association of Rhode Island.

Here is how the International Socialist Organization describes itself on its website…

The International Socialist Organization (ISO) is committed to building an organization that participates in the struggles for justice and liberation today--and, ultimately, for a future socialist society…

The misery that millions of people around the world face is rooted in the society we live in--capitalism, where the few who rule profit from the labor of the vast majority of the population…

A world free of exploitation--socialism--is not only possible but worth fighting for. The ISO stands in the tradition of revolutionary socialists Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky in the belief that workers themselves--the vast majority of the population--are the only force that can lead the fight to win a socialist society.

The ISO’s goals are pretty clear; they advocate the destruction of capitalism via revolution (that's them talking, not me) raising a few questions about their motivation for supporting an open borders policy as well as questions about how widespread their beliefs are…

1. Does the ISO view ending capitalism as part of “the American Dream”?
2. Does the ISO view support for an open borders policy as a way to accelerate the decline of capitalism and the rise of socialism in the United States?
3. Do the other groups marching today share the goal of ending capitalism and view an open borders policy as a step towards achieving that goal?

The biggest question is how much of public opinion does a coalition that includes the International Socialist Organization really represent?

Illegal Immigration and Entitlements

Mark Krikorian makes a couple interesting points related to the current illegal immigration debate, which both touch on the "wisdom" of the so-called "elite." First:

...our elite has so completely erased the distinction between citizens and foreigners, devaluing the meaning of Americanness to merely working and paying taxes on American territory, that the illegals (and legal non-citizens) actually have come to believe [that they're Americans] -- and are simply demanding the fulfillment of what they consider to already have been promised. Obviously, the point is not to excuse the foreigners' will to power, but rather that you teach people how to treat you -- and we've taught foreigners to make these aggressive demands against us.

Second:

Just as illegals are marching in the streets demanding not just amnesty but, let's face it, open borders, the intellectual elite is increasingly coming to consensus that mass immigration is bad for America's poor. After Bob Samuelson and Paul Krugman recently came out of the closet, Nicholas Kristof did the same in yesterday's N.Y. Times:

An influx of hundreds of thousands more unskilled laborers would impoverish them [America's poor] further -- and to me, that does not feel like compassion.

This last is a compelling argument. Of course, what do we mean by "poverty" in contemporary America? Also, if there was more incentivizing on both the worker end and the employer end to help employ more of our poor citizens in those jobs that "only" illegals would do, I'd be more willing to accept this liberal argument.

Many anti-poverty groups are quite "inclusive" in their championing of the poor (public health care for illegal immigrant children) and walk hand-in-hand with "immigration" advocacy groups (they never say they're "illegal" immigration advocacy groups) that help illegal immigrants get public aid.

Thus, the liberal groups have it right: the public entitlement debate (welfare reform, social security reform) is intertwined with the illegal immigrant debate. I don't think that an attempt by liberal "elites" to draw a distinction between American poor and the poor in America will be very attractive to their otherwise fellow-traveller, pro-illegal immigrant and redistributionist, anti-poverty brethren.

Finally, (and I shouldn't have to say it) I'm not "for" poverty and don't want to see poor kids abandoned on the streets, but more tax dollars money for more programs isn't the answer. I think we Rhode Islanders can atest that the easier we make it for people to live with the help of public "assistance" the more people we'll find doing just that, whether they're American citizens or not.

Education "Adequacy"

In Sunday's ProJo, education columnist Julia Steiny explained how Rhode Island has attempted to use a theory of "equity" education funding. In this model, money from higher income districts goes to the poorer districts in the hope that the academic levels of poor students would improve to that of the better-off kids in rich and middle-class districts. However, this hasn't seemed to work so a new theory--adequacy--is being studied.

Rhode Island, along with many other states is now commissioning an "adequacy study" [link to a word document] to get a handle on how much money it would take -- minimally -- to get most kids to proficiency. Rhode Island's proposal defines it as "the amount of per pupil funding necessary to support an effective and efficient educational system."

Like Steiny--who wrote, "I confess the word 'adequacy' gives me the chills, because it does not sound like it includes music or art, nor any shred of creativity."--I'm a bit skeptical about what will be deemed "adequate," too. Nonetheless, the goals of the study are worthwhile:

State Rep. and adequacy-study committee co-chairwoman Edith Ajello says. . . says that the committee's charge is to identify the "lowest cost option" for educating each kid henceforth, without regard to how the money has been spent so far.

Commendably, they are studying how to exploit some obvious economies of scale of which this tiny state rarely avails itself, such as redesigning 36 different healthcare and transportation contracts and systems to be on a statewide basis. (Finally!)

But, Steiny points out some holes in their approach:

But not to examine how the money's been spent so far is . . . well, insane, because ignoring Rhode Island's gritty, stubborn and sometimes perverse psychology ignores the significant obstacles to change. Those who do not know their history are condemned to repeat it.

Two little examples of hundreds demonstrate how a lack of curiosity can make both adequacy and equity virtually impossible.

First, the bite taken out of the per pupil expenditure for contributions to the teachers pension fund is pretty much the same district by district. But some districts added yet more benefits on top of these already-generous pensions. The 2005 Information Works! chart called "out-of-district expenditures" shows that Newport spent about $900 per pupil giving their retirees healthcare benefits for life. But 9 districts out of Rhode Island's 36 give no such benefit at all, and so spend zero dollars per pupil on retiree healthcare.

When the state comes up with an adequacy formula, how will they handle this discrepancy? Will the taxpayer be asked to raise the extra $900 per pupil so Newport can meet its obligation? Or will they allow the Newport child to do with $900 less in order to pay for the contractual obligations? (To my knowledge, Newport, Jamestown and Bristol-Warren have ended that extra benefit, but will still be paying for eligible retirees until they are gone.)

Okay, here's a different kind of example. A few forward-thinking districts and all of the charter schools have very professional rules governing hiring and evaluation of personnel. Others are stuck with completely inflexible seniority systems. The salary for a teacher who was picked for the job, shines in evaluations and gives really good service is roughly the same as for the klunker whose contract protects him or her from accountability. The money is the same, but the value is not. What's "adequate?"

A definition of "adequacy" will be critically useful as a standard or a baseline against which we can measure and understand each district's per pupil expenditure. But those devilish details will demand attention either up front in the study itself or later on when the state tries to apply the new standard of adequacy.

Our 36 regular school districts have gotten themselves saddled with many years' accumulation of contract, policy and past-practice constraints on how they spend their money. The regular districts' per pupil expenditure has long been spent to meet contractual inflexibilities, step increases, across-the-board raises, increases in healthcare, fuel costs and so forth. Almost never do they have the fiscal flexibility to adjust their academic priorities or programs.

So even if you had a formula, money would still flow to the kids through the district filters at very different rates, unless you start cleaning out those filters as well.

The perfect per pupil expenditure is the number that everyone agrees will get the job done, in most every case. Good luck finding that number.

But unless we look for it aggressively, passionately, the price of education will continue to climb while improving the lot of the kids will not.

What Happened to the Immigration Bill

Assembled from the official legislative history plus assorted media reports...

1. Last year, Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy introduced an immigration reform bill. Illegal immigrants who had been in the US less than two years would be required to return home and apply for status as “guest workers”. Illegal immigrants who had been in the US for more than two years would be allowed to pay for amnesty with fines and back taxes. Border security provisions were very weak, consisting mostly of forming various committees to study the problem. (A description of the original McCain-Kennedy plan from its supporters is available here). The bill was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

2. The McCain-Kennedy bill sat in committee for almost a year. Senate Majority leader Bill Frist became frustrated with the slow pace of the Judiciary Committee's work and with the fact they were considering only illegal immigrants currently within the US and not serious border security measures. Senator Frist bypassed the Senate Judiciary Committee (possible because of his status as majority leader?) and introduced an immigration reform bill that focused on border security (Senate bill 2454) directly to the Senate floor on March 16 of this year . (A description of Senator Frist's original bill is available here).

3. Spurred on by Senator Frist’s action, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed an immigration reform measure on March 27 of this year that combined the McCain-Kennedy guest worker and amnesty provisions with the Frist border security provisions. Formally this took the form of an "amendment" (Senate Amendment 3192) that, if approved by the full Senate, would replace the entire text of Senator's Frist's bill.

4. The Judiciary Committee compromise lacked the support needed to pass, so more compromise was necessary. Senators Chuck Hagel and Mel Martinez brokered a modification to the McCain-Kennedy proposal. Illegal immigrants here between 2 and 5 years would be required to go to a legal point of entry to the United States to initiate their acceptance into the amnesty program. This was the proposal hailed in media reports last week as the compromise that would lead to passage of an immigration bill.

5. However, several Republican Senators wanted to make other amendments. Here is a partial list as described by Senator Frist on his blog...

• An amendment by Senators Kyl and Cornyn, which would have prevented illegal immigrants who had been convicted of felonies such as burglary; involuntary manslaughter; and assault and battery from getting green cards
• An amendment by Senator Isakson, which would have prevented the creation of any new temporary worker program until the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security certified that our border is secure
• An amendment by Senator Dorgan, which would have made the temporary worker program truly temporary by refusing to provide green cards to future temporary workers
• An amendment by Senator Ensign, which would have allowed the National Guard to help secure the border

6. The Democrats didn’t want to allow votes on the Republican amendments and thus refused to allow a vote on a total bill unless the Republicans agreed not to bring their amendments up for consideration. The Democrats proposed sending the bill back to the Judiciary Committee and having the committee rewrite it without considering the floor amendments, but the Republicans voted against recommitting.

(On top of all this, to fully understand what happened, there's a whole other set of considerations concerning Senate rules of proceudure, what order amendments are voted on, and an amendment introduced by Senators Jeff Sessions and Ben Nelson that would have made large changes to the McCain-Kennedy-Specter-Martinez-Hagel-Frist compromise that needs to be taken into account.)

I would like to see the Republicans use the current Senate recess to present their amendments in clear, understandable language to the public and ask why Harry Reid is afraid of allowing a vote on them.

Steve Laffey's Campaign Contributions in Tennessee

According to a Projo article by Scott MacKay, former Tennessee Senator Fred Dalton Thompson, guest-of-honor at a fundraiser for Senator Lincoln Chafee, had this to say about Steve Laffey…

Thompson also had a needle for [Steve] Laffey, who once worked for a Tennessee investment company. Thompson said Laffey in 1994 contributed campaign money to the Democratic candidate who ran against him and the Democrat who ran against GOP Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

Anchor Rising commenter Anthony points out that campaign finance records from that period are available via the opensecrets.org website. Here are the total amounts donated by Mayor Laffey while he was in Tennessee, including the donations that former Senator Thompson was referring to...

Lamar Alexander (R)	$1,500	1999,1995
Jonathan Newman (R)	$1,000	1997
Jesse Jackson Jr. (D)	$200	1995
Jim Cooper (D)	$250	1994
Jim Sasser (D)	$1,000	1993

Lamar Alexander was (at the time) the former governor of Tennessee who ran for President in 1996 and 2000. Jonathan Newman ran an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in Pennsylvania in 1998. Jesse Jackson Jr. is a Congressman from Illinois. Jim Cooper was a Tennessee Congressman who lost to Fred Dalton Thompson in the campaign for the Senate seat vacated by Al Gore when he became Vice-President. Jim Sasser was the incumbent Democrat beaten by Bill Frist in 1994.

The Radically Different Visions of Tax-Eaters Versus Taxpayers

In an earlier posting, I introduced a book entitled The New New Left: How American Politics Works Today by Steven Malanga and a review of the book in the Claremont Review of Books. The core theme of the book was described by one reviewer as "American politics is not about [political] parties, it is about special interest group against special interest group."

Expanding on that comment, here are some excerpts from the Introduction: Tax Eaters versus Taxpayers, where the author writes:

...A new political dynamic has slowly been emerging over the past forty years, a face-off between those who benefit from an expanding government and those who must pay for it - the tax-eaters versus the taxpayers...coalitions of public employees, staffers at publicy funded social-services programs, and the recipients of government aid have emerged as effective new political forces...

This increasingly powerful public-sector movement results from the joining together of two originally distinct forces. First are the government-employee unions...

For years, government employees had no right to organize, on the grounds that there was no competition in the delivery of government services and that therefore public unions could hold cities and states hostage by going on strike and denying essential services to the public...that began to change in the mid-1950's...

...In 1960 the American Federation of Teachers mapped out a controversial strategy to win collective bargaining rights for teachers around the country, using...labor-friendly New York City as a test case...

...most of the warnings voiced about public-employee unions in those tumultuous years have proven accurate. Political leaders and labor experts predicted that government-employee unions would use their power over public services to win contracts with work rules far more generous and undemanding than in the private sector; and that without the restraints on salaries and benefits that the free marketplace imposes on private firms, unions would win increasingly meaty compensation packages that would be impossible to restrain or to roll back...

But what critics did not anticipate was how far public-employee unions would move beyond collective bargaining to inject themselves into the electoral and legislative processes...

Reinforcing the public-employee unions in the powerful new coalition of tax-eaters are the social-services groups created by the War on Poverty. Nominally private, they are sustained by and organized around public funding...This flood of money transformed many formerly private welfare organizations into government contractors, and their employees into quasi-public workers. It also spurred the creation of vast new networks of such organizations...

This social-services funding vastly expanded the publicly supported workforce almost overnight...

Almost from the War on Poverty's inception, these social-services employees and their clients began to show themselves as a powerful political force...

The gradual government takeover...has transformed...institutions, executives, and workers into unremitting lobbyists for ever greater public monies and expanding programs, and tireless foes of efforts to restrain costs...

The electoral activism of this New New Left coalition of tax eaters - public-employee unions, hospitals and healthcare -worker unions, and social-services agencies - has reshaped the politics of many cities. As the country's national political scene has edged rightward, thwarting their ambitions in Washington, these groups have turned their attention to urban America, where they still have the power to influence public policy...

Increasingly in cities around the country, the road to electoral success passes through the public-employee/health/social-services sector...

One reason why these politicians have succeeded electorally is that those who work in the tax-eater sector clearly have different voting priorities from private-sector workers or business owners...

....public-sector workers, who realize they are going to the polls to elect their bosses, make sure to remember to vote...

With so much of their economic future at stake in elections, the tax eaters have emerged as the new infantry of political campaigns, replacing the ward captains and district leaders of old-time political clubs...

Although it started out as a romantic but wrongheaded idea, the War on Poverty was the child of idealists who really believed that a benevolent, paternalistic government could offer solutions that America's private economy couldn't provide for the poor. But the most cherished ideals and programs of the movement have turned out to demonstrably wrong...

By the mid-1990's, Americans were eager for reform, and they got it...

In the face of such results, the new urban left has emerged as an increasingly cynical coalition, ever more focused on goals that benefit its members and their allies, even thought it retains the jargon of "social justice."...

Regardless of how transparent its aims now seem, this new coalition will remain formidable because the tax-eater sector is now so large in many cities and states that it can easily thwart reforms aimed at undermining its programs. With much of the legislative agenda merely concerned with expanding programs and enacting laws that add to its own numbers, the New New Left may be in the ascendancy for a long time to come.

A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled GM, France and Albany: What the declines of all three have in common (available for a fee) states:

At first glance, they seem to have little in common. But the riots in France over labor reform, the slow-motion suicide of General Motors, and the continuing decline of the New York economy all share one defining trait: entrenched and unchangeable union power.

These columns have always favored the right to collectively bargain...we should [not] fail to appreciate the consequences when unions become entrenched inside any organization...unions do not provide individual job or income security. On the contrary, they undermine security by contributing to broader business and economic decline.

At the national level, the French example is clear enough. While the French private sector is less unionized than America's, it must cope with mandated work rules that make it all but impossible to fire someone; so naturally companies are also reluctant to hire. The jobless rate is double America's, while youth unemployment is 23%. More significant is that the political clout of public-sector unions has blocked all but minor changes in these rules. Public-sector workers account for more than a quarter of the entire French work force (6.4 million of out 24.6 million), and their salaries and pensions made up 45% of the entire state budget as recently as 2003.

The current French protests are in response to a modest change that would allow employers to fire people under age 26 more easily. So entrenched has the politics of union entitlement become in France that even at the onset of their careers these young protesters are demanding security over opportunity. In the global economy, this means they will end up with less of both.

France remains a wealthy country, and its economic decline can be masked for a time as it lives off accumulated capital. But already the promises that its unions have extracted from the government seem unlikely to be kept. A growth rate of between 1% and 2% a year won't be enough to finance the pensions and health care of an aging nation. And facing up to those facts will require an increasingly painful political reckoning.

Here in the U.S., the same burden is slowly crippling New York...Power in the state capital of Albany is shared by Republicans and Democrats. But both parties bow before the public-sector unions, especially the teachers, and the health-care workers...

...New York's Medicaid costs are higher than those of Texas and Florida combined; a health-care insurance premium for a young family of four is roughly six times what it is across the border in Connecticut; and high-deductible health-savings accounts that can help the self-employed afford insurance can't even be offered in the state...

Another union-driven business cost is workers' compensation, and in New York the average cost per claim is second highest in the nation (after Louisiana) and 72% higher than the national average...

...upstate [New York] is a different story, with jobs and young people fleeing to better business climes. New York manufacturing employment fell by 41% between 1990 and 2005, or double the national rate.

Even Eliot Spitzer recently referred to upstate New York as "Appalachia." Alas, the Attorney General shows no sign of understanding that the heart of the problem lies in Albany...

As for GM, its management mistakes are legion and its weak product line well-known. But the root of its problem is that it long ago became a corporate version of the welfare state, with the same entrenched union interests...the size of its market dominance going back to its heyday 40 years ago allowed its managers to avoid confronting its uncompetitive wages, benefits and work rules even as they saw Toyota and Honda gaining in the rearview mirror.

In retrospect, GM management should have provoked a union showdown. Yet only a very brave CEO would have been willing to risk a potentially catastrophic strike on his watch for the sake of making the company more competitive after he retired. In any case, would the United Auto Workers really have budged? In 1998, young executive and future CEO Rick Wagoner endured a 54-day UAW wildcat strike at two plants in Flint, Michigan, after GM had tried to change some production rules. The strike shut down most GM production in North America and cost the company some $2 billion. In the end GM caved and the UAW escaped, having made virtually no concessions.

Even now at auto-parts maker Delphi--which is already in Chapter 11--the UAW is declaring it will take a strike that could destroy both Delphi and GM rather than agree to Delphi's proposed job cuts and work changes. As in France and New York, these union leaders would rather sink the company than make concessions that would reduce their own power.

This pattern has repeated itself again and again--in the steel and textile industries attacked by foreign competition, or the unionized grocery chains routed by Wal-Mart. The union answer has rarely been to work with a company to allow more job flexibility to become more competitive. The answer has typically been to seek a ruinous strike or lobby for political intervention that might stave off disaster for at best a few more years.

We recount all this because, even amid GM's decline and France's economic turmoil, most of America's liberal elites refuse to draw the right lesson. They cling to the belief that if only the Democrats can retake Congress, or the union movement can once again organize more of the American labor force, the old economy of union-backed job security and egalite will return. Or, worse, they propose seceding from global competition via protectionism. It is all a delusion. Down that road lies France--a nice place to vacation, but you wouldn't want to work there.

This is the central problem the liberal wing of the Democratic Party faces as it plots what to do if it does regain power this year, or in 2008...to govern for the long haul they need better ideas than trade barriers, a tax hike to increase the size of government, or the defense of the entitlement status quo.

They need to champion reforms to help individual workers better secure their own futures in a competitive global economy, rather than relying on the false hope of restoring the age of Walter Reuther. They need to promote portable pensions, cheaper health insurance and education choice. So far all we see is Jacques Chirac in American drag.

The Radically Different Visions of Tax-Eaters Versus Taxpayers

In an earlier posting, I introduced a book entitled The New New Left: How American Politics Works Today by Steven Malanga and a review of the book in the Claremont Review of Books. The core theme of the book was described by one reviewer as "American politics is not about [political] parties, it is about special interest group against special interest group."

Expanding on that comment, here are some excerpts from the Introduction: Tax Eaters versus Taxpayers, where the author writes:

...A new political dynamic has slowly been emerging over the past forty years, a face-off between those who benefit from an expanding government and those who must pay for it - the tax-eaters versus the taxpayers...coalitions of public employees, staffers at publicy funded social-services programs, and the recipients of government aid have emerged as effective new political forces...

This increasingly powerful public-sector movement results from the joining together of two originally distinct forces. First are the government-employee unions...

For years, government employees had no right to organize, on the grounds that there was no competition in the delivery of government services and that therefore public unions could hold cities and states hostage by going on strike and denying essential services to the public...that began to change in the mid-1950's...

...In 1960 the American Federation of Teachers mapped out a controversial strategy to win collective bargaining rights for teachers around the country, using...labor-friendly New York City as a test case...

...most of the warnings voiced about public-employee unions in those tumultuous years have proven accurate. Political leaders and labor experts predicted that government-employee unions would use their power over public services to win contracts with work rules far more generous and undemanding than in the private sector; and that without the restraints on salaries and benefits that the free marketplace imposes on private firms, unions would win increasingly meaty compensation packages that would be impossible to restrain or to roll back...

But what critics did not anticipate was how far public-employee unions would move beyond collective bargaining to inject themselves into the electoral and legislative processes...

Reinforcing the public-employee unions in the powerful new coalition of tax-eaters are the social-services groups created by the War on Poverty. Nominally private, they are sustained by and organized around public funding...This flood of money transformed many formerly private welfare organizations into government contractors, and their employees into quasi-public workers. It also spurred the creation of vast new networks of such organizations...

This social-services funding vastly expanded the publicly supported workforce almost overnight...

Almost from the War on Poverty's inception, these social-services employees and their clients began to show themselves as a powerful political force...

The gradual government takeover...has transformed...institutions, executives, and workers into unremitting lobbyists for ever greater public monies and expanding programs, and tireless foes of efforts to restrain costs...

The electoral activism of this New New Left coalition of tax eaters - public-employee unions, hospitals and healthcare -worker unions, and social-services agencies - has reshaped the politics of many cities. As the country's national political scene has edged rightward, thwarting their ambitions in Washington, these groups have turned their attention to urban America, where they still have the power to influence public policy...

Increasingly in cities around the country, the road to electoral success passes through the public-employee/health/social-services sector...

One reason why these politicians have succeeded electorally is that those who work in the tax-eater sector clearly have different voting priorities from private-sector workers or business owners...

....public-sector workers, who realize they are going to the polls to elect their bosses, make sure to remember to vote...

With so much of their economic future at stake in elections, the tax eaters have emerged as the new infantry of political campaigns, replacing the ward captains and district leaders of old-time political clubs...

Although it started out as a romantic but wrongheaded idea, the War on Poverty was the child of idealists who really believed that a benevolent, paternalistic government could offer solutions that America's private economy couldn't provide for the poor. But the most cherished ideals and programs of the movement have turned out to demonstrably wrong...

By the mid-1990's, Americans were eager for reform, and they got it...

In the face of such results, the new urban left has emerged as an increasingly cynical coalition, ever more focused on goals that benefit its members and their allies, even thought it retains the jargon of "social justice."...

Regardless of how transparent its aims now seem, this new coalition will remain formidable because the tax-eater sector is now so large in many cities and states that it can easily thwart reforms aimed at undermining its programs. With much of the legislative agenda merely concerned with expanding programs and enacting laws that add to its own numbers, the New New Left may be in the ascendancy for a long time to come.

A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled GM, France and Albany: What the declines of all three have in common (available for a fee) states:

At first glance, they seem to have little in common. But the riots in France over labor reform, the slow-motion suicide of General Motors, and the continuing decline of the New York economy all share one defining trait: entrenched and unchangeable union power.

These columns have always favored the right to collectively bargain…we should [not] fail to appreciate the consequences when unions become entrenched inside any organization…unions do not provide individual job or income security. On the contrary, they undermine security by contributing to broader business and economic decline.

At the national level, the French example is clear enough. While the French private sector is less unionized than America's, it must cope with mandated work rules that make it all but impossible to fire someone; so naturally companies are also reluctant to hire. The jobless rate is double America's, while youth unemployment is 23%. More significant is that the political clout of public-sector unions has blocked all but minor changes in these rules. Public-sector workers account for more than a quarter of the entire French work force (6.4 million of out 24.6 million), and their salaries and pensions made up 45% of the entire state budget as recently as 2003.

The current French protests are in response to a modest change that would allow employers to fire people under age 26 more easily. So entrenched has the politics of union entitlement become in France that even at the onset of their careers these young protesters are demanding security over opportunity. In the global economy, this means they will end up with less of both.

France remains a wealthy country, and its economic decline can be masked for a time as it lives off accumulated capital. But already the promises that its unions have extracted from the government seem unlikely to be kept. A growth rate of between 1% and 2% a year won't be enough to finance the pensions and health care of an aging nation. And facing up to those facts will require an increasingly painful political reckoning.

Here in the U.S., the same burden is slowly crippling New York…Power in the state capital of Albany is shared by Republicans and Democrats. But both parties bow before the public-sector unions, especially the teachers, and the health-care workers…

…New York's Medicaid costs are higher than those of Texas and Florida combined; a health-care insurance premium for a young family of four is roughly six times what it is across the border in Connecticut; and high-deductible health-savings accounts that can help the self-employed afford insurance can't even be offered in the state…

Another union-driven business cost is workers' compensation, and in New York the average cost per claim is second highest in the nation (after Louisiana) and 72% higher than the national average…

…upstate [New York] is a different story, with jobs and young people fleeing to better business climes. New York manufacturing employment fell by 41% between 1990 and 2005, or double the national rate.

Even Eliot Spitzer recently referred to upstate New York as "Appalachia." Alas, the Attorney General shows no sign of understanding that the heart of the problem lies in Albany…

As for GM, its management mistakes are legion and its weak product line well-known. But the root of its problem is that it long ago became a corporate version of the welfare state, with the same entrenched union interests…the size of its market dominance going back to its heyday 40 years ago allowed its managers to avoid confronting its uncompetitive wages, benefits and work rules even as they saw Toyota and Honda gaining in the rearview mirror.

In retrospect, GM management should have provoked a union showdown. Yet only a very brave CEO would have been willing to risk a potentially catastrophic strike on his watch for the sake of making the company more competitive after he retired. In any case, would the United Auto Workers really have budged? In 1998, young executive and future CEO Rick Wagoner endured a 54-day UAW wildcat strike at two plants in Flint, Michigan, after GM had tried to change some production rules. The strike shut down most GM production in North America and cost the company some $2 billion. In the end GM caved and the UAW escaped, having made virtually no concessions.

Even now at auto-parts maker Delphi--which is already in Chapter 11--the UAW is declaring it will take a strike that could destroy both Delphi and GM rather than agree to Delphi's proposed job cuts and work changes. As in France and New York, these union leaders would rather sink the company than make concessions that would reduce their own power.

This pattern has repeated itself again and again--in the steel and textile industries attacked by foreign competition, or the unionized grocery chains routed by Wal-Mart. The union answer has rarely been to work with a company to allow more job flexibility to become more competitive. The answer has typically been to seek a ruinous strike or lobby for political intervention that might stave off disaster for at best a few more years.

We recount all this because, even amid GM's decline and France's economic turmoil, most of America's liberal elites refuse to draw the right lesson. They cling to the belief that if only the Democrats can retake Congress, or the union movement can once again organize more of the American labor force, the old economy of union-backed job security and egalité will return. Or, worse, they propose seceding from global competition via protectionism. It is all a delusion. Down that road lies France--a nice place to vacation, but you wouldn't want to work there.

This is the central problem the liberal wing of the Democratic Party faces as it plots what to do if it does regain power this year, or in 2008…to govern for the long haul they need better ideas than trade barriers, a tax hike to increase the size of government, or the defense of the entitlement status quo.

They need to champion reforms to help individual workers better secure their own futures in a competitive global economy, rather than relying on the false hope of restoring the age of Walter Reuther. They need to promote portable pensions, cheaper health insurance and education choice. So far all we see is Jacques Chirac in American drag.

The Lighter Side of RI Senate '06

OK, we've been staying away from the Laffey/Chafee race, despite protestations in various comments sections. To tell the truth, nothing really "new" is going on that you can't get from the candidate's web sites. Nonetheless, here are a couple items that can be classified as "on the lighter side."

Mayor Laffey made a big to-do of unveiling something he called the "Rhody Reformer" at the PawSox home opener. What the heck was it? Here it is. (Hint: "That there's an RV, Clark.")

Meanwhile, Senator Chafee has been busy talking horses and had a whole chapter in Hugh Hewitt's new book named after him! (“It’s No Longer the Party of Lincoln—Chafee, That Is.")

Background on Prof. Dennis Michaud

Here's some more background on the new apparent GOP candidate for governor, Dennis Michaud. (And here's the audio link of Dan Yorke breaking of the story). First is an academic article he co-wrote with Kaitlyn A. Murphy about the Quonset Development Corporation. (The article is available for a fee). Michaud made reference to his work on the QDC in a ProJo Op-Ed (July 2005) he co-authored with other Brown University professors in support of Beacon Mutual's bid to privatize. The piece was aimed at showing how Governor Carcieri was inconsistent in approving the QDC's privatization via separation from RIEDC but opposing the privatization of Beacon Mutual. (As previous posts have shown, it's not quite that cut and dried). Finally, Prof. Michaud wrote about the responsibilities that the boards of public companies have in performing oversight on company management in the April 2005 edition of the Michael A. Kelly "Alert" (PDF). (He was also credited as being director of Brown University's Corporate Governance Initiative at that time).

Blogging RI

Ben Leubsdorf interviewed me for an article about Rhode Island blogs that appeared in yesterday's Brown Daily Herald. The resulting piece makes for interesting reading, although I probably didn't express my idealism about blogs as well as I might have. I did, however, try to stress that Anchor Rising is not mine alone, nor can I take total credit for its genesis. Sometimes, though, the restrictions on such pieces ween out the credit spreading.

Brown at URI

Not to assume too much, but it seems to me that RI Secretary of State and candidate for U.S. Senate Matt Brown is like his fellow state Democrats in that he hasn't had to speak to or wrangle with anybody with strongly conflicting views in far too long. I mean, think about this:

"I think it [pulling out of Iraq] is the best thing that we can do to help stabilize the situation in Iraq, given how badly the Bush administration has fouled it up," Brown said. "I do think that the root problem in Iraq is a political problem. It's an ancient, bitter conflict between the Shiites and the Sunnis ... Those groups are not going to solve their political differences as they know that our men and women are there to fight their fights for them."

So, to "stabilize" relations between these two religious groups that have been at each others' throats in a part of the world in which violence still carries a Dark Ages tint, we must allow them to fight their own fights. Of course, one could suggest that the reason the problem is a political one — as opposed to, say, a genocidal one — is precisely because the U.S. and coalition forces are around, but then again, not a few people on Brown's side of the aisle actually gave credence to Saddam's election returns.

And then there's this bit of boldness relying on ignorance:

Brown also discussed the problems facing college students in the state of Rhode Island. "I think the people are getting out of school because of the bad decisions that have come out of Washington. It is just very hard to make ends meet," Brown said. "From the cost of health care, to finding a good job, to paying off your college loans, we desperately need new leadership."

Busy as they are, I'd suggest that RI's collegiate youth needn't look so far as Washington to explain their difficulty making ends meet. In what Machiavellian class, I wonder, do they teach politicians to help create a problem and then to blame it on somebody else?

Yorke: GOP Primary Opponent for Carcieri?

Dan Yorke is reporting that Brown Adjunct Professor Dennis Michaud--who has testified on behalf of Beacon Mutual and has been on their payroll--has put forth the idea that he will run for Governor on the GOP ticket against incumbent Donald Carcieri. Michaud purportedly gives three main reasons for such a run:

1) Lack of economic progress.
2) State needs more moderate candidates (like Chafee).
3) He'll bring young people into the process.

He also claims that key Republicans initially approached him to run on the GOP ticket because, as they told him, the governor had financial problems and may not run. Michaud has stated that even if the governor can overcome these alleged financial difficulties, he will still run for governor (and thus in a primary against the governor) anyway.

Hm. Do you think this has anything to do with the focus that Governor Carcieri is bringing against Beacon Mutual? Nothing like good old fashioned threat by innuendo, huh? Rhode Island politics as usual. Yorke speculates that J. Michael Levesque--who happens to work for Harrah's Casino, who is also opposed by Governor Carcieri--may be one of those unnamed Republican insiders.

No Surprise, Voter Initiative Killed in Committee

As today's ProJo story said, the Senate Committee on Constitutions and Gaming Issues voted 6 to 4 against bringing Voter Initiative to the voters "after almost four hours of discussion and debate -- much of it familiar -- at a well-attended hearing at the State House." Those of us who have followed the VI debate are indeed "familiar" with the arguments. Of course, maybe not many are following the VI debate:

While supporters promoted the 20,000 voters who signed petitions supporting initiative, some lawmakers said they have not received much input from constituents.

"I don't think I've received five phone calls on it," said [West Warwick's Stephen] Alves. "Every two years at election time if the voters don't feel we are responsive they can throw us out."

The question is, was there no input because there is no voter interest, or is it because many of Alves' constituents may be confused because he is against Voter Initiative but all for bringing a casino vote to the people? I realize there is a difference between advocating for the concept of VI and advocating for a specific question. Gov. Carcieri has been taken to task for purportedly being inconsistent because he has the reverse stance of Alves: the governor supports VI and opposes a casino vote. On the face of it, it may seem that the Governor and Sen. Alves are both trying to have it both ways, but there is a difference. (And yes, I may drift into some of those "familiar arguments.")

The governor's support for the conceptual right of the citizens of Rhode Island to initiate a statewide vote and his personal opposition to a statewide vote on the particular issue of a casino is not inherently contradictory. For example, to follow the governor's logic, let's suppose that--with the help of his support--Voter Initiative gets passed in Rhode Island. Meanwhile, the governor maintains his opposition to a casino vote and no movement is made toward getting such a vote on the ballot. The people of Rhode Island themselves could use Voter Initiative to bring the casino question to a vote. Gov. Carcieri could still oppose it and do anything in his power to prevent it, but if all of the formalities and procedures outlined under the Voter Initiative law are followed, the vote would be put on the ballot despite the objections of the Governor or anyone else.

Sen. Alves' position is different. He would maintain the legislature's stranglehold on allowing or disallowing statewide votes and not let the RI people have any other option but to wend their way all of the various legislative roadblocks. If the legislature doesn't like an idea for whatever reason, they can stifle it. For instance, only through the influence of some special interest or large constituency will someone like Sen. Alves sponsor a bill calling for a statewide vote on a particular issue. And even then, only if that special interest (casino) has sufficient power to influence ($) a large portion (D) of the legislature will such a bill be passed. (Am I being too cynical?) There is no "Average Rhode Islander" lobby in the State House. Only with Voter Initiative can Rhode Islanders use the power of their collective voice to call for change or express their opinion.

David A. Mittell on the Mass Healthcare Plan

Projo columnist David A. Mittell likes the Massachusetts universal health care plan even less than I do.

Among other things, Mittell is concerned that using government regulation to force people to buy an inferior quality insurance product seems to be more of a giveaway to big insurance companies than it is good healthcare policy. Here is his complete list of objections...

Based on my speaking with legislators and health-care activists, who could, of course, only speculate, here is the scenario I think we ought to worry about:

• The bill is a sop to the powerful -- it protects big business and rewards big, profitable hospitals with big rate increases.
• It does not protect small business and small hospitals. It introduces an initially small $295 tax per worker per year on the labor of businesses not providing health insurance.
• It theoretically increases the number of insured, but has no way of assuring that the expanded coverage is reasonably comprehensive. It becomes, rather, a giveaway to insurance companies, and a bad deal for the newly insured.
• It doesn't appropriate enough money to provide good insurance. Its mandate for expanded coverage thus becomes what one legislator called "the camel's nose in the tent." When, in a year or two, the new plan is broke, without doing enough for the formerly uninsured, it will need a massive infusion of new cash, including a big increase in the $295-a-year tax on the labor of non-participating businesses.
• It creates a new bureaucracy with the impossible mandate of effecting top-down, bureaucratic "cost control." This entity doesn't control costs, but rather itself becomes a big cost.

The Massachusetts Univeral Health Care Plan

According to Pam Belluck in the New York Times...

Massachusetts is poised to become the first state to provide nearly universal health care coverage with a bill passed overwhelmingly by the legislature Tuesday that Gov. Mitt Romney says he will sign.

The plan is a complex mixture of mandatory coverage requirements, tax incentives, and although Ms. Belluck tries desperately to avoid using the term, tax increases. Here's a few specifics culled from the news article...

The bill, the product of months of wrangling between legislators and the governor, requires all Massachusetts residents to obtain health coverage by July 1, 2007.

Individuals who can afford private insurance will be penalized on their state income taxes if they do not purchase it. Government subsidies to private insurance plans will allow more of the working poor to buy insurance and will expand the number of children who are eligible for free coverage. Businesses with more than 10 workers that do not provide insurance will be assessed up to $295 per employee per year...

The Massachusetts bill creates a sliding scale of affordability ranging from people who can afford insurance outright to those who cannot afford it at all. About 215,000 people will be covered by allowing individuals and businesses with 50 or fewer employees to buy insurance with pretax dollars and by giving insurance companies incentives to offer stripped-down plans at lower cost. Lower-cost basic plans will be available to people ages 19 to 26.

Subsidies for other private plans will be available for people with incomes at or below 300 percent of the poverty level. Children in those families will be eligible for free coverage through Medicaid, an expansion of the current system...

Individuals who fail to get health insurance by July 2007 will first lose their personal exemption on their state taxes. In subsequent years, they would have to pay a penalty that could be as high as half of what an affordable health care premium would cost.

Losing an exemption on state taxes is a tax increase. A penalty is a tax increase. Tax increases aren't inherently bad, but let's be honest on what this program is doing -- raising taxes on young people to pay for universal health insurance.

An aide to Governor Romney explains the focus on the young...

Eric Fehrnstrom, the governor's communications director, said that for those people with incomes above 300 percent of poverty, "our assumption was that these would be mostly single mothers who just did not have the wherewithal to get insurance. It turned out it was mostly young males. In some cases they are making very attractive salaries. These are people who just don't imagine themselves needing care, but of course when they break a leg when they're out bungee jumping they go to the hospital and we end up paying for their care anyway."

This explanation should raise an immediate red-flag. Apparently, to initiate this program, the government needs to immediately grab a bunch of money from young people who don't use much healthcare and transfer it to others who do.

The problem is that the windfall of dollars added to the system is a one-time-only event that contributes nothing towards controlling costs. Once everyone is forced into the system (that has helped to create the problem by limiting the choices that people have), there's no one else left to tap, and measures like dropping treatments from coverage and even rationing become the only options as costs continue to rise. Ultimately, the Massachusetts plan does more to delay necessary reform of health insurance than it does to solve the problem.

Incidentally, today's OpinionJournal editorial mentions one of the simpler solution that would give people more control over their healthcare...

Congressman John Shadegg (R., Ariz.) has a bill to let Americans purchase affordable health insurance from any of the 50 states, thus bypassing state mandates that drive up insurance costs in New York and many other places.

Concealed Weapons and Federalism

I don't think that there have been many posts on gun issues hereabouts, but Michael Barone--commenting on David Kopel's analysis of the spread of concealed carry laws--remarks that the spread of such laws is a good sign for federalism. Nebraska recently became the 40th state to approve a concealed carry ("shall-issue") law. According to Barone:

Nebraska's action means that 40 of the 50 states have shall-issue (or even less restrictive) laws on gun possession. This is a great example of federalism: Reforms that could never have passed Congress have swept across the country, as people in some states have learned from the experience of others. While centralized elites have concentrated on restricting gun ownership, with little practical effect, decentralized non-elites in the states have promoted legal gun ownership, with results that seem benign.

Kopel's analysis and description of the typical process that has occurred in each state that has eventually approved of a shall carry law is instructive. He also explains that, while Rhode Island technically has a shall-issue law, it is not followed. Here's why:

Rhode Island actually has a Shall Issue law (for issuance by local law enforcement) and a Capricious Issue law (for issue by the Attorney General). The Attorney General has succeeded, at least temporarily, in stifling the local Shall Issue system, but a decision (PDF) of the Rhode Island Supreme Court suggests that this state of affairs is untenable. [Though the Brady Campaign has a different interpretation. - MAC] All that is necessary to implement Shall Issue in Rhode Island is a new Attorney General with a different attitude, or the proper legal challenge. Rhode Island too seems a likely candidate to become a Shall Issue state.

Kopel bases his evaluation of shall-issue in Rhode Island on his own research (PDF, p.20-30 in the file. It is taken from the Albany Law Review).

UPDATE: Meanwhile, David Gelernter believes that a new turn toward federalism can be useful as a way to tamp down the polarization that has arisen in contemporary America. He believes reining in the power of the Supreme Court would be the key. It's worth a read. (via Ramesh Ponnuru at The Corner)

Lead Paint Cleanup Could be in the Billions

In today's Projo, Peter B. Lord reports on the damage determination phase of the Rhode Island lead paint trial...

State lawyers are asking a Superior Court judge to appoint a public health expert to plan and oversee a lead-paint cleanup program in Rhode Island that they say could cost between $1.37 billion and $3.74 billion.

The proposal is part of the final step in the state's public nuisance lawsuit against Sherwin-Williams, NL Industries and Millennium Holdings...

The state lawyers say their witnesses uniformly argued that the safest and most prudent policy is to remove all lead from homes.

"The single question that remains is not legal, but practical -- how should these defendants undertake abatement of the public nuisance in Rhode Island," the lawyers argued.

However, when contrasted against DuPont's $12.5 million dollar "settlement" in the same case, the billion-dollar damage figures raise a question or two.

The DuPont "settlement", according to an earlier Peter B. Lord Projo article, took the form of charitable contributions, including "$6.6 million to abate lead problems in 600 houses...funneled through the Children's Forum". According to Julie Creswell's New York Times article, Rhode Island Attorney General Patrick Lynch was willing to offer similar deals to the other defendants in the lawsuit...

Mr. Lynch said the other paint companies could have reached a similar conclusion, an assertion disputed by Philip H. Curtis, a partner at Arnold & Porter representing Atlantic Richfield.

The questions are...
1. If damages in this case are being determined by the public interest, why was DuPont allowed to settle for a fraction of the amount that the other companies may pay and address only a fraction of the homes (fewer than 1%) that the other companies must address?
2. If all of the companies had taken a DuPont-type deal, where would the billions that the state is now claiming is necessary for cleaning up lead paint have come from?

US Census Bureau: Rhode Island 10th in Per-Pupil Spending

The Associated Press is reporting on the release of United States Census Bureau report detailing the amounts spent on elementary and secondary education in each state. Here's the AP summary of New England...

Vermont spent an average of $11,128 on each of its public school students, which is the fourth highest per pupil spending in the nation...

Vermont was not alone among its New England neighbors in having a high per-pupil spending level. Connecticut was fifth at $10,788; Massachusetts was sixth at $10,693, Rhode Island was 10th at $9,903, Maine was 11th at $9,534, and New Hampshire was 17th at $8,860, the Census Bureau said.

Another number from the report that jumps out is that Rhode is 51st (dead last) in terms of "capital outlays" at $28,171,000. Here is the definition of a capital outlay...

This category refers to the direct expenditure by public school systems for construction of buildings and roads; purchases of equipment, land, and existing structures; and for payments on capital leases. Amounts for additions, replacements, and major alterations to fixed works and structures are included. However, expenditure for maintenance and minor repairs to buildings and equipment is classified as current spending.

For comparison, Delaware, also a small state, spent $158,252,000 on capital outlays.

The Lead Paint Trial Continues

Julie Creswell of the New York Times had an excellent summary in Sunday's paper of the Rhode Island lead paint trial and how it may not be as finished as you think it is. In addition to detailing the history of the case and the pending issues involving possible appeals and setting damages, Ms. Creswell also reported on a mostly unnoticed aspect of the case that was heard today by the Rhode Island Supreme court...

As painful and expensive as the case's outcome could be for the paint companies, it also raises issues that go far beyond that industry. In particular, should state officials be allowed to essentially outsource public-health and public-nuisance cases to private legal firms that will try the cases free but take a piece of any recoveries made? Seven years ago, Sheldon Whitehouse, then Rhode Island's attorney general, agreed to those terms.

Defense lawyers representing the paint companies say that contingency-fee lawyers are interested only in racking up huge settlements, not in addressing the underlying problem. They have formally challenged the practice before the Rhode Island Supreme Court, which is scheduled to hear oral arguments on the issue tomorrow.

The official name of the case is State of Rhode Island v. Lead Paint Industries Association.

There's a slight quibble with Ms. Creswell's reporting. The use of contingency fees in this case is an issue, in part, because the lawyers didn't really provide their services for free. According to the Washington Legal Foundation, which has filed an amicus brief in the case,...

The State agreed that if it ever decided to drop the suit, it would be required to pay its attorneys on a quantum meruit basis; i.e., the value of all hours devoted to the case, at the attorneys' regular hourly rates....

[In their amicus brief], WLF also argued that the contract clause requiring a quantum meruit fee payment if the State seeks to abandon its suit effectively cedes all control of the suit to the lawyers -- because the Attorney General does not have at his disposal the millions of dollars required to satisfy that fee obligation.

What the WLF is pointing out is that after contingency-fee lawyers have invested so much time in a case, the state must continue to pursue it, not in the interest of the public good, but because it's the only way to pay off the lawyers without bankrupting the Attorney General�s office.

There's another dimension to this problem raised in the WLF brief...

WLF argued that the private attorneys handling the case for Rhode Island have an irreconcilable conflict with the State because it is in their interest to maximize any damage award paid by the defendant -- the larger the award, the larger the fee they will receive. WLF noted that a damage award based on the cost of removing all lead paint would be vastly larger than an award based on the cost of ensuring that painted surfaces on older buildings are kept intact. WLF argued that the decision of the attorneys to seek the former remedy -- despite the views of the Rhode Island legislature and virtually all scientists that the latter remedy is far better from a public health standpoint -- can only be explained by the attorneys' financial interest in maximizing their own fees.

In other words, since contingency fee lawyers are compensated based of damages awarded, they have an incentive to advocate (in the name of the state) for whatever is most expensive, not for what is most effective.

A third problem with states hiring contingency-fee layers to pursue class-action cases is described in detail in an amicus brief filed by the United States Chamber of Commerce. Remember the cronyism that everyone was upset about after the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court? Well, according to the Chamber of Commerce, it runs rampant through the world of public contingency fee litigation. Their amicus brief lists 7 cases in 7 different states (list) where Attorney Generals made either their political donors or their former law firms rich by farming out contingency fee cases.

Unfortunately, Rhode Island does not seem to be immune to this. Jack McConnell, the lead lawyer in the lead paint case, is a big donor to the Rhode Island Democratic Party. Should the Attorney General be using his office to help enrich big Democratic donors?

Finally, one other campaign contribution of interest has been brought to Anchor Rising�s attention. Last summer, paint manufacturer DuPont "settled" their part of the case for donations totaling $12.5 million dollars to be given to various charities. Not everyone involved in the DuPont agreement, however, agrees that "settling" describes the final result. Here is Dupont's position, as quoted in the Times...

A spokeswoman for DuPont, Mary Kate Campbell, said, "When you look at the terms of the understanding that we reached with the Rhode Island attorney general, the attorney general and the state of Rhode Island got nothing. Nor did any of the outside lawyers."

But is it true that the Attorney General got nothing? Last December, after the case was "settled", a lawyer by the name of Bernard Nash gave a $1,000 campaign contribution to Rhode Island Attorney General Patrick Lynch. Mr. Nash works for the law firm of Dickstein, Shapiro, Morin & Oshinsky. Mr. Nash's firm is listed on a website called the "Dupont Legal Model" as a "Challenge Award Winner" with Bernard Nash listed as an "Engagement Partner"

Here's how the Dickstein website describes their relationship with DuPont...

DuPont continues to rely on Dickstein Shapiro's attorneys for a competitive edge in resolving complex public policy and litigation matters, and recently recognized the Firm as one of the best among its select network of Primary Law Firms and Service Providers.

Should an Attorney General really be taking a $1,000 contribution from a member of a law firm involved with a corporation that just settled a multi-million dollar case with his state?

These are the cases of cronyism listed in the US Chamber of Commerce amicus brief in State of Rhode Island v. Lead Paint Industries Association...

• In 1996, then-Attorney General Carla Stovall of Kansas hired her former law partners at Entz & Chanay to serve as local counsel in the State�s tobacco lawsuit.
• Then-Texan Attorney General Dan Morales also hired contingency fee lawyers to file his state�s tobacco litigation in 1996. Four of the five hired firms together had contributed nearly $150,000 in campaign contributions to Morales from 1990 to 1995.
• South Carolina Attorney General Charles Condon came under fire for cronyism after he handpicked seven law firms to represent the state in the tobacco litigation�Six of the seven firms included the attorney general�s friends or political supporters.
• Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon selected five law firms that had made over $500,000 in political contributions over the preceding eight years, most to him and his party, to handle the state�s participation in the multi-state litigation against tobacco companies.
• The two firms selected by the Pennsylvania Attorney General Mike Fisher to handle the tobacco lawsuits also happened to be among his largest campaign donors, placing in the top ten on a list of more than two-hundred contributors.
• In 1994, Louisiana Attorney General Richard Ieyoub proposed to hire fourteen law firms � including many past contributors to his campaigns � to pursue environmental claims on behalf of his office.
• Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal requested letters from individual firms or consortia of firms to represent the state in the tobacco litigation. The Attorney General selected four of sixteen firms that expressed interest. As reported in the local media, the three Connecticut-based firms included General Blumental�s own former law firm�[a firm] whose name partner is married to [a partner of Blumental�s own former law firm]�[and a firm] whose managing partner�served as personal counsel and counselor to Governor John Rowland.

Tocqueville on State Legislatures

Here's a historical addendum to Andrew's point about Voter Initiative and it's purported incompatibility with Representative government. Tocqueville's observations concerning the functions of each House of the bicameral state legislature's of the early 19th century seem to imply that they already were getting a bit redundant.

The legislative power of the state is vested in two assemblies, the first of which generally bears the name of the Senate.

The Senate is commonly a legislative body, but it sometimes becomes an executive and judicial one. It takes part in the government in several ways, according to the constitution of the different states; but it is in the nomination of public functionaries that it most commonly assumes an executive power. It partakes of judicial power in the trial of certain political offenses, and sometimes also in the decision of certain civil cases. The number of its members is always small.

The other branch of the legislature, which is usually called the House of Representatives, has no share whatever in the administration and takes a part in the judicial power only as it impeaches public functionaries before the Senate.

The members of the two houses are nearly everywhere subject to the same conditions of eligibility. They are chosen in the same manner, and by the same citizens. The only difference which exists between them is that the term for which the Senate is chosen is, in general, longer than that of the House of Representatives. The latter seldom remain in office longer than a year; the former usually sit two or three years.

By granting to the senators the privilege of being chosen for several years, and being renewed seriatim, the law takes care to preserve in the legislative body a nucleus of men already accustomed to public business, and capable of exercising a salutary influence upon the new-comers.

By this separation of the legislative body into two branches the Americans plainly did not desire to make one house hereditary and the other elective, one aristocratic and the other democratic. It was not their object to create in the one a bulwark to power, while the other represented the interests and passions of the people. The only advantages that result from the present constitution of the two houses in the United States are the division of the legislative power, and the consequent check upon political movements; together with the creation of a tribunal of appeal for the revision of the laws. [Emphasis added]

Of course, the irony here in Rhode Island is that we have effectively created two "aristocratic" houses in our legislature. Maybe one of the first Voter Initiative's should be for term limits?

Why Voter Initiative is Not Incompatible with Representative Democracy

In previous postings, Don has discussed some of his reservations about voter initiative. Don's reservations, however, should not be confused with the weakest argument against voter initative, the argument that VI is inherently an affront to American-style representative democracy.

In a Projo op-ed, State Representative John Patrick Shanley frets that "Voter initiative lacks the elements that representative democracy provides (for all its faults) to ensure policies and priorities for all its citizens." In the Pawtucket Times, Jim Baron quotes Robert Walsh, executive director of the National Education Association of Rhode Island, as saying...

"Democrats are supporting a republican form of government while Republicans are supporting what has been called direct democracy.

"Voter initiative does not work," Walsh said flatly. Some initiative proposals could be "devastating to public education and other public institutions."

And at RI Future, the host of the site, in his typically overwrought style, objects that "Voter Initiative undermines democracy at its core."

They're all wrong, particularly with respect to the Rhode Island version of VI. Here's why.

The designers of the American constitutional system, believers in limited government that they were, did not create a two-house legislature because they believed that twice as much government to be twice as good. They created two houses to serve two different purposes.

One of the houses was a "Senate" whose members served long terms and were not subject to a popular vote (remember, Senators were originally chosen by state legislatures). This structure was designed to allow Senators to do what was right, even if it was not popular at the time they did it. The hope was that Senators would be drawn from an educated elite and carefully deliberate the needs of the country and the needs of the government when passing laws.

But elites are not angels. The founders understood that the elites would also have their own interests, and might use government to further them at the expense of everyone else (hmmm, sound familiar?). To guard against this possibility, the founders also created a "House of Representatives" with a structure very different from the structure of the Senate. Representatives were directly elected by the people, their terms of office were much shorter, and the whole House had to stand for election during each cycle. The hope here was that the House would be the branch of government that closely mirror and protect the interests of the common people.

For a combination of reasons -- an increasing population probably the most important, but also gerrymandering, the increasing complexity of campaign finance laws making it difficult for challengers to get started, and rules that make the House leaders very powerful statewide without being accountable to all of a state's voters -- it hasn't always worked out out as designed in state legislatures. The "lower" houses of many legislatures have become effectively insulated from the voters, and have become more likely to represent the views of elites and special interests than they are to represent the views of average people.

The final result, in Rhode Island at least, is that instead of having a government composed of a House and a Senate, we've ended up with two Senates (ask yourself, is there any difference between your civic relationship with your State Senator and your State Rep?) and, as the design considerations predict, with a legislative process with very limited checks on the power of elite special interests.

All voter initiative does is create a alternative pathway through the government where the interests of the people can be represented without being ignored by self-interested elites who have captured the legislative process. In American-style constitutional democracy, it is not uncommon for a legislative process to have multiple possible paths. Using the Federal government as an example, a bill passed by both houses becomes law with either a Presidential signature OR a 2/3 override vote. A constitutional amendment can be proposed by either both houses of Congress OR a series of conventions called in the states. Voter initiative fits into this tradition; a proposed bill becomes a law through either the legislative process OR through voter initiative.

A slightly better solution might be to have voter initiative be a process by which a bill can become law by bypassing the house, while still requiring Senate (full Senate only, no killing a bill in a single committee allowed) and Gubernatorial approval. But the current voter initiative proposal, where the people can be represented in the initative process, and our dual-chamber Senate can still act on or repeal a passed initiative, is a reasonable step towards restoring some necessary balance to state government.

Consequences of Campaign Finance Reform

In today’s Projo, Scott Mayerowitz reports on the out-of-state funds pouring into the Rhode Island Senate campaign...

Rhode Island's Senate race is hardly a local contest.

Two out of every three dollars raised so far have come from out of state…

With less than six months to go before the Senate primary, donors have contributed nearly $4.3 million, as of the reporting period that ended Dec. 31. That number is expected to grow substantially when new figures are released April 15.

Most of the money so far has come largely from big cities on the East and West coasts.

New York residents donated more than $500,000 by the end of December. California contributors were right behind, with $440,000. Money also flowed in from Massachusetts, Florida, Illinois and Washington, D.C.

What is often overlooked in the debate about campaign finance reform is the effect it has on how candidates spend their time. Mayerowitz's article provides a nice snapshot…

[Matt] Brown has raised 72 percent of his money from out of state, a higher percentage than any other candidate.

Brown's top-giving ZIP code outside Rhode Island is the posh Beverly Hills 90210. In the last four months, Brown has spent at least nine days fundraising in the Los Angeles area, according to his campaign.

[Sheldon] Whitehouse is also tapping national money, with New York his top source so far.

Director Martin Scorsese hosted a Whitehouse fundraiser in his Manhattan townhouse last month, an event cohosted by former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota.

These are yet more examples of how campaign finance “reform” has failed. CFR is supposed to reduce the effect of money in politics. Instead, as currently implemented, it makes candidates from everywhere beholden to the wealthy areas of the country where lots of people capable of donating $2,100 to a single candidate can easily gather in one place. To be competitive, politicians have to take time away from discussing ideas with their constituents to work on raising money from out-of-staters.

Incumbents like this system, because it gives them an advantage. Their national level connections allow them to tap into a nationwide fundraising system that can deliver donations from all over the country. Challengers without that kind of access have a harder time raising the money they need to get their message out (unless, for example, the challenger is an independently wealthy former Attorney General with lots of free time on his hands; of course, our system is supposed to be open to more than just independently wealthy Attorney Generals with lots of free time on their hands).

In an OpinionJournal interview from a few months back, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich proposed a creative solution to this problem…

"McCain-Feingold was a very bad bill which strengthened millionaires, weakened the middle class and made it harder for challengers. I would repeal any limit on people giving in the constituency they vote in." But that's not all. He'd also "simply ban all fund-raising in Washington. You can do that by straight out rules of the House and Senate." Admittedly, Mr. Gingrich has filed this proposal under "can't do." But even so, it has an elegance about it that makes it alluring….

"Now what you've got is a dance in which members go to unending PAC [political action committee] fundraisers hosted by lobbyists in order to raise enough money that they can't be challenged, which means they don't have to go home, so they can have more time free to go to more fundraisers hosted by more lobbyists. I just think that system's wrong."

No limits might be extreme, but raising the ceiling on local contributions is a reasonable idea that would increase the amount of time Rhode Island politicians spend listening to -- and ultimately representing -- Rhode Islanders, instead of out-of-state interests.