This is an Emergency

During the fund drive I heard Joe Donahue and this station working hard to bring Bill McKibben to this audience and lead us away from the catastrophe of global warming. He and the station did a great service and I am proud to be associated with them.

If your house was on fire you wouldn’t stand like a bystander waiting for it to collapse; you’d call the fire department and get anyone you could reach out of there fast.

If you child or your grandchild were about to drown, you would not turn your back moaning that it was too awful to contemplate; you’d raise hell to get your children out.

If your children disappeared on a camping trip, you wouldn’t sit around moaning; you’d search, call the rangers, find those children.

If your baby was dying of thirst, you’d find water. If your child was dying of hunger you’d find food. I met one six year old girl whose mother released her to others who brought her to America after the young girl’s brother had died of starvation in Liberia. It’s awful to contemplate but as parents we do what we have to in order to protect our children. 

Response to rhetoric from the Republican Convention

I have no illusion that what I say today will register over the important news that will be coming out of the Democratic Convention in North Carolina. But I want to respond to the Republican Convention and the party line the Republicans have been repeating.

Romney at the Convention told his people that “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. MY promise…is to help you and your family.” In other words Romney made fun of the single largest threat to the American way of life, coming in hurricanes, droughts, floods and the spread of serious diseases, suggesting if we didn’t already know it that the basic Republican position on the seriousness of the environmental threat is denial and ignorance.

But the basic Republican attack on Obama is that his policies have failed the economy.

Regulation and the Slide to Hell

There’s too much regulation, says Romney. Too much regulation, say some businesses. It’s always categorical, not about which regulation. Just that regulation is bad. Stop it.

The forests are burning. The drought continues. The deserts are growing. The earth is warming. The diseases are spreading. The storms are destroying our towns and farms. The glaciers are melting and the oceans are retaking our shores, submerging islands, making refugees and warriors. But oh block the regulation.

Character, Capitalism and Regulation

Many conservatives are concerned that we have lost a sense of moral obligations, without which the state must eventually fail. They trace most of the nation’s ills to character, including the national debt, crime, failing schools and poverty to name a few. 

Outdated Legal Doctrines

The law of contract, based on the consent of the parties, and the law of torts, based on our obligations when no agreement covers what happened, are fundamental to American law. There is only one problem. Both fields are hopelessly out of date.

Public Health

As I write this, I just listened to another story about people who want to drink raw milk. When I was 11, recovering from an illness, my doctor, the chairman of pediatrics at a New York City hospital, told my parents to put me on raw milk – but specific milk medically supervised to make sure that it didn’t carry the botulism and other diseases that could have killed me quickly.

Let me make one other disclosure. I never met my sister. She died in 1927 at the age of three. I came along many years later. It was only in my generation that parents no longer expected to lose some of their children. So I have a foot and a heart in and an understanding of both worlds.

Supreme Court Plays Guardian Counsel in the Health Care Argument

Let’s understand what that argument about the health insurance mandate was about. Everybody agreed that a single payer system would have been constitutionally OK. It would have been based on the taxing power. However toxic taxes are to the public, legally they are not particularly toxic. Everyone admits the taxing power is broad.

Toxic Taxes and Health Insurance

Yesterday the Supreme Court heard argument about whether the health insurance mandate is or is not a “tax”. If it were a “tax” then this legal challenge might be three years premature. If it were a “tax” we would be talking about the taxing power in addition to the commerce power. If it were a “tax”, it would be much harder to attack this law. So why isn’t it a “tax”?

Veterans

Dr. Ed Tick, an internationally known psychologist and founder of Soldiers Heart, came to speak at Albany Law a few days ago about the problems that combat veterans have reentering society.

Some of what he told us stunned me. Veterans comprise half the homeless population in the U.S.

Cities

There’s a lot of dissatisfaction with government these days. The tea party fumes about taxes. Politicians talk about moral hazard if they do anything for people, even when there was no way to protect oneself beforehand and the resulting situation is impossible for people to deal with. Most of that strikes me as nonsense on stilts. But I too have my pet peeves. I’ve been reluctant to talk about one, but the September issue of Scientific American has encouraged me.