The Case Against Gorsuch

My views on what we can expect from Judge Gorsuch are spelled out on TheHill.org at The case against Gorsuch: It’s all about precedent.

Chemicals, Infertility and Morals

You’ll be subjected to rolling commentary on innumerable aspects of the Gorsuch hearings. I prefer, as I often do, to address deeper aspects of our competing value systems that underlie the surface of our political battles. One is the human impact of our treatment of planet earth.

Human behavior is injuring our environment. But nature has ways of winning the battle. It turns out that our fertility is as fragile as the eagles’ before DDT was banned, that endocrine disruptors and other environmental toxins are damaging our ability to reproduce – they’re in our kitchens, pesticides and other purchases.[1] That can be a powerful counterattack against the human activity that is warming the globe. If we become infertile and our population plummets, America will become a sad, lonely, vulnerable place, and, quite likely, conquered by any healthier peoples left.

Nevertheless, I’m sick of making consequential arguments, to tell people that if we don’t do this or that, bad things will happen. I think the arguments I’ve been making are air tight. But the science floats over people’s heads. A women, well-enough educated to know better, told me that she chose not to think about the environment because it was too big to deal with. Her comment made clear to me that reason doesn’t reach nearly enough people. Science won’t solve anything unless we accept and act on it.

So let’s address the moral issue. No one, no business, no company or corporation has the right to put toxins in the environment, chemicals that can make it impossible for people to reproduce or kill or maim those of us alive, or make us produce deformed and handicapped children – no one and no company has that right. And they don’t have the right to change the subject, throw smoke in our eyes, saying something else is the problem when they aren’t bothering to check. We’ve had enough lies. This is not a football game where deception is a winning strategy. In human life, deception is sinful, immoral, totally unacceptable. Taking risks with other people’s lives and making excuses for it is criminal.

If there is an economic problem, then, as many labor leaders have suggested for decades, let’s share the work, or create other jobs that don’t do damage – jobs aren’t an excuse for hurting people. Hurting people isn’t a job; it’s a crime. People aren’t entitled to work at criminal enterprises.

The Cabinet and the President and the Members of Congress and the state and local governments aren’t entitled to commit the crime of murder by poisoning the environment. Pro-lifers and liberals should be united on the environmental front given the enormity of the killing, of adults, children, fetuses and sperm. We’ve all seen multiple films with populations at risk and the starship or other craft working hard to prevent destruction of civilizations. The authors of those stories were trying to portray the immorality of destroying civilizations, and they were warning us of the likelihood that we would face that problem.

How many of us are moral enough to deal with this issue? Isn’t it criminal to support the rape of the air, land, food and water that give us life? Isn’t it criminal to carelessly poo-poo the dangers? How many of our corporate and elected officials are criminals?

Those with so little respect for the lives of fellow human beings must repent, stop and stop those who do, immediately and completely.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, March 21, 2017.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/opinion/sunday/are-your-sperm-in-trouble.html.

Trump and Jobs

Last week I commented that scholars of intolerance tell us that feeling threatened often leads to hate. That’s one reason the economic threat to some American workers matters to all of us.

Trump is clearly working with the free marketeers. The free market is not about your, or workers’ rights; it’s about your boss’s or your company’s right to close your plant, move, lower your wages, reject your union, or just skip protecting your safety.

Trump makes different noises when talking about your jobs and when writing rules and hiring his cabinet. But his Republican Senate will insist on a free market, and Trump is counting on it.

Trump told us he wants to eliminate 75% of regulations. Those regulations protect employees and consumers; in other words, you and me. They protect our wages, require safer working conditions, ban poisons from our food and water and require companies to give us what we paid for. That’s how Trump shows us his true colors.

Obama saved thousands of jobs by saving American auto makers and growing the economy by hundreds of thousands of jobs per month – but gets no credit. Trump may have saved a few hundred but people think he takes action. With victories like that we can all starve.

Trump’s focus on the optics of small victories keeps us looking the wrong way. U.S. factory output is growing. But the jobs have changed. Missing are factory jobs for poorly educated people. I don’t say that out of disrespect. My Uncle Hershel, a truly lovely man, was a factory worker. I remember him sitting by my bed when I was ill. What I’m talking about is how to get good jobs for people like him. If we expect jobs to show up the same way they did a century ago, we’re whistling in the wind. If we think Trump can trump marketplace change by jawboning a few companies, we’re spitting in the wind. He doesn’t have the time or tax cuts to do it that way.

Central New York was once a manufacturing powerhouse. What’s left are mostly small towns far from traditional jobs. Yet one can now work thousands of miles from where things have to be made or done. We could be linked in to the world IF we invested in and rebuilt the economy, instead of jawboning the owners of obsolete factories.

And education must be available and affordable for everyone who wants a good job. Education sounds like elitism to many workers. But what made America an economic powerhouse was our system of mass education. And that’s part of why those who think we can go back to a prior era of American greatness are spitting in the wind – the rest of the world has caught up. To provide jobs, we need to provide retraining for mid-career workers on top of excellent schools, pre-school and after-school programs – all of which provide jobs.

Yes education will have to change. I’m a dinosaur, standing up in front of a class of students, even though the alternatives, so far, are not working very well. But when people figure out better methods, education will take off again – here or elsewhere. That’s where we need evidence-based experimentation – science. We rely on science from morning till night for the things we touch and use. Denying science is the height of idiocy, not a mark of greatness.

Trump yells about foreigners and markets. It’s our job to address reality.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, March 14, 2017.

How Can We Protect American Workers

Trump’s power, and his policies on jobs, immigrants, religious and ethnic hatreds and the Alt-wrong are all related.

Scholars of intolerance tell us that threat breeds hate. I suspect that all we can say about why immigrants and Muslims are really good people only makes those who feel threatened feel more threatened, because instead of talking about their needs we’re praising someone else.

So I want to talk about the needs of Americans who feel threatened economically and what can be done regarding their economic losses, recognizing that the disfunction in American politics is partly due to the desperation of workers who’ve lost once good jobs.

Protecting American workers is crucial both because people suffer when they can’t find good jobs, and because desperate or threatened people take dangerous risks at the polls and elsewhere. We must protect workers both for their sakes and for ours; it’s much the same thing.

It’s our job because government fiscal, tax, programmatic and other policy decisions daily determine how many jobs there are. Some people can make their own opportunities, but, to be fair, most good, decent, hard-working people can’t.

What can we do about it? Sometimes it helps just to set out the options. Here are the choices I can see:

FDR created unemployment compensation and Nixon proposed a negative income tax – safety-net approaches based on direct income transfers. Many object, including those who benefit from handouts, tax loopholes, deductions, farm price supports, subsidies etc. – the tax code and the budget are replete with them. But direct financial transfers are one possibility.

A second approach is to pay for jobs indirectly through trade policies. All three presidential candidates talked about that. I understand the fear of foreign competition even though there are reasons to look for other solutions for American workers: limiting foreign imports hides the cost in the price of things we buy, and isolates the American economy from developments elsewhere. It also might not work; actual hiring decisions would rest on other people’s decisions. But we can’t overcome the fear if we can’t commit to other steps, and all the talk about the risk to Social Security fans that fear.

A third approach, the conservative free market approach, is not really a solution for the working person at all – it simply puts the monkey on workers’ backs to find jobs or starve.

A fourth approach is to create new jobs by government action – fiscal stimulus, infrastructure development, and investment in science and education, all of which call for construction, maintenance and technical jobs. That’s what Obama called for but Congress drastically whittled his effort down.

Why can’t government be employer of last resort? That would automatically support a minimum wage, create better communities, and make life better for all of us. It’s not the free lunch some people worry about; it’s a job. What’s so terrible about giving people what Tom Paxton called “a job of work to do”? There’s plenty to do if we were willing to invest in our people, our workers, our infrastructure, and our environment. Sometimes spending a little can make the community more attractive and the economy zing while providing a decent income to people who need a job.

Some countries use all of those methods and have quite robust economies.

Those are the alternatives I can see: the free marketeers’ defining it away as the workers’ problem, the safety net approach of income transfers, paying indirectly through trade policies or subsidies for the appearance of helping workers, or creating jobs through fiscal stimulus or hiring people to do needed work. My preference is to put people to work – that way protecting others is good for us all. One way or the other, standing up for each other is essential.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, March 7, 2017.