Year: 2011

Every once in a while I read a news story that’s so slimy and in which civilized humans act so poorly that it makes me want to take a shower or disinfect. 

The latest skin-crawler comes from Dr. Phil Haeck (probably pronounced “hack”!), president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), who has advised plastic surgeons not to label as “cancer” a rare type of cancer linked to breast implants.  Instead, the good doctor wants his fellow plastic surgeons to call it “a condition,” and by all means avoid such terms as malignancy, tumor or cancer.

Now I’m inclined from the get-go to dislike anything plastic surgeons say.  Plastic surgery has its uses, for example, after severe burns, an accident or a mastectomy.  But most plastic surgery, and all plastic surgery that’s advertised in upscale local magazines all over the country, targets vain and insecure people who don’t like their own looks.  That makes plastic surgeon a particularly expensive, painful and pernicious part of the great American dream machine that establishes an ideal of beauty and then tries to make people feel insecure enough about not achieving the ideal to buy the products and services of the cosmetic, love advice and related industries.  Of course it’s not just looks and sexuality that are commoditized in contemporary America, but all emotions and emotional expression.

It’s bad enough to brazenly manipulate the emotions of insecure people to get them to have their noses reshaped, their breasts enlarged or the wrinkles stretched out of their faces.  But to hide a potential cancer that could arise from perhaps the most popular of such procedures—breast implants—is unethical and immoral. 

The unctuous seriousness with which the organization explained away Dr. Haeck’s comments by saying they were taken out of context only made it worse.  The context that the organization supplied was a discussion of a more dangerous type of cancer than the one that the breast implants actually cause.  Of course, both the more dangerous type and the less dangerous type linked to the implants are both typically called “cancer.”

If the good doctor had advised breast-builders to play down the risk, which the Food and Drug Administration recently called quite small, I would not be up in arms.  But Dr. Haeck didn’t play down the risk; he changed the name of the risk from “cancer,” something that makes everyone break out in cold sweats, to “condition,” something ambiguous and only potentially dangerous. 

That’s called a lie, and the ASPS should have met it by terminating Dr. Haeck’s employment.

The Republicans in state offices are taking the fact that their supporters voted in the last election whereas the Democrats’ supporters stayed home as an absolute mandate for change.  I’m not the first and hopefully won’t be the last to point out that in every state it seems, the Republican governors and legislatures are shoving extreme right-wing positions down the throats of citizens, ignoring the fact that surveys show that voters wanted one thing and one thing only—more jobs.

Most notorious at the moment is the attempt of the new Wisconsin Republican governor Scott Walker to unilaterally end collective bargaining with public unions, but Walker is the mere tip of an iceberg of anti-public union activity. New Jersey, Connecticut (Democratic governor), Ohio and Florida are just some of the states in which governors want to balance the budget on the backs of public unions. 

Side note: In going after public unions, these governors are taking advantage of the low esteem in which the average voter currently holds unions.  The anti-union feeling which today is so prevalent among the non-wealthy is a text book case of media brainwashing overcoming the best interests of individuals.  Studies show that unions raise the overall income of most people because they lead to higher incomes both for members and for other employees whose employers have to keep up with union wages and benefits to compete.  But despite this fact, many employees remain adamantly against unions.  The impact of the news media in shaping anti-union opinions since 1980 has been two-fold: 1) Thirty years of anti-union coverage and sub-textual messages in the main stream and right-wing news media; 2) Constant promotion of the Reagan ideology, summed up by the phrase, “the politics of selfishness,” which makes people more inclined to take away from others instead of wanting to emulate why those others are doing well or doing better.

But it’s not just in union-bashing that Republicans are unabashedly pursuing a right-wing agenda:

• Privatization, which leads to a net transfer of wealth from employees to owners while gutting future state revenue: In Pennsylvania, the new Governor Tom Corbett is fast-tracking privatization of hard liquor sales, which will help the state short term but lead to a long-term loss in revenues.
• Loosening gun control laws: Legislators in Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Texas, New Hampshire and other states have all introduced legislation that makes it easier to either own a gun or carry it in public.
• Ending a woman’s control over her own body: Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are trying to end all funding for abortions.  Republican legislators and governors in several states have introduced bills that curtail abortion, make it harder to get or cut funding for women who have them.  The weirdest bill, of course, is the one in the South Dakota legislature that would expand the definition of justifiable homicide to include protection of unborn fetuses.  In other words, it would be open hunting season on abortion providers and women who have abortions in the state of “great places and great faces.”

The Democrats are not immune to pulling these right-wing grand stands.  As the American political establishment has moved increasingly right since the late 70’s, Democrats have picked up the bad habits of Reagan, Bush II and other Republicans to fund government by creating risk-free and often tax-free investment opportunities for the wealthy.  In Illinois, for example, instead of raising taxes on the wealthy to meet a budget shortfall, Democratic Governor Pat Quinn wants to float a bond, which means borrowing money and repaying with tax-free interest. 

Who would have paid more if Illinois raised taxes?—everyone, but primarily rich folk, especially if the new taxes were progressive. 

Who is going to buy the bonds?  Mostly rich folk. 

What were the rich folk going to do with the money that could have been paid in taxes? Mostly invest it in fixed assets like real estate and art or in financial instruments, stocks that are not initial public offerings (the only time the money made in the stock market actually helps a company) and bonds. 

History suggests that raising taxes, especially on the wealthy, always helps the economy, because the government always recirculates the money to recipients of benefits, government employees and government contractors.  It worked for Clinton and it also worked for Reagan!  Keeping taxes on the wealthy low (and remember that taxes on the wealthy in the United States are at a historic low for an industrialized country) hurts the economy because the wealthy rate of recirculation is much less.  And yet the news media and politicians of all mainstream persuasions continue to say the exact opposite.

Welcome to a land ruled by naked oligarchs whose clothes are ideological messages with no basis in reality.

The Chris Lee affair exemplifies the weird results obtained from the mixture of politics and private life.  Lee is the married-with-lovely-children Congressman who just resigned from office because a photo he had emailed to a woman he had met through a Craigslist ad showed him naked from the waist up.  He was outed when a third party recognized the photograph and it was posted on Gawker.com.  We don’t know what extramarital adventures this upstate New York Republican had in the past, but he never even met the woman. All he really did was go hunting for an extramarital affair.

Why should the act of sniffing around for an affair lead to immediate resignation?  The problem, of course, is that he’s part of the party of high morality, the party ready to condemn the sinner even when the sin has nothing to do with his job.  

We’ll never know the entire story of his personal and family life, so we’ll never know what prompted his action.  

Whose business is it anyhow?

The immediate response to the argument that we shouldn’t care about the private lives of our leaders, as long as it doesn’t relate to job performance will say, yes, but he (or she) lied about it.  That’s why they said they impeached President Clinton: not for what he did but because he lied about it. 

But Lee never lied to the public.  As soon as Gawker.com published the photo, he came clean.  Of course, he had no choice because the truth was semi-nakedly staring at him from a computer screen.

I think Lee wanted to get caught, perhaps out of guilt or maybe to end a long and painful charade.  He must have known that if he put it on the Internet there was a much greater chance of getting caught than if he sent someone a photo in the mail.  He must have known that someone would recognize a Congressman.  There are ways to mask the origin of words but few ways to disclaim your own image.

I have found no record of Lee taking the overly moralistic stands of some other recent offenders against the morality police, such as Governor Elliot Spitzer or Senator Larry “Wide Stance” Craig did.  So unless some dirt starts emerging, we have to assume that he made himself a victim of the overall moral head-hunting tone of his party and especially its recent adherents from the far right.  He did not have to resign.  He could have said it’s a private matter.  That he decided to do so as soon as it hit the fan may make some suspicious, but to me it merely looks as if he made himself a victim of the righteousness that his party is now professing.  And that’s too bad, because I really do think we should judge people’s job performance on what they do in the job and not what they do with their private parts in their private lives.

In Western Europe outside perhaps Great Britain, no one would give a damn about Lee’s trolling for partners as long as the taxpayers weren’t paying for it and the paramour was of age.  Like universal healthcare, cheap public colleges, wonderful vocational school education and extensive inter-city mass transit, it’s another way in which the “socialist” countries of Western Europe offer a superior model to ours.

The weekend marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, and a lot of people used the occasion to wrap themselves in the flag called Ronald Reagan.  Our current President Barack Obama reminded the country how much he admired Reagan.  Sarah Palin did her best prophet-of-doom  imitation with her warning that we as a nation are straying from the true path of Reaganism.  Articles on Reagan abounded in the news media, virtually all of them in admiration.

There is no doubt that Reagan is an important figure in U.S. history, both as a symbol and an instigator of the great turn that our nation made in and around 1980.  But as usual with American icons, much of the coverage this weekend assumed Reagan’s importance rather than explaining it, or if explaining it, did so in the broadest and most inclusive of terms. 

Here then is my take on why we should and will remember Ronald Reagan:

1. Reagan led the first and biggest wave in the 30-year (and counting) movement towards a less equitable society by instituting or being the front man for the destruction of the air traffic controller unions, the restructuring of the tax code to reduce the tax burden of the wealthy, the first attacks on Social Security (including the decision to lump Social Security trust fund into the rest of the federal budget for bookkeeping purpose) and the first successful attacks on social programs for our poor, disadvantaged and elderly.  All of these moves shifted wealth up the socio-economic ladder from the poor and middle class to the wealthy.
2. Reagan symbolized the step back from the beginnings of environmental consciousness that our nation had developed in the 70’s.  Reagan led the charge against government regulation and environmental standards and articulated passionately and convincingly the “head-in-the-sand” mentality of many right-wingers regarding clean energy, pollution and the impact of man-made environmental changes. 
3. Reagan and/or his administration broke the law repeatedly, sometimes in ways that should have been labeled traitorous.  The best example of the rampant law-breaking of Reagan’s team came before he even became President, when his people entered into separate negotiations with the Iranians and promised them secret help if they held the American embassy hostages until after the election.  This traitorous  (but as yet unpunished)  act turned the 1980 election in Reagan’s favor, just as much as the illegal peccadilloes of Florida Republicans turned the 2000 election from the man who had won the popular vote nationwide to the man who would bring us two senseless wars and a torture gulag.   Other Reagan lawbreaking involved the Iran-Contra drugs-for-arms scheme and its cover-up and the savings-and-loan scandal.  In total, Haynes Johnson’s Sleeping through History finds 138 Reagan administration officials who were convicted of some crime. 

As a society we currently remember Ronald Reagan as we remember Robert E. Lee, who was a virulent racist, an active supporter of slavery and a bull-headed general who sent his men out to slaughter, yet is today considered a Southern gentleman and a great soldier.  In both cases, our views are inaccurate, smoothing over some truly disreputable actions and forgetting about the base nature of his real views. One day I hope we look at both men more realistically, perhaps in the same way we now consider Benedict Arnold or Richard M. Nixon.

Texas high school football has been in the news a lot lately.  First came the report last weekend that a high school in Allen, Texas is building a $60 million stadium for its football team.  Then came the story about how amazed the Green Bay Packers are at the luxuriousness of the indoor football practice facilities of another Texas high school.

My immediate question when I see these stories is: how does Texas rank in spending money on its students?  Studies tell us that while spending more money does not necessarily lead to better school performance, it does when the money is spent on more teachers and instructional materials.  Although many funding decisions are made by school districts not states, the state sets the tone and the standards, so it’s fair to ask this question of the entire state.

The question behind the question is really: Are Texas and many of its school districts so rich and generous that they can lavish their high school athletes OR is Texas taking money from education to spend on sports?

As many OpEdge readers may have suspected, Texas has made the decision to prefer football over education.

According to the National Education Association (NEA), using 2009 numbers, Texas ranks 38th in spending among the states and the District of Columbia.  Education Week numbers are a little older and push Texas even further down the list to 48th among the states and D.C.  The difference between the two studies is that Education Week rankings adjusted for regional cost differences but the NEA did not.  Also, Education Week used U.S. government data and the NEA collected its own data.

Either way, it’s a poor showing for a state that so royally funds the extracurricular activity of a handful of boys aged 16 to 18 years.

Let’s put it into perspective:  $60 million could pay the salaries of approximately 750 experienced high school teachers, which would allow 3,000 high school students to receive instruction in classes with an average size of 16 students instead of an average size of 20.  The impact on elementary school would be greater, as elementary school teachers tend to earn less than high school teachers do.  $60 million would also pay for four years of tuition for about 1,700 students at the University of Texas at Austin, one of a handful of state universities across the country considered a “public Ivy.”

For those who aver that a football stadium is a one-time cost whereas we have to keep paying teachers year after year (ignoring of course the stadium’s annual maintenance budget), consider instead the number of text books, computers, musical instruments, easels, foreign language instructional DVDs/CDs and science labs that the state could buy for each $60 million pleasure dome in which they ask young males to hit and tackle each other.

And for those who claim that the football team brings in needed revenue, consider that no football team could possibly stimulate the economy as much as a random selection of 48 competent, well-educated and skilled nurses, computer technicians, dieticians, plumbers, human resource specialists, middle school teachers, small franchise operators, administrative assistants, professional writers, physicians and civil engineers.

Our news media always seems to mimic the overly optimistic view of our government, at least at the beginning of the events. For that reason, one thing that an analysis of past media coverage of wars and insurrections can teach us is that at this point we don’t really know exactly what is happening in Egypt and Tunisia.

We all look for positive signs in events, but those positive signs always orient to our viewpoint.  For example, I would like Egypt and Tunisia to end up having democratically elected secular governments with two or more major parties in which Moslem and country traditions are accepted, but not mandated.  For that reason, I look at the news that Mubarak will step down for September elections as very positive.  And yet the violence in the streets continues.

By the way, I don’t believe the U.S. government really places democracy all that high on its wish list for Northern Africa and the rest of the developed world.  Past experience demonstrates again and again that what our government really wants are docile partners that will support us in global initiatives and cooperate fully with our large businesses.

But whatever the dreams our government or our people may have for Egypt, our leaders tied our hands in acting to achieve them by engaging in the fiasco known as the Iraq War.

The Iraq War hurt the United States’ ability to influence both world events and the events in other countries in two ways:

1. The Iraq War significantly harmed the credibility of the United States among Moslem countries and throughout the developing world. The rest of the world did not like the fact that we superseded the United Nations’ investigation of weapons of mass destruction.  It did not like that we invaded a nation under false pretenses.  It did not like that we tortured prisoners and rendered other prisoners to other nations for torturing.  It did not like that we destroyed a nation with no plans to rebuild it.  I believe that under Hillary Clinton’s leadership, our reputation has improved somewhat, particularly among the leaders of nations.  But there is still a lot of residual distrust and suspicion about the United States out there.  Let me ask you this: If you were a moderate Moslem leader in Egypt, would you rather “play ball” with the United States or China at this time?
2. The Iraq War drained the U.S. of trillions.  We’re broke and it’s not because of Social Security or high pensions to public workers.  It’s because our taxes are too low and we have thrown more than one trillion dollars (and counting since we still have 100,000 troops in Iraq plus pay for 130,000 military contractors still there) into the deep pit we call the Iraq War.  While we have given the Egyptian government and military a lot of money in the past, more money used wisely and not earmarked for guns could do a lot to influence the outcome of the current situation:  The United States could offer incentives to these nations to form democratic governments.  It could give legal and open support to all the parties which favor a secular government (even Egypt’s Moslem Brotherhood).  It could give aid to address the most pressing social and economic problems facing these nations.  But money is one thing that our government doesn’t have a lot of right now, and one major reason is that we spent it leveling Iraq and then dealing with the mess our leveling created.

If the United States is no longer the world’s polestar in political and economic affairs, it’s because of self-inflicted wounds like the Iraq War that are still bleeding out.

Change of subject: Since I ripped Mark Bittman in 2009 for his subtle attempt to knock healthy cooking in his piece about the anxiety of preparing a Thanksgiving feast, I should praise him for his Op/Ed piece in today’s New York Times.  In it, he lays out a careful program for improving our food delivery system, our diets and our nutritional health.  At the heart of his recommendations is the strategy to end government support of processed and unhealthy foods and begin government support of growing local foods and preparing meals from scratch.  Check out his column.