This Is Not News

One of my first forays onto the Not News soapbox was a look at the culture of debt in this country. In that piece, I briefly mentioned the movement (or lack thereof) of bankruptcy legislation in Washington. In the past three years, many Americans have ridden a roller coaster of financial disasters including corporate scandals, fallout from 9/11 and general economic slowdowns. In that time, the proposed legislation to revamp the many Americans deal with their debt has changed very little — and it has made very little progress.

Many in Congress are quick to lay blame at the other party for the eleventh hour demise of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2002, but a closer examination of the bill’s provisions tells a different tale. For reasons that few in Congress ever mention, this bill had it coming. And, from a “consumer protectionâ€? standpoint, its 2003 cousin is asking for it, too. But, since we at Not News prefer to dispense constructive criticism, I am not going to spend any more time simply trashing what’s wrong with bankruptcy reform. I’m going to present my own personal bankruptcy reform wish list. Read the remainder of this entry »

Bit of a grab bag of topics this time out, but it’s a thematically connected grab bag. Inspired by President Bush’s call in his State of the Union Address for over a billion dollars in funding for research on hydrogen-powered cars, I’ve spent some time trolling the web looking for insights and information on fuel efficiency and other energy-saving endeavors. I don’t think I found any solid answers, but I do think there are several interesting launching points for further discussion.

First, I was disappointed but not terribly surprised to find that Bush’s billion dollar proposal isn’t as impressive as the sound bite might suggest. It actually represents a cut in the absolute funding for fuel-efficient automobiles. During the Clinton Administration, the government funded the Partnership for the Next Generation Vehicle (PNGV) to the tune of about $170 million dollars a year. This ten-year program was a partnership between the government and the Big Three American automakers, whose goal was to have 80 mpg family sedans in car showrooms by 2004, at a price comparable to more traditional cars. In order to make that deadline, PNGV focused on hybrid cars which use both a gas-powered and electric motor, much like the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic Hybrid that are available today. By shifting the focus to hydrogen-powered fuel cells, the Bush Administration has pushed forward the point at which the government/industry collaboration is expected to produce a more efficient car decades into the future. Setting a more ambitious goal and then cutting the funding earmarked to achieve it does not strike me as sound policy.

It’s also worth noting that, as I said, Japanese automakers already have hybrid cars out on the market. Granted, they serve a very small niche market right now, and they don’t get 80 mpg – more like 40 to 60, which is still nothing to sneeze at. But Toyota and Honda got their cars on the market despite being rebuffed in their attempts to join up with PNGV. There is a certain irony here – a program designed to increase the competitiveness of the American auto industry inspired America’s competitors to do a better job. Sam Roe of the Chicago Tribune argues that there wasn’t nearly enough coordination between the participants, which suggests that there are significant cultural roadblocks to public/private partnership that need to be overcome. Autoweek columnist Kevin Nelson says part of the problem might be the scale of the effort – the government wasn’t kicking in enough money under PNGV to overcome the additional bureaucracy, competition and inertia it created. And if the Clinton program didn’t do much to advance the cause of science, it’s likely that Bush would do even less. As Nelson says, “Federal funding at this level would appear to have no effect on hastening technological progress.â€? Read the remainder of this entry »

The Bush Administration recently filed a brief with the Supreme Court stating its opposition to the University of Michigan’s affirmative action admissions policy. One of the rhetorical points quickly made by the administration’s critics is that Bush himself benefited from affirmative action in his academic applications, using his geographical location and status as a ‘legacy’ student to help him get into Andover and Yale. It’s a pretty effective debating technique, highlighting the fact that – especially when it comes to education – strict ‘merit’ rarely completely wins the day. What I’ve wondered more and more since the stories started hitting the press is, is that such a bad thing?

The idea of a meritocracy appeals to everyone’s innate sense of fairness, I think. We like to see other people get what they deserve, and we like to think that whatever we have, we have because we’ve earned it. In its idealized form, it’s a terrific guiding principle. But when you put it into practice, it becomes pretty mushy. Sticking with education, how do you determine academic merit? Grades? But different schools have different grading systems, not to mention different curricula and standards. Just an example – my high school worked on a 4.0-scale, and didn’t give extra weight to As from honors classes. The guy with the highest GPA in my graduating class didn’t take many – if any – honors math or English classes, while the guy right behind him did. (I am neither of the people in this example, for anyone who might think I’m bitter or anything.) Standardized test might help smooth out the comparisons – but studies have shown that they don’t nearly as good a job predicting future academic performance as our current reliance on them would suggest. Read the remainder of this entry »

For those of you who haven’t read Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the American Meal, forgive me for giving away some of the mystery – fast food is bad for you. It contains lots of fat, salt, calories, cholesterol, and other things that can, over time, be hard on your health. Good, with that out of the way, we can get down to what this book is really about – and it ain’t just French fries.

Much to the dismay of the meat and poultry industries, since its publication in early 2001, Schlosser’s book has put their business under the national microscope as much as it has the actual purveyors of fatty fare, if not more so. Why? Well, Schlosser takes the reader beyond the fast food outlets back to the source of the food – back to the potato fields and processing plants, the cattle feedlots and slaughterhouses, back to the poultry farms.

Whether you agree or disagree with Schlosser’s politics (and they are pretty obvious from the onset), you can’t help but be intrigued or even alarmed by the allegations he makes about the safety of the America’s food supply. He alleges that the meat industry – urged by its largest buyers, the fast food chains – have compromised public health safety in their quest to get meat from “farmâ€? (a loose term since animals rarely graze anymore) to slaughterhouse to market quickly and cheaply.

In the aftermath of the “mad cow� scare, several high profile meat recalls, and with some now worrying that our food supply is vulnerable to terrorist attacks, food safety is high on the national radar. But are we doing anything about it? Frankly, it doesn’t seem like it. Though Schlosser’s allegations created a media stir last year, fast food sales have not plummeted. Beef and poultry sales remain steady. Consumers seem content to remain willfully ignorant about the possibility that the meat they serve may not be entirely safe. The consumer’s mantra: “I try not to think about it.�

I thought about quoting some of the more colorful excerpts from FFN and a series about meat safety that PBS’ Frontline produced earlier this year but, in the interest of space and for those who can’t stomach it, I’ll simply link to them.

I will, however, highlight some of the major concerns that have been raised about the American meat supply. These include compelling arguments that modern methods of feeding, slaughtering and packaging meat actually increase the likelihood that the resulting product will contaminated by E. coli, salmonella, and other foodborne bacteria. In addition, there are huge gaps in the authority the federal government wields over the meat-packing and poultry industries. For example:

• Incidents of E. coli contamination have increased in the past fifty years because this bacteria does not live in the intestinal tract of cattle fed grass. It is only since cattle began eating largely corn diets that deadly strains of E. coli were able to thrive in their bodies and end up in the meat. Why do cattle eat corn instead of grass? It fattens them up faster, and an animal fed corn can go from birth to the slaughterhouse in 12 to 14 months instead of 3 to 5 years. In 1993, several people died of E. coli after eating hamburgers at the Jack-in-the-Box food chain on the West Coat. Since then, fast food chains have required that the meatpacking firms test their meat before take possession of it. However, most meat sent to supermarkets is not tested.
• As meat operations merge and consolidate, the number of animals raised and processed under one roof reaches the hundreds of thousands. According to the CDC, this increases the likelihood that pathogens will pass from “one animal to anotherâ€? and on the processing line “from one carcass to another.â€?
• The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) cannot order a mandatory recall of meat once they know it is contaminated. They must notify the firm in question, which then issues a voluntary recall. While no firm has refused to comply, this system causes delays. Carol Tucker Foreman, Director of the Food Policy Institute at Consumer Federation of America, writes, “I sat in rooms and negotiated voluntary recalls with companies. And their lawyers would quarrel and quibble and hold out for day after day, and by the time you finally got them to recall the meat, guess what? A lot of it had been eaten.â€? Statistics show that the amount of meat returned in recent high-profile national recalls averages around 20%.
• The USDA is designed with an inherent conflict of interest – it is charged with both the regulation and promotion of meat and poultry products.

The major stumbling block to resolving these and many other issues about the safety of the food industry is the industry itself. The beef and poultry producers in this country comprise a powerful lobbying force. The have successfully lobbied to delay new USDA food testing systems and at least two times have blocked bills that would have given the USDA greater authority.

More recently, Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, then-chair of the Senate Agriculture committee, proposed the Meat and Poultry Pathogen Reduction Act of 2002 (S. 2013). Despite being co-sponsored by several key senators including Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Paul Wellstone (D-MN), Charles Schumer (D-NY), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Arlen Specter (R-PA), the bill never made it out of committee.

There have been instances in recent years where public outcry did help stop some of the delays in legislation and move food safety bills forward to become law. But for that to happen now means that American consumers, not just the media, have to want to really think about what exactly is on their plates.

In the meantime – or perhaps as a starting point to get more involved on your own – there are places on the Net to go where you can learn more about safe meat handling and cooking, general food safety procedures, and alternatives to supermarket meat, including the USDA’s Food Safety site. One such place is the web site for the Whole Food Markets chain of stores. They update their site with the latest news about food safety regulation, heath advisories, recalls, and other information. And, Whole Foods Markets’ site also gets high points for its “Take Actionâ€? page, which allows you to search for your own elected officials, find out which elected officials are on which legislative committees, and more. Well done, Whole Foods. And here I thought you just made great bread.

It may be hard to imagine that any good could come from the recent scandals involving the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy, but, slowly and quietly, there has been some change for the better. That change is that many state legislatures are recognizing that the statutes of limitations for civil and criminal action in these cases need to be extended. Or, in my opinion, eliminated altogether.

Statutes of limitations, which are rarely discussed outside episodes of Law and Order, determine the length of time a state or an individual has to bring criminal or civil charges against someone else for a crime or damaging act. These statues often vary from state to state for every nearly every crime (except murder) and they vary widely in sexual abuse and molestation cases. For example, New Jersey has no statues of limitations on child abuse cases while Massachusetts, ground zero of the recent scandal, has a 15-year limit for child rape and a six-year limit for “sexual touching�. There are now twelve states with no time limits on prosecuting sexual offenses against children. More states, including Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and California have several bills in their legislatures to or extend or eliminate their statutes. Hopefully, before the scandal fades from public memory, there will be many more states that do the same.

The question I ask in all this is: Why do we need statutes on these crimes at all? I do understand the need for statues of limitations in theory. Former Massachusetts Assistant District Attorney Barton Aronson writes:

[S]tatutes . . . ensure that prosecutorial resources are well used. Prosecutions are not like wine: they generally get worse, not better, with age. When a prosecutor first learns of a crime is when he or she is in the best position to investigate and decide whether to prosecute. That is the moment when memories are freshest and evidence most accessible. If the case isn’t worth prosecuting right away, it usually isn’t worth prosecuting at all.

But Aronson is also quick to point out that this is precisely why statues of limitations don’t work in child abuse cases. Prosecutors often don’t learn of child sex abuse cases right away. Most children who have been abused often do not fully realize that what has been done to them is a crime. In other cases, the children are threatened so that they do not reveal the abuse. In still other cases, the children block out the memories of abuse only to “recover� these memories years or even decades later. These frequent delays make it difficult to pinpoint exactly when the “clock� on a statute starts running. In some states, the clock starts with the crime itself; in others it starts with the discovery of the crime, or when the child in question tells another adult what has happened.

In the recent clergy abuse scandal, the Catholic Church was instrumental in hiding evidence of sexual abuse with a tangled web of payouts to families, clergy transfers, hidden files and other acts of deceit. A strict interpretation of the law means the statues have run out on hundreds of these cases. But victims and their families argue that the abusers shouldn’t benefit from the church’s deceit. And, due in part to the public pressure surrounding this case, legislators are listening to their arguments. They are recognizing that the lengths of the original statutes in child abuse cases had little to do with the actual length of a victim’s pain and suffering.

What the writers of those statues and, evidently, many church officials did not realize is that abusing a child robs him of the innocence and trust he desperately needs in his formative years. A child abuser takes what is wonderful about being a child and, in effect, murders it. And, as we all know, there is no statute of limitations on murder.

A while back I was at dinner with my family, and somehow we started discussing my mother’s intention to move out of Philadelphia in a few years. I was surprised to hear each of my siblings talk about how much they love the neighborhood we grew up in (and all live in at the moment). What surprised me was that even though I don’t really recall discussing it much with them, their reasons echoed my own — the area isn’t too crowded with automobile traffic, there are fields and trees around, and many of the stores are within walking distance. This quasi-suburbia has almost accidentally lucked into many, although not all, of the features advocated by a movement called ‘new urbanism,’ a group of urban planners and community activists working in conjunction with environmental advocates and others to combat America’s decades-long push to the suburbs.

The main argument of new urbanism is that the way we have developed our cities and suburbs over the last fifty years has been horribly inefficient, costly in both financial and psychological terms. Because the things we need and the places we go are so spread out, we spend much more time driving than before, which means we spend less time in our communities forging bonds with our neighbors or establishing an emotional connection to the area. When we do stay at home, we have fewer options for what we can do, because zoning laws and the desire for lots of living space means that the critical mass of restaurants, shops and other businesses can’t form.

Of course, whether those entail actual sacrifices is to an extent up to the individual. I can’t imagine myself not living in a city; as I’ve said elsewhere, I loved the energy that came with living in New York City, and I sometimes even harbor thoughts of moving farther into Philadelphia than Pattie and I are now. But that’s me; someone else might like solitude or quiet and find city life horrible, and I’m not about to argue that. What new urbanites and anti-sprawl advocates have increasingly pointed out, however, is that physical expansion hurts us in the pocketbook. Setting up a new housing development means that the hosting municipality will have to deliver services to that development — gas, power and sewer utilities, police, fire and emergency services, trash collection, schools, and so on. The existing local population pays for those services through increased taxes, reduced services, or both, because the developers and new residents rarely, if ever, compensate a community for the new revenue demands it creates. Read the remainder of this entry »

My father, like me, has spent his life on the “color line” — appearing to be black, Hispanic, white or some undecipherable combination of the three. Also, like me, he never knows what race or ethnicity people will perceive him to be. He has long since ceased to care. These days, he drives a white SUV — not a flashy one but not an inexpensive one either. Recently, he and his SUV became the “darlings” of the local police in his Queens, NY neighborhood. In the course of a single week, he was pulled over four times by police. In one instance, he had not even had time to put his registration away before he heard the sirens wailing behind him again. In none of these instances did he receive a ticket or even a warning from the police. They simply asked to see his license and registration, inspected the vehicle, and sent him on his way.

Finally, one officer, as an afterthought when he handed my father back his license, mentioned that drug dealers favored SUVs. Now my dad is a very laid back kind of guy (he could not have stay married to my mother for over thirty years if he wasn’t) and when he relayed this strange tale to me several months ago, he seemed almost disinterested. Then I asked him if he thought it was some kind of racial profiling. He gave me a knowing look, shrugged, and replied, “It was some kind of profiling.” Did I mention my dad is himself a former cop? Read the remainder of this entry »

There is a certain sense in which this article is the intellectual equivalent of catching fish in a barrel. When liberals like me agree with conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute that people should pay more attention to government assistance to large corporations, my first inclination is to say that’s the ballgame and go home. But then again, some progressives argue that some kinds of corporate welfare aren’t so bad. And the Republican Party has determined that the best way to stimulate the economy in the wake of the September 11 disaster is to give enormous tax breaks to large corporations. So maybe the issue deserves a little more attention after all. Read the remainder of this entry »

The will of the people rang out loud and clear. Even New Yorkers who had never had a kind word to say about their out-spoken mayor were calling his name out in the streets. “Rudy! Rudy!” His unwavering grace under pressure has transformed Rudy Guiliani from a lame duck subject of tabloid ridicule to one of the most respected men in America and downright adored in his own city.

As a former New Yorker, I have also had my issues with Mayor Guiliani during his terms as mayor. He has at times been too brash, too harsh, and too combative. In the past, when patience and finesse were needed, he showed neither. During that last mayoral election, I applauded my mother’s decision to support his opponent. However, his handling of the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center left me no less than stunned at his ability to bring a shattered city together. It took the experience gained over each and every minute of his two terms in office. Only in that time could he have learned enough about New York to know what to do to help guide the city back from hell. So, in the names of all the family and friends I still have in New York City, I am happy to stand corrected about Rudy Guiliani.

I am, however, a bit miffed at the New Yorkers who are now decrying the term limitation that prevents Guiliani from running for a third term. Their arguments: the city needs Guiliani’s guidance to heal, a transition would be too jarring, etc. My personal favorite is from New York Daily News columnist Michael Kramer who wrote “[N]o one is a Republican of Democrat these days. We are all Americans and New Yorkers. The simple way . . . to give content to those expressions is to embrace the idea of expanding our choice for mayor.” Choice? That sounds suspiciously like the word term limit opponents like myself argued that voters give up when they back legislation that limits the terms of elected officials. New Yorkers voted in favor of term limits in 1993 and city council’s attempts to repeal the law failed twice in the last eight years. Now, when faced with the very real consequences of those actions, not everyone is a quite so sure term limits are that great after all. Read the remainder of this entry »

Thirty-two years ago, on July 20, 1969, human beings set foot on the moon for the first time.

Today, we couldn’t go back if we wanted to.

More than anything else, that sums up the current state of spaceflight research in the United States. The US stopped building the Saturn rockets that sent the Apollo missions beyond the orbit of the Earth years ago, and never developed a successor. We cannot go to the moon. We cannot go to Mars. We cannot go any farther than the low-Earth orbit of International Space Station Alpha and the space shuttle travel. What is worse, we have no plans to go any farther, no idea of how to get there from here. NASA is still trying to decide what kind of orbital craft will succeed the space shuttle, despite the fact the current fleet of orbiters is much closer to the end of its life than the beginning. There are currently no plans to use Alpha to construct interplanetary craft. There is no vision for the future, and thus no effort to make that vision real. Read the remainder of this entry »