PoliticusUSA (Politics)

New York City’s Municipal ID Program Offers Model For Circumventing Immigration Inertia (October 22, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

immigration-law-picture

I have a close friend who’s more like a little sister. We both live and work in Chicago, the third most populous city in the United States. In the Windy City, home to almost three million people, the shifting demographics of the nation have already become a new normal. As of the 2010 Census, just 45 percent of Chicago’s residents self-identify as exclusively Caucasian. Of the remaining ethnic categories, African Americans, and those of Hispanic or Latino descent, represent the largest groups.

I highlight these numbers in order to drive home the resigned frustration associated with incidents like the following. My friend, a beautiful woman of mixed racial heritage (half Caucasian, half Haitian Creole), works in a customer-facing position with a large banking chain. She’s also possessed of far more patience than most, which I suppose is a major driver of her professional success. She recounted the following dialogue between herself and a client earlier this week:

Friend (to Customer): Wow. There are a lot of people in our system with the same name as you.

Customer: Well, I’m sure you wouldn’t know this since you’re not an American, but…

Friend: How am I not American?

Customer: Because you’re of Latin descent.

Friend: I’m not. But I’m still confused as to why I wouldn’t be American.

Chicago has many flaws as an urban community, but on the whole, its citizenry skews liberal. It is not a Tea Party stronghold and for the most part, the city eludes the sort of redneck militia reputation that is often pinned on the Midwest. Yet the encounter described above is far from rare. My pal considered herself lucky that the “gentleman” assumed her immigration (of course she was born locally) is legal. This is what counts for a good encounter with the presumptive, threatened white male.

This trying anecdote was front in center in my thoughts as I read “Membership’s Perks, for Immigrants, Too” from The New York Times Editorial Board this week. Though the piece reports on The Big Apple’s introduction of a citywide identity card that “will tell everybody that its owner is a bona fide New Yorker,” the sting of truth is felt in the short opinion’s last paragraph:

“The longer it takes for Congress to act on immigration reform, the more it will fall to cities and towns to keep America’s welcoming spirit alive. Municipal IDs are signs of confidence in the benefits of integration — the belief that when strangers rub shoulders, when outsiders are welcomed and absorbed, the community flourishes.”

There’s an unwritten rule that neither side of the political aisle wants to discuss real issues in the run-up to an election. And Congress is certainly not to going to make any moves. With the midterms less than two weeks away, it seems Ebola finger pointing and Obama repudiation is as deep as any candidate is going to get. It was midsummer, during the height of the Central American child migrant border surge, that we last had any serious discussion about our broken immigration system.

So let’s be grateful to New York City for keeping this mess in the headlines, for trying to find real ways to work around the inertia on Capitol Hill to bring people together, even if it takes a little self-interested carrot dangling. That’s the American way! Per the editorial:

“The city has designed the card to include side benefits, like free admission or discounts at 33 cultural institutions, including the Bronx Zoo, Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Those perks are meant to entice nonimmigrant New Yorkers to sign up, too.”

It won’t be much longer at all until Chicago’s bank customers, such as the one who plagued my friend, will be forced to keep their ignorant observations to themselves. The judgment of one’s Americanness based on skin color is already antiquated, and with a little more time, social norms will act as a further barrier. The presumptive, threatened white male’s verbal aggression is in the death throes in the Second City. The sensation is palpable – and one of the reasons we can share these stories with something approaching pity and humor.

But for the millions of undocumented workers forced to remain on the fringes in cities and towns across the country, our nation’s failure to act is no laughing matter. Let’s not wait until after the midterms to renew calls to action. It’s well beyond time to overhaul a system that benefits from underpaid labor while sneering at the hardworking people who provide it. And if Congress won’t budge, I hope my city and many others will consider following New York’s lead.

Who’s Responsible For The Media’s Ebola Malpractice? We Are (October 18, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Ebola-story

The Ebola crisis in West Africa is a deadly serious threat. But for many reasonable, concerned Americans it’s become difficult to separate the reality of the devastation occurring on that continent, from the overblown media and political hysteria that’s dominating our national news cycle. Can any person of intelligence stay engaged when, as our own Justin Baragona reported this week, Keith Ablow, a Fox News Contributor Claims Obama Wants Ebola To Spread In US Because He Hates America?

It’s possible to feel empathy for the two Dallas, Texas healthcare workers who’ve been diagnosed with the disease after treating an infected patient, without extrapolating that we’re on the verge of a pandemic. And to take the argument a step further (I’m looking at you Fox News and Republican lawmakers), it’s a cynical act on the verge of criminal to needlessly stoke constituent fears of the unknown for perceived political gain. There’s no medically valid reason to doubt CDC Director Dr. Tom Friedan’s working theory that Nina Pham, the 26-year-old woman who was the first to contract the disease Stateside, did so because of a Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) “breach in protocol.”

There’s even less justification for leveraging the situation to foment xenophobia. I offer Washington Post writer Gail Sullivan’s piece, “For the right, Ebola is the latest rallying cry for closing the Mexican border,” by way of example. Sullivan observes “[First US-diagnosed patient Thomas Eric] Duncan arrived on a plane from Liberia. But that hasn’t stopped people from stoking fear that Ebola will spread to the United States via our border with Mexico, a country that has seen exactly zero cases of Ebola thus far. Few seem as concerned about Ebola entering the United States via Canada, our less politically-fraught border to the north.”

Less malevolent, but still shameful reporting practices have assisted in alienating thinking people. Earlier this week, Jon Stewart did a great send-up of mass media’s Ebola coverage. As the legendary Will & Grace character Karen Walker once observed of an anecdote, “It’s funny because it’s sad.” That is certainly true of the “sanity-resistant” faux analysis surrounding the isolated Texas cases. While there’s nothing humorous about the real suffering of real people, a variety of opportunists with an Ebola agenda make it hard to accommodate genuine concern with sneering disapproval. Rather than fight the good fight, it’s often easier to disengage. After all, there’s a new season of The Walking Dead on AMC.

To these layers of coverage perturbation, New York Timescolumnist Frank Bruni added another on Tuesday with his piece, “Scarier Than Ebola.” The writer opens with a succinct and withering indictment of our culture: “We Americans do panic really well. We could use a few pointers on prudence.”

Bruni continues, “During the 2013-2014 flu season…only 46 percent of Americans received vaccinations against influenza, even though it kills about 3,000 people in this country in a good year, nearly 50,000 in a bad one.

These are deaths by a familiar assassin. Many of them could have been prevented. So why aren’t we in a lather over that? Why fixate on remote threats that we feel we can’t control when there are immediate ones that we simply don’t bother to?”

It’s a feature of human nature that we are inclined to ruminate on the novel and titillating rather than the routine. It’s an impulse we come by honestly, but also one we should endeavor to check. To continue Bruni’s argument, there are thousands of risks Americans take almost unconsciously every day that pose a greater threat to body and spirit than Ebola, such as getting in a car, drinking milk after the sell-by date or listening to the Rush Limbaugh Show. And by indulging in the worst of our impulses, we not only ignore real risks, we enable truly terrible reporting and disingenuously motivated political speech.

But at the end of the day, Fox News and anti-immigration lawmakers are just giving us what we want. If there were no audience for this type of garbage, it would fade away. Let’s stop indulging it and regain a little perspective. Perhaps that will create space to aid and support eradication of Ebola where it truly exists at epidemic levels – Western Africa.

The Congressional Budget Office Vs. Paul Ryan: Will the Nonpartisan Entity Stand Its Ground? (October 7, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

paul ryan

This past weekend, while broadcasting from the snazzy new studio of NBC’s Sunday stalwart, Meet the Press, freshman host Chuck Todd uttered a provocative statement/question directed at Dan Pfeiffer, senior advisor to President Obama. The dialogue centered on the Ebola crisis and the CDC’s preparedness to handle additional American cases that may develop. Todd sought to probe Pfeiffer about the government’s assurance of readiness, with references to other Obama administration scandals and missteps:

“I think one of your challenges though is a trust deficit that has been created over the last 18 months…it is a fact about all the different sort of government gaps over the last 18 months. Edward Snowden stealing NSA files, the VA faking wait times, IRS losing emails, healthcare.gov doesn’t launch.

The president himself saying, ‘U.S. intelligence agencies underestimated ISIS.’ The DHS, the border failure with that surge over the summer, sort of failure, and of course, the secret service. Why should we trust that what you’re saying about the CDC is able to handle this? You understand why there’s more skepticism than normal.”

While the relative applicability and fairness of the interrogation can be debated, Todd’s point about a broad crisis confidence in our leadership’s honesty, competency and proactivity is well-taken. To Todd’s list I might add that an overtly political, conservatively activist SCOTUS has also led to “more skepticism than normal” when it comes to independent truth. There are very few nonpartisan, unbiased institutions left to us.

But we always have the Congressional Budget Office. Or do we? Per its website, the CBO describes its mission as follows:

“Since its founding in 1974, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has produced independent analyses of budgetary and economic issues to support the Congressional budget process. The agency is strictly nonpartisan and conducts objective, impartial analysis, which is evident in each of the dozens of reports and hundreds of cost estimates that its economists and policy analysts produce each year. All CBO employees are appointed solely on the basis of professional competence, without regard to political affiliation. CBO does not make policy recommendations, and each report and cost estimate discloses the agency’s assumptions and methodologies.”

For 30 years, American citizens have been able to enjoy the uninterrupted luxury of taking CBO data at face value, without having to search for a hidden agenda. It’s been quaint and refreshing. However, if he has his way, Wisconsin Congressman House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan will deprive voters of one of its last cynicism-free zones. In his column “Voodoo Economics, the Next Generation,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman writes:

“[Ryan] is dropping broad hints that after the election he and his colleagues will do what the Bushies never did, try to push the budget office into adopting ‘dynamic scoring,’ that is, assuming a big economic payoff from tax cuts.

So why is this happening now? It’s not because voodoo economics has become any more credible.”

Note the transition from former President Bill Clinton’s late 1990s surplus, to Dubya’s early aughts budget crater, should have been enough to teach us all that tax cuts do not, after all, pay for themselves. When money is returned to the already wealthy, they don’t invest in human capital and infrastructure projects. They buy things and hoard cash as the deficit balloons.

But nevertheless, as Krugman continues:

“Voodoo economics has dominated the conservative movement for so long that it has become an inward-looking cult, whose members know what they know and are impervious to contrary evidence…

[And] Second, the nature of the budget debate means that Republican leaders need to believe in the ways of magic.”

Well, the GOP establishment has the freedom to pursue any convoluted agenda it likes. They can continue to play Jedi Mind Tricks on the mass media and members of the party’s fervent base. But the CBO doesn’t have to play co-conspirator, and moreover, it musn’t.

One need not be an economist with a PhD to understand that large-scale tax cuts carry a cost ($3.5 trillion to extend all of the Bush cuts, except the estate and gift tax reductions, through 2020), not an economic return. Does the CBO have the pride and determination to weather the post-midterm election political pressure from the right? If not, I have to agree with Krugman that, “It would destroy the credibility of a very important institution, one that has served the country well.”

Last week we watched a once vaunted institution, the Secret Service, crumble under the weight of scandal and mismanagement. And it’s been years since the basic functions of Congress ground to a halt as the result of partisan obstruction. The CBO must protect its impartiality, not for the sake of any Republican or Democratic agenda, but for the people. Let’s do something really revolutionary. Let’s win one for common sense.

In Stunning Display Of Myopia, Ross Douthat Wonders Where The ‘Frightening Fringe Groups’ Are (October 2, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

douthatsmall_400x400

As a general rule, we’ve accepted that it’s best to ignore the right wing pundits and writers who overrun large swaths of our local and national media apparatuses. As most of us learned in childhood, once you give a loudmouth attention, it’s unlikely he or she will ever retreat. These talking heads are really just speaking to their own kind anyway, right?

Sometimes they’re whipping up the base over social issues fashioned into a wedge-shaped instrument with which to blunt public discourse (see: gay marriage 2004 or abortion 2012). Other times they are inflating a non-scandal (such as the supposed Benghazi conspiracy) to create a political distraction. And when not occupied with the previous two scenarios, these “journalists” are usually looking to provide disingenuous cover for the GOP’s indefensible positions on a whole host of issues such as: the rejection of Medicare expansion, the out of control proliferation of guns and ammunition, a head-in-the sand approach to immigration reform, and tax policy that enriches the one percent at the expense of everything else (the middle and working classes, public education, infrastructure, etc.).

But sometimes, it’s hard to let a tone deaf piece of right wing commentary slide, particularly when it appears in the “newspaper of record,” The New York Times. And doubly so when it is symptomatic of the GOP’s greatest ill: a shocking and dangerous lack of self-awareness.

At the end of a recent Sunday Review Op-Ed entitled, “The Cult Deficit,” I found myself annoyed by some of Douthat’s bland, unquantifiable assertions about the state of religious pedagogy. Take this example: “Spiritual gurus still flourish in our era, of course, but they are generally comforting, vapid, safe.” I’m not sure the majority of Americans found recently deceased Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps comforting or safe. Vapid possibly, but Phelps’ form of hate-filled ignorance was certainly not benign. However, we’ve come to accept this kind of selective memory from conservative commentators.

What really took me by surprise was the crux of Douthat’s argument, the base upon which the entire ludicrous column was constructed:

“From the 1970s through the 1990s, from Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate, frightening fringe groups and their charismatic leaders seemed like an essential element of the American religious landscape.

Yet we don’t hear nearly as much about them anymore.”

To this, I would offer three counter observations/ questions:

  1. Frightening fringe groups with religious underpinnings have progressed beyond the edge, working their way to the mainstream with shocking alacrity.
  2. Do you really not know who these people are, Douthat?
  3. To quote the character Ted from How I Met Your Mother, “If you can’t spot the crazy person on the bus, it’s you.”

Mr. Douthat, the radical fringe is, in fact, alive and well and to drop another pop cultural reference, their calls are coming from inside the House. The GOP-led, gerrymandered, ideological purity tested, Tea-Party infested House of Representatives. Your argument that “many fewer Americans ‘take unorthodox ideas seriously,’” is undone in seconds, without much effort.

  • Only 25 percent of Tea Partiers acknowledge the reality of climate change.
  • We’ve made it a mere 83 days without a male GOP candidate using the word “rape,” typically alongside a swipe at a woman’s right to choose.
  • Despite years and years of evidence to the contrary, Republican orthodoxy insists we can leverage austerity to starve our way out of recession.

It must be noted that across most of the Western world, suggestions that global warming is a hoax, that reducing access to family planning options is positive for “women’s health” or that widespread gun ownership saves lives, would be laughed out of the room. But here in good old America, these arguments are accepted as educated disagreement. And nothing is more radical and “crazy” than that. What need have we for cults when Washington is overrun with fringe lunatics with dangerous ideas, damaging the country and the direction of its policy each and every day?

Apparently when Douthat looks at a reflection of his party in the mirror, he sees normalcy. That’s how deluded the GOP perspective has become. Worse yet, the rest of us have become enablers. I opened the column with an observation that “it’s best to ignore the right wing pundits and writers who overrun large swaths of our local and national media apparatuses.” But no, that is incorrect. We are on the fringe because we allowed the conversation to be moved there.

It’s tempting to extrapolate from Douthat’s statement, “the cult phenomenon feels increasingly antique, like lava lamps and bell bottoms,” that the current radical right fever will eventually cure itself. But if there’s nothing forcing the fever to break – decreased media traction, lost votes and other forms of public rebuke – it will continue to burn.

So this column is my minor contribution to the effort. Can’t find the cult Mr. Douthat? It’s been hiding in plain sight the whole time.

No Time Like The Present: Why Historical Midterm Voting Patterns Could Mean A November Upset (September 23, 2014)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Vote-Counts-300x300

We’ve heard the reasons that Democrats are supposed to be doomed this November. President Obama’s approval ratings are at an all-time low and candidates from his party have opted to run away from the POTUS’ record (although as I argued a couple weeks ago, this is a cowardly mistake). Pro-Republican district gerrymandering has made few House races competitive. And of course, liberals tend to avoid the polls during midterms – to their own detriment.

This latter pattern led the President to observe of his base earlier this year, “We know how to win national elections…But all too often it’s during these midterms where we end up getting ourselves into trouble, because I guess we don’t think it’s sexy enough.” Aspirational attractiveness aside, every election is critically important and the most obvious solution is for Democrats to swarm the polls less than two months from now.

Midterms tend to be viewed, both individually and in the eyes of media pundits, as a referendum on the sitting President. But other writers and thinkers offer a deeper psychological assessment of these elections. Earlier this week in a piece entitled, “Obama Isn’t Finished Yet,” New York Times Op-Ed Contributor James Mann, writes:

“We might call this a kind of collective projection. We claim that a president is tired or looks tired, when what we really mean is that we are tired of him…By his sixth year in office, any president is ridiculously overexposed. We’ve seen him and heard him far too many times.

During his early years, a president naturally enjoys the hopes of his supporters; they suppress any disappointments they feel in the interests of winning the White House again. While in a second term, even his strongest supporters feel freer to express their disenchantment.”

As someone who has struggled with a practical Obama who has at times failed to live up to the “hope and change” hype of 2008 (and realistically, how could he not?), this argument makes a huge amount of sense. And if liberals are able to recognize and call out Presidential fatigue, we should also be able to mobilize against our self-defeating tendency to let it swallow all other compelling interests during the midterms. After all there’s nothing “sexier” in my own leftist circles than circumventing expected convention.

But I would also offer that there’s another reason why Democratic prospects in November might be rosier they appear. And that reason is the inept messaging and strategy of the Republican Party, which has followed the same losing general election primer since 2008 (2010 midterm success aside):

  1. Pander to the base during primary season, with a series of ideological purity tests that purge anyone remotely palatable to a demographic cross-section.
  2. Once a nomination has been secured, try to move the candidate back to the center, even if they’ve spent months being “severely conservative” (I’m looking at you Romney).
  3. Blame the media for this hoax failing to fool anybody.
  4. Repeat.

Midterms elections can be a sigh of relief for GOP strategists forced to march up and off the usual cliff. With no Presidential contest to engage, this defeatist plan of action is executed on micro levels (Senate elections being the largest field) where ideological hegemony affords it a greater rate of success.

But this one could be different. The middle class knows it’s getting a raw deal. We know that corporations are experiencing nearly all the economic gains while Congress sits on its hands. Actually, it would be better if House leadership were just plain old inactive. Instead, we get Speaker John Boehner characterized by Reuters as expressing “his dissatisfaction with a chronically high jobless rate and complained of a ‘very sick idea’ that the unemployed would ‘rather just sit around.’

Women are tired of pay inequity (especially given their status as the breadwinners in 40 percent of American households), the culturally accepted misogyny and the consistent invasions into our reproductive decisions. I know that when the Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that Hobby’s Lobby’s corporate religious objections to certain forms of contraception trumped a woman’s individual right to access them, it was a turning point for many of us.

And if there’re any remaining immigrant groups who fail to understand the Republican party’s open hostility to anything that looks like humanity (let alone progress), I’d be quite amazed.

A variety of media outlets already bespeak a lack of Democratic gain in the House as a foregone conclusion, with chances of retaining a Senate majority only slightly less remote. But that prediction discounts the most important variable: us. Eric Cantor anyone? Let’s give the heads something to talk about.