A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

Big Girl

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Just wanted to point out that I think my daughter is very cute, and she’s rapidly moving from baby to toddler status.

Anti-Flag Desecration Amendment filibustered

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A Constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration died one-vote short of overriding a filibuster. How will the nation ever survive? Oh, wait, the flag is a symbol of the country; it’s not the country itself. This bit of flag idolatry is an annoying and transparent attempt to turn the flag into a political weapon in preparation for the November elections. There have been about 7 instances of flag burning in the past 2 years, and this is how the Congress chooses to waste its time.

If anything, forbidding flag burning will make it a more attractive political statement. On the other hand, maybe if Congress is busy debating manufactured issues like this one, they’ll be too busy to cause more real problems. Nah, probably not. How long would it take to rubber stamp another war?

Firedoglake on America’s Public Employees

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Jordan Barab at Firedoglake has a compelling post entitled “America’s Public Employees: Live Like Slaves, Die Like Dogs” in which Mitch Daniels gets special mention for dissolving public employee collective bargaining rights as one of his first acts as Governor.

Barab describes what these folks do for us:

But why should public employees have the same rights that private sector employees have? Aren’t they pretty much just bureaucrats who work in nice clean offices with cushy benefits?

Hardly.

I ran the health and safety program for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) for 16 years, which means I became quite knowledgeable about what public employees actually do every day. And most of it ain’t pretty (nor is it well paying, especially where there’s no union): wading knee-deep through asphyxiating raw sewage in rat-infested sewers and wastewater treatment plants; taking care of our mentally ill in understaffed, under equipped, overcrowded violent institutions, teaching and driving buses in underfunded, crumbling inner-city schools; guarding the imprisoned refuse of society that most people didn’t even want to think about in understaffed, overcrowded prisons; laboring on the roads in the dead of night, mere inches away from speeding, hostile drivers; dealing with angry social service clients in understaffed, under funded agencies; dealing with the parents of abused children or inspecting housing in neighborhoods that armed police are reluctant to enter; taking care of this society’s poorest, sickest populations in understaffed, overcrowded public hospitals, — in other words, doing the invisible jobs that this society demands to maintain the comfortable style of living that most of us take for granted.

Barab then goes on to tell us why we should care, describing the “liberal” reaction to the New York City transit strike where many supported the strikers “in principle” but were nonetheless put out by having to be inconvenienced during the Christmas season. In addition, there was the resentment that organized public employees often have better pay and benefits than many public sector employees who are “better educated.”

People fell into the trap of assuming that because most workers these days get less than the transit workers in terms of pay and benefits (thanks Wal-Mart), that the transit workers should face reality, settle for less and just be happy they still have jobs. But they forget the important lesson of this globalized world: in a race to the bottom, there’s no finish line.

National convoy stops in South Bend

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The Indiana Department of Transportation issued a press release on the National Convoy’s trip across the United States to commemmorate Dwight D. Eisenhower’s historic 1919 trip across the country when he was a Lt. Colonel. The trip was historic because it was then he had a vision of what would become the Interstate Highway System.

The Indiana Dept. of Transportation annoyingly links this event with the Governor’s highway privatization plan which he calls Major Moves.

The press release states:

June 29, 1956 marks the day federal law brought America its unparalleled Interstate Highway System. Since that time the system has transformed our nation and economy. To this day the Interstate System remains one of the greatest public-works projects in history.

That’s accurate. What did the Interstate Highway System do? With tax dollars, it built a network of high quality roads available mostly for free to citizens. The roads contributed to an explosion in the economy that has more than made up for the tax dollars spent building those roads. That doesn’t sound at all like “Major Moves” to me.

Llamajockey and others around here have made the point that perhaps roads aren’t the best transportation tool available to us anymore given the increasing scarcity of oil and the diminishing returns of adding new roads to the existing ones. But still, to me the lesson of the Interstate Highway System is that government can use taxes to benefit society by building infrastructure that is accessible to all citizens.

Howey on Iraq

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Brian Howey wrote a column that was published in the June 24, 2006 News and Tribune that follows upon a previous column he had written and also discusses how the issue is playing in the 9th District.

I did not see the initial column, but apparently it drew the ire of Rose-Hulman chemistry professor, Dan Jelski.

“Sorry, but I think you’ve got the Iraq thing all wrong. From your column you’d think absolutely nothing had changed in Iraq at all. But you’re wrong, wrong, wrong.” He sees a prospering Baghdad exploding with satellite dishes instead of bombs.

Jelski suggests that Howey is proud of the insurgency or at least has great faith in its powers. Howey responds by citing a number of statistics that show things are not as rosy in Iraq as Jelski seems to think: Oil production is down, electricity production is stagnant and well below demand, unemployment is rampant. Doctors are leaving the country when they’re not being murdered, fewer kids are in school, 2,500 members of the U.S. military are dead, 30 to 40 people are kidnapped daily, 788 bombings have killed 6,800 people, and 100,000 familes have been displaced.

Jelski responds with what he doubtless thinks is the coup de grace:

Jelski observed: “The problems with the Brookings data is that you’d have to believe that life under Saddam was better than life in Iraq today. There is NO evidence to support that contention at all.”

Howey says the demons have been traded. I am reminded of Hobbes Leviathan. Hobbes suggested that Man in the State of Nature — i.e. without government — would be the war of all against all and, in such a state, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, and short.”

The social compact was an agreement whereby individuals traded a world of innumerable predators of various stature for one super-predator, the King. If the King came after you, you were screwed, and it wasn’t fair, especially, but in return most of the people got overlooked by the King and lived lives free of the petty predators they would face absent a King.

What we’re seeing in Iraq, essentially, is the aftermath of the local super-predator, Saddam Hussein. So, the people face a world filled with lesser monsters instead of a world with just the one. Neither state is particularly “good,” but depending how beneath the notice of Saddam you were under his reign, I can see where life could be worse today than it was under Hussein.

But, you may say, “why should the poor people of Iraq face either situation. Shouldn’t we give them a democracy that keeps them free of monsters both big and small?” To which I respond, “How much does it cost? and What’s in it for us?” I’m relatively selfish about how our government spends its money and am not a big fan of expensive humanitarian missions. This one has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives. I think we could get more bang for our blood and treasure here at home than trying to make the world nice for Iraqis.

As for the 9th District, apparently Hill is trying to get to the right of Sodrel, apparently calling for an indefinite U.S. presence in Iraq:

“He doesn’t believe a politically set withdrawal date is good public policy,” said Mike O’Connor, a lead consultant to Democrat Baron Hill, who is challenging U.S. Rep. Mike Sodrel. “We’re committed to a path in Iraq that we have to pursue until it is resolved. There would be consequences that would come out of our withdrawal from Iraq right now that would be negative in his eyes.”

Meanwhile, last week we were treated to the spectacle of the do-nothing Republican Congress engaging in a bit of wankery by debating a non-binding resolution that gave members of Congress the opportunity to make tough noises about how resolute we were in remaining stuck in the Iraqi quagmire.

Days after that resolution, we learn that:

The top American commander in Iraq has drafted a plan that projects sharp reductions in the United States military presence there by the end of 2007, with the first cuts coming this September, American officials say.

According to a classified briefing at the Pentagon this week by the commander, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the number of American combat brigades in Iraq is projected to decrease to 5 or 6 from the current level of 14 by December 2007.

The question appears to be not whether we will withdraw troops in the next year or two, but how this can be done without Bush looking weak or the Republicans looking like they were pushed into doing something the Democrats wanted to do.

Meanwhile, Senator Lugar, is skeptical that the conditions are right for a draw down of troops.

“Given current events in Baghdad, in particular, reported on every day quite apart from Anbar province, the violence is horrific,” he said on “Face the Nation.” “So getting to the plans either of General Casey or [Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-] Maliki are a broad sweep. But it is good news to know that there are contingency plans.”

This post has strayed a bit from its original focus. But now I’m left to ponder who to trust on the current state of Iraq: Senator Lugar or Professor Jelski.

Bloggers for Bayh

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Maureen Groppe, writing for Gannett News Service, has a story entitled “Bloggers push Bayh for President: Senator’s following tries to create wave.”

It has this over the top quote from one blogger, a 55 year old part time school instructor in Southern California:

“I’ll never forget his strong, steel-eyed look in his eyes. Nothing
weak there,” Earl gushed in one of three online columns he posted about
the evening. “I saw the look of a president.”

The article comes back to earth with what I think is an accurate assessment:

“I don’t think bloggers are going to pick the next president,” said
David Perlmutter, a University of Kansas mass communications professor
who is writing a book on political Web logs, or blogs. But, he said,
blogs can help candidates by creating excitement for them or serving as
an “early warning system” for what’s playing well and what’s not.

A Hoosier blogger gets a mention: Confessions of a Hoosier Democrat which, upon brief review, appears to be all-Bayh, all the time (I’m sure during certain periods, my blog could have been viewed as all-DST, all the time, so I’ll add it to my RSS feed and keep an eye on it.)

FWJG: On Gambling

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The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has an article on the State’s reliance on gambling revenue to subsidize taxes. The editorial commends the state on funding a treatment program with some of the proceeds but notes that the necessity of such a program is caused or exacerbated by the State’s legalization of gambling.

For my part, I think if the State is in for a penny, it should go in for a pound. Why be content to merely take a rake off the casino profits — why not have the State run the casinos directly and take the whole pie, reducing taxes accordingly? Normally you don’t want state run businesses — you want the private sector to be as innovative and efficient as possible. But I don’t think those policy goals really apply to gambling. I don’t think, as a State, we ought to be particularly enthusiastic about a booming gambling business that draws in more and more customers and convinces them to spend more and more of their money.  So, I don’t think the normal free-market concerns about state-run businessess apply to gambling even though I’ll concede that private businesses would almost certainly deliver a better product more efficiently.

As for the moral concern, I’m reminded of the joke that ends with the punchline, “We’ve established what you are, ma’am; now we’re just haggling over the price.” We’re not somehow morally superior because the State doesn’t run the casinos and other gambling concerns directly. We’re just suckers for letting private business keep the lion’s share of the profit on this particular enterprise.

I should note that this analysis assumes that gambling is morally tainted activity but that we’re willing to allow it because of its value in defraying our tax burden. If it’s morally equivalent to other services, then obviously the State has no business creating a monopoly for itself; but then, if that were true, the State would have no business taxing gambling concerns more heavily than other service providers.

State run casinos would just be a way to make some citizens happier to pay higher taxes. Give them some razzle dazzle and some minimal chance of making  a profit and the citizens will gladly put a little  extra money in the State’s coffers.  Charge an extra $20 on their property taxes, and they’ll be reaching for the torches and pitchforks. It’s not, apparently, that these particular citizens mind being parted from their money; they just want a little entertainment for their dollar.