Mess Up Kids

I have had links with the North East Kingdom of Vermont (near the Canadian border) since early childhood. Vermont taught me to value people as individuals (along with learning to speak with a Vermont accent . My parents met on a beautiful lake there where I spent long summers and then retired there, too, which kept my links to Vermont people. One of these was of great help to my mother after my father's death when she became blind and was one of the many who would drop in to make sure she was ok on a daily basis in the rented half of the house where my parents had been spending their winters. When the house owner wanted to sell, we bought it to keep my mother in place and then kept it on as a place which we have rented out to two families at a time. Such has made me aware of the terribly declining economy for rural people who used to thrive on family farms and the surrounding services for same. Now things are very grim, indeed. We keep the rents the same as they were 20 years ago, which allows two families to get by who decades ago would have been prosperous enough to buy a home of their own.

One of our nearby neighbors used to keep an eye on my mother and sadly has had grim things happen to her since -- her husband's early death and multiple sclerosis which has her now nearly entirely wheelchair bound. We chat frequently about things and the descriptions she gives of happenings there are frightening in their implications. Houses are being bought up and then rented out at high rates to prosperous people who go skiing or summer nearby as my parents did, whatever. The local people are ever more hard pressed to make a living. Jobs in Wal-Mart type places or Radio Shack cannot replace family farming, which is no longer economically viable. The town economy depends on a factory that could go belly up at any moment.

What really gets to one is that so many of the teens are apparently into drugs, dropping out of school at 16, getting into major trouble. In this town they vandalize whatever, e.g. smashed the car windows down an entire street one night last week. One has the sense of lives discontinued before they have even gotten started -- much as we in the city are aware of our teens in poverty circumstances dropping out of high school before graduating in percentages as high as 90% in some of our huge inner city ones.

One hates to imagine what sort of futures such kids will have. They cannot do much of anything without a high school degree in the way of employment. The factory jobs have gone to China. One has to do basic math even to be a checkout counter cashier. Trouble is what all this spells for America -- rural and urban -- so far as I can see. Riding the subways now I see many apparently unemployed African American men -- 51% in NYC at the age levels when one used to be starting a solid job career. The good thing is so many of them have young children with them, which suggests to me that at least their wives have gotten jobs that are supporting their families. But if we do not manage some serious break throughs in redistributing resources in this country and putting people everywhere to work, we are in big trouble. Europe has its problems, but it is a nearly century ahead of us now along these lines.

The one bright note in my life is that I have in my City University of NY classes the full range of students from everywhere who will be finding a place for themselves in our increasingly messed up system. I hope that some of them will work to make the U.S. a better place to live for all.

Grab It or Leave It!

[One can trace the roots of our 'ownership society' obsessions on the right back to Locke who suggested that the left out in Britain could always migrate to America and grab the lands of the native inhabitants there -- who did not share Locke's personal conception of ownership rights. This Lockean grab it or leave it mentality was supplemented by our 3rd rate latter day Calvinists who equated wealth with divine approbation and poverty or personal hardships with divine wrath for sins possibly not even recognized as such by the alleged sinner. Needless to say this dynamic duo has left the U.S. with the worst of all possible worlds in terms of social support systems and fair distributions of the wealth created by the efforts of all, not just the greedy CEOs skimming off the cream. Growl! Ed Kent]

OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Private Obsession
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: April 29, 2005

American health care is unique among advanced countries in its heavy reliance on the private sector. It's also uniquely inefficient. We spend far more per person on health care than any other country, yet many Americans lack health insurance and don't receive essential care.

This week yet another report emphasized just how bad a job the American system does at providing basic health care. A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation estimates that 20 million working Americans are uninsured; in Texas, which has the worst record, more than 30 percent of the adults under 65 have no insurance.

And lack of insurance leads to inadequate medical attention. Over a 12-month period, 41 percent of the uninsured were unable to see a doctor when needed because of cost; 56 percent had no personal doctor or health care provider.

Our system is desperately in need of reform. Yet it will be very hard to get useful reform, for two reasons: vested interests and ideology.

I'll have a lot more to say about vested interests and health care in future columns, but let me emphasize one key point: a lot of big companies are essentially in the business of wasting health care resources.

The most striking inefficiency of our health system is our huge medical bureaucracy, which is mainly occupied in trying to get someone else to pay the bills. A good guess is that two million to three million Americans are employed by insurers and health care providers not to deliver health care, but to pass the buck to other people.

Yet any effort to reduce this waste would hurt powerful, well-organized interests, which have already demonstrated their power to block reform. Remember the "Harry and Louise" ads that doomed the Clinton health plan? The actors may have seemed like regular folks, but the ads were paid for by the Health Insurance Association of America, an industry lobbying group that liked the health care system just the way it was.

But vested interests aren't the only obstacle to fixing our health care system. We also have a big problem with ideology.

You see, America is ruled by conservatives, and they have a private obsession: they believe that more privatization, not less, is always the answer. And their faith persists even when the evidence clearly points to a private sector gone bad.

I could cite many examples of this obsession at work. But a particularly good illustration of ideology-induced obliviousness is the 2004 Economic Report of the President, which devotes a whole chapter to health care that can be read as a sort of conservative manifesto on the subject.

The main message of that report is that U.S. health care is doing just fine. Never mind the huge expense, the low life expectancy, the high infant mortality; it's a market-based system, so it must be good.

The report even takes a Panglossian view of uninsured Americans - one that is completely at odds with the grim statistics I cited above - suggesting that "many of them may remain uninsured as a matter of choice," perhaps because "they are young and healthy and do not see the need for insurance."

The president's economists had only one criticism of the system: insurance is too comprehensive, which encourages people to consume too much health care. As they see it, insurance covers too large a percentage of medical costs. The answer to this problem is the creation of, you guessed it, private accounts, which have now superseded tax cuts as the answer to all problems.

Indeed, a new paper by Martin Feldstein of Harvard, which clearly reflects the administration's views, suggests that Social Security privatization and health savings accounts - tax shelters designed to encourage people to pay medical costs out of their own pockets - are only the beginning. "Investment-based personal accounts," he says, are the way to go for unemployment insurance and Medicare, too.

O.K., let's not turn this into a Bush-bashing session. President Bush didn't cause the crisis in American health care. His health care policies have made things only a little bit worse.

The point, instead, is that even though all the evidence suggests that we would be much better off under a system of universal coverage, any such move will be fiercely opposed, on principle, by conservatives who want us to move in the opposite direction.

And reform will also be opposed by powerful vested interests - my next subject in this series.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

OSI Breakfast Panel on Corporatization of Our Universities

[Here is a summary of the breakfast panel that I missed Wednesday (4/27) from the OSI Website. Columbia folk to whom this is bcc'd can see why some of us are worried about the vagueness of your reporting on how you plan to fund your biotech expansion into Manhattanville. Your answers thus far have been in generalities -- fund-raising, debt, etc. but leave open questions of corporate and military involvements? And how much money must you really extract from student tuitions, copyrights, etc. to live a decent academic life? Looks pretty extravagant to me compared with the low hourly wages of the workers to whom you lease out your properties such as the Morton Williams University Market that will not even invest a few bucks for stools for its checkout counter cashiers. Ed Kent]

http://www.soros.org/resources/events/university_20050413/summary

OSI Forum: University Inc.—The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education
Summary

“The American public still largely believes that universities are independent, nonprofit institutions,” Jennifer Washburn said. However parents, students, and citizens should all be “gravely concerned” about growing financial ties between universities and corporations.

The problem is not simply corporate funding of academic research, she said; universities themselves are beginning to look and act like for-profit companies. Today universities are engaging in patenting and licensing, and other unprecedented commercial activities that often conflict with universities’ core educational mission, according to Washburn.

She cited several concerns regarding academic commercialism, among them the problem of excessive industry influence over the research process. For example, when UC Berkeley researcher Tyrone Hayes sought to publish his work demonstrating that a common herbicide caused deformities in frogs, his corporate sponsor, Syngenta, tried to delay publication and subjected his work to lengthy internal review. Hayes was forced to find new funding to replicate his research so that he could publish his findings in a timely manner. Meanwhile, the corporation funded researchers at another university, Texas Tech, to discredit Hayes’s research. That university signed a contract giving Syngenta the right to review and control publication.

Another major problem is conflict of interest. “Today it is common for star professors to consult for the same companies that fund their research; they accept generous fees to join their scientific advisory boards,” Washburn said, and “they hold patent rights to the products they are involved in testing.” A recent study of prominent biomedical journals showed that over one-third of the authors had a significant financial interest in their own reports.

A third area of concern for Washburn is students—in particular, undergraduates—who “have not fared well in this more commercial landscape.” At the same time that legislators have increased spending on medical and biotech research centers in hope of becoming “the next Silicon Valley,” she said, they have “gutted” general funding for university education.

The corporate influence is also skewing curriculum and the research agenda, according to Washburn. For example, after UC Berkeley signed an agreement with a Swiss biotechnology firm that produces genetically modified crops, “industry money poured in to the labs of those scientists involved in developing genetically modified crops.” Meanwhile scholars focused on sustainable agriculture or who were critical of genetic modification “found themselves starved for resources.”

“Even on economic grounds, trying to turn universities into short-term profit centers is foolish,” Washburn said. "It’s important to remember that the biotechnology and computer revolutions were created in the universities at a time when business had no interest in funding this kind of research" because it had no apparent commercial promise.

Arjun Appadurai identified a few larger factors influencing the issue, such as the increasingly pervasive conflict between market values and democracy, intense competition among universities for students, the tendency of parents and university boards to reflect and amplify the commercial ethos, and the fact that research and education are now done by industry as well. For example, Microsoft certification is more important for some professionals than is university training, Appadurai noted. “The university is just one player in the game,” he said. The question must be addressed, therefore, whether universities possess a uniquely valuable relationship to research and teaching.

Warning against “nostalgia” for the past, Leon Botstein pointed out that there has always been a tension in academia between the utilitarian and the pure pursuit of knowledge. “The situation hasn’t gotten worse,” he said, “but the players have changed.”

Moreover, income expectations have risen dramatically in late-twentieth century America, Botstein said. The fact that lawyers and bankers make hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the average professor contributes to scholars’ desire to make money from research. “This is not the university’s fault,” he noted.

Kudos for the Columbia Spectator

[I, too, want to commend the Spectator for its excellent supply of information on the Columbia/David Project/MEALAC coverage. It is precisely such emotively loaded matters that do, indeed, need the light of day and balanced treatment. And as one who was thrown into the middle of disputes, myself, as a student editor back when in the McCarthy era, I can imaginatively resonate with the students trying to do justice to all here.

Let me add a few specifics of my own. I am personally a critic of the extremists on both sides in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I am empathetic with the paranoia of those who have faced 2 millennia of Christian pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust. It is ironic that the conflict there now is with Muslims who were much more hospitable to the Jews than Christians in the past (as I understand the history) -- the expulsion of both from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella being emblematic. Thus, I work with and have good email friends among those on both sides of the green line who pursue peaceful means for achieving harmony there. I oppose such destructive things as boycotts that only exacerbate the conflict with further economic and ideological impulses to fight back against injustice. And certainly Zionism, which means many different things to different factions, is not to be blindly equated with racism, nor is criticism of Israeli excesses and settlement and wall building to be equated with anti-Semitism.

The David Project, itself, looks to me to be a junior version of AIPAC, which is not something to be proud of. I saw no credible evidence that Joseph Massad was in any way abusing his students:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/mealac/faculty/massad/

Perhaps all have learned a bit from the encounter and perhaps the Columbia administration, inexperienced with things that we have been living and working with for many decades and more here in this city of immigrants, will catch up and begin to do it better. At Brooklyn College several decades ago our faculty and students, independently of and in the face of initial administrative distrust, organized our own Multi-Cultural Action Committee that has actively mediated our ethnic conflicts -- we had Mayer Kahanna complicating things for us in those early days along with distributors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion anti-Semitic screed that had been contrived by the Tzarist regime enforcers. Renate Bridenthal, herself a child refugee from the Holocaust and 7 years at completing her undergrad studies at CCNY, one of our noted historians, put out a pamphlet along with students on this last which offered a model for unmasking and diffusing ugly ideological attacks. The Spectator has done far better than the Times in serving this function.

I had better conclude with saying that Hentoff's commendation of the Spectator and criticisms of the Times are about all that I agree with either here or in many of his divergent views on civil liberties matters of late! As a former member of the ACLU advisory committee on church-state matters I have been there and seen it all and I have rarely found it wrong on the issues -- except back in the McCarthy days when there was some ugly yielding to the anti-communist mantras. Ed Kent]

.....................................................................
Liberty Beat
Columbia: The Awakening
Students accused of 'McCarthyism' have enabled all students to begin to be heard
by Nat Hentoff
April 25th, 2005 2:39 PM alert me by e-mail
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Columbians for Academic Freedom: They would not be silenced (Bari Weiss, Ariel Beery, Daniella Kahane, and Aharon Horwitz).
photo: tinazimmer.com
We just want honesty. We want to feel comfortable expressing views in the classroom that might not be the views that professors themselves hold. We just want to make a safe and good educational environment. A Columbia student in the David Project film Columbia Unbecoming, which months ago ignited the international conflict about the university's Middle East studies department. Her face was not shown because she feared retaliation.

I believe change comes not from larger organizations, but from people who believe passionately in something and are willing to put themselves on the line for an ideal. And judging by the announcement of [Columbia's new] grievance procedure I think we've achieved many things in a remarkably short period of time without institutional support. Ariel Beery, a leader of the student group Columbians for Academic Freedom, The Jewish Week, April 15

Louis Brandeis was the wisest justice to have sat on the Supreme Court. He used to say, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." A courageous small number of students at Columbia are responsible for bringing sunlight to a long festering controversy concerning the university's Department of Middle East and Asian Language and Cultures (MEALAC).

On April 11, Columbia released a new set of students' grievance procedures, which, though flawed, did have this section:

"Complaints Involving a Faculty Member [include] (1) Failure to show appropriate respect in an instructional setting for the rights of others to hold opinions differing from their own; (2) Misuse of faculty authority to promote a political or social cause within an instructional setting; and (3) Conduct in the classroom or another instructional setting that adversely affects the learning environment."

Bari Weiss, 21, of Columbians for Academic Freedom, explained to The New York Sun's Jacob Gershman the significance of that last cause for student complaint: "[An] atmosphere of intellectual orthodoxy creates an environment where dissenters are turned into pariahs."

It's worth repeating something else Bari Weiss said [in my April 13-19 column, "Columbia Whitewashes"]: "We are doing this because we believe in the rights of all Columbia students to dissent without fear of abuse. Yes, this means for conservative students as well as left-wingers, for Zionists as well as anti-Zionists. . . . Criticizing professors does not violate their academic freedom or stifle debate. It only adds to it."

On Columbia's campus, these students were reviled by other students, and by some professors, for engaging in a "right-wing onslaught," for being "witch-hunters," and for engaging in "McCarthyism."

I am of an age to have experienced McCarthyism directly from the source and his followers, as was revealed years later in my FBI files (obtained through the Freedom of Information Act). It was there I learned the names of the towns in Russia from which my late parents came, and in which I was accused of being at "radical" meetings in other countries where I've never been and of mocking FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

The ravening senator from Wisconsin and his acolytes—including many in the press (anyone remember George Sokolsky?)—were dedicated to suppressing speech by "subversives," "fellow travelers," and other unpatriotic dissenters.

To call what the students in Columbians for Academic Freedom have been doing "McCarthyism" shows the need for much more teaching in schools, including universities, about that fear-ridden period of actual McCarthyism in American history—and what could happen again if there is another 9-11 or its equivalent.

Bari Weiss and her colleagues at Columbia have been expanding and deepening free speech, not suppressing it. As Ariel Beery notes:

"There are those people who just pass, and those who are willing to stake their claim in stepping outside of the normal discourse to spur the rest of society to action. Sometimes, it upsets people that [these] others seem to claim a right to be heard, and they feel like we're ruining it for everyone. But you have to stand up for what you believe sometimes."

I asked Ariel Beery for his reaction to Columbia's new grievance procedure, with its tiers of faculty committees, deans, vice presidents, the ombudsman office, and other officials before students can get fully heard. The most glaring of his objections is "the fact that students will not sit on any adjudicating committee."

It is a measure of how far Columbia has yet to go to secure free inquiry for everyone in its community that students are omitted from this mechanism that is designed to encourage them to report their grievances without fear of retaliation from, among others, faculty members.

In a later column, I will explore the persistent hostility of the New York Civil Liberties Union to these students who have "stepped outside the normal discourse" to awaken not only Columbia but also, I expect, other universities to recognize that academic freedom is also the essential right of students.

For this awakening at Columbia, much credit also goes to its student newspaper, the Columbia Spectator (Megan Greenwell, editor in chief). From the beginning of this furor, the Spectator has accurately and comprehensively carried the story forward and has kept its pages open to the conflicting views—including bylined commentaries—across the spectrum of this resounding clash that is far from ended. And the Spectator showed up The New York Times by rejecting the administration's offer to give it an exclusive, along with the Times, on the release of the faculty investigative report if it promised not to include comments on that report from the students who made that report necessary.

The Times accepted the bottom-of-the-deck deal; the Spectator scorned it. Said the Columbia Journalism Review Daily: "Given that in this case, student journalists on a campus newspaper upheld a higher standard of journalistic integrity than the 'paper of record,' the Times is right to be embarrassed."

The Spectator also beat the Times in covering the whole story.

NeoLibs?

I had planned to attend this morning a breakfast forum sponsored by Soros' OSI, which I shall not be able to make, "to mark the publication of University Inc. The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education."

The following posting by one of my CUNY colleagues points to this phenomenon in two of the institutions where I was educated, Yale and Columbia. It raises the question in my mind as to when liberal turns to 'Neoliberal' or whatever one wants to call those who begin to use force and deception rather than persuasion to pursue goals that do not represent the best interests of our academic communities, but rather the dispositions of those who happened to be in charge of them via the appointments of wealthy donor-trustees. I was particularly struck by the difference between the Ivies and Oxford in this regard when I first attended the latter as a student. I had had to do battle as the Chairman of the Yalie Daily there with all sorts of university wrong-doing ranging from anti-Semitic admissions quotas to cover-ups of group rapes of local high school girls by the frat of which the current Bush was later president, which sponsored an annual "pig night" to which young New Haven girls were invited and then told of their ugliness at midnight when well liquored up. Our then president was a refugee from Wall St. He threatened my expulsion for writing an editorial disclosing that our frats were routinely serving minors. I was in a special Directed Studies program which included Ford Scholars selected directly from earlier years in high school and I had had it having had to rescue at least one under aged one from local bars where he was well on the way to becoming a teen alcoholic.

The following was posted by my wider colleague, Jesse Lemisch, Professor of History Emeritus, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.

Click below for my "Alan Brinkley: Liberalism in Collapse?" on History News Network with links to Jennifer Washburn's magnificent piece posted on The Nation's website, Brinkley's shameful strike-breaking memo of February 16, and my speech in support of the Columbia TA/RA union, Graduate Student Employees United (April 2004)

http://hnn.us/articles/11548.html

Legal Enforcement of Whose Morals?

In Telecast, Frist Defends His Effort to Stop Filibusters
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Senator Bill Frist stepped up his threats to change Senate
rules to circumvent blockades of judicial nominees while
calling for "more civility in political life."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/25/politics/25justice.html?th&emc=th

..................................................................

We started our exploration of moral issues in my class this semester in applied ethics by asking 'what is the right thing to do?' and noted that four aspects of any moral investigation must be sorted out:

1) What are the relevant facts to be considered?

2) What concepts and sub concepts apply to any given moral problem?

3) What are the arguments for or against a particular moral position?

4) What are the fundamental presuppositions or starting points of the proponents of the various moral positions brought to bear on this issue?

Again, by pure chance we most recently happened to explore the traditional controversy between proponents of enforcing a particular moral code legally (moral conservatives) versus defenders of liberty (Mill and Hart -- moral liberals) who maintain that individual conscience and liberty should not be curtailed by government (legal enforcement) unless harm or extreme offense to others are involved.

Conservatives justify enforcement of their preferred moral norms on the basis:

a) that not enforcing them will cause the destruction of society

b) that any majority has the right to enforce its preferred moral code.

Liberals warn of the potential 'tyranny of the majority' that the conservative position invokes and appeal for utilitarian assessment of the relative gains and losses entailed by any particular moral decision.

"Justice Sunday" yesterday, as it was denominated, beamed a political appeal to conservative churches to punish law makers who do not enforce religious conservatives' preferred moral values. It portends a conservative drive to outlaw abortion, homosexuality, stem cell research, cloning, etc. This drive to punish non conformity to conservative moral norms is being opposed by most traditional U.S. churches and civil liberties organizations.

The open question now with the recent election of Pope Benedict XVI is whether he will seek to enforce by law his moral values which he takes to be absolutes dictated by G-d and which in addition to the above also condemn the use of condoms to protect against such dread diseases as AIDS? He is reported to have urged Catholics in our last national election not to vote for Catholic office seekers who do not conform to his church's absolute moral norms.

Liberal Catholic theologians such as Hans Kung, who originally sponsored Pope Benedict for his first Tubingen university teaching position, are opposed to Benedict's absolutism and have argued that the Catholic Church must modify its moral stands to adjust to particular times and moral problems, particularly such things as allowing condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS:

http://www.speakersaccess.com/topics/politics/kung.html

http://homepages.which.net/~radical.faith/thought/kung.htm

Personally, as a secular humanist philosopher, I side with Kung, whose works I have read and occasionally reviewed and who, I regret, has been the loser in the struggle for moral dominance within the Catholic Church. He, as I, also trained in theology, see no religious warrant and only great harm in Benedict's opposition to the use of condoms to prevent either births or diseases. I see no legitimate warrant for interference with our Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade which defined pregnancy and its termination as a sphere of privacy rights of women impregnated in whatever circumstances to terminate an unwanted pregnancy prior to the viability of a fetus. The attack on homosexuality puts at life risk those so attacked.

Hopefully this emerging conflict in moral claims can be resolved by evaluating the relative gains and losses involved in determining what is the right thing to do and not with ad hominen (personal) attacks such as one gathers were launched by religious conservatives during their so-called "Justice Sunday" presentation. And I certainly hope that Pope Benedict XVI will follow the Kantian lead of 'respect for persons' so well enunciated in one of Pope John Paul II's scholarly theological books, which I also happened to review some years ago.

Let's Get the Republicans Where It Hurts!

I happen to be re-reading John Stuart Mill's classic On Liberty (1859) in preparation for teaching it to a political philosophy class next week.

It occurs to me that we Democrats, rather than trying to 'out moral' or 'out faith' the Republicans, ought to be exploiting the obvious bifurcation in the intellectual mechanisms driving the right wingers of the Republican party: the libertarians who reject state interference with such things as their owning weapons with which they can blow away their neighbors versus the moral absolutists who hate gays and hyperventilate over a conceptus while leaving millions of American children to go hungry and with inadequate medical care, housing, and education!

It is pretty obvious that the two right wings that dominate the Republicans do not hang together and, thus, fly their bird in divergent directions. We should be hitting them where it hurts. Do you want morals strictly enforced or do you want government to end restrictions on your liberties? Admittedly the Republican pols have been pretty clever in stringing along these divergent contingents of supporters -- both sides probably assuming that the other cannot possibly enact its threatened policies. But now they are in control and something is bound to give -- not with a whimper, but with a potentially big bang!

We should be hitting them where it hurts. To the baby lovers we should be shouting loud and clear that if they so love the unborn, they had better get ready to ante up their taxes to pay for the kids that they want to bring into the world who need proper food, housing, medical care and education -- at home as well as aboard. And if they oppose taxation to supply such needs they are truly hypocrites of the first order.

To the libertarians we should be pointing out that the more hungry kids that are produced around the world, the more guns will be needed to fend off crime and wars over the ever more limited resources that they will be needing such as oil and drinkable water. So they better get ready to pay more taxes for a greedily enlarging military budget! Terrorists abound!

All this is a bit simple-minded, but it tells it as it is. We had all better get our acts together pronto before it is too late. Tax and spend on the necessities -- or run for cover back into those basement bomb shelters that were so popular back when we anticipated a global nuclear holocaust. 9/11 is but a small sample of worse likely to come unless we stop acting like the biggest bully on the globe!

Let's get 'em with the realities. Faith-based nonsense expired with the Scopes Trial back in 1925!

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopes.htm

Harlem Rally for Mumia Abu-Jamal Today (Saturday, April 23)

[As I understand the circumstances a car with Mumia and his brother was stopped late at night by Philadelphia police who shot Mumia's brother. Mumia shot back and killed a policeman and was thereafter sentenced to death. He is a political activist who posts columns (was a journalist) from his death row cell. Given the life sentence recently for the right wing European roots bomber who killed two while bombing an abortion clinic, a gay club, and a crowd, Mumia's sentence in a far more complicated legal situation, balancing rights of self-defense against murder charges, looks to be an all too typical racist miscarriage of American justice. Ed Kent]

Organize to Stop the Legal Lynching of
Brother Mumia Abu-Jamal!

April 23, 2005 - Harlem

1 pm: Rally and March
starting at the Harlem State Office Building at 163 West 125th Street

3 PM: Salem United Methodist Church
129th Street & 7th Avenue

Program including former Mayor David Dinkins, Pam Africa, Margarita
López, Herman Ferguson, Nana Soul, Seeds of Wisdom, Ramona Africa and
many others!

Legal Update by Attorney Rachel Wolkenstein

International Concerned Family & Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Asians for
Mumia, David Wong Support Ctte., December 12th Movement, Free Mumia
Abu-Jamal Coalition, NYC, Harlem Tenants Council, Iglesia San Romero de
las Américas, International Action Center, The Jericho Movement,
Latin@s
por Mumia, The National Mumia Task Force, NY Friends of MOVE, Ossining
NAACP, Patrice Lumumba Coalition, ProLibertad, Rainbow Flags for Mumia

212-633-6646 . 212-330-8029 . www.mumia.org .
www.freemumia.net .
www.freemumia.com .
www.millions4mumia.org

"When a cause comes along and you know in your bones that it is just,
yet refuse to defend it--at that moment you begin to die. And I have
never seen so many corpses walking around talking about justice."
--Mumia Abu-Jamal

Free Mumia and All Political Prisoners!
Latin@s por Mumia • www.freemumia.net

NYC Jericho Movement
nycjericho@riseup.net •
http://www.jerichony.org

Enroned by the Health Insurers

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Passing the Buck
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Much of the health care spending of the United States is
devoted to trying to get someone else to pay the bills.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/22/opinion/22krugman.html?th&emc=th

................................................

I certainly have to support Krugman's accusation here that our health insurers waste much of our monies that should be directed to health on bureaucracies focused on denying payments to the insured! My wife handles such things for our family. She must spend literally hours and hours, fax after fax, doing battle with our health insurance companies, getting them to pay that for which we are supposedly covered. She often wins battles amounting to many thousands of dollars in proper payments -- but not always. We are sometimes rescued by our caring doctors who forgive many thousands of dollars of payments due, but we still end up spending about 10% (tax deductible) of our family income on additional medical payments that are promised by our medical insurance contracts, but denied by the companies when the bills are presented to them!

I hate to think how those who either do not or cannot fight back are being routinely cheated with this ugly games playing! There ought to be punitive laws regulation this insurance company malpractice!

Norman Siegel: "We Have Just Begun to Fight!"

A multitude of events were running simultaneously on 116th St. between B'Way and Riverside Drive this afternoon (Wednesday, April 20). A large grandstand has been set up at the RSD end for a 4-6 pm union rally (Unite/HERE; UAW; AFL-CIO) expecting hundreds of union members arriving to support the graduate student strikes simultaneously in process at Yale as well as Columbia.

The striking students are now into day three of their marching and chanting at the 116th St. gate.

And at 2 p.m. opponents of the Columbia expansion into Manhattanville, including Norman Siegel representing businesses in the area, Jordi Reyes/Montblanc (Chair of CB#9) Maritta Dunn and other board members, tenants, business owners threatened by the sly Columbia move behind the scenes to achieve condemnation/eminent domain there, student supporters such as Nel Gerster of the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification, Tom Kappner of CPC, and many others spoke out along the lines of Norman Siegel's concluding comment: "We have just begun to fight!"

I have my monster teaching day at Brooklyn College tomorrow and so will delay until later a fuller account of things. But in this lovely day it was good to see an assembly of people who actually give a damn in these Enroned times of deceit and exploitation.

Messed Up U.S. Health Care 'System'

The Medical Money Pit
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Why does health care in the United States cost so much?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/15/opinion/15krugman.html?th&emc=th

........................................

It is pretty clear from Krugman's specifics here that just about everyone connected with our U.S. health care institutions is making out like a bandit -- except those who need medical care.!
Ed Kent

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: April 15, 2005

A dozen years ago, everyone was talking about a health care crisis. But then the issue faded from view: a few years of good data led many people to conclude that H.M.O.'s and other innovations had ended the historic trend of rising medical costs.

But the pause in the growth of health care costs in the 1990's proved temporary. Medical costs are once again rising rapidly, and our health care system is once again in crisis. So now is a good time to ask why other advanced countries manage to spend so much less than we do, while getting better results.

Before I get to the numbers, let me deal with the usual problem one encounters when trying to draw lessons from foreign experience: somebody is sure to bring up the supposed horrors of Britain's government-run system, which historically had long waiting lists for elective surgery.

In fact, Britain's system isn't as bad as its reputation - especially for lower-paid workers, whose counterparts in the United States often have no health insurance at all. And the waiting lists have gotten shorter.

But in any case, Britain isn't the country we want to look at, because its health care system is run on the cheap, with total spending per person only 40 percent as high as ours.

The countries that have something to teach us are the nations that don't pinch pennies to the same extent - like France, Germany or Canada - but still spend far less than we do. (Yes, Canada also has waiting lists, but they're much shorter than Britain's - and Canadians overwhelmingly prefer their system to ours. France and Germany don't have a waiting list problem.)

Let me rattle off some numbers.

In 2002, the latest year for which comparable data are available, the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman and child in the population. Of this, $2,364, or 45 percent, was government spending, mainly on Medicare and Medicaid. Canada spent $2,931 per person, of which $2,048 came from the government. France spent $2,736 per person, of which $2,080 was government spending.

Amazing, isn't it? U.S. health care is so expensive that our government spends more on health care than the governments of other advanced countries, even though the private sector pays a far higher share of the bills than anywhere else.

What do we get for all that money? Not much.

Most Americans probably don't know that we have substantially lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality figures than other advanced countries. It would be wrong to jump to the conclusion that this poor performance is entirely the result of a defective health care system; social factors, notably America's high poverty rate, surely play a role. Still, it seems puzzling that we spend so much, with so little return.

A 2003 study published in Health Affairs (one of whose authors is my Princeton colleague Uwe Reinhardt) tried to resolve that puzzle by comparing a number of measures of health services across the advanced world. What the authors found was that the United States scores high on high-tech services - we have lots of M.R.I.'s - but on more prosaic measures, like the number of doctors' visits and number of days spent in hospitals, America is only average, or even below average. There's also direct evidence that identical procedures cost far more in the U.S. than in other advanced countries.

The authors concluded that Americans spend far more on health care than their counterparts abroad - but they don't actually receive more care. The title of their article? "It's the Prices, Stupid."

Why is the price of U.S. health care so high? One answer is doctors' salaries: although average wages in France and the United States are similar, American doctors are paid much more than their French counterparts. Another answer is that America's health care system drives a poor bargain with the pharmaceutical industry.

Above all, a large part of America's health care spending goes into paperwork. A 2003 study in The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that administrative costs took 31 cents out of every dollar the United States spent on health care, compared with only 17 cents in Canada.

In my next column in this series, I'll explain why the most privatized health care system in the advanced world is also the most bloated and bureaucratic.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

Republicans Attack Constitution!

Frist Set to Use Religious Stage on Judicial Issue
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Senator Bill Frist will participate in a telecast
portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for
blocking the president's nominees.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/15/politics/15judges.html?th&emc=th

...............................................

AMENDMENT I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

...............................................

As I spent several decades as a member of the ACLU Church-State Advisory Committee focused on the First Amendment, I am appalled by this direct Republican attack upon it -- and the rule of law generally!

Dangerous Precedents!

What one fears emerging from a rogue action such as the U.S. attack on Iraq are the precedents set for other nations to pursue their own national goals outside the rule of law and international peace-keeping standards. One gathers now that while making peace with India, China may be about to launch an aggressive military approach to Japanese efforts to develop oil resources in areas claimed by both. We may be beginning to see here what could be the beginning of the end -- world-wide conflict to dominate our ever decreasing supply of essential resources -- oil, water, whatever. I doubt that the Bush administration is in any position to cope with either this new Asian conflict or the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the face of its professed (through its appointments) contempt for international standards of conduct. Who will take a Bolton seriously outside of right wing Bush supporters? Those who do not know or recognize history are condemned to repeat it -- now with a wide variety of WMDs?

.........................................................

* China premier hits back at Japan *
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao tells Japan to "face up to history" after protests against its controversial textbooks.
Full story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4435521.stm

.........................................................

Japan Snubs China on Gas, History Feud Simmers
By REUTERS

Published: April 13, 2005

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan began allocating rights for gas exploration in a disputed area of the East China Sea on Wednesday, a move likely to rile China at a time when ties are at rock-bottom levels in a dispute over Japan's wartime past.

A senior Chinese official, calling the energy dispute one of the main problems plaguing Sino-Japanese relations, had warned Tokyo a day earlier not to award the test drilling rights and said doing so would ``fundamentally change the issue.''

Simmering tensions between the two Asian giants over a range of topics, especially what China sees as Japan's failure to own up to wartime atrocities, erupted in China at the weekend, with thousands of people taking part in protests that turned violent.

Some concerns have arisen about a Japanese backlash. In Tokyo on Wednesday, members of a right-wing group shouted slogans at the Chinese embassy, where security has been tightened, and dragged Chinese flags behind two vans, a witness said.

Some Japanese media said officials had pressed for a decision on gas exploration before Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura goes to Beijing for a planned two-day visit from Sunday to seek a solution to the broader diplomatic impasse.

But top government spokesman Hiroyuki Hosoda said the timing of the decision was coincidental.

``This (drilling rights) is an issue that was pursued as an industrial issue. It just happened that awarding exploration rights began today,'' Hosoda told a news conference.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said Japan was not trying to be confrontational.

``The aim is to turn a sea of confrontation into a sea of cooperation,'' Koizumi told reporters.

China and Japan, respectively the world's second- and third-biggest oil consumers, are also at odds over China's exploration for natural gas near an area Japan claims as its exclusive economic zone.

China overtook the United States as Japan's biggest trading partner in 2004 with about $178 billion in trade. Japanese corporations sank about $9.2 billion into China that year.

Hosoda noted that Japan had apologized in the past for the suffering caused by its wartime aggression.

``We have expressed deep reflections over history,'' he said.

``There is no change in that point of view. We have said many times that we want to maintain this attitude sincerely and put it into practice.''

Many in countries that were victims of Japan's World War II-era expansion feel past apologies have been insincere, partly because senior politicians often make contradictory remarks.

CONCERNS AND DISPUTES

On April 1, Tokyo reiterated its demand that China halt its own exploration project and provide data on its gas development projects in the area, giving Beijing about a week to provide a ``sincere'' response.

Unless China provided the data, it would be hard for Japan to consider the possibility of joint development of gas fields, a senior Japanese Foreign Ministry official told reporters.

Japan considers waters east of the midway point between its coastline and that of China to be its exclusive economic zone. It has voiced concern that nearby gas field development by China would draw reserves from geological structures that stretch under the seabed into its economic zone.

The two governments disagree on the location of the boundary between their respective zones.

``We made the decision because it is of vital importance to set up test drilling rights to protect Japan's national interests,'' a Japanese trade ministry official told reporters.

The process of creating and awarding the rights is likely to take several months. A decision on actual drilling would be made separately by the firms.

Teikoku Oil Co and Japan Petroleum Exploration Co said earlier this year that they would like to start exploring for oil and gas in the East China Sea as soon as possible if they got a government go-ahead.

The decision on drilling rights follows Japan's approval last week of school history books that critics say gloss over Japanese wartime atrocities.

The move ignited passions in China and both North and South Korea, where resentment runs deep over Japan's brutal 1910-1945 colonisation of the peninsula. Pyongyang late on Tuesday denounced the history texts, calling Tokyo a ``political dwarf.''

Machimura tried to soothe such anger, telling a group of visiting South Korean lawmakers on Wednesday that Japan regretted having caused pain to South Koreans during its colonial rule.

Thousands took part in the violent weekend protests in China which also targeted Tokyo's bid for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told reporters in New Delhi on Tuesday that Japan must ``face up to history squarely'' and that the protests should give Tokyo reason to rethink its bid for a permanent council seat.

At the United Nations, diplomats said they were watching the feud closely but so far it had had little impact, mainly because the chances for U.N. reform this year were fading anyway.

Tokyo has demanded an apology and compensation for damage caused to Japanese property in the protests, and urged China to protect Japanese firms and expatriates.

Beijing has not apologized.

Volunteers?

I don't seem to see many of our couch potato patriots volunteering either themselves or their children for tours of duty in Iraq or the other locales coveted by the neocons. As one whose daughter resigned from medical training in the National Guard just in time not to have been subject to call up, I am infinitely glad not to have one of mine at risk there.

But is it too much to point out that our super patriots at most seem to make lightening visits to Iraq or Afghanistan and then get themselves the hell out of there as fast as they can before a stray rocket gits 'em? How hypocritical.

During WW2 they all volunteered and we kids were actually disappointed that the war had ended before we could risk our lives for peace, justice, and country. The present deal of oil, torture, boredom, death, disability (mental or physical) is an Alice in Wonderland replay of real life just wars. How obscene!!!!!!!!!!!!!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]

Violence Against Women (Event and Info Sources)

Please pass along word to fellow students about this event. Also students with special concerns in this area might wish to get on the mailing list of Judie Montoya ("It Happening with Women") who reports daily on events involving women -- Judie Montoya -- or join either of two lists, Beijing 95, which emerged from the international conference on women's rights held there that year, or FAVNET (feminists against violence, which is mainly a network of counselors and organizations that assist victims -- it is a closed list and can be joined only with recommendations from members). Also Christine Hansen and the Miles Foundation have been targeting abuses of women in the military recently:

http://www.stopfamilyviolence.org/sfvo/miles_SASC.html

We shall be getting to women's rights in at least Philosophy 6 and possibly 43, so this event would be useful background. Possibly some who attend can report back Thursday (for extra credit ;-). Ed Kent

.....................................................................

I am writing to invite you and your classes to attend a session next
Tues. April 12 at 1:30 in the Jefferson-Williams room in the Student
Center (SUBO). [Brooklyn College, CUNY]

The main focus will be Violence Against Women During Wartime.
There will be two great speakers: Premilla Dixit from the NYC Social
Forum and The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
Also, Cynthia Rothschild who is an LGBT and Women's Human Rights
Activist and Amnesty International USA Board Member.
Cynthia will also speak on LGBT issues.

I ask that you encourage your classes to come..
some prof. offer extra credit or assign a short paper based on the
talks...

They will each speak for about 20 min. followed by questions and round
table discussions..
There has been much effort to get this together and we ask that you help
bring a crowd..

Sponsoring the event is:
Students for Global Justice, Arts of Democracy, The Womens Center, RAW,
Latin Women, LGBTA, and the Health Clinic

Attached is a flier that you can print up and pass around class if you
like..
Feel free to respond with any questions..

Thank you for your time,
Lisa Roche
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]

Hearings on CCNY Students and Staff Member Charged with Crimes for Picketing Recruiting Session

So far as I can determine from eye witness reports, those charged here were guilty of nothing more than picketing this meeting, used no violence, were possibly violently used (as reported in one instance seriously head injured) by security officers at CCNY, which has an horrendous record for civil liberties violations, as detailed to me a while back by Jose Elique, former FBI and head of overall CUNY Security during a previous comparable incident at CCNY in which he made clear to me that CUNY college administrators independently control and direct the actions of their college security officers on each of our CUNY campuses. Jose was disgusted by the previous out of control events there, drafted a protest letter, himself, which he shared with me, but decided not to send out. He resigned from the job and went elsewhere a bit thereafter. Ron McGuire is, himself, a CCNY graduate who defends CUNY students pro bono in such situations. I hope our CUNY high command, including our Chancellor, Matt Goldstein, himself a CCNY grad, will intervene to stop this nonsense. Bill Crain, psychology, head of the CCNY Senate has just completed a 3 day fasting vigil protesting this incident. Both the CCNY Senate and Faculty Council have passed resolutions condemning it. All this smacks too much of the McCarthy era -- which also hit CCNY members with wild charges. Carol Lang, a grandmother, is the much respected and beloved long-time administrative assistant of the CCNY Theater Department, who was interviewed with Hadas Thier on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now. Manifestly neither of these petite women could possibly have intimidated or injured a burly CCNY security guard! I am embarrassed as a CUNY faculty member and resident of this area that such abuses are being indulged by our administrations. I am sending blind copies of this comment variously to Columbia, Brooklyn and other CUNY faculty and administrators, local political representatives, and other lists and persons. Might CB#9 also join in this protest? there is absolutely no excuse for this type of intimidation, particularly on a public college campus! I received this notice following the 4/8 preliminary hearing, but will try to update as more information arrives.

Ed Kent, Ph.D. Columbia, Philosophy, Brooklyn College, resident 440 Riverside Drive, one year teacher of the Morris R. Cohen philosophy of law course at CCNY where I had the honor of awarding the Cohen prize for exceptional work to one of my students. I also intervened behind the scenes there to protect the tenure of Leonard Jeffries and Michael Levin as an offshoot of my volunteer work for the ACLU and NYCLU.

............................................................

Friends: The disciplinary hearing for the three CCNY students suspended for protesting military recruiting on campus will begin on Friday, April 8th at 10 AM in room 1/215 in the NAC building at City College. Carol Lang, the CCNY staff member suspended following the March 9th anti-recruiting demonstration, will have her disciplinary hearing on Thursday, April 14th at 10 AM in Room 50 in Shepard Hall. Supporters are urged to attend both disciplinary hearings. Carol, and the students, Hadas Thier, Nick Gergreen and Justino Rodriguez appeared in Manhattan Criminal Court today (April 4th) where they were formally arraigned on misdemeanor charges that carry maximum penalties of one year imprisonment. Carol, Hadas and Nick are charged with 3rd degree Assault, Resisting Arrest and lesser charges. Justino is charged with Resisting Arrest and two lesser charges of disorderly conduct. Carol and the students entered not-guilty pleas and all four criminal cases were adjourned to April 21 at 9:30 AM in Part "A" on the 4th floor at 100 Centre Street. Shawn Maher of Harlem Neighborhood Defenders is representing Carol and the students in both the criminal cases and the disciplinary hearings. The students have been suspended from classes since March 9th and Carol has been suspended from her job without pay since March 11th. Over 1,000 supporters have signed petitions urging that the suspensions be lifted and the charges dropped. Supporters should try to come early to the April 8th hearing because seating is limited in NAC 1/215. The CCNY NAC building can be entered at 137th Street either at Amsterdam or Convent Avenues. The nearest subway stops are 137th Street on the 1/9 lines or 145th Street on the A-B-C-D lines. The NAC building is a short walk from either station but there are free purple busses to City College from the 137th Street and 145th Street Stations. In Solidarity, Ron McGuire

--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy) -- Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]