Lost in Translation: Electronic Records and Health Reform

A typical day at work will invariably find me hunched over a piece of paper, staring at a jumble of illegible loops and lines, trying to figure out what on earth five loops and a squiggle is supposed to convey to the reader.

No, I am not a handwriting analyst, a historian of ancient writing, or a translator of foreign languages. I am a medical student, simply trying to read the paper progress note of another physician or resident in attempt to figure out what happened to my patient during his visit two months ago. This frustration contrasts to a recent gig at a VA hospital whose medical records and charts are completely computerized; a model system where I was able to breezily click through the past medical history of my patients. As an incoming medical professional in an already digitized world, I am constantly disgusted at the inefficiencies and difficulties that arise from using paper charts.

How Common are EHR’s?

Electronic medical record is one of the current buzz words in the health care field. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine this past spring found that only 1.5% of hospitals have a comprehensive-electronic record system present in all units . Other recent studies have found that a small percentage of physicians’ practices currently utilize electronic health record (EHR) system or CPOE (computerized provider order entry) at all practice locations, leaving a larger majority of our hospitals and health care providers to sift through endless piles of paper every day to learn about their patients.

Costs and Benefits

Those who doubt the inherent benefits of comprehensive EHR implementation put forth the financial objection that estimates over hundreds of thousands of dollars for many physician practices to implement and maintain such a system. However, some studies show that the costs to the health care system created by the problems using paper charts have the potential to outweigh the costs of an EHR in the long-run. More importantly, even if ultimately shown to be cost neutral, effective use of electronic health records have been shown to improve quality and save lives. Many of these quality gains are realized with robust systems that include evidence-based decision support tools to providers.

The Scary Truth

The old joke of physicians having illegible handwriting holds true in my experience: for the majority of physician providers, their writing is difficult to read at best. At worst, it is plain illegible. This creates a multitude of problems in our health care system that is a huge detriment to the efficiency, safety, and the economics and structure of the health care system. The most obvious and feared complications of simple bad handwriting are huge mistakes that can needlessly cost a life.

In its landmark report, to Err is Human, the Institute of Medicine estimated that up to 98,000 lives are lost every year from medical errors.  Not surprisingly, one study found that approximately 90% of  inpatient medication errors occur at either the ordering or transcribing stage.  I see nearly every day how easy it can be to make a mistake with a life-or-death magnitude simply by misinterpreting the wrong word or number from a chart leading to a dangerous drug reaction or an incorrect treatment. Even if I finally correctly translate all of the scribbled notes in the paper chart, it will have taken me five times as long to treat my patient, increasing the time it takes to treat the patient and increasing the chance of an adverse outcome. Talk about inefficiency in health care!

Aside from the danger and inefficiency, medical errors due to paper charts can wreak havoc on many other players in the health care system by causing a high number of lawsuits. When a physician is sued due to a medical error, it drives up the cost of the already sky-high malpractice insurance that all physicians have to pay. While it may seem to the general public that all doctors are rich and live to play golf, many have high debts from school, don’t make the big bucks, and work horrendous hours. Add high malpractice insurance, and this causes financial difficulty for physicians in certain specialties that can cause shortages of some primary care doctors such as obstetricians.

Alternatively, physicians might be forced to cherry pick their patients, only accepting Medicare and private insurance patients, causing uninsured and Medicaid patients to use the ER as their only health care venue, thus shifting the burden of cost to taxpayer’s wallets in the form of hidden hospital fees to compensate for many cases of avoidable uncompensated care. Many critics of EHR within medical field fail to realize that in improving the efficiency and safety of medical records translates far down the line to many aspects of the health care system. Indeed, in a time of health care reform, the transition of paper charts to electronic medical records will play a large role in improving the health care system.

Reason for Hope?

Through the ARRA EHR stimulus, part of the larger stimulus bill, Congress recently set aside $19 billion dollars, or the equivalent of over $40,000 per physician in a practice, to assist in implementing electronic health records (EHR) that meet meaningful use definitions (e.g., CPOE). This is a huge step forward in the attempt to computerize medical records across the country.

As a health care professional, I am excited to see the dedication to the improvement in health care of the current administration and frankly shocked at those who refusal to consider any reform to this health care system that is so obviously inefficient, expensive, and backward compared to any other developed industrialized nation. An entire overhaul of our health care system is required, in which EHR are only one part. However, the same critics of implementing EHR because it is “too expensive” are focused on the short term in all areas of health care reform, battling reform not because they have a better idea, but because they have no idea. I challenge any EHR or health care reform naysayer to step into my shoes for a day to read handwritten patient notes in a paper chart and to make a life or death decision based on an illegible scrawl. Our patients deserve better.

Review of Freedom’s Orator

Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s.

by Robert Cohen Oxford University Press, 532 pages, $34.95

It probably wasn’t until seven years after his death that a Mario Savio speech would reach its largest audience – albeit in altered form.  Anyone of a certain age who detected an echo of Savio’s 1964 “gears of the machine” speech in the 2003 season finale of Battlestar Galactica was not having one of those legendary acid flashbacks.  The show’s producer had been looking at a copy of the speech hanging on his wall for five years and it was with the permission Savio’s widow that the character known as “The Chief” delivered a paraphrase of the words that led into the famous Free Speech Movement (FSM) sit-in at the University of California, Berkeley’s Sproul Hall.

Probably more of Savio’s peers saw the clip of his original speech in another television show, though, Martin Scorsese’s 2005 Bob Dylan documentary, “No Direction Home.”  Only fitting in that, as FSM principal Jack Weinberg told Robert Cohen, author of the Savio biography, “Freedom’s Orator,” back then “If you named … young people who were famous, all the rest were rock musicians … [the] Beatles and Bob Dylan–and Mario Savio was a celebrity of that caliber.” Since it was Weinberg’s arrest that set off the thirty-two hour blockade of a police car that created FSM, he may lack sufficient distance to make such a judgement, but then it is a fact that, upon finishing his speech that day, Savio turned the mike over to Joan Baez for a rendition of her friend Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A Changin.”

When Mario Savio enrolled at UC Berkeley in 1963, it was his third college in three years.  Berkeley already had a free thinking reputation when he arrived.  That fact was the better part of why he was there: There was a serious student political party of several years standing called SLATE; Cal students had participated in major San Francisco demonstrations in 1960 at a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing at City Hall and outside the 1964 Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace; and the Civil Rights movement was a campus presence – Savio would be one of 167 arrested at a sit-in protesting the discriminatory hiring policies of the San Francisco Sheraton Palace hotel.  By the time Savio left, the campus had a free speech reputation as well – the man and the institution each having become a nationwide symbol of a new wave of student activism.

A ban on political advocacy on the Berkeley campus dated back to the 1930s, apparently a result of a West Coast Red scare that followed the San Francisco general strike.  There was, however, a twenty-six-foot-strip of sidewalk on Bancroft and Telegraph Avenues where such activity went on because it was believed to be city, not university property.  But in September of 1964, university administrators decided otherwise and shut the free speech area down.  A couple of brief sit-ins protesting the ban at administration offices followed over the next few days.  Then, at a Sproul Plaza rally called in defiance of the ban, administrators decided to arrest the above mentioned Jack Weinberg because he was not currently a Cal student, having dropped out of graduate math studies to concentrate on civil rights activities through a campus chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality.

Cohen writes: “The method used to arrest Weinberg could not have been more provocative … he had been dragged into a police car in the center of Sproul Plaza.  It was the most crowded spot on campus and shortly before noon, the busiest time of day.” A “fairly major level of stupidity,” Savio later observed.  At that moment, the Berkeley sit-in moved to a new level: “Before the officer could start his engine students were sitting in around the car.” Savio, who had already emerged as the leader of protests against the free speech ban, had been sitting on the car’s hood and, he recalled, later, “Sometimes you’re just … gripped by the moment and you have a feel for what’s poetically right.” Then “I took my shoes off.  I didn’t want to hurt the car,” (although he would later bite a cop’s leg – and subsequently apologize profusely), stepped up into history and gave the first speech of the protest that would block the police car for the next day.

The American campus had never seen anything like this before.  And it grew – 6,000 came to a December 2 protest at which Savio gave “the speech” about blocking the machine with your body that swelled the numbers ultimately deciding to sit in at the Administration office building to over a thousand.  Jackie Goldberg, later an LA City Councilor and member of the California Assembly, remembered the people “who walked into that building who had come to the rally not intending to sit in,” but did “because Mario had given that speech that just lifted us four or five inches off the ground.”

But as a speaker at the Sproul Hall memorial service following Savio’s death recalled, it wasn’t just that speech, but the fact that so many students had already heard Savio many times articulate their growing sense that right was on their side over the preceding months.  Literary critic Wendy Lesser considered him “the only political figure of my era for whom language truly mattered … the last American perhaps who believed that civil, expressive, precisely worded, emotionally truthful exhortation could bring about significant change … The sentences he spoke were complicated and detailed, with clauses and metaphors and little byways of digression that together added up to a coherent grammatical whole.” Well, maybe there were a few more besides Savio, but he was definitely a carryover from a pre-sound bite era of detailed argument.

At least a bit of his style can be traced back to Savio’s experience a few months earlier with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Freedom Summer which he considered “the event which more than any other created the white student movement” by bringing together “privileged upper- and middle-class youths from northern campuses with the disenfranchised black community of Mississippi.” As Cohen writes, “Having defied the Klan in Mississippi, he was not going to be intimidated by campus officials in Berkeley.” And if there is another figure that Savio resembles, both in his plain spoken but powerful speaking style and his reticence regarding the limelight, it would likely be Robert Moses of SNCC.

The Berkeley free speech advocates ultimately carried the day, although not before Savio was hauled off stage by campus police in front of a crowd of 15,000 at Berkeley’s Greek Theater, another disastrous episode in a series of administration blunders.  His arch adversary, UC Chancellor Clark Kerr later acknowledged that he “was obviously a genius at understanding crowds, appealing to them, and handling situations like that – quite beyond the capacity of any of us in the administration.”

There was a down side to all this, Cohen notes – the “rift between the Left and liberalism [that] would benefit the Right and contribute to the rise of Ronald Reagan” who would win the governorship two years later promising to “clean up the mess” in Berkeley.  Savio was expelled from the university for his actions and would not complete his undergraduate degree for nearly two decades.  In the immediate aftermath of the FSM he was a sought after speaker, participating in the 36-hour 1966 Berkeley Vietnam War teach-in but, as he would say many years later, “ I had trouble during the anti-Vietnam days because it was hard for me to talk about something I had not seen.” He ran a desultory 1968 state Senate campaign as a Peace and Freedom Party candidate, but never showed any inclination to stay in the limelight just because he could.  On the balance celebrity was a burden to him and he retired from public view (although FBI files show that the agency followed his activities for the next decade.)

Jackie Goldberg certainly surprised a few of us at the memorial service who did not personally know Savio with her mention that he was “a very troubled person.” Cohen tells us that he was hospitalized for depression in 1971 and that his eloquence was all the more striking to those who knew him, as he suffered from a severe stutter that he did not shed until the Free Speech Movement.

When he finally returned to college in the 1970s, he was again brilliant, this time in physics, to the point where a professor later included “Savio’s Theorem” in his text book Analytical Mechanics for Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.   When opponents of 1980s US Central America policy pined for a movement to rival that of the Vietnam era, it just came naturally to seek out Savio, whose subsequent seclusion had left his place in the annals of 1960s student activism untarnished.

Savio responded with speeches on a number of campuses that were every bit as thoughtful as before, particularly on the difficulties of mounting efforts against American foreign policy.  Recognizing that the anti-Vietnam War movement did not carry with it the physical dangers that pushing for civil rights did in many locations, he nonetheless defended it as, in some ways, the more difficult effort.  Compared to arguing for constitutional rights, the antiwar case was “less sweet.  I mean there is no way it could be otherwise.  It is an attack rather than a defense,” but “That’s what was needed because the war had to be stopped.” He thought “There was no way to have a decade to catch up so you could educate people so you could talk to them about these things.  In fact what was necessary was what the country got.  It got the best it could, given the time pressure.” Likewise, he thought opposing US Central America policy more difficult that opposing apartheid in South Africa.

In producing his definitive biography, Cohen has included nearly a hundred pages of Savio’s speeches and writings, starting with his 1960 valedictory speech at Martin Van Buren High School in Queens, New York, apparently delivered without hint of his then severe stammer, and ending with a pamphlet co-authored with his son Nadav, “In Defense of Affirmative Action: The Case Against Proposition 209.”   (Some of his speeches are also available at www.savio.org.)

When Savio died of a heart condition at age 53, he was heavily involved in a fight against a tuition increase at Sonoma State University where he lectured in math.   One colleague found his method of continuing to bring student voices to the fore “really wonderful.” He would get journalists to the campus “because it was Mario Savio calling,” but “he would not be there when the reporters came” – so they spoke with student activists instead.

Kennedy: Policy Over Politics

Over the last two weeks, I’ve heard countless arguments about what the death of Ted Kennedy means to everything from health care to bipartisanship to the legacy of the New Deal to overall themes of leadership and compromise in Washington. At least in the mainstream media, there has been little nuanced introspection and examination of the what his legislative accomplishments may teach us about the policy dilemmas of the current day. Rather, most commentary, like virtually everything else on the airwaves during the congressional recess, has been dominated by political opportunists and windbag journalists who know of little outside of the rules of thumb that they have been taught in their elite circles. As I think about all of this, I myself ponder what Ted Kennedy’s real legacy may be for the substantive policy debates in months and years ahead

Outside of the man, his family, and close friends, most of us cannot begin to know for sure what Ted Kennedy himself would think. Instead, let’s take a look at his life of policy work through our own unique lens. By understanding this legacy, we can better frame our own ideas about the current situation and what may be the way forward.

Policy Lessons: Liberal Lion or Man of Compromise?

Of course, like all of us, Ted Kennedy’s life was anything but perfect. From the privileged youngest son of Camelot and playboy philanderer to the elder statesman who became a champion of the working class, Ted Kennedy lived an interesting life indeed. Most of us probably know the beginning and end of this story, along with several chapters in-between. However, what I believe is most instructive are the policy and legislative lessons of the period post-1980, after Kennedy’s presidential ambitions were slammed shut for good.

It was during this latter stage of his career that Ted Kennedy became known for being able to reach across the aisle to get things done. During this era, Kennedy was largely responsible for more legislation than any other Senator could dream of. There are too many bills to mention, but a few significant ones that Kennedy played a major role in during this time include:

The Americans with Disabilities Act

The Family and Medical Leave Act

The State Children’s Healthcare Insurance Program

No Child Left Behind Act

I purposely have included No Child Left Behind on this list as it is a bill that is often not all that popular with the base of the so-called Liberal Lion. This bill in particular has led many right-wing commentators to argue that Ted Kennedy was all about a compromise akin to capitulation, as so many of his centrist Democratic colleagues unfortunately have been over the past three decades. However, nothing could be farther from the truth. While Ted Kennedy was perfectly willing to compromise the means, I have yet to find an instance in this period where he compromised the ends. In order to get more funding for education, yes, he was willing to agree to tougher standards for teachers and more accountability through testing.  (Yes, the Bush administration did not follow through on all of the promised funding, but funding did increase.) Sure, in order to get a path for citizenship for illegal immigrants, he was willing to negotiate other issues with John McCain and George W. Bush in the immigration bill on which President Bush jumped ship after a backlash from his own base. However, at the end of the day, while he often was willing to meet the other side half way, that is not the same thing as capitulating on the main reason/goal that brought him to the negotiation table in the first place. If your goal is to provide all Americans affordable insurance options, you can be willing to negotiate the means of getting there, but any man or woman of principle simply cannot be willing to negotiate away the end goal.

While Ted Kennedy’s legislative record does teach us that one can accomplish much by being willing to accept frameworks that could be expanded in the future, it tells us nothing of  agreement to self-aggrandizing political compromises that have no real policy implications to ever improve the lot of those who you aim to help. According to recent reports, this type of debate is currently going on between the policy and politics people in the Obama administration. I firmly believe that the lessons of Kennedy’s legislative experience squarely support the ideals of the policy camp and those who choose real substance over faux accomplishment and photo ops.

What’s the Matter with Such Principled Negotiation Today?

Part of the problem with going a bipartisan route to achieving such compromise on policy matters, including the processes and mechanisms of bills such as health care, is that lately it seems that virtually no Republicans share the same overall end goals to improve policy. Sure, we may all disagree on what policy improvement should look like, but in order to negotiate we must at the very least agree that our end goal is to actually improve policy and not to simply pump up our political agendas. If it was a given that 10 GOP Senators honestly agreed to the goals of a good health care bill that extended affordable coverage to 95% of Americans, then Ted Kennedy’s type of compromise would work. If such honest negotiation was taking place on both sides of the aisle, the Senate finance committee would have reached an agreement months ago instead of being nothing but a vehicle for delay meant to kill any real reform. Unfortunately, in the current debates, it seems that with the possible exception of the two Senators from Maine, there are no honest brokers on the GOP side of the aisle today. For believers in a healthy diverse intraparty political system, this is disappointing to say the least.

Given these current dynamics, anyone who falls for such a bipartisan negotiation trap in the current political environment is at best naive, at worst guilty of political malfeasance. It would be akin to negotiating with Strom Thurmond over civil rights or Jefferson Davis over slavery. In times when there is no loyal opposition that is serious about policy improvements, bipartisanship is nothing but smoke and mirrors. Thankfully during many legislative battles of the past, such as the civil rights battles of the 1950s and 1960s, there were supporters of change on both sides of the aisle and bipartisan compromise was not only possible, but the only way forward. Unlike today, during this time period both parties had national support that crossed both geographical and ideological lines.  When ideology and worldviews cross cut party identification on certain issues, those issues are ripe for bipartisan compromise. Otherwise bipartisanship means nothing.  Unfortunately the only real substantive policy negotiation that can occur today is between members of the same political party. This much has been obvious for a long time to anyone who has had their eyes open.

Bottom Line

When it comes to health care and other pending issues such as global climate change legislation, President Obama and Democrats in Congress need to choose policy over politics and hold out  the hope that doing the right thing for those who elected them will win out at the ballot box at the end of the day. It can’t be the other way around.  A real leader can do more with a four year window than a series of weak leaders could ever hope to accomplish in decades of impotent rule. It’s time for real leadership and adherence to ideals that would make Ted Kennedy proud.

Any views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of any organizations that the author is in any way affiliated with.

Review of Embedded With Organized Labor

Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home, by Steve Early
Monthly Review Press, 288 pages, $16.95

Ed Sadlowski; Jay, Maine; Pittstown Coal, Tony Mazzochi, the Charlestown Five; Ron Carey – as the names float by on the pages of “Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home,” it sometimes seems that Steve Early’s new collection of articles must encompass every person, place, or corporation of significance to the labor movement over the past four decades.  Not quite, but actually the volume’s thirty nine essays – most of them book reviews – cover even more ground than that.  For instance, there’s stories of labor journalists from the deep past of whom you’ve likely never heard.  But the topic most of interest to Early, recently retired from the Communications Workers of America but preferring to think of himself as “redeployed,” is the future of the American labor movement.

There was a time when leftists of a certain age asked themselves how they could love a labor movement that didn’t seem to want to love them back. Certainly the welcome mat wasn’t out on that day Early recalls “In May of 1970, [when] hundreds of flag-waving New York City construction workers … attacked a crowd of antiwar demonstrators on Wall Street.”  The breach between labor and the left would actually broaden two years later when the AFL-CIO refused to back George McGovern against Richard Nixon.  The South Dakota Senator would come closer to espousing the politics of the leftists of the day than any other Democratic nominee in their life time, but for AFL-CIO President George Meany he was too antiwar, too radical. Some see payback in McGovern’s current opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act.  But ironically, the individual he cites for past opposition to the concept of binding arbitration that constitutes one of the bill’s components is none other than Meany.

Still some, like Early, persisted.  A few unions like the United Electrical Workers (UE), which to this day maintains the egalitarian tradition of paying no official a salary higher than the highest you can earn under a UE union contract, actually worked with and encouraged student radicals – such as this writer.  (Early drops the sobering fact that this honorable organization – which had half a million members before leaving the CIO in 1949 rather than submit to the government-driven purge of Communist Party members going on in other unions – has now shrunken to 17,000 members.)

Acceptance came much harder in most other unions, though, but ultimately those who didn’t see the labor movement as a collection of “real-life Archie Bunkers who railed against a whole generation of spoiled ‘meathead’ college kids,” would even prevail, to a degree, and by “the fall of 1999,” Early notes, “steelworkers and radical students were seen marching side by side (or at least on the same side) in street protests against the World Trade Organization.”

The signal change of those intervening years was John Sweeney’s 1995 election as AFL-CIO president.  Although a book that Early reviews on that subject bears the tile, “Not Your Father’s Union Movement,” his election did represent a return to the past in the sense that afterward the labor movement would again more or less openly welcome the left as it generally had before the Cold War.  Of course, with Joseph Stalin now more than forty years dead and the Soviet Union itself gone for a decade, this thaw came none too quickly.

Sweeney comes in for his share of criticism in Early’s book, yet it seems fair to say that he did pretty much try to do what he said he would  –  reverse the long term decline of labor that Early notes in the book’s first paragraph: “When I first got involved the labor movement in the early 1970s, unions still represented almost a quarter of the country’s workforce.  Now, unionization is down to 12.4 percent overall and only 7.6 percent in private industry.”  Sweeney had assumed the Federation’s leadership largely on the strength of the fact that his own Service Employees International Union (SEIU) had been an exception to the general downward trend, largely due to the fact that much of its constituency was public employees, more than a third of whom are now unionized.

But Sweeney has not been particularly successful in reversing the overall trend, although SEIU has continued growing to the point where it is has become the nation’s largest union.  And in 2005, Andy Stern, Sweeney’s successor at SEIU, led unions comprising about a third of the AFL-CIO’s membership into a rival Change to Win federation dedicated to doing what Sweeney could not.  About the best thing that can be said about the split to this point is that it has not damaged the labor movement nearly as badly as some had feared.  The overall national percentage of union membership has even risen for the past two years, although it remains lower than before the split.

Not one to see easy fixes for labor’s decline, Early is skeptical that even the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) currently pending in Congress will represent the cure-all some hope for.  He cites a Canadian labor relations scholar’s findings that “union density and bargaining coverage are falling even in provinces such as Saskatchewan and Quebec that have card check and first-arbitration clauses” – precisely the EFCA items that its advocates hope will save union representation drives from the often debilitating process of National Labor Relations Board elections and management refusal to bargain.  The measures he thinks are really needed – repeal of “Taft-Hartley Act restrictions on real union solidarity and the Supreme Court’s seventy-year old sanctioning of the use of striker replacement” are not part of political discourse today – “except in the speeches of Ralph Nader.”

And as SEIU has dominated the labor movement of recent years, so it dominates Early’s book, with Stern coming in for fairly severe criticism.  “Since 1996,” he writes, “when Stern replaced Sweeney, 40 SEIU locals – or 14 percent of its 275 affiliates – have been put under trusteeship to implant new officers.”  While he grants that “[S]ome of those ousted ran old-guard fiefdoms,” others just didn’t want to go along with what he views as questionable programs coming from the top, and perhaps the “air of arrogance and exclusivity” emanating from some SEIU staffers or an “attitudinal style … closer … to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs than to veteran staffers of the trade union movement” that one reviewed author describes.

(The largest of these trusteeship battles is currently playing out with the leadership of the newly formed National Union of Healthcare Workers claiming to have filed decertification petitions aimed at taking back close to 2/3 of the 150,000 members it formerly led in SEIU’s now trusteed California-based United Healthcare Workers West.)

The fact that book reviews constitute the core of Early’s book naturally constrains him largely to topics that other writers have chosen and many of the more interesting matters are raised only peripherally.  There is the fairly central question of just what a labor radical is to do.  At the one end are the “colonizers” like Wellesley graduate Elly Leary, interviewed in Staughton and Alice Lynd’s “The New Rank and File,” who spent twelve years building cars at the Framingham, Massachusetts General Motors plant.  Jobs like this were hard enough, Early notes, “without the additional task of proselytizing.” The group of radicals that Leary eventually became part of was just about learning its ass from its elbow on how to proceed sensibly when the plant closed in 1989 and they were deindustrialized out of the working class.

At the other end there is “SEIU’s ‘best and brightest’” who come in for Early’s criticism because “most have never been a janitor, security guard, nursing home worker, home health care aide or public employee.”  Of course, Early himself came in for that very criticism back in the mid-1970s as he recounts in the book’s first piece: when he was interviewing coal miners for the United Mine Workers Journal, one obviously wary miner politely shook hands with him, then “looked me in the eye and said knowingly, ‘Ah, pencil hands.’”

And then there’s the question of why the labor radicals do what they do.  I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb in saying that most of the people we encounter in these pages saw themselves as socialists, if not by that name precisely then by some synonym they thought more appropriate to the time and place.  They weren’t motivated just by the hope of a better labor movement, but of a better country, a better world – and they saw the labor movement as the best means to that end.  For that sort of thing we will have to wait for Early’s next book, though – he is currently writing his history of the sixties radicals and the labor movement.  But the current book will give you plenty to chew on for the moment.  And, oh yes, it comes with an excellent index, unusual in an essay collection, but extremely useful because this book is dense – and I mean that as a complement.

San Francisco Gets an Antiwar Congresswoman

The recent 226-202 House of Representatives approval of the supplemental budget was a particular disappointment to antiwar activists.  At one point they’d thought it might be possible to block the bill and its $79.9 billion Department of Defense appropriation earmarked largely for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, – at least temporarily.   Nonetheless, San Francisco antiwar voters might take some consolation in one thing anyhow – it appears that the city now has an antiwar Congresswoman.  And no, it’s not House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but Jackie Speier, elected just last year to represent the less liberal western part of the city and several towns on the Peninsula to the south.

Not only was Speier one of but sixty votes (fifty-one of them Democrat) against the budget in its first trip through the House, but she also made a second, tougher vote against it.  When House Republicans took umbrage at the addition of a $5 billion International Monetary Fund loan guarantee, they announced they would switch sides and vote against the bill upon its return from the Senate, raising the possibility of its defeat should the antiwar Democrat votes hold firm.

Predictably, they did not.  This time even Pelosi herself – who did not vote the first time as is common practice for a Speaker – was recorded in favor, presumably to demonstrate how much the House leadership really wanted the votes.  And yet, despite a San Francisco Chronicle report that “the White House has threatened to pull support from Democratic freshmen who vote no,” Speier did just that, one of only six freshmen – among thirty-two total Democrats – to do so.  Arguably, Speier was doing nothing but what San Francisco voters had directed her to do last November when 59 percent of them supported Proposition U which stated that the city’s Congressional representatives “should vote against any further funding for the deployment of United States Armed Forces in Iraq.”

But realistically speaking, although the ballot question’s only exception concerned “funds specifically earmarked to provide for their [American troops in Iraq] safe and orderly withdrawal” and did not exempt funding requests from Democratic Presidents, the fact that George Bush had negotiated a troop withdrawal agreement before leaving office seems to have made most House Democrats feel they have a pass to fund that war right through 2011. And certainly Pelosi has never given any indication of paying the proposition any heed despite the fact that 61 percent of her district backed it.

On the contrary, she’s made it clear that she views it as a Democratic Speaker’s duty to ensure the funding of what a Democratic President has now taken on as his wars.  Her spokesman, Brendan Daly, told the Chronicle that Pelosi was telling members “we need to do this, this is President Obama’s plan for both Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s got a plan to end the war in Iraq.  He’s got a plan to refocus our efforts in Afghanistan, and we need to support the president in that, and this is the right way to go.”

And yet when Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) proposed adding language calling for the Secretary of Defense to “submit to Congress a report outlining the United States exit strategy for United States military forces in Afghanistan” by December 31, 2009, it was no dice.  Pelosi’s view is apparently that the President shall give us his plan in his own good time. (McGovern has since filed his amendment as a free-standing bill with 84 co-sponsors.)

Her San Francisco colleague Speier, on the other hand, said she had “serious problems with the current wars” and didn’t believe that “escalating the conflicts make America or the world safer.”  Speier’s viewpoint is particularly welcome in that it differs so markedly from that of her predecessor, the late Tom Lantos, who voted for the first House resolution for the Iraq War (which Pelosi did not.)

Moreover, in her ascent to her new position, Speier had betrayed no particular maverick tendencies.  She gained it not through any kind of insurgent antiwar campaign but more of a vetting process of the area’s political establishment.  A former state legislator forced to leave office due to term limits, she had failed in a prior bid for the Democratic nomination for Lieutenant Governor. But when she announced her interest in the Lantos seat, it soon became clear that she would have the endorsements deemed to matter – and presumably the attendant campaign financing.  At this point, other potential candidates backed off and the insider consensus choice was presented to the voters for their ratification.  Speier then won 90 percent of the Democratic vote in a special primary after a campaign that seemed to involve less of telling people what she stood for than reminding them that they already knew her – and that her ultimate victory was inevitable.

So, at a point when the country’s antiwar movements are largely stalled, Bay Area antiwar voters can at least cheer the pleasant surprise of having a new Congresswoman willing to buck both the White House and the House leadership.

Indian Elections: Good News for India’s Future

It’s over. India’s marathon national assembly elections, after five phases of voting spread out over the past month, have finally been completed. And, as usual, the Indian electorate has surprised the experts, pundits, and commentators once again. The common knowledge was that this was anyone’s election – the Congress-led UPA coalition, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s NDA coalition, and even the Third Front, a motley collection of communist and regional parties, all had a chance to win. There was a feeling that the UPA held the edge, but no one expected a clear winner.

After the votes were tallied on March 16, the UPA did emerge victorious. And by much more than anyone had thought. To form a government in India, a party or coalition must win 272 seats to claim a majority in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. The Congress won 206 seats on its own, and its five pre-poll allies won an additional 52 seats, putting the UPA within reach of 272, needing to pick up only a few more independent and smaller party representatives. To American ears, this may sound like less than a mandate. However, in most national elections, only about half of Indian voters vote for the two parties with a national presence – the Congress and the BJP. The last time any single Indian party won over 200 seats was in 1991. And the most optimistic Congress members predicted 180 seats at the most. The BJP finished a distant second, claiming 116 seats, and no other party gained more than 23 seats. The last UPA government didn’t even have 272 members and had to rely on support “from the outside” from India’s communist parties – known as the Left. When the Left withdrew its support over the Indo-US nuclear deal, the Congress was forced to enlist the support of an on-again off-again ally, the Samajwadi Party, who also supported the UPA from the outside. So the fact that the Congress was able to nearly cross 272 with its rather small pre-poll alliance was definitely a surprise. It also means that it will not need to coddle temperamental allies while governing.

So, why the outpouring of support for the UPA? There are a number of early theories. Many commentators have asserted that voters chose the harmony and stability of another five years of UPA rule. Electing the NDA or the Third Front would certainly have brought policy changes and more unpredictable relations with other countries. Yet a mere desire for stability does not convincingly explain the results in my mind. Indian voters are notorious for kicking incumbents out of office. Indeed, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is the first PM to be reelected since India’s first PM, Jawaharlal Nehru, nearly 50 years ago.

Other commentators give more positive reasons for the UPA’s success. Many credit Dr. Singh’s honest, able, deliberate, and understated style of governing as an asset that appealed to voters in a time of regional instability and rapid economic change within India. This seems plausible, especially since the NDA decided to attack Singh as a weak PM beholden to the Nehru-Gandhi family dynasty, while projecting their PM candidate, LK Advani as stronger and better able to respond to the threats India faces. This macho saber-rattling may have worried voters who perhaps appreciated Dr. Singh’s thoughtfulness and restraint in response to events like the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November.

Others give credit to the political blossoming of handsome, young Nehru-Gandhi heir Rahul Gandhi, who was a tireless campaigner and who spearheaded Congress’ campaign strategy in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh (UP), where the Congress recorded its best showing in two decades. Rahul worked hard for the Congress campaign and began to show some political savvy while presenting a fresh, young face to voters – in contrast to the elderly leadership in other political parties. Given the Indian media’s obsession with glamour, celebrity, and the Nehru-Gandhi family, Rahul’s influence may be overblown, but it does seem to have made a positive difference in the way voters – especially young ones – view the Congress. And his bold political strategy in UP was indeed a success.

The last major reason for the UPA’s success was voter support for its unprecedented and substantial welfare policies that poured billions of rupees into programs to improve rural development, agriculture, health, and education. The NDA’s 2004 campaign slogan – “India Shining” – backfired on them spectacularly when voters reminded them that most Indians had not joined the hallowed ranks of the middle class. It appears the UPA learned from the NDA’s mistake. India is changing fast, but not everyone has gained from the country’s new found prosperity. The UPA’s programs targeted the country’s poorest and most disadvantaged, aiming to improve lives, the country, and their election chances. And it worked.

In my previous article about the Indian elections, I stressed the importance of coalitions. With the Congress’ spectacular showing, coalition politics will be less significant than in the past. This hardly marks the end of coalition politics, however. The Congress was fortunate that its coalition partners did very well, particularly in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. It also seems significant that most of the UPA’s support came in states that were also fielding Third Front parties. Perhaps the voters’ rejection of this anarchic hodge-podge brought voters to the UPA in greater numbers. In others, it is entirely possible that Congress benefited from voters’ rejection of a new, untested coalition.

Confused? Well, that’s how it goes with Indian elections. The question is: What will happen now? With the Congress’ strong showing, there are now high expectations for significant improvements in India’s governance and policies, some of them wildly unrealistic. Will the UPA be able to deliver? Does their win herald a new direction for Indian politics? Don’t expect dramatic changes, though the UPA may now act more boldly in pursuing certain favored policies. For example, there is frequent speculation that without needing to rely on support from the Left, the UPA will accelerate India’s economic liberalization (even though some are making the argument that India’s protected markets and regulated banks have saved it from the worst of global economic implosion). The neighborhood is also changing quickly. Worries about Pakistan’s stability have risen dramatically. The Obama administration is scaling up the war in Afghanistan. Rebuilding society after a long civil war in Sri Lanka presents a new challenge. These changes may compel the UPA to make some new foreign policy choices.

However, barring a political catastrophe, the UPA’s reelection will provide 10 years of relative political stability at the national level. At this point in time, when India is being touted as an emerging global superpower, this stability should only help legitimize its global ambitions, particularly in the able hands of Manmohan Singh. Despite the UPA’s shortcomings, their reelection gives India the political opportunity to take the next steps toward being a global leader.

This is the second of two articles about this year’s Indian national elections and the second in a series of pieces about major elections in Asia this year.

Same-Sex Marriage: Obama’s Lincoln Moment

On Wednesday night, Governor John Baldacci of Maine signed legislation that he struggled to support. While governors are often pressed by their legislatures and constituents to support laws that they do not necessarily agree with, this bill—one that legalizes same-sex marriages—was a personal dilemma for the first-term governor. After weeks of agonizing over the decision, the Governor released a statement to the press that outlined the reasoning behind his eventual approval:

In the past, I opposed gay marriage while supporting the idea of civil unions. I have come to believe that this is a question of fairness and of equal protection under the law, and that a civil union is not equal to civil marriage.

The first governor to sign a same-sex marriage bill, Baldacci touches on the heart of the same-sex marriage debate: The arguments for or against same-sex unions based on morality, religion, tradition, or any other logic is irrelevant. What matters is the law. And the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution that he refers to clearly states “[no] State [shall] deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Which means that, like it or not, from Baldacci’s perspective, gays and lesbians should be entitled to the right to marry if straight people are allowed to marry.

Over the course of the past several months, four states have legalized same-sex marriage in their states: Connecticut, Vermont, Iowa, and New Hampshire (Massachusetts legalized gay marriage back in 2004). Recently, both New York and Washington D.C. have decided to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. And now there is talk that New Jersey may become the sixth state to legalize same-sex marriage in the coming months.

Throughout this civil rights upheaval,  President Obama and his administration have remained conspicuously mum. According to the New York Times, Obama has said that as a Christian he opposes gay marriage but remains a “fierce advocate of equality” for gay men and lesbians. And so far, he has remained true to that statement by pledging to sign a U.N. declaration, which Bush refused to sign before he left office, that calls for a worldwide decriminalization of homosexuality (the United States was the only western nation not to support the measure). Moreover, Obama has continually recognized qualified persons with same-sex sexual orientations for top level jobs: In his short time in office, he has appointed numerous openly gay officials for executive administrative positions and may be considering two prominent lesbian lawyers to replace Justice Souter on the Supreme Court.

Although the saying goes that “actions speak louder than words,” his silence is an action that may indicate his political discomfort with gay rights advocacy. During the election, he reiterated that same-sex marriage is an issue that should be decided by the states. And, to a certain extent, he’s constitutionally correct: There is currently no federal marriage license that any straight couple can apply for but, then again, opposite-sex couples who marry in their home state trust that their marriage will be honored no matter which state they travel to or live in. And while there is no federal law regulating straight marriages, the 1996 Federal Defense of Marriage Act passed by Congress regulates same-sex unions. The Act explicitly outlines that states do not have to recognize same-sex marriages or civil unions performed in other states. That is a gross discrepancy.

While Obama has said that he supports a repeal of that legislation and of the military’s “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” policy, he has remained virtually silent on the gay marriage issue since he took office and has chosen to not comment on the landslide of same-sex marriage laws in recent months. Although this issue may not seem like a priority for the administration when they have an economic crisis and two wars to contend with, it should be a priority for the president since Obama has repeatedly stated that he wants America to rebuild and renew its reputation in the world. In a 2007 article he wrote for Foreign Affairs, he stated:

At moments of great peril in the last century, American leaders such as Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy managed both to protect the American people and to expand opportunity for the next generation. What is more, they ensured that America, by deed and example, led and lifted the world — that we stood for and fought for the freedoms sought by billions of people beyond our borders. […] They used our strengths to show people everywhere America at its best.

Yet, how can those freedoms be realized if America does not follow its own laws and ensure that all of its own citizens receive the same “protection” under the law? If President Obama is going to continue to reiterate that marriage laws should be left to the states, then he should actively pursue a repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act since it is a federal measure. So too, if he wants America to “lead by deed and example” then he must show support for states that have passed inclusive marriage legislation and encourage others to do the same. It sets a very bad “example” to have some areas of the country have more “freedoms” for its citizens than others.

Or, Obama could take a cue from his favorite president, Abraham Lincoln. When Lincoln took office in 1861, he viewed slavery as a states’ issue and expressly stated that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists.” However, two years later, he delivered his Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves because it was “an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution.” Certainly, it is thorny comparison between slavery and gay rights and America is not in a civil war where gay marriage is, like slavery was, the catalyst for domestic combat; nevertheless the United States is at a civil rights crossroads that needs to be addressed by the President. Had Lincoln chosen to never take that stand on slavery, decided to put it off until later, or thought he could leave the responsibility on to the next administration, Obama may have never even had a chance to be our president. Obama should take a page from the book of his presidential idol and realize that, regardless of the political risk, he is obligated as America’s national leader to stand up for the rights of all Americans.

Obama has continually said that he wants his presidency to speak to and for all Americans. In his famous Democratic nomination acceptance speech, Obama evoked Martin Luther King and reiterated that “now is the time” for the United States to rebuild and renew:

[I]n America, our destiny is inextricably linked, that together our dreams can be one. “We cannot walk alone,” the preacher cried. “And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.”

Indeed, we cannot turn back and now is certainly the time.

If Republicans Won’t Play Along on Health Care, Who Cares?

The Republicans bluffed and lost in February when they complained that the stimulus bill wasn’t “bi-partisan” enough. Okay, so House and Senate Democrats acquiesced to some of their demands, including tax cuts for businesses and removing provisions for “family planning” (the euphemism that refers to things like abortion and contraception). The Republicans responded to these concessions by voting against the bill.

Not a single House or Senate Republican voted in favor of the stimulus bill. They apparently believed that this would demonstrate to the American people their opposition to wasteful spending and fiscal irresponsibility. Trouble is, the American people didn’t much care what the Republicans thought; they’re in the midst of a financial crisis, where hundreds of thousands of jobs are being lost each month. Hell, yes, they want a stimulus!

Republicans were using a two-pronged approach to sway the public: (1) tax cuts are superior to government spending when it comes to stimulating the economy; and (2) the government is spending way too much. I won’t go into the merits of the arguments here, but suffice it to say that those were the counter-arguments to the Democratic spending bill (yes, “stimulus” = “spending.” Recall President Obama’s statement: “What do you think a stimulus bill is?”).

The public doesn’t much care for tax cuts when those tax cuts would benefit only the top earners in the country. Now, what does look like a good idea is investment in public works projects that have been long-neglected by Reaganites who believe that the government shouldn’t spend any money on anything that isn’t national defense.

Those four paragraphs were a flashback.

Interior — White House, Present Day.

President Obama is meeting with GOP leaders, reminding them that when they clamored for “bi-partisanship,” they abandoned it just as much as they accused Democrats of abandoning it. Between 2003 and 2009, Republicans were used to getting their way every time. Sure, Democrats have controlled Congress since 2007, but for some reason, Democrats spent those two years perfecting the fine arts of cowering and acquiescing. Whenever Republicans talked about “bi-partisanship,” they meant, “Give us everything we want or we’ll call you names. We’ll say you’re soft on terrorism. We’ll say you’re engaging in pork-barrel spending. And if that doesn’t work, then we’ll call you socialists and say that you hate America and want the terrorists to win. So you’d better give us all the things we demand, and if you ever try to put your own agenda forward, we’ll slap you down so hard you’d think Mike Tyson had taken Trent Lott’s seat.”

Well, the tables have certainly turned. And I’m pleased that Obama is prepared to shut Republicans out if they refuse to play ball. Hypocrisy? Not at all. I believe in universal health care. I think it’s absolutely necessary and I think it’s nothing but good. If Democrats are willing to embrace it and make it law, then I support them. When Republicans tried to stop SCHIP, I disagreed with them. It’s a matter of not only agreement and disagreement, but also of what’s good for this country. Quite honestly, the Republicans are not interested in governance. They’re interested in stalling until 2010. They want the wheels of government to grind to a halt so that they can then go back to their constituents in November, 2010 and say, “Look at what the Democrats have done for you! Nothing, that’s what! Aren’t you sorry that you voted them into office?”

And therein lies the fundamental difference: Democrats, including President Obama, are interested in doing something constructive. I will frequently disagree with the methods they use, but I largely agree with their philosophy that the government is going to need to spend money to improve the country. I agree that the wealthy should pay for the impoverished. And I agree that health care should be our right not only as citizens, but as human beings. I think the Democrats’ approach is superior to the Republicans’ approach, and that is why I believe that if Republicans are unwilling to reach an actual compromise with the Democrats, then they should be left behind. It is not the Democrats who should have to bend to appease the Republicans; the Democrats won, their ideas are better, and if the Republicans don’t want to go along with them, then it’s their own funeral. Congress doesn’t even need the Republicans.

I’m not the only one who believes this. The American people would rather the Democrats get on with their agenda instead of watering it down to please Republicans whose sanction they don’t need and whose contempt they will get in return for their efforts. In the New York Times/CBS poll referenced above, 56% of those surveyed said that they thought Democrats should stick to their policies, but 79% thought that it was Republicans who should be bi-partisan. That says a lot: not only do Americans want Democrats to do whatever it is Democrats want to do, but they simultaneously think that Republicans should do whatever it is the Democrats want to do.

Health care reform is way too important for Democrats to be chicken about. The last significant health care reform we had in this country was the prescription drug bill from 2005, which funneled a lot of money directly from the government into the hands of prescription drug companies. Sure, the bill could have included a provision for the government to use its significant bargaining power to get better deals on drugs — but then, that would hurt the drug companies’ revenue, wouldn’t it? At approximately the same time, Congress passed a bankruptcy bill that offered terrific terms for banks, credit card companies, and the very wealthy, but left middle- and low-income people in the dark.

The relationship between bankruptcy and health care is quite close; President Bush declared, in 2005, that we needed the bankruptcy bill so as to stop people from gaming the system and trying to get the rest of us to pay off their debts. To listen to him, you’d think Americans were going bankrupt after buying too many Faberge eggs. At the time he said that, though, fully half of bankruptcies in American were being caused not by frivolous over-spending, but by health-care spending. People were — and still are! — spending themselves into tremendous debt in order to stay healthy and alive. And since our health care system discourages regular check-ups, people are guaranteed to see a doctor only when the condition is serious, which means that it will cost more money to fix than it would have if a doctor had caught the condition earlier, during a regular check-up.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Republicans see health care as a political issue instead of a humanitarian one. In 1993, Bill Kristol wrote that Republicans couldn’t afford to let the Clinton health care plan survive; if it did, then the Republicans would be finished. Let me re-iterate that: to Bill Kristol, it was more important that heath care get defeated so the Democrats wouldn’t win re-election in 1994 than it was for people to have universal access to health care.

That’s what we’re up against. And that’s why I support the Democrats. And if Republicans don’t want to join, who cares? Let them explain to their constituents in 2010 about how they didn’t want those same constituents to have universal health care, all so that the free market could survive.

Tax Resisting Takes a Stand on Tax Day

Last Wednesday was tax day for most Americans. I say “most Americans” because there are some who recognize the legal obligation to pay taxes, but who chose not to pay some or all of their taxes for ethical or moral reasons. And, in big cities all over the United States, groups gathered on April 15 to protest the bank bailouts, gay marriage laws, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with the argument that paying taxes to the federal government encourages corporatism, discrimination, or unjust combat.

In the United States, some citizens subject themselves to IRS fines and penalties and actually resist paying taxes. And while many Americans may be disgruntled by Timothy Geithner’s bank plan, tax resisting (not to be confused with tax evasion, which is subject even stricter penalties and possible jail time), has always has been an integral part of American democracy in spite of the the fact that it is subject to fines and penalties. In the 1790s the first US Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, implemented a controversial luxury tax on whiskey that had some citizens so riled up that they actually tarred and feathered a handful of tax collectors. While Hamilton insisted that the tax had to be instated in order to pay off debts from the Revolutionary War, the tax resisters were not pleased with that explanation, and in 1794 Washington had to send an army of 12,000 to rural Pennsylvania to quell a rebellion (by the time the troops arrived, the dissenters had dispersed).

Of course, Henry David Thoreau is probably the most famous tax resister, spending a night in jail for refusing to pay six years of back taxes on the principle that he did not support the Mexican-American War and institutionalized slavery. But what about today? Is withholding taxes, despite the fact that it is subject to heavy government penalties, still one of the best ways to show anger and frustration towards one’s government?

A resident of Brooklyn, who I will call Barb Smith for purposes of anonymity, thinks that if you’re frustrated with your government, it makes you a “more responsible citizen.” At a demonstration on the front steps of the New York Post Office, she and fellow disgruntled citizens gathered to lend their voice to the anti-war movement. Handing out fliers that document military spending in this country, Smith, a third-year tax resister and war protester, pointed out that, “Money has an impact and where you spend your money has an impact. My decision [not to pay federal taxes] is in alignment with my conscience.”

Also gathered on the steps on the Post Office was a small group of elderly women from an international pacifist organization. One woman brandished a sign that said, “Raging Grannies and their Daughters.”

However, the sign did not mention granddaughters and Smith noted that, “Unfortunately, there are not many young people involved [in the tax resisting movement]. It’s mostly middle-aged and older people who are passionate about the issue.”

However, despite the age gap, the movement definitely gained momentum this year in cities around the country. Fox News had all day coverage of  “tea parties” in cities like Atlanta and Salt Lake City where protesters angrily voiced their tax boycott of the Wall Street bailouts. In Austin, Texas, Governor Rick Perry galvanized a crowd of angry citizens and even suggested that Texas might secede one day while, in downtown Houston, close to 2,000 people turned out to protest the federal government and threaten secession.

In Boston (the home of the first tea party back in 1773) gay rights groups gathered to protest their inability to file federal joint tax returns, even though Massachusetts has legalized gay marriage. A group with similar concerns gathered on the steps of the New York Post Office but when asked, none claimed to be resisting taxes. “We just want Albany to give us equality,” one woman implored.

Yet, despite all the hoopla surrounding tax resisting this year, the demonstrations still beg the question, does tax resisting in spite of the potential penalties really make a difference?

“I don’t know if the IRS cares,” another protester, who I will call Mark Johnson for anonymity, a fifth year tax resister from New Jersey said, “but I’m appalled at what the money is used for and I resist with a token amount.”

When asked what he does with the money he owes, Johnson insists, “I don’t keep it, I give it to organizations that do good that hopefully counterbalance what the government would do with the money. This year, I’m giving the $198 I owe and I’m sending it to the Iraq Collateral Repair Project.”

And, while he admits he only protests with a small amount of money, Johnson notes that there “is not enough outrage” and that he does the little that he can to press the point that he is not pleased with military spending in this country.

Although it is doubtful that Congress or the Obama administration paid much attention to tea parties, protests, or tax resister demonstrations on Wednesday, many see tax resistance, despite the fact that it is illegal, as the one act outside of voting that citizens can participate in to vocalize their disappointment with their government. And, while there is always the possibility that you can be audited, Smith notes that, “This is America. I’m not afraid of the IRS.”

Editor’s Note: This Web site does NOT in any way endorse or condone any act of tax resisting or tax evasion. Because of possibly incriminating statements, the names of quoted individuals were changed at the request of the editor.

The White House Science Agenda, So Far

A few minutes into President Obama’s inaugural speech, he highlighted the importance of science to our nation:

“For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of our economy calls for action, bold and swift. And we will act, not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We’ll restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. All this we will do.”
(emphasis added)

Nevertheless, the first thing I noticed upon visiting the White House Web site was the absence of Science from the Agenda menu on the home page. They do however list a link to their Technology page on that menu, and thankfully some scientific issues are listed there.

Regardless of how the White House organizes their Web site, many of us are breathing a sigh of relief – and not just because President Obama presumably cares about the environment and will work to make the air cleaner. On a wide range of issues, citizens may now expect a return to sensible public discourse that places science and rational thought above political ideology and pseudo-science. No longer will we be held hostage by George W. Bush’s willful ignorance of life-threatening issues (recall that it took five years for the former president to acknowledge that “America is addicted to oil”). While we will have to rely on Congress to create substantive legislation, President  Obama has certainly set the right tone for better living through science.

In the three months since the inauguration, several important topics have gained attention. Global warming and stem cell research are two issues many people are concerned about, and we have already seen the new administration act decisively on these fronts.

President Obama recently announced an international summit, to be held at the end of this month, to coordinate action to address global warming. Representatives of 16 countries (each G20 members) are expected to attend the “Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate.” The forum is in advance of the United Nations’ Climate Change Convention, which will be held in Copenhagen in December.

Obama frequently mentions global warming as a top issue, including during the presidential campaign and in numerous public appearances and official statements. He signed a memorandum in January requiring the Transportation Department to work with the EPA to enforce the average fuel efficiency standard of 35 miles per gallon for all cars and light trucks (a category that includes SUVs). In February the president signed another memorandum that forces the Department of Energy to establish efficiency standards for consumer and commercial appliances according to previously passed federal laws. These are very important steps considering that increasing efficiency is the quickest and most cost-effective way for Americans to reduce energy usage and the related greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

These clear actions and statements from the president in the earliest days of his tenure are a very encouraging sign of his commitment to reducing the threat of undesired climate changes. It remains to be seen whether government agencies, manufacturers, and the public will work together to rise to the challenge of increasing energy efficiency.

Regarding stem cell research, in March Obama issued an Executive Order that permits scientists to finally work without fear of restrictions by the federal government. Specifically, the order revoked the rules created in 2001 by former President Bush, which prohibited federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and restricted the techniques available to researchers. While research was hampered in the U.S. for eight years, several other countries continued their work, threatening to undermine our progress and competitiveness in this field. Stem cell research is one of the most promising frontiers in biology, and many experts believe that there will be many potential tremendous benefits in curing a wide variety of ailments and genetic diseases.

Other items currently on the administration’s technology laundry list include:

• Ensuring open internet and media, including net neutrality;
• Creating a modern communications infrastructure, with broadband availability virtually everywhere in the country;
• Increasing America’s competitiveness through trade, tax credits, and direct investment in science;
• Fostering entrepreneurial ventures;
• Protecting intellectual property rights;
• Improving science and math education;
• Increasing the use of science and technology to solve national problems;
• Lowering health care costs and improving quality through improved information systems;
• Investing more in renewable energy research and development; and
• Advancing health through biomedical research.

As you can see, this is quite a long and ambitious list. President Obama has said that he expects us to work together with him on the many issues that he highlighted during the campaign and in his presidency so far. Given the country’s many significant challenges outside the realm of science and technology, hopefully we will be able to make meaningful progress in at least some of these areas.

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