Searching for Nanny

Any big newspaper contains treasure troves of obscure little items, not important enough or too common for an individual article but bundled together by section of the newspaper as “shorts” or “digest” or “about town.”  I’m glancing over the financial section “digest” of the Washington Post this morning as my wife and I babysit a grandchild for several days, which definitely slows down, in an enjoyable way, my blogging.  Some of the items too common to merit serious attention by The Post this morning include: a suit by Freddie Mac of 15 of the largest banks for rigging the LIBOR interest rate  so as to cost Freddie Mac (and the U.S. taxpayer) over three billion dollars; JP Morgan Chase agrees to repay $546 million dollars to settle claims that it had wrongfully held the money for itself from deposits for investors by another investment company when the other company went bankrupt; Barclays Bank paid nine senior executives including its CEO, $61 million in bonuses less than a year after being fined for manipulating interest rates; nine key executives commute by plane at company expense  to J.C. Penney headquarters in Texas from their homes in California, New York and Boston, although the company is struggling to stay in business; and oil companies have agreed among themselves and with environmentalists to voluntary fracking standards which are tougher than those set by government regulators.  All this in one day in an obscure little section for items not important enough to notice.  What’s going on here?

Early in my career, I had a boss who was grudgingly beloved by all of us for making statements like, “I wouldn’t authorize that expenditure, even if it was my own money.”  He was always conscious that he was making choices about “someone else’s money”, with a responsibility to spend it properly on their behalf.  That introduced us to a view of fiscal integrity and fiduciary responsibility that stuck with us, even though now it seems almost quaintly Victorian.  What those news items show in common is an at least initial attitude on the part of someone (in the case of fracking, it was regulatory authority) that the consequences of their activities for someone else was not worth considering.  That someone else’s money is fair game.

I often mention the bubbles we all live in, rich,, professional, working class, poor, elderly, young, east coast, mid west, etc., etc.  We grow daily more remote from each other, not even sharing the same diet or shopping malls or schools or churches. That uncaring attitude about the consequences of our actions on others is in part a product of that remoteness.  Those executives who spend exorbitant amounts commuting by air probably could not name, or identify with, any of those who work for them in a retail store.  Those bank executives have probably never shared a lunch with any investor in that bankrupt company whose money they were trying to hang on to.  We turn fellow human beings into statistics we can manipulate without any consideration of our shared humanity.

The dehumanization of those for whom we bear some responsibility, like it or not, is probably not going to go away.  It is a consequence of life in any large society.  But something can be done.  And it is a role for government little thought about.  An interesting science fiction story I read years ago described a society where, when a person had committed a major crime, a conspicuous robot followed him everywhere, making his criminality obvious both to him and others, until it became obvious by his actions that he had internalized the moral norm that had been violated; at which point, the robot went away.  Obviously, such activity would be silly in real life.  But the appropriate role for government is possible in the form of strict and strictly enforced regulations, the “nanny state” so derided by conservatives.  A truth known to behavioral scientists is that values follow, not precede, habits.  The role of strictly enforced regulation is to strengthen values by making responsible behavior a habit.  We need much more, not less regulation.  We will all benefit, like it or not, just as a nanny sometimes makes us mad while teaching us basic life skills.  Now that those oil companies have agreed to at least some regulation, it is time for government to make it enforceable, for there will always be some who try to evade even their own rules.

Social Obligations

Occasionally, when we have to decline an invitation we’d love to accept because of a prior commitment we don’t really cherish, we console ourselves by muttering that there’s really no choice, it’s “a social obligation.”  That’s a small phrase that covers a lot of territory.  Sometimes it just means a cheerful chat when we’d love to walk away. Other times, it could stretch to substantial aid to family or friends who have suffered catastrophe.  Occasionally it could stretch all the way to disaster relief in Turkey or Indonesia.  In general, it’s a recognition that we owe our fellow human beings many things that go beyond the immediately agreeable or profitable, that we are all mutual participants in a network of humanity.  It’s something that the “only what’s in it for me” crowd would just as soon forget, unless of course they are the ones in distress.  Forgetting comes easiest when it can be done in the name of maximizing corporate profits and protecting individualism. 
Our national ideology of individualism, “beholding to no man and no man beholding to me”, obscures the natural human reciprocity that shows up in times of great trauma, and it makes us easy targets of the corporate warfare on our national interests.  One of the current major targets of that warfare is the obligation to care about those who did, but no longer work for you.  In these recessionary times, unemployment benefits are just too great a burden on the health of the corporation and the economy: so goes the screed.  And retirees are living ”too high off the hog” for corporate profits to bear because of Social Security cost of living increases, which must be trimmed for the seniors own moral good. That profits-only orientation is hidden in the argument made that senior retirement benefits prevent adequate care for the young.  Nonsense!  Both young and old must be cared for, even at the expense of corporate profit.  Harold Myerson commented in the Washington Post a few weeks ago that this currently fashionable rant ignores the fact that in the last 35 years, the working careers of most seniors, retirement incomes outside Social Security benefits have actually gone down, leaving more and more seniors unable to afford retirement – of course, that’s no concern to the corporations who “downsize” them anyway in favor of younger, cheaper workers; that massive senior “downsizing” is one of the invisible prices we are paying for rampant individualism. Older and younger workers both get laid off – no age discrimination there – but it’s the younger workers who get rehired.  Older workers are left to the early retirement they can’t afford.  That’s when the switch from defined benefit retirement plans to 401(K) plans initiated by corporations beginning in the 1970’s kicks in; in 1975, 88 percent of workers with retirement plans had defined benefit plans, while by 2010 that number had fallen to 35 percent. Corporations saved a lot of money that way, none of it going to the workers.  But a 2010 Federal Reserve survey found that retiring workers typically had only about a $100,000 IRA (which would yield at best about $5000 a year in current income, assuming no market crashes) with no other retirement income sources to supplement their Social Security benefits – totally inadequate for long-term retirement.  That’s the setting for the proposals to reduce Social Security cost of living increases.  Corporate interests and ideology are increasingly drowning out the voice of individuals, in the name of protecting laissez-faire individualism.

That’s where social obligation enters the picture.  Our retirement and our health care financing systems are based on employer and individual worker contributions; in an age where corporate ownership is increasingly remote from concerns over individual former workers, we must find alternatives.  In 1950, over half those Americans over 65 lived in poverty; pursuing our current course, we are headed back in that direction.  It would constitue a national tragedy, as well as countless personal ones.  Other nations not so blinded by rampant individualism as ours have developed public, not employer based, systems, a recognition on their part of an important social obligation.  We need to look to places like Germany for examples of what can be done while still prospering in a reasonable fashion.  What they do may or may not work for us, but something must be found.  Like it or not, it’s a social obligation.

Drawing the Line

One of my favorite British mystery series, shown several times on PBS but now seen only rarely, is Foyle’s War.  It relates the adventures of a police detective during World War II Britain, and continually combines wartime plot complications with old fashioned hunting down of malefactors.  One of the interesting plots involved a murderer from an aristocratic English family who turned out also to be a German secret agent.  That brings to mind one of the most obscure trivia of World War II, that German casualties included eight U.S. citizens who had become members of the German SS.  War has historically been a time of switching sides for some, and suffering the consequences, often without benefit of trial.

That is one of the often ignored complexities of the drone warfare issue.   Another is the “collateral damage” issue; from the burning of Washington by the British in the 1812 War to Sherman’s burning of Atlanta to the U.S. firebombing of Dresden to Hiroshima, death and injury to civilians has been a part of warfare.  The assumption has been that close association with the enemy brings you into the same crosshairs with him, whether you deserve it or not.  In that regard, targeted drone strikes are actually a more precise way of limiting “collateral damage” than has been available in the past.  And the argument that use of a new weapon like drones could be copied by some future adversary has never dissuaded us in the past: witness the Monitor/Merrimac battle, jet planes or Hiroshima.   The oddity of a new weapon does not mean its future misuse by the American government against the American people; jet planes are not a weapon of any U.S. police force.   So, does there remain a line that should not be crossed, and if so, where is it?

A clear line would be to avoid attacking U.S. citizens not part of an invading army on U.S. soil.  But that is already illegal, and, by the way, has been since 1812.  Even in the Civil War, solitary confederates off the battlefield were arrested, not shot on sight.  That is because adversaries on American soil fall under our police powers, and our whole justice system, including rights to trial and due process are based on the exercise of those powers.  Even on American soil, military justice requires a different system, with its own rules of procedure and penalties.  A clear difference is that police powers are exercised after commission of a crime, and not based only on intent, and that is not a limitation under military powers. Under military law a soldier can be punished for inaction, not the case in civilian law. Such differences are what declarations of martial law, rarely done and never lightly, are all about.

The absence then of police jurisdiction in an area of violent conflict is an indicator of the availability of drones.  The more complex issue is that of “targeted” drone strikes, i.e. strikes aimed at specific people, who may or may not be American citizens.  An obscure provision of the Constitution prohibits “bills of attainder”, warrants to arrest a person based only on his perceived bad character; that is the source of the prohibition under police powers against arresting someone before actual commission of a crime.  Again, that applies to those under our police jurisdiction.  Putting it all together then, the use of targeted drone strikes in parts of the world where we are engaged in armed military conflict is morally ugly, but legally acceptable.

The real question then is whether we morally can accept targeted drone strikes as ugly but necessary. Here we can fall back only on the old moral test regarding the lesser of evils:  is it the minimal bad thing we can do to avoid greater evils?  As I’ve noted, it involves actually more limited collateral damage than techniques used in the past; it does not require unusable advance planning in immediate action situations, and currently is suitable only for use in sparsely populated hostile terrain.  Its use is against those who have committed or clearly intend to commit great harm against the U.S., involving the loss of many lives.  So long as it involves the highly limited use made of it so far, then drone warfare appears to meet the “least of evils” test.  The real test will come when it becomes cheaper and still more tightly targetable.  War itself is the villain here.  It should be noted, by the way, that I am no lawyer, so my analysis involves only my version of common sense and cannot be blamed on any law school.  Then again, sometimes common sense applies even to the law.

Growing Young Again

“You can’t go home again” is the famous observation by novelist Thomas Wolfe, and that is the growing problem of the baby boom generation.  Raised in the quiet 50’s and roaring 60’s in an America different in major ways from today’s, they deplore what they see now but just lack the energy to work hard to make it better.  Instead, they tend to hunker down and hope for a kinder tomorrow that will bring back the yesterday they recall, not always accurately, as somehow better. In the process, they tend to see more deficits than investments, more aliens than energetic new Americans, more dangers than opportunities.  What emerges is, according to demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution, a widening culture gap between the largest generation and the youngest.  And that endangers all our futures.  The 78 million baby boomers are increasingly negative and isolated from the young in their views, and while the youngest seek new opportunities and new visions, the largest generation has the votes to stop or delay them.  Baby boomers were born to parents educated because of the GI Bill, benefitted from Eisenhower’s major expansion of the transportation system, had the major financial load of aged parents in ill health removed by Medicare, got everything from Teflon to computers through publicly funded research programs and educated their own children with the student loan programs. Yet they see public programs now only as another addition to deficits.  Instead of growth, they seek austerity.

In 1822, we were expanding into new territory, creating new states, vigorously building new roads and canals; this, ten years after the British had captured Washington and attacked Baltimore and New Orleans.  While Lincoln was fighting a Civil War he was also beginning a transcontinental railroad.  Back then, bursting with energy, as a nation we were so young we didn’t know better.  Yet, over ten years after 911, we are, as retired Marine and author Peter Munson points out in the Washington Post, hunched-over psychologically  as a culture, still in mourning, awaiting an enemy’s next blow.  He contrasts that with the can-do attitudes of the young soldiers he fought alongside of  in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We have ceased being expanders and become only defenders. In the process, we are missing opportunities to seize the advantage in new technologies, fold a new generation of energetic young workers into a workforce strongly in need of them, make the transition to clean energy and act on the issues of global climate change.

The recession of the last few years was not just a financial crisis.  It was also a product of declining industries and technologies ripe for replacement,, enabling a major switch of the economy from old energy sources to new, old infrastructure to bridges and buildings suited to the 21^st century, old assembly lines to robotics.  Economists report that jobs and wages are shrinking today, but that is in the old economy. Potential for jobs and wages in the new economy is unbounded.  Such a new economy requires educated and skilled workers of all types, yet we want to cut student loan programs, fight against the Dream Act, and reduce major research programs to a minimum.  We have seen the waves of the future in nanotechnology, robotics and green energy, but we don’t feel we can afford them yet.

The most bothersome statistics I’ve seen lately are the Pew Center’s report that only 23 percent of baby boomers regard the growing immigrant population as a change for the better, and the report that the percentage of American young people with college-level education has dropped from 1^st in the world to 14^th.  The German economy has shown how highly educated workers and acceptance of immigrants into the labor force can create an economic boom.  The 2010 census revealed that our under-age-18 population would have declined had it not been for the entrance of 5.5 million Hispanic and Asian youth.  Economists tell us that, with declining birth rates, we face major labor shortages without immigrants. Yet, until we cease our defensive attitude as a nation, we will miss opportunities to enable a better future.

It comes to this.  We cannot rely only on self-funded education of wealthy elites to guarantee our success as a nation.  We need more, not less, immigrants and native-born minorities each year, and we need them to become educated.  They are young, willing and able to become positive additions to the American work force, as others from abroad have done for many generations.  We need to educate them, and they want education.  We need more Dream Act and Student Aid legislation that will enable us to develop not just immigrant but our already present minorities to become more skilled for the economy of the future.  The neurosurgeons of today descend from the starving immigrants of the past.  A national program for education of young people in need, immigrants and American-born alike, is a priority.  They are our future.