Can the center hold? Can America be governed?

February 21, 2010

Sunday, time for poetry. From Irish poet William Butler Yeats(1865-1939)

THE SECOND COMING

…Things fall apart; the
centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed

upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide
is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of
innocence is drowned;

The best lack all
conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate
intensity…

We’ve written here about the destructive effect of gerrymandering in California, where every legislative seat is safe for the incumbent party: challenge can only come from within the incumbent’s own party. What’s true in California is true for the nation. The respected Cook Political Report sets the number of competitive seats at 50 out of a total of 435. The other 385 members are immune from an attack from the opposite party. Republicans need only appeal to the extreme right to get another term, while Democrats need only appeal to the extreme left.

As a result, “the people’s business is not being done,” to quote retiring Senator Evan Bayh. Our representatives in Washington are failing us, not only politically, but ethically as well. They promised to carry out the people’s business, but they are choosing to look first to their own job security. Non-partisan redrawing of district boundaries, as in Iowa and as proposed for California, would solve the problem, but that’s a long way off.

But in the meantime was Yeats right? Can the center hold? Not as long as the best lack all conviction. If you’re in the center you need a large dose of passionate intensity. And so do our centrist politicians—especially those in “safe” seats. And our President.

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Gridlock in DC? Evan Bayh says yes; Ron Paul and Bill Maher say no

February 17, 2010

Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) shocked the political world Monday by announcing that he is stepping down rather than serve a third term in the Senate, even though he would be practically certain of reelection. Bayh said that while he loved his quarter century of public service he didn’t love the Senate—not any longer.

“Congress is not operating as it should. There is too much partisanship and not enough progress — too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving. Even at a time of enormous challenge, the peoples’ business is not being done.”

Bayh told the truth, I thought. Who could disagree when even a Republican plan for a bipartisan commission to deal with our alarming deficits was scuttled by seven of its Republican sponsors just as soon as President Obama announced his support. Maybe Bayh’s action would spark some change.

Not so fast. In separate interviews with Anderson Cooper Tuesday, both Congressman-Presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-TX), darling of the conservative right, and television host-social critic-political commentator Bill Maher, darling of the progressive left, disagreed.

They both told Cooper that the problem with Washington, and with American government, was too much compromise, not too little. That what America needs is more principled progressives/conservatives (take your pick) like them to prevent the conservatives/progressives (take your pick) from continuing to lead America down the path to destruction.

As long as people follow “principled” thought leaders like Paul and Maher Bayh’s gloomy analysis will stand: the people’s business will not be done. Ethics calls for people to do the work they’re hired to do, for our legislators to do the people’s business. They’re failing colossally.


Read The Ethics Challenge: Strengthening Your Integrity in a Greedy World

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California Democrats: at a new ethical low and digging furiously

February 16, 2010

The Los Angeles Times reports that California Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and “more than a dozen Congressional Democrats” have donated $160,000 to a campaign for a voter initiative to overturn Proposition 11. That’s the 2008 initiative that gave a nonpartisan commission the power to set state legislative district boundaries.

Up to now California legislators have designed their own districts (like the California 38th congressional district shown above) to maximize their job security. In effect they choose their voters, instead of the voters choosing their legislators. Result: In California in 2008, every incumbent running for reelection won—51 congressmen, 9 state senators, and 52 assemblymen. And only nine seats have changed parties in 648 California legislative and congressional races in the last four election cycles (2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008) combined. Or looking at it like a betting person, the incumbent party has a 981/2 percent chance of holding on to each seat. Stalin and Mao would have been impressed.

The current system ensures dysfunctional politics. Legislators get a free ride in general elections. They need only win in their primary. So the Democrats appeal to the far left, the Republicans to the far right, and they all get reelected. The vast majority of voters and the non-voters? They get bad government.

The people mustered a 51-49 majority to fix the system with Prop. 11. The politicians are clawing back for their own selfish interests.

Shame on them.

Read The Ethics Challenge: Strengthening Your Integrity in a Greedy World

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Liz Cheney: loyal daughter, misinformed, or just plain liar?

February 15, 2010

FoxNews.com headline: Liz Cheney: Biden, Obama Administration Ignoring Al Qaeda Pursuit of WMD.

Fox reports that Cheney “accused Vice President Biden of downplaying the threat from Al Qaeda and suggested the Obama administration isn’t doing everything in its power to stop terror.” Their report quotes Cheney: “Al Qaeda is working very hard to try to obtain weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda armed with any nuclear or biological weapon is clearly one of the gravest threats we face…The notion that this White House and this administration is minimizing that possibility makes you very concerned, I think has to make us very concerned about whether or not they are doing everything in their power to prevent it.”

Huh? Where’s she been for the last few years?

Obama has long stated that the number one threat to our security is the possibility of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. As recently as his speech on Afghanistan on December 1, 2009 he stated that, “we know that al-Qaeda and other extremists seek nuclear weapons, and we have every reason to believe that they would use them.”

She’s not a recluse or a dummy: it’s hard to conclude that she’s anything but a pants-on-fire liar. Worse, she’s strengthening Al Qaeda’s efforts to sow terror in the Western world.


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My recent blogs on blogspot

February 14, 2010

Here are links to my recent blogs at http://bobstonesethicschallenge.blogspot.com/

▼ January (18)

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The guards who watched the beating in Seattle should be fired…and their defenders

February 14, 2010

Television news this week showed video of a girl in Seattle being brutally kicked and beaten by other girls while three security guards stood by and made calls on their cell phones—apparently calling for help. No move to help the victim. The outrage was compounded by unnamed officials who defended the guards’ (non-) conduct as proper.

Jack Marshall in his ethicsalarms.com blog has an excellent analysis of the guards’ behavior, likening it to the Nuremberg defense (“just following orders”).

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors got it right in 2007 when they ordered closure of the Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital. The hospital had been the venue for a series of egregious mistreatments of patients, but when a woman was left writhing on the floor of the emergency room for 45 minutes before dying of a perforated bowel, that was the last straw.

Behaving without humanity, even under orders, ought to be a firing offense. The guards should have been fired. So should the “officials” who defended their conduct. Just like the bystanders and their higher-ups at MLK-Harbor Hospital were.

Read The Ethics Challenge: Strengthening Your Integrity in a Greedy World

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The unethical federal budget

February 14, 2010

Is it ethical to make a commitment that you know you can’t keep? Heck, no! Some employers used to promise retirement benefits that they didn’t set aside money for. The government decided to outlaw such unethical behavior: now the law requires employers who promise retirement benefits to set aside funds to pay when the benefits come due.

Sadly the government isn’t about to do what it’s required employers to do. The government has promised Americans that they’ll be covered by Social Security and by Medicare, and—if they’re poor—by Medicaid. The costs of these “entitlement” programs are growing steadily as:

  1. the baby boomers are just starting to come under Social Security and Medicare. (The first boomers, born in 1946, become 65 next year, then an avalanche in the next ten years.)
  2. life expectancy is increasing—babies born this year have a 50-50 chance of living to 100
  3. medical care gets more expensive as people grow older, and
  4. medical science is developing ever-more-expensive treatments.

All in all, this “perfect storm” will either bankrupt the country or force America to break its promises to the elderly.

So what are our politicians doing to fix this problem? Some are calling for budget cuts, knowing that the entitlement programs are not cut-able under present law. Others are calling for reform, knowing that reform can’t come close to solving the funding problem. Every one of our legislators knows about the problem. But it’s not being addressed. This is profoundly unethical behavior: they agreed to do the people’s work if they were sent to Washington, and having won election they are sloughing off the problem to our grandchildren.

Whose fault is it and what can be done? I’ll address this in coming blogs.

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Palin was the best part of the Tea Party convention, the audience the worst

February 14, 2010

Sarah Palin gave a rousing speech at the Tea Party convention, raking and mocking President Obama with zingers like “How’s that hope-y, change-y stuff workin’ out for ya?” The crowd enthused, having paid $350 to hear the speech live, and the left’s commentators tut-tutted over Palin’s writing notes on her hand to help her remember her key points. All in good fun.

But there was a truly ugly side of the convention. Tea Partiers can no longer pass off the birthers as a tiny group of nuts that aren’t representative of true Tea Partiers. Not after the crowd’s wild enthusiasm for Tom Tancredo’s keynote speech. Ex-congressman Tancredo (R-CO) explained that “Barack Hussein Obama” was only elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote.” [Wild cheers]

“People who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House.” [More wild cheers]

I’m not sure who he was referring to. Perhaps it was Latinos and African-Americans who couldn’t have voted had there been a literacy test—like in the good old days when blacks were turned away from polls all over the South, no matter how literate they were, because the point of the tests was to turn them away.

I’m pretty sure, however, what the crowd was cheering. It was that Obama voters were others, a different species, not even entitled to be part of the American system. The crowd responded to hate speech with cheers.

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