But trying to reach the surface

"Layers of Time No. 3" (encaustic and collage on panel),  by Willa Vennema, in the "Beneath the Surface'' show of encaustic works by artists from around New England at the Saco (Maine) Museum through May 28.

136 ways to confuse

"In the spring {in New England} I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours."  

--  Mark Twain

Twain lived for many years in Hartford, Conn., although his favorite place in the world might have been gorgeous Dublin, N.H., near Mount Monadnock. I became very familiar with the town because I had to drive my manic-depressive alcoholic mother there on numerous occasions to be dried out at a famous place for such problematic work known as Beech Hill Farm, on the top of a mountain above the village. Further down the hill was Yankee Inc., which still publishes Yankee Magazine and the Old Farmer's Almanac.

Dublin remains a good place from which to watch the  vagaries of New England weather.

-- Robert Whitcomb
 

Nothing plane about this geometry

Encaustic work from Caryl Gordon's show "Organics and Geometrics,'' at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, through April 30. She sees our world as a mix of organic and geometric shapes.

Yves Salomon-Fernandez/Tony Dreyfus: A drawback of math emphasis

Via the New England  Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), part of the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

In June 2015, we argued in a NEJHE article “Reducing Math Obstacles to Higher Education,” that intensified efforts to improve math education may make sense for many students, but for other students–those who lack ability or interest in math–the prescription of more math limits their ability to attain a college credential. As a result, heightened math requirements can limit some students’ employment options and play a counter-produc­tive role in helping this segment of students achieve full participation in the economy.

Such students would benefit more from an educational program with reduced emphasis on traditional math. They could better spend more time on other studies that would help them develop themselves toward successes in further education and careers. All students, including those with little ability or interest in math, should have access to higher education and a college credential that will help them develop the abilities they will need as workers and citizens in a complex society.

In the current article, we focus more on economic issues. Public discussion today focuses greatly on the relationships among economic inequality, education and technological change. But understanding in this area suffers from assumptions about the value of math education for gaining useful skills when work opportunities and skill demands are so varied. With this article, we hope to stimulate research, debate and experimenta­tion that could create new understandings and models to build the flexible programs we need to move closer to full economic participation and economic independence.

As our work has proceeded, a new book has greatly encouraged us: The Math Myth, And Other STEM Delusions by eminent political scientist Andrew Hacker (The New Press, March 2016). Hacker has written extensively about race, gender and income inequality, and with his wife Claudia Dreifus, authored the 2011 book Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It. Many of Hacker’s points in The Math Myth dovetail closely with ours; he also provides much useful insight into how misleading arguments for more math education have exaggerated the benefits of current approaches to math and allied fields. We hope the publication of The Math Myth will contribute to the goal we hold of reducing math barriers to higher education and good jobs.

Technological progress and the need for math

Education beyond high school is becoming increasingly necessary for entry into the better-paid and more secure sectors of the job market. (Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute provides substantial evidence on the income benefits of college in “Higher Education Earnings Premium: Value, Variation, and Trends,” Feb. 24, 2014.) In so many vocations and careers, math plays little or no role, but higher educa­tion is required. As a result, math-based barriers to higher education block people from education toward careers in which they could prosper and contribute more to the nation. We all should have access to such education whether or not we are good at math.

The 20th-Century experience showed how new technology could gain millions of users without demanding users’ expertise. If mechanized factories, the automobile, the telephone and the computer were to spread, some people had to master new knowledge and skills. But most people did not need to learn how to run an assembly line, repair a car engine or design the circuits inside a telephone or personal computer. The creation of technology requires scientists and engineers and its use demands technicians, operators and repair people. As a result, any member of our technology-dependent society inevitably relies on people with mathematical, scientific and engineering skills.

We need these technically and mathematically trained people—yes, many of them. But we do not allneed higher math to contribute in the workplace; for a large number of jobs, higher math skills do not play any significant role.

One argument for sustained universal math education is that tech­nological progress and global competition demand greater science and math skill. Such concerns can be seen in government reports such as “STEM Education: Preparing for the Jobs of the Future,” (from the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, April 2012) or “Federal Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education 5-Year Strategic Plan” (from the National Science and Technology Council, May 2013). While this argument partly springs from concerns that American companies face shortages in STEM skills that weaken their competitiveness, another concern is that workers without skills in science and math will suffer limited access to well-paid jobs. Those without science and math skills will, in this view, be denied access to the “new economy.” But this argument disregards key realities of the modern highly specialized economy. Technological and economic change increases math skill demands only for some workers, while leaving math skill demands unchanged or even reduced for others. In an economy with so much specialization of skill and inequality of opportunity, investment in math is a winning bet for some and a losing proposition for others.

In school, home and workplace, powerful math technology is included in handheld graphing calculators, in the most common spreadsheet software and in computer algebra and statistical systems. Such technology is also embedded in countless other programs and devices. What are the implications for math skill demands in the workplace and for what high school and college students should learn? As such technology spreads, who benefits from gaining greater math skills?

Those who head into industries focused on science and engineering may gain important advantages through math skill. The construction engineer may have skills and advantages over the road-building project manager who, in turn, probably has advantages over someone who lays asphalt or pours concrete. Managers and designers of all types—mechanical, electronic and financial—receive benefits from their greater skills.

But even in such technology-dependent industries, large numbers of jobs do not depend at all on math skill. The driver, the call-center worker, the bank teller or the salesperson relies on the math that they need being baked in to their equipment, so that machines operate safely, so that software gets the customer info to the right file, so that the deposit is added and the interest figured. To be sure, such tasks may still require human intelligence, for example, to evaluate the appropriateness of a transaction, to maintain good will with a customer, to recognize exceptional conditions that might cause danger and so forth. Powers of mathematical estimation and arithmetic could play a role.

Indeed, much of our efforts in design of equipment, software, jobs and larger systems are intended to protect operations from the human errors of the operators. Whether or not we like this development, the proportion of people who need to fully understand the mathematical principles or operations of their work is reduced. Perhaps a positive aspect is that more human energy can be devoted to human contact with customers and co-workers. (Andrew Hacker, in Chapter 4 of Math Myths, emphasizes that many people in scientific or technical jobs that require mathematical training, including physicians, engineers and actuaries, often do not draw on that training in any meaningful way.)

More detailed analysis of the experiences of students and of workers in STEM and other fields suggests that the supposed shortage of STEM skills has been exaggerated. Hal Salzman, Daniel Kuehn and B. Lindsay Lowell, in “Guestworkers in the high-skill U.S. labor market” (Economic Policy Institute, April 24, 2013), point out that only 5% of U.S. workforce jobs can be classified as STEM employment. And large proportions of graduates in STEM subjects, as much as half, do not end up working in their fields. (The low percentage of jobs in STEM fields does not include jobs in health.)

The “bad equilibrium” of weak high schools and economic inequality

Even as recent high school graduates wonder whether the cost of college is worth it, salary data continue to show that those with a college credential earn on average much more over a lifetime compared to those without. In fact, the job market in many areas of the country is less welcoming than it once was to people without any college experience. Many employers are increasingly using the college degree as they once used a high school diploma, as a screen to focus on potential employees for jobs at middle-skill levels that in the past were more often filled by people without college degrees. (A September 2014 report by Burning Glass Technologies, “Moving the Goalposts: How Demand for a Bachelor’s Degree Is Reshaping the Workforce,” includes detailed data on different job areas in which a bachelor’s degree is increasingly required.) Meanwhile, college-going rates across the country are at an all-time high, but income inequality continues to grow.

A full understanding of our rising economic inequality would help guide us to strategies toward greater equality. But this inequality is so multifaceted, affecting our society so deeply, that it remains hard to grasp. One key part of this “bad equilibrium” is the sorting of students by the educational system. Math plays a central role in this sorting by which different students are encouraged to pursue or are blocked from pursuing different amounts and levels of education. A second key part of the bad equilibrium is the reinforcing cycles of low wages and low skills.

For "first-generation" college students and students from low-income families, entry into college involves overcoming many obstacles, including a college environment that may be unfamiliar in many ways. As we pointed out in the prior article, math requirements serve as an effective barrier to entry into college and thus limit the potential for many to move to a higher income level with more marketable skills. Weakness in math should not exclude anyone from entry or success in the colleges that can develop these skills and to certify with diplomas that students have them. Yes, study of math can help develop some of these desired skills, especially tenacity in problem-solving, but many paths can help build this tenacity. All students deserve productive paths to develop the skills they need for employment, including mental discipline and problem-solving skills.

Adopting educational approaches that lead to full economic participation

Breaking this negative cycle of unequal opportunity will require many changes—in schools and across many of our social and economic institutions. Is wholesale change possible? We think so. But our country needs profound educational progress, so we can meet the many challenges emerging from rapid economic, technological and environmental change. We are proposing that the K-12 and higher education sectors take a long-term view in addressing existing exclusionary college-entry policies that discourage students who are weak in math from making long-term choices that will help them contribute to the economy at their full potential, generate personal wealth and earn income sufficient for financial independence.

Data on income inequality and wealth gaps point to interactions between race and ethnicity and individual and family wealth. In a 2015 report from Demos and the Institute on Assets and Social Policy called “The Racial Wealth Gap, Why Policy Matters,” Laura Sullivan and her co-authors show how changes in housing and educational policy could reduce the large racial and ethnic gaps in family wealth. We take the position that our educational policies and systems should reduce, certainly not worsen, the social conditions that limit economic mobility for marginalized populations, especially for students of color. In recent years, those populations have suffered significant setbacks. According to Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry writing for the Pew Research Center in December 2014, wealth inequality has grown along racial and ethnic lines since the Great Recession; the median wealth of non-Hispanic black households and of Hispanic households fell between 2010 and 2013 and neither group has experienced significant improvements since.

This link between race and income inequality is particularly concerning as demographers are predicting that minority groups will rise to over half of the total population by mid-century. As Sandra L. Colby and Jennifer M. Ortman described in their March 2015 Census report “Projections of the Size and Composition of the U.S. Population: 2014 to 2060, Population Estimates and Projections,” "no group will have a majority share of the total and the United States will become a 'plurality' of racial and ethnic groups." We will all be depending on a more multi-colored workforce and need to develop schools, workplaces and policies that help us “pull together” in the context of a competitive global economy.

In an economy where education matters ever more, it becomes both a social and economic imperative that we provide education that works for students of all backgrounds. Our economic success depends upon learning how to make the path through school and the path from school to work successful for alltypes of students. Both the K-12 and higher education sectors can play active roles in disrupting the pattern of low skills and low wages. Reforming the roles of the K-12 and higher education systems will require many changes in our society as they are critical gate-keepers that determine who gets a shot at earning the credentials that can lead to individual economic prosperity.

Ideas for change

In “Reducing Math Obstacles to Higher Education,” ­­we advocated new thinking about how to build a more flexible educational system of greater access and equality that students need. We called for K-16 collaboration toward solutions to the problem of math as a barrier to higher education and use of empirical data to measure the magnitude of the problem, especially for vulnerable populations. We now add some ideas for change that we think are needed.

• High schools should take a variety of steps to bring their programs more in line with the intellectual, personal and economic interests of their students. As we explained in the prior article, the third and fourth years of high school math are unproductive for many students who do poorly in math and have educational and career interests that do not benefit much from math. For some students, such steps might include less time studying math in the final two years of high school and more time on other subjects in which they can envision a career.

• At the same time, high schools should innovate in other ways to make their program more engaging and useful. As we noted in the earlier NEJHE piece, high schools should expand their mission to include strong programs in arts and social sciences that appeal to the expressive and social interests of adolescents, that develop a rich variety of skills and intelligences, and provide more knowl­edge about the adult world and the many fields of study available in college. High schools should also move the science program to a greater focus on biology and the applied disciplines of health, nutrition, environmental and earth sciences.

• To give high schools and high school students more flexibility in designing their curricula to meet student needs and interests, colleges should eliminate admission requirements of three or four years of high school math for those students not pursuing STEM degrees. Colleges should also eliminate general college graduation requirements that all students pass a math course at the same level regardless of their major and instead establish major requirements for math with renewed attention on what math is actually needed by the majority of the majors—much in many fields, less in others.

We advocate this reduction in math requirements, not because we want to “dumb down” education in the sense of making it easier and less useful. Instead, we think it is the fundamental duty of the educational community to make the invaluable benefits of skill and knowledge available to the widest possible proportion of students. We must challenge all our preconcep­tions about what is required to learn. Is calculus really needed for people to prepare for careers in medicine and other health professions? What math do accountants and coders really need to do their work? How much physics can one learn without calculus? How much chemistry can one learn without algebra? Progress on many questions such as these may open doors to many students who currently are excluded from knowledge and skills that can make their education more engaging, their citizenship more responsible, their work life more rewarding and their contribution to society more complete.

Some will object that reducing math requirements means “closing doors” or locking certain students into a disadvantaged class of people with a weak education. This concern appears well-intentioned, but we think misses the bigger picture and closes off opportunities for positive change.

The bigger picture is that our system today–with its single high school path of uniform requirements for all students in a world of highly unequal resources–is effectively closing doors of opportunity for millions of students. Those attending strong high schools, good colleges and established graduate programs have diverse opportunities and salaries far higher than those who attend weak high schools and get little or no college education.

We need schools that come much closer to engaging the interests, desires and ambitions of students, to help people learn what they really can use in their intellectual development and in their work lives. Real economic opportunity demands a deep redesign of school programs. We hope to see some of this deep change in the next decades.

Sustained open doors

We focus on just two aspects of new directions that would complement reduced math requirements in order to improve access and effectiveness of higher education. The first aspect is “sustained open doors,” a strategy that responds directly to the concern about reduced math requirements limiting opportunities for students.

Inevitably, all students do not find motivation, ability and resources available together to support hard work at school. Hence we see early bloomers and late bloomers, school aces and strugglers, rich kids and poor kids. Many students lack the financial and family resources to continue their education into adulthood without interruption.

Yet long educational paths, as much as 20 years total, can pay off far better than short paths ending without any college. Our society must make special efforts to keep doors to education open over students’ lives so that hopes for equal economic opportunity remain real. The students who fail to take advantage of high school for diverse reasons deserve meaningful second chances. Many other students would also do well to leave school after high school or two years of college and to experience the world of work. All these students should later find welcoming opportunities to return to school, with full chances to learn whatever can further their intellectual and economic growth.

For example, someone wanting at age 25 or 30 to enter a field that requires more science or math should be able to study for a year or two and then rejoin a path of a more advanced education. As education for newly created careers becomes more necessary, such re-entries into math and other fields will become needed at various ages of life.

Intellectual focus, personal direction and connection to work

A second aspect of a more just and effective system of education would restructure the last two years of high school and first two years of college to better foster intellectual development, personal direction and engagement with the world of work.

We look at the education of students ages 16 to 21 as one continuum that is ripe for coordinated and systemic reform. Consider this span of education in three two-year periods: the last two years of high school (grades 11 and 12); the two years of community college or the first two years of four-year college (grades 13 and 14); and the last two years of four-year college (grades 15 and 16).

In each of these three two-year periods, students should be encouraged to make choices: to focus their studies for intellectual development and to learn about related careers and work skills. In grades 11 and 12, the degree of focus might be modest, e.g. having students choose one of several major areas for additional study such as science and math, the arts, history and society, or languages. Some focus such as this is common in European high schools for students of this age.

Students planning to finish or pause their education after high school or after only two years of college should have ample opportunities to gain work-related knowledge and skills through courses, internships and apprenticeships. But even those students planning on four-year college should be encouraged to choose a broad focus area and to include in their studies some work-related learning.

Similarly, a two-year college program or even the first two years of a four-year college could include a modest concentration in one subject area, like a minor in a subject such as science, language or history. Such a two-year concentration would help students gain more experience with choice about their academic and vocational lives. Students entering the last two years of college might choose a major related to or different from their focus from the first two years of college. But the earlier experiences of focus and connection to work could make the last half of the college career much more useful.

* * *

Our preference for less focus on math is rooted in the fact that the prevailing math curriculum is blocking many students from completing high school, getting to college or completing college. Those who are least successful in math need more education, not less, that will help prepare them for better jobs and better lives. Our goal should be to offer an education of equal value to all young people—not the same goals for all, which wind up creating much opportunity for some and much less for others. These students less able or less interested in math have a fully equal right to a college education and to the wide opportunities for personal and economic growth that college can bring.

Tony Dreyfus taught math at Brookline High School outside Boston. He also worked with the public school systems in Chelsea, Revere and Everett, Mass., in support of elementary math improvement efforts through math coaches. His college studies in economics and master’s degree in city planning with a focus on regional economics included extended study of statistics and economic modeling.

Yves Salomon-Fernandez is interim president of Massachusetts Bay Community College. She is the incoming president of Cumberland County College in New Jersey. She holds a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a doctorate in education statistics from Boston College.

Barbara Holland: 'A handful of moments'

"Poets and songwriters speak highly of spring as one of the great joys of life in the temperate zone, but in the real world most of spring is disappointing.  We looked forward to it too long, and the spring we had in mind in February was warmer and dryer than the actual spring when it finally arrives. We’d expected it to be a whole season, like winter, instead of a handful of separate moments and single afternoons." 

-- Barbara Holland, from Endangered Pleasures: In defense of naps, bacon, martinis, profanity, and other indulgences

Llewellyn King: Another way to fix the illegal-alien problem

Sometimes a better idea is so obvious and so simple that it is overlooked.

For example, it took automobile manufacturers nearly 100 years to realize that drivers and passengers might like to drink something on their journeys, and might need a place in their vehicles to put their drinks. Then they did not get there without a shove from a chain of convenience stores, which started giving away simple plastic devices that clipped onto a window -- woe betide you if you inadvertently opened the window.

According to one man, and his band of dedicated followers, that is what is happening with the immigration debate. He does not propose to solve the issue, but rather to defuse it; to introduce a “third way” which will help those who live in fear of a knock on the door from deportation officers, as well as those who bear the cost of their illegal status.

Illegal immigrants -- or undocumented immigrants, if you prefer the gentler term -- live in what is, in effect, a kind of open prison. They dare not leave the United States because they cannot return. They flit in the shadows, imposing huge costs on local communities for education, healthcare, housing, policing and prisons.

The man with the idea as simple as a cup holder is Mark Jason, 77, a fiscal conservative, who lives in Malibu, Calif. For six years, he has been at the helm of the Immigrant Tax Inquiry Group, an organization he created and finances.

The core of Jason’s plan is to issue illegal immigrants who are working or want to work with a 10-year, special work permit that can be renewed. No amnesty; no citizenship, nor talk of mass-citizenship. The permit holders and their families could leave the country and return, but that is just part of the plan.

There is a caveat, and it is the key to the plan: A 5-percent tax would be levied on both the workers and the employers, which would raise $176 billion over a 10-year period. Instead of going into general revenue, that money would be employed where the illegal immigrants are distorting local economies.

“The model creates $100 billion to act as a financial salve to help heal our immigration issues, and $76 billion to be used for our needed infrastructure,” Jason said, adding, “We calculate that if we allocate 40 percent of the total revenue of $176 billion, we can create over 1.4 million American jobs at $50,000 each in a wide spectrum of fields, including health, education, law enforcement and construction.”

Under the plan, he said, “we would get people out of the emergency rooms and into healthcare plans.”

Gone would be the 18-percent “nanny tax,” which few employers or immigrantsactually pay. Gone too, for the most part, would be the more important Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN), which Jason, a former Internal Revenue Service special agent and university budget officer, says accounts for the loss of more than $50 billion over 10 years in fraud. Fraud occurs, for example, when ITIN tax filers claim imaginary dependents for excessive tax credits.

Anyone can get an ITIN number, and many undocumented workers paying ITIN tax believe that it is a path of sorts to legality; that one day, they will be able to show they have worked, paid taxes and, therefore, are upstanding people worthy of citizenship.

Jason sees himself as a man who fixes things. After  high school in Mexico, in the 1950s, he learned to fix diesel engines because he was appalled by the pollution from their exhaust – pollution he found to be worse than that in his native Los Angeles. He also studied animal husbandry, so that he could try to fix the problem of “scrawny cattle and hogs” in Mexico.

In 2007, Jason heard that the California State University system did not have the funds to admit 8,000 new students. “That was the system that gave me the two distinctly different majors that helped me throughout life, and I wanted other students to have the same opportunity,” he said. So he worked on a state tax reform fix.

Now Jason, who has held briefings in Washington, needs to find a member of Congress who will write a bill and introduce it.

 Llewellyn King is host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and a long-time publisher, columnist and international business consultant. This first ran  at InsideSources.

The endless search to 'find' our identity

"Notes from Tervuren'' (gouache, collage and ink on sheet music), by Radcliffe Bailey, at Samson Gallery, Boston through May 28.

His  symbolism-laden work explores African-American and international black identity and how individuals may have arrived at their subjective racial, familial, political and national identities.  As with many artists these days, there's a strong focus on issues of individual and group identity.

Robert Whitcomb: The gig economy

I’m old and lucky enough that most of my working life took place when large U.S. enterprises usually made long-term commitments, albeit often rather vague, to their competent workers. If a recession hit, senior executives would grit their teeth and try to hang on to their employees.  Back when I was a business editor at The Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune and elsewhere, Fortune 500 senior executives’ commitment to their fellow employees often impressed me. Not much anymore!

There was something like two-way loyalty, and the top people often showed a certain sensitivity about public perceptions of their compensation.

Now the idea is to maximize short-term profit and stock price and thus senior execs’  and board members’ compensation above all else.  I have seen that in some sectors where managements that used to be satisfied with 15 percent profit margins raised them to over 30 percent. And CEOs now make  on average over 300 times the average pay of their employees, compared to 20 times in 1965!

Thus many companies  refuse to spend money on long-term investments, such as employee  training: While such outlays strengthen companies in the long haul, they cut into short-term net income. So train yourself – you may well be laid off next month anyway.

Then there’s the rise of the “gig economy,’’ in which “on-call’’ workers, “permatemp workers,’’ “independent contractors’’ and people employed  by such  contract firms as Manpower comprise an ever larger share of the workforce.

The Wall Street Journal reports that these days 17 percent of women and 15 percent of men have such “alternative employment.’’ Such jobs are up by more than half from 2005. (See ‘’’Gig’ Economy Spreads Broadly,’’ WSJ March 26-27).

These positions, with  their very unpredictable hours, pay lower wages than regular jobs and offer few if any fringe benefits.  They are spreading rapidly across more sectors, such as law and healthcare, pulled by computerization and globalization. They have long been particularly common in higher education,  which depends on low-paid adjunct teachers to offset the cost of almost-impossible-to-fire tenured professors, with  their high salaries and big benefits.

Employers obviously need flexibility to adjust their staffing levels. But when they reduce the ranks of their full-time employees beyond a certain point to keep short-term profit margins and senior executive pay sky high, they risk undermining the viability of their enterprises by destroying the institutional memory and employee morale and loyalty needed formost enterprises’ long-term success.

Short-termism usually triumphs. CEOs don’t expect to have their jobs very long; thus they want to accelerate their compensation.

Meanwhile, the economy as a whole tends to stay in a low-growth pattern as the purchasing power of most people shrinks and national wealth is increasingly concentrated in a tiny group whose members can perpetuate their (and their children’s)  power with the aid of cash (and later, lobbying and other jobs) for politicians in return for favorable policies.

We’ll see a revival of private-sector unionization as more workers see that as the only way to obtain a modicum of economic security. We’ll also see an increasing number of economically insecure Americans following the siren song of such con men as Donald Trump and such presumably sincere but wrong-headed reformers as Bernie Sanders who don’t understand the need  to encourage the “animal spirits’’ of entrepreneurism; Mr. Sanders has never had a job in business. There are reasonably centrist policies that can make things better, such as adjustments in the tax code and labor regulations.

None of this is to say that “contingent’’ and/or freelance employment can’t work well for some people. I myself have enjoyed some of its flexibility as a partner in a couple of small businesses. But you can’t build a strong economy on it.

xxx

Post-Brussels, President Obama and some other sensitive souls continue to avoid saying “Islamic’’ before  “terrorism’’. They’re being intellectually dishonest. Islam (mostly its Sunni side) has big problems, the worst being that too many of its emotionally needyfollowers adhere to the 7th Century barbarism  and supremacism in some of its scripture. Islam needs a reformation.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) is a Providence-based editor and writer and overseer of this site.

Sean Moulton: Speed up government rulemaking

Via OtherWords.org

One of the dirtiest words in politics is “regulation.”

It conjures up images of confusing paperwork, red tape, and obstacles to progress and innovation. However, when it comes to guaranteeing that the water we drink is lead-free, the air we breathe is clean, and that the food we buy at the supermarket won’t cause cancer, people are all for them.

The winds quickly change when you refer to regulations as “protections.”

Regulations, the rules that govern the laws passed by Congress, are necessary. But they present a target-rich environment for corporate and special interests.

Just because a law is passed doesn’t mean it’s going to be enforced. More often, it’s up to various federal agencies to interpret the law and write the rules — that is, the regulations — for its implementation.

This rulemaking process makes it too easy for special interests to twist a good law into something that’s more beneficial for their own interests than American taxpayers. They spend billions of dollars every year to gain access to decision-makers in government in an attempt to influence their policies.

If you want to get the money out of politics, you should also worry about the money inpolicy.

Away from public view, many players take aim at the rules  that agencies make: industry, lobbyists, lawyers, politicians, and even other agencies. Their influence and interference often leads to enormous delays and compromised standards.

For example, it took the EPA more than 10 years — and a court order — to finish rules on mercury emissions from power plants.

It was a rule about mercury. In the air. That people were breathing. If that doesn’t qualify as an urgent issue, what does? Yet it took a decade for the government to get regulations in place.

The process has become cumbersome to the point that you can never know whether agencies will finish making rules that they start — much less ensure that the final rules will match a law’s original intent. Unfortunately, all attempts by Congress to “solve” the rulemaking problem have consisted of provisions that would actually make the current system worse.

One preposterous proposal, put forward by Sen. Rand Paul, actually calls for Congress to have oversight over new rules.

Congress is surely dysfunctional. Even proposals with bipartisan support can inexplicably languish for months on the Hill and die with no action. That’s not where you go to smooth out a rocky process.

The fact is that  “reform” proposals like these aren’t meant to remedy our rulemaking dilemmas. Instead, they’re part of a campaign by powerful interests to make the process even less effective.

What we need is greater transparency and accountability in rulemaking. There should be no secret processes where political pressure can be brought to bear behind closed doors. Any changes made to a federal agency’s rule — whether by the White House, other agencies, or lawmakers — should be done on the public record, with a full explanation of why it was necessary.

Agencies should also have the authority to operate more quickly and decisively based on their expertise, including rejecting proposed changes they believe damage a rule.

As distasteful you may find regulations, we need to speed up the rulemaking process and make it less vulnerable to pressure from outside groups. Without it, our laws will only protect the highest bidders.

Sean Moulton is the Open Government Program Manager at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO.org).

Will they regret it in the morning?

"Girls Night Out" (acrylic on canvas), by Larisa Martino, in the show "Fashion Statements,'' at ArtProv Gallery, Providence, April 2--May 27.

The wonders of wax

"Festival of Flags I'' (encaustic), by Jeanne Griffin, in the big group show "Beneath the Surface,'' at the Saco Museum, Saco, Maine, April 2-May 28. 

The show includes the work of some of New England's best painters working in encaustic, also known as  hot-wax painting. The process involves using a mix of heated beeswax and damar varnish to which colored pigments are added. The liquid or paste is then applied to a surface -- often prepared wood, although canvas and other materials are often used. The effects can be very beautiful --- and sometimes eerie.

James P. Freeman: Will Boston follow New York's perilous progressivism?

“One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.”
— Vincent J. Scully, Yale architectural historian

So was the thinking about the demolition  in 1963 of a Beaux Arts masterpiece in New York City, the old  Pennsylvania Station, an act of progressive vandalism, from which rose (or sank) the present site of the Madison Square Garden complex, a dingy maze of commerce and commotion. In the 1960s, progressivism – once a purely political movement – began to seep into civics and cultural mores, even private-sector  architecture.

The city ultimately recovered from this destructive movement in the 1990s and 2000s. But with vicious irony, Bill de Blasio was elected in 2013 as New York City’s mayor (the first Democrat in 20 years) within days of the  50th anniversay of the old Penn Station’s demise.

De Blasio is today’s most outspoken urban progressive, with ambitions beyond his abilities. His friend, and fellow co-chair of Cities of Opportunity Task Force (COTF), Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, should resist this progressive lurch, and distance himself from de Blasio, as he eyes re-election next year.

De Blasio’s Progressive Agenda is intellectual graffiti, slowly defacing the very progress that New York City has enjoyed over the last 20 years; it is also agitating residents, given recent polling.

Boston too has experienced a remarkable 20-year rejuvenation, from which it should not retreat in an effort to emulate New York.

Walsh may not seem like a progressive pillar (more of a wanna-be) but that didn’t stop then-Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi, during 2013’s mayoral campaign, from describing his stance on issues as, “dear to progressive hearts.” As The Globe further noted a year later, de Blasio and Walsh “both campaigned on a message of economic populism, vowing to tackle income inequality and dramatically expand early education” – among the flash points of the progressive agenda.

With regard to “rising inequality” and “declining opportunity,” de Blasio said, upon the launch of the COTF that, “the task force is going to organize and focus the progressive ideas coming out of cities.” The defining mission of the COTF is to “make equity a central governing principle” and “advance a national common equity agenda.”

What progressive ideas in the last 50 years have benefitted the likes of, say, Detroit, Chicago and Baltimore, bastions of murder and mayhem? And since when is equity a “governing principle”?

Under Mayors Rudolph Guiliani and Michael Bloomberg, New York City repelled those progressive ideas, making the city safer and more prosperous. Boston was certainly not a progressive haven during these years. Indeed, the late Thomas Menino – Boston’s longest serving mayor – was more of a powerbroker and pragmatist, eschewing lofty ideas. Rather, he fully embraced being the “Urban Mechanic.”

Last year at the second meeting of the COTF, held in Boston, Walsh said, “inequality is a national crisis. It’s holding down wages, it’s holding back our economy, it’s undermining the American Dream.”

Not in Boston. Apparently Walsh does not see the paradox of progressive thinking as it applies to his city. Boston has one of the highest inequality levels in the country, yet The Hub is flourishing. It will be fun watching Walsh explain why Boston should adopt de Blasio’s progressive politics during next year’s mayoral race.

There are other areas where the two mayors are ideologically simpatico: climate change (both mayors attended a Vatican conference on slavery and climate change last year; Walsh says – seriously! – there is “social equity” when “talking about the environment”); free universal pre-K education (in a 2013 position paper Walsh indicated that there is“no greater equity issue” than ensuring all students “start kindergarten with foundational skills”); and affordable housing. Progressives demand equality of outcomes in all aspects of life — even if it is not earned or deserved or paid for.

Writing for The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson noted that the mayoral class of de Blasio and Walsh, among others, in 2013 is “one of the most progressive cohorts of elected officials in recent American history.” Collectively, they may be “charting a new course for American liberalism.”

Today 27 of the nation’s 30 largest cities have Democratic mayors. But, mercifully, 23 states are controlled by both Republican legislatures and governors. It remains to be seen if the new progressives will leave a positive legacy. Preferably, it will be a short-lived one.

Once again, there is talk of “transforming” Penn Station and returning it to its former state of grandeur. That is the delicious irony of New York’s progressivism: everything old is new again. Boston need not repeat the refrain or rattletrap.

James P. Freeman is a New England-based writer and former columnist with The Cape Cod Times.  This piece originated in The New Boston Post.

Webcast: Using 'white hat hackers' to thwart cybercriminals

From The Boston Global Forum (bostonglobalforum,org), see a Webcast on using "white hat hackers'' to to fight cybercrime.

http://bostonglobalforum.org/2016/03/white-hat-hacking-presentation-to-the-bgf/

'T' is for terrified

"T,'' by Russell duPont, which won "Best in Show'' at the exhibition "Con/TEXT,'' to run at the South Shore Art Center, Cohasset, Mass., April 8-MaY 22.

Jim Hightower: Scalia was a frequent flyer on 'Conflict-of-Interest Airlines'

Via OtherWords.org

The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s demise at a Texas resort shows why we can't trust judges to police their own integrity.

How curious that he died, of all places, in an exclusive West Texas hunting lodge.

Yet more curious, all expenses for hizzonor’s February stay were paid by the resort’s owner, John Poindexter. He’s a Houston manufacturing mogul who won a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court in an age-discrimination case last year.

In another curiosity, the names of some 35 other people who were in Scalia’s hunting party are being kept secret. Moreover, the late judge — an ardent promoter of corporate supremacy over people’s rights — was flown to the remote getaway for free aboard someone’s or some corporation’s private jet. The name of this generous benefactor has also been withheld.

Curious, huh?

This isn’t a murder mystery — by all accounts, Scalia died of natural causes. It’s a moral mystery: Who was buying (or repaying) favors from an enormously powerful member of America’s highest court?

There’s a bit of poetic justice in the fact that Justice Scalia, in particular, passed away under such circumstances, for his expiration exposes a little known ethical loophole through which moneyed interests can curry special favors from Supremes: judicial junkets.

The West Texas hunting excursion was hardly Scalia’s first freebie. He was the Supreme Court’s most frequent flyer aboard “Conflict-of-Interest Airlines,” accepting more than 280 privately paid-for jaunts in the past dozen years to luxury destinations, including Hawaii, Hong Kong, Ireland, Napa Valley, Palm Springs and Switzerland.

Every lower-court judge is subject to a formal code of conduct, but the nine top court judges have exempted themselves from those rules. Scalia’s inconvenient demise shows why we can’t trust them to police their own integrity.

For more information, go to www.FixTheCourt.org.

Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.

Cash crop

"Lobsterman'' (4-block woodcut), by David Witbeck, at the Providence Art Club.

And renting of cloth

"Grief'' (fabric), by Liz Collins, in the show "Intimacy + Materiality,'' at the Helen Day Art Center, Stowe. Vt., through April 10.

Clean and cook before eating

"Mackerel on Spade'' (watercolor) by Amy Hourihan, in the show "3x3: 3 Artists, 3 Media,'' at Centennial Gallery, Peabody, Mass., through April 15.

Donald Kaul: This liberal's fond words for Nancy Reagan

Via OtherWords.org

I was late to the Nancy Reagan Admiration Society. She had arrived on the political scene, after all, on the arm of Ronald Reagan, a man I neither liked nor admired.

I thought he was a phony — a B-movie star who seemed either unwilling or unable to differentiate between movies and real life. He was fond of telling stories like that one about the wounded airman and his fatherly senior officer who, as their disabled bomber rocketed toward the earth, comforted the boy by saying, “Don’t worry, son. We’ll ride this down together.”

I wondered how “Dutch” could have known the final words of the officer, who presumably died in the subsequent crash. Years later I found the answer. The scene was in a World War II movie.

He was always doing things like that, copping a scene here or a line there from an old movie and making it his own.

And Nancy Reagan was part and parcel of that act — a clotheshorse whose main job was to sit slightly behind her husband at speeches, gazing at him admiringly while nodding at appropriate moments.

In the years since those early days, my opinion of both Reagans has changed.

He never shed his willful ignorance of most matters, but he had a certain charm. And he excelled in his greatest role, that of the grievously wounded president wisecracking with emergency room doctors as they fought to save his life after he was shot.

And I realize now that Nancy was far more than an adoring spouse. She was a silent partner who was always there to give him support and advice.

And after his presidency, when he was being assailed with Alzheimer’s, she became his rock.

Anyone who’s had the experience of caring for a loved one suffering from the disease knows what an all-consuming, pitiless task it is. She endured it bravely and uncomplainingly for 10 years.

I don’t buy the notion that Reagan was a great president. Yes, he made some positive contributions. But he also convinced Republicans that the way to prosperity was to allow the government to spend lavishly on things like the military so long as it didn’t tax. We live with the burden of that malign idea even now.

Nancy Reagan, however, was one of the great first ladies. All in all, she was a noble, even heroic figure, and she deserves all the accolades now coming to her as the nation mourns her passing.

And she must have been appalled by the floating food fight at most of this year’s Republican presidential debates.

Her beloved husband was the author of what he called the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.

But the Republicans have opened up their big guns on the Donald Trump bandwagon, hoping to derail his glide to the nomination. And he’s returned fire.

Establishment Republicans seem to think they can deny Trump the number of delegates needed for an automatic, first-ballot victory and to take him to a floor fight at the GOP convention.

It’s a hare-brained scheme.

Do they really think that if Trump is denied a victory he won at the ballot box by a parliamentary trick, his supporters will just acquiesce and support the hand-picked Republican nominee?

The Reagan era is officially over, usurped by the age of Trump.

OtherWords columnist Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Mich. 

Chris Powell: Applying the Looney Principle to a deserving Yale University

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Let no one accuse Connecticut's Democratic Party of not having any principles. The party seems to be operating on a principle of state Senate President Martin Looney. The Looney Principle is simply: What's yours is mine.

The Looney Principle is on display more than ever now with his legislation to tax large private college endowments, the threshold set so that only Yale University's endowment, nearly $26 billion, would be subject to taxation. Looney and other supporters of the legislation say it would prod Yale to invest more in ways beneficial to New Haven, as if Yale doesn't have a right to spend its own money in its own interests.

But the core constituencies of Connecticut's Democratic Party, the government and welfare classes, are growing anxious as their parasitism and mistaken policy premises keep driving the state down and tax revenue with it, and they see Yale's endowment as ripe for plunder. After Yale's endowment is taxed, maybe private endowments and savings will be next.

For Connecticut must not ever tell its government employees that they no longer can take Columbus Day off with pay, nor its welfare recipients that they should stop thrusting on state government the support of children they never were in a position to support themselves.

Despite the assertion that Yale should do more for New Haven, Yale already does a lot for the city, voluntarily paying the city millions of dollars each year out of guilt for being tax-exempt like other colleges and nonprofit civic organizations. Indeed, without Yale and its thousands of middle-class employees and its students bringing a lot of money into the city from all over the country and the world, New Haven, impoverished as much of it is, would be Bridgeport, whose miles of crumbling industrial hulks along the Northeast Corridor railroad tracks give rail passengers the impression that a nuclear war broke out shortly after they left New York.

Actually what broke out was the Looney Principle.

Yale officials have responded indignantly to it, but the endowment-tax legislation is just what the university deserves for long having subsidized the parasitism that is now turning on it. No college in the country has been more politically correct than Yale. From nullification of federal immigration law to nullification of free speech to the coddling of the fascist impulse of its students demanding "safe spaces" against disagreement, Yale has supported many of the movements that are wrecking the country.

So if the endowment tax gives Yale ideas like those recently entertained by General Electric as it considered Connecticut's future, saw ahead only decades of tax increases, and began packing up in Fairfield to depart for Boston, at least Connecticut would be rid of a bad influence and New Haven's government and welfare classes would have to turn their parasitism on each other.

As for the state's premier purportedly public institution of higher education, the University of Connecticut, it again has defeated demands for greater accountability for its own endowment, managed by the UConn Foundation, which has enjoyed exemption from state freedom-of-information law.

Instead of subjecting the UConn Foundation to that law as all other public agencies are subjected, state legislators have agreed to require only that the foundation submit an annual report summarizing its financial transactions. The foundation would remain free to conceal the identity of donors and thus free to keep selling them university favors, as it did several years ago when an especially arrogant donor purchased the dismissal of the university's athletic director.

Since UConn will remain in effect a private university, state government might as well tax away its endowment too.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.