A Farewell to the Lion of the Senate

There will be millions of words written about the life and work of Edward Moore Kennedy, most of them by people who know far more than I do about his life and career. Senator Kennedy was already in the Senate for three years at the time of my birth so it is difficult for me to imagine it without him there. I was obviously too young to recall with any clarity the tragedies of late 1960s - the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. I do recall casual discussions among adults around me who said that Ted Kennedy had squandered an opportunity to run for President in 1972, mainly based on his actions on Martha's Vineyard in 1969. Likely because I was mostly surrounded by Democrats who were Roman Catholics, the conversations sounded sad - not angry.

Committing oneself to a public life in politics is an extraordinary act regardless of party affiliation. Many would probably say that Senator Kennedy had no choice given his family history but he never complained publicly about the inevitable loss of privacy. His failed first marriage, his son's bout with cancer, his presumed issues with alcohol and his reputed infidelities kept a great many journalists and media pundits employed. Americans like nothing better than a good scandal, particularly if they dislike the person at the center of it. Perhaps it grows out of the puritan roots of some of the first Old World settlers. Perhaps it is because so many of us can identify on some level with the failings and mistakes of those who choose to lead very public lives. Perhaps it makes some people feel less guilty about their own failings. In a nation where half of marriages end in divorce, it seems to me incredibly hypocritical to judge Ted Kennedy for having gone through one himself.

Whatever the motivation of the authors, I have read scores of hateful messages posted on AOL only hours after Senator Kennedy's death. Ironically, many of them are poorly written, misspelled diatribes from people who lead very private lives and are relieved from the responsibility to publicly apologize for their own failings as human beings. I say "ironic" because Senator Kennedy, among his many interests, was a leading advocate of programs to improve education. Had he won every battle he fought for better education, the commentary might appear more rational and less mean-spirited.

While it is true that dynastic wealth can smooth the way for a budding politician, it also can cause people to become lazy do-nothings. Ted Kennedy took the harder path. Whether you agreed with him on public policy or thought he was too far to the left, he never gave up trying to make the nation more fair and more just.

Jealousy and hatred, with few exceptions, do not make anyone wealthier, smarter, better informed or happier with their lives. Compassionate and thoughtful people generally do better in life. The most compassionate among us may not be the wealthiest, smartest, best informed or happiest but they certainly are far more elegant and careful than most of us. We want them around us in tough times and good times. When Republican Senators say generous things about Senator Kennedy, it proves that public policy differences don't always trump friendship and camraderie.

Mike Bloomberg For Mayor

Like many of you on Facebook, I was invited to join Mike Bloomberg's on-line affinity group. (I don't know how else to describe it.) Some of my more liberal purist friends will cringe a little bit because I usually share their healthy suspicion of people who are asking for a third term they said they didn't want.

Having lived in NYC for nearly 25 years, I can tell you that Mike Bloomberg has done more good things for the city than many of his predecessors, regardless of party affiliation. I don't mean to discount Ed Koch's or David Dinkins's contributions. Had Dinkins won a second term, my opinion about Mike Bloomberg might be a little different, but millions of New Yorkers were treated to two terms of Rudy Guiliani, the only mayor in my memory that did not appear to like many New Yorkers and was downright nasty when anyone disagreed with him. He claimed credit for community policing - a Dinkins era program already underway when Guiliani took office - and spent much of his time playing vindictive games with state and city agencies.

His welfare to work program forced thousands of recipients into dead-end job paths while paying them peanuts. He offered thousands of "Work Experience Program" participants to the NYC Transit Authority to supplement station cleaning but when he demanded that the Authority forgo millions in revenue (from the City) to offer school passes for free transit and was rebuffed, he stopped the payments anyway and then reneged on his promise of providing a meaningful way to move welfare recipients from welfare to work by providing only a fraction of the people he promised. He must have been really angry when he found out that many of those WEP participants actually got full time jobs and a real career path at Transit that paid Transit scale rates of pay. The WEP participants in the NYC program got nothing like that.

I give Mr. Guiliani credit for one thing - an important thing. He was a steady hand during the 9/11 attacks and did help to heal the City for the last several months of his term. Bloomberg inherited that catastrophe and a economic crisis that could well have turned out to be worse than the fiscal crisis during the mid 1970s. He did a remarkable job on both fronts.

I am convinced that Mike Bloomberg actually likes New Yorkers - not just ones that look like him, but even those who disagree with some of his proposals. He generously and publicly gives credit to his staff, perhaps the most talented staff in recent memory. Call them cronies if you want but I'll take Bloomberg's cronies over what we put up with before he held the office.

A third term? Why not? I have a mental list of a few alternatives for the office but I can't say that any of them would be better than what we have right now.

Government Run Programs

If you are like most people, you live in a community that includes a public sector employee. You might have befriended a few. Most go to work each day, arrive on time, work the entire day and return to their families, just like you do. While it is certainly true that people at the top of the public sector food chain make bad decisions, they are constrained (usually) by regulations that emanate from the legislation that created the program. Do you assume that your neighbors are incompetent? Do you assume that they are lazy? If your answers to those questions is "yes", have you ever had a conversation about what they do?

I was a public sector attorney for nearly 13 years. I worked on average a 10 hour day, including quite a few weekend days, took no lunch break and do not consider myself stupid. The agency paid me about half of what I could have made in the private sector to do the same kind of work. My colleagues, in general, worked just as hard. I also spent some time representing public school bus drivers and clerical staff. No one I ever met was lazy or incompetent.

The proposal to create a government-run option (yes, option) to compete with private health insurers has created a firestorm of protests among many different groups. The private health insurance industry is particularly rabid about stopping it. That ought to tell you something. They are afraid that they will have to compete and it will cost them a chunk of their profits that they have grown very accustomed to. Private insurers pay their CEOs and upper management far, far more than federal government scale salaries. Private executives get bonuses just like their contemporaries on Wall Street. They hire administrative types to do the grunt work which often involves telling their insured that the plan doesn't cover the procedure they need or that they have a pre-existing condition that will never be covered. Too many people have a horror story for me to believe that the private sector is so magical in delivering affordable, quality health care.

"Government run" does not always mean poorly run. It does not mean that everyone is asleep at their desks. It does mean that overhead costs are lower and it does mean that private sector insurers will have to hustle to be chosen over a public option. If we really care about getting insurance to everyone - which all by itself should spread risk and lower premiums for everyone in both the private and public sectors - we shouldn't dismiss it because of old prejudices about public employees.

Many of us entirely miss the point, which I have said before: you are already paying for universal "coverage". Forget about taxes for just a minute. Every time a person cannot pay a medical bill without using funds otherwise set aside to pay a mortgage payment, he or she risks foreclosure. Foreclosures that happen near you - in this case "near" could mean a block away or two miles away - chip away at your own house values, most Americans' biggest investment. If that doesn't wake us up, what about the people who do make the mortgage payments and fail to pay the hospital. Let's assume the hospital doesn't force the patient into bankruptcy. Their other option is to cut back on the care they deliver, either through lay-offs or closing practice areas in non-lucrative specialities. If they do force the patient to file for bankruptcy, we're back to vacant houses and all of the ugly things that are happening too often these days.

If you're worried that spendthrift patients who have medical problems and mortgages and no health insurance are the real problem, work to tighten credit markets to limit their ability to sink themselves into a sea of debt. It is silly but true that there were people out there who had more revolving credit than they earned in salary in a year.

The other important thing many of us forget is that WE are the government if we take the time and spend the energy to be involved in decision-making. Casting a vote every time you are asked to do so is a good start but there is so much more to a democracy than casting votes. Maybe we are too busy to do very much but if we all woke up a half hour earlier or went to sleep a half hour later and sent a few well-written email, it would tell our representatives that we are watching what they do much more closely than they think. It will matter when lobbyists come knocking on their door, threatening to fund another candidate if they don't tow the corporate line. At least they will be able to say that no amount of campaign contributions or lobbyist-paid phone banks could overcome the opinion of their constituency. Maybe some would be bold enough to say that out loud at a town hall meeting.

Beyond the Melting Pot

Daniel Patrick Moynihan - before he was a US Senator - wrote Beyond the Melting Pot in the mid 1960s. I'm not sure when the term "melting pot" was invented to explain uniquely American immigration patterns over the past couple of hundred years but Moynihan rejected the idea that immigrant groups soon adopt the culturally majoritarian "American" way (if that even exists).

Instead, he wrote about "cultural pluralism": that immigrants and even their children and grandchildren hold onto parts of the pre-immigration customs and culture, sometimes out of pride, sometimes for other good reasons. His theory goes a long way towards explaining why we have parades celebrating nearly every major ethnic group in New York City. Every group tries to show the rest of us how their subculture (holidays, food, etc.) differs from others and that it is a source of pride to celebrate those differences.

There are times when Moynihan's premise is so obviously correct. My sister's recent marriage to her husband is one off the best examples. Leah's husband was born in the US but he spent a great deal of time in India, his parents' birthplace. Leah's roots on her mother's side go back to pre-revolutionary America and to the turn of the 20th century when her father's Italian great grandparents came here. Courtesy of her mother-in-law, the rehearsal dinner was meant to honor and celebrate Ajay's cultural roots, including traditional dress, regional Indian food and traditions. The wedding itself was mostly Western, but it was pretty clear that Mom loved the henna painting on her hands.

Many of us do this all the time without even thinking about it. We are thrilled to get a gift of stuffed cabbage from our Polish-American friends. Even if we didn't hail from Sicily, we love the food. Even if it's not the "real stuff" Mexican food is very popular across all subcultures. Although I have used food as an example, it's much deeper than that.

Whenever I hear about calls for immigrant "assimilation", I bristle. To me, the truth is that American "culture" encompasses so many traditions that no one can claim a truly specific cultural standard. Americans, for the most part, are very cafeteria-style in their daily lives. It's a gift that very few countries can even comprehend. I think we're pretty lucky.

Health Care Legislation

I guess I am joining the Greek chorus on this issue. Including a government sponsored program in the menu of health insurance choices does not mean that you have to give up coverage you already like or that we will become a socialist country. Even if you believe that we actually should become a socialist country, it would take decades. We are too far away from any European notion of a social safety net.

The misinformation about the Obama administration's vision of modifying (yes, "modifying", not throwing the existing system out with the trash) is even worse than it was when Hillary Clinton attempted to take on the issue in the early 1990s. The scare tactics employed to maintain the status quo are shameful. I wonder how many uninsured people could be insured if the advertising budgets of the naysayers were directed at paying for those benefits.

Most people with some knowledge about the existing system know that far too many people rely on emergency room treatment for common non-emergency maladies, especially when the patients lack health insurance. It's the most expensive way to deliver that kind of treatment and accounts for much of the problem. These patients often cannot afford to pay the bill. Those of us who are employed and have insurance already end up paying for unnecessary ER treatment either through income taxes, being unable to recover money lent when the uninsured file for bankruptcy or through depressed house values when the uninsured cannot make mortgage payments and face foreclosure on their houses.

The fact is that most of our current economic problems are tied together in a knot. Getting health insurance to the millions who don't have it is one of the most important first steps in addressing so many other issues.

I was struck by President Obama's remarks at a recent town hall meeting. He mentioned that we needed to listen to each other which is the whole reason I started this blog in the first place. Obviously, I think he's right.

An Open Letter to Justice Sotomayor

First, congratulations on your nomination and appointment to the United States Supreme Court. You are obviously well aware that you are an important symbol to millions of young women from every racial and ethnic background. Like many others, I think it reaches beyond that. Your ascension to the highest court in the land did not require a promise from you that you would erase your life history or to make any pledge that was not required of your new colleagues.

Many people will wonder whether your judicial style will resemble Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's or whether your tenure on the Court will be marked by the kind of pragmatism of retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Will advocates spend much of their time attempting to argue directly to you as they did to Justice O'Connor and now Justice Anthony Kennedy, assuming that you might be a swing vote on some important issues? I make no assumptions. Based on past Court decisions, there will be occasions where there is unanimity among you and your colleagues. There may be occasions when you lean toward the conservative wing and times when you will agree with and write for a majority of the justices who are viewed as progressive or "liberal".

You come to the Court at a critical time in the nation's history. Issues related to reproductive rights, limits on executive power and the rights of lesbians and gays to enter into civil marriages that are valid in any state no matter where those unions are formed, will all be in front of you. Few "easy" cases will get to you. I applaud your willingness to tackle the difficult ones.

I watched some of the confirmation hearings and read or listened to some of the punditry that accompanied your nomination. Much of it was insulting or ignored your long service as a federal judge. I have already written a post about the importance of a diverse Supreme Court that reflects our society as it really is. The legitimacy of the Court, in my view, depends on it.

As you sit in your chambers, hire law clerks, get to know your colleagues better and settle into your new role, I wish you the best of luck and that you will continue to do what the greatest lawyers do - listen and learn. Please do not forget your roots; most of your colleagues have not done so. I, for one, believe that you will be a star.

Thank you again for your willingess to serve the country in this way.

What We Want

I spent a little time the other day filling in some profile information on my Facebook account. One of the questions asked me about my favorite quotes. I mangled one of the quotes a bit because I didn't remember the exact words that Samuel Gompers, a life long labor activist and founder of the American Federation of Labor, which in the early 1950s merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (hence, the AFL-CIO) used at the turn of the 20th century.

The real quote is: “What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures,”

The labor movement ultimately got some of the things that Gompers championed. For non-history buffs, Gompers at the time was focused on skilled trade workers. Since then, I think Gompers's quote resonates far beyond the constituency he was trying to reach and represent. 100 years later, most people who work in any variety of endeavors (both unionized and non-unionized and every collar color) would agree with the list of wants that he mentioned, some of which were realized.

Of course, his list was not exhaustive (perhaps because he could not imagine that a social safety net would be created in the aftermath of the Great Depression when he made his remarks). I am pretty convinced he would support current efforts at health care reform.

I think that he would have been delighted that even (employed) working class people, and especially the middle class, have a better standard of living that grew practically non-stop through 2008. Much of the credit goes to inventions and discoveries that we take for granted today because they are mass marketed and typically become cheaper because of the magic of economies of scale. Time saving kitchen appliances, access to television and radio, the Internet and other things that did not exist when he made his remarks might have surprised him.

I am not suggesting for a minute that it's inherently wrong to want more material things (conspicuously absent from the quote). I would be a hypocrite if I said that. Nevertheless, I do not believe that he would be happy to know that there are people who live in really tough economic times but continue to attempt to acquire things that they don't really need or can't afford.

There are as many different reasons for wanting more material things as there are people who want more. A group of my friends call it "lifestyle creep". As salaries rise, we almost reflexively buy more things. Certainly, the growth of the US economy depends to a large extent on those desires and a willingness to spend down savings or use credit to get the latest and greatest things.

If "lifestyle creep" disappeared, it would probably make recessions worse and longer-lasting and would ultimately change the way businesses market their products. It's happening as I sit here. People are flocking to take advantage of a government-sponsored $4500 to scrap a serviceable but old, energy-inefficient car in favor of a new car that uses less fuel. Let's not fool ourselves. It takes lots of energy to build a new car. People buying cars under this program are probably thrilled and it might go a long way toward saving domestic auto manufacturers, but I don't think that the environment is better off for it. To me, it's a dilemma. I am trying as best I can to repair, reuse, recycle, etc., but I am hardly perfect. I find it easier to deprive myself of things than to hold back on giving gifts to others. I can't say that I need anything at this point but that doesn't mean that I won't go into a store and buy something I don't need.

I hope that Samuel Gompers's vision sticks in my mind, especially when I want to buy another "thing" that is cool but unnecessary to change my quality of life. Save your money for people who have real needs. That should do nothing to hurt the economy; I predict it will make you feel better.