Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog

The city of San Francisco has started a Let’s Green this City campaign to encourage people and businesses to be more environmental and sustainable. It started with a Green Is advertising campaign on the bus stops, and a bunch of grass couches. The ads were particularly inventive, starting with just the white words “GREEN IS” on a green background, progressing to “GREEN IS blue” (or yellow or brown), and finally, only after the suspense had built up, revealing that the campaign was not just another corporate product launch.

The campaign seems to be doing things right, printing their ads with eco-friendly inks on recycled paper, and building a website full of discussion forums rather than just top-down propaganda. It’s wholistic, like any real sustainability initiative has to be, and it focuses on suggesting things to do, rather than not to do. Now all that remains is for the people to make it our own by participating.

Prop 89 establishes publicly funded statewide elections in California, funded by a 0.2% increase in the corporate income tax rate. It also tightens campaign contribution limits and creates a limit of $10,000 for corporate spending on ballot measures. It’s based on AB (Assembly Bill) 583, but when that got stuck in the California Senate, the California Nurses Association (CNA) added the funding source and the contribution limits and got enough signatures to put it on the ballot, largely without consulting with other groups that had supported Clean Money before. That was a stupid move, as I’ll describe below.

Public funding for campaigns is a really good idea, which has been working in Maine and Arizona since 2000 and several other states more recently. I’ll try to counter some of the more popular objections:

I don’t want my tax money going to some slimy politician.

Slimy politicians are selected by our electoral system. In order to run for office, you have to be able to convince people, in particular wealthy people, to give you money. That in itself takes an unusual personality. Then those people tend to call in favors once you’re elected. Even if you started with high ideals, the realities of running a campaign tend to squash them. By funding campaigns, we can encourage better candidates to run in the first place, and perhaps rehabilitate some of the existing ones.

I don’t want my tax money going to politicians I disagree with.

Look at how large corporations do this. They give to both sides of most races so that whoever gets elected owes them favors. Wouldn’t you rather elected officials owe favors to you rather than to big money?

There are better uses for this money.

Direct corporate subsidies in California cost roughly $3 billion each year. Funding all campaigns costs about $200 million. Now, not all subsidies are wasteful, but when the recipients have been funding campaigns for many years, it’s safe to assume that some are. If even 10% of subsidies are wasteful, publicly funded campaigns pay for themselves. That doesn’t even consider the less obvious manipulations of our laws made possible by the legalized bribes we call campaign donations.

There’s just too much money in politics.

Well, yes, but the laws we’ve passed to try to limit spending have either not worked or been unconstitutional limits on speech. It seems that campaign spending is just destined to go up. So we need to work to limit the damage caused by that spending, or even make it beneficial by helping candidates communicate their positions.

And yet instead of letting the bill take its natural course through the legislature and only bring it to the people when it was obvious the legislature was too corrupt to pass it, the CNA impulsively decided to bring it to the people now, without bringing the other sympathetic parties on board. This lost the vote of the teachers’ union and everyone who dislikes the initiative system on principle. On top of that, they added clauses to the bill that serve only to punish corporations. Yes, big business has hurt the state, and may in fact deserve to be punished. But we also need their help to rebuild our society, and pursuing a war between progressives and businessmen helps nobody. By adding punitive language to what should have been just a Clean Elections act, the CNA lost the potential support of moderate businesses and most of the Republican party.

Getting California to adopt clean elections would have been an uphill struggle in any case. There was no reason to make it even harder by alienating many of the potential supporters, especially when clean elections themselves might help enact some of the more overreaching parts of Prop. 89 a few years later. The CNA should be ashamed of having jeopardized this essential measure.

I still think Prop. 89 is worth voting for, despite its flaws. The unfairness to corporations can be fixed over the next few years, despite requiring yet another election to confirm the changes, and clean elections will reduce corruption and help citizens begin to feel like they have a voice again. That whole “voice” thing is actually the best reason to vote for this, over almost any objections. Our democracy only stands a chance if individuals know they can overcome entrenched interests in our society.

I canvassed yesterday against Proposition 85, which would require parental notification before abortions and then went with that group to watch the debate between Schwarzenegger and Angelides.

The people I talked to were overwhelmingly opposed to 85, as you would expect in SF, but the voter lists we had were pruned to just women Democrats and a few “other”s, so I suspect we got a biased picture. The whole process was geared toward turning out the base, rather than opening any sort of dialog or changing minds. Now, maybe abortion is too polarized an issue to try to change minds on, but parental notification seems like enough of a wedge issue that we should be seeking out those on the fence.

The governor’s debate was extremely interesting politically. I disagree with most of the issues the Governator has pushed, with the significant exception of the recent CO₂ emissions law. And yet I disagree more with Angelides’ apparent philosophy toward politics. Several times, Schwarzenegger mentioned the idea of giving back to society. And when asked, “What’s the one thing you regret doing in office?”, Angelides weaseled out by complaining about deficit spending, which I would be surprised if he had any authority over. Schwarzenegger’s answer wasn’t perfect — he admitted a mistake in strategy rather than a mistake on an issue — but he said he’d learned that he needs to work to bring people together instead of trying to go over their heads.

So, we need to escape from partisan politics and convince people again of the importance of giving back to their communities. But we also need to fix the important particulars. In this election, it seems that I have to choose between the two and, right now, I’m leaning toward the larger goals over the particulars.

In the sciences (though not in fields like medicine, technology, and law, of which the principal raison d’être is an external social need), the formation of specialized journals, the foundation of specialists’ societies, and the claim for a special place in the curriculum have usually been associated with a group’s first reception of a single paradigm. At least this was the case between the time, a century and a half ago, when the institutional pattern of scientific specialization first developed and the very recent time when the paraphernalia of specialization acquired a prestige of their own.

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, page 19

Part of this book’s claim is that it’s not falsifiability that makes something science. While so far Kuhn hasn’t mentioned them, creationists are actually right when they say that evolution is not falsifiable, because “normal” scientific work is the process of tweaking the theory to make it fit the world, not testing a theory with an eye to throwing it out if it doesn’t fit. If a theory doesn’t fit the world, scientists still won’t give it up until another theory comes along to replace it. And yet creationism can’t claim to be the successor to evolution because it doesn’t provide a foundation for future scientific work. To be scientific, a theory has to propose useful experiments or studies that can elaborate the theory, and I’ve never seen any kind of creationism do that.

I’m sitting in Coffee to the People after having just picked up the keys to my and Jim’s new apartment, 1298 Haight St. #6, San Francisco, CA 94117. Next up, moving.

Americans have the right to be audible. This is an implied right under the freedom of speech because what is speech, really, if one is forbidden from having an audience? Free speech was designed originally to allow those with political views to argue for those views in the earshot of those who might not already agree about those views. The freedoms of the press and of assembly let us preach to the choir, but only the freedom of speech allows me to try to convert people. Yet this right has been dramatically curtailed in the last several decades:

“Free speech” areas, currently legal under the doctrine of time, place, and manner restrictions.

Ostensibly, these are designed to prevent people from disrupting other people’s speeches and activities. Yet even standing next to the primary focus of an event, I never had the right to disrupt that event (directly at least: the ideas in my speech may be arbitrarily disrupting) with my right to speak. There was no need to ban all speech in certain places in order to prevent that. In practice, these separate-but-equal “speech quarantine” areas are used to shove officially unpopular speech into the background, while discriminating in favor of speech endorsed by those in power. Those whose speech is favored by the state get to use its resources to project their message, while those whose speech is disfavored aren’t even allowed to be seen.

Speech in “private” places.

Malls have significantly replaced the public square as the centers of American community life. Yet they currently may forbid any political speech within their property. This, of course, leaves political speech with no effective place to live. The malls argue that since they own the property, they have the right to determine what goes on within it, and this would be a perfectly reasonable argument, were they just a private area. Yet the civil rights movement set the precedent that a business open to the public must obey a higher standard than, say, a private office. This should extend not just to the people but also to the activities allowed inside. Of course, the diners favored for the civil rights movement’s sit-ins are too small to allow public speech without disrupting the primary business of the place. But any place, like a mall, or some bookstores and coffee shops, which is intended as a public forum, must allow all speech in that area, not just that speech deemed acceptable to the management.

Finally, advertisements.

Commercials are a more subtle issue because they’re never exactly open to the public; they’re merely a way to pay for the ability to speak to large numbers of people at once. But, once the basic exchange of money for speech has been established, it must be executed without any more discrimination about the content of the ads than is allowed in government-owned places. If a car company can pay $100,000 to tell me to buy a car, Adbusters must be able to pay $100,000 to tell me not to buy a car. Station owners argue that allowing certain content in their commercials will drive off other advertisers. This argument should be disregarded for two reasons: First, the government created these profits in the first place by establishing the monopolies over broadcasting. Second, the right of a human being to speak, and thereby effect change, trumps any claim of a corporation to make money.

The freedom of speech has been slowly taken away in recent history by both the gradual reduction in public space and apparently minor procedural restrictions like speech quarantine areas. It’s time to reverse that decline and take back our right to be audible.

Remember, remember the fifth of November
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people. — V for Vendetta

Go see it. And if you happen to know anyone who isn’t convinced that we must be ever vigilant against governments trying to take away our essential Liberty, in return for a little temporary safety, take them too.

So. I finally got my brain to shut up long enough for me to figure out that I’d found someone special back in Texas. She’s visiting California over her spring break.

In other news, Johari and Nohari are pretty clever.

Edit: We’ve broken up, amicably.

I went to San Francisco today on the Freedom Train to attend the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. The celebration left something to be desired — people were not singing in the aisles, or demanding that MLK’s work be completed. At one point, a rabbi reminded us that, though we may be “Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics”, we all worship one god. *sigh* silly monotheists. And I worry about these kinds of celebrations of individual people. It’s very easy to try to co-opt the holiday by saying, this is what Martin Luther King would have done, without considering whether he actually would. Perhaps that hasn’t happened to MLK, and I hope it never does, but it happened to Jesus, so we need to stay vigilant.

However, Martin Luther King was a great man and deserves to be remembered (as Sunshine said most eloquently). And, more importantly, his work is not completed, and urgently needs to be pursued. Unfortunately, the remaining work is harder than that already completed. Racism and other prejudices of any form are no longer publicly acceptable. There are no longer officially segregated restrooms, businesses, and schools. There is no more enemy, or rather, the enemy has melted into the general population. Blacks who kill whites are far more likely to receive the death penalty, yet it’s difficult to call any single case an instance of racism. And both blacks and latinos suffer a disproportional homicide rate, yet we don’t care enough to do much besides throwing people in prison after the fact.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

I don’t really care that some people are richer than others. I care that the rich use their money to get richer. And, even more importantly, the rich use their money to make sure their children are rich too. We talk a lot in this country about equality of opportunity, but the truth is, the poor just aren’t getting it. But the rich don’t have to know this. Increasingly, they can use their money to isolate themselves in walled gardens where they only have to interact with other rich people. As long as races remain segregated by their incomes, we rich whites can keep our prejudices about both other races and the poor by never meeting any counterexamples. And, we can continue to sabotage our society by defunding essential social programs, knowing that our money will keep us out of trouble. Until it is too late anyway. This is not just!

The rich have no right to be isolated from social problems they create. If they are unwilling to do it voluntarily, they must be forced to confront the real struggles of the working poor. It is time to desegregate the neighborhoods, not just the schools, by both race and class.

Comments, again, on the blog, so I see them and they survive more than 30 days on lj.

A scenario: Tom and Sally have sex. Sally gets pregnant. Assuming they don’t get married, what happens? Sally can abort the fetus or not. If not, she can give the child up for adoption or not. If not, Tom can pay child support or not. How should they decide what to do?

I think it is completely Sally’s decision whether to have an abortion. I don’t think this is obvious though. The potential child she’s carrying would be a shared child. At least after the child is born, they’d have roughly equal rights to it, so perhaps they should have equal rights to the fetus as well. Tom may see an abortion as killing his child. Nevertheless, as wicked_wish put it, she’s effectively carrying a life-threatening parasite, and nobody else has the right to force her to do it for nine months. However, her decision to abort or not may be informed by external circumstances, as I’ll discuss next.

The decision to give the child up for adoption is shared. Neither parent has the exclusive right to raise the child, and neither has the right to prevent or force the other to raise it. I think this is obvious, but I’d be happy to hear any disagreement.

I think the decision to pay child support is entirely up to Tom. If Tom didn’t want a kid, Sally has no right to force one on him. Of course, he should make this decision early, before Sally decides whether to abort, and if he decides not to help support the kid, it is simply no longer his child: he gets no parental rights. A promise to help support the kid should be legally and ethically binding even if he changes his mind later. But if Tom doesn’t want a child, and makes that known early, he is not a deadbeat dad.

I’m not sure what should happen if Sally doesn’t want to financially support the child, but Tom wants to keep it, and she wants to keep her parental rights. She bore the child for nine months, which should count for something, but a child costs a lot to raise, probably more than the worth of nine months of time, even nine pregnant months. It feels wrong to talk of buying parental rights, but it could be the right way to handle this. You pay $X, you get so much parental rights. The nine months of pregnancy should count as hazardous duty (double/triple normal salary?), but perhaps aren’t anything qualitatively different.

I don’t really know how child support is handled now, so the last two paragraphs may be totally off-base. But I’m sure someone among my readers will have an idea. Comments/flames here.