"Woody" Guthrie was born in 1912 in Oklahoma, seven
years after it was admitted as a state. He was one of eight children,
one whom, a sister, died in a coal fire. His father, who was active in
the Democratic Party, named him after the future President. Guthrie's
father was a businessman and property owner who later fell upon hard
times. Guthrie's mother, Nora, suffered from Huntington's disease - the
same debilitating illness that would afflict Woody Guthrie during the
last decades of his life. Nora Guthrie was institutionalized when
Guthrie was only 14 years old. Since Guthrie's father by then living and
working in Texas in order pay off debts from failed real estate deals,
Guthrie and his six remaining siblings were on their own in Oklahoma.
At that very early age, Woody Guthrie worked odd jobs around his home
town, where he came to depend upon the compassion of family friends for
meals and shelter. He soon taught himself to play the harmonica and
displayed an aptitude for music that he learned to "play by ear." As a
gifted listener, Guthrie also learned a number of ballads and
traditional English and Scottish songs from the parents of his friends.
To ward off hunger, Guthrie would often play a song in exchange for a
sandwich or quarter.
When he was eighteen years
of age, Guthrie began to travel with the migrant workers from Oklahoma
to California. From them, he learned the traditional folk and blues
songs. Many of the songs he later wrote described the wrenching
suffering and injustices that he witnessed during in the Dust Bowl era
and in the throes of the Great Depression. His experiences instilled
within him a life-long commitment to social justice that he expressed in
his folk songs. His most famous ballad "This land is your land" has
been a inspiration to generations of folk artists:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.
As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
I saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me.
I roamed and I rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
While all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me.
When the sun came shining, and I was strolling
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
A voice was chanting, As the fog was lifting,
This land was made for you and me.
As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.
In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I'd seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.
The
lyrics of Woody Guthrie's ballad capture the passion and
love of country that is expressed by Walt Whitman in his poem, "I hear America singing,"
in which Whitman celebrated the lives of the mechanics, the carpenter,
the mason, the boatman, the shoemaker and the woodcutter. Much like
Whitman, Guthrie believed that it was the ordinary person - the
Everyman - who personified the quest for equality and whose lives
expressed the essential democratic values. Guthrie also understood, as
did Whitman, that great concentrations of wealth in the few, if not
curbed, would subvert democracy and render meaningless the phrase
"equality of opportunity."
In 1968, Guthrie's ballad became
the unofficial song of Robert Kennedy's tragic presidential campaign.
Kennedy's murder that year, coupled with the assassination of Martin
Luther King and the tragic death of Thomas Merton, caused this country
to fall into a deep, numbing slumber from which it has yet to awaken.
Since that fateful year, the democracy that the Progressive Movement,
the New Deal and the Great Society endeavored to create has been chipped
away, brick by brick, by the purveyors of money and influence.
The right-wing noise machine, fueled by an array of wedge issues such
as guns, religious liberty, hostility to unions and public employees and
budget deficits, are working feverishly to distract the attention of
all of us who are vulnerable from noticing the root causes of our
misery: a dysfunctional federal system and a poorly performing economy
that are largely the fault of the political elite, at all levels of
government, who continue to pander to the agenda of the wealthy and
their corporations, rather than to address the needs of ordinary
citizens.
If a song has the power to
summon a nation to reclaim its destiny, Woody Guthrie's ballad should
become the anthem for all progressive voters in the 2012 election at all
levels. The lyrics challenge each of us to take our country back from
those who seek to privatize the American Dream and to close off the
access of ordinary citizens to the public square with signs that say
"no trespassing."
In almost every country in the world, workers celebrate May 1st
as May Day, or International Workers' Day. It is a national holiday in
more than 80 countries.
May Day was created to
commemorate one of the many bloody events in the labor history of the Untied
States: The 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago. The tragedy refers to
the aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on
Tuesday May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. A peaceful rally in
support of workers who were striking for an eight-hour day was held in
the square. An anonymous provocateur threw a dynamite bomb at police
after they began to forcibly disperse the supporters who had gathered
at the public meeting. The bomb blast and subsequent gunfire resulted
in the deaths of seven police officers, four civilians, and the wounding
of scores of others. Many, if not all of the deaths, including those of
the police, were believed to have been caused by poorly trained police.
A bilingual English-German flier notifying people of a rally in support of striking workers (Chicago, 1886). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In the public prosecutions that followed, eight anarchists were
arrested and subsequently convicted of conspiracy, notwithstanding the
candid admission by the prosecution who conceded that none of the
accused defendants had thrown the bomb. Seven of these anarchists were
sentenced to death, and one was given a term of 15 years in prison. The
death sentences of two of the defendants were commuted by Illinois
governor Richard J. Oglesby to terms of life in prison, and one other
defendant committed suicide in jail before he could be hanged. The other
four were hanged on November 11, 1887. In 1893, Illinois' new governor
John Peter Altgeld pardoned the remaining defendants and publicly criticized the
trial.
In 1889, the first congress of the Second Socialist
International, meeting in Paris for the centennial of the French
Revolution, issued a call for international demonstrations, in 1890, to
honor of the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Chicago
protests. May Day was formally recognized as an annual event at the
International's second congress in 1891.
In the United
States, by contrast, the Central Labor Union and the Knights of Labor,
suggested that the celebration of Labor Day for American workers be
observed in September as a patriotic alternative to May Day. President
Grover Cleveland, ever a supplicant of the business community and
fearful that a May 1st commemoration of Labor Day could become an
occasion to remind workers of the injustices they suffered, agreed in
1887 to support a Labor Day holiday in September as the Knights had
proposed.
Despite President Cleveland's proclamation, American workers
continued to observe and to celebrate May1st well into the twentieth
century. Parades in New York City, Chicago and in other metropolitan
areas, drew millions of union members and supporters of workers'
rights. Eighty-one years ago, on May 1, 1933, Dorothy Day, appeared at a
rally in Union Square to distribute the first edition of her newspaper
and to announce the formation of her organization, the Catholic Worker
movement, that to the present is based upon the humble poverty and
a radical commitment to social justice inspired by the Gospels and the
example of St.Francis of Assisi.
Each
year, on the 1st May there is a huge free concert in "San Giovanni"
square in Rome, Italy. In 2007 there were approximately 700000 people
Gradually, however, as the assault upon unions and workers' rights
began to gather momentum under the guise of combating Bolshevism and
socialism, the meaning and the purpose of May Day, have been, by and
large, successfully erased from the collective consciousness of
Americans as revisionist scholars have continued to rewrite American
history to depict it as the heroic efforts of the self -made "haves and
soon-to-haves" to triumph over the forces of collectivism. In 1921,
after the Russian Revolution of 1917, May 1st was promoted as
"Americanization Day" by the Veterans of Foreign Wars and other groups
as a counter to communists. In 1949, Americanization Day was renamed to
Loyalty Day. In 1958, the U.S. Congress declared Loyalty Day, the U.S.
recognition of May 1st, to be a national holiday.
Not to be
outdone in his patriotic zeal, President Dwight Eisenhower established
the first Law Day in 1958. Thereafter, in 1961, Congress issued a joint
resolution that designated May 1st as Law Day, which was subsequently
codified (U.S. Code, Title 36, Section 113). "Since then every president
has issued a Law Day proclamation on May 1 to celebrate the nation's
commitment to the rule of law", as the American Bar Association proudly
proclaims on its website.
This May Day should remind
every working American how much ground employees have lost in the
workplace in the past sixty-five years. After the death of
Franklin Roosevelt and the election of a Republican Congress in 1946,
the right-wing in the United States became resurgent. The first great
success of New Deal critics was achieved with the enactment of the
Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which was passed over President Truman's veto.
The effect of this legislation was to outlaw "closed shops" and to
permit individual states to allow "open shops" - i.e. shops in which
elected unions could not require all of the employees to belong to the
unions, irrespective of whether the non-union employees also received
and enjoyed the benefits of collective bargaining.
As a
result of that legislation, corporations began an inevitable migration
to the South where welcoming state legislatures hastily enacted
"right-to-work" laws. The migration of these manufacturing companies
away from the unionized urban centers of the Midwest and North left
hundreds of mill towns impoverished and desolate, and the union movement
was effectively eviscerated. It took only a few more decades, however, for the owners of
corporations to discover that, once they had escaped from the threat of
unionization, they could escape almost all government regulation by
moving their business and manufacturing operations out of the United
States to Third World countries.
Even among the few unionized
workers still employed in manufacturing, a two-tier pay system has
been imposed by management to which unions were forced to acquiesce
because of downward economic pressures: younger workers now make
substantially less per hour than more senior employees who perform the
same work. The effect of this two-tier system denies younger workers
upward mobility and divides workers based solely upon dates of hire:
"The changing job market is undercutting entry-level wages for those who
do not go to college. 'In the 1960s and 1970s, you saw high school
graduates getting good jobs at Ford and AT&T, jobs that in
inflation-adjusted terms were paying $20 or $25 in today's wages," said
Sheldon Danziger, a professor of public policy at the University of
Michigan. "Nowadays most kids with just high school degrees will work in
service-sector jobs for $10 or less..."
According to the
U.S Department of Labor ["Union Member Summary," January 22, 2010], as
of 2010, only 12.3 per cent of employed wage and salary workers were
union members. Not surprisingly, many of the same non-union employees do
not seem to understand that their ability to influence working
conditions and wages, as solitary individuals who lacked comparable
bargaining power with managers and owners of business, are virtually
nil. Apparently, however, the myth of the autonomous, self-made
individual who can receive recognition, remuneration and advancement
solely by dint of one's own hard work continues to resonate in the
workplace to the present, notwithstanding all of the evidence to the
contrary.
The effect of this continuing economic trend has
been to show, once again, that the market economy, and the ideology upon
which it is based, produces results quite different from its theory: In
an world of unrestrained competition, only the few, the wealthier, the
more powerful, the more resourceful, the better educated, the more
mobile, will be able to maximize their opportunities; everyone else gets
left behind.
With the demise of the labor movement, the
American workplace continues to be governed by the nineteenth century
doctrine of employment-at-will, which further circumscribes the ability
of most Americans to protect their livelihoods or to improve their
conditions of work. The legal fiction of at-will employment essentially
posits an equality of bargaining power between individual employers and
employees: Each is free to accept or reject employment, resign or be
fired without cause or restriction.
Since employers in
"union-free" environments are legally permitted to unilaterally impose,
almost without restriction, whatever conditions of work they require as
to hours, compensation, and often restrictions on re-employment after
discharge in the form of non-competition agreements, the relationship is
again one of inequality in which the employees are burdened and the
employers benefitted. In response to this conundrum, the operative
political philosophy of this country, which is based upon John Locke's
model of politics, can provide no guidance or remedy whatsoever, since
his politics envision nothing beyond solitary actors whose property must
be protected as well as their rights of acquisition.
The
labor laws of the United States today are among the most restrictive
and onerous in the developed world. Labor laws that are rigged in favor
of the employers and the legal fiction of at-will employment need to be
at the top of any agenda to reform the American economy and restore a
vibrant middle class. Since corporations and employers are not required
to any show any loyalty to their employees, employees need to demand
that our labor laws and our tax policies protect the rights of workers
and the middle class, and place obstacles in the way of corporations,
particularly multi-national corporations, from doing further damage to
the American economy.
The philosopher George
Santayana reminds that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat
it. Reclaiming the American Dream must begin with reclaiming our
collective history. Remembering the meaning of May 1st and expressing
our solidarity with one another and with workers everywhere is an
essential first step in that process.
In a recent interview on the Christian Broadcasting Network, Congressman Paul Ryan stated that, as a Catholic, the Church's "social magisterium" was the inspiration for his most recent House budget proposal. Ryan claimed that one essential goal of that teaching was to prevent the poor from staying poor and not becoming lifelong dependents of the government. Ryan further stated that, "A person's faith is central to how they conduct themselves in public and in private." After a series of biting criticisms from progressive Democrats who documented that the spending cuts contained in Ryan's proposed budget would savage the poor and advantage the wealthy, Daniel Henninger, a right-wing opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal,valiantly rose to Ryan's defense: He accused the Congressman's critics of "demolishing Paul Ryan" and distorting Ryan's commitment to the Catholic notion of "subsidiarity - i.e. a principle that holds that human affairs are best handled at the lowest possible level, closest to the affected persons.
The question that Henninger avoided asking, however, is whether, in fact, the values that Paul Ryan endorses are consonant with the tradition of Catholic social philosophy and whether they are, in fact, conservative at all? All of the evidence suggests the contrary.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued a guide entitled "Sharing Catholic Social Teaching: Challenges and Directions." It emphasizes that "The Catholic tradition teaches that human dignity can be protected and a healthy community can be achieved only if human rights are protected and responsibilities are met. Therefore, every person has a fundamental right to life and a right to those things required for human decency. Corresponding to these rights are duties and responsibilities--to one another, to our families, and to the larger society." As such, "Human dignity can be protected and a healthy community can be achieved only if human rights are protected and responsibilities are met. Every person has a fundamental right to life and a right to those things required for human decency - starting with food, shelter and clothing, employment, health care, and education. Corresponding to these rights are duties and responsibilities -- to one another, to our families, and to the larger society."
Under a section entitled "Option for the Poor and Vulnerable," the guide proclaims: "A basic moral test is how our most vulnerable members are faring. In a society marred by deepening divisions between rich and poor, our tradition recalls the story of the Last Judgment (Mt 25:31-46) and instructs us to put the needs of the poor and vulnerable first." Indeed, this option is a major barometer of one's commitment to social justice since "The moral test of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable members. The poor have the most urgent moral claim on the conscience of the nation. We are called to look at public policy decisions in terms of how they affect the poor. The 'option for the poor,' is not an adversarial slogan that pits one group or class against another. Rather it states that the deprivation and powerlessness of the poor wounds the whole community. The option for the poor is an essential part of society's effort to achieve the common good. A healthy community can be achieved only if its members give special attention to those with special needs, to those who are poor and on the margins of society."
Equally emphatic is the Catholic Church's rejection of those economic doctrines that have elevated the primacy of the markets and capitalism over basic human needs. "The economy must serve people, not the other way around. All workers have a right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, and to safe working conditions. They also have a fundamental right to organize and join unions. People have a right to economic initiative and private property, but these rights have limits. No one is allowed to amass excessive wealth when others lack the basic necessities of life." Although "Catholic teaching opposes collectivist and statist economic approaches.... it also rejects the notion that a free market automatically produces justice. Distributive justice, for example, cannot be achieved by relying entirely on free market forces. Competition and free markets are useful elements of economic systems. However, markets must be kept within limits, because there are many needs and goods that cannot be satisfied by the market system. It is the task of the state and of all society to intervene and ensure that these needs are met."
The section styled "The Dignity of Work and the Rights of Workers" expresses the Catholic Church's long-standing endorsement of unions and the need for government regulation of the economy in the public interest: "The economy must serve people, not the other way around. Work is more than a way to make a living; it is a form of continuing participation in Gods creation. If the dignity of work is to be protected, then the basic rights of workers must be respected--the right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, to the organization and joining of unions, to private property, and to economic initiative." Consistent with this view, "All people have a right to participate in the economic, political, and cultural life of society. It is a fundamental demand of justice and a requirement for human dignity that all people be assured a minimum level of participation in the community. It is wrong for a person or a group to be excluded unfairly or to be unable to participate in society."
Catholic social doctrine insists upon the importance of government as a positive instrument to advance the public good. For that reason, the current assault that is being waged by Ryan and his Republican supporters upon government is impossible to square with historic Catholic social teaching. As the " Sharing Catholic Social Teaching: Challenges and Directions: Guide to Catholic Social Teaching" explains, "The state has a positive moral function. It is an instrument to promote human dignity, protect human rights, and build the common good. All people have a right and a responsibility to participate in political institutions so that government can achieve its proper goals. The principle of subsidiarity holds that the functions of government should be performed at the lowest level possible, as long as they can be performed adequately. When the needs in question cannot adequately be met at the lower level, then it is not only necessary, but imperative that higher levels of government intervene..."
In his encyclical, Mater et Magister, Pope John XXIII emphasized the central role of the state in promoting social justice: "As for the State, its whole raison d'etre is the realization of the common good in the temporal order. It cannot, therefore, hold aloof from economic matters. On the contrary, it must do all in its power to promote the production of a sufficient supply of material goods, 'the use of which is necessary for the practice of virtue.' It has also the duty to protect the rights of all its people, and particularly of its weaker members, the workers, women and children. It can never be right for the State to shirk its obligation of working actively for the betterment of the condition of the workingman. "
By contrast, Congressman Ryan has repeatedly expressed his admiration and enthusiasm for the writings of Ayn Rand and is reliably reported to have required that all of his staff read Rand's Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Rand extolled unbridled selfishness and condemned altruism as a misguided instinct. Given the legacy of antisocial individualism in this country, the gospel of selfishness has enjoyed a long and venerable history long before "Objectivism" was touted as something new and fashionable. Particularly during times of economic crises when, as now, the social fabric has begun to fray, the advocates of selfishness have regularly reappeared to peddle their political philosophy as a nostrum that they claim will cure all that ails the country's body politic.
The kind of anti-government rhetoric advanced by Congressman Ryan is at loggerheads with the Catholic moral teaching that is an essential part of the conservative political tradition. Because that tradition traces its lineage from Aristotle, through Thomas Aquinas, to Catholic philosophers today, that authentically conservative tradition is fundamentally at odds with the kind of anti-social individualism that dominates current GOP political discourse. In stark contrast to Catholic social teaching, that discourse draws its values from the tradition of classical liberalism that emerged after the Protestant Reformation and was trumpeted by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith, among other English thinkers.
Part of the confusion over whether Ryan's proposed budget reflects consistent Catholic social teaching is directly attributable to the confusion and timidity of the current U.S. Bishops. Obsessed by matters sexual and reproductive, blind to enormous scandal in their own midst, and chosen primarily because of their obsequious, unquestioning loyalty to an increasingly rigid and doctrinaire pontiff, they have chosen to mute their fidelity and responsibility to affirm historic Catholic teaching in a Faustian bargain not to offend the GOP politicians who agree with them solely on issues of contraception and reproductive rights.
Paul Ryan, as a right-wing libertarian, has never expressed a commitment to the idea of social justice, nor is he able to comprehend that the notion that the public interest is something different and distinct from a mere aggregation of self-interests. He also denies that the role of government, to use the words of A.D. Lindsey, is to "hinder the hindrances" - that is, to eliminate those impediments that stand in the way of a person's moral and civic development. For those reasons, Ryan, as is also true of his fellow GOP Catholics - Santorum, Gingrich ad Speaker Boehner - may be a Catholic in his theology, but his social philosophy and his politics are firmly rooted in the classical liberal politics that emerged from the Protestant Reformation and are antithetical to Catholic social teaching.
No where in the text of the United States Constitution is there any language that suggests or permits the Supreme Court of the United States to pass upon the constitutionality of statutes enacted into law by the Congress. Nevertheless, Hamilton in Federalist No. 81 suggested that such a power might be a necessary extension of Supreme Court's jurisdiction given the need for at least one of the three putatively coequal branches of government to determine which actions of the federal government or the states might violate Article VI of the Constitution which expressly provides that "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all treaties made...... shall be the Supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every States shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding. "
The United States Supreme Court, the highest court in the United States, in 2010. Top row (left to right): Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, and Associate Justice Elena Kagan. Bottom row (left to right): Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, and Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Not long thereafter, in Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803), Chief Justice John Marshall, in a perverse and ingenious decision that was carefully crafted to handcuff Thomas Jefferson and other advocates of limited judicial power, held that the Congress had acted unconstitutionally in granting the Court the authority to issue original writs of mandamus. Decades after this power to invalidate acts contrary to the Constitution was firmly established as a legal principle, in the case of Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. (9 Wheat.), 1 (1824), Marshall ruled that the power of the Congress to regulate "commercial intercourse" extended to all activity having any interstate impact -however indirect - and that this power was plenary and virtually unlimited: "The wisdom and discretion of Congress, their identity with the people, and the influence which their constituents possess at elections are, as in many other instances...the sole restraints...on its abuse." Ibid. at 197.
It was not until one hundred and seven years later, despite the expansive language of Marshall's opinion, that the United States Supreme Court finally conceded the right of Congress to set minimum wages and maximum hours for employees who were engaged interstate commerce. United States .v Darby, 312 U.S. 100 (1941). A year later, in Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942) the Supreme Court held that the Congress could regulate a farmer's cultivation of wheat for his own family's consumption because the cumulative effect of that kind of act by individual farmers would affect the supply and demand for wheat in the interstate commodity markets.
Since the advent of the Rehnquist era, however, an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court has tried to narrow the scope Article I, section 8, which confers upon the Congress, without any limiting language, the power "to regulate Commerce with foreign nations; and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes." To do this, they have chosen to breath new life into only one word of the language of Tenth Amendment that reserves certain powers not delegated "to the States respectively, or the people."
In San Antonio v. Lopez, 115 S. Ct. 1624 (1995), by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court struck down a gun conviction that occurred within a 100 yards of a school on the grounds that the interstate commerce clause did not apply. That same term, in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. V. Thornton, et al, 514 U.S. 779 (1995), Justice Clarence Thomas came within a "whisker' of persuading his colleagues to return American constitutional jurisprudence to the Articles of Confederation. In his dissent, Justice Thomas observed that the majority had "fundamentally misunderst[ood] the notion of `reserved powers,'"and that "[c]ontrary to the majority's suggestion, the people of the States need not point to any affirmative grant of power in the Constitution in order to prescribe qualifications" for their members of Congress. Thomas contended that "[a]s far as the Federal Constitution is concerned . . . the States can exercise all powers that the Constitution does not withhold from them." Furthermore, "[t]he Federal Government and the States thus face different default rules: where the Constitution is silent about the exercise of a particular power--that is, where the Constitution does not speak either expressly or by necessary implication--the Federal Government lacks that power and the States enjoy it."Justice Thomas insisted that "[I]f we are to invalidate Arkansas' Amendment 73, we must point to something in the Federal Constitution that deprives the people of Arkansas of the power to enact such measures."
After the more recent appointments of Scalia, Alito and Roberts, questions about the Court's independence as an impartial, precedent-observing, judicially- restrained and non-partisan arbiter of the Constitution have become more pronounced. The apparent hostility of these three appointees, coupled with the reflexive, unabashed and well-documented hostility of Clarence Thomas to Congressional power, and the intellectual and linguistic difficulties with which Justice Kennedy appears to struggle, raise worrisome concerns about the fate of the Affordable Health Care Act and the hundreds of separate provisions, including the a personal mandate, the restrictions on denial of insurance for pre-existing conditions, the Medicaid extension provisions, and the extension of family medical insurance to family dependents until their twenty-sixth birthday, that the act encompasses.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported that a record 50.7 million Americans--16.7% of the population--were uninsured in 2009. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation's report on Medicaid and the uninsured, in 2004, at which time when 44 million Americans were reported to be uninsured, uncompensated care was estimated to be $40.7 billion. Today that cost has likely doubled. In a remarkable and important book, The Great Risk Shift, Yale University Political Science professor, Jacob S. Hacker, after reviewing longitudinal studies, concluded that "Over a two year period, more than eight million adults and children - one out of three non-elderly Americans, 85 percent of them working or the kids of working parents -spend some time without the protection against ruinous health costs that insurance offers."
The cost for medical treatment for the uninsured is borne by all of us, as taxpayers through Medicaid and by additional, pass-through assessments imposed by insurers on the healthcare insurance plans of those of us who have coverage.
If any of the lower court decisions provide guidance on the ideological world-view of the current Supreme Court's reactionary wing concerning efforts to reform health care, the decision of U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson might be informative. Judge Henry ruled that the healthcare coverage mandate was unconstitutional because Congress, based upon his narrow and unsupported interpretation of the interstate commerce class, cannot regulate what he deemed to be purely passive economic activity. In Commonwealth of Virginia v. Sebelius, 728 F.Supp.2d 768 (2010), Judge Hudson found that, "At its core, this dispute is not simply about regulating the business of insurance - or crafting a scheme of universal health insurance coverage- it's about an individual's right to choose to participate."
To arrive at this extraordinary conclusion, Judge Hudson failed to objectively apply the "rational basis" scrutiny test that federal courts have historically used to review the underlying authority of Congress to enact legislation under Article I of the Constitution. Judge Hudson accomplished this feat by verbal legerdemain: He contended that in ruling on the federal government's earlier motion to dismiss,"the Court recognized that the Secretary's application of the Commerce Clause and the General Welfare Clause appeared to extend beyond existing constitutional precedent..." Judge Hudson then proceeded to distinguish the instant case before him from the broad swath of Supreme Court precedent that, since the advent of the New Deal, has upheld the power of Congress to regulate a wide array of private economic activity based upon of its power to regulate interstate commerce. The 1964 Civil Rights Act - that outlawed racial segregation - was expressly based upon that constitutional grant of authority to the Congress.
Judge Hudson next turned his attention to a favorite target of right-wing jurists: Article I, section 8, clause 18, that expressly permits Congress to "make all laws Necessary and Proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States..." This clause, which has also been described as the "elastic clause" enables Congress enact legislation for the "General Welfare"not specifically enumerated.
Judge Hudson reasoning was a perfect non-sequitur: "If a person's decision not to purchase health insurance at a particular point in time does not constitute the type of economic activity subject to regulation under the Commerce Clause, then logically an attempt to enforce such provision under the Necessary and Proper Clause is equally offensive to the Constitution."
In his decision, Judge Hudson denied that Congress had authority, independent of its power to regulate commerce, under the Necessary and Proper clause to enact health care reform. If his reasoning is subsequently adopted by the five equally reactionary members of the Roberts Court, the Constitution, as a document, will no longer be interpreted as a flexible, evolving instrument that can be adapted to ever-changing conditions beyond those ever envisioned or anticipated by the Founding Fathers. An increasingly rigid and narrow interpretation of the text of the constitution will do for constitutional jurisprudence what Southern Baptists, given their literal interpretation of the King James Bible, have done for the ability of Christian doctrine to evolve in the face of new, unanticipated challenges: make it obsolete. The harm to all of us as citizens, however, will be far greater.
A jurisprudence rooted in 18th century notions of individual rights and Adam Smith's economics will not help to create public policies for the 21st century. Rather, if the Affordable Health Care Act is struck down by five, unelected, unaccountable jurists, it will signal this country's continued departure from the principles of democratic governance. If Dickens' observation that "the law is a ass" is not to be confirmed, the five right-wing judges will have to sharpen their analytical tools and put aside their ideological biases.
Rick Santorum's recent criticism of colleges as elitist
institutions that indoctrinate young people struck a resonant chord
among evangelicals and among self-identified "conservative" voters who believe
colleges and universities are bastions of the godless socialism whose
faculties relentlessly promote that agenda. Santorum further claimed
that "62 percent of kids who enter college with some kind of faith
commitment leave without it." Does the evidence support Santorum's
claims?
Courtesy of the New Yorker
In a recent article by Calvin University Professor Jonathan P. Hill in The Chronicle of Higher Education [
"Parsing Santorum's Statistic on God and College: Looks as if It's
Wrong"] examines the recent data by social scientists who have examined
religious commitment and higher education in recent years. Hill
observes that the data "mostly contradicts the picture that Santorum
paints." Hill further notes that "Studies using comparable data from
recent cohorts of young people (for example, the National Longitudinal
Survey of Youth 1997, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent
Health, and the National Study of Youth and Religion) have found
virtually no overall differences on most measures of identity, practice,
and belief between those who head off to college and those who do not.
The one exception to this is the consistent finding that college
graduates attend religious services more frequently than those who do
not graduate from college."
Aside from them the data that
shows Santorum's claims are not supported by real world evidence, his
criticisms raise more fundamental questions that need to be asked. What
is the purpose of higher education? Should universities prepare young
men and women for careers, or should it give them the tools that enable
them to think for themselves? Should colleges be servants of the
status-quo? Should a higher education expose young men and women to
ideas that challenge their world views?
C.P. Snow was not
the first intellectual to bemoan the emergence of "Two Cultures"- the
chasm between those who studied the humanities and those who pursued
studies in science and engineering. The notorious curmudgeon and former
president of Boston University, John Silber, consistently criticized the
value of "shop" degrees and urged undergraduates to pursue a broad
liberal arts education. Silber further observed that college curricula
were being "dumbed-down." He once remarked that the high school
education that mother received in Texas in the early part of the
twentieth century was more rigorous than the undergraduate curriculum at
Boston University during his tenure as president of that university.
The U.S. Department of Education reports that between 1989 and 1999,
the number of students enrolled in degree-granting post secondary
institutions increased by 9 percent. During the next ten ears, from
1999-2009, enrollment increased 38 percent from 14.8 million to 20.4
million. Over and above enrollment in accredited 2-year colleges, 4-year
colleges, and universities, an additional 472,000 students attended
non-degree-granting, Title IV eligible post secondary institutions in
fall 2008.
Over and above the data Professor Hill cites
that shows little evidence of indoctrination, there is evidence that
suggests that today's college students, despite their increased numbers,
are not as broadly or as well-educated as their predecessors, including in the critical in the area of citizenship education. In a 2005 report by the
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 14,000 freshman and seniors at fifty
colleges and universities were administered 60 multiple-choice
questions which were intended to measure their knowledge of American
history and government, world affairs, and the market economy. The first
of its major findings was that "America's colleges and universities
fail to increase knowledge about America's history and institutions."
The report noted a trivial difference between college seniors and their
freshman counterparts regarding knowledge of America's heritage.
"Seniors scored just 1.5 percent higher on average than freshman, and,
at many schools, seniors know less than freshman about America's
history, government, foreign affairs, and economy. Overall, college
seniors failed the civic literacy exam, with an average score of 53.2
percent, or F, on a traditional grading scale."
Hence, not surprisingly, Santorum may have misdiagnosed the malady. It's not that
college students are being indoctrinated; to the contrary, the evidence
suggests that they are not learning enough, and that they are unable to
defend their own ideas and beliefs with the kind of knowledge and logic
that a liberal arts education implies.
The
Marxist philosopher and social critic, Herbert Marcuse warned that "An
economic system that encourages its young men and women to tailor their
educations to the needs of the marketplace, irrespective of their hopes
and ambitions, is an economic system that should be roundly condemned. A
nation that discourages the study of art, music and the Humanities is a
nation that will inevitably find itself populated by unthinking dolts
and automatons."
Santorum's fears about indoctrination
are nonsensical. Colleges and universities are not indoctrinating young
men and women. Rather, it appears that, because a number of colleges and
universities today have less rigorous and less comprehensive courses of
study, they are failing in their core mission of educate our youth. If
this trend is not reversed, the seeds of the GOP's anti-intellectualism
will continue to fall on fertile ground among those who fear change in
all of its manifestations and those who stubbornly cling to the chains that
bind them.
The real danger is that Santorum's criticism
of education at all levels, if it were to be translated into public
policy, would have a chilling effect upon the intellectual curiosity of
young people and their willingness to explore the world of ideas.
Marcuse's warning then will become self-fulfilling prophecy.
Former Pennsylvania U.S. Senator Rick Santorum has now become the darling of the GOP right-wing evangelical "values" voters. Santorum claims that his worldview has been shaped by his commitment as a Catholic to his church's social teaching. But is that true?
Santorurm's professed "Catholic worldview" has led him to assert that President Obama is waging war against the Catholic Church by requiring its institutions to provide for contraceptive care for their employees as part of their health insurance; he has railed against abortion, supported capital punishment, supported "right to work laws," and opposed government regulation of the economy and any and all efforts to regulate the possession and display of fire arms.
In addition, he has vociferously denied the existence of climate change and criticized President Obama's commitment to the environment and his efforts to support the development of alternative sources of energy as a "phony theology" that endorses an "Earth-based" conservation mentality. Simultaneously, Santorum has embraced a bellicose foreign policy that supports the current Israeli Likud Party's hard-liners, recommended war if necessary against Iran and questioned whether continued U.S. involvement in the United Nations and other international agencies is a a surrender of the country's sovereignty.
Santorum's website touts his commitment to limited government, fiscal conservatism and family values: "Every American should have access to high-quality, affordable health care, with health care decisions made by patients and their physicians, NOT government bureaucrats America needs targeted, market-driven, patient-centered solutions to address the costs and underlying causes of being uninsured rather than a one-size fits-all, government-run health care system."
"Rick Santorum is committed to reviving our economy, restoring economic growth, and creating jobs in America again by unleashing innovation and entrepreneurship through lower and simpler taxes for American businesses, workers, and families. He also will roll back job killing regulations, restrain our spending by living within our means, and unleash our domestic manufacturing and energy potential. His vision for America is to restore America's greatness through promotion of freedom and opportunity for all. This is just the start. A plan made in America to promote America's families and prosper its businesses."
"Coming from Pennsylvania, a state with a rich heritage of hunting and fishing, Senator Santorum understands firsthand the importance of preserving our constitutionally protected rights found in the 2nd Amendment. Senator Santorum fights to preserve this tradition, and will work to ensure these rights are not infringed upon."As a Senator, Rick Santorum opposed frivolous lawsuits against the gun industry by supporting legislation (The Protection of Lawful Commerce Act) that would protect law abiding firearms manufacturers and dealers from frivolous lawsuits attempting to hold them liable for criminal acts of third parties."
Santorum's website further proclaims that, "As a believer in American Exceptionalism.... Rick Santorum understands that those who wish to destroy America do so because they hate everything we are - a land of freedom, a land of prosperity, a land of equality....As an elected representative, Rick knew that his greatest responsibility was to protect the freedoms we enjoy - and we should not apologize for holding true to these principles."
The question that now needs to be answered, however, is whether the allegedly "conservative values" that Rick Santorum professes to endorse are consonant with the tradition of Catholic social philosophy and whether they are, in fact, conservative at all? All of the evidence suggests that they are not.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued a guide entitled Sharing Catholic Social Teaching: Challenges and Directions. It emphasizes that "The Catholic tradition teaches that human dignity can be protected and a healthy community can be achieved only if human rights are protected and responsibilities are met. Therefore, every person has a fundamental right to life and a right to those things required for human decency. Corresponding to these rights are duties and responsibilities--to one another, to our families, and to the larger society." As such, "Human dignity can be protected and a healthy community can be achieved only if human rights are protected and responsibilities are met. Every person has a fundamental right to life and a right to those things required for human decency - starting with food, shelter and clothing, employment, health care, and education. Corresponding to these rights are duties and responsibilities -- to one another, to our families, and to the larger society."
Under a section entitled "Option for the Poor and Vulnerable," the guide proclaims: "A basic moral test is how our most vulnerable members are faring. In a society marred by deepening divisions between rich and poor, our tradition recalls the story of the Last Judgment (Mt 25:31-46) and instructs us to put the needs of the poor and vulnerable first." Indeed, this option is a major barometer of one's commitment to social justice since "The moral test of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable members. The poor have the most urgent moral claim on the conscience of the nation. We are called to look at public policy decisions in terms of how they affect the poor. The 'option for the poor,' is not an adversarial slogan that pits one group or class against another. Rather it states that the deprivation and powerlessness of the poor wounds the whole community. The option for the poor is an essential part of society's effort to achieve the common good. A healthy community can be achieved only if its members give special attention to those with special needs, to those who are poor and on the margins of society."
Equally emphatic is the Catholic Church's rejection of those economic doctrines that have elevated the primacy of the markets and capitalism over basic human needs. "The economy must serve people, not the other way around. All workers have a right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, and to safe working conditions. They also have a fundamental right to organize and join unions. People have a right to economic initiative and private property, but these rights have limits. No one is allowed to amass excessive wealth when others lack the basic necessities of life." Although "Catholic teaching opposes collectivist and statist economic approaches.... it also rejects the notion that a free market automatically produces justice. Distributive justice, for example, cannot be achieved by relying entirely on free market forces. Competition and free markets are useful elements of economic systems. However, markets must be kept within limits, because there are many needs and goods that cannot be satisfied by the market system. It is the task of the state and of all society to intervene and ensure that these needs are met."
The section styled "The Dignity of Work and the Rights of Workers," expresses the Catholic Church's long-standing endorsement of unions and the need for government regulation of the economy in the public interest: "The economy must serve people, not the other way around. Work is more than a way to make a living; it is a form of continuing participation in Gods creation. If the dignity of work is to be protected, then the basic rights of workers must be respected--the right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, to the organization and joining of unions, to private property, and to economic initiative." Consistent with this view, "All people have a right to participate in the economic, political, and cultural life of society. It is a fundamental demand of justice and a requirement for human dignity that all people be assured a minimum level of participation in the community. It is wrong for a person or a group to be excluded unfairly or to be unable to participate in society."
The Catholic Church's positions on war and the environment are equally unambiguous. They are rooted in a broad vision of the obligations that we as human beings owe to one another and as stewards of the earth: "We are one human family whatever our national, racial, ethnic, economic, and ideological differences. We are our brothers and sisters keepers, wherever they may be. Loving our neighbor has global dimensions in a shrinking world. At the core of the virtue of solidarity is the pursuit of justice and peace. Pope Paul VI taught that if you want peace, work for justice. The Gospel calls us to be peacemakers. Our love for all our sisters and brothers demands that we promote peace in a world surrounded by violence and conflict." Further, "We show our respect for the Creator by our stewardship of creation. Care for the earth is not just an Earth Day slogan, it is a requirement of our faith. We are called to protect people and the planet, living our faith in relationship with all of Gods creation. This environmental challenge has fundamental moral and ethical dimensions that cannot be ignored."
The kind of anti-government rhetoric advanced by Senator Santorum and the other professed Catholic GOP Presidential contender, Newt Gingrich, are at loggerheads with the Catholic moral teaching that is an essential part of the conservative political tradition.Because it traces its lineage from Aristotle, through Thomas Aquinas, to Catholic philosophers today, that authentically conservative tradition is fundamentally at odds with the kind of anti-social individualism that dominates current GOP political discourse. In stark contrast to Catholic social teaching, that discourse draws its values from the tradition of classical liberalism that emerged after the Protestant Reformation and was trumpeted by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith, among other English thinkers.
Catholic social doctrine insists upon the importance of government as a positive instrument to advance the public good. For that reason, the current assault that is being waged by Santorum and his Republican supporters upon government is impossible to square with historic Catholic social teaching. As the guide, Sharing Catholic Social Teaching: Challenges and Directions. Guide to Catholic Social Teaching explains, "The state has a positive moral function. It is an instrument to promote human dignity, protect human rights, and build the common good. All people have a right and a responsibility to participate in political institutions so that government can achieve its proper goals. The principle of subsidiarity holds that the functions of government should be performed at the lowest level possible, as long as they can be performed adequately. When the needs in question cannot adequately be met at the lower level, then it is not only necessary, but imperative that higher levels of government intervene..."
In his encyclical, Mater et Magister, Pope John XXIII emphasized the central role of the state in promoting social justice: "As for the State, its whole raison d'etre is the realization of the common good in the temporal order. It cannot, therefore, hold aloof from economic matters. On the contrary, it must do all in its power to promote the production of a sufficient supply of material goods, 'the use of which is necessary for the practice of virtue.' It has also the duty to protect the rights of all its people, and particularly of its weaker members, the workers, women and children. It can never be right for the State to shirk its obligation of working actively for the betterment of the condition of the workingman. "
Rick Santorum has expressed no commitment to the idea of social justice, nor does he understand that the notion that the public interest is something different and distinct from a mere aggregation of self-interests. He also denies that the role of government, to use the words of A.D. Lindsey, is to "hinder the hindrances" - that is, to eliminate those impediments that stand in the way of a person's moral and civic development. For those reasons, Santorum may be a Catholic in his theology, but his social philosophy and his politics are decidedly anti-Catholic.
In this season of political gridlock, continued economic misery
and partisan sniping dominated by SuperPACS and millionaires determined
to protect their tax advantages, the United States Supreme Court has
issued a decision that is destined to further Balkanize this country. In Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. EEOC, 565 U.S.
___ (2012), Chief Justice Roberts on behalf of a unanimous court, ruled
that a plaintiff's suit for redress under the Americans with
Disabilities Act was barred under the Free Exercise of Religion and the
Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because she had been
employed as a "called minister"and teacher in a Lutheran school.
Chief Justice Waite
The Court's decision, which was decided with the assent of the Court's
four supposed moderates - Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and
Kagan - should send a chilling message to every American citizen who is
concerned about the rule of civil law. As the record before the Court
showed that Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School
purports to offer a "Christ centered education" to students in
kindergarten through eighth grade. The Lutheran Synod to which this
church and school belonged divided its parochial school teachers into
two categories: "called" and "lay."
"Called" teachers
are described as practicing Lutherans who are believed to have been
summoned by God, through the congregation to which they belong, to
pursue their vocation. These teachers are required to take a course of
theological study, receive the endorsement of their local Synod
district, and pass an oral examination by a faculty committee. A teacher
who has then satisfied these requirements may be called by a
congregation. Once called, a teacher receives the formal title "Minister
of Religion, Commissioned." A "commissioned minister" enjoys a status
analogous to tenure: At Hosanna-Tabor, a call could be rescinded only
for cause and by a vote of a super majority of the congregation.
As reflected in the record before the Court, "lay" or "contract"
teachers are not required to be trained by the Synod or even to be
Lutheran. At Hosanna-Tabor, lay teachers were appointed by the school
board, without a vote of the congregation, to one-year renewable terms.
Although teachers at the school generally performed the same duties
regardless of whether they were lay or called, lay teachers were hired
only when called teachers were unavailable.
Cheryl Perich
was initially employed by Hosanna-Tabor as a lay teacher in 1999. Later
that school year, Hosanna-Tabor asked her to become a called teacher.
Perich accepted the "call" and completed the requirements that enabled
her to become a commissioned minister. She taught kindergarten during
her first four years at Hosanna-Tabor and fourth grade during the
2003-2004 school year. She also taught math, language arts, social
studies, science, gym, art, and music. In addition to these purely
secular teaching duties, Ms. Perich taught one religion class four days a
week, led the students in prayer each day as almost all parochial
school teachers do, and once a week attended a weekly school-wide chapel
service with other teachers and pupils. About twice a year, Perich is
reported to have led the chapel service herself.
In
2004, Perich became ill in June 2004 and was eventually diagnosed with
narcolepsy. Because of her illness, Perich began the 2004-2005 school
year on disability leave. At the beginning of January, 2005, however,
Perich notified the school principal, that she would be able to report
to work the following month. The principal replied that the school had
already contracted with a lay teacher to fill Perich's position for the
remainder of the school year.
Perich refused to resign
her position as a called teacher in exchange for an offer by the
congregation to pay a portion of her health insurance premiums. On the
morning of February 22, 2005, after she was medically cleared to return
to work, Perich reported to school. The principal asked her to leave
but she would not do so until she obtained written documentation that
she had reported to work. Later that afternoon, the principal called
Perich at home and told her that she would likely be fired. Perich
responded that she had spoken with an attorney and intended to assert
her legal rights.
Following a school board meeting that
evening, the chairman of school board sent Perich a letter in which he
stated that Hosanna-Tabor was reviewing the process for rescinding her
call in light of her "regrettable" actions. He subsequently wrote with a
second letter in which he advised Perich that the congregation would
consider whether to rescind her call at its next meeting. As grounds for
termination, the letter cited Perich's "insubordination and disruptive
behavior" on February 22, 2005 as well as the damage she had done to
her "working relationship" with the school by "threatening to take legal
action." The congregation then voted to rescind Perich's call on April
10, and Hosanna-Tabor sent her a letter of termination the next day.
In response, Perich filed a charge with the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, in which she alleged that she had been
discharged from employment in violation of the Americans with
Disabilities Act, 42 U. S. C. §12101- et seq., and that she had been
unlawfully retaliated against by her employer because she had opposed
acts and practices declared unlawful by act under §12203(a) of the
Americans with Disabilities Act .
Enacted in 1990 by the
United Stated Congress, the Americans with Disabilities Act declares the
purpose of the statute to be four-fold: "(1) to provide a clear and
comprehensive national mandate for the elimination of discrimination
against individuals with disabilities; (2) to provide clear, strong,
consistent, enforceable standards addressing discrimination against
individuals with disabilities; (3) to ensure that the Federal Government
plays a central role in enforcing the standards established in this
chapter on behalf of individuals with disabilities; and (4) to invoke
the sweep of congressional authority, including the power to enforce the
fourteenth amendment and to regulate commerce, in order to address the
major areas of discrimination faced day-to-day by people with
disabilities." See § 12101. Findings and purpose.
The EEOC subsequently brought suit against Hosanna-Tabor in United
States District Court Michigan based upon its determination that Perich
had been fired in retaliation for threatening to file an ADA lawsuit
and Perich intervened in that litigation. During the proceedings Hosanna-Tabor filed a motion for summary judgment under Federal Rule of
Civil Procedure 56 in which it alleged that only disputed issues of law,
not fact, existed and that the Court should decide , as a matter of
law, that the "ministerial exception" under the First Amendment barred
the suit because the claims at issue were solely related to the
employment relationship between the religious institution and Perich
who, as a minister, had been fired for a religious reason- viz, that
her threat to sue the Church violated the Synod's belief that Christians
should resolve their disputes internally.
The District
Court entered summary judgment in Hosanna-Tabor's favor and held that
"Hosanna-Tabor treated Perich like a minister and held her out to the
world as such long before this litigation began," and that the "facts
surrounding Perich's employment in a religious school with a sectarian
mission" supported the Church's characterization. In light of that
determination, the court concluded that it could "inquire no further
into her claims of retaliation."
The Court of Appeals for
the Sixth Circuit vacated and remanded, and directed the District Court
to proceed to the merits of Perich's retaliation claims. Upon review,
the Court of Appeals concluded that Perich did not qualify as a
"minister" under the "ministerial exception," because her duties as a
called teacher were identical to the duties of lay teachers.
The Supreme Court granted certiorari, and reversed the decision of the
Court of Appeals. In his opinion, Chief Justice Roberts invoked the
provisions of the First Amendment that "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof," denied that there where "internal conflicting
pressures" between the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise
Clause, and held that, "Both Religion Clauses bar the government from
interfering with the decision of a religious group to fire one of its
ministers."
Because there existed no precedent for the
Court's expansive interpretation of the "ministerial exception,"
Roberts selectively cited and distorted historical examples. First,
Roberts examined the provisions of the Magna Carta in which King John
agreed that "the English church shall be free, and shall have its rights
undiminished and its liberties unimpaired." What made this reference to
Magna Carta rather disingenuous was the Court's past, well-documented
unwillingness to accept "foreign law" as a precedent, and Roberts'
failure to note that the prerogatives of the "English Church" were
explicitly recognized in 1215 A.D. because all parties conceded that the
secular powers were entirely subordinate to the spiritual authority of
the Roman Catholic Church.
Next, Roberts cited to the
experiences of King Henry II, King Henry the VIII, and the Various Acts
of Uniformity enacted during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I,
notwithstanding the fact that these later acts explicitly outlawed the
practice of the Roman Catholic faith and other "heretical sects" in
England after the Protestant Reformation. Roberts' citation to the
experience of the Puritans who "fled to New England, where they hoped
to elect their own ministers and establish their own modes of worship"
was equally unavailing, since among the first acts of the Puritans in
the Massachusetts Bay Colony was to establish a theocracy that punished
all other dissenters. Its position as the established church remained in
place until 1833 when it was disestablished by the Massachusetts
General Court.
Roberts further strained credulity when he
posited some kind of equivalence between the James Madison's
enunciation in 1806, when he was Secretary of State under President
Jefferson, of a "scrupulous policy of the Constitution in guarding
against a political interference with religious affairs" in response to
an inquiry by Catholic Bishop John Carroll about whether he was
permitted to appoint ecclesiastical authorities in the newly acquired
Louisiana territory, or a Congressional Act in1811 that President
Madison vetoed because it sought to grant a corporate charter to the
Episcopal Church in the District of Columbus and Ms. Perich's status as a
teacher who primarily taught secular school subjects but who also
performed some ancillary religious functions.
The Court's reference to prior cases, Watson v. Jones, 13 Wall. 679 (1872) and Kedroff v. Saint Nicholas Cathedral of Russian Orthodox Church in North America, 344 U. S. 94, (1952) and Serbian Eastern Orthodox Diocese for United States and Canada v. Milivojevich,
426 U. S. 696 (1976), was equally unhelpful. Those three cases involved
disputes about the control and disposition of church property, and did
not implicate matters of settled public policy such as the commitment of
the Untied States, through the Congress, to eradicate the vestiges of
discrimination in the workplace.
As Chief Justice
Roberts conceded, "Until today, we have not had occasion to consider
whether this freedom of a religious organization to select its ministers
is implicated by a suit alleging discrimination in employment."
Nevertheless, he stated, "We agree that there is such a ministerial
exception. The members of a religious group put their faith in the hands
of their ministers. Requiring a church to accept or retain an unwanted
minister, or punishing a church for failing to do so, intrudes upon more
than a mere employment decision. Such action interferes with the
internal governance of the church, depriving the church of control over
the selection of those who will personify its beliefs. By imposing an
unwanted minister, the state infringes the Free Exercise Clause, which
protects a religious group's right to shape its own faith and mission
through its appointments. According the state the power to determine
which individuals will minister to the faithful also violates the
Establishment Clause, which prohibits government involvement in such
ecclesiastical decisions."
In so ruling, Roberts struggled to distinguish the Court's holding in this case from a prior case that was on point, Employment Div., Dept. of Human Resources of Ore. v. Smith,
494 U.S. 872 (1990). As the EEOC noted in its brief, that was a case in
which the Supreme Court declined to recognize a ministerial exception
two members of the Native American Church were denied state unemployment
benefits after they were fired from their jobs for having ingested
peyote, a crime under Oregon law. There the Court found that the denial
of unemployment benefits did not violate the Free Exercise Clause, even
though it conceded that the peyote had been used for a valid sacramental
purposes. The Court held that the "right of free exercise does not
relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a valid and
neutral law of general applicability on the ground that the law
proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or
proscribes)."
Roberts then engaged in a feat of
legerdemain in which he opined that, although participation in a core
sacramental ceremony by Native Americans was not exempted under the Free
Exercise Clause, laws that prohibited discrimination in employment can
not be enforced when they somehow encroach upon a church's central
beliefs and mission: "It is true that the ADA's prohibition on
retaliation, like Oregon's prohibition on peyote use, is a valid and
neutral law of general applicability. But a church's selection of its
ministers is unlike an individual's ingestion of peyote. Smith involved
government regulation of only outward physical acts. The present case,
in contrast, concerns government interference with an internal church
decision that affects the faith and mission of the church itself. See
id., at 877 (distinguishing the government's regulation of 'physical
acts' from its 'lend[ing] its power to one or the other side in
controversies over religious authority or dogma'). The contention that
Smith forecloses recognition of a ministerial exception rooted in the
Religion Clauses has no merit."
Left unanswered by Robert's opinion are some important questions. Did the Court refuse to accept Employment Div., Dept. of Human Resources of Ore. v. Smith,
as binding precedent because the religious practices in question
involved a non-mainstream religion? If the religious principles in
question involved Islam and Zoroastrianism or Jasinism would the Court
have awarded more deference to the administrative decisions of the US
EEOC ?
Precisely how does the right of a parochial
school teacher - who was never ordained as a deacon, minister, or bishop
in the Lutheran Church but held some title as a "called" teacher - to
seek redress under anti-discrimination laws interfere with a church's
"selection of ministers"? How does the right of teacher to seek redress
interfere with the central doctrines or core beliefs when Lutherans,
along with Roman Catholics, Orthodox Catholics and Episcopalians,
accept the Apostle's Creed as the central statement of their religious
beliefs? Would the Court grant the same kind of deference to the
tangential practices and beliefs of religious groups that upheld the
subjugation of women, demanded the segregation of the races, or
permitted members to deny essential medical treatment to children,
spouses or elderly believers because it contradicted their settled
religious beliefs and practices?
The breadth of religious exemption set forth in Tabor-Hossana is extraordinary given the court's refusal to be bound by past precedent (the legal principle known as stare decisis).
The Court was also unwilling to acknowledge a compelling government
reason to defer to a "religiously-neutral" and "facially-valid" statute
enacted by Congress to address pervasive issues of employment
discrimination. Equally inexplicable was the Court's refusal to grant
any deference whatsoever to the reasoned arguments of the United States
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that has a wealth of accumulated
institutional administrative experience, and by law is charged with the
oversight and enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act as
well as almost all other civil rights statutes.
The Tabor-Hosanna
decision is especially worrisome given the enactment of so-called
"conscience clauses" that have been adopted by a number of U.S. states,
including Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky,
Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi,
Pennsylvania, and South Dakota. These acts permit pharmacists,
physicians, nurses and other providers of health care not to provide
certain medical services for reasons of religion or conscience. Despite
their possession of licenses granted by secular state authorities, these
laws exempt them from discipline if they refuse to provide a specific
service. These "conscience clauses" have been enacted primarily in
connection with issues such as reproduction, abortion, sterilization,
contraception, and stem cell based treatments, but may include any
aspect of patient care.
This concern about the interplay between religious law and civil law has now become critical. In a recent New York Times
article ("Ruling on Contraception Draws Battle Lines at Catholic
Colleges," January 30, 2012), Denise Grady chronicles the kind of
problems confronted by Fordham University students. Because Fordham
University's student health service refuses to prescriptions for birth
control, many students had to go to Planned Parenthood or private
doctors to get prescriptions. Some of the students, unable to afford
doctor visits, simply gave up the use of birth control pills entirely.
In that article, one Georgetown University Law School graduate, who
suffered from polycystic ovarian syndrome, was reported to have been
prescribed birth control pills by her physician who noted the reason on
his prescriptions. Because Georgetown's health services would not fill
the prescription and she could not continue to pay $100 a month
out-of-pocket, she stopped using birth control pills.Within a matter of
months, she was diagnosed with a large ovarian cyst and lost one of her
ovaries.
The article noted that many other Catholic
colleges refuse to prescribe or cover birth control for religious
reasons. As a consequence, the Obama administration, citing the medical
case for birth control, announced an administrative decision that the
new health care law would require insurance plans at Catholic
institutions to cover birth control without co-payments for employees,
and that may be extended to students. In response, Catholic
organizations contend that the rule would force them to violate their
beliefs, despite the fact that they receive significant funding from the
federal government for buildings and facilities, research, student
grants and for student health services.
Sister Mary Ann
Walsh, a spokeswoman for the United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops, as quoted to the effect, "We can't just lie down and die and
let religious freedom go."
The controversy has continued
to escalate. During Masses on January 28 and 29, 2012 priests across
the country were instructed to read letters condemning the Obama's
administration's proposal. Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik even declared
that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and President Obama have said to
Catholics, "The hell with you."
In Reynolds v. United States,
98 U.S. 145 (1878), a case that Chief Justice Roberts did not cite in
his opinion, a unanimous Supreme Court denied a Mormon's argument that
his religious convictions - that included as a core principle his right
to practice plural marriage - should take priority over the secular
laws of the United States. Chief Justice Waite upheld the principle of
separation of church and state but asked, "Can a man excuse his
practices to the contrary because of his religious belief? To permit
this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief
superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen
to become a law unto himself. Government could exist only in name under
such circumstances...."
How can such a broadly
construed "ministerial exception" as enunciated in this case be
reconciled with Article VI of the Constitution that provides that "This
Constitution and the Laws of the United States.....shall be the Supreme
Law of the Land"? Wasn't the Civil War waged to uphold that the
supremacy of federal law? Isn't there a danger that plethora of
religious exceptions, even if granted on a case by case basis, will over
time subvert the rule of civil law? Before ruling, Chief Justice
Roberts and his eight associates should have pondered the importance of
Justice Waite's warning.
The evidence continues to mount that the GOP's insistent
demands for still further reductions in federal, state and local
spending have exacerbated and prolonged the current recession. In
response, advocates for austerity measures have now begin to argue that
demands for increased government programs to lift the economy and to
reign in abusive business practices are nothing less than an assault
upon free enterprise itself.
Former New Hampshire U.S. Senator John Sununu is a case in point. In an opinion column in today's Boston Globe
( "Apple, not manufacturing, is America's future," January 30, 2011),
Sununu showed that he is oblivious to the daily economic struggle of a
majority of Americans who must grapple with high unemployment,
declining wages, mortgage foreclosures, lack of access to affordable
medical insurance, loss of retirement savings and diminished prospects
for themselves, their children and their grandchildren.
In his column, Sununu argued that we should not lament the loss of
manufacturing. In order to support the proposition that corporations
like Apple represent the future for America, Sununu had to ignore all of
the evidence to the contrary. Previously for example, Charles Duhigg
and Keith Bradsher reported in the New York Times ("How the U.S. Lost
out on iPhone Work," January 21, 2012) that nearly all of the 70 million
iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other assorted products sold
by Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas, primarily in China
by third-party vendors with whom Apple contracts for services and
products.
One facility alone, Foxconn, employed
230,000 workers, who often worked six days a week, in shifts that lasted
12 hours per day. More than a quarter of Foxconn's work force was
reported to live in company barracks; many workers earned less than $17 a
day; and the intolerable working conditions within its facilities have
led to suicides and explosions from aluminum dust that killed and
injured scores of workers. By contrast, Apple employs only 43,000 people
in the United States and 20,000 overseas.
As a result
of its exploitation of these workers, the New York Times article noted
that Apple made a profit of $400,000 per each of it's actual employees, a
sum greater than that made by Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil and Google.
In response to that data, one current Apple executive stated, We sell
iPhones in over a hundred countries, We don't have an obligation to
solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product
possible."
Sununu's enthusiasm for Apple's business model
is expansive: "In just ten years, the market value of Apple has grown
from $7 billion to over $400 billion. The return for mutual funds and
pension funds owning the stock have been outstanding, and thousands of
employees have earned financial security." That enthusiasm, however, is
not tempered by any recognition that, for millions of middle class
Americans who do not directly own Apple stocks, the stock market has
been an unmitigated disaster.
CNN News reported that,
on September 29, 2008, the Dow Jones lost nearly 778 points, in the biggest
single-day point loss ever, after the GOP House rejected the
government's $700 billion bank bailout plan. The day's loss totaled
approximately $1.2 trillion in market value, the first post-$1 trillion
day ever recorded, according to the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000, the
broadest measure of the stock market. As a result, many middle income
investors lost their life savings and have never recovered.
Apple's predatory business practices and the out-sourcing of U.S.
manufacturing must be viewed in the context of the American economy as a
whole. Numerous studies report that more than 47 million Americans,
including 9 million children, do not have health insurance. A study by
Harvard University Medical School in 2009 attributed that the lack of
medical insurance to about 45,000 deaths per year in the U.S.
Researchers for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2010 reported
that 17.2 million households - or 14.5 % of all households in the United
States - were "food insecure" and that in one-third of those households
"normal eating patterns were disrupted." In 3.9 million of those
households, children went hungry.
As the real unemployment
rate climbed to approximately 20 million Americans in 2011, another 2.6
million Americans, according to the Census Bureau, descended into
poverty. Almost simultaneously, the World Bank observed that the United
States had a higher level of income inequality than Canada, South Korean
or any country in Europe with the exception of Turkey.
In
October of last year, the Internal Revenue Service and the Congressional
Budget Office released findings which showed that the top 1% of the
American population continued to receive a disproportionate share of the
country's wealth. In 2009, the 1.4 million who belong to the top 1%
made an average of $1 million dollars in 2009. Further, since 1979, the
share of U.S. Income enjoyed by the top 1% has increased from 9.18% to
17.9% as of 2009, or more than the entire bottom half of the U.S.
population.
Almost simultaneously, Forbes magazine
reported that, as of November, 2011, the four hundred richest Americans
enjoyed a combined worth of $1.53 trillion, which figure had increased
from $1.37 trillion over the previous year. Their combined wealth was
thus approximately equivalent to the GDP of Canada.
Sununu does correctly note a shortfall of trained U.S. works, including
scientists and engineers. He, however, refuses to recognize that the
same austerity measures that he and other GOP leaders have advocated
have caused the lay-offs of thousands of public school teachers around
the United States and forced state governments to cut back significantly
their investments in pubic higher education.
Today's
Republican Party has become an apologist for an economic status-quo
that is stacked against ordinary Americans The net effect of the
extraordinary concentration of wealth and power has been that the
decisions and predilections of fewer and fewer individuals now determine
the outcomes in the American economy while the overwhelming majority of
Americans have little ability to influence macro-economic trends or
economic and political policies.
In the alternate
economic universe that so many GOP members inhabit, the enormous wealth
now enjoyed by a mere 1% of the population should be an object of
public celebration rather than the focus of civic opprobrium or class
envy. As Erasmus once observed, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed
man is king."
An article by Erin Ailworth in today's Boston Sunday Globe ("In China, opportunity is in the air"') as well as two stories that appeared last week in the New York Times
about the use of third-party vendors in China by Apple corporation
reveal the magnitude of this country's economic problems. All of the
platitudes about the need to build a knowledge-based economy can't
counter the evidence that a huge chunk our adult and adolescent
population can't read, compute, or understand scientific reasoning well
enough to cope with the technological and information demands of this
century. Hence, they will never be a part of a knowledge-based economy.
For that very reason, the need to invest scare funds to improve
public education for future generations has never been greater. Sadly,
however, the retrenchment of funding at the state and local levels -
fueled by a mistaken and short-sighted insistence upon austerity in the
public sector - has only exacerbated the problem.
In the
long run, of course, the migration of jobs to China and other
third-world countries will prove self-defeating: An increasingly
impoverished middle class here in the U.S. will eventually be unable to
purchase the high-end goods that out-soured manufacturers such as Apple
and other U.S. based corporations wish to sell to domestic consumers.
Thus, over time, as economic inequality continues to grow and purchasing
power erodes, the life-styles of perhaps a majority of Americans will
be reduced to that of most Chinese and Indians today.
The
problem is that, by and large, entrepreneurs and the boards of directors
of corporations do not care about the long-run consequences of their
behaviors, no matter how ill-advised self-defeating. Perhaps they have
accepted, accepted as a corporate credo, to blithely, John Maynard
Keynes' observation that, in the long-run we will all be dead.
Their sole goal is to maximize profits to please their shareholders.
Given a mind set that sincerely believes that the pursuit of
self-interest is somehow a public good, they remain oblivious to
problems such as poverty, pollution or basic principles of social
justice.
Left to their own devices, entrepreneurs and
corporations often engage in practices that have harmful consequences to
the public, notwithstanding the fact that their activities are heavily
subsidized by taxpayer money - e.g. roads, trains, airports, intangible
infrastructure such as employee training and R&D, favorable tax
policies, legal standing, and legal protection of trade secrets and
intellectual property. They also know that if they are unable to escape
the ultimate consequences of their poor decisions, if all else fails,
they can always enter into bankruptcy and re-emerge as a new corporate persona.
The manufacturing crisis in the U.S. has a long history. The migration
of American manufacturing began in earnest with the passage of the
Taft-Hartley Act. Shortly thereafter, Southern states out-bid one
another in a collective race to the bottom as they rushed to enact
"right-to-work" laws that destroyed families and unions and impoverished
manufacturing in New England and the Mid-West.
Today,
out-sourcing works even better because corporations such as
Boston-Power, Inc., Apple and other corporations can avoid the expense
of employing a domestic labor force and can thus be free of all
government regulations that concern safety conditions, workers' rights,
and wage and hour laws and pensions.
The kind of short-sighted, predatory capitalism described in the Globe and in the Times,
coupled its exploitation of vulnerable workers in the third world
whose governments and the elites who control those governments are
unwilling to protect them, appears to be the favored model of
twenty-first century capitalism.
It is reminiscent of the
kind of manufacturing capitalism that was widely practiced in Lowell,
Massachusetts at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th
century. The difference, however, is that the descendants of those
exploited workers were able to move on and up for two important
reasons: the ability of workers to unionize and to demand higher wages
and better working conditions; and the emergence of a progressive
political tradition that, through concerted political efforts, brought
an end the worst vestiges of the First Gilded Age, including monopoly
capitalism, Social Darwinism and laissez-faire.
Unfortunately, the social mobility enjoyed by our grandparents and even
our great grandparents will be alien to our children and grandchildren
unless the apathy of citizens can be overcome and the enormous wealth
and power now wielded by the few and wealthy to shape opinions and
political consciousness can be countered.
There are no
easy solutions to this crisis, but the purported "laws of economics" are
not to be confused with the laws of physics. Economic systems do not
operate in a vacuum and there is nothing inevitable about the operation
of economic trends. Economic systems and political systems are the
products of human imagination and ideology as they are shaped by
historical forces. Economic theory itself is the step-child of political
theory.
Capitalism as an economic system emerged only
slowly as result of the disintegration of the feudal, agrarian economic
system and the development of trade and banking in the late Middle Ages
and the Renaissance. The development and justification for it as a model
was provided by the political ideas of John Locke, David Hume and Adam
Smith.
Because there is nothing inevitable about
economic trends and developments, they can be countered by intelligent
and carefully crafted monetary and fiscal policies, and intelligent
legislation. In extremis, even the "laws of economics" - as
articulated by the proponents of classical, orthodox liberal economic
theory - can be suspended by operation of law, as was required during
World Wars I and II.
All of the empirical evidence suggests
that out-sourcing, deregulation and a commitment to the myth of
"free-trade" have been major contributing factors to the loss of
manufacturing, stagnating wages and the growing impoverishment of the
former middle class. The model of the market economy, because of these
practices, is no longer responsive to the political system that was
responsible for creating and nurturing capitalism.
The
critical need is to restore the proper balance between the pursuit of
wealth as a purely private activity and the public interest. In a
democracy, citizens have the capacity and the right to imagine and to
create new political, economic and social structures and arrangements
that are rooted in a shared commitment to social justice and a
recognition of the mutual obligations that we owe to one another as
members of a political community. By law, policies can designed and
imposed to protect the rights of workers to join unions, to create an
industrial policy, to re-impose selective tariffs (as the Chinese now
do), to enact a tax code that punishes out-sourcing and domestic
dis-investment and to provide incentives for job-creation and domestic
re-investment.
All that we lack is the commitment - and a sense of urgency.
By Paul Nevins on January 25, 2012 3:06 PM
|3 Comments
The Edsel, named after Henry Ford's son, was an automobile that was manufactured by the Ford Motor Company during the later 1950s. The
Edsel, because rumors had circulated that it would be an entirely new
kind of car, quickly disappointed consumers. It was viewed as stodgy and
unstylish, and it was designed with the same engineering and bodywork
as most other Ford models. Hence, it never became a popular model and it
sold poorly. As a result, the Ford Motor Company lost millions of
dollars on the Edsel's development, manufacture, and marketing. Today,
the name "Edsel" is synonymous with failure.
Fifty-two years later, the Ford Fusion has become a
top-selling automobile. Stylish, sleek, relatively inexpensive, the 2010
model was awarded the Motor Trend Car of the Year and the hybrid
version of the Fusion was recognized as the 2010 North American Car of
the Year Award. The new 20013 Ford Fusion represents the second
generation of the car, a thoroughly re-designed model that was
unveiled at the 2012 North American International Auto Show. Since its
introduction in 2006, the Fusion has sold over one million vehicles.
Both of these automobiles have been manufactured by the same company,
but the contrast could not be greater. The Edsel illustrates the kind of
a poorly designed, poorly-performing vehicle that was the result of
arrogant and unimaginative corporate groupthink and planning. By
contrast, the Fusion is emblematic of the future of automobile
manufacturing, based on a desire to provide consumers with an extremely
dependable, fuel efficient and attractive alternative to European and
Japanese manufactured cars.
In some important
ways, the Ford Motor Company, and its experiences with these two very
different automobiles, serves as a metaphor for the current state of
American politics. The GOP today - as exemplified by their Presidential
candidates - is dominated by those who profess a nostalgia for the
America of the 1950s. They express a preference for limited government,
low taxes and a truculent foreign policy .Their nostalgia, however, is
not reality-based..
In the 1950s, economic inequality
was significantly lower than today, median incomes, in terms of real
purchasing power, higher, and the share of taxes paid by corporations and
wealthy Americans was greater. Robert H. Frank, a Cornell University
economist, reported in a New York Times column ["Income Inequality: Too
Big to Ignore," October 16, 2010] that, during the decades after World
War II, incomes in the United States rose rapidly and at about the same
rate - approximately 3 percent a year - for employees at all income
levels. As a consequence, America had an economically dynamic middle
class; its roads and bridges were well maintained; and Americans as a
whole were optimistic as investments in infrastructure and public goods
increased. In that era of relative economic equality, Frank noted, that
public support for infrastructure - paid for by taxes - enjoyed wide
support.
By contrast, Frank notes that, during the
past three decades, as the economy has grown much more slowly,
America's infrastructure has fallen into grave disrepair.
Simultaneously, all significant income growth has been concentrated at
the top of the scale with the largest share of total income going to
that top 1 percent of earners.
It is also
important to remember that President Eisenhower, despite the bellicosity
of John Foster Dulles and other members of the GOP's lunatic fringe,
was able to disengage this country from the Korean War. He was also able
to keep the United States out of any major confrontation with the
Soviet Union by a combination of diplomacy, some-ill considered covert
action that later had disastrous consequences, and the use of concerted
multi-lateral alliances such as NATO.
At
the end of his second term, President Eisenhower warned against an
ever-growing military-industrial complex and observed that, "Every gun
that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in
the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those
who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending
money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its
scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all
in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a
cross of iron."
Because of their inability to apply
the facts of the past to the needs of the present, today's GOP have
become the Edsel of American politics. If President Obama and the
Democratic Party want to become the future model of American politics -
the Fusion, as it were - they must not be intimidated by the rhetoric
that endorses austerity, trickle-down economics and a passive role for
government in the face of increasing misery.
The
Oxford University philosopher, Thomas Hill Green, challenged the
conventional wisdom of his day - classical liberalism with its laissez-faire prescriptions - with the argument that, in a democracy, government must be used
as a positive instrument for the public good. Green's advocacy of an
activist government, his disavowal of extreme individualism and his
communitarian politics were subsequently endorsed by A.D. Lindsay who
insisted that the purpose of the state is "to serve the community and in
that service make it more of a community."
"Modern
liberalism" as articulated by Green and Lindsay, if embraced by
Democrats, can provide a firm foundation for a creation of a new and
resilient progressive tradition. It would also offer tangible evidence
that, even in politics, it is still possible to learn from past
mistakes, triumph over political inertia, and offer a coherent vision
that can persuade a majority of citizens that their greatest needs will
not remain unmet.
For that very reason, the need to invest scare funds to improve
public education for future generations has never been greater. Sadly,
however, the retrenchment of funding at the state and local levels -
fueled by a mistaken and short-sighted insistence upon austerity in the
public sector - has only exacerbated the problem.
