Our Punishment-Oriented Society: Can We Change?

I spent five weeks in Europe this fall and another week in New York City, and during that time I was able to see a number of cultures and find the groove, if you will, of their societies. You'd think you couldn't learn much about a society by whirling through, say Vienna, for three days, visiting museums, palaces, marketplaces, and sitting in cafes, but if you take the time to chat with the Muslim woman that works the bakery, or the entrepreneur with a new cafe in the Jewish Quarter, or the architect who rented you the room during your stay, and so on, you can get a pretty good idea of the way the Viennese Austrians do it and why. And so it was with the dozen or so countries I visited.

To say that, by and large, European countries manage their populations far better than we do here in the U.S. is an understatement to say the least. But what would you expect from me, an avowed progressive for whom socialism is not a dirty word?

Having said that, what caught my attention this morning was an article my wife, a preschool director and teacher, discovered in the New York Times, entitled "Schools That Separate the Child From the Trauma." What was contained in it was so profound -- and from my own experience as an educator, it rang so true -- that I immediately leapt beyond it to the implications for our greater society. First, consider this:

Recently, I reported on the damaging effects that prolonged stress can have on young children who lack adequate protection from adults. Over the past 15 years, researchers have learned that highly stressful — and potentially traumatic — childhood experiences are more prevalent than previously understood. Now scientists are shedding light on the mechanisms by which they change the brain and body. These insights have far-reaching implications for schools, where it’s still standard practice to punish children for misbehavior that they often do not know how to control. This is comparable to punishing a child for having a seizure; it adds to the suffering and makes matters worse.

Thankfully, some places are getting smarter. “The hot spots in education are Massachusetts and Washington State,” explains Jane Stevens, a health and science journalist who edits ACES Too High, an excellent website containing a wealth of information about “adverse childhood experiences” (ACEs) and the effects of stress and trauma on children. “Educators understand that the behavior of children who act out is not willful or defiant, but is in fact a normal response to toxic stress. And the way to help children is to create an environment in which they feel safe and can build resilience.”

This is not a small issue in education. A great many students come to school with emotional and behavioral difficulties that pose serious barriers to their learning. In a study (pdf) of 2,100 elementary students in 10 schools in Spokane, Wash., for example, researchers from Washington State University found that more than 20 percent had two or more ACEs (experiences that include having been homeless, witnessing domestic violence or having a parent who uses drugs or is incarcerated). Compared with children with no known stresses, these kids are two to four times more likely to have problems with attendance, behavior, academics and health. As the number of ACEs increase, the students fare considerably worse on all counts.

“When kids have undergone a lot of adversity, it changes how they respond to people and challenges in their environment, including very simple things that we might not think about — like how many transitions you ask them to do before lunch,” explains Chris Blodgett, a clinical psychologist who directs the CLEAR Trauma Center at Washington State University(pdf). “For traumatized people, changes are encoded largely as danger.”

When a child violates rules or expectations, the standard response is to try to reason with the child or use punishment, he added. “What the science tells us about how stressed brains react to change, loss or threat is that children will often violate rules because they feel profoundly out of control. It’s a survival reaction and it may actually be intended to control the situation.”

The lessons learned here are clear and recommend strongly that we reform the way we deal with the behavioral issues of our most at-risk children. The implications for our greater society are profound indeed, which led me to think about key failures in our culture and compare and contrast them with what I've seen in both Europe and Japan recently and much earlier when I lived in the Netherlands and Japan.

Those societies are much less violent, incarcerate fewer citizens, have superior health outcomes for much less expenditures while having extremely vibrant economies. Americans should wonder why.

It's illuminating to view how we choose to "try to reason with the child or use punishment" when dealing with behavioral issues. And further on in the article I was struck by this passage:

One big thing is to help children become aware of their bodies, said Emily Cooley, a special-education teacher who works with Powers at his new position as principal of the Mary E. Baker Elementary School in Brockton. “One of my students has three pictures on his desk: a mail box, a snack and a bean bag chair. If this boy is not feeling in his body that he can be in class, he knows he can pick up one of the pictures and go get my mail in the office, get a crunchy snack, or take a break in the bean bag chair.” (Bean bag chairs and bubbles seem to be particularly helpful to young kids.)

“It’s not to avoid tasks,” she added. “It’s so he can calm himself and be here physically and mentally — so we can work on the academics. Little things like this can really have a big impact on children.” [emphasis mine]

 The point I draw from this is the parallel between "spare the rod, spoil the child" and the conservative/libertarian notion of what welfare does to people, as Paul Ryan so tellingly explained when he said, "...we don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives."

From Ryan's point of view, there is virtue in our punishment society. For conservatives, especially religious ones, it's a question of character. To let the child who misbehaves off the hook is to "spoil the child." To let people who lead stress-filled lives mired in poverty off the hook with food stamps, WIC, housing and home-heating credits, and unemployment insurance is to "lull able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency."

Obviously, Paul Ryan didn't grow up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, or east Oakland, California. He has no idea of the stress caused by poverty, just as many Americans can't imagine how these and other realities in the lives of children leave them at risk of being unreachable without special accommodations.

In my view, we turn our society into prisoner factories, allowing children who grow up in the stress of poverty and crime to end up under-educated, with little to no opportunity, and thus turning to a life of crime that feeds our prison system. Yet have we made an effort to offer preschool nationwide? No. Do we offer, as a right of citizenship, universal access to healthcare? No. Do we allow, according to the 2010 Census, 23 percent of American children to suffer from food insecurity? Yes. Have we allowed college tuition to rise to levels that place a college education out of reach for an increasing segment of our society? Yes. Do we instead declare this to be a character issue in which those who are born into or end up in poverty deserve their fate? Yes, as our society as a whole has done so far, with conservatives and libertarians in the lead.

How might our society do things differently? Look to the social democracies of Europe and East Asia for answers. These societies, with their universal preschool, maternity/paternity support, universal healthcare, and social safety nets, have low crime and general healthy, productive populations with stable economies. Is this an accident? No.

If there is a place to start, it would be with our children. Establish universal preschool and at all levels adopt teaching and behavior methods reflected in the NYT article quoted above. Eliminate malnutrition, especially among our our children. Good, stable, successful societies are no accident, nor are dysfunctional, failing ones. It's time to make better choices.

Remember this example of how tea partiers view what to do with the unfortunates among us?

Or what conventional conservatives think of those who end up in the "hammock" of welfare:

Finally, let's look at what the budget chief of the Republican Party thinks about his country:

I've no choice but to parse that statement because of how almost comically wrongheaded it is. First, uncomically, Ryan frames his whole statement with "The point is we are reaching a fiscal tipping point, the moral tipping point is even worse." Since he goes on to talk about takers versus makers, the only conclusion one can draw is that makers are moral and takers are immoral.

Then, he says that "We can become a society in which the net majority are takers not makers." What the hell is a "net majority?" That implies that the group of people, American society, is not a whole but a net amount. Of what? The only conclusion I can come to is that Ryan throws the "net" in there to sound wonkish. Jeez.

So, he establishes a fiscal and moral tipping point, which he considers one and the same: Certain fiscal choices must, then, be immoral. Which fiscal choices are we making or about to make that are immoral? Good question. How does he answer it?

What's this "net majority" of "takers?"  "Seventy percent of Americans get back in dollar value more than they pay in taxes." Ah ha! The takers! Are these the conservatives or the liberals? You'd think because he's a conservative he'd be talking about the liberals, since the moral divide by his rhetoric would dictate that the moral people would be conservatives who aspire to be makers and the liberals who either aspire to be takers or to be the enablers of the takers.

In the course of the next few sentences, unfortunately for Ryan, he gets it all jumbled up:

"The good news is that survey after survey, poll after poll, still show that we're a center-right country, seventy-thirty."

"Seventy percent of Americans want the American Dream."

"Only thirty percent want the welfare state."

For a policy wonk (those who've looked at his budget proposals, none of which has ever added up, know better), his math really, really doesn't work. And if his math doesn't work, then what is he really trying to say? Here's his math:

Seventy percent of Americans are takers. Thirty-seventy is the makers-versus-takers split.

Our center-right country is seventy-thirty, with seventy percent believing in the American Dream, by which he must mean the responsible, hardworking conservatives.

By Paul Ryan's math, however, forty percent of the conservatives are takers, which surpasses the thirty percent of takers that are liberal. Who knew?? Certainly not Paul Ryan.

Here's Paul Ryan's real math: When you combine his "hammock" statement with his "moral tipping point" statement it adds up to this: It's the poor's fault that the rest of us can't have more shiny new objects, and it's the liberals' fault that forty percent of conservatives are takers.

What is he really talking about? What are these shiny new objects? What are Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, any conservative or libertarian for that matter, talking about? Certainly not universal preschool, or universal healthcare, or unfettered access to higher education. That's for the makers, not the takers.

Saturday Night Music

I always enjoy this one. Here's a great version of Alejandro Escovedo's "Always a Friend," this time with the Boss himself:

Happy Saturday.

Europe and the Great Recession

Paul Krugman developed this chart comparing how Europe has fared so far in the Great Recession with how it fared in the Great Depression of the 1930s. The comparison is grim:

This tracks nearly the first six years, from the start of the economic downturn until today.

The takeaway is that the European powers that be, with their forced austerity, have botched this recovery. What will history call this era? We don't know yet.

McDonald's Knows What American Workers Need -- It Just Doesn't Want to Provide It

McDonald's and America working together: Wages + food stamps = a living!

McDonald's, one of the most successful American brands in history, has developed a very successful business model to sustain it: make cheap but comfortable food -- a perfect balance of salt, fat, and sugar -- and vastly underpay your workers to deliver it. Result? Bulging profits and soaring stock prices.

That doesn't mean that McDonald's doesn't think its workers don't require more income to live with basic dignity, it just means that its business model demands that it not be the one to provide it. From a New York Times article on Switzerland's flirtation with a guaranteed income for its citizens:

The advocacy group Low Pay Is Not OK posted a phone call, recorded by a 10-year McDonald’s veteran, Nancy Salgado, when she contacted the company’s “McResource” help line. The operator told Salgado that she could qualify for food stamps and home heating assistance, while also suggesting some area food banks — impressively, she knew to recommend these services without even asking about Salgado’s wage ($8.25 an hour), though she was aware Salgado worked full time. The company earned $5.5 billion in net profits last year, and appears to take for granted that many of its employees will be on the dole.

Absurd as a minimum income might seem to bootstrapping Americans, one already exists in a way — McDonald’s knows it. [...]

McDonald's is not alone in adopting this approach, which amounts to taxpayers underwriting their profit margins. Much of the restaurant, hospitality, and retail industries thrive on this model. The only surprise here is that conservatives tolerate this wholesale theft of public moneys.

Oh, wait, conservatives have attacked this formula: massive cuts to food stamps and welfare programs. Problem solved.

Yes, Mary Landrieu's Plan Is a Winner

Louisiana's Mary Landrieu

I've been steamed at how misinterpreting Barack Obama's message on keeping your healthcare policy if you liked it has been a successful political misinformation gambit for conservatives and a convenient bash-the-president message for mainstream media, which is predisposed to knock liberal concepts down (it's a knee-jerk reaction, they can't help it). So, when I first heard Mary Landrieu's proposal all I could do was, well, steam on.

But Marcos over at Daily Kos gets it right in supporting Landrieu's plan to let people keep their lousy plans if they really want to (but insurance companies can't issue new lousy ones):

Right now, the blame is being put on Obama and the Democrats. This bill would turn things around and put the pressure exactly where it belongs: on insurance companies and obstructionist Republicans.

Republicans are acting as if these insurance cancellations are the worst thing since Hitler. Well, put them on the spot: Are they really interested in mitigating the law's unintended injustices (whether real or perceived), or do they merely want to undermine its implementation for sabotage purposes?

We know the answer, of course. Landrieu's bill doesn't have a prayer of passing. Republicans will obstruct it every step of the way. But instead of having Obama taking away your insurance, we'll reverse the equation: It'll now be Republicans defending the ability of insurance companies to cancel those policies.

Heading into 2014, that may be the difference between retaining the political high ground, or facing another 2010. Landrieu's gambit is genius.

Marcos is often more intrigued by political victories than policy ones, even though they're regularly interchangeable. But here with the Landrieu plan, political victory may lead to policy victory, in that the political gambit buys time for a policy victory to come to fruition.

I say, go for it, Democratic Party.

Conjugating Richard Cohen After Most Recent Horrible Column

Here's how I conjugate Richard Cohen's future as a columnist for the Washington Post:

Richard Cohen should go

Richard Cohen should have gone

Richard Cohen shall have gone

But...

Richard Cohen will go

...is not a given.

Ta-Nehisi Coates explains the case.

Josh Marshall amplifies:

The issue isn't that Cohen is a racist. It's that he holds his position of vast influence while living in some older white man's cocoon, liberalish in a way but not much, in which he's either indifferent or unconcerned with the actual America around him and routinely jumps at the chance to normalize and legitimize retrograde views about race. The problem with the article isn't racism but inaccuracy, both descriptive and moral. And the complacent inaccuracy makes it worthy of criticism and contempt. People who have physical revulsion at interracial couples aren't "cultural conservatives"; they're racists. These attitudes about race are not conventional. Most people recognize them as racist and unacceptable in our society today.

I will now and forever have a gag reflex when I see Richard Cohen's face on the Op-Ed page of the Gaggington Post, see Weymouth, Katerine.

Yuk.

Does anyone remember this?

Or maybe this?

Or this?

Whaddya say, Cohen, is your time at hand? After this?

Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled—about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York—a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts—but not all—of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.

Are we finally there with this nonsense? Jeez, I hope so.

American Presidents: Which Ones Abused Their Power?

I caught a snippet of a recent Marcy Wheeler blog post -- more on that later -- that spoke of the causes of potential decline of American hegemony, but what it awakened in me was a filter for judging Barack Obama's ever-shifting legacy.

This led me to review the legacy of recent presidents, say, going back to Truman, which includes those presidents in my lifetime. I'm not sure I know enough about each on the list, but it's a good line, so let's draw it.

Okay, let's back up and look at Barack Obama. Currently he's suffering a sharp drop in favorability ratings, brought on mostly by the disastrous rollout of his signature healthcare act, but I suppose also because of the on-going NSA scandal. I'm not ready to judge him on the healthcare rollout because it's very common for the U.S. to fail massively when attempting a new initiative, especially if large IT systems are involved.

So, looking rather at a simple frame of "abuse of power," how would we judge recent presidencies? Who has abused presidential power? For simplicity, let's assume that, if it happened on their watch, they're guilty.

• Barack Obama: Yes.
• George W. Bush: Yes.
• Bill Clinton: No.
• George H. W. Bush: No.
• Ronald Reagan: Yes.
• Jimmy Carter: No.
• Gerald Ford: No.
• Richard Nixon: Yes.
• Lyndon Johnson: Yes.
• John Kennedy: No.
• Dwight Eisenhower: No.
• Harry Truman: No.

Twelve presidents, five guilty of presidential abuse, seven not. How did I arrive at this?

• Barack Obama: NSA, Guantanamo.
• George W. Bush: NSA, Guantanamo, Iraq, torture, corrupt Dept. of Justice.
• Ronald Reagan: CIA, Iran-Contra, Central American adventurism, Granada.
• Richard Nixon: Vietnam, Cambodia, CIA, FBI, Watergate.
• Lyndon Johnson: Vietnam (Tonkin Gulf).

John Kennedy might deserve an honorable mention because of the assassination of Diem in Vietnam, but I don't know off-hand the provenance of that evil deed.

In my view, the most corrupt presidencies have been Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush because their abuse of power was so extensive. Ronald Reagan's role in Iran-Contra was well-insulated and his legacy barely includes it, but I never bought that. It was successful PR, but that's all it was. Let's assume he knew exactly what was going on, and let's face it, it was a huge violation of U.S. law.

Nixon, well, everyone agrees there. As for George W. Bush, his presidency is a special case, being singled out as perhaps the most abusive. Between CIA black ops, black sites, torture, corruption of American law -- with the cooperation of the DOJ -- creation and development of Guantanamo as a law-free zone of massive evasion of both federal and international law, and, well, how far do I need to go? Bush/Cheney wreaked much havoc on our international reputation. And the essential infrastructure of our domestic and international surveillance system was built at their direction.

Here is where we come to Barack Obama, and here is where the fact that the American presidency does not easily relinquish powers once obtained has dealt a devastating blow to an otherwise laudatory American president. Simply put, Barack Obama inherited a growing surveillance state from George W. Bush and not only didn't control it but allowed it to expand, both domestically and internationally.

That fact alone is devastating, both to Barack Obama's legacy and America's international reputation. It's possible -- we can't know this now -- that the NSA "problem" gets ameliorated over the last years of the Obama presidency or simply fades from memory, like Reagan's amorphous involvement in Iran-Contra. Any maybe we patch up our relationships with our allies. But people with memories -- let's call them historians -- may not be so kind.

Count me, for now, among them. Abuse of presidential power has stained Barack Obama's legacy. He has a chance to clean it up in his last few years. But knowing how begrudgingly presidents relinquish an acquired power, I'm not holding my breath.

Footnote. One factor should be noted, and that's the effect of institutional momentum. Barack Obama may step into the presidency only to find that a powerful institution has established ways of "how we do things here" that he didn't anticipate. I'm not saying that men in black suits sit a president down and tutor him in the ways of the world, but institutions do tend to maintain themselves as leaders come and go. Bush/Cheney are an example of leaders who broke the mold, whereas as Obama may be an example of a mold breaking a leader. How one decides this, however, may depend on one's point of view.

There are factors, too, that presidents don't control. Obama did want to close Guantanamo, but a Congress controlled by his own party shut him down by not allowing funding for resettlement of prisoners to the mainland. So there's that to consider. Still, overall, it comes down to the leader. A Lyndon Johnson would have gotten Guantanamo closed. But Johnson perpetrated the Tonkin Gulf incident to create -- like Bush's WMDs -- a case for war. Johnson's forcefulness got him what he wanted and his diminished legacy is the price he'll forever pay for it, just as Bush will never escape his false WMD claim.

Also, I don't classify the use of drones as a presidential abuse of power. Military tactics in an age of asymmetric warfare may be viewed with distaste and even horror, but that doesn't necessarily criminalize them, regardless of one's abhorrence of military aggression. (Note: I'm a pacifist, but that doesn't mean the new realities surrounding asymmetric warfare shouldn't or can't affect our notions of right and wrong.)

Finally, one might have noticed that "protecting moneyed interests" was not included in the list of presidential abuses. Why? Well, when did presidents, with the possible exception of Teddy Roosevelt and Howard Taft, not protect the wealthy?