. . . because much of the content relates both to Washington, D.C., and "outside the beltway" -- the heartland, specifically Iowa -- and because after going from Iowa to Washington via Texas and California I subsequently returned, From DC 2 Iowa.
April 9, 2012, 4:30 a.m., plus April 18, 2012, Addendum
Giving TIFs the Sniff Test
The following op ed column appeared in this morning's [April 9, 2012] Iowa City Press-Citizen. Its reproduction in this blog enables the addition of the supporting source material in the form of endnotes,, plus a sampling of prior blog entries about TIFs.
[April 18: For some subsequent developments regarding this TIF, sufficiently off-putting to cause two members of the "I've never seen a TIF I didn't like" City Council to vote against it, see "Addendum," below.]
"Moen TIF Proposal Just Doesn't Pass the 'Sniff Test'" Nicholas Johnson Iowa City Press-Citizen April 5, 2012, p. A7
As Ronald Reagan would say, “There you go again.”[1]
Sadly, our seven recovering TIF-aholic[2] City Councilors have fallen off the wagon.
Fifty years ago tax increment financing, or TIFs, were designed to encourage urban renewal of blighted areas.[3] Is that how you’d describe the Ped Mall? Should they be used to enrich the developers of millionaires’ high-rise condos?[4]
My sources regarding the latest TIF shenanigans? Like the 1930s Will Rogers, “All I know is what I read in the papers.”[5]
The stories indicate this Mark Moen deal is even worse than a TIF. Like other TIFs, it shifts tax revenue away from schools and Johnson County,[6] and it’s unfair to the competing landlords without TIFs.[7]
So why worse? It’s a direct payment to Moen before construction of his $10 million, 14-story tower; a “forgivable loan.”[8] Forgive a $2.5 million loan?! It’s reminiscent of MidAmerican Energy’s demand ratepayers pay in advance for a nuclear power plant.[9]
Why no bank loan? Banks charge high interest and don’t recite the Lord’s Prayer about loan forgiveness.[10] You can’t blame Moen for preferring the Municipal Bank of Iowa City.
Where’s the money coming from? The City will sell municipal bonds. Because bondholders’ interest isn’t taxable, cities can pay them low interest. Even so, 18 years from now, we taxpayers will have paid $3.8 million (including interest) for our Council’s generosity.[11]
Iowa bankers complain about credit unions’ unfair competitive advantage.[12] (Banks pay taxes; credit unions don’t.) Why the bankers’ silence about this tax-free competitor?
Iowa legislators, like most Americans, are focused on “the economy,” special interests’ abuses, and the wisest use of taxpayers’ dollars. Bailouts, subsidies, corporate welfare, earmarks – and TIFs – are not in favor.
It turns out Iowa’s TIF practices are among the nation’s worst.[13] Reforms have been proposed and debated.[14] The ugly facts about TIFs and abuses are being revealed by ever-increasing numbers of legislators, economists, academics and journalists.[15]
So why does our City Council pick this of all moments to spit in their eye, rather than join the reform movement? How did the most urgent need for its next $3.8 million become a gift to Moen for his latest development?
Most Council members are likeable and even admirable, as is Mark Moen. All are creatively thoughtful about our downtown. But I have neither been asked nor volunteered to invest in his personal projects, and don’t appreciate the City Council forcing me to do so.
Why is this a good investment for taxpayers? Apparently it wasn’t a good investment for the combined resources of Moen, family and friends, bankers, and other potential investors sitting on cash and looking for returns.[16] And if it was a good investment for them, why do they need the TIF?[17] Just because he says so?[18]
Why doesn’t he build a 10- instead of 14-story tower, structurally strong enough to add the top floors later, when and if it produces the necessary profits? Or, since we’re paying for one-fourth of the tower, have the City own those floors?
Recipients of TIFs understandably think they are a nifty idea.[19] They argue TIFs pay for themselves with increased taxes later. But in this case the City has agreed the $10 million building may be assessed for property taxes as low as $5.76 million.[20]
Can the Council guarantee the tower’s economic success? That it wouldn’t be built without the TIF?[21] That taxpayers’ interests are protected if it fails, or Moen becomes bankrupt?
So far, this use of taxpayers’ money offers more questions than answers. _______________ Nicholas Johnson teaches at the University of Iowa College of Law. For more TIF commentary and resources see FromDC2Iowa.blogspot.com.
2. Editorial, "Rein In Speculative TIFs,"The Gazette, April 1, 2012 (hereafter "Editorial") ("Iowa's addiction to TIFs has 'seriously distorted' the property tax system" (emphasis supplied)); Jennifer Hemmingsen, "Time to Rein In TIF Shell Game,"The Gazette, April 1, 2012 (hereafter "Hemmingsen") ("This TIF addiction puts the squeeze on taxpayers outside TIF districts, and on county governments and school districts frozen out of the revenue stream.")
3. "The Iowa Picture: Tax Increment Financing; Overdue for Reform After All These Years,"Iowa Fiscal Partnership, March 29, 2012 (hereafter "The Iowa Picture") ("What is TIF? Originally a product of the push for urban renewal in the 1950s and ’60s, tax-increment financing (TIF) was designed to facilitate redevelopment of blighted areas in cities.")
5. "Will Rogers," wikipedia.com. Hopefully, these Endnotes will at least provide some sense of when, where, and in which papers I came to "know" what's in this op ed column.
6. "Why We Need Serious TIF Reform, an Iowa Fiscal Partnership Backgrounder," March 29, 2012 (hereafter "Backgrounder") ("Tax shifting is an integral part of TIF. When cities are allowed to divert taxes from overlying entities — school districts, community colleges, transit authorities, the county — those entities are forced to raise taxes to make up for the lost revenue from the increment. Residents of those broader jurisdictions — inside and outside the city — thus pay higher taxes."); Peter Fisher, "Tax Increment Financing: A Case Study of Johnson County," Iowa Fiscal Partnership, November 21, 2011 (hereafter "Fisher"); "Hemmingsen" ("This TIF addiction puts the squeeze on taxpayers outside TIF districts, and on county governments and school districts frozen out of the revenue stream. It’s a growing burden: In 2002, the impact of TIF on state school aid was $5.2 million, according to [Iowa State economist David] Swenson. In 2012, it was $46.8 million.").
7. For a compelling example of the impact of TIFs on the competitors who don't receive them, see the comments of the owners of Iowa City's Alexis Park Inn, contained in "Call the Cops, Robbery in Progress," April 24, 2008.
8. "Bannow" ("Tax increment financing usually provides property tax abatement after development has occurred. However, in this case, the TIF will be given in the form of an upfront, forgivable loan."); Gregg Hennigan, "Iowa City Approves $2.5 Million Loan for High-Rise Building; The $10.7 Million Building is to Have Retail Space, Offices, condominiums and Apartments,"The Gazette, April 4, 2012, p. A2 (hereafter "Hennigan") ("The City Council voted 6-0 Tuesday night to approve a $2.5 million tax increment financing agreement with developer Marc Moen for a 14-story structure he plans to build on the Pedestrian Mall. . . . The $2.5 million will be given as a forgivable loan at the start of the project.")
9. Perry Beeman, "Heated battle over nuclear plant nears critical mass,"Des Moines Register, March 21, 2012 ("House File 561 would allow the investor-owned utility to do something it has not done with any other power plant: charge ratepayers for a plant before it’s constructed.")
10. Matthew 6:9-13, New International Version of the Bible, BibleGateway.com:
9 “This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, 10 your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us today our daily bread. 12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And lead us not into temptation,[a] but deliver us from the evil one.'"
11. "Hennigan" ("The city will sell bonds to cover the cost, which Finance Director Kevin O’Malley estimated at closer to $3.8 million when interest is included. It will take an estimated 18 years to repay the debt."), and "Municipal Bonds," wikipedia.org ("In the United States, interest income received by holders of municipal bonds is often exempt from the federal income tax and from the income tax of the state in which they are issued . . ..").
12. “Credit Union Regulation,” American Bankers Association (within ABA Issues Index/Credit Unions (“Credit unions are a $951 billion industry. Over the next five years, the credit union tax exemption will cost the federal government nearly $8 billion.”)
13. Rod Boshart, "Working group hopeful of TIF reform; Coralville Von Maur deal sparked legislative look,"The Gazette, March 28, 2012 (hereafter "Boshart") ("Rep. Tom Sands, R-Wapello, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said there have been mounting concerns that Iowa has some of the nation’s most lenient TIF provisions with less oversight than other parts of the country. . . . 'TIF has got to be addressed,' he said. 'There are some that are wanting to do very little, but it’s real hard for them to defend the abuses of TIF that some cities are using right now. I think if we don’t get it under control, the abuses will continue to grow . . .."); "The Iowa Picture: Tax-Increment Financing; Overdue for Reform After All These Years, Iowa Fiscal Partnership, Updated March 29, 2012 ("[I]n the 1980s, when Iowa cities were allowed to start using TIF for economic development, broadly defined [no] longer did there need to be a finding of blight or decline to implement a TIF district. Rather, city officials could determine it was necessary for economic development. Even then, the presumption remained that a public subsidy of a project under TIF would only be used if a worthy development, carrying a public benefit, could not be expected to occur without it. It was to be a true incentive. Loosely written law has permitted these standards to lapse. The use of TIF in Iowa has expanded well beyond its intended purposes, often going against the principles that are meant to justify it.").
14. "Editorial" ("a bipartisan House-Senate working group is studying Iowa’s tax increment financing rules"); "Boshart" ("A bipartisan House-Senate working group is hoping to craft reforms to the state’s tax increment financing system that can win legislative approval this session, group leaders said Monday [March 26, 2012].").
16. "O'Leary" ("The developer is asking for $2.5 million in TIF assistance in the form of a forgivable loan provided by the city before the project starts. Moen would use the money to leverage private financing . . ..").
17. "Hennigan" ("Critics . . . argue a TIF is often unnecessary for a project to move forward — and if it is needed, then the project is not viable on its own.").
18. "O'Leary" ("Moen said the city’s financial assistance is 'absolutely critical' for the new project."); "Hennigan" ("Moen has said the project would not happen without the financial assistance . . ..").
19. "O'Leary" ("'I think Iowa City’s use of TIF is a model of how TIF is intended to use, and has been applauded by everybody,' Moen said."); "Bannow" ("Although Moen has been critical of Coralville’s use of TIF, he said this project [his new tower proposal] represents responsible use, as was the $6 million in TIF that was given to Plaza Towers."); "Hermiston" ("Local developers Marc Moen and Kevin Digmann said TIF, when used responsibly, is a valuable tool, pointing to the Plaza Tower . . . made possible through TIF use.").
20. "Hennigan" ("The agreement also requires the property . . . to have [a] minimum assessed [value] of $5.76 million . . ..").
21. "Hennigan" ("Critics also argue a TIF is often unnecessary for a project to move forward . . .."); "Editorial" ("[M]ost of the state's TIF activity has been use[d] to underwrite commercial and retail development, according to Iowa State University economist David Swenson's research. Much of that development would have happened anyway, Swenson said."); "Backgrounder" ("TIF Reforms . . . State law also should require that TIF funds be used only when necessary"); "Hermiston" ("Many also spoke in favor of requiring TIF projects to undergo a 'but-for analysis' that would prove the project could not go forward without TIF funding.'The but-for measure is the key,' [Johnson County] Supervisor Rod Sullivan said. 'We obviously haven’t been able to get folks to do that analysis locally. I think we need, somehow, we need somebody to play referee. There has to be some kind of but-for analysis.'").
__________
Sampling of Prior TIF Op Ed Columns and Blog Entries From 2011
Remember the old line, "Gravity. It's not just a good idea, it's the law"? On April 17 Chris Gordon reminded us that "Limiting TIFs to precise public purposes is not just a good idea, that also is the law." Chris Gordon, "No Reason for City to Pitch In On New Downtown Tower,"Iowa City Press-Citizen," April 17, 2012, p. A7.
He notes that, among many other Iowa Code provisions that appear to be violated by this TIF (some violating the letter of the law, all violating its spirit), "First, Iowa Code 403.5.4 (1) provides that local urban renewal plans that propose residential redevelopment must show that there is a shortage of housing, that existing housing is so deficient as to be a threat to the public welfare, or that land is needed for low-income housing. The City-University Urban Renewal Plan does none of this. Indeed, the detailed objectives for the sub-areas of the plan make no mention of the need for residential development."
I offer no independent "legal opinion" regarding the validity of Gordon's assertions, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which because I haven't done the legal research into the statutory language, the legislative history, and the court interpretations. But it does seem to me there is enough smoke billowing from his campfire that it warrants some lawyer doing so.
The Iowa City Council has approved a revision to developer Marc Moen’s 14-story building that would include inserted balconies and an overhanging cantilever design [-- a revision] that “substantially deviates” from the concept presented in the original agreement . . . a cantilever design that would include a 4-foot overhang . . . for the top 13 floors. Inverted balconies would begin on the fifth floor. The roughly 5,600 square feet that would be added [the equivalent of two or three additional houses] . . . would increase the assessed taxable value of the structure by an estimated $1.5 million . . .. Moen noted that . . . the new design would include additional costs . . ..
Why is this not proof that he never needed the TIF in the first place -- even if it was legal, which Gordon suggests it wasn't -- and even if the Council had explained why it fails to trigger any of the dozen categories of reasons why TIFs are a bad idea -- which the Council refused to do (because, of course, it couldn't)? (I am assuming the Council has not provided Moen even more taxpayers' money to cover the "additional costs" of these revisions.) It looks to me like he had enough money available to build the building he first proposed, but wanted what would be (to his aesthetic tastes) a more attractive building that would require, that's right, a $2.5 million TIF. (Given that the City may tax him on approximately half the value of the building, it is not unreasonable to project that the "$1.5 million" in additional assessed value represents about $2.5 million in additional actual value.)
Mayor Matt Hayek and Council Member Jim Throgmorton voted against the revision. Why? It turns out that this little "revision" also involves, in effect, a gift of public property (use of a "public right of way") to Moen that was not originally contemplated, and will stand as a precedent for future developers -- kind of like giving downtown restaurant owners the opportunity to put tables and chairs on the public sidewalk to personally profit from more customers. "Hayek and Councilor Rick Dobyns questioned whether approving the use of the overhang, which would encroach over the Dubuque Street and Black Hawk Mini-Park sides of the tower, would create a precedent for future developers to request the same. 'If we do this, the council’s got to be comfortable with what could be requests to cantilevers in the public right of way on other buildings,' Hayek said . . .."
So far as the newspaper story reveals, the Council made no effort to put a dollar value on this additional gift of public property -- a little bonus on top of the taxpayers' future re-payment of $3.8 million already committed.
The U High Idea and the Price of Educational Success
The Iowa Board of Regents wants to close the University of Northern Iowa's Price Lab School in Cedar Falls.
Local citizens have filed suit to delay the decision, arguing that the Board does not have legal authority to close it. Jeff Reinitz, "UPDATE: Lawsuit seeks to overturn Price Lab closure,"WCF Courier, March 27, 2012 ("A group of educators, parents and residents is asking the court to overturn the Iowa Board of Regents decision to close Malcolm Price Lab School as part of budget cuts last month."). Gregg Hennegan, "Confusion reigns over legal authority to close Price Lab; Over 2,000 pages were released under an open-records request by The Gazette, KCRG-TV9 and the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier,"The Gazette, March 29, 2012, p. A1 ("Part of the confusion on the issue is that two code sections are in play. Chapter 265 deals with laboratory schools. Another, 256G, calls for a research and development school housed in Price Lab. Democratic state senators and representatives from Black Hawk County argue that Price Lab must exist to be the location for the research and development school. The lawsuit says that because the Board of Regents was not granted the legislative authority to establish a research and development school, it does not have the power to “disestablish” the school.")
The closure is even more sad and ironic given UNI's proud history as a teacher training institution: Iowa State Normal School, 1876–1909; Iowa State Teachers College, 1909–1961 (the name by which I knew it as a boy); State College of Iowa, 1961–1967; and, finally, the University of Northern Iowa, from 1967 to the present.
The story reminded me of the commencement address I delivered June 1, 1972, on the occasion of the closing of the University of Iowa's University Elementary and High School. The full text of the transcript of those extemporaneous remarks are here. I was an FCC commissioner at the time, and returned to my home, and the school that had been my home for 13 years, to try to provide a bit of levity on that very sad occasion.
You'll have to go to the source, linked above, for the levity. What's excerpted below is the portion addressing the value of such schools.
I cannot know now about the Price school, as I did not know on that occasion about U High, the degree to which an individual experimental school is living up to its potential, its mission, and meeting its goals.
The comic, Lewis Black, has a routine regarding the ozone hole. Angrily he shouts, "We've got rockets. We've got Saran Wrap. Fix it!!" That's the way I feel about experimental schools. I don't know that there is anything wrong with the Price school. I haven't heard that there is. But if there is, "Fix it!!" Don't close it.
Because what I am willing to contend I do know -- now reinforced with a term as school board member in Iowa City -- is that the idea of experimental schools is as sound now as it ever was. They deserve more support, not less, and certainly do not deserve to be closed.
Here, then, are excerpts from my thoughts about that idea, from the remarks I subsequently titled, "The Last Commencement Address: The U High Idea" -- as applicable today to the "Price Idea" as they were then to U High:
How do you measure, how do you describe, an institution like the University Schools?
"We spent less on the University Schools throughout all those years, in fifty-seven years, than what was spent on the single set of video tapes that we know as 'Sesame Street.'"
It's really not much at all in terms of money--at least not the kinds of money I've been accustomed to administering the last few years.
The total budget for all of the fifty-seven years of the school's existence--based on a doctoral dissertation I looked at--I project to be about six million dollars. Six million dollars for the whole fifty-seven years is approximately twenty percent of the FCC's budget for one year.
And the FCC's budget is one one-hundredth of one percent of the federal budget. We spent less on the University Schools throughout all those years, in fifty-seven years, than what was spent creating the single set of video tapes that we know as "Sesame Street."
Nor is the school much in terms of land and buildings. We have now returned this evening--fifty-seven years later--to a spot just across the yard from where the school was originally. And then in the 1920's it moved down the street to where you all went to school. We still don't have an auditorium. We have to gather at McBride Hall for our last commencement.
No, I think an institution like U High is very difficult to program on a computer or enter on a balance sheet, because basically it's an idea--an idea and the people who shared that idea and participated in it.
[omission]
"The only way to think in terms of the impact of an institution like this is in terms of the people whose lives it has affected, and the ripples it produces throughout the rest of society."
And we shouldn't forget ourselves, I suppose, the alumni of U High, a group that now numbers about twenty-five hundred, including you as of this evening.
Because the only way to think in terms of the impact of an institution like this is in terms of the people whose lives it has affected, and the ripples it produces throughout the rest of society. The effect of U High is felt whenever one of its former staff members goes elsewhere and begins training professors, who teach teachers who teach students. Because in that way his or her influence ultimately spreads a thousand times beyond what it was in terms of a handful of students who were privileged actually to be in their classroom for a semester or so. There are hundreds of of former U High staff, students, and student teachers, who are today university presidents and deans of schools of education, professors and teachers and officials of educational institutions and associations--officials of one kind or another.
The effect of U High has been felt not only through people, but also in terms of the teaching materials and new teaching methods and texts that have been evolved here.
Indeed, I think it's somewhat ironic that U High really began at the behest of the President of the University, Walter Jessup, because of the difficulty he was running into in trying to do some educational experimenting in the public schools. They wouldn't let him do it the way he wanted to do it. And his reaction was very much like that of Howard Hughes. You'll recall Howard Hughes was once staying in a hotel out in Las Vegas and he didn't like the service, so he just bought the hotel. Well, that's kind of what President Jessup did, as Emil Trot recalls it, who was one of U High's first students. He said, "If that's the way you fellows are going to be, all right, I'll just start my own school." And he did.
"The accepted methods of teaching today all had to begin at some time, and in some place; as often as not, when you track it back, it turns out that the place was U High and the time was about twenty years before the ideas were believed to be safe enough to try in the public schools."
Because what President Jessup realized, as I think almost anybody knows who has ever had to deal with large bureaucratic institutions--whether it's the military, or school systems, corporations, government agencies, whatever it is --a television network--is that it's not really a place where genuine creativity and intellectual activity can take place. People who are hired to do a job, to carry out a mission which they do not control, may be superb at what it is they've been hired to do, but they simply don't have the time, the talent or the temperament to expend a lot of effort in challenging the basic assumptions of their own institution.
* The concept of speed reading, which enjoyed a boom nationally in the late 1950's and early 60's, was first tried out on us by Dr. Jim Stroud in the 1940's. I doubt that the testing of such a radical experiment would have been approved by any school board in the nation at that time.
* It was the staff of U High that developed comprehensive curriculum guides in the late 1930's and 1940's that could not be developed within the public school system within the state of Iowa, and guides which were still valued by teachers in and out of the state some thirty years later.
* The concept of interdisciplinary team teaching was evolving in the 1920's and 1930's at U High some twenty years before it became widespread throughout the schools of the nation.
* The work of Dr. Ralph Ojeman in giving junior high school students an awareness of basic psychology was carried out at U High in the 1940's.
* Iowa has pioneered in the field of testing and many of those tests were tested first at U High. This is now one of Iowa City's major industries, as you may know.
The list goes on and on and on:
* foreign language teaching in grade school,
* techniques in music instruction,
* research in physical education (I saw the other day that Lou Alley had written an article or speech about techniques of physical education in the year 2000--so we're still looking ahead in that field),
* new curricula for teaching the sciences,
* innovation in teaching spelling to grade school pupils was done by Ernest Horn here,
* English in high school (Dr. Carpenter's great efforts),
* and new approaches to mathematics by Dr. Price and others.
And so on and so on. The accepted methods of teaching today all had to begin at some time, and in some place; as often as not, when you track it back, it turns out that the place was U High and the time was about twenty years before the ideas were believed to be safe enough to try in the public schools.
The trouble with U High was that it was all done naturally and relatively quietly. U High has never had an Office of Public Information, it never hired a public relations firm, and, to my knowledge, no principal ever called a press conference. And it was that natural sense of concern and commitment, of excitement and adventure about life and about education, that was naturally passed on by the permanent staff of U High to us, to the student teachers and to the junior staff.
Kozol describes in a book called Death at an Early Age how some public schools, almost sadistically, drive any creativity and curiosity and sense of individual worth and development out of their wards.
My wife, who attended the University Schools with me, has told me similar stories over the years about things she has witnessed in public schools where she has taught in Virginia, California, Texas, the District of Columbia.
My own experience is limited to that of a parent; but I must say it has often left me in a state of despair about the quality of education offered my own children by public schools that often brag of their national superiority.
I don't mean to suggest that there aren't good public school teachers. Of course there are. There are a great many who are competent, who are concerned--many more than are ever recognized or thanked or adequately compensated. But I think they all feel the oppression of a bureaucratic system of which they are a part, and none can really feel that he or she is a part of an exciting adventure at the frontiers of educational innovation. Whatever the public schools may be, they are not that.
Even if one is willing to concede that no justification can be offered for providing an elitist education to a privileged few Iowa boys and girls who attend the schools as students, it seems to me that teachers--at some point in their career, and for however short a time--ought to have been exposed to such a faculty and student body.
"Somewhere, in the seventy-billion-dollar, barnacle-encrusted, bureaucratic industry that goes by the name of 'Education,' somewhere in amongst the concrete buildings and the computers and the layers of administrators, somebody better be watching to make sure that the torch of learning has not gone out entirely. If that is not to be the University of Iowa, so be it. . . . But as anybody knows who has tried to keep a camp fire going all night without a match, you can start it up again by blowing on one red hot coal, but once you are left with nothing but ashes you're just going to be blowing dirt into your face and into the darkness."
Somewhere, in the seventy-billion-dollar, barnacle-encrusted, bureaucratic industry that goes by the name of "Education," somewhere in amongst the concrete buildings and the computers and the layers of administrators, somebody better be watching to make sure that the torch of learning has not gone out entirely.
If that is not to be the University of Iowa, so be it. We certainly have lots of company. Lab schools are closed all over the land. It's a respectable position.
But as anybody knows who has tried to keep a camp fire going all night without a match, you can start it up again by blowing on one red hot coal, but once you are left with nothing but ashes you're just going to be blowing dirt into your face and into the darkness.
I don't for a moment think that a lab school can single-handedly reform public education, but it can help.
"School is where you learn about freedom and democratic or popular control. It's the last time you'll hear it mentioned, let alone practiced. . . . Teachers encourage you to challenge assumptions, to ask basic questions. Employers, you will find, fire you when you do."
The fundamental problem, of course, as you will soon discover, is that there is a basic conflict between the values of genuine education that you have been taught at University High School, and the values of the corporate state into which you are now--or in a few years--going to move.
* School is where you learn about freedom and democratic or popular control. It's the last time you'll hear it mentioned, let alone practiced.
* Learning gives you a sense of your unique, individual worth. But your value to the economy--as a consumer and an employee--is not as an individual, but as a predictable piece in a mass merchandised economy (as a consumer), and as a reliable machine in an industrial state (as an employee).
* As your education progresses, you are given more and more choice and control over selecting your own activities and goals. This is called maturity. Once you graduate, however, you are expected merely to execute predefined goals under the close direction of others. You have virtually no control or choice over what you produce, how you produce it, or what it's used for.
* Teachers encourage you to challenge assumptions, to ask basic questions. Employers, you will find, fire you when you do. Paul Goodman has described your dilemma under the descriptive title, Growing Up Absurd. If you haven't read it, you might enjoy it.
Two alternatives are basically available, neither of which do I find very acceptable.
One is to simply drop out. John Prine has a delightful little song in which he puts that bit of advice with the line, "Blow up your TV"--which always delighted me for a starter--"Blow up your TV/Throw away your paper/ Move to the country/ And build you a home." Well, that's not really bad advice, but it's not really going to solve the problem either, because for most of us, at least, it's not very practical.
Now another solution is to try to modify the educational system, and, as Kozol and my wife will tell you, that now appears to be the most widely accepted solution. If we could only train young people in school to really like Barbie dolls, motel decor, neon signs along suburban highway shopping centers, television programs, Detroit cars, hair spray, and Coca Cola, then they won't be so frustrated when they get out.
I saw a film the other day about how they do it in South Africa. It's very similar to our system. It's the way in which they sustain apartheid there. Essential to the state of society upon which the life and economy of that nation is based, is the enforced ignorance of its blacks. They are simply not permitted to see the swimming pools, and tennis courts and schools that their labor, and misery, support.
No, I don't really think that the answer lies in seeing to it that no one in our society--students or student teachers--ever get a glimpse of what a subculture of truly dedicated free minds and educational researchers might look like. I don't think keeping people from that vision is going to solve the problem.
I think they should be given that spark, that vision, that dream, against which to measure their daily lives. John Gardner, whose two books, Excellence and Self Renewal, may very well be among the most important of the Twentieth Century, has said that a nation that does not value excellence in its plumbers as well as its philosophers will find that neither its pipes nor its theories hold water.
No, I believe it is work that must change, not quality education.
The work place is today, as it was in the time when Brandeis described it, the place where we have the greatest abridgment of citizens' rights.
Workers and consumers, you and I, simply must be permitted to exercise greater control over the products, as well as the means, of production. And gradually, in some places in this country and others, that principle is being extended. Because a democracy simply cannot survive when it forces mature people to spend their lives dying in their jobs. We cannot give people the right to grow, and question, exercise discretion, and control their activities for only the twelve years of their lives that they are in school--and that only if they are lucky.
"A citizen cannot be repressed and treated as a machine subject to authoritarian control eight hours a day all year long and then suddenly perform as a mature person of judgment for eight minutes every four years when he or she enters the polling booth."
A citizen cannot be repressed and treated as a machine subject to authoritarian control eight hours a day all year long and then suddenly perform as a mature person of judgment for eight minutes every four years when he or she enters the polling booth.
Well, that's the challenge that confronts you, I think: to put the U High idea into practice, to live your life in ways that argue more eloquently than words or buildings, that those who preceded you as staff and as students were right to have invested in U High what they have.
And, I'm sure, that you will do.
__________
And, as an addendum, now on the fortieth anniversary of those remarks: Iowa farmers have always been a smart lot. You have to be in that business. And two basic bits of advice any one of them could give you are: (1) don't sell off your topsoil (or let it erode away), and (2) don't eat your seed corn.
If only our officials and administrators had as much wisdom. For the educational innovations made possible by our nation's lab schools are the top soil and seed corn that represent America's only hope of growing one of the world's best educated, most innovative, productive and happiest people on Earth.
Every four years I take a look at the Republican field of presidential candidates.
There are two reasons why I'd probably never end up voting for any of them, and at least one reason why I engage in this exercise anyway.
First, over the years I've become increasingly non-partisan, disgusted with both of our money-driven major parties, and willing to give serious consideration to thoughtful ideas from anywhere on the political spectrum.
However, my political activity, such as it has been, is based in the Democratic Party. I've been registered as a Democrat, a Precinct Co-Chair for the Democrats, a member of the Party's county central committee, a candidate for Congress in a Democratic primary, and have received three presidential appointments from Democratic presidents.
Second, no matter how wonderful a presidential candidate of either party might be, he or she brings with them a cast of thousands to which at least some deference must be paid. (Although, as President Obama has shown the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party that got him the nomination and much of the election, it need not be all that much deference.) I'm not thrilled with the national and Iowa leadership of either party. But I think the Democratic Party's gang of party members, major contributors, political consultants, staffers, lobbyists, elected officials, influence peddlers, and hangers-on would be at least marginally better than those who would surround and pressure any Republican president.
So why do I bother evaluating the Republican candidates for president?
Because, given our system, the president is virtually guaranteed to be either a Democrat or Republican -- whether chosen by the voters or the Supreme Court justices. One of the parties is going to win, and their candidate is going to govern us for better or worse. That's why I'm not interested in encouraging the nomination of the Republican candidate least likely to win. I want the Republican candidate who, if she or he wins, will do the best job.
That doesn't mean I'll be sending them money, going door-to-door on their behalf, or voting for them. But every American's conversations at the office water cooler, and family dinner table, contribute something to the national dialogue -- first reflected in public opinion polls, and ultimately in election results. So do blog entries, comments on call-in radio programs, letters to the editor in newspapers, and the other ways we express ourselves.
Of course, corporations, the wealthy -- the plutocracy -- continue to exercise grossly disproportionate influence over both parties, with their campaign contributions directly and now with their "super-pacs." As New York's Boss Tweed used to say, "I don't care who does the electing, just so long as I do the nominating." They are the ones who are doing the nominating for both parties.
But whatever the reasons for, and consequences of, our two party system, the fact is that every American has a stake in the candidates for the presidency offered us every four years by those two parties.
"Oh, so do you really prefer him to Rick Santorum?" a friend asked, sarcastically.
That's a cheap shot.
As I've learned more about Romney, I've become increasingly impressed with his smarts, education, experience, accomplishments, commitment to public service, and obvious managerial ability in running a presidential campaign. Today I would say of him (as I said earlier about Jon Huntsman), Mitt Romney is much, much better than just the "least worst Republican."
He has a lot more going for him than the fact that he is the obvious best choice from among the final four.
In 2007-08, as the candidates were touting their "experience" as qualifying them to be president, I gave some thought to "Just what is the experience that would qualify someone to be president?" Here's an abbreviated excerpt from an op ed column I wrote on the subject at that time:
There’s no perfect, qualifying “experience.” But two things can help.
One is experience at administering large institutions: a federal cabinet-level department, a state government, military branch, major university or corporation.
The other is the understanding and rapport earned by having worked in institutions with which a president must relate: city, county and state government; the federal executive, legislative, judicial and administrative branches; international organizations and embassies; labor unions and Wall Street, among others.
By these standards both Democrats and Sen. John McCain are unimpressive.
Nicholas Johnson, "Politics: Assessing Candidates' 'Experience,'" The Gazette, March 30, 2008, p. A9, embedded in blog, with links to many more items, in "Gazette Op Ed: Candidates' 'Experience,'" March 30, 2008.
At that time Governor Bill Richardson came the closest to the range of experiences I thought useful. Mitt Romney doesn't rank that high, given his relative lack of experience with the House, Senate, White House, and Cabinet positions. And his work with the Olympics, while useful, is not exactly the same as the State Department, an ambassadorship, or the United Nations, World Bank, IMF or other international organization. But he has been a governor (and in a state where he had to work with Democrats), which comes the closest to any training we have for the presidency, he's administered other large institutions (Bain; the Olympics; this year's campaign), and certainly has ties with Wall Street and the business community.
You may have noticed that I've said nothing so far about his likely positions on the issues, were he to become president. He would probably seldom come up with the solutions that I would. For example, if trade unionism has been, and could be again, America's shortest path to a vibrant middle class -- or if the quickest and cheapest way out of a recession is for the federal government to become the employer of last resort -- Romney would probably prefer driving a paved road (i.e., financial aid to the wealthy "job creators") to walking my dusty path to prosperity.
Many of these differences are candidly laid out in his campaign document, Believe in America: Mitt Romney's Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth, September 1, 2011 (listing "Romney for President" as the author), which is available as a pdf file from the Romney campaign Website and as free Kindle download from Amazon.
For example, in the opening section, "Day One, Job One; Five Bills for Day One; Five Executive Orders for Day One," one of the top five executive orders is "An Order to Empower American Businesses and Workers: Reverses the executive orders issued by President Obama that tilt the playing field in favor of organized labor, including the one encouraging the use of union labor on major government construction projects," p. 7. (I suspect there are a good many workers who would willingly forgo this "empowerment.") Among Romney's tax proposals are reducing the corporate tax to 25%, continuing the present low rates on capital gains, and abolishing the estate tax (currently only applied to estates over $5 million) -- proposals unlikely to do much to stimulate consumer spending by the working poor and unemployed, pp. 37-47, 154.)
Moreover, even if he wanted to give a hand up to the 99%, he would be opposed by the same special interests that President Obama is now confronting.
As for his position papers and statements during the past year, this is a Republican primary campaign, after all. Romney needs the support of the members of a party that has largely lost its rational middle. His opponents charge him with not being conservative enough! I give him (and other candidates) some slack regarding what they say and do while campaigning (within limits).
His opponents' charges that he is the "Etch A Sketch" candidate is another bum rap, in my view. Peter Grier, "Romney Etch A Sketch: Is aide's comment a present for his foes?"Christian Science Monitor, March 22, 2012 ("Asked whether Mr. Romney had moved too far to the right for the general election, [senior Romney aide Eric] Fehrnstrom said [on CNN] that the GOP hopeful would hit a reset button for the fall campaign. 'It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch,' he said. 'You can kind of shake it up and restart it all over again.' . . . Romney’s primary opponents immediately seized upon the image of an erasable toy to project their doubts about the depths of Romney’s conservatism. Both Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich held up Etch A Sketches at rallies on Wednesday.") Fehrnstrom's choice of metaphor may have been very unfortunate, but he spoke the truth about all candidates. Hopefully candidates don't outright lie during the primary and general election campaigns, but is it really news that they change emphasis and nuance as they must appeal, first to their own party's extremes, and then to the independents in the middle during the general election? Indeed, what they say and how they say it will vary from town to town and audience to audience.
What some others see as his shortcomings, I see as positives. I may well be wrong, but what others see as flip-flopping I see as managerial pragmatism. We've seen what ideological purity, and refusal to negotiate let alone compromise, has produced in Washington. President Obama is kind of a pragmatist, albeit one who gives in too much and too early (in my judgment). Romney's experience as Massachusetts' governor qualifies him to do as well, or better.
Some others are troubled by his Mormon religion. I see it as a positive. Santorum's vision of an American version of the Taliban, using government to impose one group's religious and social values on the rest of us, appeals to me not at all. As a fallen-away Unitarian, I have studied, and participated in, most of the world's most popular religions at one time or another (including the Mormon) as I've worked out my own. Whether you call it religion, ethics, or morality, I think it useful for individuals (and the communities in which they live) to carry a moral compass that they check for directions from time to time. Maybe it's no more than a hunch, but Romney seems to have that.
Nor do I find his seeming inability to speak the language of ordinary Americans disqualifying -- that his tie to NASCAR fans is that he knows a number of folks who own race teams, his appeal to UAW members is that his wife has two Cadillac cars, that his income from lecture fees is only a modest $300,000-plus. I find such unscripted comments almost charming in an odd sort of way. For more from this perspective, see Ashley Parker and Michael Barbaro, "The Retooled, Loose Romney, Guessing Voters’ Age and Ethnicity,"New York Times, December 28, 2011, p. A1.
My wife sees in some politicians a quality she calls "Elvis." Bill Clinton had "Elvis." Romney clearly does not.
What I see in Romney is a bright, well informed, analytical, hard working, focused, pragmatic, problem-solving manager. A little touch of "Elvis" would be comforting, but it doesn't trump the other qualities. See Ashley Parker and Michael Barbaro, "Romney Takes Analytic Approach to Campaign Chaos,"New York Times, February 28, 2012, p. A16 ("Mr. Romney’s once inevitable-seeming march toward the Republican nomination has endured an agonizing stretch of setbacks . . ., unexpected challenges . . . and verbal mishaps . . .. So the candidate is taking refuge in what he knows best: rigorous analysis of the problem and a calm determination to execute a long-term plan. 'He just sits down and is cold and clinical and analytical,' said John H. Sununu, a former governor of New Hampshire and a Romney adviser who has spent hours with him on the campaign trail.")
Some reports of his relationships as governor with the Massachusetts legislators are a little troublesome. Michael Barbaro, "Legislators Recall Governor Who Didn't Mingle,"New York Times, March 10, 2012, p. A1 ("For officials used to the glad-handing and alcohol-lubricated culture of local politics, Mr. Romney was an unfamiliar breed: a data-driven chief executive used to delivering unquestioned orders, a political newcomer who cast the legislature as a foe, a delegator who preferred working with just the leadership and an emotionally remote figure who tended not to socialize — and because of his Mormon religion did not drink. Even though he worked just a few hundred feet from them for four years, Mr. Romney displayed little interest in getting to know lawmakers and never developed real relationships . . ..") A president can probably get by with no "Elvis," but they all need a little "LBJ."
One of the most insightful columns about Romney (meaning the author shares my instincts about the man) is David Brooks, "The Wealth Issue,"New York Times, January 20, 2012, p. A27 ("[I]s Mitt Romney’s character formed by his wealth . . . corrupted by ease and luxury? The notion is preposterous. All his life, Romney has been a worker and a grinder. He earned two degrees at Harvard simultaneously (in law and business). He built a business. He’s persevered year after year, amid defeat after defeat, to build a political career . . . the sort of relentlessness that we associate with striving immigrants, not rich scions. . . . George Romney, Mitt’s father, was born in Mexico. But when he was 5, in 1912, Mexican revolutionaries confiscated their property and threw them out. . . . Within days, they went from owning a large Mexican ranch to being penniless once again, drifting from California to Idaho to Utah, where again they built a fortune. . . . Romney . . . may have character flaws, but he does not have the character flaws normally associated with great wealth. His signature is focus and persistence. The wealth issue is a sideshow.")
We have been well served by some presidents, governors and senators of wealth; George H.W. Bush, Franklin Roosevelt, the three Kennedy brothers, and the Rockefellers come to mind. Wealth can carry with it a sense of oblesse oblige, a sense of independence from the baser political pressures. I don't know enough about Romney today, or his Massachusetts record, to have a sense of how he scores on this quality, or would as president. But while I don't think wealth "is a sideshow" in this context, neither should it be disqualifying.
And that's my response to the question: "Why Mitt Romney?"
Former Senator Chris Dodd, the Motion Picture Association of America's impossible effort to reincarnate Jack Valenti, recently went charging into the Valley of Silicon with a brigade of lawyers, lobbyists and publicists at least equaling Tennyson's 600, and with results no more victorious.
What they encountered was as initially invisible and unexpected as that which greeted the British brigade in the Ukraine -- or the British redcoats 80 years earlier in America. Those whom esr describes as "technologists" had embedded their bunkers in the code they had written; what Larry Lessig first described as "west coast code" (as distinguished from the "U.S. Code" created by Congress on the east coast); the Internet which supports today's global business, education, finance, journalism, politics, social relations -- and entertainment.
Eric S. Raymond, sufficiently well-known and revered (in some quarters of his community) to go by "esr," in a true gesture of combative fairness, took it upon himself to explain to Senator Dodd why he had lost when "Into the Valley of Silicon road MPAA's 600."
Although I agree with much of what esr has to say, I'll add a little overly simplistic comment about my own position. The complaints of some copyright owners, including some Hollywood studios and producers, I find quite reasonable. Imagine if you had invested $100 million of your own money in the creation of a feature film, and then found pirated DVDs of it available (at a fraction of what they would someday sell for in America) on the streets of Beijing, Moscow and Singapore -- before you've even had your first showing of the film in a motion picture theater.
That's not to say the solutions the MPAA proposes make political, public interest, pragmatic, or even economic sense. It's just to say that their outrage and frustration is understandable.
Ironically, many over-compensated, multi-million-dollar corporate CEOs are not as swift as one would assume they'd be when it comes to designing business plans to optimize bottom line profit. Take the recording industry, for example. Few executives saw the genius in the Grateful Dead's willingness to let concert goers tape, and share, their concerts. Few saw the reasonableness of their customers' reluctance to pay $15 or $20 for a CD, when all they wanted was a single cut. After further alienating their customer base by suing everyone from teenagers to the elderly, they've finally come to see the wisdom in Apple iTunes' sale of multi-billions of individual songs.
It's important to recognize the distinction between ends and means when it comes to the constitutional intellectual property protection called copyright. The end, the goal, in Article I, Section 8, is that "The Congress shall have power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, . . .." The means is a limited time copyright (originally 14 years, and now expanded by Congress to over a century, in response to Disney's desire to control Mickey Mouse).
"Fair Use" is an effort to promote the ends, the goal. It provides a four-factor guidance to the circumstances under which copyright material may be used without violating the copyright law. The two most significant are commercial considerations. Will the use adversely impact the income of the true copyright owner? Is the purpose of the user to make a profit, or are they using it in a classroom, a book review, or other commentary? The other two relate to the nature of the work, and the amount used. Use of factual material, historical accounts, or news are more likely to be considered fair use than use of creative works, such as songs, poetry, novels or plays. And the amount used is critical. The entirety of a song, poem, short story, or other work will have a tougher-to-impossible time passing as fair use than, say, a single sentence or paragraph from a 400-page book. All four factors are relevant; for example, just because it's "history," or the user isn't profiting from it, doesn't mean the user can reproduce an entire chapter or book.
The reason for this diversion into "fair use" is because legitimate corporate efforts to protect their intellectual property (such as films) from criminal taking, reproduction, and profitable sale, can sometimes take the form of a gross overreaching that encroaches on users' legitimate fair use utilization or other user rights under the copyright law.
From my perspective, that's what the fight is, or should be, about. Such revisions as there may be to the copyright law need to meet a "least restrictive alternative" standard -- remedies that simultaneously protect corporate intellectual property from criminal profiteers, while enhancing rather than curtailing efforts to "promote the progress of science and useful arts," and the fair use doctrine, by enabling the widest possible use of copyright material.
As esr hints in the last line of his essay ("if you’d like to discuss some ways of fighting piracy that don’t involve trampling on us and our users, we do have some ideas"), he and presumably other technologists are even willing to help out in designing such balanced standards.
Now, here is . . .
An Open Letter to Chris Dodd Posted on Thursday, February 23 2012 by esr
Mr. Dodd, I hear you’ve just given a speech in which you said “Hollywood is pro-technology and pro-Internet.” It seems you’re looking for interlocutors among the coalition that defeated SOPA and PIPA, and are looking for some politically feasible compromise that will do something against the problem of Internet piracy as you believe you understand it.
There isn’t any one person who can answer your concerns. But I can speak for one element of the coalition that blocked those two bills; the technologists. I’m not talking about Google or the technology companies, mind you – I’m talking about the actual engineers who built the Internet and keep it running, who write the software you rely on every day of your life in the 21st century.
I’m one of those engineers – you rely on my code every time you use a browser or a smartphone or a game console. I’m not exactly a leader among them as you would understand the term, because we don’t have those and don’t want them. But I am a well-known philosopher/elder of the tribe (I’ll name two others later in this letter), and also one of our few public spokespersons. In the late 1990s I helped found the open-source software movement.
I’m writing to educate you about our concerns, which are not exactly the same as those of the group of firms you think of as “Silicon Valley”. We have our own culture and our own agenda, usually coincident with but occasionally at odds with the businesspeople who run the tech industry.
The difference matters because the businesspeople rely on us to do the actual technical work – and since the rise of the Internet, if we don’t like where a firm’s strategy is going, it tends not to get there. Wise bosses have learned to accommodate us as much as possible and pick the few fights they must have with their engineering talent very, very carefully. Google, in particular, got its huge market capitalization by being better at managing this symbiosis than anyone else.
I can best introduce you to our concerns by quoting another of our philosopher/elders, John Gilmore. He said: “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
To understand that, you have to grasp that “the Internet” isn’t just a network of wires and switches, it’s also a sort of reactive social organism composed of the people who keep those wires humming and those switches clicking. John Gilmore is one of them. I’m another. And there are some things we will not stand having done to our network.
We will not have it censored. We built the Internet as a tool to make every individual human being on the planet more empowered. What the users do with the Internet is up to them – not up to Hollywood, not up to politicians, and not even up to us who built it. Whatever else we Internet geeks may disagree on among ourselves, we will not allow our gift of fire to be snuffed out by jealous gods.
Because we will not have the Internet censored, we are also implacably hostile to any attempts to impose controls on it that could be used for censorship – whether or not that is the stated intent of the controls. That is why we were absolutely unanimous against SOPA and PIPA, and a significant reason that you lost that fight.
You speak as though you believe that the technology industry stopped SOPA/PIPA, and that by negotiating with the industry you can set up the conditions for a successful second round. It won’t work that way; the movement that stopped SOPA/PIPA (and is now scuttling ACTA) was much more organic and grass-roots than that. Silicon Valley can’t give you the political firepower or cover you’d need. All you’ll get from them is a bunch of meaningless press conferences and empty platitudes from CEOs who have nothing actually to gain by helping you and really wish you’d go away so they can get back to their jobs.
Meanwhile, the engineers inside and outside those companies will take it as their duty to ensure that you lose that battle again if you try to fight it again. Because there aren’t a lot of us, but the vast mass of Internet users – who do vote in numbers large enough to swing elections – have figured out that we’re on their side and we’re their early-warning system. When we sound the tocsin – as we did, for example, by blacking out Wikipedia – they will mobilize and you will be defeated.
Accordingly, one of the cardinal rules for any politician who wants to have a long career in a 21st-century democracy has to be “don’t screw with the Internet”. Because it will screw you right back. At least two primary challenges to SOPA/PIPA sponsors are in the news right now because they wouldn’t have happened without the popular outrage against it.
Hollywood wants you to screw with the Internet, because Hollywood thinks it has problems it can solve that way. Hollywood also wants you to think we (the engineers) are foes of “intellectual property” and in willing cahoots with criminals, pirates, and thieves. Neither of these claims is true, and it’s important that you understand exactly how they’re not true.
Many of us make our living from “intellectual property”. A few of us (not including me) are genuinely opposed to it on principle. Most of us (including me) are willing to respect intellectual property rights, but there’s a place where that respect abruptly ends. It stops at exactly the point where DRM threatens to cripple our computers and our software.
Richard Stallman, one of our more radical philosophers, uses the phrase “treacherous computing” to describe what happens when a PC, or a smartphone, or any sort of electronics, is not fully under the control of its user. Treacherous computers block what you can see or hear. Treacherous computers spy on you. Treacherous computers cut you off from their full potential as communications devices and tools.
Treacherous computing is our second line in the sand. Most of us don’t actually have anything against DRM in itself; it’s because DRM becomes a vehicle for treachery that we loathe it. Not allowing you to skip the advertisements on a DVD is a small example; not allowing you to back up your books and music is a larger one. Then there was the ironically pointed case of the book “1984″ being silently disappeared from the e-readers of customers who had paid for it…
Some companies propose, in order to support DRM, locking up computers so they can only only run “approved” operating systems; that might bother ordinary users less than those other treacheries, but to us would be utterly intolerable. If you imagine a sculptor told that his new chisel would only cut shapes pre-approved by a committee of shape vendors, you might begin to fathom the depths of our anger at these proposals.
We engineers do have an actual problem with Hollywood and the music industry, but it’s not the one you probably assume. To be blunt (because there isn’t any nice way to put this) we think Big Entertainment is largely run by liars and thieves who systematically rip off the artists they claim to be protecting with their DRM, then sue their own customers because they’re too stupid to devise an honest way to make money.
I’m sure you don’t agree with this judgment, but you need to understand how widespread it is among technologists in order to get why all those claims about “piracy” and lost revenues find us so unsympathetic. It’s bad enough that we feel like our Internet and our computers are under attack, but having laws like SOPA/PIPA/ACTA pushed at us on behalf of a special-interest group we consider no better than gangsters and dimwits makes it much worse.
Some of us think the gangsters’ behavior actually justifies piracy. Most of us don’t agree that those two wrongs add up to a right, but I can tell you this: if you make the technologists choose between the big-media gangsters and the content pirates, effectively all of us will side with the content pirates as the lesser of the two evils. Because maybe both sides are stealing on a vast scale, but only one of them doesn’t want to screw with our Internet or cripple our computers.
We’d really prefer to oppose both groups, though. Our sympathies in this mess are with the artists being ripped off by both sides.
Consider this letter our “Don’t tread on me!”. Our agenda is to protect our own liberty to create and our users’ liberty to enjoy those creations as they see fit. We have no give and no compromise on either of those, but long as Hollywood stays out of our patch (that is, no more attempts to lock down our Internet or our tools) we’ll stay out of Hollywood’s.
And if you’d like to discuss some ways of fighting piracy that don’t involve trampling on us and our users, we do have some ideas.
Manipulating Us Into Buying Poor Quality Products We Don't Need, With Money We Don't Have, To Impress People We Don't Like
It's Super Bowl Sunday, February 5, 2012. "Only a game"? You've got to be kidding. It's the top rated TV show of the year; an advertiser's dream -- albeit an expensive one, at $3.5-4 million per 30-second message.
Indeed, our acceptance of advertising is now such that there is almost as much interest among some TV watchers in the ads as in the game.
Put "Super Bowl commercials 2012" into Google and up pop 2.2 million links to Web sites.
When I was a kid you could earn money by walking around town carrying advertising boards front and back. The companies paid you to advertise their products. Today's kids stand in line, willingly paying the companies extra, for the privilege of possessing goods carrying the companies' logos.
Shirts, pants, shoes, hats, drinking cups, backpacks are sought, and proudly worn or carried, because of the ads.
Advertising has entered the schools, from the ill-fated TV commercials on "Channel One," to wall posters, to event programs, to scoreboards. Colleges find no conflict in forbidding athletes to bet on games, while running ads for gambling casinos on the scoreboard; or bemoaning students' binge drinking, while profiting from the beer ads during those televised games. I have a law school colleague who has jokingly suggested we use advertising revenue to reduce tuition by including, say, a "Microsoft Minute" at the beginning of each class period. (I suspect that some day it will no longer be considered a joke.)
It's still possible to be paid for wearing advertising -- if you're a NASCAR driver . . .
. . . , or a college football or basketball coach who can put a Nike swish on every player's uniform.
There are even those, among whom I have included myself on occasion, who believe that public officials should not only be permitted, but required, to wear the corporate logos of those who fund their campaigns. Not everyone bothers to read, let alone understand, campaign contribution disclosure reports. A more meaningful form of "public disclosure," immediately apparent when they appear on television or at public events, would be to require of them the same honest disclosure that NASCAR drivers impose on themselves -- like this:
With the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, and other opinions appearing to take the corporate view of things, some (not I) have even advocated this approach for the justices:
While not exactly the same thing, the Oklahoma legislature has taken a rather permanent step in this direction, with corporate sponsorship of the entire state capitol building.A couple I know -- whose known hobbies include biking across the country, world championship poker playing, high class public service, and European travel -- also include a nearly-completed goal of visiting every state capital in the 50 states. A recent trip included Oklahoma City and the Oklahoma State Capitol building -- and its backyard oil well.
Much to their surprise and mine, inside the dome, around the base, are inscribed the names of the corporations that hold up the building (and perhaps its occupants and the taxpayers as well).
The only name on display in this picture is "Hobby Lobby Stores" (no pun intended), but I was assured the names continue around the entire base.
If it's worth $3.5-4 million for a 30-second commercial on a super bowl game, imagine what it would be worth to have your corporation's name enshrined forever inside the capitol dome of the national capitol building in Washington -- or even your state capitol building. Future generations of visiting school children and your potential customers could look upwards toward the heavens, see your name and logo, and give thanks for what you've contributed to making ours the best government money can buy.
Both the Press-Citizen and Gazette (and possibly Daily Iowan to come) have stories about Iowa Athletic Director Gary Barta's meeting with faculty leaders yesterday. The differences in the stories are striking.
The Press-Citizen's story, buried in small print at the bottom of page 3 leads with the report that Barta "defended the departments hiring practices and coaches' salaries" (the exclusive subject matter of the entire story). Emily Schettler, "Barta Defends Coaches' Salaries and Iowa's Hiring Practices,"Iowa City Press-Citizen, January 25, 2012, p. 3.
The Gazette, by contrast, in heavy type at the top of the page, leads with "Barta on Tuesday [Jan. 24] told faculty leaders he is comfortable with the department's renewed relationship with the Iowa Lottery" (the exclusive subject matter of the Gazette's entire story). Diane Heldt, "Barta: I'm Comfortable with Lottery Relationship," The Gazette, January 25, 2012, p. 11A.
I guess you had to be there. (Which is probably the case of anyone's report of any event.)
Barta says he's "comfortable" with the Iowa Lottery "because it's a state-sponsored agency." Is that relevant? Should it be? During my first judicial clerkship (U.S. Court of Appeals, 5th Circuit) a significant part of our caseload involved what was then called "the numbers racket," often Mafia-run, it was considered a serious crime. So, OK, now the state has taken it over. Does that make it, for NCAA student-athlete purposes, not gambling? I don't think so.
But what really caught my eye in Ms. Heldt's report was, "Barta said any relationships the department has with the gambling industry are limited to the Iowa Lottery . . .." [Photo of Kinnick scoreboard.]
Why did that catch my eye? Because the last time I checked (so it may have changed), the Kinnick scoreboard was still running an advertisement for the Riverside gambling casino, and the casino still had a Kinnick skybox for its high rollers.
And my memory, and a prior blog entry, indicate that the NCAA at one time put the Iowa athletic program on notice that it did not look favorably on these gambling industry associations, in light of the concerns and spirit of Article 10.3. ("The NCAA wants to distance itself from sports gambling, and the gambling industry generally, in every way possible. It expressly forbids association with gambling casinos at NCAA events or in its advertising. It highly recommends that NCAA schools follow the same practice. It has written the UI athletic program with regard to its partnership with the Riverside Gambling Casino. And yet our football program tries to rationalize the gambling partnership while refusing to do anything about it." "Conflicts, Cover-ups and Corruption," June 26, 2007.)
I very seldom reprint a former blog entry. But since this one is so on point, and since it's over five years old (and therefore long forgotten if ever remembered), I now do so:
Is the University of Iowa Athletic Department, specifically the football program, promoting gambling?
There is very little ambiguity regarding the NCAA's rules regarding gambling on college sports. The NCAA Division I Manual provides [Note Jan. 25, 2012: What's below is the relevant Article 10.3 in 2006; the current, 2007 version, has been only slightly modified from this one.]:
10.3 GAMBLING ACTIVITIES
Staff members of a member conference, staff members of the athletics department of a member institution and student-athletes shall not knowingly: (Revised: 4/22/98 effective 8/1/98)
( a ) Provide information to individuals involved in organized gambling activities concerning intercollegiate athletics competition; ( b ) Solicit a bet on any intercollegiate team; ( c ) Accept a bet on any team representing the institution; ( d ) Solicit or accept a bet on any intercollegiate competition for any item (e.g., cash, shirt, dinner) that has tangible value; or (Revised: 9/15/97) ( e ) Participate in any gambling activity that involves intercollegiate athletics or professional athletics, through a bookmaker, a parlay card or any other method employed by organized gambling. (Revised: 1/9/96, 1/14/97 effective 8/1/97)
It couldn't be much clearer, could it? Academic institutions are able to claim that they want to maintain an impenetrable wall between their athletic programs, staff and student athletes, on the one hand, and the temptations of sports gambling on the other.
Of course, these standards do not address, nor could they, gambling on sports by those unaffiliated with a university. (And I am not claiming that the Universty's getting in bed with gambling interests, and taking the gambling industry's money, is "the same as" coaches and athletes betting on games.)
But it does seem a bit incongruous for the University's athletic program to enter into what amounts to a partnership with the gambling industry. How has it done that?
The University has (1) sold special indoor box facilities in the football stadium to a local gambling casino, aware that the casino purchased the facility to entertain, and encourage, high rollers, (2) knowing that the casino plans to bring gamblers into the state, put them up at its hotel, transport them to and from the football games, and (3) then agreed to let the casino use the football program's oversized electronic scoreboard to advertise the gambling casino to the 70,000 plus sports fans in attendance! (4) Removing any possible ambiguity about this, the Casino Web site's opening page currently displays, "Turn a Hawkeye game day into a weekend getaway!" See William Petroski, "E. Iowa Casino to Lure U of I Fans; It will offer post-game parties, stadium shuttles,"Des Moines Register, August 29, 2006 ("The casino has spent $165,000 for a three-year deal to lease a new skybox at Kinnick Stadium, and the casino has purchased dozens of football tickets for its preferred customers. Starting with the Iowa-Iowa State game on Sept. 16, charter buses will be offered to transport patrons between the casino parking lot and Kinnick Stadium, and there will be post-game parties at the Riverside complex."), and William Petroski, "Kinnick ‘Hotel’ ad omits 'Casino;' By design, an ad for Riverside's complex does not mention gambling,"Des Moines Register, September 8, 2006 ("Chief Executive Officer Dan Kehl pointed out in a recent interview that . . . many students already gamble online.").
The duplicity is stunning. Apparently the University, recognizing the impropriety of what it was doing, but wanting the money from the gambling industry advertising anyway, decided everything would be OK if only it would falsely represent that no gambling actually takes place in a gambling casino by changing the name on its scoreboard from the gambling casino's real name -- the "Riverside Casino & Golf Resort" -- to that of a non-existant facility called the "Riverside Hotel & Golf Resort."
While I suspect that few of the 70,000 fans were led to believe that the Casino had truly decided to abandon gambling income for total dependence on its hotel business, there may well have been a few who found the name switch a little bizarre and baffling.
Not only does a university's promoting gambling to the young students in its charge violate basic principles of common sense and decency, it also violates the spirit of the law (which forbids anyone under the age of 21 to enter a gambling casino), and the spirit of the NCAA rules.
(Another incongruity is that while the University forbids consumption of alcohol in the stadium and some tailgating areas, a special dispensation to drink is granted to the Casino's stadium gamblers, as well as the guests of other purchasers of the $50,000-plus-a-year indoor skyboxes. There's no telling what lesson that provides the students in the stands and the athletes on the field.)
The University is certainly in no position to feign ignorance and innocence. As early as May 2006 the campus paper reported,
"[Riverside Casino Manager Joe] Massa has hired a sales manager to lure groups and conventions to the casino, and he plans to hire a sales staff in Chicago and Des Moines. A package could include a hotel stay with a trip to Kinnick Stadium for tailgating and box seats at an Iowa football game. Kehl says he wants to organize junkets to the casino, where out-of-state gamblers would be flown into the Eastern Iowa Airport."
What has the University had to say about all of this?
"University of Iowa athletic director Gary Barta said Tuesday that the university would not place restrictions on a Riverside casino that has rented a Kinnick Stadium skybox with plans to bring big gamblers to Hawkeye football games.
“'We have never placed any restrictions on a company which owns tickets, how they use them secondarily,' Barta said. 'Once they are sold to a company, it is that individual’s or that company’s discretion how they use them.'
"The new $140 million casino at Riverside is placing a special marketing emphasis on Hawkeye football games. The casino, located 12 miles south of Iowa City, has spent $165,000 for a three-year lease on a skybox at Kinnick Stadium. The casino has also purchased dozens of Hawkeye football tickets for its preferred guests.
"Iowa has 19 casinos, but the opening of the Riverside complex Thursday at 9 p.m. marks the first time a casino has been so close to one of Iowa’s three state universities.
"Barta said the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the U of I are 'very concerned about possible ill effects as they relate to gambling and intercollegiate athletics.'
"He added, 'On the other hand, the various casinos in this state, they are legal businesses. So you walk that fine line between your concern about gambling and its association with intercollegiate athletics and what you know has been understood as a legal entity in this state.'"
"San Francisco 49ers fans, how much would you pay to own a seat on the 50-yard line at the team's sparkling new stadium in Santa Clara? Try $80,000. And if you're looking for single tickets and want primo seats, you'll have to pay almost triple what it costs for a comparable view of the football action at Candlestick Park." Mike Rosenberg, "Club tickets won't come cheap at Santa Clara 49ers stadium,"San Jose Mercury News," January 10, 2012. [Photo credit: NFL.] "This is what $1 billion looks like."
Of course, just because you own the seat doesn't mean you can actually sit in it and watch the 49ers play football. No, for that you'll need a $3750 season ticket. And if you want to take someone with you you'll need two seats and two season tickets.
We're not talking skyboxes here. Just a seat, out in the open, braving the elements. Before those tickets even went on sale a wealthier class of fans had already purchased $225 million worth of "luxury suites." No, we're just talking ordinary ticket holders, couples who think three hours or so watching football well worth the $750 for their tickets.
From "The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs" ("Killing The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs is among the best known of Aesop's Fables [and] has become idiomatic of an unprofitable action motivated by greed") to the "housing bubble" ("an economic bubble affecting . . . over half of American states. Housing prices peaked in early 2006 . . . and may not yet [2011] have hit bottom . . ..") there comes a time when things peak and begin their decline.
In fact, not that far from Santa Clara are those who remember Silicon Valley's "dot-com bubble" of the late 1990s ("A combination of rapidly increasing stock prices, market confidence that the companies would turn future profits, individual speculation in stocks, and widely available venture capital created an environment in which many investors were willing to overlook traditional metrics such as P/E ratio in favor of confidence in technological advancements").
One of the most serious "peak" phenomena is the prospect of declining oil supply (at prices the market can bear), known as "peak oil." Nick A. Owen, Oliver R. Inderwildi, David A. King, "The Status of Conventional World Oil Reserves--Hype or Cause for Concern?" Energy Policy, vol. 38, August 2010, pp. 4743-49 ("While there is certainly vast amounts of fossil fuel resources left in the gound, the volume of oil that can be commercially exploited at prices the global economy has become accustomed to is limited and will soon decline. The result is that oil may soon shift from a demand-led market to a supply constrained market."), and the more general essay, "Peak Oil," Wikipedia.org ("Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline.")
Is it possible that we could be reaching "peak football"?
The NFL's first TV contract paid the League $4.65 million in 1962. By 2010 the clubs earned over $20 billion -- 4000 times as much. Major college sports now gross $5.6 billion (over half from football), and the Iowa Hawkeyes' football coach, at $4 million give or take, is the state's highest paid "employee." Weiler, Roberts, Abrams & Ross, Sports and the Law (4th ed. 2011), pp. 434, 746.
Taxpayers are becoming increasingly reluctant to underwrite the cost of billion-dollar stadiums they cannot afford to enter, just to increase the profits of the billionaires who own the teams, and the millionaires who play the game. (This one will require the city's taxpayers to take out an $850 million loan to cover most of the construction costs.) Lisa Fernandez, "Santa Clara: Group says it has enough signatures to force vote on 49ers stadium loan,"San Jose Mercury News, January 18, 2012.
With the NFL playoffs coming tomorrow, this may not be the best of times to raise the issue, and peak football may be a decade or more away. But everything seems to have its "peak," and it's unlikely football will be the last exception left standing.
That's the bad news.
The good news is that, unless we start building a lot more rapid rail than is likely, we wouldn't have been able to find the gas to drive to those stadiums anyway -- even if we could afford to pay the tariff to sit in our $80,000 seats.
# # #
Every once in awhile, after I've written and posted a blog essay with what is for me an original idea (that is, though others have undoubtedly thought it, I am unaware that they have), along comes someone who makes me think I may not be nuts after all. Here's yet another example:
"Football is dead in America. . . . [I]t's not the lawyers who are the death of football. Blaming lawyers misses the point. Like their counterparts in nature, lawyers are merely the cleanup crew. What finishes football are the parents of future football players. The NFL desperately needs American parents. Not as fans, but as suppliers of young flesh. The NFL needs parents to send their little boys into the football feeder system. And without that supply of meat for the NFL grinder — first youth teams, then high school and college — there can be no professional football. And yet every day, more American parents decide they're finished with football. Why? Because parents can no longer avoid the fact that football scrambles the human brain. In cultural terms, parents who send their 10-year-olds to play football might as well hold up signs saying they'd like to give their children cigarettes and whiskey." John Kass, "American Football Industry is on its Deathbed; As the dangers of football become more well-known, parents are less likely to allow their children to take part in the high-impact sport,"Chicago Tribune, April 24, 2013.
January 18, 2012, 5:00 a.m.; added item January 22.
Connecting the Dots Everybody knows that the dice are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Everybody knows that the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the fight was fixed The poor stay poor, the rich get rich That's how it goes Everybody knows
Everybody knows our political process, and thus ultimately our government, is corrupted with the influence of money. (See, "More Support for Going Communist Than Congress," November 16, 2011.) Sometimes it's illegal bribery. More often it's perfectly legal "campaign contributions." As I've often said, "The problem is not so much that corporations violate the law. It's that they write the law."
There's no little pill we can take to solve this problem. Even if there were, Big Pharma would patent it and then raise the price beyond the ability of any but the top 1% to pay for it. And those folks would have no reason to take it. They are not suffering from this political disease; they're profiting from it.
What we can do, by way of baby steps toward a solution, is to publicize the data that will enable the media and the people to connect the dots. We need to see, not just that politicians get money from special interests, not just that government largess tends to be squandered on those least in need of it. We need to see the unmistakable direct connection between the contributions and the return on that "investment."
Fifteen years ago I wrote a column in the Des Moines Register making this connection. A little research disclosed the "rate of return" on political "contributions." It turned out to be 1000 to one. That is, those who gave $1 million (say, in soft money for a political party's national convention) could expect to receive $1 billion in return. This online reproduction of that column actually provides the footnotes of verification: Nicholas Johnson, "Campaigns: You Pay $4 or $4000," Des Moines Register, July 21, 1996, p. C2. (The "$4 or $4000" reference was the contrast between what citizens would pay for public financing of campaigns ($4 each) compared with the additional amounts we have to pay as consumers and taxpayers when they are funded by corporations and the wealthy ($4000).)
Earlier that year this blog commented, "Unfortunately, . . . investigative reporting of money in Iowa politics and governing is all too rare. Occasionally there will be stories regarding which legislators have raised how much money. There may even be a reference to where some of that money came from. Very rarely is there an effort to investigate the extent to which there is a relationship between the sources of campaign funds and the votes of the recipients -- let alone a routine reporting of these relationships for every single member of the Iowa legislature." Nicholas Johnson, "Golden Rules & Revolutions: A Series, Part VIII: Money and Lobbyists in Iowa: Smoke and Mirrors," April 19, 2008.
This was an extraordinary bit of research and reporting, certainly warranting another "Hat's Off" for the Register and, in this instance, Lee Rood.
But while the nursing home story concentrated on receipt of campaign contributions, Rood's story concentrates on the distribution of taxpayers' money to the wealthy.
We have still not connected the dots. We need to know not only how much legislators receive in "contributions" (and from whom), we need to know not only how much they give away (and to whom). We need to know the relationship between what each individual legislator (or member of Congress) received from a given special interest (or its lobbyists) and how that individual legislator voted on the subsequent largess to that contributor.
By Monday [Jan. 16] we finally had an example of what I've been calling for. The New York Times focused on former Senator Rick Santorum, now a candidate for president in the Republican primaries. Michael Luo and Mike McIntire, "Donors Gave as Santorum Won Earmarks," New York Times, January 16, 2012, p. A1.
As Luo and McIntire report, "The announcements flowed out of Rick Santorum’s Senate office: a $3.5 million federal grant to Piasecki Aircraft to help it test a new helicopter propeller technology; another $3.5 million to JLG Industries to bolster its bid to build all-terrain forklifts for the military; $1.4 million to Medico Industries to upgrade equipment for its munitions work. . . . A review of some of his earmarks, viewed alongside his political donations, suggests that the river of federal money Mr. Santorum helped direct to Pennsylvania paid off handsomely in the form of campaign cash."
That's what I mean.
It's hard work connecting those dots. Those who have such information are reluctant to share it. But our democracy demands no less -- from the media, the academic and research communities, the government, indeed all of us.
As my favorite school superintendent's wall sign had it: "In God we trust; all others must bring data" (attributed to W. Edwards Deming).
In short, it's not enough that "everybody knows."
Without data, without connecting the dots, what everybody knows is unlikely to ever become what everybody does.
So why worse? It’s a direct payment to Moen before construction of his $10 million, 14-story tower; a “forgivable loan.”[8] Forgive a $2.5 million loan?! It’s reminiscent of MidAmerican Energy’s demand ratepayers pay in advance for a nuclear power plant.[9]
