. . . 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.
As always, the best single source for current and background materials, documents, and links to newspaper coverage and more is to be found at "University of Iowa Sexual Assault Controversy -- 2007-08," July 19-present (incorporating and updating original blog entry, "UI Sexual Assault Update," July 19-August 9) -- to no one's surprise the most popular site here yesterday. Some eight new newspaper articles and editorials have been added there this morning. (And see that source for summaries of, and links to, the editorials and stories referred to below.)
"'The Case for Mills and Jones'?!" you exclaim.
Well, yes and no.
No, I'm not defending the behavior of either as presented, and criticized, in the Stolar Report. But I did get your attention, didn't I? And I don't think peremptory firings are appropriate -- for the reasons set forth below.
Normally I find myself in agreement with much that appears on the Register's editorial page from its editorial board and columnists. But this morning they went to bat twice and struck out both times in my opinion when they suggest that Mills and Jones should be fired and that it is the Regents who should be drafting new procedures.
A desire for self-preservation is only human. But it often interferes with our ability to understand systemic institutional failures when the most popular response is to scapegoat someone -- other than oneself, of course.
o FEMA's Michael Brown was not the sole reason for the institutional disaster that followed the Katrina disaster.
o Ralph Nader was not the sole (or even primary) reason for the failure of the Democratic Party's presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2004.
o And Marc Mills and Phil Jones were not the sole reason for the University of Iowa's disorganized and chaotic response to the alleged sexual assault of last October 14.
The Gazette's morning editorial acknowledged "[the] university’s mistakes, miscommunication and inconsistent actions [and the] lack of understanding and leadership [that] made a terrible situation worse [as] too many university leaders did too little to make sure the [situation] was handled humanely and efficiently." Editorial, "Inquiry Must Lead to Swift Changes," The Gazette, September 20, 2008, p. A4.
And, as he so often does, the Press-Citizen's classy editorial cartoonist, Bob Patton, captures it with a stroke of his pen this morning under his heading of, "The Heat is On." [Credit: Bob Patton and the Iowa City Press-Citizen, September 20, 2008, p. A21.]
The drawing shows the "Stolar Partnership" "Investigation into U.I. Handling of Sex Assault Case" as a magnifying glass focusing the heat -- like a small boy using a magnifying glass to cremate ants on a summer's day -- on Mills and Jones, while UI President "Mason" and "Rest of UI Administration" stand on the shady sidelines.
So, what's wrong with focusing on Mills and Jones?
1. It's unfair. As The Gazette acknowledges, and Patton portrays, there's plenty of blame to go around to all of those "too many university leaders."
2. Orderly and balanced personnel review. The Regents set the example: President Mason's performance review was bifurcated, as the Regents first considered (on September 17) her accomplishments and failings separate and apart from her handling of this sexual assault case, and will subsequently consider the latter.
Every employee's performance can be reviewed periodically. And when Mills and Jones next come up for review they should be entitled to no less consideration than President Mason: how they performed with regard to this case (however seriously deficient it may, ultimately, be found to be) should be considered within the context of their overall performance.
Peremptory dismissals -- the petulant, retaliatory, scapegoating firing of employees -- are as counterproductive as they are inappropriate and unfair.
3. The back story. Neither Marc Mills nor Phil Jones have had an opportunity to fully and candidly tell their side of the story.
Is it possible that Mills was not on a "frolic and detour" of his own, but was in fact doing either what President Mason directly told him to do, or what he assumed, based on prior experience, she would want him to do? Is it possible that Jones had a prior experience with the football culture that permeates the University, and experienced what happens to those who dare to challenge it, and knew it would be counterproductive as well as personally risky to challenge the Athletic Department's "informal procedure" in this case?
I'm not suggesting for a moment that either -- or other possible scenarios -- are true. How could I know? All I'm suggesting is that there may be some explanations for their behavior other than the knee-jerk conclusion that "both are ignorant, incompetent, unfeeling SOBs who must be blamed for all that happened and peremptorily fired."
And note that both are "damned if they do, and damned if they don't" reveal their back story.
Based on the refusal of virtually all administrators to speak to the media about this case and the UI's procedure for handling it since last October, one possibility is that they've been instructed by President Mason not to. If that's the case, for them to tell their side of the story either to the Stolar investigators or the media -- especially if their story involves putting more of the responsibility on her -- would not bode well for their continued employment by the University. And even if they were to wait to speak out until after being fired, that would scarcely endear them to any potential future employer.
4. "Take me to your leader." For The Gazette to talk about the University's "lack of leadership" suggests that the University has a leader. Indeed it does. It is the President of the University of Iowa. Whatever happened to "the buck stops here"?
Patton is right. President Mason has been given "a base on balls" by Stolar, the media, many of the public, and the Regents (so far).
I'm not suggesting "this is all her fault" -- any more than it is all anyone's fault -- or that she should be severely punished in some way.
What I am suggesting is that both (a) in terms of what happened and why, and especially (b) what now to do about it, the Regents and their universities would have much to gain by understanding what was, and was not, done by the UI President's office to review, redesign and refine the University's procedures for handling sexual assaults by football players both prior to October 14 and since that day.
Especially is this so given what must have been known by all regarding the University's handling of the Pierre Pierce case. As the Press-Citizen editorialized this morning, "more than six years after the first sexual assault allegations against former Hawkeye basketball star Pierre Pierce, the University of Iowa still hasn't figured our how to handle such situations correctly."
Following October 14, what "management information reporting systems" did she have in place to track the Unviersity's handling of the case? What procedures does she have in place for monitoring not only crises, but the operation of the University generally?
After all, most of the Stolar Report's recommendations are kind of no-brainers: crimes should be reported to the police; alleged victims should have assigned advocates throughout the process; there ought to be a single office/clearing house; it should not be the University's general counsel; the function should not be merged in EOD with its responsiblity for sexual harrassment generally.
That's not to say we're not in the firm's debt for pointing them out. It's only to say that, once they do so, one's response tends to be, "Why, yes, of course. And why weren't we already doing that?"
It's one of those "which would be worse" choices. Would it be worse that neither the University president, nor anyone else in admnistrative positions, has thought to review its organizational structure and procedures for handling football players' sexual assaults over the past six years? Or would it be worse that a review was conducted during President Mason's first year in office but no one thought of any of the obvious remedies proposed by Stolar?
5. Diversion of focus. So a final reason why it's a mistake to focus on Mills and Jones is that it diverts the attention of the public, media journalists and editorial writers, Regents, and Regents' universities' administrators from the systemic, managerial and administrative problems that must be addressed if any meaningful progress is to be made.
Governance and Drafting the New Procedures
At the top I mentioned two Register editorials this morning with which I disagree. The second proposes that it is the Regents that should draft a new set of procedures for how the Regents' universities' handle athletes' sexual assaults.
The point, in this limited context, is that under a governance policy in which a board limits itself to setting what John Carver calls "ends policies" (and the rest of us might call "measurable goals") (and leaves it to the CEO to select the means for reaching those ends/goals), creating the specific structures, procedures, hiring practices and training programs -- or whatever else a CEO might choose -- for dealing with sexual assaults is the choice of the CEO, not the Board. The Board focuses on the results produced by the CEO in reaching the Board's ends/goals -- which constitute both the CEO's "job description" and the basis for his/her performance evaluation.
That's not to say, in this instance, that it would be inappropriate for the Board to express its dissatisfaction with what happened at Iowa this past year, only that the expression of that dissatisfaction should take the form of "ends policies" rather than specific procedures.
Moreover, rather than come up with a one-size-fits-all set of organizational structures and procedures, the Regents might at least want to consider starting with both present structures/procedures, and proposals, from each of the three universities. At a minimum, that kind of approach might come up with some creative ideas that would otherwise not be considered; and it might just be that there are very good reasons for having variations between the schools.
September 19, 2008, 8:00 a.m. September 18, 2008, 3:15 p.m.
Stolar Report
For the most part, this morning's [Sept. 19] newspaper coverage of the Regent's meeting and the Stolar Partnership Report are not significantly different from the online coverage yesterday -- reports about "The Report." That full document is probably the best source for anyone really interested in the details. The Stolar Report [a pdf file uploaded by the Press-Citizen]. (The most complete Web site for all material related to these matters -- reports, basic documents, news coverage, commentary, and links to more -- remains "University of Iowa Sexual Assault Controversy -- 2007-08," July 19-present.)
Indeed, the Report is so relatively well done, candid and thorough (while attempting to avoid accusatory and mean-spirited language, e.g., "no cover-up"), that there is very little to add to it by way of anyone's commentary, including mine. (Of course, not everyone bought the "no cover-up" conclusion: "'The general counsel [Marc Mills] failed to turn over documents for no justifiable reason,' [Regent Michael] Gartner said, seeking clarification from Stolar. "What is a cover-up if there was a regents investigation by Tom Evans and there were relevant documents not turned over for no justifiable reason?' [Stolar lead investigator James] Bryant replied, 'I don't call it a cover-up, but it was certainly inappropriate.'" Source: Morelli and Hermiston story, below.)
On the one hand it's a cute and clever line. But if you think about it, it captures a useful analytical approach to understanding UI officials' behavior over the past year.
Like the governments' (plural) response to Katrina, there are often two categories of problems when things go very, very wrong with an institution's response to crisis: (1) the behavior of individuals within the system, and (2) the system itself.
1. Individuals' behavior. In the movie "War Games" a government official, frustrated over the possibility that someone responsible for launching a missile might freeze up and refuse to do it, proposes to "get the human out of the loop."
As long as there are humans in the loop one can make every effort to minimize ineffective and unbecoming human behavior, but never successfully eliminate all of it.
Whether picking a president of the United States or others in positions of responsibility in business, universities and other institutions, one can look for qualities: common sense, good judgment and wisdom as well as intelligence, knowledge and information; an ability to learn quickly ("a quick study") enough about new responsibilities and bodies of information to enable one to know what they know, what they don't know, how to frame the questions of experts to find out, and the ability of a "judicial mind" to hold judgment in suspension until all the facts are in; a demonstrated capacity for empathy, respect, compassion and sensitivity for "the least of these" as well as the most powerful; action based on an awareness of the difference between data and diatribe, information and ideology; a basic honesty and sense of ethics, willingness to confess error and change one's mind; an advocate for institutional honesty, democracy, transparency, and candor -- and so forth. You get the idea.
The other thing an institution can do, having hired such people, is to provide them whatever additional training may be useful.
2. "The system" and procedures. One of the major tasks for which administrators get the big bucks is proactively anticipating a variety of possible crises (as well as more mundane day-to-day challenges and operations), designing systems that will enable the institution to deal with them most efficiently, effectively and fairly, and then running drills to make sure they work, and tweaking the procedures so that they will work better.
Upon discovering years ago that a major corporation found it could save 30% on its winter heating bill for an industrial plant by having the employees close a large sliding door, I was prompted to observe that any bright 10 or 12-year-old could probably walk through any manufacturing operation that had not been overseen by a good industrial engineer for the last 5 or 10 years and do equally well in coming up with savings; the opportunities are so obvious.
Lest you assume I'm disparaging the quality of the employees, quite the opposite is my intention. Workers often have much more creative insights when it comes to efficiency than managers. But they also haven't been asked, have full time jobs that require all their attention -- and such suggestions for improvements as they may have offered in the past are as likely to have been rebuffed or ignored as implemented.
Every University administrator has, of course, responsibility for their own behavior -- regardless of the system within which they must function. But it is not the responsibility of the football coach, or the director of EOD, the University's general counsel, or the Vice President for this or that, to address, let alone redesign, the procedures for handling sexual assaults by athletes -- or others. They have full time jobs operating under the system (or rather the lack of a system) that is currently in place. Even if they had the time, they might well have been criticized for undertaking such a redesign, and been charged with having meddled in something that "is none of their business."
I'm not prepared to make a judgmental declaration as to what the Regents and UI administration "should" have done. But I am willing to suggest that much if not all of what's involved in "Story One" (events of last October 14), "Story Two" (what UI administrators did thereafter) and "Story Three" (the Regents' response and first, and now second, investigation of Stories One and Two) could have been prevented, and would have been avoided -- up to and including the current, postponed evaluation of UI President Sally Mason -- had more attention been given to the formulation (and application) of a workable "governance model."
Systems design and procedures are, in the first and last analysis, the responsibility of an institution's CEO. And whether one's primary concern is for the institution's (and one's own) public relations, or a genuine compassion for victims, a university's systems and procedures that deal with sexual assaults by athletes would seem to be one of the first and most predictable of the potential crises that could be dealt with proactively by any major American university with multi-million-dollar semi-pro athletic teams.
So there it is as my guide as to what to look for while reading through the Stolar Report -- because it deals with both: Ask yourself, Is this part of the Report dealing with the (a) behavior of given individuals operating within the current non-system, or is it (b) describing that non-system, or making recommendations as to how an appropriate system might be designed? They are, as I've noted, questions that might equally well be asked with regard to Katrina -- or our current global financial crisis.
A Serious Suggestion for Iowa City City Council's Revisit of Alcohol Regulations
Occasionally I give the University and the City Council (and bar owners) a bit of a hard time for their failure to do anything meaningful and effective with regard to students' irresponsible drinking and its consequences.
So when the Council appears willing to take another look at the matter I want to acknowledge that fact, and make what I hope will be received as a serious suggestion. Chris Rhatigan, "Council to look at alcohol rules,"Iowa City Press-Citizen , September 17, 2008, p. A3 ("The Iowa City Council will discuss regulations on alcohol at its next work session [Monday, September 22, 6:30 p.m.]. Mayor Regenia Bailey said a variety of alcohol-related issues will be on the table. . . . One subject that will be addressed is well-drink or mixed-drink pitchers.").
I don't claim that this idea has been thoroughly thought through and vetted, or that it couldn't be improved with at least some tweaking. But I do think it's something consistent with what the Council and others have talked about in the past, and is at least worth the Council putting on the table and considering along with its other options.
Of all the efforts to discourage those 3000 youngsters who become the tobacco industry's "replacement smokers" each year (i.e., replacements for the industry's customers killed by tobacco) one of the most effective turned out to be simply raising the price of a pack of cigarettes. Might that also be a useful approach to excessive consumption of alcohol?
And no, I'm not about to suggest the Iowa City City Council start setting the city-wide price of a glass of beer. (Joke follows: Although if it would impose a sufficient city beer tax it could probably eliminate the property tax as well as the binge drinking.)
What I'm about to propose be considered can be thought of as a sub-set of the focus on keg sales, beer pitcher specials, and what the Council referred to as "well-drink or mixed-drink pitchers."
Would it be possible for the Council to legislate the elimination of such discounts? (I've made no effort to research the legality of its doing so.)
The Council would not be setting prices. Each bar owner could continue to do that -- presumably coming up with prices that would maximize his or her income.
But it would be required to be a permanent, fixed price -- per ounce or other volume -- that would not vary by occasion (e.g., 21st birthday), day of the week or year, or time of the day (e.g., "happy hour").
Say, to just arbitrarily pick a number, a bar owner decides to sell domestic beer for 20 cents an ounce. A 12-oz. glass is $2.40, a 16-oz. glass is $3.20, a gallon (128 oz.) is $25.60. There would be no economic incentive to buy (and consume) larger quantities -- or to come to the bar when discount price "specials" were offered.
(Presumably there might be a need to have separate per-ounce prices for domestic and imported beers, and of course for hard liquor -- but that would also be the bar owner's choice.)
Prices would be set by the bar owners: s/he could charge 15 cents or 30 cents or whatever other amount they wished for beer; but whatever they chose would be their price 24/7 (subject, perhaps, to some opportunity for adjustment up or down to a different, "permanent" 24/7 rate every, say, 90 or 180 days as their experience, and profits, might dictate).
This is, admittedly, a very limited proposal with presumably relatively limited effect. It doesn't deal with the sale of kegs or cases of beer, or the incongruous practice of permitting under age customers into a business the sole purpose of which is to profit from the sale of alcohol when the sale to those individuals is a violation of law (for all of which I have other ideas).
This approach would not interfere with "social drinking," responsible alcohol consumption in bars -- whether legally or illegally. What it would do is reduce the economic incentive to binge drink, and the consequences of such intoxication, provided by the "specials" that make such behavior so much more economically affordable.
For the next week or so the Regents and UI will be major news.
In a move reminiscent of the old line, "Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the show?" the Regents will be holding a special, closed session this afternoon to evaluate UI President Sally Mason's performance during the past year -- except for the matter of the UI's handling of the alleged sexual assault last October 14.
The Regents are meeting near Iowa City today (September 17) and tomorrow.
Tomorrow, as the last item on the agenda, they will be receiving the Stolar Partnership's Report on how the University handled the October 14 events and their aftermath -- along with how the Regents themselves handled the first investigation of the matter, that concluded everyone had done well. Presumably the report will at least be available online later tomorrow.
Then the University is apparently going to be given a week (and perhaps more) before being asked to respond to the Stolar Report -- at an additional Regents meeting called specially for that purpose.
Some legislators had earlier asked that a presentation be made to them as well, though little has been heard of that recently.
In any event, the Web page, "University of Iowa Sexual Assault Controversy -- 2007-08," July 19-present, has been updated this morning with these items and more -- including links to a couple basic documents and some of what the formerly withheld 3200 pages of documents reveal about how this case was handled.
Unprecedented: Two Consecutive "Hats Off" Awards to Press-Citizen
Yesterday's Press-Citizen editorial earned it a "Hats Off" journalism award -- in this case "civic journalism" in the best tradition of putting the interests of readers/taxpayers ahead of the interests of government subsidized businesses. Editorial, "Center to Open Without Public Assistance," Iowa City Press-Citizen, September 15, 2008, p. A9. See Nicholas Johnson, "Taxpayer Rescue," September 15, 2008.
I don't know if anyone's put lipstick on the Sheraton, but it's sure had its snout in the trough more than once. It (and its predecessors) squatted down over Dubuque Street, promising to at least keep a walkway open. Now it wants to seize more of that City property for its own -- without paying taxpayers a dime -- while asking us to pick up at least half the cost of the remodeling necessary to complete this land grab.
Since neither the City nor the University is prepared to do anything meaningful to cut back on the downtown drunkenness, with all of the attendant consequences that predictably flow from our surfeit of bars and illegal sales to underage patrons, the hotel has also reasonably requested that it be permitted to close off the walkway after 11:00 p.m.
The common sense resolution? Permit the post-11:00 p.m. closure. Deny the narrowing of the walkway and the movement of taxpayers' money to the hotel's bottom line. That's what the Press-Citizen is proposing. Will the City Council have the courage to take this course? Watch this space and see.
Financial Crisis: How We Got Here, Where We're Going
And there are significant lessons here for this year's presidential election, and regulation generally.
As I've often conceded, when it comes to servicing their major campaign contributors (big corporations and the wealthiest 1/2 of 1%) George Wallace was right: "there's not a dime's worth of difference" between Democrats and Republicans.
Having said that, the Republicans are both more comfortable, and skilled, at doing so. Democrats never have been very good at "Republican light."
President Reagan summed up the ideology: "government is not the solution; government is the problem." An unregulated market is the consumer's best friend. "Deregulation" and "re-regulation" are heralded as the rising tide that will lift all boats. "Get the government off our backs" -- unless it's about to put money in our pockets -- they say.
Well, in my view the consequences of unrestrained and unregulated greed and selfishness have left in their wake in our economy and society what Hurricane Ike left in its wake in Galveston.
This financial collapse is just one example. The collapse of coal mines on miners is another. The growing disparity between the wages of workers and those of CEOs is another. The examples are endless. Just look around.
I don't think either McCain-Palin or Obama-Biden are inclined or able to return our country to sanity with regard to business' excesses. I just think the Democrats will be marginally better, and that the margin is well worth our voting for.
As Story and Andrews report:
"During the Depression, Congress separated commercial banks, which take deposits and make loans, from investment banks, which underwrite and trade securities. The investment banks were allowed to do business with less oversight, while commercial banks operated with tighter supervision.
"But after Congress repealed those Depression-era laws in 1999, commercial banks began muscling in on Wall Street’s turf. As the new competition whittled down profit margins, investment banks used more of their capital to trade securities and also began developing financial derivatives to fuel profits."
On a lighter note . . .
. . . if you haven't yet seen the September 13 NBC "Saturday Night Live" routine that's all over the Internet, take five minutes to watch:
[Credit: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, NBC "Saturday Night Live" Source: http://entertainment.msn.com] With a whole lot of common sense, courage and a sense of humor we'll get through all this.
The Way Free Private Enterprise is Supposed to Work: Thinking and Acting Globally and Locally
Looks like the taxpayers aren't going to be picking up the losses for the 158-year-old Lehman Brothers, now on its way to bankruptcy. It's not like the Bush Administration (and many Democratic senators and members of Congress) wouldn't like to send us the bill. After all, they had no qualms about having us pay for the JP Morgan Chase takeover of Bear Stearns in March, thanks to the Federal Reserve, and the $200 million or more they asked our grandchildren pay off in order to keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac struggling along, since all they otherwise would have had was ownership of half the homes in America, worth over $5 trillion.
Much was made this past week of the government's refusal to have us taxpayers pick up the cost of the U.S. auto industry management's persistent errors of economic and market judgment. The companies wanted some $25 billion from us. But then I read somewhere that the Administration had already given them $25 billion; this was just an additional request for the same amount. (Also in the financial news: the Bank of America has purchased Merrill Lynch (also in trouble and worth $100 billion last year) for $50 billion; and AIG is looking around for someone with $40 billion in spare pocket change to help them out.)
Corporate operations have become a "heads we win, tails you lose" proposition of "socialism for the rich and free private enterprise for the poor" in this country. When a company makes a profit it gets to keep it -- indeed, more and more of it, as tax rates for corporations and the rich have been slashed from what they once were. On the other hand, if it has losses that are big enough, the shareholders can just ask the taxpayers to cover those losses. It's a sweet deal.
So now there seems to be at least one example the Bush Administration can point to when this standard practice was not followed: Lehman Brothers, after reporting a half-billion of income has conceded a $2.8 billion loss one quarter followed by a $3.9 billion loss the next, and without a taxpayer bailout is headed for bankruptcy.
Why the switch? Who knows? Maybe someone in Washington has looked at the books and discovered we're $53 trillion in the hole (debt, plus unfunded future obligations) and decided we just couldn't afford it. Maybe there's a Republican fear of the remote possibility that the electorate will be treated to some discussion of issues other than lipstick on animals before they go to vote -- say, the economy -- in which case it would be handy for the Republican team to be able to cite at least one example of a time when the free private enterprisers didn't send the taxpayers the bill for their losses.
Anyhow, it's lucky Hong Kong's Hang Seng and Tokyo's Nikkei are closed today for national holidays. London's FTSE and Frankfurt's DAX are going to end their trading days down at least 2-3% and it would have been worse if the Asian markets were open. (India's SENSEX index was down over 5%.) Based on the Dow Jones and S&P 500 futures this morning, it looks like the U.S. markets will be down about 3% today.
Meanwhile, a comparable if short-lived burst of sanity has occurred right here in River City, and been memorialized in a Press-Citizen editorial. Editorial, "Center to Open Without Public Assistance,"Iowa City Press-Citizen, September 15, 2008, p. A9.
Of course, in a way it's kind of sad. It's like the headline, "Man Bites Dog." The extent to which our public officials let for-profit businesses stiff the taxpayers for start-up costs on the front end and their losses on the back end is so endemic to government these days that "Taxpayers Spared Cost of Starting New For-Profit Business" is news.
But the fact that it's rare doesn't mean it shouldn't be celebrated, and editorialized about.
I have often written of "why business subsidies don’t make sense for any city [and are] especially inappropriate for Iowa City." In one Press-Citizen op ed column I itemized some 11 categories of reasons why this was so. Nicholas Johnson, "Courage, Councilors," October 3, 2007.
Of course there are examples of for-profit companies that, with the generous assistance of taxpayers, have not later gone belly up, or left town, leaving the taxpayers holding the bag. But such examples do not come close to constituting a persuasive case why taxpayers should move their money to the bottom line of for-profit companies. To the best of my knowledge, no one has to this day ever taken on that column's itemization of categories and documented why all of them are wrong.
One of those categories was:
“Need” is impossible to know. Many projects will go ahead without subsidy. If tax breaks are available, of course entrepreneurs will say they won’t act without them. But how can we know when that’s just blackmail?
Today's Press-Citizen editorial involves a case study illustrating this very category:
We're glad that Mercy Hospital and a group of local surgeons have managed to find enough funding to build a new ambulatory surgical center in Iowa City's Northgate Plaza . . ..
But we're even more happy that the Iowa City Council didn't offer any tax incremental financing to help the development of the project. After all, the first question of determining whether a project deserves a TIF should be, "Can it succeed without public financing?" Since the answer in this case was clearly, "Yes," the city was right to deny the request eventually -- although it could have done so much earlier in the process.
Last year, investors for the surgeons' group and Mercy came to the city requesting a $600,000 TIF to help build their proposed 24,000-square-foot facility.
The point is not that we couldn't have known whether the doctors really needed the $600,000 or not. The point is, as I wrote last year, "If tax breaks are available, of course entrepreneurs will say they won’t act without them."
The point is that while I would contend that we can always know that taxpayer funding of for-profit businesses is inappropriate for all the reasons I've itemized, one of those reasons is that we can virtually never know whether more appropriate funding sources could and would be found if taxpayer money was not available.
The paper's editorial doesn't go that far. The editorial board expressly says, "As an editorial board, we've never viewed TIFs as the automatic four-letter word of economic development."
But it's entitled to this blog's "Hat's Off" journalism award anyway for the rest of its conclusion:
[T]the decision on whether to grant a TIF needs to be based on much more than a bottomline explanation on how it offers a win-win arrangement for both the city and the business. Otherwise the city risks granting businesses massive tax breaks for doing simply what their corporate officers and the current market would have them do anyway. . . .
We don't want the city to be hostile to new businesses or expansions . . .. But neither do we want the city to fork over cash every time someone shows there's a little profit to be made.
On behalf of my grandchildren and great grandchildren, I thank you Press-Citizen editorial board -- and, oh yes, you too Federal Reserve Board.
The Register editorializes this morning that we should have more foreign language instruction in Iowa's schools. Editorial, "Encourage Learning Foreign Languages,"Des Moines Register, September 14, 2008, p. OP1 ("Marcia Harmon Rosenbusch, director of the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center at Iowa State University in Ames, said all children should have the opportunity to study foreign languages in elementary school. Many European Union youngsters learn a second language starting in preschool. 'I think high school is really late,' she said. It's also out of sync with President Bush's 2006 National Security Language Initiative, which calls for better developing foreign-language skills. . . . That's why Iowa school districts should look for more creative solutions, with help from the state. The status quo is falling short.").
Here's my response -- too long for the Register's limitation on the number of characters it permits in comments about its stories:
Great Idea -- But Let's Pick One
As someone who has used foreign languages during considerable international travel, I couldn't agree more with the desirability of Iowa's schools requiring, or at least offering, foreign languages.
But given the small number of our high school students who are truly fluent in reading, writing and speaking a foreign language when they graduate we might want to consider some alternative approaches.
Here's one.
1. Pick one foreign language. When I was in school it was French, then the international language. Today the international language is English -- and a second, rapidly gaining, U.S. language is Spanish. But whatever the choice, just pick one.
2. Start teaching it in kindergarten and continue every year until high school graduation -- and students' mastery.
3. Forget the cafeteria choice of foreign languages. Concentrate resources and teachers on one. But when parents or students want to, make it possible for K-12 students to get credit for studying additional languages from universities and community colleges, private companies and tutors, or study abroad programs.
It's one more example of how, when we put our minds to it, we can get a greater return on less investment in our schools. Every high school graduate would be truly fluent in at least one foreign language (something they, and we, can't claim now) -- and at far less public expense than what our present K-12 foreign language programs costs.
And no one who wanted to do so would be deprived of the opportunity to earn credit for learning additional languages.
Throughout its reporting about the events since October 14, the Press-Citizen often includes a line similar to that in Hermiston's September 12 story, below: "Because it is the Press-Citizen's policy not to identify alleged sexual assault victims, it has not named the mother."
Many media organizations follow that policy. It reflects a sensitivity toward the alleged victim. It reduces at least one of the many disincentives that discourage victims from reporting assaults. And it doesn't really interfere all that much with the ability of the media to tell the story.
The question is, why not apply a similar standard to the accused? There may be a reason. I'm not saying there's not. I'm just asking, what is it?
A person's reputation is a very fragile -- and valuable -- thing.
There are many elements of "defamation," but it is, in general, the utterance or repetition of a falsehood that is damaging to the subject's reputation. (Related "causes of action," as lawyers refer to theories for law suits, might include "false light," "public disclosure of private facts," and "intentional infliction of emotional distress" -- in short, personal harm that can sometimes come from truth as well as falsehood.)
Clearly, for the mass media to spread far and wide that someone has committed a crime, or other disreputable act -- let alone one that is as highly charged emotionally as "sexual assault" -- when the subject of the charge is innocent, or before it can be known whether or not they are innocent, is to inflict a form of punishment that is often far more severe than the punishments handed down by a court. It is a way of holding up someone to shame and ridicule in a community; although different physically, in its effect on one's reputation it is something not unlike the earlier use of stocks for public humiliation (a wooden structure, in a public place, in which an offender's arms, legs and head could be held in place).
Once one's reputation is besmirched it is almost impossible to redeem it. As Mark Twain is credited with saying, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." Or as I sometimes quote, but cannot now find the source for: "The truth is a notoriously slow runner in its race with the lie."
Indeed, in many countries for a newspaper or broadcast station to engage in the kind of reporting we've had about this alleged assault would constitute a form of contempt of court for which the media's reporters and owners would be punished with fines and imprisonment. (The concern is not just for the reputation of the accused, but for the legal process itself, since pre-trial publicity may so taint the public's understanding of a case -- before any evidence has even been marshaled, not to mention admitted during a trial -- as to make it virtually impossible to find that "impartial jury.")
I suffer no illusions that we'd ever adopt such a policy here. But considering it as a theoretical matter, why not? There are good reasons for the media to report on what various aspects of our government -- from the military to the judiciary -- are up to. After all, "checking value" is one of the basic values of, or reasons for, the First Amendment (i.e., the media's ability to look for, investigate and report on institutional abuses -- not just governmental units, but corporations, trade unions, hospitals, and so forth. Other values include "marketplace of ideas/search for truth," "self-governing," "safety valve" (i.e., an alternative to violence), and "self-actualization.") A self-governing democracy requires that the citizenry have the opportunity to know what its government is doing.
So I don't think we'd want to bar the media from reporting about the courts, judges, trials and accused defendants. But that doesn't answer: how much would we, the public, lose if the media (a) could investigate and gather information about courts/trials whenever it wanted, but (b) could not report what it knew until either the conclusion of the trial, or at least after it was started, and (c) could not reveal the names of accused defendants until they'd been found guilty?
For purposes of monitoring the operation of government, does the public really have to know these details any earlier? Maybe they do. But, if so, why?
The folks least able to reply, or otherwise protect themselves, are those who are not in the public eye, with easy access to the mass media. But I've discussed elsewhere the need to do something about the latter as well. We've seen it during this presidential campaign. Is there nothing that can be done to prevent, or at least minimize, the lies and deliberate misrepresentations that pollute the public's participation in elections -- as well as whatever harm they may do to the personal reputations of candidates and others? See, "Defamation of Public Figures: Rethinking New York Times v. Sullivan" in Nicholas Johnson, "It's Biden -- for 'Experience'?" August 23, 2008.
The consequences from gossip and serious, unproved assertions, are complicated by the fact that few among us, it seems, are able, or if able, inclined and willing, to apply the distinctions between an allegation and proof, an inference and a fact, an hypothesis and a theory, an assertion and data, ideological faith and policy analysis, a rumor and a report, rhetoric and research. My sense is that if we're spending time on such distinctions in our K-12 curriculum they're not being applied by a good many graduates years later.
Secondly, if the lie could travel halfway round the world in Mark Twain's day, today's Internet makes it possible to cover the world with lies in a small fraction of the time he had in mind.
As it happened, I came upon a couple of authors' efforts to explore these issues recently.
Here are excerpts from the first, written by someone who seems able to truly internalize "innocent until proven guilty":
"Those vicious thugs brutally raped that poor girl and left her bloody and beaten!"
So I remember one caller confidently proclaimed on a local talk show in reference to the alleged sexual assault in a university dormitory. After what seemed like a long pause, the host stated, "Well, remember these allegations are still unproven and we should refer to the accuser as alleged victim."
Left unchallenged were the words "vicious thugs," "brutally raped" and "bloody and beaten."
I never read those descriptions among the few details that have been released to the public by the police. Yet, even though the start of the defendants' trial is a long way off, the caller, and apparently the host, were confident in their condemning judgments extrapolated from unproven allegations. . . .
I close with my own opinions of others' guilt.
Given that the trial concerning the alleged rape has not even started, I currently think the two defendants are innocent.
From that excerpt and the table of contents it looks like Professor Solove is struggling -- perhaps with some success -- in addressing what possibly can be done to moderate the potential harm to reputations that's been exacerbated by the Internet, while retaining its open access, diversity and wild west character.
There are no obvious answers -- at least they're not obvious to me. But we'd all better be looking for some, because it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Whose Business is Business Anyway?The Gazette's "Money" section had an unusual report the other day worthy of commendation: George C. Ford, "Who Owns What in the Corridor,"The Gazette, September 7, 2008, p. D1.
Our local papers provide us plenty of what amounts to free advertising disguised as "news" about local businesses: promotions and awards received by local business persons; the opening of new businesses or other upbeat descriptions of the persons and properties involved; a new factory coming to town. But there's relatively little in the way of information beyond that.
Like, most basic, who owns Iowa City? Noam Chomsky quotes America's early John Jay as saying that "those who own the country should govern it." Nicholas Johnson, Are We There Yet? (2008), Part X: Action. Whether they "should" do so is worthy of debate. But that they do is beyond much question. It's true in most communities and states as well as for our nation. And, that being the case, it seems to me "the Fourth Estate" (the media) owes those of the local citizenry who constitute its readers at least a little information about who their real governors are and what they're up to.
Anyhow, what The Gazette did, in one sense is no big deal. It just reported on the ownership of nine major malls and other facilities in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. What was striking about the feature was simply how rare something like that is.
I would think the papers' readers would be interested in the laundry list of benefits businesses receive from our local governments and utilities -- the city employees who clean up the vomit outside our plethora of local bars rather than requiring the bar owners to pay for it; the city property turned over to bars and restaurants on city sidewalks formerly used for walking; the extensions of roads and water mains; the deep discounts offered for industrial users of water and electricity over what the rest of us have to pay; the cash, TIFs and other subsidies and tax breaks awarded the favored few.
Wouldn't some itemization and reporting about those things be of as much interest to readers as a complete directory of the salaries of all government employees? I would think so.
Why is it we can name the athletes arrested for offenses related to alcohol abuse, but many of us would be hard pressed to name the owners of Iowa City bars who profited off the sale of the alcohol that contributed to that behavior?
At a time when we need all the land in greenbelts and greenways we can possibly obtain, for a whole variety of reasons -- not the least of which is as one means to reduce or eliminate the economic loss from future flooding -- who are the developers buying up that land with the intention of building the malls, parking lots, roads, homes and businesses that will add to the rapid runoff, intensity and frequency of the future floods that will produce even more economic loss than that from which we've just suffered? Isn't that something you'd like to know? I would.
So a "Hat's Off Award" to The Gazette, along with hopes it may inspire more coverage of one of the most important, and least reported, stories in any community.
September 9, 2008, 8:00 a.m.; September 13, 2008, 5:00 p.m.
Maria Houser Conzemius, Deepak Chopra, and Molly Ivins
Our local PUMA ("Party Unity My A**"), popular and often insightful Press-Citizen blogger, has announced today why she is leaving the Democratic Party: the Party's failure to bestow its nominations for either president or vice president on Senator Hillary Clinton. Maria Houser Conzemius, "Why I've left the Democrats,"Iowa City Press-Citizen, September 9, 2008.
By September 13 the Press-Citizen had received enough response to the column to devote an entire page to columns and letters of rebuttal -- linked at the bottom of this blog entry.
She is expressing a frustration, and taking action on the basis of it, that many Democrats and Republicans have felt over the years with regard to one disappointment or another.
There is a progressive wing of the Democratic Party -- sometimes called "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" -- the members of which feel a great deal of frustration with "the corporate wing of the Democratic Party." These are the folks who feel the Party has turned its back on its natural constituencies of poor, working poor, working class, and lower middle class -- and ask their Party's leaders, "So, how's that working for you?" Because their abandonment has happened to coincide with a good many lost elections, when in the progressives' view, had the Party stood by them it could have won virtually every position in the country from court house to White House. They feel they are being taken for granted, that the Party leadership believes it can ignore them because they have nowhere else to go.
But the reality is that they really don't have anywhere else to go -- except to third parties.
How to reconcile their dilemma? The late Molly Ivins advised disaffected progressives, when Ralph Nader was running: (1) determine how close the Democratic Party-Republican Party race is in your state; (2) if it's close, vote Democratic; (3) if not (either way) vote for Ralph.
Isn't this another case where the PUMAs can "have it all"? Rather than not voting at all, or voting for McCain-Palin, why not apply the Ivins' rule?
If you're an angry Hillary Clinton supporter who lives in a state that's "too close to call" vote Democrat. If the polls indicate either McCain or Obama are going to win in a walk, by a wide margin, write in Senator Hillary Clinton for president.
Wouldn't that be a more effective way to make your point? You'd actually get to vote for Hillary -- at least in some states, making your point, and your frustration, much more specific and clear than by not voting, or voting for McCain. But you'd also avoid turning the country over to the right wing, anti-feminist ideology and programs, the continuation of the Bush Administration, represented by the McCain-Palin ticket.
This is gratuitous advice, I recognize. I don't have a dog in this particular fight. But I can relate to Maria's frustration and just think there may be more effective -- and less destructive -- ways for her and other PUMAs to vent it.
Deepak Chopra is a controversial guy. I don't want to take responsibility for all he's ever said and written any more than I'd endorse everything ever said by a visiting minister in my church. But I've always been more interested in judging ideas on the basis of their content than on the basis of their source. And I thought his take on the significance of the differences between Palin and Obama -- not unrelated to Maria's column -- worth excerpting this morning.
Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that. . . . Palin's pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.
She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of "the other." For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don't want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind. . . .
Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants, being different from "us" pure American types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism is a foreign threat. The radical right marches under the banners of "I'm all right, Jack," and "Why change? Everything's OK as it is." The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the same time. She can add mom to apple pie on her resume, while blithely reversing forty years of feminist progress. . . . Republicans have won multiple national elections by raising shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness.
Obama's call for higher ideals in politics can't be seen in a vacuum. The shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just conservatives possess a shadow -- we all do. So what comes next is a contest between the two forces of progress and inertia. Will the shadow win again, or has its furtive appeal become exhausted? No one can predict. The best thing about Gov. Palin is that she brought this conflict to light, which makes the upcoming debate honest. It would be a shame to elect another Reagan, whose smiling persona was a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to the demoralized state we are in. We deserve to see what we are getting, without disguise.
I'm not saying Chopra's "right" -- after all, how could you ever "prove" or "disprove" such an hypothesis to the satisfaction of the scientific community? I'm just saying I found it something worth reflecting upon this morning as I continue to try to make sense of this year's presidential election.
The September 13th Response
Lisa Krotz, "Palin comes at too much of a price,"Iowa City Press-Citizen, September 13, 2008, p. A17 ("Conzemius quotes a pro-Hillary blogger saying she looks forward to a day when the Democratic party is 'willing to nominate and support female candidates.' Was she asleep during all of 1984 when Geraldine Ferraro was running on the democratic ticket for vice president? If Conzemius chooses to vote against Obama for political, ideological and issues-based reasons, that is certainly her prerogative. But voting against . . . what appear to be her own self-interests serves little purpose.").
Maria Houser Conzemius, "Conzemius responds to her critics,"Iowa City Press-Citizen, September 13, 2008, p. A17 ("The battle strategy of voting for McCain/Palin is not a game to us PUMAs; it's war. We've had enough. We're not stepping aside anymore. We're not going to the back of the bus anymore.").
We need a third standard for evaluating when firms are "too large." The antitrust laws' standard (adverse impact on market competition), and what Congress originally intended to be the FCC standard for broadcast stations (a robust "marketplace of ideas") are no longer adequate.
The third standard? Institutions should not be permitted to become so large that the impact of their collapse on our national economy would be so severe that taxpayers must be asked to pay for their bailout.
It's not that our nation's founders didn't know better. As Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "I, however, place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared."
This morning we're dealing with yet another case study of why we need this new standard: the potential $200 billion bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, described by the New York Times as an "extraordinary" bailout that "could become one of the most expensive financial bailouts in American history."
I remember when I was involved in the Administration of President Lyndon Johnson how insistent the President was one year that the federal budget not go over $100 billion. He felt there might be a significant public and media backlash were that cap to be exceeded.
Yes, I know, there's been some inflation over the past few years; $100 billion isn't what it used to be. Still it's something of a shocker to realize that the mere interest on the national debt was $430 billion in 2007 -- over four times the entire federal budget when I was in government.
There are some basic terms here that need to be distinguished and understood, and are often and easily confused. (The details, and "off budget" expenditures, make it even more confusing; I'm not even going there -- except to note that the total, long term costs of the latest Iraq War are projected to be something on the order of two-to-three trillion.)
The "federal budget" is what the government projects it's going to spend during the next fiscal year (October to October).
A "budget deficit" is what the government incurs for a given year if the government spends more than it takes in. It's what you have during any year that you put more debt on your credit cards than you pay off.
The "national debt" is what the government has, or what keeps increasing, when those budget deficits accumulate year after year. The same thing applies to your credit cards: spend more than you pay off and your total "credit card debt" increases.
"Interest on the national debt" is what the government has to pay, just as you have to, to those from whom it's borrowed. Were it to fail to pay these interest payments -- even if it has to borrow even more money to pay the interest on its former loans -- it would result in a collapse of our own entire economy, and very likely that of Japan and European countries as well. Of course, paying interest doesn't reduce the debt; it just keeps the Chinese from refusing to loan our government the money it borrows each year to keep the country running. It's like your making large enough payments to the credit card company each month to cover the interest you owe -- while your total balance owing continues to rise.
"Unfunded obligations" are what's coming in the future that the government has no way of paying, and has no plans for addressing -- in our government's case a couple major examples are Medicare and Social Security. It would be like your taking out a second mortgage on your house to pay off your credit card debt with no realistic way to make the mortgage payments when they come due; or a low monthly payment mortgage on a house with an enormous "balloon payment" obligation down the road you have no way of paying off.
So what are these numbers?
Budget. President Bush this year (2008) presented Congress with a budget of $3.2 trillion (over 30 times what it was in my day).
Budget deficit. Whoever occupies the White House next year will inherit from President Bush a $482 billion budget deficit.
National debt.Our current national debt is about $9.7 trillion. (If you'd like to track its increase day by day check the "Debt Clock." or the U.S. Treasury page.)
Interest on the national debt, as noted above, is now well over $400 billion a year.
Unfunded obligations -- hold onto your hat -- are now about $53 trillion.
What does all this mean?
Let's start with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The bailout plan for the companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a seismic event in a year of repeated financial crises followed by aggressive federal intervention, places the companies in a government conservatorship, much like a bankruptcy reorganization. The plan also replaces the management of the companies.
The rescue package represents an extraordinary federal intervention in private enterprise. It could become one of the most expensive financial bailouts in American history . . . [as it] commits the government to provide as much as $100 billion to each company to backstop any shortfalls in capital. . . .
Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, and Lawrence H. Summers, a Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, along with many other critics, have long maintained that the companies were too powerful politically and financially, and that their huge portfolios posed enormous risks to the financial system. . . .
[Treasury Secretary Henry M.] Paulson has sought to avoid taking sides in the debate, but in recent months came to the conclusion that the companies’ conflicting missions of providing federally backed financing for affordable housing while serving shareholders were untenable.
“Market discipline is best served when shareholders bear both the risk and the reward of their investment,” Mr. Paulson said on Sunday.
CNN's Glenn Beck refers to our nation's unfunded future obligations as a $53 trillion asteroid hurtling toward Earth, the first impact from which is scarcely 10 years away. Glenn Beck, "The $53 Trillion Asteroid," CNN, March 14, 2008.
No one in Washington, or those headed that way, seems willing to talk about it, but the United States is headed for a severe shaking up from this asteroid. Although we are the primary target, rather than the whole of planet Earth, no country will escape the impact of our failing economy -- including our major creditor, China.
Former Comptroller General David Walker has been riding around the country on his horse shouting "the asteroid is coming, the asteroid is coming," but we either haven't heard him or can't internalize the significance of what he's saying. (Here's his July 2007 segment on CBS' "60 Minutes.")
What does this mean to my family?
If you count Mary and me, our seven children, five grandchildren and three great grandchildren, that's 17 people.
There are as of this morning about 304 million people living in the United States if you count everyone from new-born babes to the terminally ill. Divide $53 trillion by 304 million and you get a per-person share of those unfunded obligations of $174,342 per person. Multiply that by our family of 17 and you get a . . .
. . . family share of that national debt of $2,963,815!
I don't know about your family, but when I see the Chinese government's REPO Man coming up the walk to knock on the door I'm going to know that this family is in deep, deep trouble.
Talk about "our chickens coming home to roost"!
How much does your family owe the Chinese?
Isn't it about time we insist our public officials -- city council members granting TIFs as well as Congress bailing out wealthy shareholders -- heed Secretary Paulson's wisdom: "Market discipline is best served when shareholders bear both the risk and the reward of their investment.”
Now this bailout is being sold as in the consumer's best interest, making mortgages and car loans once again available at more reasonable rates and terms. It's pointed out that the shareholders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have seen a real reduction in the value of their stock. True enough.
But what about the millions of profit that have already been made by the CEOs of Wall Street firms, by banks, mortgage companies, realtors; what about the future income that will now be coming their way? Those responsible for their profits -- and everyone else's losses -- aren't paying any of those costs. The taxpayers are. And that's wrong.
(Note that all we're talking about here are the "bailouts." That's only one aspect of our system of "socialism for the rich and free private enterprise for the poor." See, e.g., Nicholas Johnson, "Who's The Reason?" September 5, 2008. There are also the tax breaks, subsidies, defense contracts, tariffs, price supports, earmarks and other dozens of ways government functions to transfer taxpayer money to the political parties' largest contributors.)
It's not like this was some big surprise, like critics weren't pointing out that "their huge portfolios posed enormous risks to the financial system." Those profiting from those risks showed little concern for the rest of us until they, too, began to suffer some losses -- at which point they wanted the taxpayers to bear the risk and the loss. Once we permit firms to reach such a size that a reasonable argument can be made they cannot be allowed to fail because of the far reaching consequences for our economy it's already too late.
No firm should be permitted to reach a size such that Secretary Paulson's wisdom -- "Market discipline is best served when shareholders bear both the risk and the reward of their investment.” -- can no longer be applied.
