Home » Politics (Page 4)
Category Archives: Politics
New Employment and Health Care Stats Refutes Obamacare Opponents
by Brian T. Lynch, MSW
The latest labor statistics and health care statistics refute the false claims being made against the Affordable Care Act (ACA) by Obamacare opponents. The claims and facts below are summarized from an excellent op/ed in Forbes magazine by Rick Ungar, which can be found here:
CLAIM: Obamacare will lead to a decline in full-time employment as employers reduce hours to below 30 per week to avoid providing health benefits.
FACT: Numbers just released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), shows that part-time workers in the U.S. fell by 300,000 since the Affordable Care Act became law. This past year, the first full year of Obamacare health coverage, full-time employment grew by over 2 million. Part-time employment leaders who oppose Obamacare. Fewer cops, fewer teachers, fewer folks providing essential social services in the public sector all to make political point.
CLAIM: Millions of Americans are losing their individual health insurance policy due to Obamacare.
FACT: A new study by Lisa Clemans-Cope and Nathaniel Anderson of the Urban Institute found that prior to the Affordable Care Act the number of people kept their individual policy was very low with just 17 percent retaining coverage for more than two years.” The Urban Institute conducted a survey last December that asked 522 people between the ages of 18 and 64, “Did you receive a notice in the past few months from a health insurance company saying that your policy is cancelled or will no longer be offered at the end of 2013?” Only 18.6% said their plan was cancelled because it didn’t meet ACA coverage requirements, while the expected cancellation rate was 17% in the years prior to Obamacare. You can find the following bar graph and read more in Health Affairs.
The 18.6 percent who lost individual health insurance coverage due to the ACA requirements amounts to about 2.6 million people. According to the Urban Institute researchers over half of these folks will be eligible for coverage assistance. Still, roughly one million people will have to replace their cancelled policy with something that may cost them more. This isn’t good but it is less dramatic than what has been reported and most of these individuals would have been in the same boat prior to the ACA.
Facts matter – The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index was also just released. It reveals that 15.9 percent of American adults are now uninsured, down from 17.1 percent for the last three months of 2013. That translates roughly to 3 million to 4 million people getting coverage who did not have it before. The the number of Americans who still do not have health insurance coverage is on track to reach the lowest quarterly number since 2008.
There are currently 5 to 8 million people who can’t access Medicaid because their political leaders oppose Obamacare. That means the number of people being denied access to Medicaid expansion for political reasons is greater than the number who have signed up for Obamacare so far. The Rand Corporation recently analyzed 14 of the states with governors who oppose the Medicaid expansion and found their actions will deprive 3.6 million people of health coverage under Obamacare. These states will forgo $8.4 billion in federal funding. Moreover, their political opposition to Obamacare will cost these states $1 billion for programs that partially compensate medical providers who care for the indigent. (see Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/03/medicaid-expansion_n_3367301.html).
Below is an excerpt and table of the uninsured by state that is taken from the Health Affairs Blog, which you can goto at: http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2014/01/30/opting-out-of-medicaid-expansion-the-health-and-financial-impacts/
Clearly, if the extreme efforts underway to by politicians to derail the Affordable Care Act was instead focused towards making it work, Obamacare would be wildly successful.
Examining the numbers. The number of uninsured people in states opting in and opting out of Medicaid expansion is displayed in Exhibit 1. Nationwide, 47,950,687 people were uninsured in 2012; the number of uninsured is expected to decrease by about 16 million after implementation of the ACA, leaving 32,202,633 uninsured. Nearly 8 million of these remaining uninsured would have gotten coverage had their state opted in. States opting in to Medicaid expansion will experience a decrease of 48.9 percent in their uninsured population versus an 18.1 percent decrease in opt-out states.
Exhibit 1: Uninsured Population by State, Pre- and Post-ACA
Here is a link to a website where you can check out state-by-state enrollments using an inter-active map: https://www.statereforum.org/tracking-health-coverage-enrollment-by-state?gclid=COCG7ffPob0CFYt9OgodPTQALQ
And this link is to an inter-active map showing the state-by-state status on Medicaid expansion: https://www.statereforum.org/Medicaid-Expansion-Decisions-Map?gclid=CJ_i4L3Rob0CFYuXOgod2RMA4g
Obama to Expand Executive Authority, Says Ezra Klein
by Brian T. Lynch – January 30, 2014
Yesterday evening Ezra Klein spoke at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, as their guest lecturer. Ezra Klein is a journalist, blogger (Wonk Blog), political analyst and occasional guest star on MSNBC’s news opinion shows. At age 29 he is one of the most influential journalists in Washington, and he is currently creating his own internet news organization in collaboration with Vox Media.
Klein focused his remarks on the broad structures of modern American politics that explain the context for President Obama’s State of the Union address the night before. The President’s address, he started, was notable for what it didn’t contain. It didn’t contain any reference to getting any big new initiatives passed in Congress. President Obama has conceded that anything he proposes would be blocked from passage. Instead, Obama proposed plans to accomplish what he can through executive orders. He is using, and perhaps expanding his executive powers. The other remarkable feature of the President’s address was the specificity and scope of these executive plans. Klein spoke to both of these issues.
By objective measures, according to Klein, the U.S. Congress is the most polarized it has been in a long time. He pointed out that polarization is not synonymous with rancorous debates or disagreements. Polarization is a measure of the overlap between two political parties, the less overlap, the greater the polarization. He pointed out that in the 1950’s and early ’60’s the Democratic party was comprised of moderates, liberals from the North and conservatives from the South. The Republican party was also a blend of conservatives, liberals and moderates. Under these conditions there were pitched debates both between and within both parties. There were also ways to forge compromises between like minded representatives within each party.
The dynamic that blended the two parties this way was race, according to historians Klein cited. Once the civil rights act was passed and progress was made in racial integration, the Democrats lost the South and the two parties began reshuffling. Liberals moved into the Democratic Party and conservatives moved into the Republican Party. This resulted in less overlap and lead to the polarization we have today. In Klein’s view, the most conservative Democrat today has less in common with the most liberal Republican in that party, and vice versa. There is so little overlap that compromise is nearly impossible to achieve.
Party polarization and the inability to compromise leads directly to congressional stalemate (which Klein begrudging called “gridlock”). Under current conditions, when a minority party helps the majority pass legislation it makes the majority party look strong and effective, thereby improving their chances of being re-elected. Conversely, when the minority party obstructs the majority, it makes the majority party look ineffective and powerless causing voters to switch allegiances and elect the minority party. This, according to Klein, explains why the current congress is unable to act.
Without structural changes, such as the rise of a third party, Klein sees little hope for improvements in congress. The most powerful branch of government, the legislative branch, is at an impasse. According to Klein, that doesn’t mean nothing will be getting done. As he sees it, when congress can’t exercise its powers, the authority and power of the other two branches of government grows to fill the void. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing (but it does seem to require greater vigilance on our part). This brought Klein to his second observation about Obama’s State-of-the-Union address; the detailed account of where the Administration would be taking actions without the Congress.
The first two years of the Obama presidency saw the passage of more huge and important pieces of legislation than at any other time since the Lyndon Johnson administration. These are game changing initiatives with far reaching implications for American society. For example, the ACA has many little noticed, but broadly stated provision that will eventually re-invent (and improve) how treatment of common illnesses will be approached by doctors in the future.
Klein pointed out that most laws are written in general legalese that still requires Executive Branch interpretation and the creation of rules and policies to create an operating administrative framework. The 2,000 page Affordable Care Act, he said, has already generated tens of thousands of pages of rules, regulations and policies in a still unfolding process actuating the law. It is the creation of policy and administrative regulations that gives chief executives in state and federal government their most effective way to exercise power.
President Obama just announce that this is exactly what he intends to do. I will uses his executive powers to permanently shape the policies and interpretations of the legislation he got passed in his first term. He intends to accomplish the goals for which he was elected through the constitutional powers he has as the administrator-in-chief of the federal bureaucracy.
(Note: Once in place, the rules and administrative codes created to animate laws are, by intentional design, hard to alter. This is actually the role and purpose of a bureaucracy, to be a bulwark against the capricious dictates of power or transient swings of populist politics. Bureaucracies are often maligned for being cumbersome and slow to change, yet this is also their greatest contribution towards stable and coherent governance. This fact is little understood and seldom appreciated.)
Much of the beltway media has interpreted the President’s address as an admission that he is already a lame duck president, but nothing could be further from the truth. Klein believes that the rest of his term will produce enormous changes and benefits through executive actions. Because these changes will be happening in the nitty-gritty of agency bureaucracies it will be difficult for the beltway press to report on the changes.
The Washington media, according to Klein, has a structural bias towards the much easier reporting on Congress. The legislative branch is centralized, accessible and filled with characters and conflicts that sell the news. Administrative law is dry, decentralized and much less accessible. Still, this is where Klein sees the real action over the next few years. Perhaps this is where he intends to focus his attentions as he moves to create his new internet news venture with Vox Media. Time will tell.
In Defense of Bureaucracy
by Brian T. Lynch, MSW
People often accuse the Federal government of being an entrenched bureaucracy, which it is. They blame the bureaucracy for all of the government’s problems, but the truth is a bit more complex. After all, it isn’t the bureaucracy passing sweetheart legislation, it is our elected un-representatives. The bureaucracy may write the rules but it does not runs the show.
Believe me, having worked in the bureaucracy my entire career, I can tell you it isn’t in charge. It is subject to enormous political pressures from elected executives, representatives and even the courts. No rules are passed without political sign off. Elected official send their political appointees deeply into the bureaucratic hierarchy to infiltrate and transform their missions. Politicians often say one thing and do another, using the bureaucracy as their cover. In truth, bureaucracies are only as good as the politicians we elect to run them.
Obamacare is a great illustration of this. In states where the chief executive wants it to work the bureaucracy has created workable systems and overcome large obstacles to make it work. In states where the chief executive would like to see it fail the bureaucracy has made a hash of things. I call it planned incompetence. The bureaucrats were given a mixed mandate to create a faulty system to prove the politicians position that Obamacare doesn’t work and that government doesn’t work. Bureaucracies are tools that can be used for good or evil by people in power. Bureaucracies are the interface between ordinary citizens and political rulers.
Did you know that the modern bureaucratic government structure was established by an enlightened English King (one of the Henry’s) to assure that his erratic, sometimes irrational sons could not, on a whim, destroy the good government administration he created to serve his people? We don’t think much about it today, but bureaucracy still serves a vital, useful purpose in assuring the smooth and planful administration of government.
The very characteristic most often criticized, its slowness to respond, is also its primary benefit. It methodically operationalizes the dictates of our political rulers to maintain continuity and order in government administration, not that it always succeeds. But if we didn’t have it we would be subject to every impulse of the chief executives and this would lead to real chaos in government services. So while I am quick and well experienced to criticize the bureaucracy, I am less inclined to condemn it.
Obamacare – Is It For Good or Evil?
Like anything else, you can use a thing or abuse it. The Affordable Care Act is being shredded for political reasons in many states to create proof that it doesn’t work. It’s a shambles in the hands of those who want to use it as a cudgel with which to beat up Obama. More enlightened states are taking every advantage of the ACA and in doing so they are better serving their citizens and improving their state budgets. Here below is a snippet from an article in the Washington Post:
How we got Obamacare to work
By Jay Inslee, Steve Beshear and Dannel P. Malloy, Published: Washington Post, November 17, 2012
[snip] In our states — Washington, Kentucky and Connecticut — the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” is working. Tens of thousands of our residents have enrolled in affordable health-care coverage. Many of them could not get insurance before the law was enacted.
People keep asking us why our states have been successful. Here’s a hint: It’s not about our Web sites.
Sure, having functioning Web sites for our health-care exchanges makes the job of meeting the enormous demand for affordable coverage much easier, but each of our state Web sites has had its share of technical glitches. As we have demonstrated on a near-daily basis, Web sites can continually be improved to meet consumers’ needs.
The Affordable Care Act has been successful in our states because our political and community leaders grasped the importance of expanding health-care coverage and have avoided the temptation to use health-care reform as a political football.
In Washington, the legislature authorized Medicaid expansion with overwhelmingly bipartisan votes in the House and Senate this summer because legislators understood that it could help create more than 10,000 jobs, save more than $300 million for the state in the first 18 months, and, most important, provide several hundred thousand uninsured Washingtonians with health coverage.
In Kentucky, two independent studies showed that the Bluegrass State couldn’t afford not to expand Medicaid. Expansion offered huge savings in the state budget and is expected to create 17,000 jobs.
In Connecticut, more than 50 percent of enrollment in the state exchange, Access Health CT, is for private health insurance. The Connecticut exchange has a customer satisfaction level of 96.5 percent, according to a survey of users in October, with more than 82 percent of enrollees either “extremely likely” or “very likely” to recommend the exchange to a colleague or friend.
In our states, elected leaders have decided to put people, not politics, first.
[Read more here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-we-got-obamacare-to-work/2013/11/17/3f2532bc-4e42-11e3-be6b-d3d28122e6d4_story.html ]
_______________ … _______________
If you feel that the media isn’t doing a good job of covering the positive side this story and isn’t reaching the ACA doubters and haters you know, then do something about it. Point them to this article or refer them here to read something that is directly from the chief executives of states where the ACA is working.
A Passionate Call for an Alternative to Poliltics
What follows is the very essence of passion and disphoric expression by the next generation towards today’s intractable political systems that serve the interests of the rich and powerful. Russel Brand’s passion and rejection of establishment processes to bring about change mirror the essence of the Occupy movement. The outragiously disparate distribution of wealth and power has so distorted and hoplessly incumbered politics and democracy that he and many young people today are repulsed by it all. They struggle for an alternative that doesn’t yet exist and may never exist. The rant is perhaps a glimps into the hearts and minds of the coming generation. Through the social media an emotional consensus is building which has no clear expression or pathway to change.
Actor Russell Brand reduces BBC newsman to stunned silence with diatribe against corporate oligarchy
By Travis Gettys
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Actor and comedian Russell Brand is calling for a political and philosophical revolution in his guest editorship of the New Statesman magazine, and he explained what he wants to see in a passionately argued interview on BBC’s “Newsnight.”
Combative host Jeremy Paxson asked the British actor, who’s known for his past drug use and his brief marriage to pop singer Katy Perry, what gave him the right to promote his political beliefs, particularly since he’s never voted.
“I don’t get my authority from this preexisting paradigm, which is quite narrow and only serves a few people,” Brand said. “I look elsewhere for alternatives that might be of service to humanity.”
Ted Cruz, Money and the Power to Turn Out The Lights
Most people agree that Senator Ted Cruz, a freshman Senator from Texas, is the quartback of the federal government shutdown. He has his ideological reasons for pulling the plug, for sure, but instead of following the confusing politics behind his crazy Jihad against Obamacare, I decided to follow the money trail that backs him. Ultimate it is money, not ideology, that translates into the power to shutdown the federal government.
In the 2012 election Club for Growth and the Senate Conservative Fund were Sen. Cruz’ top two donors. These conservative fund raising groups contributed over a million dollars to his campaign.
The Senate Conservative Fund (SCF) was Cruz’ second biggest donor, contributing $385,103 to his campaign, according to OpenSecrets.org. The SCF is a leadership PAC, which means it is money raised by other politicians to support certain candidates running for office within their own party. The SCF is associated with James W. DeMint, a former South Carolina Senator and the current president of the conservative Heritage Foundation. SCF gave about $2.1 million to Republican candidates in the 2012 election cycle, which means Ted Cruz received 18% of their direct candidate support. This is significant since James DeMint has been characterized as the hidden hand behind the move to defund the Affordable Care Act (aka: Obamacare).
Club for Growth (CFG) contributed $705,657 to Ted Cruz, making them his biggest donor. That donation amounted to almost 17% of all the money CFG spent in contributions to support Republicans in the 2012 election. Only Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona received more money from CFG (one-million dollars).
But the most revealing fact about CFG’s support for Cruz is that the organization spent $4.27 million supporting a few Republican candidates while also spending a whopping $10 million (in outside spending) to oppose other Republican candidates. In other words CFG is like a wrecking ball destroying fellow Republican candidates who don’t meet their conservative standards.
I tried to learn where CFG gets its money, but this is difficult because it is a “527” organization, a 501(c)4 not for profit, that is allowed to collect unlimited contributions. CFG doesn’t have to disclose its donors or reveal its activity. According to a February, 2011 article by John Nichols of The Nation, The Club for Growth is “an organization funded by extremely wealthy conservatives to carry out their budget-stripping goals.”
What seems to emerge from this view of the government shutdown is a tectonic rift in the financial power base underneath the Republican party. Well organized and well funded sources of money are narrowly targeting resources to heavily fund a select few candidates while, in the case of Club for Growth, using resources to undermine Republican candidates who are less ideologically pure. Indeed, Club for Growth uses its club to cull the herd, a development that has no equal in Democratic politics.
Up until now the Senate and House Majority Leaders held all the purse strings of power to punish or reward members of their party. Not so any more. Ted Cruz does not stand alone when he defies his Republican colleagues in the Senate, as pundits have suggested. Rather, he is the tip of an iceberg around which his caucus has to navigate. He is able to side steps House Speaker John Beohner and whips support for defunding Obamacare in the House because he carries with him both a carrot and a club.
It is difficult to work out all the implications that may result from this rift in the fabric of Republican politics, but over the short term it can’t be very good. The rift is just the public view of a subsurface divide between the wealthy elite who are the titians of power in America. It isn’t clear, to me, exactly what is at play. What are the control points that one group seeks over the other and what would be the gain? Intrigue at that level of play is heavily cloaked in secrecy. For now, all we can do is to try and read the tea leaves.
What Good Can Be Salvaged from the Trayvon Martin Case
Trayvon Martin is dead and George Zimmerman walks free. Was justice served?
Hood Up! Justice for Trayvon Martin by musyani75
That answer depends on who is asking the question. It should be a national outrage that this question splits us along both racial and political lines, but this has all become too predictable for outrage on these grounds. If we focus on the facts of the case the verdict divides us and there is no chance for reconciling our opposing views. If we shift the focus to our racial divide the glacial pace of reconciliation is measured in generations and no satisfactory solution can be seen. If we shift the focus to politics the question of justice will fade like an echo in the wind of endless partisanship. But focusing strictly gun laws in Florida may hold some slim hope for something good to come out of Trayvon’s death. If this trial has done anything useful, it has been to drawn attention to the crazy legal framework that informed this verdict.
Who instigates a conflict that turns deadly has always been a factor in determining guilt. The concept is that deadly conflicts are be avoided at the earliest possible stage, before they turn deadly. If you initiate the conflict, the onus is on you to end it before someone gets hurt. The “stand your ground” laws in Florida and elsewhere upends this logic. Now, whoever walks away from a murderous gun fight can legally claim it was self-defense, even if the dead guy was unarmed. It is mostly a reasonable assumption that the survivor of a deadly conflict must have felt their life was in danger at some point.
In Florida, you can now walk up to anyone in the street, provoke them into assaulting you physically and then shoot them in self-defense. You are no longer held responsible for their death. If this was not the intent of the “stand your ground” laws, it is the absurd practical implication following this verdict. These laws, with their faulty legal premises, need to be overturned.
Still I have to wonder what the legal outcome would have been if Trayvon also had a gun and ended up shooting Zimmerman first. Would days pass before he was arrested and charged? Would he have been acquitted by this jury?
If the only twist to this story was that Trayvon had managed to turn the barrel of Zimmerman’s gun around at the last instant to kill him, would the legal premise of the stand your ground law have been applied to Mr. Martin? Would the actions of the police and the outcome of the justice system been different? These questions are too important to ignore, but I am afraid the best answers to them depends largely on what we teach our children.
GOP Doubles Down with Cynical Student Loan Bill
THE HOUSE HAS PASSED STUDENT LOAN SOLUTIONS, TIME FOR THE SENATE TO ACT
Posted by Nick Marcelli on June 18, 2013
Today, House Republican Leadership held a press conference to discuss the steps the House has taken to avoid the doubling of student loan rates on July 1. The House has already passed a solution to avoid the doubling of student loan rates that echoes the President’s own plan. It is time for the Senate to act.
BUT WAIT!
Take a closer look at what the GOP and Eric Cantor are touting as a positive step to help students pay for college.
Stafford Loan – Current fixed rate for this student loan is 3.4% and it is scheduled to double in July to 6.8%. The House GOP just passed the Smarter Solutions for Students Act (SSSA) which would end the fixed rate and calculate a variable rate at 2.5% points over the 10 year Treasury Bill rates, with a cap of 8.5% on Stafford Loans. The average 10 yr T bill rate so far this month is 2.66%, so the current Stafford Loan rate would be 5.16%.
While the 5.16% today is better than the 6.8% rate beginning in a few weeks, the variable rate cap of 8.5% is 1.7% higher than the fixed rate would be. So Congratulations to the House GOP for passing a plan that would both lower and raise student loan rates at the same time. If this isn’t cynical enough for you, add the SSSA’s current student loan rate of 5.16% today with the cap rate of 8.5% and then divide by two. This gives us the variable rates mid-range of 6.83%, nearly identical to the higher fixed rate as of July. So for bankers this is a revenue neutral proposal over a range of years while current college students get only a 52% rate increase as of July. For future college students the rate can more than double the current 3.4% fixed rate.
A look at the other provisions of the bill reveal similar findings. This could be a bill written by the student loan industry to squeeze more out of students without appearing to be quite as greedy.
Below is an analysis that (also cynically) does not assess the financial impact if the current 3.4% rate is allowed to stay the same.
H.R. 1911, Smarter Solutions for Students Act
cost estimate
may 20, 2013
read complete document (pdf, 28 kb)
As ordered reported by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on May 16, 2013
H.R. 1911 would change the interest rates for all new federal loans to students and parents made on or after July 1, 2013, from a fixed interest rate set in statute to a variable interest rate, adjusted annually. Under the bill, interest rates for all new subsidized and unsubsidized student loans would be based on the interest rate on a 10-year Treasury note plus 2.5 percentage points, with a cap of 8.5 percent. (Borrowers pay no interest on subsidized loans while enrolled in school or during other deferment periods but are responsible for interest at all times on unsubsidized loans.) The interest rate for all new GradPLUS and parent loans would be based on the interest rate on a 10-year Treasury note plus 4.5 percentage points, with a cap of 10.5 percent. The bill also would eliminate the cap on the interest rate on all new consolidation loans (multiple loans for a single borrower combined into one loan) originated on or after July 1, 2013.
Under current law, all subsidized and unsubsidized loans originated on or after July 1, 2013, will have a fixed interest rate of 6.8 percent, and all GradPLUS and parent loans will have a fixed rate of 7.9 percent. In addition, the interest rate on all consolidation loans is capped at 8.25 percent.
CBO estimates that enacting H.R. 1911 would reduce direct spending by about $1.0 billion over the 2013-2018 period and by $3.7 billion over the 2013-2023 period. Enacting the bill would not affect revenues. Pay-as-you-go procedures apply because enacting the legislation would affect direct spending. Implementing the bill would not have a significant impact on spending subject to appropriation.
Principles Involved in Keystone XL Pipeline Decision
The following is an exchange between Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey and me regarding the Keystone pipeline. Below is my response to his initial constituent letter (further below). I don’t know if this is of interest or value to readers of this blog, but I encourage everyone to be vigilant and vocal regarding this issue in the comming months. Thank you.
Dear Senator Menendez,
I thank you and your staff for getting back to me regarding my concerns about the Keystone XL pipeline. I needed to respond to what I read as an equivocal response to my concerns.
In general, the choices we make are good to the extent that they improve our future options and support the imperatives of life. Jobs today in exchange for environmental degradation lasting over a millennium is a Faustian bargain. Developing the Canadian tar sands is a bad, short term profit driven idea. The energy the planet will derive is minimal while the harm it will cause is measurable and will degrade life for generations to come.
But that decision is not in our nations hands. The only issue for us is how to minimize the environmental impact of transporting tar sands through the US. In this regard, a “black swan” analysis is the best measure in my view. Given enough time, our worst case scenarios always under estimate the actual impact of worst case events.
Therefore, any transportation options that would limit the volume of future releases of tar sands into the environment and confine spills to our Earth’ surface are far preferable to the pipe line where far greater volumes of subterranean releases are possible. I ask you and your staff to keep this in mind when evaluating the final environmental impact study and in considering how you ultimately decide.
Thank you for taking the time to consider this message.
Brian Lynch
Here is Senator Menendez’ original response to my concerns:
Dear Mr. Lynch:
Thank you for contacting me to express your concerns about the proposed Canadian tar sands oil pipeline. Your opinion is very important to me, and I appreciate the opportunity to respond to you on this critical issue.
I share your concerns about the environmental impact of tar sands and of the Keystone XL pipeline. That is why I joined several of my colleagues in sending a letter to the State Department requesting answers to a number of questions about the Draft Environmental Impact Statement the State Department had produced for the pipeline proposal. The letter raised concerns about the environmental degradation caused by oil extraction, greenhouse gas emissions, and the risks associated with transporting oil through the United States. My concerns led me to vote against a proposal to circumvent the permitting process and build the pipeline without proper review. However, I have also heard from proponents of the pipeline who have emphasized the jobs that will be created by the project, as well as its possible energy security benefits.
As you know, the Obama Administration has delayed a decision on the pipeline pending a review of alternate routes. On March 1st, the State Department issued a draft environmental review of the Keystone XL project that evaluated other methods of transporting the oil, such as trucks, barges and two train options. The report determined that all options would carry environmental risk, and that the train options would actually release more greenhouse gases than the proposed pipeline. The State Department’s report concludes that “(a)pproval or denial of the proposed project is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands.” Following this draft report, there will be a 45-day comment period, followed by a final environmental report and a recommendation from the Secretary of State as to whether the Keystone pipeline is in the national interest.
Ensuring that we are making smart choices about our nation’s energy future and protecting the health and safety of Americans are two of my top priorities. Please rest assured that, in my position as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I will keep your views in mind as I closely monitor this ongoing situation.
Again, thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. Please do not hesitate to contact me if I may be of more assistance. I invite you to visit my website (http://menendez.senate.gov) to learn more about how I am standing up for New Jersey families in the United States Senate.
How Public Schools Came to Be and the Fight to Dismantle Them
Publicly funded local schools are a universally accepted social norm. Abandoning them would be almost unthinkable. When we stop to consider what we value in our communities, local public schools are almost always a top consideration and a source of civic pride.
This isn’t just true in the United States. Publicly funded education has become a global norm in all advanced societies for nearly century. But a hundred years isn’t very long in the sweeping arch of history, is it? Public schooling has fundamentally altered American society, yet few of us can recount how this radical change came about. How did public schools come to be?
The fight to establish public schools is almost lost history. There is very little content or comment about it on the Web or in our public media. What we do hear lately are a great many lively debates about burdensome public school taxes, failing schools, voucher programs, charter schools, and making public funds more available for private schools and colleges. Lost to our comprehension in these debates is how these arguments follow the exact fault lines in what was an incredibly contentious battle, waged over the course of a generation, to establish public schooling. The political struggle for public education has been compared as second only to the fight for the abolition of slavery in its intensity and divisiveness, but who remembers any of that today?
The battle to undo public education is already underway. If we fail to grasp the fact it is because we have no historical context to recognize the attacks for what they are. If we hope to retain and strengthen our system of public education in America, we need to place the current arguments against it in historical context. We need to reclaim our history.
To this purpose I recommend a book copyrighted in 1919 by Ellwood P. Chubberly entitled, “Public Education in the United States, A Study and Interpretation of American Educational History.” It is a text book, long out of print, but the entire book can be downloaded or read on line. Much of the book is obviously dated, but the early chapters on the history of public education provide the valuable context we need to understand the political arguments today.
Of particular interest to our purpose here is Chapter V., “TheThe Battle for Free State Schools”, beginning on page 118. Read this chapter first for some quick insights. Below is the full URL addresses and links to the book and its Table of Contents.
Full URL Addresses:
Book
Table of Content
Data Driven Viewpoints 