Today, The Morningside Postpublished an op-ed* I wrote on New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s decision to start his own SuperPAC, Independence USA PAC:
Two years ago, when the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that, for the purposes of the First Amendment, corporations were people – a phrase presidential candidate Mitt Romney made famous last year –the floodgates burst to unleash torrents of political campaign advertising. What rendered this decision especially troubling was the fact that these SuperPACs – a category that did not even exist prior to 2010 – are often funded by “dark money,” or unknown financial backers, whose advertisements and other campaign expenditures have already surpassed $400 million during this presidential campaign.
Candidates shuttling back and forth among moneyed patrons and trading away their policymaking autonomy for the chance to blanket Ohio in 30-second TV spots: this is no way to run a democracy. According to the Washington Post, since June of this year, the two candidates have personally attended 176 fundraisers (69 for Obama, 107 for Romney). Republican strategist Karl Rove’s fundraising organization American Crossroads has spent over $63 million in the 2012 election cycle alone, and yet its donor list remains a closely guarded secret.
In the face of this frontal assault on our democratic ideal of “one person, one vote,” Mayor Bloomberg’s attempt to launch political moderates back into the halls of power amounts to little more than a bandage. And it is the worst kind, because it confuses the symptom for the underlying illness: by using the very same funding tactics that helped drive the fringe into the mainstream American political landscape in the first place, Bloomberg’s efforts constitute an implicit endorsement of the post-Citizens United world. But accelerating the funding arms race is not the right long-term approach.
* Edited here only to add spaces after punctuation marks, which were accidentally eliminated in the transition from Microsoft Word to The Morningside Post.
In the pages of the New York Times, the former director of the Mossad and national security adviser writes:
Despite the Republican Party’s shrill campaign rhetoric on Israel, no Democratic president has ever strong-armed Israel on any key national security issue. In the 1956 Suez Crisis, it was a Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who joined the Soviet Union in forcing Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula after a joint Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt.
In 1991, when Iraqi Scud missiles rained down on Tel Aviv, the administration of the first President Bush urged Israel not to strike back so as to preserve the coalition of Arab states fighting Iraq. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir resisted his security chiefs’ recommendation to retaliate and bowed to American demands as his citizens reached for their gas masks.
After the war, Mr. Shamir agreed to go to Madrid for a Middle East peace conference set up by Secretary of State James A. Baker III. Fearful that Mr. Shamir would be intransigent at the negotiating table, the White House pressured him by withholding $10 billion in loan guarantees to Israel, causing us serious economic problems. The eventual result was Mr. Shamir’s political downfall. The man who had saved Mr. Bush’s grand coalition against Saddam Hussein in 1991 was “thrown under the bus.”
In all of these instances, a Republican White House acted in a cold and determined manner, with no regard for Israel’s national pride, strategic interests or sensitivities. That’s food for thought in October 2012.
On a related note, Monday’s debate section on Israel was an embarrassment to both candidates and the United States. No one’s best interests are served by repeating Likud Party propaganda for 15 minutes.
The New York Times‘ Steven Erlanger, like most of the rest of us that watched last night’s unmoderated monologue-fest, is unimpressed:
In general, there was a sense among analysts and observers outside the United States that these were two intelligent, competent candidates, who do not differ overly much on key issues of foreign policy, and were actually debating with domestic constituencies in swing states foremost in mind.
The debate over Iran and Israel was really about Jewish voters in states like Florida, while the debate over China was really about jobs in Ohio and the Midwest, noted François Heisbourg, a special adviser at the Foundation for Strategic Research, based in Paris. And that makes perfect sense in a tight American presidential election, where most voters do not consider foreign policy a priority, Mr. Heisbourg said.
“The balance was more toward 9/11 than the pivot to Asia,” Mr. Heisbourg said. “There was more about risks and threats than friends and allies. Both spoke in a Hobbesian world as tough characters willing to deal with monsters out there, not as people spreading the gospel of working with friends and allies to make the world a better place or spreading U.S. influence to help people get along.”
Le Monde said on its Web site, “For each question, the two candidates came back to the economic situation of the country, proof that this is the electorate’s main preoccupation.”
Mr. Obama even spoke of China as an “adversary,” although he said it was also “a potential partner in the international community if it’s following the rules.” Mr. Romney said essentially the same thing, speaking of confrontation over trade and not about working with China on issues like North Korea, Pakistan and Iran. For Mr. Heisbourg, “Both were wrong on China, portraying it as an adversary, but each got the message across about defending jobs in Ohio.”
Sather Gate at UC Berkeley: If Prop. 30 fails, it may not be long before students take to protests again.
With the 2012 election just around the corner, a number of key issues around the United States are front-and-center in the higher education universe. Not all of the major higher education issues will be directly affected or determined by votes on November 6th, but if you’ve been following higher education news at all (or have been reading here), you’ll no doubt be at least somewhat familiar with the current U.S. Supreme Court case examining affirmative action in state universities, Fisher vs. University of Texas. Since Victoria has so eloquently covered it here, here, and here, I’ll cover a few other higher education-related headlines you may or may not know about already in this short series on higher education. So, without further ado, your higher ed issue du jour:
Proposition 30 in California
California Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed several ways to chip away at the more than $25 billion deficit he inherited after taking office in 2011, but drastic spending cuts only gets one so far without gutting the entire system. As such, Gov. Brown has proposed raising over $6 billion annually from 2012-13 through 2016-17 and continuing through 2018-19 with smaller amounts raised per year. Most of the money would come from raising taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year by roughly 1-3% and by increasing the state sales tax by 0.25% annually for four years.
The Numbers
89% of the funding raised through Proposition 30 must be directed toward K-12 funding, and the remaining 11% will go toward community colleges. However, as the LA Times explained, these figures would sufficiently meet requirements enacted in 1988 by Proposition 98, which requires that approximately 50% of the state general fund must be spent on public education. This would infuse the state general fund with $3 billion for such state priorities like higher education and curb the skyrocketing tuition increases students have faced.
Why is Proposition 30 significant?
1) Draconian budget cuts over the past few years have left state funding of California’s higher education system in tatters. In fact, it is now more expensive for a student from California to attend a state school than Harvard or Yale (granted, it may still be extremely difficult to gain admissions to Harvard or Yale, but the mere fact that attending a public university in your own state could be more expensive than an Ivy League university is simply bewildering – and we’re not talking just UC Berkeley or UCLA). With $3 billion from Proposition 30 set aside for non-public education (as in most other states, public education in California does not include higher education), California can and should use that funding to invest more in its public higher education system. If Proposition 30 fails, public universities would see a $500 million reduction in state funding for the 2012-13 year alone (CSU has already approved a 5% tuition increase for next year if Proposition 30 fails). This would trigger tuition increases for the CSU and UC systems across the board, so whether you’re an in-state or out-of-state student, you might be looking at even more sticker shock for spring semester (as if the prospect of likely tuition increases next school year weren’t bad enough already!).
2) Proposition 30 faces competition on the Nov. 6th ballot. Led by Molly Munger, a lawyer and wealthy schools advocate, Proposition 38 is also a plan to fund California’s schools. However, instead of a temporary round of tax increases, it would lock in a sliding scale of tax increases for the next twelve years, regardless of how California’s economy performs during that time. Proposition 38 also focuses exclusively on K-12 education while giving no attention to higher education. Moreover, the challenge of having a competing tax-increasing proposition on the ballot is that voters aren’t too keen on tax increases to begin with, so seeing more tax initiatives on the ballot might push the average voter to simply vote no for all tax increases. Finally, only one of the two propositions can be enacted even if both pass – whichever proposition has the most votes over 50% will be the one enacted. Thus, between Proposition 30 and Proposition 38, Proposition 30 seems the more appropriate proposal at this time. If neither passes, there will be devastating effects for education in California, period.
What’s Next?
On November 6th, we’ll know if voters in California are willing to tighten their belts just a little bit more (easier said than done, I know) to invest in their younger population. If Proposition 30 passes, more students will be able to access, afford, and stay in college (e.g. Cal State would back track on the 9% tuition increase they implemented this year through refunding tuition, granting tuition credits, and/or recalculating financial aid). If Proposition 30 fails though, California will be balancing its budget even more on the backs of its own students. The costs of attending public higher education in California will increase at an even greater rate than anticipated and could close off access to higher education for many low-income and middle-income students. So, even if you don’t reside in California, the implications of the Proposition 30 vote on how other states may try to tackle budget balancing without destroying public higher education make this an issue worth tracking.
Next Time: Changes to the University of North Carolina’s financial aid system and projected impacts on students
Samson Lim is the chief scholarship junkie of Seattle-based Scholarship Junkies, a scholarship resource organization that works to help students make higher education more affordable. Among his various scholarship experiences, Sam spent a year conducting ethnographic research on access to higher education in Berlin, Germany, as a 2010-11 U.S. Fulbright Student Scholar. Currently, Sam can be found buried in reading for his Masters of Education program in Politics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and often tries to highlight higher ed and financial aid issues in 140 characters or less at @samsonxlim.
First comes Christopher Benfey at the New York Review of Books, whose glowing praise for Barack Obama is exceeded only by his palpable disgust for Mitt Romney:
I have no idea what Clint Eastwood had in mind when he dragged an empty chair up to the stage at the Republican Convention in Tampa last August. Maybe he was thinking, as some have suggested, of some bygone exercise in a Lee Strasberg acting class. “Please, Clint. Talk to the chair. You are Hamlet and the chair is Ophelia. Please. Just talk to her.” Or maybe a marriage counselor had used an empty chair to teach the tight-lipped gunslinger from Carmel how to empathize with his wife. “Go ahead, Clint, make her day. Tell her what you’re feeling.”
I was thinking of that empty chair in Tampa as I watched Tuesday’s presidential debate at Hofstra University. I was thinking what our country would be like, what the world would be like, without Barack Obama seated in the Oval Office. That’s the empty chair that keeps me awake at night…
The tragic dimension is there in the President’s face and in his shoulders. It was there, visibly there, in his performance in the first debate—not “lackluster,” as it was widely described, but burdened, bedeviled, fraught. Not for nothing did he invoke, and quite rightly, Abraham Lincoln. During the second debate, he was more combative, confrontational, locked in. But what came through most strongly was the contrast between Romney’s vacuous claim to care for 100 percent of all Americans (since we’re all “children of the same God,” he can apparently include even the 47 percent who are moochers), and the detailed ways, the detailed policies, in which Obama has actually shown that he cares for all of us.
Yeah, I’d say it’s a bit over the top, especially for the New York Review of Books, whose essays are generally more thoughtful and less, shall we say, obsequious. Fortunately, the New Yorker‘s endorsement of the president was substantially more nuanced:
Perhaps inevitably, the President has disappointed some of his most ardent supporters. Part of their disappointment is a reflection of the fantastical expectations that attached to him. Some, quite reasonably, are disappointed in his policy failures (on Guantánamo, climate change, and gun control); others question the morality of the persistent use of predator drones. And, of course, 2012 offers nothing like the ecstasy of taking part in a historical advance: the reëlection of the first African-American President does not inspire the same level of communal pride. But the reëlection of a President who has been progressive, competent, rational, decent, and, at times, visionary is a serious matter. The President has achieved a run of ambitious legislative, social, and foreign-policy successes that relieved a large measure of the human suffering and national shame inflicted by the Bush Administration. Obama has renewed the honor of the office he holds…
One quality that so many voters admired in Obama in 2008 was his unusual temperament: inspirational, yet formal, cool, hyper-rational. He promised to be the least crazy of Presidents, the least erratic and unpredictable. The triumph of that temperament was in evidence on a spring night in 2011, as he performed his duties, with a standup’s precision and preternatural élan, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, all the while knowing that he had, with no guarantee of success, dispatched Navy seal Team Six to kill bin Laden. In the modern era, we have had Presidents who were known to seduce interns (Kennedy and Clinton), talk to paintings (Nixon), and confuse movies with reality (Reagan). Obama’s restraint has largely served him, and the country, well.
But Obama is also a human being, a flawed and complicated one, and as the world has come to know him better we have sometimes seen the downside of his temperament: a certain insularity and self-satisfaction; a tendency at times—as in the first debate with Mitt Romney—to betray disdain for the unpleasant tasks of politics. As a political warrior, Obama can be withdrawn, even strangely passive. He has sometimes struggled to convey the human stakes of the policies he has initiated. In the remaining days of the campaign, Obama must be entirely, and vividly, present, as he was in the second debate with Romney. He must clarify not only what he has achieved but also what he intends to achieve, how he intends to accelerate the recovery, spur employment, and allay the debt crisis; how he intends to deal with an increasingly perilous situation in Pakistan; what he will do if Iran fails to bring its nuclear program into line with international strictures. Most important, he needs to convey the larger vision that matches his outsized record of achievement.
David Cole takes a look at suggestions for banning various forms of offensive speech and comes away unconvinced:
Such proposals to regulate hate speech—whether “two-pronged” or not—are flawed, for principled, legal reasons, as well as strategic, political considerations. As a legal matter, any attempt to penalize speech because of its offensive content contravenes the First Amendment’s bedrock principle that the government should not be in the business of defining what messages are permissible or impermissible. Arguments for regulating hate speech often take the same form as those made by defenders of laws prohibiting flag burning: if the content of the expression is offensive, and the speech itself is deemed of negligible value, it should be suppressed. But the last thing we need in a democracy is the government—or the majority—defining what is or is not a permissible message.
Second, defining “hate speech” in a way that draws a clear and enforceable line between that which deserves protection and that which can be prohibited is an elusive, and probably impossible, task. Ruthven’s proposal distinguishes between criticism and “insult,” an approach eerily reminiscent of the one Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan has adopted in defending the prosecution of journalistsfor “insulting” Turkey. Waldron’s proposal draws similarly vague lines between speech that offends, which he would protect, and speech that denigrates the human dignity of individuals or groups, which he would not. Canada prohibits “any writing, sign or visible representation” that “incites hatred against any identifiable group.” Ireland prohibits “blasphemous” speech that is “grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion.”
Such laws empower the government, or a jury, to draw lines between legitimate criticism, satire, and public comment on the one hand, and “insulting,” “abusive,” or “hateful” speech on the other. Is there any reason to be confident that government officials or juries will do a good job of this? And as long as the lines are so murky, many people will be compelled to steer clear of legitimate expression that some official or jury might, from its own viewpoint, deem over the line after the fact: this would stifle free speech and lead to self-censorship. Ruthven himself seems ambivalent about whether Rushdie’s depiction of Mohammed in The Satanic Verses is “insulting,” and therefore should be prohibited, or an example of artistic criticism that should be protected.
He concludes:
There is a place for limits. I am a professor. I do not tolerate, in my classroom, disrespectful speech of any kind, because it interferes with the learning environment that I seek to foster. I am also a father, and have a similar view with respect to the need for respectful speech around the dinner table. A responsible newspaper publisher might well decline to print an article that its editors were convinced was likely to spark violence. But these limits are not imposed by law, but by social norms and ethics, which are in turn informed by discussion, dialogue, and culture. Such norms are quite powerful, and ensure that for the most part, people do not use their freedom of speech irresponsibly. In those isolated instances where freedom is exercised irresponsibly, it is far better to employ more speech to condemn it—as President Barack Obama did recently in response to the YouTube video—than to empower the state to limit speech by punishing dissidents deemed hateful or insulting.
