Author: Robert I. Grundfest

I am a teacher, writer, voice-over artist and rationally opinionated observer of American and international society. While my job is to entertain and engage, my purpose is always to start a conversation.

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Education Health News Politics

Educational Food Fight

This past week featured not one, but two terrible ideas related to schools that people need to know about. One is a conservative issue while the other, oddly enough, is one of those issues that has bipartisan stupidity blowing its tailwind (there’s a visual, no?).

Declaring that serving school children fresh fruits and vegetables might be too expensive for some districts, the House Appropriations Committee voted to allow states to get waivers so they don’t have to meet the health standards. This, of course, is Michele Obama’s number one policy concern as First Lady, and she certainly weighed in on the issue, so it’s really no surprise that the Republicans would want to allow states to opt out of the program. After all, there are all of those meat, potato, sugar and fast/snack food interests that need to get something for their campaign contributions. And they can’t give either Obama a political victory, can they?

The main opposition is that the program is costly and restrictive, and I can see why. Students, at first, probably throw out a lot of nutritious food, especially if they’re not getting it at home and they don’t like it. And junk food is less expensive than fresh fruits and vegetables because those industries want people to stretch their budgets on those foods, not on apples, kale and avocados.

But the larger issue is that it’s the job of schools to educate, not only in the classroom but also in the cafeteria and the playground. Can you imagine schools opting out of safety regulations or allowing students to fight during recess or physical education because, well, isn’t competition and survival of the fittest the main building blocks of a free enterprise, entrepreneurial economy? What’s the difference between that and modeling and serving healthy food in the cafeteria? What you bring from home is your business. In school, it’s in the state’s interest to keep people healthy. When you’ve seen, as I have, students coming our of the cafeteria line with pizza with french fries, then you know there’s a problem.

The bipartisan ridiculousness is over the Common Core Curriculum Standards. The left doesn’t like them because of their reliance on tests and the right doesn’t like them because they want the states to be able to craft their own standards and believe that the federal government has no business regulating schools. Both sides have good points, but in the end, the United States will only be able to compete with other countries if every student learns the same body of knowledge.

And the problem is not just one of geography. States across the country have a hodgepodge of standards that are difficult to reconcile, from when they require students to master certain mathematics and science skills to requiring physical education or how many years of United States History students must take. Where I teach, students do not get any instruction in Greek or Roman history, which is the basis our form of government. Yes, we should be teaching multicultural perspectives, but to be able to graduate from high school with no knowledge of the great people who presaged Western culture is not a quality practice.

The Common Core standards do need serious editing and we do need other evaluative measures than tests to measure their effectiveness. Getting rid of them, though, is not the answer.

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Domestic Policies Gun Control mass murders News Politics shooting

Guns. Again.

I started watching Elliot Rodgers’ online twisted manifesto about how women ignored, belittled and frustrated him and how, obviously, his only appropriate response was to kill as many as he could, but after two minutes, I had to stop.

This is madness.

We keep asking the same questions. How does a person such as this get legal access to guns and ammunition? Can killings like this be prevented? If the answer is no, then why not? We seem to be able to address, debate or even stop other types of anti-social behavior, but in the present political climate, where the Second Amendment seems more sacrosanct than the First, the answer we keep getting is that no, there’s nothing we can do. I can’t accept that.

Perhaps the country’s tolerance for gun violence and murder has not been tested enough, even with the killing of students in public schools and colleges, and that we need even more killing before we’ve finally had enough. I can’t accept that either. I’ve had enough. No more.

Maybe we’ll get a more liberal Supreme Court that will undo the terrible mischief of the Heller decision that completely obliterated the militia clause in the Second Amendment and made gun rights a personal right. I understand that many gun owners from across the political spectrum believe that this was the correct decision, but a more specific historical analysis shows that the Framers’ intent was not to make sure that everyone could have a gun for personal use, but rather so they could join the state militia quickly in case it was necessary for public defense. The Framers distrusted a too-strong national army and put the militia clause in the Second Amendment for a reason. It was there that Mr. Justice Scalia, the high priest of Original Intent, found that the Framers obviously did not mean for it to have legal weight and told us in Heller that we could ignore it. Go buy a gun. It’s your personal right.

And so here we are, shrugging our shoulders and repeating the old script that says that guns are not the problem, mental illness is the problem. Or society is the problem. Or anger is the problem. Or the president in the problem. But guns? Access to guns is never the problem.

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Domestic Policies Education New Jersey News Politics

Pension Tension

OK, who didn’t see this one coming?

Governor Chris Christie says he’s not going to make the full public employee’s pension payment he promised after the Democratic turncoats in the state legislature sided with him over working people in the spring of 2011. In raw numbers, that’s a $2.4 billion dollar cut. The NJEA is suing. Moody’s and Fitch are threatening to further lower the state’s credit rating.

Wealthy people, thank heavens, are safe. After saying that “there’s nothing off the table” concerning the budget, it turns out that there is something off the table, and that’s any revenue from wealthier residents or businesses. So essentially what we have is the Republican ideology that says that unions are destructive, raising revenue is not viable, and the middle class must bear the brunt of the costs of quality public schools and public services. And if they can’t pay for it, then oh well.

I’ll say it again: Christie will not win another general election in his lifetime. Donors know it, which is why they’re looking more favorably at Jeb Bush (shudder), and the far right has already abandoned him. Meanwhile, those of us who still proudly live in New Jersey will need to endure Christie for an entire second term.

Perhaps after that, we can begin to move forward.

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Domestic Policies Education News Politics

Marshmallow U.

If nothing else, the past week has shown that those on the left can be just as short-sighted and ill-advised as those on any other part of the political spectrum. That the forum for these misdeeds is the university make the issues that much more compelling.

I’ve been waging a somewhat lonely campaign to remind my senior students that college is not the place to look for job training. Oh, they might find it there, but too many of them chose the schools that they did because “they could get a good job” if they went there. Far be it from me to argue that there’s no financial reward for going to a university, and a good one at that. My point is that too many young people go off to higher education with dollar signs in their heads. My job is to remind them that they are, in fact, going to a place where the people in charge are experts in their fields and will be asking their students to complete academic work that demands rigor, attention to detail and actual academic skills. As with anything related to young people, they’ll eventually learn the lesson.

It’s too bad, though, that the universities are the ones who have gone soft. This graduation season has seen Brandeis, Rutgers and Smith cave in like an abandoned mine in the face of student protests over who would speak at graduation ceremonies. Other universities chose speakers purposely to avoid controversy. This is terrible. I understand that the students are paying for their education and believe that they should have some control over who ushers them into the working world. But to disqualify the head of the International Monetary Fund or former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice misses the point of a liberal education. There people have something valuable to say. They’ve been through some of the pivotal events of the century. They’re powerful women, for heaven’s sake. They deserve to be heard. Shame on the universities who gave in.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, along comes another new concept on the campuses called “trigger warnings.” No, these have nothing to do with guns, but, rather, are a device to let students know that what they are about to read, hear, see or study might offend one or more of their sensibilities. An example:

The most vociferous criticism has focused on trigger warnings for materials that have an established place on syllabuses across the country. Among the suggestions for books that would benefit from trigger warnings are Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” (contains anti-Semitism) and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (addresses suicide).

I can certainly understand giving students a warning for graphic violence or scenes of genocide or rape, but there is something to be said for surprise or initial reactions or confusion or disbelief when you read or hear something jarring for the first time. That’s part of learning and being aware of one’s own reactions in social or academic situations.  And how does one adequately write a policy that covers every eventuality? Didn’t colleges try to do that in the 90s with speech codes? Those didn’t work out so well. I can’t see this working out well either.

Students want to be safe, but learning is not always safe. It’s supposed to be challenging, upsetting, rewarding, fun and, yes, life-altering. Blocking graduation speakers and warning students about some content but not other content is a recipe for intolerance. That’s not right.

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Categories
Education Foreign Policies Jews News Politics Racism

Mazel Tov Laos

Whatever they’re doing in Vientiane to combat antisemitism, the rest of the world needs to take notice.

According to a poll just released by the Anti-Defamation League, 26% of the world’s adults harbor some form of anti-semitic attitude. From the article:

The highest concentration of anti-Semitic attitudes was found in the Middle East and North Africa, the survey showed, led by the West Bank and Gaza, where 93 percent of respondents held such views, followed by Iraq at 92 percent, Yemen at 88 percent and Algeria at 87 percent. The areas where anti-Semitic attitudes were least prevalent were Oceania, the Americas and Asia.

I can’t say that I’m surprised by the findings or the fact that most of the hatred seems to come from areas where there are conflicts between Jews and other populations. But then comes this:

In Laos, less than 1 percent of the population held such views, the lowest anywhere, the survey said.

What is the Laotian secret? Is it that they remember the horrors of the Vietnam War and the Cambodian genocide that followed and are making sure that ethnic hatred is banished from the country? Do they have an especially tolerant attitude towards their Jewish population (I couldn’t find the Laotian Jewish population, but approximately 300 Jews live in neighboring Vietnam)? What programs are they teaching in schools that are so effective that only 0.02% of the population is anti-semitic? We need to find out and copy it immediately.

In the meantime, thank you Laos for being a beacon of openness.

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Domestic Policies Express Yourself News Politics war war on women

We Need A War On War

If the Greatest Generation fought and won World War II and created a new world where a war like that one was far less thinkable, then the Baby Boomers must be the Double Secret Greatest Generation for fighting multiple wars on multiple fronts.

We fought the War on Poverty. Haven’t won that one yet. We’re currently fighting the War on Terrorism, the War on Women, the Climate War, the War on Christmas (how will we know if we’ve won that one?) and other, lesser wars on education, entitlements, health care, obesity (seem to be winning this one), the minimum wage, voter ID laws, sabermetrics and a few others that I’m sure others believe us to be waging.

What we really need, though, is a War on War. That one would be worth fighting, albeit delicately. Because obviously we couldn’t’ be fighting an actual war while fighting a war to end wars. So don’t look for the United States to enter Syria, Iran, North Korea or even Nigeria with a force ready to end hostilities or to slap some people in the face, grab them by the shoulders and yell, “What the heck are you thinking?” (I would volunteer for this kind of duty. I do outrage really well.)

The War on War has to start with every individual and every media outlet in the country. It requires a sustained effort on the part of every citizen and we need to teach it to our youth. It would be an idealistic campaign, but sometimes those are the most successful ones. Besides, we can’t afford to lose this one.

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Education News Politics

New Jersey and Mississippi: Perfect Together

There can be no more damning a statistic than the one in today’s Star-Ledger and on nj.com. This article lays out in stark detail why Chris Christie will not be elected president, and why he should not have been reelected this past November. His economic record is terrible and New Jersey is tied with Mississippi, and just above New Mexico, as the state with the most anemic private sector job increases in the country.

Mississippi at least has some excuses for its place on the list, owing to its history, relatively poor population and the destruction of its industrial base over the past 40 years. New Jersey should be doing better. After all, this is the home state of the major pharmaceutical industries and one with a terrific public school system (unless Christie has his way with it) and a college-educated work force willing to put up with serious infrastructure problems (‘nother train tunnel anyone? Anyone?) and terrible roads/trains/buses. And that’s before we even get to work.

The governor will surely blame his troubles on the Democrats who run the legislature and who won’t approve his business-friendly judges or cut the income tax so he can starve the public sector unions that contribute so much to the state’s bottom line. He’d much rather make the unions pay even more for their pensions and benefits, simultaneously taking more money out of the economy and destroying the middle class, while blocking the even small revenue boost that would come from asking the wealthy to pay more. And he won’t even make the pension payment he promised.

The Governor wants to run on his economic record. The problem is that he doesn’t have one that the rest of the country would benefit from. He still also opposes marriage equality and ran against an immediate minimum wage increase of $1. It passed because the people of New Jersey voted for it, but nobody’s getting rich on it.

Further complicating Christie’s future plans is the entry of Jeb Bush into the national Republican conversation. Now donors might have to choose the Bush that even his mother preferred to be president with a governor who’s still defending himself over a traffic jam. Right now, Christie is losing that race too. It really has gone from bad to worse. He won reelection with over 65% of the vote. Now he might not even compete with the family whose last son presided over the destruction of the economy and fought two wars on credit cards.

I’ll say it again: Chris Christie won in 2013. That will prove to be his final general election win.

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Education marriage equality News Politics

The Wide Left Turn

First it was marriage equality. Now it’s the minimum wage. And prison reform. And some lefty laboratories in cities across the country. It’s not a sharp turn to the left as many had anticipated with Obama’s election in 2008. It’s a wide turn, and the country’s already done the first hand-over-hand on the cultural-political wheel.

If you haven’t seen the Frontline series on American prisons, please go their post-haste and watch what you can. The growth of the prison population in this country is staggering, and is a direct result of the conservative policies that created minimum sentences and the mandated arrests of millions of low-level and non-violent offenders, most of whom were males of color. Pair that with the creation of laws that, in some states, treated 12 year-olds as adults, and the results are explosive. We built prisons, then made sure we filled them up.

That’s changing. Many states, such as Kentucky, are trying to reform and rewrite their legal codes to provide the kind of care that young, at-risk juveniles and older, clearly sick men and women need in order to avoid jail time. One of the stories on the program shows a clearly distressed young women who needs counseling, medication, emotional support and a mentor if she is to thrive as a citizen. Otherwise, she’s going to wind up as a ward of the state and she might commit a violent act against someone. Another story shows a 67 year old addict who’s been released from jail to a halfway house with nothing. No money, no prospects, no clothes other than the sweats on his body. And he’s supposed to get a job? Go on welfare or food stamps (that the GOP wants to cut more)?

And while we were spending all of this money on being punitive, the right wing also told us that we needed to spend less on schools and lower taxes that paid for needed government services. Spending more on prisons and less on schools has had a direct impact on our culture. But as I said, that’s changing.

There are other signs of a wide left turn. Minimum wages are going up in some states. In New Jersey, the people voted to raise the wage over the objections of Governor Christie. Today’s vote to try and raise the national wage ended in a Republican-led filibuster, which will show up in Democratic ads come the fall. The national reactions to comments from Donald Sterling and Cliven Bundy shows that, although there are still racists in the United States, they will not be tolerated as they were before. Courts are striking down voter ID laws, most recently in Wisconsin, which is a welcome sign for democracy.

We still have work to do, and there will be setbacks, but slowly and surely, ideas that for years were ridiculed as soft and unworkable are seeing the light of day.

A left turn indeed.

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Education News Politics

Christie: Classless and Clueless

It’s not enough that Governor Chris Christie is not going to make a full contribution to the state’s public worker pension system, despite promising to do so as a result of his signing the pension and benefits bill in 2011. And it’s also not enough that he continues to blame public workers for the state’s economic and fiscal messes.

It’s far too much, though, for him to blame cuts in cancer research and other programs on the fact that the state’s pension obligation would take too much money out of the budget. Yes, it’s politics. Yes, it’s a tactic to deflect interest and attention away fro the George Washington Bridge scandal, and yes, it’s not beneath a man who will say anything to become 2016-relevant again. But this kind of class warfare is disgraceful.

Blaming public workers and asking them to pay more for their pensions, which would take money out of the economy at a time when he should be stimulating it, continues Christie’s consistent failures on the economy. He could instead be asking the wealthy to pay more to help bail out the state. He could have approved the third railroad tunnel between New York and New Jersey, which would have provided jobs and a needed infrastructure project. He could have raised the nation’s lowest gasoline tax, which not only would have provided funds but would have sent a message that it’s time for New Jersey’s drivers to economize for the environment.

Hell–he could have allowed Tesla to sell some cars in New Jersey.

But no. New Jerseyans are stuck with a governor who hasn’t a clue about how to successfully grow an economy and invest in education. All he has is a surplus of bluster, and that we don’t need.

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Categories
Healthcare News Obama care Politics

Health Care Horror?

You’d think that people were dying because they signed up for health insurance. You’d think that people were going broke because they had to leave behind their old policies that didn’t cover needed expenses and treatments. You’d think that the opponents of the Affordable Care Act would come up with a specific, viable alternative that they could run on this November.

Oh, the horror. None of this is happening.

I will say for the final time that the website rollout was terrible and horrible, but it’s now time to move beyond that because over 7 million people now have health insurance and the numbers keep going up. Citizens living in the most prosperous country in the world will not have to worry about medical costs bankrupting them or forcing them to lose their houses or their livelihoods. People can now make decisions based on their own life choices, rather than having to stay at a dead-end job because of the benefits.

Oh, the horror?

The real horror is being perpetrated by the states that refuse to take free federal money to expand Medicaid and cover even more people. These states are led by governors and legislatures that are acting on ideology rather than common sense. They have convinced themselves that president Obama wishes to enslave their citizens through federal programs, making them dependent on the government for their happiness. It’s irrational and will eventually lead to defeat for the politicians that are erecting the legal roadblocks to health care.

The history of the United States has moved inexorably in one direction, and that’s towards equality, access and enhanced civil rights. The Affordable Care Act will survive and thrive because it enables citizens to live better lives. In the end, it is truly American.

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Categories
Abortions Domestic Policies Health Healthcare News Politics

The Abortion Freeport Doctrine

In 1857, the US Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that slavery was legal and that slaves were property. Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, in debates with challenger Abraham Lincoln in 1858, was a supporter of popular sovereignty on slavery, That is, he wanted to let the people of a territory decide if it was to be legally free or slave. This, obviously, wouldn’t be possible given the Court’s decision because the justices said that slavery could not be banned. So Douglas came up with a dance that came to be called The Freeport Doctrine. This doctrine would allow slavery, but would encourage territories to enact high legal boundaries to its implementation, rendering it moot in practice.

Despite the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973, anti-abortion groups have stopped at nothing–not even the law–to enact high legal hurdles that inhibit the right of every women to control their reproductive lives and health choices. In one of the presidential debates in 2004, George W. Bush even invoked Dred Scott as a guiding principle for his judicial choices. Abortion equals slavery. Welcome to the Abortion Freeport Doctrine.

Three states have taken this tactic to new extremes. Texas passed an onerous law that will result in the closing of more than half of the remaining clinics in the state. Arizona passed a law, now under judicial review, that would restrict medication abortions. And Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant said today that he will sign a law that will prohibit abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, and with no exception for rape or incest This is all on top of restrictive laws that have been passed, and have passed judicial muster, over the 41 years that Roe has been the law of the land. The Supreme Court is now weighing whether the Affordable Care Act can require all employers to cover contraception for all of its employees, because those companies consider some contraception to mimic abortions.

This is an emotional issue and the debate over abortion does not yield any middle ground. But we can find a way to make abortions less likely, provide contraception and sex education, and allow women and their doctors to make decisions that are in the best interests of the patient. That’s called freedom of choice and it’s something I hear a great deal about from those on the political right who want the government out of our lives, except in the bedroom. Or kitchen. Or back seat. Or…you get the point.

My solace comes from the belief that the conservative tide has crested and that we’re seeing the worst of the restrictions now. Many will stay in the most conservative states, but the idea that a women’s body is her own is pretty much a settled social idea that the court overturns at the country’s peril. It’s worth remembering that the Freeport Doctrine went nowhere. It’s also worth remembering that it took another hundred years for African-Americans to gain their full legal rights. I hope we’re not still debating the choice issue 60 years from now.

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Categories
Domestic Policies Health Healthcare News ObamaCare Politics

March 31 Is Only The Beginning

I suppose it would have been fitting if the Obama Administration had scheduled April Fool’s Day as the last day to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. We’ve certainly been treated to a smorgasbord of ineptitude, shifting deadlines, executive pronouncements that let certain economic sectors off the hook, and some rude, disrespectful, sometimes hateful objections from the right-wing about the entire business.

That’s why March 31 is so important. It represents the end of the first, and possibly most vital, stage of the implementation of the act. Millions of people have signed up for heath insurance. Millions of others are now covered by Medicaid. The federal and state websites are still balky, but they work. The end of the beginning is upon us. It can only get better from here. And the best part is that the law is working.

Republicans have dropped their demand that the law be scrapped, which six months ago looked like a possibility as they shut down the government and Healthcare.gov showed exactly what can go wrong when the government attempts to shortchange the software cycle. Now the arguments are that the law needs to be fixed, although GOP candidates are running against it to the exclusion of everything else, except perhaps voter ID laws that will guarantee a Republican majority in the House for the foreseeable future. Even Democrats in tossup races in Louisiana and North Carolina are talking about fixing the law so it doesn’t ensnare the middle class and endanger employer-provided health insurance.

The problem is that, over time, that’s exactly what the law will accomplish. We are moving into uncharted waters, where the employer mandate will shift and companies will start to drop health insurance from their benefit plans. How this will work is the key. Will companies give employees a voucher with a dollar amount attached to it to buy insurance? Will they raise wages so people can pay for their own policies? Will insurance companies bring down the cost of policies so they can remain viable? Will we eventually get a public option that takes private insurance out of the economy? These are the questions that will define how successfully the ACA reforms the health care industry. Follow the money. That’s always been the gold standard of social change.

My sense is that employer-sponsored health insurance will be gone from most industries within 7-10 years, and the fallout won’t be as bad as some have predicted. Companies have a vital interest in the health of their workers and insurance companies won’t want to price people out of plans. Without the major expense of providing health insurance, companies will be able to pay workers more, though not too much more. The minimum wage will be less of a burden as it rises. Workers will need to make healthier choices and get checked more often before health issues become major concerns. The GOP calls this personal responsibility, and they accuse the Democrats of coddling the country with social programs. The ACA will do more for people taking control of their health than anything we’ve done in the United States. Remembers, the ACA is based on Republican ideas. That’s why the law is both a curse and a blessing.

All of that is in the future. For now, President Obama’s approval numbers are in the tank. History will remember him far more positively.

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