Mitt Romney isn’t running for president any longer, but he’s still our there saying odd things. My local paper this morning contains several snarky letters-to-the-editor about that conference call last week, where he said President Obama won a second term by giving “gifts” to special interest groups. Even Newt Gingrich and Bobby Jindal are on his case!
It feels weird to be on the same side with those guys (especially Newt), but I must also take exception to what Romney said. Of course, I wasn’t in on the call, so I didn’t actually hear him say it. But I’m told it went something like this:
"With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift. Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents' plan, and that was a big gift to young people.”
The college loan interest isn’t one of my issues, but health care is. So I’ll start with those free contraceptives.
You may be right, Mitt. Getting pills and diaphragms without a copay might make life easier for many young women, and may have won some points for Obama. On the other hand, it’s just as likely that you lost points with your vow to “get rid” of Planned Parenthood, along with other things you’ve said about abortion and birth control. I was a college-aged woman in the 1970s. My primary concern wasn’t getting those services for free; it was being able to get them at all.
And those young adults who can stay on their parents’ health insurance until they’re 26? You’re not the first to take a pot-shot at that. Somewhere back in the campaign cycle, another guy -- it might have been Ron Paul -- said, well, if that’s going to be the rule, we ought to raise the voting age to 27.
I’m tired of hearing politicians speak of this provision like it was some kind of wild, new, un-American idea, because it isn’t.
First of all, it isn’t a “gift.” Young folks up to 26 can be covered on a parent’s health insurance policy if (a) the parent has health insurance, and (b) the parent agrees to keep the kid on as a dependent.
Parents may not have insurance. A lot of Americans don’t. Those parts of Obamacare that say we all have to get some and the insurance companies can’t refuse to sell it to us won’t kick in until 2014. If parents do have insurance, and choose to keep under-26 offspring on the policy, chances are it won’t be free. I’ve worked at places that had group health plans. Most paid at least part of the premium for the employees, but if I wanted coverage for my family, I’ve always had to pay extra for that.
Point two: Young adults need that insurance, and many don’t yet have the means to get their own. We’ve seen some job growth in recent months, but it’s still tough out there, especially for young folks just entering the market. When they find a job, it often comes without benefits. In the two weeks since the election, I’ve heard businesses wailing about Obamacare and how it’s going to break their budgets, how they can’t afford to provide health care for their employees, The complaints all seem to be coming from restaurant chains, and that’s where a lot of young adults work.
Point three: This is not a new idea. Before Obama signed the health care act, before he was elected to his first term, many existing health insurance plans (including the one at my company) offered coverage for unmarried dependents up to age 25. And I personally know quite a few parents who have used that option for kids who were still in school or still trying to find their place in the economy.
Under the new law, young adults can stay on until 26 and it doesn’t matter if they’re married. On this provision at least, Obamacare didn’t make a big, sweeping change. It simply took an existing industry practice, made a couple of incremental changes, and made it a required feature of any policy issued after September 23, 2010.
Gifts, indeed.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Five Good Things About the 2012 Election
Barack Obama won a second term. I’m glad about that, but I didn’t feel like popping balloons and shooting fireworks on election night.
This campaign season was crazy, disheartening, hideously expensive and unconscionably long. And what do we have at the end of it? Same President, same Speaker of the House, same Senate Majority Leader, and more or less the same divided Congress. Is there any hope that our elected leaders will solve any of our pressing problems in the next four years, or will it be the same old gridlock?
Now that a week has passed, and some of the dust has settled, I find a few signs of hope in last Tuesday’s results.
This campaign season was crazy, disheartening, hideously expensive and unconscionably long. And what do we have at the end of it? Same President, same Speaker of the House, same Senate Majority Leader, and more or less the same divided Congress. Is there any hope that our elected leaders will solve any of our pressing problems in the next four years, or will it be the same old gridlock?
Now that a week has passed, and some of the dust has settled, I find a few signs of hope in last Tuesday’s results.
- Big Money didn’t buy our votes. This was our first presidential contest since the Citizens United ruling. Corporations and SuperPacs spent $billions to elect Mitt Romney and other candidates who would do things their way. For the most part, they lost.
- Health care reform (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, or whatever you want to call it) has survived a Supreme Court challenge and a slew of candidates who vowed to repeal it. Looks like it'll stick around long enough for all its provisions to go into effect. I don’t doubt it will be a rocky road. But I’d rather see the country go down that road, making course corrections as needed, than go back to the way things were.
- Outrageous comments about rape did not win over the electorate. Missouri’s Todd Akin (legitimate rape rarely causes pregnancy) and Indiana’s Richard Mourdock (if it does, it’s a gift from God) lost their Senate bids.
- We will, in fact, see some new faces in the Senate, and they aren't all tea-party favorites like Ted Cruz (newly elected in my home state). The League of Conservation voters reports that seven of eight environmentally-minded candidates won. And come January, we’ll have more women in the Senate than ever before. Maybe these leaders will find something better to do than deny climate change and block access to birth control.
- Texas is still very much a red state, but our House of Representatives will be less lopsidedly Republican than it was during the last session. I suppose that's something.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Corporations Aren't People
Corporations are not people. Anyone with common sense can see they’re not. It’s one of those truths that should have been self-evident, until lawyers got involved.
The 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, has led to public outrage. Two years later, it’s clear that the newly blessed corporate “right” is not having a healthy effect on our democracy.
But Citizens United didn’t come out of nowhere. Some would argue that the ruling was a logical next step on a path we started down more than a century ago. Maybe I’ll say more about that in a future post. Just now, I prefer to meditate on how a corporation is not like a person.
First, a caveat. For purposes of this discussion, “corporation” doesn’t mean a non-profit group like the Humane Society or the Sierra Club. It doesn’t mean my grandfather’s business, which was a corporation with all shares held by family members. I’m referring here to for-profit corporations that trade on the public stock market.
By law, such a corporation has only one purpose: to make money for its shareholders. And that’s the first thing that makes it different from a real person.
Sure, people like money. Some of us like it a lot, and do a great deal of sweating and scheming to acquire more of it. But ultimately, money is only good for what it can buy. What we really want is food, clothing, security, cars, IPhones, a nice place to live, cool vacations, a big-screen TV and an education for our kids so they can earn money to buy their own stuff when they grow up. Some people use money to gain power and status, bend others to their will, or hire goons to beat up people they don’t like. Whatever a person chooses to do with it, money is chiefly a means to an end.
For a corporation, money is the end and everything else is a means. Anything it does -- bringing jobs to a community, putting out a good or lousy product, making snazzy Super Bowl commercials, buying off politicians, even donating to a worthy cause -- is in service of its real purpose. If those incidental activities don’t pay off (i.e., lead to increased profits), then the corporation will find a way to do without them.
Point two: People are living, breathing organisms. As such, we need clean air, clean water, and food that will nourish our bodies. A corporation doesn’t need those things. It eats only money.
For a person, being alive has a flip side; it means he’s going to die someday. A corporation, on the other hand, is theoretically immortal. It may have a human CEO and board of directors, but those individuals can be replaced. Shareholders come and go as people trade in the market. If a shareholder dies, his stock becomes part of his estate and passes to his heirs. And the corporation goes on.
Point three: A corporation has no conscience, and has no soul.
A wise friend explained this to me one day. We were discussing our investments. Yes, I own stock in corporations, and I’m choosy about where I invest. I try to pick companies that don’t pollute, treat employees decently, and produce things that make the world a better place. I don’t want to believe that corporations are, by their very nature, immoral.
“Not immoral. Amoral,” my friend said. “Morality is outside their frame of reference. An entity can’t be moral or immoral if it hasn’t got a soul.”
I bet I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking of real, live people you’ve met who appear to have no conscience, already have more money than you could ever figure out how to spend, and are willing to do egregiously unethical things to get more. You’re wondering if corporations are really so different from people after all.
Hold that thought. I’ll come back to it in a moment.
When I first started pondering the morality of corporations. I thought about sharks. A shark, I suspect, doesn’t spend energy worrying about right and wrong. It’s just a fish with big teeth and a taste for blood, swimming through the ocean and devouring any critter that looks good to eat. A corporation, I thought, is like that.
But sharks have a place in the ecosystem, and there are checks and balances in nature that keep predators from wiping out the competition. If you’re among those who believe that God created the earth and everything in it, then God created sharks. I trust He knew what He was doing.
God did not create corporations. People did. Funny thing ... our myths and literature are full of cautionary tales about persons who have taken it upon themselves to create some kind of pseudo-life form and had it not go well at all. Frankenstein’s monster comes to mind. The Jewish legend of the golem. The goblins in Dean Koontz’s creepy novel Twilight Eyes. Somebody dreams up a creature that’s stronger, faster, or more devious, intending to use it as a tool, a servant, a weapon. Instead, the thing turns on its creator and the whole human race.
I think we’re living that story now.
Last Sunday, I saw a piece in the Wall Street Journal about the people who work on Wall Street, and how a surprisingly high percentage are psychopaths or sociopaths. One person quoted in the article said you really sort of have to be one to succeed in that world. Another described a sociopath as “a person with no conscience.” (italics mine)
When you give corporations the same status and rights as people, maybe it’s inevitable that your society will cultivate people who think like corporations.
We’ve created a monster, and now the monster is us.
The 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, has led to public outrage. Two years later, it’s clear that the newly blessed corporate “right” is not having a healthy effect on our democracy.
But Citizens United didn’t come out of nowhere. Some would argue that the ruling was a logical next step on a path we started down more than a century ago. Maybe I’ll say more about that in a future post. Just now, I prefer to meditate on how a corporation is not like a person.
First, a caveat. For purposes of this discussion, “corporation” doesn’t mean a non-profit group like the Humane Society or the Sierra Club. It doesn’t mean my grandfather’s business, which was a corporation with all shares held by family members. I’m referring here to for-profit corporations that trade on the public stock market.
By law, such a corporation has only one purpose: to make money for its shareholders. And that’s the first thing that makes it different from a real person.
Sure, people like money. Some of us like it a lot, and do a great deal of sweating and scheming to acquire more of it. But ultimately, money is only good for what it can buy. What we really want is food, clothing, security, cars, IPhones, a nice place to live, cool vacations, a big-screen TV and an education for our kids so they can earn money to buy their own stuff when they grow up. Some people use money to gain power and status, bend others to their will, or hire goons to beat up people they don’t like. Whatever a person chooses to do with it, money is chiefly a means to an end.
For a corporation, money is the end and everything else is a means. Anything it does -- bringing jobs to a community, putting out a good or lousy product, making snazzy Super Bowl commercials, buying off politicians, even donating to a worthy cause -- is in service of its real purpose. If those incidental activities don’t pay off (i.e., lead to increased profits), then the corporation will find a way to do without them.
Point two: People are living, breathing organisms. As such, we need clean air, clean water, and food that will nourish our bodies. A corporation doesn’t need those things. It eats only money.
For a person, being alive has a flip side; it means he’s going to die someday. A corporation, on the other hand, is theoretically immortal. It may have a human CEO and board of directors, but those individuals can be replaced. Shareholders come and go as people trade in the market. If a shareholder dies, his stock becomes part of his estate and passes to his heirs. And the corporation goes on.
Point three: A corporation has no conscience, and has no soul.
A wise friend explained this to me one day. We were discussing our investments. Yes, I own stock in corporations, and I’m choosy about where I invest. I try to pick companies that don’t pollute, treat employees decently, and produce things that make the world a better place. I don’t want to believe that corporations are, by their very nature, immoral.
“Not immoral. Amoral,” my friend said. “Morality is outside their frame of reference. An entity can’t be moral or immoral if it hasn’t got a soul.”
I bet I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking of real, live people you’ve met who appear to have no conscience, already have more money than you could ever figure out how to spend, and are willing to do egregiously unethical things to get more. You’re wondering if corporations are really so different from people after all.
Hold that thought. I’ll come back to it in a moment.
When I first started pondering the morality of corporations. I thought about sharks. A shark, I suspect, doesn’t spend energy worrying about right and wrong. It’s just a fish with big teeth and a taste for blood, swimming through the ocean and devouring any critter that looks good to eat. A corporation, I thought, is like that.
But sharks have a place in the ecosystem, and there are checks and balances in nature that keep predators from wiping out the competition. If you’re among those who believe that God created the earth and everything in it, then God created sharks. I trust He knew what He was doing.
God did not create corporations. People did. Funny thing ... our myths and literature are full of cautionary tales about persons who have taken it upon themselves to create some kind of pseudo-life form and had it not go well at all. Frankenstein’s monster comes to mind. The Jewish legend of the golem. The goblins in Dean Koontz’s creepy novel Twilight Eyes. Somebody dreams up a creature that’s stronger, faster, or more devious, intending to use it as a tool, a servant, a weapon. Instead, the thing turns on its creator and the whole human race.
I think we’re living that story now.
Last Sunday, I saw a piece in the Wall Street Journal about the people who work on Wall Street, and how a surprisingly high percentage are psychopaths or sociopaths. One person quoted in the article said you really sort of have to be one to succeed in that world. Another described a sociopath as “a person with no conscience.” (italics mine)
When you give corporations the same status and rights as people, maybe it’s inevitable that your society will cultivate people who think like corporations.
We’ve created a monster, and now the monster is us.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
That Contraceptive Mandate
I got e-mail this week from Senator John Cornyn. He sends out a newsletter called “The Lonestar Weekly.” The lead story this time was about the contraceptive mandate that’s been causing the big firestorm in the media. Pundits everywhere seem to be arguing one side or the other: should faith-based employers be required to provide health insurance plans that cover birth control?
Cornyn, predictably, says no. Not that he, personally, has anything against birth control. Well, he doesn’t exactly say that, but he makes a point of saying contraception isn’t the point:
“The dispute over the mandate is not a dispute over the use of contraception. It is a dispute over First Amendment rights.”
He devotes several paragraphs to this argument, using phrases like “a blow to one of our most cherished liberties” and “the bedrock principles upon which our great country was established.” His headline vows, “If President Obama doesn't end contraception rule, Congress will.”
Cornyn, predictably, says no. Not that he, personally, has anything against birth control. Well, he doesn’t exactly say that, but he makes a point of saying contraception isn’t the point:
“The dispute over the mandate is not a dispute over the use of contraception. It is a dispute over First Amendment rights.”
He devotes several paragraphs to this argument, using phrases like “a blow to one of our most cherished liberties” and “the bedrock principles upon which our great country was established.” His headline vows, “If President Obama doesn't end contraception rule, Congress will.”
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