Free Enterprise and the Commons

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Once upon a time, before corporations had become persons, they were legal entities that offered ordinary people the chance to own shares in the nation’s economy, an opportunity until-then reserved primarily to industrial titans and robber barons. It hasn’t turned out that way: far more families own cats than shares of stock, and 10% of Americans own 81% of all stocks. This has exacerbated the wealth gap, centralized corporate decision-making, and provided lots of money to influence politics – a 21st-century version of the “military-industrial complex” Eisenhower warned against. With congressional approval ratings remaining abysmally low, many Americans feel shut out of the economy and unrepresented by their elected officials. In a democracy, this is not a good thing. The current system has privatized the commons, polluted it, extracted its public goods at a fraction of their value – and created a class of politicians beholden to special interests.

Yet I believe that the free-enterprise system itself provides fertile ground for change, and I see many people planting seeds of hope: shareholder initiatives demanding changes in corporate environmental and social policies; signs of recognition that the best long-term returns will come from companies that operate sustainably and mindfully; social networks and crowdfunding that are democratizing investment opportunities and financing young entrepreneurs. Their collective effort is to create a free-enterprise system that is open to ordinary people, that exists not just for private gain but for public good and that seeks not to destroy the commons but to revive it.

Dennis (Allegedly)

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The very weird case of J. Dennis Hastert, the former Speaker indicted for perjury and illegal bank withdrawals for payments he apparently made to someone who was purportedly blackmailing him for alleged sexual abuse when he was a high school wrestling coach. My thesaurus is exhausted. And so we have the all-too-depressingly-familiar accusations of sexual misconduct by a man who (a) was in a position of power and trust over vulnerable young men and (b) had spent his career in the helping professions.

We also have another story of a less personal – and more common – kind of abuse. When Hastert left Congress he became a lobbyist, and however you dress up the role of a lobbyist, it is essentially to sell access – something that former House speakers have lots of. After a sluggish start, Hastert’s business began picking up around the time he needed money to make large payments to the still-unidentified blackmailer. (I wonder what would have happened if these demands had arisen while Hastert was still in Congress, with access not just to people but to classified information.)

There is much more to be learned about the personal case of Dennis Hastert, whose sudden fall from grace caught his many admirers by surprise. But how many more stories do we need to read about the cozy connections between those who purport to serve the public good and those who only want to line their own pockets before we get serious about political and financial reform?

Let Them All Run

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It used to be said that anybody (well, any boy) could grow up to be president, and clearly the dozens of Republican candidates frantically trying to get noticed took that civics lesson to heart. But how can you be president if you can’t even make the cut for the televised debates – which Fox and CNN will limit to the 10 highest-rated candidates in current polls The grousing has begun. Which polls? How current? With what margin of error? “If you’re a United States senator, if you’re a governor, if you’re a woman who ran a Fortune 500 company,” said former Senator Rick Santorum, who in 2012 went from 0% to Romney’s runner-up – and is back again to 0%, “then you should have a right to be on stage.” Santorum is right (a sentence I never thought I’d write). The thing stinks.

Will it be a circus to have 18 or 20 candidates, including Donald Trump, interrupting each other? Isn’t that why we watch, waiting for a gaffe or putdown? But what’s happening now is even more demeaning, as candidates try to claw their way into the top 10 with all the dignity of reality show contestants.

Since when do broadcast companies and ever-changing polls, which together have done so much to dumb down our elections, get to choose the candidates – and, incidentally, provide superPACs one more opportunity to buy advertising? Let’s bring back the excitement and honest corruption of the old conventions, with their horse-trading in non-smoke-filled rooms. In the meantime, let them all run.

Class Acts

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For those who are counting, the number of Republican presidential candidates now equals all your fingers and half your toes, while the Democrats are up to three. With all the handwringing over big money in politics, it’s fun to watch everybody publicly distancing themselves from the plutocrats (although not from their money) and pandering to the middle class, which is how 90 percent of Americans have traditionally identified themselves. Hillary has gone a step further and thrown in her lot with “everyday Americans” (notwithstanding the Clintons' reported 16-month earnings of $30 million). The Republicans have jumped to fill the void. “They are the party of privilege,” announced the George Pataki. “We are the party of the middle class.” The myth of the middle class has long been the glue that held America together. It was as much aspirational as real – a belief in opportunity – but as the gap between the rich and everyone else continues to expand, that belief is eroding: almost as many people now identify themselves as lower class as middle class. They are not deluded: a recent report ranks the United States fourth from last among developed nations in income inequality – ahead of only Turkey, Mexico and Chile. And that, a Princeton study concludes, is creating a political system in which “policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans [and] America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”

Maybe that’s why Bernie Sanders is gaining traction in Iowa.

Ireland’s Referendum (Part 3)

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Like many nationalist revolutionaries, Éamon de Valera was a deeply conservative man. Born in Brooklyn to an Irish mother, he was a leader for over 60 years of the movement that took Ireland from a British colony to independence, from Civil War to a Republic. It was a violent time, and de Valera sought to mold an Irish identity that would hold the country together after centuries of English oppression. His building blocks were the conservative values of the peasantry, the Irish language and, above all, the Catholic Church. And a gloomy disposition settled over the land, particularly on Sunday mornings. But anyone who enters an Irish pub on Saturday night – and much of Ireland does – learns quickly that gloom is not the default position of the Irish spirit. Here people spar with words and sometimes fists. The lyrical Irish language seems fashioned for poetic jousting – so de Valera made Irish mandatory in the schools and almost nobody speaks it anymore. Then came the revelations of what the church had done, not to young boys only, but to unmarried pregnant girls, and people reacted with the special anger of betrayed believers.

But as the old foundation came down, it seemed to release something deeper than the “us-vs-them” mentality to which Ireland had clung for so long. It's impossible not to be struck by the gaiety that infused last week’s marriage referendum, the sheer joy of reaching out. Memo from Ireland to us: inclusion is good for the soul.

Ireland’s Referendum (Part 2)

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I lived for several months in Ireland, much of it with Catherine, her husband Pee and their nine children, in a small farmhouse without plumbing and powered by turf. I also spent time on the road, hitchhiking around Waterford and Cork, and later up the west coast from Dingle Bay to Donegal. Ireland is a small place, just 300 miles long and 170 miles across, and yet its landscape and culture are remarkably varied. I discovered, in my travels, three very different countries: the fertile pastures of the east and south where Anglicans and Catholics lived amicably together; the barren, rock-strewn west to which Cromwell had driven the conquered Irish 300 years earlier – where beneath a thin veneer flourished a pagan world of fairies and leprechauns and mythic giants, where Gaelic was still the language of daily life; and the midlands, Catherine’s Ireland, impoverished, ruled by priests, steadfastly holding to the old ways. Last week, when Ireland’s voters overwhelmingly approved the gay marriage referendum, the single district to vote against it was in the midlands. I wonder what Catherine would have made of it all. She never questioned the Church or the priests who ran her parish as a fiefdom, and yet she was the kindest person I have ever known. And so, when her youngest, beloved daughter, Kathleen, got pregnant as a teenager, Catherine overcame her catechism and opened her heart to her grandchild. And when Kathleen died from cancer a few years later, it could not rock her mother’s faith.

Ireland’s Referendum (Part 1)

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I got off the bus at Moyne Cross and followed the one-lane road until, after about a mile, I turned into a narrow lane and walked up a hill toward a stone farmhouse. A woman just coming out of a small barn stopped and looked at the unshorn wanderer walking toward her. It was June 1972 in Longford, a rural county in the center of Ireland, and I had come in search of the woman who had nursed me through rheumatic fever when I was five – and who a few years later, as my own family was falling apart, had returned here to begin a family of her own. I had sent a letter to her maiden name, at the last address my mother had, and set out to find her. I had come to one of the poorest, most remote parts of Ireland, a place of small farms still without plumbing, where families sold milk from their few cows at the nearby creamery and grew potatoes, onions and cabbages in the rocky soil. A place where the Catholic Church and the pub were the centers of communal life, where the parish priest was the unquestioned arbiter of morality and politics, where divorce was prohibited, contraception illegal and ideas sternly censored. A place, I think today, where gay marriage was unimaginable.

But that afternoon I wondered only if, after all the years, she would know me.

“Catherine,” I said as I approached her.

“So it’s you, is it,” she answered.

Phoenix Rising

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With three children and one of my closest friends living there, I visit San Francisco often. Walking its steep streets is a cardio workout for an aging heart and a journey back to a time when the city was the capital of an alternative America, where I first heard the Grateful Dead in the summer of 1966. David Talbot’s Season of the Witch tells San Francisco's story from the aromatic innocence of 1967’s “Summer of Love” through the AIDS epidemic that infected over half the city's gay population 20 years later, but which, Talbot argues, “also had a strange power to heal [as] acts of human grace, in the midst of unspeakable anguish, began to help close San Francisco’s deepest wounds” – scars from its harrowing years of bombings, murders, kidnappings and hatred.

I had forgotten many events that had seemed so vivid then, and I hadn’t realized how interconnected the light and darkness had been – never knew, for example, that Jim Jones, who forced 909 followers to drink Kool Aid laced with cyanide in a Guyana jungle, had not long before been a major political force, delivering money, votes and other, more personal favors to the city’s most progressive leaders, including George Moscone, Willie Brown and Harvey Milk – and murdering Congressman Leo Ryan, the one politician who responded to the cult members’ growing cries for help.

It’s a story of how easily we fall victim to Utopian dreams and of what strength we can summon in the face of tragedy.

The Other Side of Justice

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If the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev showed our justice system working as it is meant to, what happens when it doesn’t? One result is that innocent people go to prison, and it is very hard to get them out, even when those who sent them away have become convinced of their innocence. With 2.3 million people in jail, America has the world’s highest rates of incarceration (equaled perhaps by North Korea), and for some, it is much easier to get in than to get out. On Sunday Justice Aid sponsored a benefit for two organizations that are dedicated to freeing the wrongly convicted: Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, which focuses on D.C., Maryland and Virginia; and Innocence Project New Orleans, which covers Louisiana and Mississippi, two states that have more prisoners than any other places on earth. (Full disclosure: Justice Aid was founded by my friend and cousin, Stephen Milliken, a retired judge of the D.C. superior court known for his creative approach to sentencing.)

Between them, MAIP and IPNO have to date helped exonerate 45 people who had served a combined 829 years in prison for crimes they did not commit. We read that most people who are arrested are guilty of something, and perhaps that’s so, but our system of justice isn’t supposed to be about the law of averages; it’s based on the rights of individuals. What struck me about the people we saw on Sunday was not their bitterness at being wrongfully jailed but their infectious joy at being finally free.

The Jury

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There was little joy in Boston last Friday afternoon when 12 jurors unanimously sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death. Only 15% of the city’s residents supported the death penalty for the 21-year-old marathon bomber; across the country, four times that many wanted him executed. The reaction to the verdict was muted in Boston, even among the victims. Some quietly expressed gratitude that justice had been served. Others, notably Bill and Denise Richard whose 8-year-old son Martin was the youngest to die and whose 7-year-old daughter Jane lost her left leg, opposed the execution. There was no sympathy for Tsarnaev, but there was also no outcry for vengeance, no demand for public retribution – only a kind of sad and weary spirit, and a determination to move on. I was one of those who had hoped the jury would decide for life, although life in the supermax prison seems a living death. But I have only admiration for the 12 people, whose identities I will never know, who came to a different conclusion. I don’t know why they did so, but I think that, amid the horrific sadness of the testimony, they looked daily at Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and saw . . . nothing – no sign of the empathy that connects us to each other. And so all the arguments of his defense team – which were efforts to humanize him – came to nothing.

We have seen so many instances of our justice system breaking down. Here, whether you agree with the outcome or not, it worked.

Stumble of the Week

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I had heard that members of the National Football League cheat (and knock out their fiancées on elevators and use drugs), but I had never known that each team’s quarterback plays only with his own balls. This is just one of the things I have learned in my prodigious research into “Deflategate,” the scandal that is riveting New England. If you don’t live near Boston or watch lots of ESPN, you may be unaware of the claims that the New England Patriots improperly manipulated the pressure in their footballs to the advantage of their quarterback, Tom Brady. But in Boston this is front-page news, the topic of excruciating analysis on sports radio and the subject of a 243-page, multi-million-dollar report, which charges the Patriots with intentionally lowering the pounds per square inch in their footballs. Yesterday the Patriots hit back with a 20,000-word rebuttal that includes a report from a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, cites the “ideal gas law,” and says that the minute and forty seconds their employee spent in the bathroom with two bags of footballs was not to deflate the balls, but “is consistent with the time that it takes a gentleman to enter a bathroom, relieve himself, wash his hands, and leave.” The gentleman in question is known as “the Deflator” because he is trying to lose weight.

There is much more to come in this story, but unlike, say, the Middle East, the solution seems obvious: Why not have both teams play with the same ball?

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

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As I walked along Market Street in San Francisco, past payday loan storefronts and pawnshops and “We Buy Gold” signs, the Dickensian stench of poverty rising from the sidewalk, unkempt people with paper cups and cardboard signs dared me to make eye contact. Whatever sympathy I might have had for one person down on his luck turned quickly to irritation at the legion of mendicants, their ranks swollen by addicts, drunks and scam artists, making me run an urban gauntlet of guilt. We like the objects of our generosity to be grateful, passive and scarce.

But that isn’t how they come these days in a world of massive displacement, where we read daily of thousands of desperate people washing up on a resort beach in Malaysia; of trying to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa crammed onto rickety boats in a diaspora in which more 2,000 people drown every year; of swimming across the Rio Grande at night and then driven across America by “coyotes” in what has become a multi-billion-dollar business dominated by organized crime. For them, our southern border is just one more obstacle to survival.

The United Nations Refugee Agency estimates that the number of displaced people worldwide now exceeds 50 million, a misery index that will overwhelm both national borders and traditional notions of charity. There are many reasons this is so, but the driving factor is war: “Peace is today dangerously in deficit. Humanitarians can help as a palliative, but political solutions are vitally needed.”

American Uber

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To those who haven’t experienced the phenomenon known as Uber: it’s not just a taxi company with a Teutonic name, whose valuation has gone from $60 million to $50 billion since 2011; it’s also an improbable reminder that America’s melting pot still bubbles. I have yet to meet an American-born Uber driver, and perhaps as a result I’ve heard some poignant stories. I wrote in March of a young Eritrean man who fled to Sudan, was kidnapped for his body parts and ultimately ransomed by his father. More recently, I had a young Palestinian driver who had grown up an Israeli citizen in Jerusalem, come to America where he married a refugee from Guatemala who had been adopted by a woman from one of Baltimore’s first families. The couple, now settled in Boston, were awaiting their first child. Although he had fled from the Middle East, he carried none of the baggage of hate we associate with that place, blaming the violent passions on political opportunism, not ethnic animosity.

Yesterday, my driver had fled from Yemen because his family had been on the wrong side of the civil war. “When I was 13,” he told me, "they put me in jail. It was because of my last name." He will never return, he said, the tribal conflicts will never end. But he wasn’t looking back. “I want my son to understand what we have here.”

I am inspired by these stories of gritty immigrants for whom America still represents a beacon of hope.

Carly

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“The health of our water is the principal measure of how we live on the land.”  Luna Leopold While Texans brace for Emperor Obama’s military invasion, Californians continue to pray for rain. With 93.4% of the state in its fourth year of “severe drought," a beautiful sunny day is an oxymoron and the clouds have no rain.

Carly Fiorina knows why. The latest contestant in the Republican presidential sweepstakes, Fiorina’s main claim is that she ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground, the difficulty of which should not be underestimated. Her analysis of the drought is equally unsettling. “Droughts are nothing new,” she wrote recently. The problem this time is not nature. It’s people, specifically “overzealous liberal environmentalists” whose policies “allow much of California’s rainfall to wash out to sea” instead of being diverted to Central Valley cantaloupe farmers. “It comes down to this: Which do we think is more important, families or fish?”

This is nonsense. Anyone who thinks that a drop of water making it to the ocean is wasted should visit the once-mighty Colorado, which has been so thoroughly dammed and diverted (4.4-million acre feet a year to California alone) that it hasn’t flowed regularly to the sea since 1960. Its estuary has become a poisoned trickle. We’re the problem all right: we’re killing the river.

A river is not a pipe. It’s an ecosystem that, if we care for it, will return huge benefits – including fish. Our health depends on its health. The answer, Ms. Fiorina, is “families and fish.”

Conditional Love

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If you don’t wear an American flag on your lapel, proclaim America the most exceptional nation in the history of the world, and say “thank your for your service” to every person you see in a uniform (“You’re welcome, but I’m in the Salvation Army”), then to many you aren’t a loyal American. I’m unclear how this squares with a self-proclaimed democracy in which (1) trust in our elected representatives barely breaks single digits, (2) fewer than half the people support the president, and (3) politicians of both parties are routinely indicted – e.g., New York’s Assembly Speaker (Democrat) and Senate Majority Leader (Republican). Maybe it’s just government we distrust. So let’s turn to the private sector, where banks commit crimes, get fined billions and no one in management gets fired; under-performing hedge fund managers average $465 million in yearly compensation; the Koch brothers recognize the reality of climate change but still fund its debunkers; the wealth gap has reached oligarchic proportions; and corporate lobbyists annually spend $2.6 billion writing laws and purchasing politicians. It’s disgraceful.

And yet, America was founded on a set of ideals, which, however short we fall, we continue to reaffirm:

This seems an “American exceptionalism” worth holding on to and living up to.

Geezers (Old Friends)

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The four of us have known each other for well over five decades, even longer for some, which has given our friendships the comfortable, broken-in fit of an old jacket. Our paths have diverged over the years. We have lived in different places and done different things, concentrated on our own families and careers, lost touch with parts of our pasts and even, over time, with each other. But with old friends the bonds persist. When we meet again, even after many years, we pick up where we left off, not needing to define ourselves nor explain our references. As we have grown older, we have come to savor these things, and so, four or five years ago we decided to get together for a long weekend at least once a year. A lot has changed, of course, and only in our own eyes do we look the same as we used to. But above all, it’s the laughter that brings us together, laughter that comes as easily as before but seems kinder now.

There are many benefits that come with growing old, from cheap movie tickets to grandchildren to the relief that we may yet escape the messes we humans have made in this world – to old friends, whose common memories remind us that the past is not gone. It has been incorporated into the arc of our lives, whose stories are yet unfinished. We get together every year because we have learned that old friends keep us young.

The Courtroom

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“All rise,” said the clerk, and they all rose, including the defendant, whose slight build and guileless face belie the horrific things he had done. That contrast is at the core of the defense’s strategy to save the life of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whose trial entered its sentencing phase this week. The trial had been heading here since the opening statement, when Judy Clarke said, “It was him,” acknowledging in three syllables that her client had committed the crimes of which he stood accused – that he was one of two men whose knapsacks filled with bombs brought carnage and never-ending grief to the Boston Marathon two years ago. Clarke’s aim was not to assert Tsarnaev’s innocence, but to save his life. On Monday, the defense team cut right to the chase: Spare our client the death penalty, said attorney David Bruck, because life in prison without the possibility of parole is far worse. “One punishment is over quickly, the other will last for life,” condemned to a solitary existence 12x7-foot cell at Colorado’s super max prison, described by its former warden as “a clean version of hell.”

The defense’s portrait of Tsarnaev as a lost teenager – “a good kid” from a disintegrated family, overwhelmed by his murderous and fanatical brother – points to the possibility of rehabilitation.

“When it’s 23 hours a day in a room with a slit of a window where you can’t even see the Rocky Mountains,” ex-warden Robert Hood told Mark Binelli, “let’s be candid here. It’s not designed for rehabilitation.”

The defense relentlessly builds its case of humanizing Jokar.

He was an incredibly hard worker who “always wanted to do the right thing,” his third-grade teacher told the jury.

“He looks around the room,” said a spectator, “and maybe it’s the last time he sees a woman in his life.”

“Jokar was super smart, very kind . . . a really lovely person,” said his fifth-grade teacher.

“This is where the government keeps other terrorists who used to be famous but aren’t anymore,” Bruck told the jury, “He goes here and he’s forgotten. No more spotlight like the death penalty brings . . . no martyrdom . . . no autobiography . . . no nothing.”

“He was quiet, friendly, humble,” said his eighth-grade teacher. “All the teachers loved him.”

“He’ll be crazy in a couple of months,” said a spectator.

In their determination to save his life, have his lawyers condemned Tsarnaev to a living death?

“Why don’t they just ask him?” said a spectator.

Environmental Scorecard

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No issue better reflects the growing chasm between America’s two political parties than that of the environment, which was born in the Republican Party and was once a broadly bipartisan issue. The 1972 Clean Water Act, for example, passed the Senate, 86-0, and the House, 366-11 – and then easily overrode Richard Nixon’s veto, 57-12 and 247-23. But the League of Conservation Voters’ latest National Environmental Scorecard tells a completely different story, particularly in the House of Representatives, where most Democrats score above 90%, most Republicans below 10%. Among the leadership the difference is even starker – with Democrats at 92% and Republicans at 2%. And there’s a nice consistency among the declared presidential candidates: Cruz 0%; Paul 0%; Rubio 0%. The partisan differences are escalating for two reasons: (1) most Republicans’ current scores are significantly lower than their lifetime averages (Oregon’s Greg Walden has dropped from 11% to 3%, for example, and Virginia’s Frank Wolf from 26% to 6%); and (2) the tea party wing is pushing the GOP deeper into anti-environmental territory. Many House votes now attempt to roll back existing protections – keeping pesticides out of our waterways, for example, and carbon pollutants out of the air. Others seek to prevent the Defense Department from replacing fossil fuels with biofuels and the EPA from using peer-reviewed scientific studies with confidential health information.

This creates a dilemma for the League, as it tries to maintain a semblance of non-partisanship, something it has traditionally done by supporting Republicans with mediocre records – like Maine’s Susan Collins (55%) – over pro-environment Democrats. Such Republicans are ever harder to find.

Stumble of the Week

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Only 19 months until Election Day, and already the candidates are stumbling wildly. This week, in two breathless paragraphs in Time, Rand Paul praised the Koch Brothers who, “unlike many crony capitalists who troll the halls of Congress looking for favors, . . . have consistently lobbied against special-interest politics.” Clearly gratified by such public genuflection, David Koch looked ahead to “when the primaries are over and Scott Walker gets the nomination,” a pride of place the Wisconsin governor kept for about a day – until he appeared to oppose legal immigration for depressing the wages of working people, something to which the brothers are not averse. And then there was the Byzantine story of the Clinton Foundation raking in not-always-reported donations from foreign billionaires who developed uranium mines in Canada and then sold their company to the Russians, all while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. Somewhere in the midst of this, a Russian investment bank involved in the uranium deal paid Bill Clinton $500,000 to give a speech in Moscow – all of which may be perfectly legal by some letter of the law, but it seems a twisted tale in need of explanation from a presidential candidate. It is said that when Harry Truman retired from the presidency in 1953, he and Bess got in their old car and drove themselves back to Independence, Missouri, where they lived in the house they had owned all their married lives on Harry’s army pension from World War I. That seems a long time ago.

Deportees

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Europe’s leaders, who have come under heavy criticism for an inadequate response to the thousands of refugees trying to reach their shores, are calling the latest events on the Mediterranean a humanitarian crisis. This seems a small ray of hope in the ongoing disaster – because you can’t have a humanitarian crisis without humans, and it's a step forward to see a human tragedy where others see a border-security breakdown or an immigrant problem. It seems unfair to blame Europe for the desperate people embarking from North Africa on overcrowded boats owned by unscrupulous human traffickers, as a Boston Globe editorial did yesterday, arguing that “the European Union has a moral duty to provide the financial resources and manpower to stem this escalating humanitarian crisis.” Europe didn’t cause the crisis, at least in its present incarnation, and it is not going to be able to stop it – and I can't think of many countries that would make the efforts Italy has made to rescue those at sea.

We need to stop flaying ourselves long enough to recognize that while the West isn’t perfect, there’s a reason why millions of desperate people are trying to get here, and no amount of wishing or wall building is going to make them stop coming. One lesson from Europe is that, whether out of humanitarianism or self-interest, we need to accept the responsibility our success has given us by continuing to engage with the world, which has become a very small place indeed.