The Positive Voices

Banks emit A friendly tone; At least until You want a loan. I have here in my hand, as Sen. Joe McCarthy used to say about alleged communist evidence, a bona-fide “Delivery Authorization” from Wachovia Bank (“a Wells Fargo Company”). They’ve already sent two. By simply moving a gold sticker from the top of the sheet to the reply form at the bottom, and entering the last four digits of my Social Security number, I can get my valuable “free” credit report. Of course I’ll also need to sign on the dotted line. That act will not only rush me my free report but will also commit me to paying $12.99 per month for a further series of updated reports until, more or less, Hell freezes over. The amount will be conveniently deducted from my Wachovia bank account. Trouble is, I don’t happen to need this service, nor, with only the rarest exceptions, does anybody else. It’s just easier for banks to make money with gimmicks like this than by the messy business of offering loans. The “free credit report” is by now a familiar sales technique modeled on those slippery publishers who have long used it to sell unwanted subscriptions. Thus banks have dutifully fulfilled the requirements for entering that same elite category of slimy scoundrels. They started a while back by quietly charging unconscionable interest rates on credit cards, adding confiscatory fees if you were ever late. Then they came up with debit cards so you wouldn’t unknowingly overdraw your account, but quickly proceeded to add an overdraft protection and stick you with usurious rates and fees in case you overdrew anyway. Plus they wouldn’t divulge that you were unknowingly overdrawn until it was too late. From there it was just a small step up to subprime loans, credit default swaps, and all those other murky depository dealings. In fact, murky dealings are where banks now make much of their money so that they can pay their murky top executives excessive salaries. For example, they don’t really relish timely debt payers like you and me as credit card customers. They prefer folks who struggle to stay even and who regularly fall behind. These are the ones who sink into their clutches. That’s where the profits are. They also don’t favor savvy homeowners or other borrowers who try to refinance their existing debts at today’s lower interest rates. New loans and mortgages are strongly resisted just now. Banks want you to keep paying at your old inflated rate, if you wouldn’t mind, until current rates ratchet back up. Then they’ll cheerfully offer you a loan. In the meantime, they’ll just hide in their vaults and play the bond market while huckstering credit cards and needless credit reports. Congress is hammering out the final details of a financial reform package that, among other things, will create a new consumer financial protection agency. Let’s hope it will actually put an end to such Wall Street fraud and abuse. But the new financial regulations will fall short in other areas. For example, neither the White House nor Congress have supported proposals to break up the “too big too fail” banks. President Obama seems incapable of appointing officials in top economic posts who have much interest in reining in Wall Street. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, and National Economic Council head Larry Summers are all from the old failed school of banker supremacy. Suffice it to say, that old school has no great interest in reform. Things are going just swell for them, thank you. Sure, the economy may be in the tank and personal suffering may be near universal, but not on Wall Street. Salaries and bonuses there remain huge and sacrosanct. Massive campaign contributions go to making sure that any new federal or state laws can be readily circumvented, and so far those dollars have been remarkably well spent.

Got our leaderInto power,Why does life Still seem so sour? Since Obama’s election, a destructive new thread in conservative commentary has emerged: “Blacks have finally arrived. We don’t need to concern ourselves with ‘them’ anymore. If we can elect an African-American president, then prejudice must be dead.” The unspoken corollary is, “OK, they got what they wanted. Now we can go back to discriminating again.” As if to emphasize this point, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell (R) issued a provocative proclamation praising the brave Confederate boys who fell in The War Between The States. Recent Democratic governors didn’t produce such statements, and even recent Republican ones had included wording to make plain that they weren't supporting slavery. McDonnell didn’t even add that kind of fig leaf—until the ensuing uproar essentially forced him to do it. Such is the perceived sentiment these days that one can support discrimination pretty openly. And just in case you might think Virginia’s Confederate History Month stunt could be an aberration, note that Texas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama have all declared their own version of it in recent years. It’s not that American racism ever went away. If things seemed to pick up for minorities during the artificial boom years, it had little to do with public intention. If African Americans had an easier time buying a house, it was more because the market was overbuilt than because of any greater tolerance. If mortgages were easily available, it was more due to the need for new swindle victims than to bankers experiencing a sudden vision of racial harmony. Schools, too, are still a mixed bag. Obama’s inauguration spawned no new flood of integration. If anything, America’s slow drift toward re-segregation has continued unabated. Now that No Child Left Behind has proved largely ineffective, the latest fad is to fire all the staff at a failing school and hire new teachers and administrators. Not much talk, though, of more money or services to bring individual low performers up to speed. Less talk yet about wide-ranging district mergers to force more integration. Jobs haven't provided any relief either. Black unemployment remains far above the rate for whites at all education levels, worsened now by the recession. Cases are even cited of blacks scrubbing their resumes to bleach out telltale signs of race. Sure, they’ll get discovered at the interview, but in the nuanced world of bias they may be over the hump by then. Having an African-American president doesn’t seem to have much altered police behavior either. Random stops on city sidewalks and highways continue to follow historic patterns. Connecticut passed a law in 1999 requiring police departments to submit periodic reports on the racial makeup of such suspects to the African-American Affairs Commission. Nice try. Only a handful of departments bother filing the reports at all, and the commission has no budget to analyze them. There’s no enforcement. New York City and other big places are constantly under the gun for such profiling. In the Big Apple last year, blacks were seven times more likely to get busted for plain old pot possession than whites, even though studies show their usage to be about equal. Housing policy is more of the same. Westchester County, a large New York suburb, signed a federal agreement to build hundreds of affordable homes and market a slew of them to blacks. Nice thought. Six months later, only pretense had been accomplished and no one has been put in charge of anything. Nor are they ever likely to be. Some jurisdictions around the nation with particularly strong leadership for a few years have successfully integrated a bit of housing and some schools. Mostly though, leaders of that stripe soon get unelected and the community returns to its regular segregated course. None of this has changed with Barack Obama’s presidency. Citizens just treat him as an intriguing racial interlude while going on about their often discriminatory lives.

Trains are fun, But too much fuss; How about A high-speed bus? America doesn’t lend itself to speedy trains. Aside from the crowded Northeast corridor and maybe California, its cities are too small and too far apart. The paying public just isn’t there. Sure, there are plenty of places which can and do support short-haul subway, trolley, light rail, and even heavy rail for commuters. But for most intercity travel, trains cost too much for too few passengers. By and large, rail won’t fly. There are other problems too. One is that most of the high-speed money would have to come from the federal government, automatically making it a congressional boondoggle. For it to pass, there would need to be a rail line in every state. Ponder if you will the Great Falls-Billings Express. If there isn’t something for everybody in the plan, there won’t be anything for anybody. Nor are there enough champions. For highways, we see road builders, automakers and oil companies. For airports there are plane makers, oil companies, and chambers of commerce. But trains don’t use that much fuel, and in any case are mostly made in Canada and Japan. We don’t yet have a potent rail-building lobby. And with our newly diminished interest in global warming, public support for efficiency is dwindling, too. Rail sounded exciting when gas cost $4 a gallon, but at $2.75, maybe I’ll just drive. The concept of “peak oil” seems likewise to have peaked. The oil cartel is back to regularly announcing dramatic new finds, whether or not they’ll ever be able to get a pump into them. At any rate, the public is no longer scared. Plainly, if we were serious about rail we’d need to jack up the price of gas so that drivers would face serious choices. In Europe the going rate is $7 a gallon. But here in the United States, politicians are afraid to raise the gas tax at all. There’s no way trains can compete with that, other than for commuting. Yet while news for train travel is pretty gloomy on the auto front, it’s much cheerier when contending with airlines. We can thank Osama bin Laden for much of that. Airport security procedures are now annoying enough to drive passengers back into their cars, or even trains, if there were any. Plus the airlines themselves have started nickel-and-diming us to the point where wise passengers carry food from home and strive to live out of a carry-on bag. Just for spite we might ride a high-speed train from New York to Chicago, if we could find one. Unfortunately, that’s not a sufficient business plan to start construction. One rail asset our country does thankfully enjoy is old rights-of-way. Some are used for freight, others are abandoned. Most are not straight enough for high-speed service, but they would offer a great launching-pad for land acquisition if we should ever get our transportation act together. But perhaps a better, if unspoken, option is the high-speed bus. Government doesn’t support intercity buses today. But why not? We’ve already built the highways. Let’s now build terminals at major interchanges and supply high-quality buses with real rest rooms and vendors, running on frequent schedules. Then plan a local bus to meet each arrival and head straight downtown. We’d provide parking too. The buses would go the speed limit, but this kind of infrastructure would make the system much more rapid than what we’ve got now. OK, so you might not be willing to bus from Philly to Denver, but you wouldn’t take a train either. You might, however, bus from Cincinnati to Cleveland rather than fly, if it were done well. In any case, the job won’t get done by high-speed rail, so let’s get working on a practical alternative.

Treating prisoners, Like a curse; One sure way, To make them worse.   It seemed like a great idea at the time—not letting prisoners vote. That avoided political retribution, especially in states where sheriffs are elected rather than appointed. It also meant that legislatures could freely treat inmates like dirt while shrewdly filling up jails with marginal black or poor offenders to get them out of the voting booth. For a long time this was a winwin situation. California and New York lawmakers were especially “tough on crime,” while Southerners were especially “tough on blacks.” Eventually, many politicians found it useful to be tough on both. And later on, they added Latinos. Many an election went to the ”toughest” and plenty of candidates enjoyed those “purified” voter lists. Then came the Great Recession. Suddenly, America’s bloated prisons became an incumbent’s nightmare. “Who can we let go without getting tagged as ‘soft on crime?’” “Which prisons can we close without getting beat up by the jailers union?” “What services can we cut without firing up the ACLU?” “Is it cheaper to privatize?” Less frequent, unfortunately, is the question, “Who are we holding that we shouldn’t?” But that one is at last occasionally being heard. New York has finally repealed most of its so-called Rockefeller Drug Laws, synonymous with the modern definition of “draconian.” And it has tardily dawned on California that parole is cheaper than incarceration. Also that perhaps while “three strikes and you’re out” may be a delightful political concept, the state can no longer afford it. Arizona, conversely, isn’t thinking much beyond hiring a private prison contractor. It looks like locking people up is a hard habit to break. The American prison population quadrupled in just the last 25 years. We’ve even surpassed China and Russia in the percentage of citizens in the clink. Meanwhile the rest of the world just scratches its head. “What are those crazy Americans up to now? Their country isn’t crime-ridden.” True, but we do loathe coddling. No matter to us that recidivism seems to slacken when treated with education, health care, decent food, easy visitation, periodic release time, halfway houses, generous parole, libraries, and other elements of civilization. Rather we see ourselves as “tough but fair,” and in our heroic imagination we somehow connect our harsh behavior back to the glory days of the roughand- ready frontier. Nor should we forget the special case of illegal drugs. We’re at our most draconian when punishing the cultivation, sale and possession of those products that ironically were legal 50 years ago. We still cling to this stance even while much of the world is now pulling back, legalizing and regulating them, treating addicts, reducing crime, improving health and closing prisons. Maybe the discipline of shrunken budgets will actually cause us to rethink our basic incarceration policies rather than just continuing to prospect for more line items to cut. Or maybe not. America is not steeped in learning lessons from the rest of the world. They are, after all, just foreigners.