"Cultural Appropriation": Moral Outrage Or Moral Imperative?

Somehow, in progressive world, there are actions that, in one context, are moral imperatives -- so morally important that the authorities must compel them to occur -- while in another context essentially identical actions are moral outrages -- so outrageous that the authorities must step in to prevent them from occurring.  When you spot one of these contradictions, you can be forgiven for thinking that something is going on here that doesn't make much sense.

Last week I considered one instance of this phenomenon, the question of economic and racial integration of neighborhoods.   There, it seems that to the progressive mind economic and racial integration of currently wealthy neighborhoods is a moral imperative, and where it is not occurring naturally it must be forced by government coercion; but it equally seems that economic and racial integration of currently poor neighborhoods is a moral outrage, and where that is occurring naturally it must be stopped by government coercion.  Perhaps one might conclude that the "integration" mantra is just a pretext for some faction to demand and collect a few political spoils for its members.

An equally fascinating instance of the phenomenon is what goes by the term "cultural appropriation."  If you haven't been following what's going on on college campuses (and why would you?), you may not be aware that "cultural appropriation" is the moral outrage of the day.  Somewhere along the line, it became a moral outrage for a member of one "culture" to "appropriate" the trappings of some other "culture."  Or at least, some such "appropriations" became a moral outrage in certain contexts.  But wait a minute, you say -- American culture a mishmash of cultural trappings of people who came here from all over the place; so it can't possibly be that all "cultural appropriations" are out of line.  You are absolutely right.  And for that reason, you are going to need an official progressive "cultural appropriation outrage meter" to tell you which cultural appropriations are moral outrages and which are not.  The funny thing is, those "cultural appropriations" that are not moral outrages turn out to be not merely morally neutral.  Instead, they are moral imperatives.  Go figure.

The first application of our official cultural appropriation outrage meter will be to that most emotion-provoking of all types of outerwear, the Halloween costume.  You have probably heard that the campus of prestigious Yale University was thrown into turmoil last fall over the critical issue of culturally appropriative Halloween costumes.  It all started with a mass email to the entire community from Yale's Intercultural Affairs Committee, warning students to avoid wearing any costume that might be considered culturally insensitive.  The email does not seem to be available online any more, but is quoted in an article in Cosmopolitan here:

"Halloween is also unfortunately a time when the normal thoughtfulness and sensitivity of most Yale students can sometimes be forgotten and some poor decisions can be made including wearing feathered headdresses, turbans, wearing 'war paint' or modifying skin tone or wearing blackface or redface."

Previously you might have understood, for example, why wearing blackface might have been considered inappropriate -- not because of "cultural appropriation," but rather because it could be thought a form of ridicule.  But that wouldn't explain what's wrong, for example, with "headdresses" and "turbans."  Anyway, a co-head of one of Yale's residential colleges had the temerity to respond with an email suggesting that it might be OK to be a little bit offensive in a Halloween costume; and that comment caused the whole place fell apart.  It was a moral outrage!

But that moral outrage was then far exceeded a few months later at Bowdoin College in Maine.  Catherine Rampell had the story here in the Washington Post in March.   Some students, one of whom hailed from Colombia, threw a tequila-themed birthday party for one of their friends; and at the party several of the kids were photographed wearing mini-sombreros, a few inches in diameter.  When the photos showed up on social media, all hell broke loose:

When photos of attendees wearing those mini-sombreros showed up on social media, students and administrators went ballistic.  College administrators sent multiple schoolwide emails notifying the students about an “investigation” into a possible “act of ethnic stereotyping.”  Partygoers ultimately were reprimanded or placed on “social probation,” and the hosts have been kicked out of their dorm, according to friends. . . .   Within days, the Bowdoin Student Government unanimously adopted a “statement of solidarity” to “[stand] by all students who were injured and affected by the incident,” and recommend that administrators “create a space for those students who have been or feel specifically targeted. . . . "  The statement deemed the party an act of “cultural appropriation,” one that “creates an environment where students of color, particularly Latino, and especially Mexican, students feel unsafe.” The effort to purge . . . two [student government] representatives who attended the party, via impeachment, soon followed.

So we know that for a non-Hispanic to wear a mini-sombrero to a birthday party is a moral outrage.  Now apply that learning, if you will, to the context of food.  For example, is it OK for a dining hall at a small mid-western college to serve somewhat modified versions of Asian cuisine, such as sushi or banh mi (a kind of Vietnamese sandwich)?  It seems that that very thing is the cause of ongoing outrage at wacky Oberlin College in Ohio.  The controversy has been raging since the fall, but in just the past few days nutty actress Lena Dunham (a graduate of Oberlin) has weighed in.  People has the story on July 15:

“There are now big conversations at Oberlin, where I went to college, about cultural appropriation and whether the dining hall sushi and Banh Mi disrespect certain cuisines,” the actress told Food & Wine. “The press reported it as, ‘How crazy are Oberlin kids?’ But to me, it was actually, ‘Right on.'” . . .   The complaints arose last November, when the Ohio college’s newspaper The Oberlin Review  published a report citing multiple international students who felt the food service management company contracted by the liberal college had “[blurred] the line between culinary diversity and cultural appropriation by modifying the recipes without respect for certain Asian countries’ cuisines.”  The paper cited students complaining about the manipulation of traditional recipes like the Banh Mi Vietnamese sandwich — which is traditionally made up of grilled pork, pate, pickled vegetables and fresh herbs on a crispy baguette, but at Oberlin’s Stevenson Dining Hall was served as pulled pork and coleslaw on ciabatta bread.“  It was ridiculous,” Vietnamese freshman Diep Nguyen said. “How could they just throw out something completely different and label it as another country’s traditional food?”

I love that part of the Vietnamese guy complaining that Oberlin didn't make the banh mi in the "traditional Vietnamese" way with a "crispy baguette."  A baguette is "traditional Vietnamese"?  Could this guy not know that the baguette was "culturally appropriated" by the Vietnamese from their colonial overlords, the French?  Really!

Anyway, if we might look for just a moment at the big picture, I would ask, what is the quintessential institution that arose to create, preserve and transmit the white, and particularly the white male, culture?  Of course, it is the university.  And now all the other races, ethnicities, and genders want in; indeed, claim to be entitled to be let in.  They want to "appropriate" our culture!  Is it a moral outrage?  Of course not.  It's a moral imperative!  I for one am not offended in the least.  I'm proud of the culture of my ancestors.  Let everyone else share it!  (Why don't the other ethnicities feel the same way about their culture?  Probably most of them do.  It's just a few congenital whiners who have ginned up this "cultural appropriation" thing.)

Meanwhile, if you feel like dressing up as a preppie next Halloween (say, a cardigan sweater, a pair of green pants, and smoking a pipe), don't expect to generate a lot of moral outrage.  Preppies are absolutely fair game for ridicule.  

When Did It Become Morally Acceptable To Want The Poor To Be Poorer?

I seem to recall a time in my youth when the American federal government somehow thought that an important part of its mission was to help the poor to become less poor.  And since the single most important reason that the poor were poor was that they lacked access to inexpensive and reliable energy, a big part of the effort to help the poor become less poor consisted of bringing the benefits of fossil fuel-based energy to the poor.

And thus, starting in the New Deal period in the 1930s and continuing from then, we had things like the Rural Electrification Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority out there working to bring the benefits of electricity, much of it generated from coal, to the rural poor of America.  The REA focused on financing distribution networks to distribute the mostly coal-generated power.  TVA actually built multiple coal power plants in its own name.   One could quibble over whether a socialist model of government-directed development exemplified by REA and TVA was the best way to bring the benefits of inexpensive electricity to the poor.  But at least the government recognized that its mission was to help make the poor less poor, rather than the reverse.

Then somewhere along the line things turned.  Suddenly it became fashionable to seek to use government power to make the poor poorer.  Of course, nobody would put it in exactly those terms.  But quite obviously the government's goal shifted from seeking to have as much energy and as cheap as possible available to the poor to enhance their living standards, to instead seeking to restrict and limit the amount of energy available to the poor and intentionally increase its price so that the poor would be forced to use less of it and would have their living standards lowered.  These efforts have gone under various names, all of which are euphemisms that seek to divert attention away from the intended effect of further impoverishing the poor; but the intended effect is nonetheless obvious to anyone who pays attention.  We have, for example, the proposal for a "cap and trade" program -- explicitly designed to force the price of fossil-fuel-derived energy up in order that lower income people can no longer afford it and will consume less.  We have proposed "carbon taxes" -- and even more direct way to force up the price of energy so that low income people will have no choice but to consume less.  And now we have EPA's Clean Power Program -- a coercive program to drive cheap coal power generation out of business and thereby force the people to purchase far more expensive and less reliable options, like wind and solar.  (The implementation of the Clean Power Program is currently stayed by an order of the Supreme Court issued shortly before the death of Justice Scalia.)

I can't pinpoint exactly when the U.S. government made its 180 degree turn.  But clearly the turn had been made by the time Barack Obama was elected President.  It was during his 2008 campaign that Obama famously acknowledged that the whole idea of his plan for a cap-and-trade system was to make electricity prices "skyrocket":

[U]nder my plan of a cap and trade system electricity rates would sky rocket.    

Obama then appointed as his chief science advisor a guy named John Holdren, who has made a career of advocating to de-industrialize the United States.  Holdren had a long collaboration with eco-doomsayer Paul Ehrlich.  One of the famous quotes from their work is this:

A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States.   

From Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich, and John Holdren, Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions (W.H. Freeman, 1973), p. 279.  Holdren has never backed off from this statement, nor from many others like it; and he remains President Obama's science advisor to this day.  Holdren appears completely oblivious to the fact that industrialization and economic development have made the average American some 50 or so times better off than his pre-industrialization predecessor.

Remarkably, in his seven plus years in office President Obama has been thwarted in his efforts to deepen the energy poverty of the poor.  His cap-and-trade plan failed to pass Congress.  His Clean Power Plan has been stayed by the Supreme Court.  The fracking revolution -- entirely brought about by the private sector -- has recently caused the price of fossil-fuel-based energy to go down rather than up.  Nevertheless, Obama's would-be Democratic successors, Sanders and Clinton, have both advocated for policies that would restrict or ban fracking and thereby force energy prices back up to the detriment of the poor.  (Hillary has been somewhat circumspect about her intentions, but at a Democratic debate in March she admitted that "By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place." )

All of which brings me to an article titled "When Will Africa Get Healthy and Prosperous?" by a guy named Steven Lyazi that appeared on July 13 at the townhall website.  Lyazi is from Uganda, where he works as a "day laborer and student."  He describes some of the effects on his very poor country of Western efforts to restrict fossil fuel development and require his country to rely on so-called "sustainable" energy sources:

[E]nvironmental activists, western powers and UN agencies dictate what issues are important – and use them to keep us poor and deprived: manmade climate change, no GMO foods, no DDT to prevent malaria, using wind and solar power and never building coal, natural gas or nuclear power plants. This is a criminal trick that denies us our basic rights to affordable energy, jobs and modern living standards.

Then he describes some of the very practical effects of intermittent electricity:

In January 2015, I was in Kampala’s Mulago Hospital caring for my friend and mentor, Cyril Boynes, who was dying from a stroke and kidney failure. The doctors and nurses tried to save him, but they had old, broken equipment and constantly battled electricity failures. Many times, the power went out, the lights and equipment stopped working, and people died before the electricity came back on.

My question is, how does anyone think that this is morally acceptable?

The Most Offensive Part Of President Obama's Dallas Remarks

On Tuesday President Obama spoke in Dallas on the subject of the recent killings of five policemen.  Many have commented that his remarks began in an appropriate and respectful (if overly self-referential) manner, but somewhere around the middle turned inappropriately toward using the tragedy for nakedly political purposes like advocating for more gun control and more money for failed government bureaucracies.

I'll try not to rehash points already made by others, but I do want to focus particularly on this one paragraph:

As a society, we choose to underinvest in decent schools.  We allow poverty to fester so that entire neighborhoods offer no prospect for gainful employment.  (Applause.)  We refuse to fund drug treatment and mental health programs.  (Applause.)  We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book . . . .  

Put aside the question of the high inappropriateness of using this occasion for such advocacy.  You are still left asking yourself, doesn't the President of the United States know that he himself was given vast resources by the people and charged with responsibility for using those resources to address and solve these problems that he lists?  If there has been failure to solve (or even make progress as to) these problems, how does he come off taking no responsibility at all and instead blaming "society"?

Start with the statement where I know the underlying data in most detail:  "As a society, . . . [w]e allow poverty to fester so that entire neighborhoods offer no prospect for gainful employment."  Who's the "we" there, pal?  It sure isn't the American citizens and voters.  I would say that the American citizens and voters have shown great, even unbelievable, generosity in approving, through their elected representatives, some $1 trillion per year of funding for government programs supposed to combat poverty.  About two-thirds of the spending is done by the federal government, all of it under your direct control for the past seven and a half years.  That's about $5 trillion of federal "anti-poverty" spending in the last 7+ years on your watch by federal bureaucracies answering to you.  With any minimally competent allocation of these funds, that sum should have been far more than sufficient to eradicate poverty once and for all.  But in fact, on your watch, poverty as measured by your own Census Bureau hasn't even gone down at all, not even by a little.  And as the poverty rate has stayed about the same and the population has grown, the absolute number of people deemed "in poverty" has actually increased.  Don't try to blame this on us.  We put you in charge, and we gave you way more than enough money to do the job.  What is your excuse?

In your 7+ years of running $5+ trillion of anti-poverty spending, what exactly have you done to use that vast amount of money effectively so that poverty didn't continue to "fester"?  People who know anything about the federal "anti-poverty" programs know that they are intentionally structured so that so-called "poverty" will never go down.  The articles at this site addressing this issue are almost too numerous to count; examples are here and here.  As far as I can tell, you haven't spent one minute of your time, let alone one drop of your political capital, in your 7+ years seeking to restructure or re-allocate federal "anti-poverty" spending so that any of it would actually address the problem at hand.  The truth is that you are only too happy to see poverty "fester" so that you can cynically use it as a tool for yourself and the federal bureaucracies for obtaining ever more money to spend on accomplishing nothing. 

OK, all of that is bad enough.  But then you would use the occasion of the death of five policemen to try to blame the American public or "society" for what is in fact one hundred percent your own personal failure?  It's beyond disgusting.

Are any other of the statements in the quoted paragraph above any more hinged onto reality?  "We refuse to fund drug treatment and mental health programs."  Huh?  You sure wouldn't get that impression about "drug treatment programs" from reading the National Drug Control Budget from your Office of National Drug Control Policy.  The budget shows federal spending for drug treatment programs at over $12 billion per year and growing by almost $1 billion per year in recent years.  And the list of programs is endless: There's the Medicare & Medicaid-funded Substance Abuse and Treatment Services Program (over $6 billion right there!), the Substance Abuse Treatment for Veterans Program ($708 million!), the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant Program (another $1.5 billion!), the Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment Program, the Treatment Research Program (another $707 million!), the Substance Use Disorders Treatment for Military Service Members/Families Program, the Drug Free Communities Program, the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas Program, the Primary Care and Addiction Services Integration Program, the Homeless Assistance Grants Program, the Drug Courts Program, the Offender Re-entry Program/Prisoner Re-entry Initiative, the Bureau of Prisons Drug Treatment Efforts, and the Judiciary Treatment Efforts; and that's before we get to drug prevention programs like the International Organized Crime Intelligence and Operations Center, the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grants, the Education Prevention Efforts, the Prevention Research Program, the Drugged Driving Program; and I'm far from done, but isn't this enough?  Can anyone even think of some kind of drug treatment or prevention program that the federal government is not funding?  And then we can start in on the equally endless list of "mental health" programs that get annual funding from the feds: the Community Mental Health Services Block Grants, the Youth Violence Prevention Program, the Project Aware State Grants (new in 2014!), the Mental Health First Aid Program, the National Child Traumatic Stress Program, the Children & Family Program, the Consumer and Family Network Grants, Project LAUNCH, the Primary & Behavioral Healthcare Integration Program, the Suicide Prevention Program, the Homelessness Prevention Program, the Criminal & Juvenile Justice Programs, the Grants For Adult Trauma Screening & Brief Intervention Program, the Children's Mental Health Services Program, the PATH Homelessness Program, the Protection and Advocacy Program, the endless grants to the National Institutes of Health for research (over $2 billion per year right there!) -- and again, I am far from done.

Really, it could not be more insulting to the American people to suggest that somehow they have been less than exceedingly generous in funding "drug treatment and mental health programs."  If somehow all of these dozens of programs are not succeeding, if they are disorganized and unfocused, if they are trying to do way too many things at once and succeeding at none of them, there is exactly one person to blame, and that is you, President Obama.  That's what it means to have a unitary executive, as our Constitution provides.  There's one guy, and he is accountable.  If we elected you to do one thing, it was to spend our money effectively to accomplish the intended goals; and by your own admission you have completely failed in these areas.  By what kind of hubris do you turn around and blame "society" for what is your own personal failure?  "Society" was not in charge of running these programs.  You were!  

And then we have "As a society, we choose to underinvest in decent schools."  OK, the federal government does not have principal responsibility for schools, so at least this one does not represent Obama blaming others for his own personal failure.  Also, there could be some room to debate about the optimum level of school funding.  Still, I find this statement almost as obnoxious as the previous two.  

I say there might be some room to debate because at least some studies claim to show a positive relationship between school spending and educational results.  But when you scratch the surface, you tend to find that those studies have been funded by the teachers unions and are highly suspect.  For example, see this study from the Shanker Institute (Al Shanker was the long-time President of the United Federation of Teachers).  Other studies, for example this one from the Heritage Foundation, show no such positive relationship between increased school spending and student achievement.  Several things about school spending and student achievement are clearly true:  First, inflation-adjusted per student school spending has been increasing for decades, without any measurable increases in overall student achievement.  Second, many "blue model" jurisdictions that have dramatically increased their spending on K-12 education to levels far above national norms supposedly in order to improve student achievement have gotten no noticeable return on their investment in improved performance.  Notable examples are New York City (over $20,000 per student annual expense!), D.C., and Baltimore.  Third, many jurisdictions that rank toward the bottom in annual per student spending (e.g., Utah, Wisconsin) get some of the best results.  So, President Obama, what is the level of per student spending that you advocate as the appropriate amount to "invest" in "decent schools"?  Believe me, he will never say.  He will continue to blame "society" for failure to achieve perfect results no matter how much is spent.  It's just politics at its most cynical.  And at a memorial service for dead police officers!

I suppose Obama thought that if he said these things at a memorial service for slain police officers, nobody would be uncouth enough to push back.  So I guess I'm not in the running for the "couth" award.

What Is It About The Issue Of "Climate Change" That Makes People Lose Their Minds?

Let's face it:  Humans like to put on a facade of rationality, but more often than not the connection between human action and rational thought is seriously lacking.  Bring a narrative of sin and redemption into the mix, and in all probability any hope of applying rational thought to the problem at hand will be lost.  Are you telling me that you are in favor of evil?  Debate over.

Which brings me once again to the subject of climate change.  Somehow, at least among my favorite whipping boys the progressives, climate change has become the sin-and-redemption story of our times.  You are committing the grave sin of destroying the planet by leading a comfortable, modern, energy-enhanced life; but redemption is at hand through using government coercive action to force you (but not me!) back into a state of pre-industrial poverty.  Along the road to redemption, sign-posts keep popping up that point to things that make no rational sense.  But the true believer plunges forward.

The issue is in the news this week in multiple contexts.  Several state Attorneys General, led of course by the execrable Eric Schneiderman of New York, are investigating ExxonMobil for the alleged sin of misleading their shareholders about the risks to their business from climate change and the government response to it.   Meanwhile, in Orlando, Florida, Democratic Party operatives have been considering the party's 2016 platform, to be adopted at the upcoming convention.  Try, if you will, to make some rational sense of this.  Believe me, it can't be done.

The Christian Science Monitor on July 6 reports on the back-and-forth at the Democratic Platform Committee meetings.  On the climate change issue, it seems that the delegates broke down into two camps, one pressing for extreme measures now, and the other taking a more "moderate" approach (we will impoverish the people somewhat more slowly!).  Sanders-nominated delegates, led by one Bill McKibben, advocated for the more extreme approach:

One of Sanders’s delegates is Bill McKibben, a climate activist and founder of the environmental advocacy group 350.org, who last Monday wrote in Politico that the Clinton campaign was “obstructing change to the Democratic platform,” particularly on climate policies. In particular, he highlighted how two of his proposals – to call for a carbon tax and a ban on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the platform – were voted down 7 to 6.   

Of course, it is the fracking revolution that is credited by just about everybody who knows about the subject with cutting the price of fossil-fuel-based energy about in half over the course of the past year.  This decline has in turn cost the major oil companies and the petro-states hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue in just the one year.  (The United States consumes about 7 billion barrels of oil annually.  A price decline of $50 per barrel, as has occurred over the past year, therefore represents a loss to oil producers, and a savings to American consumers, of about $350 billion per year on oil alone.  And that's just in the United States.  Savings just in the U.S. from the corresponding decline in the price of natural gas could easily be another $100 billion, based on ~30 trillion cu.ft. consumed and a decline of $3 per thousand cu.ft. in the price.)

So how would a ban on fracking affect the major oil companies and petro-states?  Likely it would be the best thing that ever happened to them.  With possibly a few exceptions, the oil majors and the petro-states are not the ones who practice fracking; fracking is the game of the upstarts and the new entrepreneurs.  Meanwhile, can anybody think of a reason why banning fracking would not promptly cause the price of oil to head back to the $100+ where it was found a short year ago?

Anyway, try to find a place where McKibben, Sanders, et al. admit that their agenda is explicitly to increase the annual cost of energy for the typical American family by around $2000 or so and transfer the money to the likes of Exxon, Chevron, Shell, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Qatar.  The Christian Science Monitor article points to a group in the Democratic Party that it calls the "young climate hawks," who see the climate change issue as an "urgent existential" issue with no room for compromise.

[The] climate hawks . . . increasingly see climate change not as a political or policy issue, but as an urgent existential one.  “There’s been progress made, and I’m happy to see that, but that doesn’t mean I’m satisfied,” says Adam Hasz, executive coordinator for SustainUS, a youth-led environmental advocacy group.  “I don’t think on climate we can afford a middle ground,” adds Avery Raines, the group’s environmental advocacy fellow. “Americans cannot afford to compromise in any way.”

Well, Adam, the guys from Exxon and Saudi Arabia couldn't agree with you more.  Are you sure that you've thought this through?  I guess the defining characteristic of "youth" is that, so far, somebody else has paid for the expenses of their lives.  Just wait!

Meanwhile, on the "fraud" front, former Bank of England governor Mark Carney has convened something called the Task Force on Climate Related Disclosures to put some pressure on the fossil fuel companies.  Carney has recruited none other than former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg to run the task force.  The task force "seeks to bring transparency and consistency to how companies warn investors about dangers they face from climate change."  Given that Mike Bloomberg is heading the thing, you can understand why Bloomberg News is all over the story.  From July 11:

The fossil fuel industry risks losing $33 trillion in revenue over the next 25 years as global warming may drive companies to leave oil, natural gas and coal in the ground, according to a Barclays Plc energy analyst.  Government regulations and other efforts to cut carbon emissions will inevitably slash demand for fossil fuels, jeopardizing traditional energy producers, Mark Lewis, Barclays’s head of European utilities equity research, said Monday during a panel discussion in New York on financial risks from climate change.

You might think that this is a really smart group of people.  But could they really not have noticed that the effect of restrictions proposed by the most radical restrictors would clearly be to increase, rather than decrease, the value of reserves of the major companies?  Yes, theoretically, all world governments could suddenly order that all fossil fuel reserves be kept in the ground, and thereby promptly plunge the world into darkness.  Really, could anyone actually believe that that's going to happen?  And if only half of production gets restricted, that makes the remaining unrestricted half all that much more valuable.  

And then there's that $33 trillion value currently put on the oil reserves by the markets.  Of course, if the markets thought that "green" substitutes like wind and solar would be a cheaper source of energy in the time frame before those reserves can be consumed, then the reserves would have no value.  That makes the $33 trillion a very rough proxy for the loss the world would incur if world-wide government regulation in the near term prevents the extraction of all the reserves.  Is it possible to think about this rationally and consider that a result that could possibly happen, let alone one that is morally acceptable?

But then, in the world of "climate change" advocacy, nothing makes any sense at all.  

Is Economic And Racial Integration Of Neighborhoods A Good Thing Or Not?

The answer to the question, of course, is that economic and racial integration of neighborhoods is a good thing, except when it is not.  To the New York progressive, some economic and racial integrations are good -- so good, in fact, that if not happening naturally they must be forced by government coercion.  On the other hand, other economic and racial integrations are bad -- so bad, in fact, that even though happening naturally they must be stopped by government coercion.  

But, you ask, how can we tell which instances of economic and racial integration are the good ones, and which are the bad ones?  To get that answer, you'll just have to get inside the progressive groupthink.  As far as I can tell, the progressives have not attempted to articulate an intelligible set of criteria for distinguishing the "good" integrations from the "bad" ones.  If you are part of the "in crowd," you just inherently know.  Looking on this phenomenon from the outside as a member of the "out crowd," all I can say is, I can't discern that there is anything more to the progressive criteria for distinguishing the "good" from the "bad" integrations than pure tribalism:  A particular integration is "good" if "our tribe" wants it to happen, and "bad" if "our tribe" does not want it to happen.  One could be forgiven for concluding that economic and racial integration is not really the goal at all, but rather is just a pretext for "our tribe" to try to get what it wants through government coercion.

And so I return to the bizarre story of the ongoing economic and racial integrations of two locations near to me -- one being Westchester County, the suburban jurisdiction located immediately to the North of New York City; and the other being the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  I last reported on these two stories on June 6.  Obviously, in one of these jurisdictions (Westchester), further economic and racial integration is good, and therefore must be forced by government; while in the other (the Lower East Side), further economic and racial integration is bad, and must be stopped by the government.  There have been new developments in both in the past week.

You may recognize Westchester as a county with racial demographics remarkably close to those of the nation as a whole.  According to 2010 Census data here, Westchester's population was 13.3% black and 21.8% Hispanic or Latino.  Most of its cities also show substantial racial balance (e.g., New Rochelle -- 18.1% black, 27.8% Hispanic or Latino; White Plains -- 13.2% black, 29.6% Hispanic or Latino).  Only two towns in the whole county had a population over 90% white, and both of them barely cleared that threshold (Lewisboro at 90.4% and Pound Ridge at 90.1%).  Nevertheless the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development joined a 2006 lawsuit against the County to force further integration through the construction of low-income and "affordable" housing; and in 2009 the County entered into a consent decree agreeing to build some 750 units of same, and also agreeing to have a "monitor" to oversee its efforts to improve integration.  The construction of the "affordable housing" has not proceeded at a pace acceptable to HUD, which has returned to court multiple times since 2009 to force Westchester to heel.

One of the requirements of the 2009 consent decree was that Westchester produce an "analysis of impediments" to the construction of affordable housing in the County.  The County has produced several such documents, but HUD has "rejected" them.  In the latest development, HUD and its "monitor" took Westchester back before federal judge Denise Cote to get it slapped down.  According to the New York Times yesterday:

In her ruling from the bench, the judge, Denise L. Cote, called the county’s analyses a “failed process” and gave Westchester officials 30 days to select a consultant for the study. The federal monitor in the case, James E. Johnson, may accept the county’s choice or pick his own consultant. In either case, the consultant will then have four months to prepare an analysis and recommend any zoning changes.   

So take that, Westchester!  Obviously, everybody knows that further integration in your precincts is good, and indeed required.  If you won't accomplish it at the pace we demand, then a court will order you to do it!

But then there's the story of the Lower East Side.  The Lower East Side has historically been a low-income neighborhood, but more recently has seen fairly rapid gentrification.  The gentrification, with its resulting economic and racial integration, has not required any government coercion to accomplish.  On the Lower East Side, the local Community Board 3 met last week to select a new Chairperson (the prior Chairperson being term-limited).  The Villager reports on the story here in its July 7 edition.   According to the article, although the board did "manage" to select a new Chairperson, the meeting was "marred" by protests -- protests seeking to stop the influx into the neighborhood of new luxury buildings and their high-income residents.  Obviously, this must be the "bad" kind of economic and racial integration.

At a contentious public session at the meeting’s start, activists with the Coalition to Protect Chinatown and the Lower East Side staged a vocal protest against the handling by C.B. 3 of a community-based Chinatown rezoning initiative. . . .  The plan would create a new special zoning district in Chinatown and the Lower East Side with increased height restrictions and protections to fend off sky-high luxury towers and fancy hotels. . . .   David Michael . . . charged up and down the aisles hurling abuse at C.B. 3 members and holding up a sign over [Board Chairperson] Li’s head that read, “Sell Out.”  Other demonstrators paraded up and down the aisle of the auditorium shouting, “They’re not listening to us and turning over the neighborhood to developers who are treating us like cockroaches!”

Of course, the politicians at the meeting fell all over themselves pledging to do everything in their power to keep the "developers" out -- and thereby stymie the further economic and racial integration of the neighborhood.  It's obvious to everyone that this instance of economic and racial integration is "bad" -- isn't it?  You just have to have a scorecard to tell the good integrations from the bad ones.        

The Issue No One Is Talking About: Exploding Federal Commitments

Somehow in the political season, there come to be issues of the day that everyone talks about on that day.  These issues can range from the relatively important (e.g., Hillary's breaches of national security while Secretary of State) to the relatively trivial (e.g., Trump's re-tweet of an image of a six-pointed star, alleged to be anti-Semitic).  Meanwhile, as these issues of the day draw away all the attention, everyone's gaze is diverted from what ought to be the main issues.  Even for candidates who constantly protest that they want to get away from whatever they are being asked about right now and "talk about the issues," they almost never want to talk about the really important issues.

For the federal government, in my opinion far and away the overriding issue is:  what the hell are they spending all that money on?  For those not on top of these things, the federal budget for the current 2016 fiscal year (October 1, 2015 to September 30, 2016) is just a hair under $4 trillion (and only a fool would bet on the final total coming in under the $4 trillion by the time things are done).  And the big question is, does the $4 trillion represent intelligent choices of appropriate priorities for the government, or are various programs that have once established a toe-hold now exploding out of control while nobody is paying attention?  

Given the progressive world view of government as the infinite source of costless free money, you would be right to suspect that everyone in the government is only too happy to see spending explode while nobody is watching.  Hey, we're creating perfect fairness and justice here!  Of course, somehow the exploding spending goes for programs just happen to be the domains of the progressive activists and Democratic party supporters.  But it's not corrupt because it's the government!

So let's consider a few examples:

• Student loans.  When Barack Obama took office in 2009, the amount of outstanding federally-backed student loans was $657 billion according to federal data here.  When I first covered the issue in 2012, the total had just hit $1 trillion; and when I returned to the issue in early 2015 it had broken $1.1 trillion.  Now?  The Q2 2016 number is $1.255 trillion.  Oh, and these numbers don't appear anywhere in the federal budget.  A student loan hits the budget only when the borrower fails to pay and the government has to take the loss.  So how much of the trillion and a quarter will actually be repaid?  Just try to find that out.  It used to be that you could look up the "default rate" and get a good idea, but then the government got into granting every kind of deferment and forbearance you can think of -- like "income-based" repayment plans and write-offs of balances for people who go to work in non-profits and "public service" -- so that they could make the "default rate" look small.  Today they claim the "default rate" is down to 11.7%, but that's only because they are hiding millions and millions of borrowers who are going to be excused without repaying in full.  Easily half of the tril-and-a-quarter will not be repaid; and of course, the tril-and-a-quarter continues to grow daily.  Who benefits from this huge handout?  Of course it's the key Democratic constituency of the Higher Education Blob.
• Pension guarantees.  Charles Blahous at E21 writes on July 5 about "The Worsening Pension Problem Nobody Talks About."  This one is the crisis in federally-insured multi-employer pension plans.  Haven't heard of those?  The "multi-employer" plans cover workers in industries with lots of employers of workers who all do the same thing.  The classic example is trucking.  Most of the plans are sponsored by unions.  According to a chart in Blahous's article, when President Obama took office in 2009 the federal multi-employer program was thought to be solvent.  The most recent figures are a "$52.3 billion deficit estimate consist[ing] of $54.2 billion in liabilities against only $1.9 billion in assets."  That was quick!  And believe me, this is just the beginning of an explosion to come.   Supposedly the taxpayers are insulated from having to pay for this disaster through the PBGC, which charges premiums to the plans; but of course, when they set this up nobody took account of the fact that unions gradually put their employers out of business.  So like all government insurance programs eventually, the PBGC is dead broke.  The biggest disaster for the moment is the Teamsters' massive so-called "Central States" pension fund, which is coming close to running out of money.  They have recently been knocking on the government's door seeking the inevitable bailout.  Who benefits?  Another key constituency of the Democratic party, labor unions.
• Food stamps.  When Obama took office in 2009 the number of food stamp recipients was about 33 million, and the annual budget of the program was about $54 billion.  Since then, it's been eight years of economic "recovery."  In the past, food stamp usage increased during recessions and went back down during recoveries.  This time it was the opposite.  Today, the number of recipients is around 46 million, and the budget for the program soared to about $80 billion in 2013, before falling back in 2015 to about $74 billion.  How has that happened?  Part was a loosening of eligibility restrictions, for which the Congress bears much of the responsibility; but a bigger part was overt and aggressive promotion of expansion of the program by the Obama administration.  The good news for this one is that the budget and number of recipients have both declined marginally in the last couple of years.  But why aren't we back down to levels well below where we were in 2009?  Without doubt, this administration believes -- with a good deal of justification -- that recipients of monthly federal handouts are likely to vote for continuation of same.
• Medicare/Medicaid.  According to data available from CMS here, in 2009 expenditures on Medicare were $499 billion and  on Medicaid $375 billion.  By 2014 it was $619 billion for Medicare and $496 billion for Medicaid.  It all just marches forward on autopilot. Obamacare in particular has caused a great expansion in the ranks of Medicaid beneficiaries.  

I could go on, but you get the picture.  The federal government has long left the world of rational consideration of cost-effectiveness of spending, in favor of massive autopilot increases for whatever programs got themselves in the door at some magical historical moment.  Anyway, it's all way too complicated to focus political attention on.  Let's get back to calling Trump a racist!