What’s Dartmouth got to do with It?

“If you know your history, then you would know where you coming from”

-Bob Marley

For those of you still puzzling over the nonsense of the recent Supreme Court ruling against restrictions on corporate and union interference in the political process, Texas Monthly has had some interesting blog posts by their political editor (a lawyer by trade) Paul Burka.  He is a conservative, but he does call bullshit when pols fail to do their job and/or homework.  To prove I’ve done my homework, we’ll first have a history lesson.

A landmark Supreme Court ruling from 1819 under Chief Justice John Marshall sanctified contracts and corporate charters in a lawsuit between Dartmouth University and New Hampshire.  It turns out the Dartmouth began from a charter from the King of England.  New Hampshire wanted a state university of its own to educate its people and figured it would be nice to have Dartmouth instead of starting their own.  Since we weren’t under the King of England the charter shouldn’t be valid in the new republic.  The state of New Hampshire nationalized the university and took over the board of the school.  A lawsuit (naturally) followed and famous lawyer-politician Daniel Webster argued for his alma mater’’s independence before the high court.

In the lawsuit Dartmouth College v Woodward, the Supreme Court ruled that even though Dartmouth began under a royal charter, the contract must be respected and the state could not infringe on the rights of the corporation initiated by the King.  The state had to give up Dartmouth, and the Court made contracts totally inviolable in the United States, even in the case of nonexistent royal charters.  This incidentally is a foundational case in corporate personhood and paved the way to the Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific decision that made corporations people.

Burka explains how the Citizens United decision differs significantly from the Dartmouth case and even from a 1990 ruling in Michigan.  A not-so illogical consequence could be a corporation asking to register to vote or run for office.  The effects on the already “pro-business” Texas Legislature are examined here.

Bigger than Senator Brown: Rolling Back Democracy

The Supreme Court has overturned restrictions on campaign financing by ending the century-old bans on unions and corporations financing of elections.  I had meant to write that this decision was pending and going to have massive implications, but I never got around to it.

Citizens United, a small non-profit corporation, made a documentary called Hillary the Movie. Under long-standing law dating back to Theodore Roosevelt, corporations are forbidden from political advertising and donations.  This small corporation was forbidden from distributing the movie under election laws after losing a Federal Election Commission lawsuit.  This case went to the Supreme Court with Citizens United arguing that corporations are people and are entitled to free speech under the First Amendment and therefore the McCain-Feingold law of 2002 and other related campaign laws are unconstitutional.  This seemingly invalidates state laws against corporate contributions like in Texas, where Tom DeLay was indicted and the Texas Association of Business convicted for their illegal donations in the 2002 state elections.

The Supreme Court agreed (5 to 4) in what is to be one of the worst-ever decisions made in the history of Supreme Court.  Now corporations and unions will freely spend to better buy our corrupt democracy.

My solution?  Repeal the doctrine of corporate personhood which applied the Fourteenth Amendment rights of people to corporations.  In a bizarre 1886 decision called Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific, the Court held that corporations were people!  The implications of this decision are huge and must be seen in the Canadian documentary, the Corporation.  Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor thinks the original decision was wrong.

Let’s fight back!

Links

Reclaim Democracy - Take Action Now!

Weekend at Umar Yar Adua’s

If you’ve ever talked to a Nigerian about the state of their country, you will hear countless stories of corruption and cartoon foolishness in their military-political-thieving class.  My personal favorite is the “coup from heaven” where long-time dictator Sani Abacha died of a heart attack in the company of two Indian prostitutes (usually followed by the statment “he overdosed on Viagra”).

That cake may now have been taken by the clowns at the King Faisal Hospital in Saudi Arabia.  President Umar Yar Adua, a Muslim, was elected in very precarious health in 2007 in a blatantly rigged election.  Nigeria has a history of taking turns between Christians and Muslims for their presidents, but this time the Muslims got a bum deal because former president Obusanajo had a sickly Muslim replace him.

He is so sickly that word on the street is that he is dead and has been dead for over a month having been hospitalized in December in Jeddah.  The joke finally came out went someone sent to Saudi Arabia to get the President to sign the budget was not allowed to see him.  His aides locked the man in the room and returned a “signature” for the supplementary budget.  The hospital says he is just doing fine.

Being dead I assume would make it hard to deliver for the President to deliver the state of the union this month.

Issue XXXIV: How to save the World for Cheap in the new Decade

Four years ago in Bolivia when I volunteered in a regional hospital, I saw a disease that regularly destroyed the hearts and bowels of rural villagers every day.  AIDS?  No, nothing sexy like that.  Malaria?  Nope.  Tuberculosis?  No, not anything in the Global Fund.  Or that receives any attention.       

Chagas disease kills 14,000 people a year and infects 10-15 million, and it turned 100 years old this year.  Sadly, there has been little progress in the research and treatment of the disease in these one hundred years since Brazilian doctor Carlos Chagas discovered it.  There are two drugs for the disease, both over thirty years old.  Both have highly toxic side effects (but not lethal) akin to cancer chemotherapy, but it is difficult to know when to treat because there are very poor diagnostic tests for the disease.  All of this must vex the single pediatric cardiologist in Bolivia who has to treat the thousands of affected children’s hearts.

Chaga’s disease is one of the dozen or so “neglected tropical diseases” that affect the bottom billion of humanity, primarily highly-impoverished rural dwellers in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.  They cause 20% of the developing world’s death, disability, and disease.     

Because these disease do not exist in the First World, do not travel to the First World, or infect soldiers stationed in the tropics, little research occurs on these drugs.   MSF calls this the 90/10 gap.  90% of the world’s research goes for conditions that afflict the 10% in the developed world while only 10% of the world’s research goes for 90% of those living in the developing world.    

Because the populations affected are so small and impoverished, there is no incentive for pharmaceutical companies to research treatments for these drugs.  But even for an NGO to order a patch of 50,000 pills for these treatments is difficult because it costs a drug company too much to produce such a small batch of pills.  The cooperation of drug company donation programs is key in this field.    

Who champions them?

NTD’s do not have a Bono championing them, and when Prince William got shistosomiasis while on a safari in Africa, the World Health Organization’s Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Disease wrote the court to ask for his help publicizing the plight of those with a very treatable condition.  The palace did not respond. 

However, the Carter Center has championed the elimination of onchocerciasis, river blindness, in the Americas with donations of Mectizan from Merck & Co.   Jimmy Carter has been instrumental in promoting the NTD cause.  MSF’s Access to Essential Medicines Campaign now has a Break the Silence website for Chagas “celebrating” 100 years of neglect of this disabling disease and explaining how you can inform yourself and take action.      

Future

In era of massive budget deficits in the OECD, how can we and how should we prioritize our official development assistance?  A very good case is made to prioritize these diseases over expensive programs treating chronic diseases like HIV/AIDS.  Treatments are usually only needed once a year, and can be done without functioning health systems.  Drugs cost only a few pence per year while producing dramatic health improvements.  In Nigeria, successfully de-wormed areas are greener on satellite images because farmers are now healthy enough to farm better.

These health causes should not, in the end, compete with each other in a zero-sum game I believe.  Fighting to take more of the AIDS budget for NTD’s while the bankers enjoy their tax-funded bonuses and Christmas parties is a bit parochial. 

Their ultimate dream said WHO NTD Director Dr. Lorenzo Savioli, “is not a new program, but to join the Global Fund and receive the same grants as AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria do.”  That would be something to make Carlos Chagas proud. 

Links

World Health Organization – Neglected Tropical Disease List and Website

Medicins sans Frontieres – 100 Years of Chagas

Don’t trust them with your money!

I wrote a column for the student newspaper, but it is only in print right now.  Whenever it comes online, I will post it as a new report.  In the meantime, enjoy these news updates.

• Invest smartly, we’re the experts – Nobel Prize winners in Economics don’t know how to invest their money.  One professor won for telling people they should diversify their investment portfolios.  Naturally, he didn’t.  Neither do the other winners.  If these eggheads can’t get it right, how should we expect average Americans to make very complicated decisions about retirement?  Or health care?  Sometimes choice is a bad thing, and the customer isn’t always right.  And the experts preach what they can’t practice.
• Taking back what the rich “nonprofits” won’t give – The city of Pittsburgh is cursed with having very rich nonprofit organizations that bring employment and jobs to the city but no tax money.  Pittsburgh has to still provide city services like fire, emergency, and police services to these wealthy nonprofits and has to deal with the nonprofits eroding the tax base by buying up profitable business and properties and making them non-taxable.  If you remember my account about nonprofit hospitals, you’ll remember that the University of Pittsburgh is the worst.  The solution?  The city demanded that the 10 colleges contribute or face a 1% tuition tax.  I am broadly sympathetic with the city’s plight, but I am not sure taxing students is the best way to get money out of the colleges.  Still, any organization paying millions to its CEO and not paying taxes is suspicious.
• Let’s combine the stories - Perhaps the worst idea would be to get economics professors at rich universities to dabble in investing.  Perennial Clinton hack and good-for-nothing bigmouth Lawrence Summers ran Harvard in his post-Clinton Administration years.  After he ran out a famous African-America studies professor for making a rap album and engaging too much with the public, he jumped into managing the Harvard endowment.  As Treasury Secretary, he believed he had invented a brave new world of finance where the Ivy League school could muck it up with the most garbage of financial instruments and make a killing year after year.  Post-recession score? Endowments are down 17% nationally, but Harvard lost 30%.  No free cookies anymore for the poor professors.

Perhaps it is inbred “brilliance” like this that keeps Lawrence Summers on as Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser.  Or his wise comment that we should export toxic waste and pollution to Africa because they have lower life expectancies there anyway.  With jerks like that in charge of America, is it any surprise that the climate change negotiations failed?

News You Can Use

• But who pays taxes? – I always think it is funny that whenever people about taxes being too high for the rich in America, no one ever talks about how low-income people pay much higher rates of taxes at the state and local level.   In this report, this website decodes how sales and property taxes take a higher percentage of income out of the middle and working class than the upper class leading to most tax systems actually being regressive and anti-poor.  In “low tax Texas”, people making less than $18,000 pay 12.2% in state and local taxes while millionaires pay only 3.0%.  Shh!  It’s a secret!

• First Ever Defeat of the Fed - Congressman Ron Paul may (R-TX) have pulled off what critics of the Federal Reserve have longed for forever: an audit of the Federal Reserve.  Today, the House Banking Committee added his audit bill to a bigger banking reform bill, a must-pass bill.  This victory is amazing when you consider the fact that Banking Chairman Wright Patman (D-TX) for decades tried to bring under democratic control the opaque and secretive institution that can veto the will of the President and Congress while refusing to divulge its activities and trillion dollar balance sheets.  In fact the institution is more secretive than the CIA which complies with the Freedom of Information Act, while the Fed simply stopped taking notes during its meetings once the law started in the 1970s (see William Greider’s magestic Secrets of the Temple for more).  Ron Paul arranged a left-right alliance of conservatives and populist Democrats to fight for the measure against the corporate centrists in both parties.  Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders is supporting the bill in the Senate, which only makes it that much more interesting.

• One more nail in the California dream – The University of California has decided to jack tuition up 32% to over $10,000 a year (three times more expensive than a decade ago) as the flagship campus, Berkeley, goes on strike.  Chancellor Mark Yudof, who fought for tuition deregulation in Texas as head of the University of Texas, has been putting workers and professors on unpaid furloughs, cut janitor services, stopped hiring, and canceled classes.  Yet somehow he managed to give bonuses and pay raises to executives in the system making over $250,000 to $1,000,000.  Funny how budget cuts work, huh?  I wonder how many janitors could have kept their jobs with that money.  Take that Wall Street!   Check out this interview quote:

What do you think of the idea that no administrator at a state university needs to earn more than the president of the United States, $400,000?
Will you throw in Air Force One and the White House?

Issue XXXIII – Dispatch from Britain: Drugs are Bad (some of the time)

Nutts about Drugs – Last month I learned in class that drugs in Great Britain are classified by A, B, or C depending on their perceived dangerousness to society.  Class A drugs are given the longest sentences (7 years) while B and C drugs are given less sentences (5 and 2 years respectively).  Recently, Parliament asked for a review of the harmfulness of drugs to society to see whether or not twenty drugs were placed in the appropriate class based on their danger to society.  Sounds fair, right?  Then the report came out

It turns out the ABC classification had little to do with danger and more the with perception of which drugs were dangerous.  People are going to jail for using drugs that are not really that harmful.  For example, the scientific study found that some A class drugs like heroin and cocaine were indeed in the right category (class A) but some drugs that were barely harmful like ecstasy and LSD were Class A.    Meanwhile, alcohol is the fifth most harmful drug in society but is completely legal and so is tobacco (ninth most harmful).  Clearly, the classifications need to be adjusted.

Instead, Home Minister Alan Johnson has decided to upgrade marijuana’s status to Class B after it had been moved down to Class C a few years ago.  Rather than listening to the scientists, he played war on science a la George W. Bush.  Professor David Nutt advised the government that this was going against the report and said so in a lecture in July.  So Home Minister Johnson decided to fire him for “campaigning” against the Government.

The press has been raking the minister over the coals, day in and day out, over this.  Other members of the scientific panel on drugs have resigned, and scientists are outraged and mass resignations may follow from scientific committees.  The Minister of Science is also shocked that Johnson fired him without consulting him either.  As it now stands, there is a chill in the scientific community to advising politicians on good policy.  Who thought that an allegedly “progressive” government would play the Catholic Church to Professor Nutt’s Galileo in the 21st century?  Just another lesson in the moral and political failings of the Blair-Brown New Labour Government.

 

Links

The Times – “How can scientists advise this or any government?”

BBC - “Graph of the harmfulness of twenty drugs“

Issue XXXII: Education in Britain

I’ve got a gig writing for the London School of Economics’s student newspaper, the Beaver.  Last week the opinion section (aka Comment) ran four pieces on whether LSE takes too many students from private schools.  Only 7% of British students go to private schools, but they account for over 40% of LSE students.  Is this elitism, discrimination, or just a statement of how bad state schools are?  These are three opinions (1, 2, and 3) .

Apparently in Britain, all universities are public with tuition capped at £3,225 per year.  That means Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Imperial, and any other university you can think of in Britain costs less than the University of Texas at Austin currently.  Oxford sniffles that it should go private and be like Harvard and charge $30,000-$40,000 a year and wiggle out of admitting state school students like the Government wants them too.   As the token American writer, I warn Britain what private university education really means and obscene social inequalities that result from it.

In other news:

• The London School of Economics fell in the World Rankings that the Times of London does every year.  Boo hoo.
• A Gazan trapped by Israel’s siege is unable to attend LSE after Israel destroys his home.  A campaign by students guilted the administrators into offering him a full scholarship to make up for his losses.  Really brings the Palestinian issue home, doesn’t it?

News Roundup

• Japan has elections? - Japan is a one-party state with elections.  Until today.  For only the second time since World War II, the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan lost in an election against the opposition, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ).  A former LDPer, Ichiro Ozawa aka “The Destroyer“, will be the man behind the curtain in the opaque world of Japanese politics.
• Who killed primary care?  - Slate.com has an interesting article about Medicare’s Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC), a panel run by the American Medical Association that decides what a physician’s services are worth.  Somehow only subspecialists ended up on the committee!  Gasp!
• Did Madonna take them all?  - In a very surprising feature, the Economist talks about the falling birthrates in Sub-Saharan Africa despite few improvements in socioeconomic status.  Urbanization of a very rural continent is part of the explanation.  It’s interesting to note that there used to be two Europeans for every African, now there is a one-to-one ratio.  Soon there will be twice as many Africans as Europeans.  And all of Africa only adds up to a billion people… less than India.
• As if you hadn’t heard – Ted Kennedy died.  The liberal lion of the conservative era, he pretty much lost all the time.  An article from his bitter admirer.
• Third World sold out for Crummy promise from Big Pharma  – Hopefully you have heard that Obama outrageously agreed to veto price controls against pharmaceutical companies if they “voluntarily” decide to reduce costs by $80 billion over TEN years.  The deal was struck with the quite sleazy head of pharmaceutical lobbying, ex-Congressman Billy Tauzin (R-LA).  Less played on the news, is the fact that Obama administration is adopting their talking points in fighting against the developing world’s struggle for affordable access to essential medicines.  Activists consider the Obama Administration no different or better than the Bush administration on this issue.  Apparently, getting an African in the White House doesn’t help Africans.  Barack Obama’s pathetic attempts for an inoffensive healthcare deal leaves us with a health care plan that doesn’t help Americans or the rest of the world either.    

 

Issue XXXI: But Who is Education Really for?

Is higher education (at least at the highest and most elite levels) really about education?  Or is it really just another Dr. Seussian moneymaking scam to put green stars on our bellies to make us feel entitled?

Once upon a time, going to your state’s (or country’s) proud and storied land-grant public university was good enough to get you on your way up to the top of your local elite.  But in the age of globalization, we now have an internationalization of elites and with it, an internationalization and concentration of elite status markers.  The biggest one?  A fancy American (or British) college education, particularly Oxbridge or the Ivy League.

The modern Sylvester McMonkey McBeans are “independent schools”, private boarding schools that function as feeder schools into the Ivy League.  Despite the Great Recession, applications to attend these schools (tuition averaging $20,000 a year) are still rising.  Apparently the elite that sold the world for a mortgage-backed security can still afford to pay $32,000 for some young punk’s high school.  Hell, Manhatten Private School Advisers charge $18,500 just help parents apply to these boarding schools.

Then when the young’uns graduate, Mommy and Daddy can get them into an elite college as a “legacy” admission (at Amherst, for example, 10% of seats are set aside for children of alumni who don’t make the grade).  Or by virtue of going to one of these prep schools, their headmasters (you know, principals in the rest of America) can work their connections and “understandings” with Ivy League schools to get them in.  This helps explain how the 7% of privately-educated children in Britain end up representing 40% of the enrollment of Oxford and Cambridge.  Apparently the green stars pay off.

Or do they really?  Wouldn’t these rich kids do just as well going to public K-12 schools?  SAT scores correlate strongly with affluence, so why would they need the help to get in?

Or why bother at all with fancy colleges?  An even dirtier secret is that rankings have next to nothing to do with the actual teaching and learning at the undergraduate level and more to do with alumni donation rates, SAT scores, and rejection/acceptance rates.  Surveys that remain unreleased to the general public find the amount of actual critical thinking and learning going on has nothing to do with the name brand of a school, so is anyone actually getting what they pay for?  Besides giving us the green belly star of smug entitlement of course.

Meanwhile our own state universities seek to abandon their public interest mission after decades of declining funding.  The University of Texas at Austin, for example, cost $50 a semester for tuition in the 1970s when 90% of their budget came from the state.  Now only a third of the budget comes from the state and the rest has to come from tuition and fees and other sources.  The once proud and cheap University of California System also faces financial and academic ruin from their budget crisis I detailed earlier.  UC San Francisco only receives 7% of its budget from the state of California, and they want to cut that too.

Yet despite the funding shortfalls public school administrators have picked up the habits of shameless and unaccountable private sector bankers.  Our former University of Texas chancellor, Mark Yudof, was an overpaid asshole ($787,319 with perks) who jumped ship to mismanage the University of California and collect more money ($828,000).  His sole accomplishment, as far as I can tell, was deregulating tuition through the roof while watching the flagship fall in international and national standings (15th to 70th in the world).  And like politically tone-deaf AIG executives, the UT bigshots gave themselves million dollar bonuses, despite hurricane season.  Yet rank-and-file university employees haven’t seen a raise in years!

Is it any wonder that Tony Marx, president of Amherst, said that elite colleges “deepen the country’s growing class divisions and exacerbate the long-term decline in economic and social mobility”?

Preach on brother; we could use more of you for those of us in the education world who don’t see education as a luxury good.  Perhaps we should stop joking that these institutions are a charities while we are it too.

Links:

Businessweek – Article about the new radical college president of Amherst

The Economist – Nauseating article about private boarding schools

Independent – Charity status of private schools under threat