I saw your recent blog post entitled Judge Vaughn Walker Got it Wrong, in which you wrote:

[Walker's] decision fails to deal with the basic, underlying issue–rather he focused solely upon individual testimony on how Prop 8 affected them personally. Wrong focus.

There is only one issue before each of us Californians: Is Marriage of Divine or of Human Origin?

Judge Walker pays no attention to this fundamental issue, and relies solely upon how Prop 8 made certain members of society “feel” about themselves.

Those of us who supported Prop 8 and worked for its passage did so for one reason: We truly believe that Marriage was instituted by God for the specific purpose of carrying out God’s plan for the world and human society. Period.

That may be what you and many others believe about marriage, but that belief has no standing in court. Judge Walker was not placed on the bench to decide whether laws and conduct in the United States match up to the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, or other religious writings. His job is to measure the disputes that come to his courtroom against the laws and constitution of the United States of America.

Period.

Maybe even Exclamation Point.

The sacred text for Judge Walker is the US Constitution, and nowhere in the Constitution and its twenty seven amendments is God mentioned. Nowhere. Not even once.

Religion gets only two mentions in the Constitution. Article VI says there can be no religious test to hold office, and the First Amendment restrains Congress from establishing an official religion and abridging the free exercise of religion. That’s two mentions of religion, and both in the negative.

If the defendant-intervenors in the Prop 8 case tried to raise the issue of the divine institution of male-female marriage, any federal judge would have been right to throw the argument out. Judge Walker summarized this in two sentences in his decision (pdf p. 10), distilled from two of the most on-point Supreme Court cases:

A state’s interest in an enactment must of course be secular in nature. The state does not have an interest in enforcing private moral or religious beliefs without an accompanying secular purpose. See Lawrence v Texas, 539 US 558, 571 (2003); see also Everson v Board of Education of Ewing Township, 330 US 1, 15 (1947).

The state is not in the business of making religious judgments — and I’m surprised that you, the soon-to-be-retired Roman Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles and a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic church would want a secular judge to be passing judgment on whose religious views are correct. You and your brother bishops seem very passionate about claiming that kind of authority only for yourselves.

Cardinal, if you don’t like Walker’s ruling and want someone to blame for it, you might look in the mirror. It was likely money from Roman Catholic and Latter-Day Saints individuals and institutions that paid for the work of the defense-intervenors, and from where I sit, they did a pretty poor job.

Judge Walker gave them every opportunity to lay out a non-religious rationale for their position, and they failed. Miserably.

They did not build a case on facts, but merely asserted that one existed. They did not put forth credible expert witnesses, they did not bring forward peer-reviewed scientific studies, and they did not put forward a single convincing secular purpose for the kind of discrimination Prop 8 sought to enshrine in law. Wrote Walker (pdf p. 11):

[Prop 8] proponents in their trial brief promised to “demonstrate that redefining marriage to encompass same-sex relationships” would effect some twenty-three specific harmful consequences. Doc #295 at 13-14. At trial, however, proponents presented only one witness, David Blankenhorn, to address the government interest in marriage. Blankenhorn’s testimony is addressed at length hereafter; suffice it to say that he provided no credible evidence to support any of the claimed adverse effects proponents promised to demonstrate.

That’s the sum total of the case put forward by the defenders of Prop 8. One witness, and not a particularly good one at that. Walker weighed that poor excuse for a case against the strong, vigorous, and well-supported arguments of the plaintiffs, and (surprise, surprise) sided with those seeking to overturn Prop 8.

Indeed, your blog post proves the wisdom of Judge Walker’s ruling. You declare that there is one and only one reason you and others backed Prop 8 — your religious beliefs about the divine institution of marriage. Indeed, by the end of Walker’s decision, he seems to agree that this *is* what the case is about. After dismantling the six purported rationales for Prop 8 put forward by the DIs, Walker writes (pdf p. 134):

what remains of proponents’ case is an inference, amply supported by evidence in the record, that Proposition 8 was premised on the belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite-sex couples. FF 78-80. Whether that belief is based on moral disapproval of homosexuality, animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate. See Romer, 517 US at 633; Moreno, 413 US at 534; Palmore v Sidoti, 466 US 429, 433 (1984) (“[T]he Constitution cannot control [private biases] but neither can it tolerate them.”).

Walker believes that you and your fellow Catholics believe that gays and lesbians are “objectively disordered” and sex between people of the same gender is a “grave depravity.” He’s read the materials put out by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (see Finding of Fact #77, points i and j on pdf p. 104). By the end of his decision, he agrees with you that this is why you want to enshrine this belief in law.

Thank God, however, that he believes this is “not a proper basis on which to legislate.”

You may be free to discriminate against gays and lesbians within the Catholic church as a matter of faith, but the state of California is not free to do the same as a matter of law.

Thank God.

Your brother in Christ,

The Rev. Dr. Peterr

The Associated Press

Updated: 06/12/2010 11:47:24 PM MDT

New York » Jonis Assmann doesn’t know how derivatives work, but he’s counting on them to help bring in next year’s soybean harvest in Brazil.

Assmann is not alone in his confusion, even though trade in many items we buy every day would slow or even stop without derivatives. The financial instrument even touches the outcomes of Utah Jazz basketball games.

But they also got much of the blame for the financial meltdown, so it’s no wonder they’re the target of a regulatory overhaul that a congressional conference committee took up last week.

The legislation could affect everything from a cup of coffee to the gas in your car. Here’s the story of one derivative.

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Hedging bets » Assmann is perpetually worried he will run short of cash if prices for his crops fall. So he tries to pay for some of his supplies at the start of the growing season with a fixed amount of soybeans that will be collected at the end.

His suppliers don’t want to take on the risk of falling prices, either. But last month Philadelphia chemical maker FMC Corp. agreed to send Assmann all the insecticides and herbicides he needed in exchange for a third of his expected harvest.

Making the barter possible was a separate derivative that FMC, without Assmann’s knowledge, got a bank to design. That side bet is designed to make sure FMC won’t lose a penny if soybean prices fall.

“They seem very complicated,” Assmann, 39, said when told about the derivative. “A poultry company here lost a lot of money in derivatives. I don’t fully understand them.”

Derivatives are private bets between two parties on how the value of assets such as crops or measures such as interest rates will change in the future. Most aren’t traded on exchanges, andthey’re hard to value, but the bets are increasingly blamed for having a volatile effect on world economies.

There’s a derivative for nearly everything. You can bet that the Standard & Poor’s 500 index will be higher in a year or the dollar will fall in value. You can bet that people of a certain age will die off faster than expected. A few creative financiers once devised a derivative that allowed you to bet on the value of future royalties from old David Bowie songs. Others came up with one to bet on how many basketball games the Jazz would win in a year. And, yes, you can bet on soybeans in all their varieties — crushed or ground, solid or oil, normal-sized or miniature.

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Ticking time bombs? » For all the positives that investors see in derivatives, the investments can also be dangerous. Dubbed “financial weapons of mass destruction” by billionaire Warren Buffett, derivatives have been behind nearly every recent financial blowup, from the bankruptcy of Orange County, Calif., in 1994 to the collapse of the housing market in 2007 and 2008.

Two years after panic on Wall Street brought the economy to near-collapse, Congress is finalizing a sweeping overhaul of laws governing the financial services industry. Legislation is pending that would regulate derivatives for the first time — and could make derivatives such as FMC’s difficult to execute. House and Senate negotiators have begun crafting the final bill, and President Barack Obama hopes to sign it into law by July 4. Both the House and Senate versions would require users or middlemen to set aside money in case their derivatives generate big losses.

Supporters of the legislation say regulation is needed to prevent another meltdown. But opponents say regulation will make it too expensive for companies such as FMC to hedge their risk and will throw sand into the gears of commerce. That’s because derivatives affect the price of nearly everything we buy — a steak at a restaurant, bread at the supermarket.

“There isn’t a thing you use that isn’t somewhere hedged by derivatives,” said Lee Prisament, a doctor who ditched medicine 20 years ago to design derivatives at banks such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. “The average Joe benefits from them without even knowing it.”

Or is hurt by them.

Derivative contracts worldwide have a value of $700 trillion, or 10 times the worth of all the goods and services produced in the world in a year. Speculators are behind much of this market. But derivatives’ popularity also reflects fear at companies that they could get walloped by unexpected changes in the prices of things they buy or sell.

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Avoiding surprises » In the case of the Brazilian soybeans, the fear showed up in a most unlikely person.

Scion of a proud farming family of German descent, Assmann greets visitors with a firm handshake and exudes confidence when talking about business. He boasts that he’s “usually 80 percent right” guessing where soybean prices are heading. But that other 20 percent can sock him with big losses.

Five years ago, Assmann was caught by surprise when prices for soybeans dropped on world markets. He lost $1 million, had to lay off a dozen workers and found himself scrambling for cash to pay suppliers, including makers of herbicide and insecticide. This year, because of the crops-for-chemicals deal, Assmann hopes his scrambling days are over.

On a sunny day in April, Marina Fusco, an FMC analyst in Brazil, grabbed her laptop and jumped in a pickup for a four-hour drive to Assmann’s farm in the big agricultural state of Mato Grosso do Sul, west of Sao Paulo. She was ushered into his office to answer a seemingly simple question. If FMC’s chemicals cost $660,000, just how many bushels should he eventually hand over?

The answer isn’t easy because Assmann will start planting in November and won’t harvest until May next year. It’s anyone’s guess what the price of soybeans will be then. The soybean futures market at the Chicago Board of Trade provides one clue. But futures fluctuate every second, and those changes over tens of thousands of bushels can translate into big money.

So Fusco and Assmann haggled, stealing glances at their computers to check prices for Chicago futures due in May 2011. Fusco threw out a few numbers and fired off a half-dozen e-mails to staffers at her Brazilian office and in Philadelphia to double-check her math. After an hour, the two agreed to value the soybeans at roughly $10 a bushel regardless of what the market price is next year. Assmann would have to hand over 66,000 bushels in exchange for FMC’s chemicals.

The two signed a single-page contract stipulating terms like the warehouse to which Assmann must send the soybeans when they’re harvested. Now it was up to one of Fusco’s colleagues in Philadelphia, Julian Treves, to prevent FMC from losing money if soybeans are worth less than $10 a bushel when the company receives Assmann’s crop. Here is where derivatives come into the story.

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Transferring risk » Treves called Citigroup Inc. in Houston. Within 10 minutes, he agreed to pay Citi $3,000 to design a derivative to protect FMC. If the price of soybeans is below $10 in a year, Citi must pay the difference to FMC. If the price is above $10, FMC must give the difference to Citi.

Banks like Citi, in turn, typically transfer their risk by finding a company that regularly buys soybeans and wants to lock in prices a year ahead of time at $10. In Wall Street parlance, FMC and Citi are hedged — protected against the hard-to-predict price fluctuations.

Even the harshest critics of derivatives are fans of such hedging. Locking in a stable price for a key raw material allows a manufacturer or a retailer to avoid raising prices on a host of products, from coffee at Starbucks Corp. to clothes at a department store.

“You shouldn’t tar all derivatives with the same brush,” said Frank Partnoy, a former derivatives trader who lashed out at them in his book “Infectious Greed.” “It’s hard to think of the world without them.”

The problem is, derivatives can also be used to gamble. That’s because you don’t have to own the asset that a particular derivative tracks. Say that FMC just had a hunch that soybean prices would fall. It could have entered into soybean futures contracts in hopes of making a little money on the side.

American International Group Inc. nearly collapsed in 2008 thanks to such side bets. Though largely an insurer, AIG gambled hundreds of billions via derivatives that homeowners with bad credit would continue making payments on their mortgages. What’s more, it didn’t set aside much money in case it was wrong and had to pay parties that took the other side of the bet that these homeowners would stop paying.

When homeowners did stop paying during the housing crash, AIG suffered huge losses. Taxpayers had to fork over $182 billion to keep the company afloat.

The financial overhaul bills passed by the Senate and the House won’t outlaw the kind of speculation AIG did. But they will force AIG and many other derivative users to put money aside. The goal is to prevent another financial meltdown.

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Reforming derivatives » The Senate version would require banks that take people’s deposits or borrow from the Federal Reserve to put their derivatives-trading units into separately funded subsidiaries walled off from their other businesses. The House version would not. In addition, both bills would replace many private deals like FMC’s with one-size-fits-all contracts that trade on public exchanges where everyone could see prices. The two versions would allow some companies that are hedging, not gambling, to continue with their customized deals.

If FMC were forced to use an exchange, it would be able to hedge soybeans only in standardized units of 5,000 bushels. Thus it could have hedged only 65,000 bushels, not the 66,000 it will own after Assmann’s harvest. That would have left FMC exposed to losses on a 1,000 bushels if prices fell under $10 in a year. Since FMC has struck similar deals with dozens of other Brazilian farmers, the losses could add up.

Also, many standardized contracts only allow hedging on prices for certain months in the future. In the case of soybeans, FMC can enter into contracts that expire in May 2011 when Assmann harvests his crops but not in four other months of the year. Some of the farmers bartering with FMC harvest their crops later in the long Brazilian growing season during months for which standardized contracts don’t exist.

Finally, the two bills would force bank middlemen, like Citi in FMC’s case, to set aside money in case either party to a derivative can’t pay up.

“If Citi has to hold higher reserves, Economics 101 says they’ll pass those costs on to us,” said FMC treasurer Tom Deas.

Despite the likely change in rules, derivatives will remain popular. The fear of something going wrong, and the desire to hedge against it, is just too powerful.

Since his barter with FMC, Assmann’s fear of falling prices has started to come true. Investors on the Chicago Board of Trade now predict soybeans in May 2011 will fetch closer to $9 than $10. Says the otherwise confident farmer, “You can never be 100 percent sure.”

The lowdown on derivatives

Why care about derivatives » They affect the price of nearly everything we buy — a steak at a restaurant, bread at the supermarket, gas for our cars.

What they do » With them, you can bet on virtually anything — commodities prices, interest rates, even the popularity of David Bowie songs.

Why the crackdown » Congress is looking to regulate derivatives because they are behind nearly every financial blowup in recent years, from the bankruptcy of Orange County, Calif., in 1994 to the collapse of the housing market.

Updated: 02/25/2010 05:26:05 PM MST

The Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board on Feb. 20 bravely endorsed civil unions for our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters (”Equal rights: We can have marriage, civil unions,” Opinion).

In this op/ed piece, Boyer Jarvis, Utah’s caretaker of civil rights, praises the Tribune for ‘bravely’ endorsing civil unions, and then gently prods all of us to take the more courageous step to full equality—marriage.  He reminds us that separate isn’t equal and that we shouldn’t settle for half-steps.

Because I have taken the trouble to learn a little bit about the long history of the custom of marriage, I am willing to assert that marriage was civil before it became religious. At first, marriage was a way for two separate factions (two families, two tribes, two fiefdoms, two commercial enterprises, two empires, etc.) to unite and gain strength by marrying the daughter of one faction leader to the son of the other faction leader. When churches became significant elements of society, they quite naturally made the uniting of a woman with a man a basic part of their religious creed and practice.

By the 16th century, churches apparently had become the primary manager of marriage, and when Henry VIII could not obtain the Pope’s approval for his divorce from Catherine, King Henry ended his allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church and established the Church of England. Churches and religious leaders were important contributors to the public life of Colonial America, but the Founding Fathers were careful to exclude from the Constitution of the United States any role for an established church. And Thomas Jefferson described their intended wall between church and state. The First Amendment clearly says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof … .”

While churches have basic doctrines and practices governing religious marriage, from the beginning of this nation the various states have enacted laws concerning marriage licenses, the rights and responsibilities of the parties in a marriage, and the procedures to be followed when a marriage ends in divorce.

Obviously, because a license to marry must be obtained from the county clerk, all marriages are civil marriages, even when they are performed in a church. As the editorial board has acknowledged, “The controversial topic of same-sex marriage may simply be a matter of semantics.” The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines semantics as “the study or science of meaning in language forms, particularly with regard to its historical change.”

By endorsing civil unions for gay and lesbian couples, the editorial board has, perhaps unintentionally, adopted a ’separate but equal” stance that was ruled unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

Today, in support of the principle of equality before the law, a separate status in marriage for gays and lesbians is not equal. True equality means marriage for any two people who can obtain a marriage license from the county clerk, and the county clerk should be required to issue marriage licenses to all law-abiding same-sex couples.

It is nonsense to say that same-sex marriages “threaten the sanctity of marriage.” The First Amendment guarantees the right of churches to perform marriages according to their established, Bible-based or revealed doctrines. The sanctity of marriage has always depended on the extent to which the partners in a marriage keep the promises they have made to each other, to their community, to their church and/or to their God.

Boyer Jarvis is a retired University of Utah professor. He lives in Salt Lake City.

This is a very good read. It’s long, but worthwhile. Take the time to read it and you will be glad you did.

A Good Week For Science — and Insight into Politics

by George Lakoff

Over the past couple of weeks, the NY Times has been reporting on results from the cognitive and brain sciences that confirm past research in those fields partly by me and partly by my community of colleagues. What makes this of general, not personal, interest is that the scientific results are especially important for understanding what has been going wrong for the Obama administration and for liberals generally, and what has been going right for conservatives. I’m going to start out with some science, and get on to the politics after brief discussions of three important NY Times articles and what they mean scientifically.

It’s always satisfying for a scientist to see his or her predictions proved right experimentally (which happens often) and actually discussed in the press (which happens rarely). As a cognitive scientist and linguist, it’s been a good couple of weeks for me and my colleagues, especially in the NY Times.  Experiments are hard to do and I celebrate all the experimenters cited.  Experiments are also hard to report on, and I praise the journalists at the Times for a fine job.

Metaphor and Embodiment

Back in 1980, Mark Johnson and I, in Metaphors We Live By, demonstrated the existence of metaphorical thought and argued that metaphor and other aspects of mind were embodied. That book, and our 1987 books, my Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things and Mark’s The Body in the Mind, helped to start a cottage industry in the study of embodied cognition.

The experimental results confirming our theories of embodied cognition have been coming in regularly, especially in the area of metaphorical thought.  Natalie Angier, on February 1, < www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/science/02angier.html [1]> summarized some of the recent research very clearly.

• A University of Amsterdam study showed that subjects thinking about the future leaned forward, while those thinking about the past leaned backward.  This was predicted by the 1980 analysis of common European metaphors in which The Future is Ahead and The Past is Behind. This is not just a matter of language, but of thought, as Johnson and I showed.

• At Yale [2], researchers found that subjects holding warm coffee in advance were more likely to evaluate an imaginary individual as warm and friendly than those holding cold coffee. This is predicted by the conceptual metaphor that Affection is Warmth, as in She gave me a warm greeting.

• At Toronto, subjects were asked to remember a time when they were either socially accepted or socially snubbed. Those with warm memories of acceptance judged the room to be 5 degrees warmer on the average than those who remembered being coldly snubbed.

• Subjects asked to think about a moral transgression like adultery or cheating on a test were more likely to request an antiseptic cloth after the experiment than those who had thought about good deeds. The well-known conceptual metaphor Morality is Purity predicts this behavior.

• Students told that that a particular book was important judged it to be physically heavier than a book that they were told was unimportant. The conceptual metaphor is Important is Heavy.

• In a parallel study with heavy versus light clipboards, those with the heavy clipboards were more likely like to judge currency to be more valuable and their opinions and their leaders more important.

• And in doing arithmetic, students who used their hands to group numbers together had an easier time doing problems that required conceptual grouping. This is predicted by the analysis of mathematics in Where Mathematics Comes From by myself and Rafael Núñez where we show how mathematics from the simple to the advanced is based on embodied metaphorical cognition.

These results don’t happen by magic. How can these results be explained?

Johnson’s and my 1999 book, Philosophy in the Flesh, incorporated a neural theory of how embodied metaphorical thought works. What a child is regularly held affectionately by its parents, two distinct brain areas are activated simultaneously – one for temperature and one for affection. The synapses in both areas are strengthened and activation spreads along existing pathways until the shortest pathway between the areas is found and a circuit is formed. That circuit is the neural realization of what is called a “primary metaphor” that is embodied.  Hundreds of such cases are formed unconsciously and automatically in childhood.

My Berkeley colleague, Srini Narayanan has shown what computational properties such circuits must have. In still unpublished work, he has shown that the relative timing of first spikes across a synapse predicts the directionality of elementary metaphors in all known cases.  The very idea that such low-level phenomena at the level of neurons can result in the vast range our metaphorical thought is truly remarkable.

A crucial part of the story of embodied cognition comes from the neuroscience of the 1990’s, which showed that the same brain regions used in actually moving and perceiving are used in imagining and remembering moving and perceiving. These results led Jerome Feldman to the crucial idea that meaningful thought expressible in language is mental simulation that uses the neural structures of the sensory-motor system to imagine what is embodied, usually below the level of consciousness.

These are experimental findings and theories based on considerable evidence. Taken together they explain the results of the experiments: Primary metaphorical thought arises when a neural circuit is formed linking two brain areas activated when experiences occur together repeatedly. Typically, one of the experiences is physical. In each experiment, each subject has the physical experience activating one of the brain regions and another experience (e.g., emotional or temporal) activating the other brain region for the given metaphor. The activation of both regions activates the metaphorical link. Thus, if the metaphor is Future Is Ahead and Past Is Behind, thinking about the future will activate the brain region for moving forward. If the metaphor is Affection is Warmth, holding warm coffee will activate the brain region for experiencing affection.

Angier did not seek out the theoretical studies that allow these explanations – and led to the performance of the experiments in the first place. That’s too much to ask of a NY Times article. But it was nice to see some of the relevant experiments reported on in the NY Times, even if the explanations were left out.

These cases don’t have any direct political implications in themselves, but they are indirectly important, as we shall see.

Words and Polls

The past week in the NY Times was also pretty good for me with respect to predictions.

There was a CBS/NYTimes poll [3] that showed support for ending “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” varied considerably depending on whether “homosexuals” or “gay men and lesbians” was used in the question. “Gay men and lesbians” gat a lot more support – in the ball park of 15% more, which is a HUGE difference on a poll.

Those of you who’ve read my Don’t Think of an Elephant! and The Political Mind will be familiar with the basic results of frame semantics, developed by my Berkeley colleague Charles Fillmore and others within the cognitive and brain sciences.

The first basic result: The meaning of every word is characterized in terms of a brain circuit called a “frame.”  Frames are often characterized in terms of the usual apparatus of mental life: metaphors, images, cultural narratives – and neural links to the emotion centers of the brain. The narrow, literal meaning of a word is only one aspect of its frame-semantic meaning.

The second basic result is that this is mostly unconscious, like 98% of human thought.

On the inherent link between semantic and emotion, see my discussion in the Political Mind (Chapter 1) and the excellent books by Antonio Damasio (Descartes’ Error) and Drew Westen (The Political Brain).

“Homosexual” is simply defined via a different frame than “gay men and lesbians.” Professor Geoffrey Stone of the U. of Chicago, writing in the Huffington Post on February 13, describes the difference:

“Homosexual” conjures up dark visions of filthy bodily acts that arouse deeply-rooted feelings of disgust and ancient fears of Sodom and Gomorrah and hell and damnation. “Gay men and lesbians,” on the other hand, increasingly reminds us of people we know — sons and daughters, cousins and classmates, nieces and nephews, coworkers and neighbors.

In short, there is a big difference in meaning – the framing difference between the thought of gay sex and the idea of the civil rights of people in your community. The consequences are political, as Professor Stone observes:

When we hear religious leaders or politicians referring to “homosexuals in the military,” “homosexual marriage,” or “special rights for homosexuals,” we must recognize what they are doing. Especially for the 15% of Americans who react so viscerally to the term “homosexual,” they are trying to chew their way into the worst parts of our psyches in order to manipulate our beliefs and values and make us worse people than we really are.

I’ve been writing for years about how effective the right wing has been at framing, and how progressives often use right-wing language, even in polls. I have had numerous discussions with well-known pollsters who did not get the point and could not distinguish commonplace language from commonplace language that activated right-wing frames.

The cognitive science matters here. The CBS/NYTimes poll results were to be expected given our current understanding of how words get their meaning by being neurally linked to frame-circuits.

Blinks, Worms, and Spankers

Nick Kristof, in his February 14 column [4], discusses three experiments distinguishing conservatives from liberals.

• · In one experiment, the strength of blink reflexes to unexpected noises was measured and correlated with degrees of reactions to external threats. Conservatives reacted considerably more strongly than liberals.
• · Another experiment was based on the fact that disgust reactions create glandular secretions that change skin conductance. Subjects were shown disgusting images (like some eating a handful of worms). Liberals reacted mildly, but conservative reactions went off the charts.
• · A third study showed a strong correlation between attitudes toward spanking and voting patterns: spanking states tend to go Republican. The experimenters correlated spanking preferences with what they called “cognitive styles.” As Kristof reports it, “Spankers tend to see the world in stark, black-and-white terms, perceive the social order as vulnerable and under attack, tend to make strong distinctions between “us” and “them,” and emphasize order and muscular responses to threats. Parents favoring timeouts feel more comfortable with ambiguities, sense less threat, embrace minority groups – and are less prone to disgust when they see a man eating worms.”

All three results follow from a cognitive science study called Moral Politics, which I published in 1996 and was reprinted in 2002.  There I observed that conservatives and liberals had opposite moral worldviews structured by metaphor around two profoundly different models of the ideal family, a strict father family for conservatives and a nurturant parent family for liberals. In the ideal strict father family, the world is seen as a dangerous place and the father functions as protector from “others” and the parent who teaches children absolute right from wrong by punishing them physically (painful spanking or worse) when they do wrong. The father is the ultimate authority, children are to obey, and immoral practices are seen as disgusting.

Ideal liberal families are based on nurturance, which breaks down into empathy, responsibility – for both oneself and others, and excellence: doing as well as one can to make oneself better and one’s family and community better. Parents are to practice these things and children are to learn them by example.

Because our first experience with being governed in is our families, we all learn a basic metaphor: A Governing Institution Is A Family, where the governing institution can be a church, a school, a team, or a nation. The Nation-as-Family version gives us the idea of founding fathers, Mother India and Mother Russia, the Fatherland, homeland security, etc.

Apply these monolithically to our politics and you get extreme conservative and progressive moral systems, defining what is right and wrong to each side.

There is no moral system of the moderate or the middle. Because of a neural phenomenon called “mutual inhibition,” two opposing moral systems can live in brain circuits that inhibit each other and are active in different contexts. For a nonpolitical example, consider Saturday night and Sunday morning moral systems, which coexist in the brains of many Americans. The same is true of “moderates,” who are conservative on some issues and progressive on others, though there may be variations from person to person.

Kristof doesn’t mention Moral Politics, though he got a copy at a Democratic Senate retreat in 2003, at which we both spoke. If Moral Politics is still on his bookshelf, I suggest he take a look. I also recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the difference between conservative and progressive moral systems.

Conservative Populism and Tea Partyers

After the Goldwater defeat of 1964, conservatism was a dirty word and most Americans wanted to be liberals, especially working people who were highly unionized. Lee Atwater and colleagues, working for the 1968 Nixon campaign, had a problem: How to get a significant number of working people to become conservative enough to vote for Nixon.

They intuited what I have since called “biconceptualism” (see The Political Mind) – the fact that many Americans have both conservative and progressive views, but in different contexts and on different issues. Mutual inhibition in brain circuitry means the strengthening of one weakens the other. They found a way to both strengthen conservative views and weaken liberal views, creating a conservative populism. Here’s how they did it.

They realized that by the late 60’s many working people were disturbed by the anti-war demonstrations; so Nixon ran on anti-communism. They noticed that many working  men were upset by radical feminists. So they pushed traditional family values. And they realized that, after the civil rights legislation, many  working men, especially in the South, were threatened by blacks. So they ran Nixon on law and order.  At the same time, they created the concept of “the liberal elite” – the tax and spend liberals, the liberal media, the Hollywood liberals, the limosine liberals, and so on. They created language for all these ideas and have been repeating it ever since.

Even though liberals have worked tirelessly for the material benefit of working people, the repetition of conservative populist frames over more than 40 years has had an effect. Conservative ideas have spread in the brains of conservative populists. The current Tea Party movement is an attempt to spread conservative populism further.

Sarah Palin may not know history or economics, but she does know strict father morality and conservative populist frames. Frank Rich, in his February 14 NY Times column, denied David Broder’s description of Palin as “perfect pitch populism”  and called it “deceptive faux populism” and a “populist masquerade.”  What Rich is missing is that Palin has a perfect pitch for conservative populism – which is very different from liberal populism. What she can do is strengthen the conservative side of bi-conceptual undecided populists, helping to move them to conservative populists. She is dangerous that way.

Frank Rich, long one of my heroes, is a perfect pitch liberal. He assumes that nurturant values (empathy, social and personal responsibility, making yourself and the world better) are the only objective values. I think they are right values, values that define democracy, but unfortunately far from the only values. Starting with those values, Rich correctly points out that Palin’s views contradict liberal populism and that her conservative positions won’t materially help the poor and middle class. All true, but … that does not contradict conservative populism or conservatism in general.

This is a grand liberal mistake. The highest value in the conservative moral system (see Moral Politics, Chapter 9) is the perpetuation and strengthening of the conservative moral system itself!! This is not liberal materialism. Liberals decry it as “ideology,” and it is. But it is real, it has the structure of moral system, and it is physically part of the brains of both Washington conservatives and conservative populists. The conservative surge is not merely electoral. It is an idea surge. It is an attempt to spread conservatism via the spread of conservative populism. That is what the Tea Party movement is doing.

False Reason and Real Reason: The Obama Mistake

It was entirely predictable a year ago that the conservatives would hold firm against Obama’s attempts at “bipartisanship” – finding occasional conservatives who were biconceptual, that is, shared some views acceptable to Obama on some issues, while keeping an overall liberal agenda.

The conservatives are not fools. Because their highest value is protecting and extending the conservative moral system itself, giving Obama any victory at all would strengthen Obama and weaken the hold of their moral system. Of course they were going to vote against every proposal and delay and filibuster as often as possible. Protecting and extending their worldview demands it.

Obama has not understood this.

We saw this when Obama attended the Republican caucus. He kept pointing out that they voted against proposals that Republicans had made and that he had incorporated, acting as if this were a contradiction. But that was to be expected, since a particular proposal that strengthens Obama and hence weakens their moral view violates their highest moral principle.

Such conservative logic explains why conservatives in Congress first proposed a bipartisan committee to study the deficit, and then voted against it.

That is why I don’t expect much from the President’s summit with Republicans on February 25.  Why should they do anything to strengthen Obama’s hand, when it would violate their highest moral principle, as well as weakening themselves electorally. If Obama thinks he can shame them in front of their voters, he is mistaken again. Conservative voters think the same way they do.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama used framing perfectly and articulated the progressive moral system (empathy, individual and social responsibility, making oneself and the world better) as well as it has ever been done.

But he changed after the election. Obama moved from real reason, how people really think, to false reason, a traditional view coming out of the Enlightenment and favored by all too many liberals.

We now (finally!) come to the point of going through all those experiments in the cognitive and brain sciences.  Here are the basic differences between real and false reason, and the ways in which all too many liberals, including Obama during the past year, are wed to false reason.

Real reason is embodied in two ways. It is physical, in our brain circuitry. And it is based on our bodies as the function in the everyday world, using thought that arises from embodied metaphors. And it is mostly unconscious.  False reason sees reason as fully conscious, as literal, disembodied, yet somehow fitting the world directly, and working not via frame-based, metaphorical, narrative and emotional logic, but via the logic of logicians alone.

Empathy is physical, arising from mirror neurons systems tied to emotional circuitry. Self-interest is real as well, and both play their roles in real reason. False reason is supposed to serve material self-interest alone. It’s supposed to answer the question, “What’s in it for me?,”which President Obama assumed that all populists were asking. While Frank Luntz told conservatives to frame health care in terms of the moral concepts of freedom (a “government takeover”) and life (”death panels”), Obama was talking about policy minutia that could not be understood by most people.

Real reason is inexplicably tied up with emotion; you cannot be rational without being emotional. False reason thinks that emotion is the enemy of reason,  that it is unscrupulous to call on emotion. Yet people with brain damage who cannot feel emotion cannot make rational decisions because they do not know what to want, since like and not like mean nothing. “Rational” decisions are based on a long history of emotional responses by oneself and others. Real reason requires emotion.

Obama assumed that Republicans would act “rationally” where “rationality” was defined by false reason – on the logic of material self-interest. But conservatives understood that their electoral chances matched their highest moral principle, strengthening their moral system itself without compromise.

It is a basic principle of false reason that every human being has the same reason governed by logic – and that if you just tell people the truth, they will reason to the right conclusion. The President kept saying, throughout Tea Party summer,  that he would just keep telling the truth about policy details that most people could not make moral sense of. And so he did, to the detriment of all of us.

All politics is moral. Political leaders all make proposals they say are “right.” No one proposes a policy that they say is wrong. But there are two opposing moral systems at work in America. What moral system you are using governs how you will see the world and reason about politics. That is the lesson of the cognitive science behind Moral Politics and all the experiments since then.  It is the lesson of all the research on embodied metaphor. Metaphorical thought is central to politics.

Finally, there is the lesson of how language works in the brain. Every word is neurally connected to a neural circuit characterizing a frame, which in turn is part of a system of frames linked to a moral system. In political discourse, words activate frames, which in turn activate moral systems. This mechanism is not conscious. It is automatic, and it is acquired through repetition. As the language of conservative morality is repeated, frames are activated repeatedly that in turn activate and strengthen the conservative system of thought – unconsciously and automatically. Thus conservative talk radio and the national conservative messaging system are powerful unconscious forces.  They work via principles of real reason.

But many liberals, assuming a false view of reason, think that such a messaging system for ideas they believe in would be illegitimate – doing the things that the conservatives do that they consider underhanded. Appealing honestly to the way people really think is seen as emotional and hence irrational and immoral. Liberals, clinging to false reason, simply resist paying attention to real reason.

Take Paul Krugman, one of my heroes, whose economic sense I find impeccable. Here is a quote from a recent column:

Republicans who hate Medicare, tried to slash Medicare in the past, and still aim to dismantle the program over time, have been scoring political points by denouncing proposals for modest cost savings – savings that are substantially smaller than the spending cuts buried in their own proposals.

He is following traditional liberal logic, and pointing out a literal contradiction: they denounce “cuts in Medicare” while wanting to eliminate Medicare and have proposed bigger cuts themselves.

But, from the perspective of real reason as conservatives use it, there is no contradiction. The highest conservative value is preserving and empowering their moral system itself. Medicare is anathema to their moral system – a fundamental insult. It violates free market principles and gives people things they haven’t all earned.  It is a system where some people are paying -God forbid! – for the medical care of others. For them, Medicare itself is immoral on a grand scale, a fundamental moral issue far more important than any minor proposal for “modest cost savings.” I’m sorry to report it, but that is how conservatives are making use of real reason, and exploiting the fact that so many liberals think it’s contradictory.

Indeed, one of the major findings of real reason is that negating a frame activates that frame in the brain and reinforces it – like Nixon saying that he was not a crook. Dan Pfeiffer, writing on the White House blog, posted an article called “Still not a ‘Government Takeover’,” which activates the conservative idea of a government takeover and hence reinforces the idea. Every time a liberal goes over a conservative proposal giving evidence negating conservative ideas one by one, he or she is activating the conservative ideas in the brains of his audience. The proper response is to start with your own ideas, framed to fit what you really believe. Facts matter. But they have to be framed properly and their moral significance must be made manifest. That is what we learn from real reason.

The NY Times is home to a lot of traditional reason, often based on false principles of how people think. That is why the reporting of those experiments brightened my day.  Perhaps the best way to the NY Times mind is through the science of mind.

Kudos once more to the Times’ science reporting on those experiments.

George Lakoff is the author of Moral Politics [5], Don’t Think of an Elephant! [6], Whose Freedom? [7], and Thinking Points [8] (with the Rockridge Institute staff). He is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, and a founding senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute [9].

Someone’s in charge, right?

By D.P. Sorensen

Columnist for City Weekly

If we are willing to cut God (by the way, does anyone know what his last name is?) some slack, we could say that he just wasn’t paying attention when the earthquake struck Haiti last week, taking the lives, by latest estimates, of some 100,000 souls in that island paradise. Proof that he does pay attention, at least part of the time, came in the form of his intervention in 2008’s election, when, according to Sarah Palin, her selection as the Republican vice presidential candidate was “God’s will.”

The fact that God smiled on Sarah Palin, but not on the 100,000 Haitians, raises some troubling questions about God’s basic competence. Even if we do cut him some slack, and allow that he was distracted by other things—after all, he is a very busy fellow—he just doesn’t come off all that well.

There are those who will perhaps take a harsher view of God’s culpability in the Haitian matter. Rather than taking a tolerant view of the situation and attribute God’s negligence to him being understandably asleep at the wheel, these sticklers will jump all over our overworked deity and accuse him of being a cruel and vicious sadist. They will point to the long history of catastrophe, suffering and misery endured by his children here on planet Earth.

These ungrateful critics of the Creator of the Universe will accuse him of being, at minimum, a nasty piece of work. They are an overly earnest bunch. They should adopt the carefree and somewhat bemused attitude of the late Randolph Churchill, begot by Winston, who didn’t have occasion to think deeply on the mysterious ways of our Lord until he picked up the Bible during a slow period during the North African campaign of World War II. After thumbing through the Old Testament, with its amusing tales of wanton destruction and random punishment, Randolph famously remarked, “I say, this God chap is a bit of shit.”

Randolph the son of Winston chalked it all up to old stories in an old book and took the rational position that the angry and bloodthirsty God of the Old Testament was merely a fictional character, a scary personage whose usefulness in keeping people in their humble place had long since outlived its primitive function.

Poor Randolph just didn’t get it. Those of us fortunate to be living in our enlightened age know that God continues to work his will in mysterious ways. Much as we might like to, we cannot simply dismiss him as a mean old man, or as a mean old lady, for that matter. (It would be interesting to see what would happen if we imagined God as a lady instead of a gentleman. Would we be as accepting of Her fickle ways as we are of His?)

For, like it or not, God is still in the thick of things, though, as we know from the thousands of rotting bodies in Haiti, he seems occasionally to screw up. But we have to take a wider view of things and look at the big picture. From pulpits across the land, our godly superiors will be assuring us in the coming days that the appalling catastrophe in Haiti is part of God’s plan. I first learned about God’s plan when John Kennedy was assassinated. The Sunday after the assassination, a kindly and dimwitted ecclesiastical authority took to the pulpit to bring us the comforting news that the killing of Kennedy was part of God’s plan.

I must admit that, at the time, I was tempted to stand up and scream, “You gotta be kidding!” Then, as now, I was reluctant to entertain the proposition that nobody was in charge. That would seem to be the rational conclusion. Who, after all, would want to believe that someone called God, residing who knows where (Paradise? Kolob?), was inflicting awful suffering on the least of his creatures? Why would he want to do that? Does he get bored with the tedium of eternity, and on a whim decide to divert himself with the sport of suffering and the spectacle of death?

No, brothers and sisters, it is part of God’s Plan.

Someday we will know why the thousands of children are crushed by concrete, and why some are mercifully dispatched at one fell blow and why others are left screaming in the rubble to die of starvation or succumb to the pleasures of sepsis. Their slow and agonizing suffering will surely make sense to us one shining day.

-Associate yourself with persons of good character. It is better to be alone than in bad company.

-Think before you speak.

-Accept corrections thankfully.

-Be not obstinate in supporting your own opinion.

-Do not repeat news if you know not the truth thereof.

-Speak not evil of the absent.

-Do not reprove or correct another in anger.

-Do not curse or revile anyone.

-Let your conversation be without malice or envy.

-Yield the place in front of the fire to the latest comer.

-Jog not the desk on which another reads or writes.

-Speak not injurious words either in jest or in earnest. Scoff at none although they give occasion.

-In disputes, give liberty to each one to present his opinion.

-Be attentive when others speak.

-Always submit your judgments to others with modesty.

-Do not undertake to teach your equal in an art in which he is qualified.

-A man should not preen himself about his achievements, his wit, his virtue, and much less about his wealth.

-When a man does the best he can, yet succeeds not, do not blame him.

-Do not express joy before one who is sick or in pain.

-If anyone comes to speak to you while you are sitting, stand up, even though you may consider him your inferior.

-Show a good example, particularly before the less experienced.

-Do not give advice unless you are asked.

-Be not curious to know the affairs of others.

Updated: 12/11/2009 12:20:29 AM MST

It has come to this.

Utopia, the ill-starred fiber-optic network in which 10 Utah cities are enmeshed, is hemorrhaging cash. Those cities already are on the hook for millions of dollars in pledges of sales tax revenues to back the system’s debt. Utopia could begin to call on those pledges just as cities face budget crises caused by the recession.

Now the Utopians have come up with a new scheme: create special service districts to finance the system. But the folks in Brigham City, who apparently are the first to participate in this new model, have discovered an ugly catch.

The service costs $3,000 upfront. Or you can pay $25 a month for 20 years, which adds up to $6,000. But if you choose the payment plan, the special service district will place a lien on your home.

Customers in Brigham City have complained that salesmen didn’t tell them about the lien when they signed up for the monthly payment option. Now both Utopia and the city say that it’s too late for customers to back out.

This is just the latest unpleasant surprise that Utopia has sprung, and it may not be the last.

It wasn’t supposed to work out this way. When backers proposed the network in 2002, they called it UTOPIA for Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency. But the acronym wasn’t the only thing that was too clever by half.

It was supposed to provide customers in the member cities with high-speed, fiber-optic data service for things like

Internet, telephones and television. Utopia would lay the cables. Private providers would compete to offer services over the system. All the cities had to do was guarantee a portion of the system’s debt, so that it could be financed at lower interest rates.

But things started to go sour. The systems never attracted enough customers to make a go of it. The participating cities had to double down on their commitments so that the debt could be refinanced. Meanwhile, the whole thing keeps losing money.

We argued against Utopia almost from its founding because we thought it was a bad idea for municipal governments to get into the risky telecommunications business. Not when the likes of Qwest and Comcast were already duking it out with private capital. We also thought it unfair for Utopia to be tax-exempt when its competitors weren’t.

Unfortunately, our misgivings came true. Utopia turned out to be a financial quagmire rather than a technological paradise. And the swamp keeps getting deeper.

“I need to focus my attention on being a better husband, father, and person,” Woods said on his Web site.

Woods and his wife, Elin, have been married five years and have a 2-year-old daughter and a 10-month-old son.

The announcement came two weeks after Woods crashed his SUV into a tree outside his Florida home, setting in motion a stunning downfall for the world’s No. 1 player who for 13 years rarely made news off the golf course. One woman who said she had a 31-month affair with Woods shared a voice mail that she said Woods left her two nights before his Nov. 27 accident.

“I am deeply aware of the disappointment and hurt that my infidelity has caused to so many people, most of all my wife and children,” Woods said. “I want to say again to everyone that I am profoundly sorry and that I ask forgiveness. It may not be possible to repair the damage I’ve done, but I want to do my best to try.”

Woods has not been seen in public since the accident.

He gave no indication when he might return in what could be a pivotal year as he pursues the record 18 major championships won by Jack Nicklaus. Woods, who did not win a major this year, has 14.

The Masters, where Woods has won four times, is April 8-11. The U.S. Open is at Pebble Beach, where Woods won by a record 15 strokes in 2000, and the British Open returns to St. Andrews, where he has won twice by a combined 13 shots.

It will be the second straight year that a PGA Tour season begins without its star player. A year ago, Woods was recovering from reconstructive knee surgery that kept him out a total of eight months.

This is different.

“We knew before he was coming back,” said Steve Stricker, one of Woods’ favorite players on tour. “Now, we’re not sure when he’s coming back. But this sounds good. I hope everything works out for him.”

The PGA Tour supported the decision.

“His priorities are where they need to be, and we will continue to respect and honor his family’s request for privacy,” PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem said in a statement, the tour’s first public comment since Woods mentioned his “personal failings” and “transgressions” in a Dec. 2 statement. “We look forward to Tiger’s return to the PGA Tour when he determines the time is right for him.”

Woods’ agent, Mark Steinberg, told The Associated Press that it was the right decision for Woods and his family.

“The entirety of someone’s life is more important than just a professional career,” Steinberg said in an e-mail to the AP. “What matters most is a young family that is trying to cope with difficult life issues in a secluded and caring way. Whenever Tiger may return to the game should be on the family’s terms alone.”

Craig Parry, who played a practice round with Woods in Australia last month, said Woods brought the problems on himself.

“What he did was totally wrong,” Parry said at the Australian PGA Championship. “And he’s got no one to blame except himself. You can look at other people, but he’s the one who’s got to look in the mirror.”

Woods was out of action from July 2008 until the end of February this year, and television ratings dropped 50 percent. The tour is trying to renew a half-dozen title sponsors, and it is to begin negotiations on the next television contract later next year.

As for Woods’ corporate endorsements, all have stood by him for now.

“Tiger has been part of Nike for more than a decade,” Nike said in a statement Friday. “He is the best golfer in the world and one of the greatest athletes of his era. We look forward to his return to golf. He and his family have Nike’s full support.”

Meanwhile, Accenture no longer has an image of Woods on the home page of its Web site. Earlier this week, Woods standing amid cactus plants studying his next shot was among three rotating pictures on the home page.

Steinberg said it would be “premature and inappropriate” to talk about Woods’ specific business relationships.

“Suffice it to say, we have had thoughtful conversations and his sponsors have been open to a solution-oriented dialogue,” Steinberg said. “Of course, each sponsor has unique considerations and ultimately the decisions they make we would fully understand and accept.”

Earlier this year, Woods became the world’s first athlete to surpass $1 billion in career earnings, according to Forbes magazine. His sponsors include Nike, Gillette, AT&T, Gatorade and Tag Heuer.

Woods last played a tournament Nov. 15 when he won the Australian Masters for his 82nd victory around the world.

Stricker, who went undefeated as Woods’ partner at the Presidents Cup, said his leave was the right decision.

“I think it’s great that he’s going to put his family first and work things out,” Stricker said from Naples, Fla., where he is playing the Shark Shootout. “Golf will always be there. He wants to make sure his marriage is right and everything is good on the homefront. We’ll sure miss him on tour until he gets things taken care of.”

Woods also indicated he would step away from the work of the Tiger Woods Foundation, which has served some 10 million children.

“There are millions of young people who have truly changed their lives through the foundation’s programs, and millions more still counting on us for help,” Woods said in a separate statement through his foundation. “I am committed to them and to the foundation’s excellent work, and I know my staff will continue these efforts during my absence.”

Salt Lake Tribune

The debate over gay marriage — and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ role in passing California’s anti-gay Proposition 8 — is coming back to Utah.

“We’re bringing the pain of this home,” said Reed Cowan, who directed “8: The Mormon Proposition,” which will have its world premiere next month in Park City at the Sundance Film Festival.

Cowan’s documentary is one of more than 50 titles announced Dec. 3 in the festival’s non-competitive slate.

“It’s really well done, and it’s really thorough,” festival director John Cooper said. “[Cowan] goes very deep, into the Mormon Church and its relationship to the anti-gay-marriage movement, all the way back almost before it really started, all the way back to the ’90s.”

The movie chronicles the 2008 campaign for Prop. 8, which overturned a court decision to allow same-sex marriage in California. In the film, Cowan tracks the LDS Church’s involvement with the Yes on 8 forces — and reveals what the film’s producer/editor Steven Greenstreet calls “an orchestrated strategic campaign” by the church to pass similar ballot measures in other states over the past two decades.

The LDS Church had no comment on the film, a spokesman said Thursday.

“I saw the pain in my own family, relative to the subject of Proposition 8 — and whether or not they’d go with what the prophet said,” said Cowan, who is gay and was born in Roosevelt, Utah. His personal experience prompted Cowan, who worked as a TV reporter and anchor for seven years in Utah, to make the movie.

The documentary traces the politics behind “quashing the civil rights of a marginalized group,” Cowan said, and profiles gays and lesbians who “not only felt the sting of Proposition 8, but the other measures like it all over the country.”

One politician featured prominently in “8: The Mormon Proposition” is Utah state Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan.

Cowan’s interview with Buttars in January — in which the lawmaker mentioned “pig sex,” compared gay activists to Muslim radicals and called the gay-rights movement “probably the greatest threat to America” — was broadcast on Cowan’s former station, KTVX, Ch. 4, in February.

The resulting uproar included calls for Buttars’ resignation. Republican leadership stripped Buttars of the chairmanship of two Senate committees.

“He’s a piece of work,” Sundance’s Cooper said of Buttars.

Cowan predicted the international media will latch onto Buttars. “We smoked a bully out of his hole, and we’ve got him on the run,” Cowan said. “Buttars is the new Anita Bryant, and the world press will see that, crystal clear.”

Buttars did not respond to calls seeking comment Thursday.

8: The Mormon Proposition

A trailer for Reed Cowan’s “8: The Mormon Proposition” can be found on the movie’s Web site, www.mormonproposition.com

Worse Than Enron?

Wall Street’s big banks are playing dangerous new accounting games—and this time taxpayers are on the hook for hundreds of billions. Nomi Prins uncovers a scandal in the making.

by Nomi Prins

Enron was the financial scandal that kicked off the decade: a giant energy trading company that appeared to be doing brilliantly-until we finally noticed that it wasn’t. It’s largely been forgotten given the wreckage that followed, and that’s too bad: we may be repeating those mistakes, on a far larger scale.

Specifically, as the largest Wall Street banks return to profitability-in some cases, breaking records-they say everything is rosy. They’re lining up to pay back their TARP money and asking Washington to back off. But why are they doing so well? Remember that Enron got away with their illegalities so long because their financials were so complicated that not even the analysts paid to monitor the Houston-based trading giant could cogently explain how they were making so much money.

After two weeks sifting through over one thousand pages of SEC filings for the largest banks, I have the same concerns. While Washington ponders what to do, or not do, about reforming Wall Street, the nation’s biggest banks, plumped up on government capital and risk-infused trading profits, have been moving stuff around their balance sheets like a multi-billion dollar musical chairs game.

I was trying to answer the simple question that you’d think regulators should want to know: how much of each bank’s revenue is derived from trading (taking risk) vs. other businesses? And how can you compare it across the industry-so you can contain all that systemic risk? Only, there’s no uniformity across books. And, given the complexity of these mega-merged firms, those questions aren’t easy to answer.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, for example, altered their year-end reporting dates, orphaning the month of December, thus making comparison to past quarterly statements more difficult. In the cases of Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, the preferred tactic is re-classification and opaqueness. These moves make it virtually impossible to get an accurate, or consistent picture of banks ‘real money’ (from commercial or customer services) vs. their ‘play money’ (used for trading purposes, and most risky to the overall financial system, particularly since much of the required trading capital was federally subsidized).

Trading profitability, albeit inconsistent and volatile, is the quickest way back to the illusion of financial health, as these banks continue to take hits from their consumer-oriented businesses. But, appearance doesn’t equal stability, or necessarily, reality. Here’s how BofA, Citi and Wells Fargo play the game:

Bank of America: The firm reclassified its filing categories upon acquiring Merrill Lynch, but it doesn’t break down the trading vs. investment banking revenues of Merrill. This either means the firm doesn’t truly know what’s going on inside its new problem child, or doesn’t want to tell. (No wonder no one’s jumping for the upcoming CEO vacancy.) That said, despite the obvious information clouding, new acquisitions generally don’t have their activities broken out, which makes it a lot harder for regulators, shareholders, or we, taxpaying subsidizers, to know whether the merger was a success or not.

According to Scott Silvestri, Bank of America’s spokesman, “On our second quarter’s earnings release, there was a note explaining why we changed reporting structure. But, with every quarter that passes, it’s harder to unscramble the egg. It’s been a merged entity since January 1, 2009.”

He added that “we have an earnings supplement. Every quarter, we put out a standalone Merrill 10-Q that shows its profitability.” True, but what’s the point of issuing a separate Merrill report, without delineating Merrill’s contribution in its main books so that you can clearly see how specific parts of Merrill’s business impact similar ones in the merged entity? Furthermore, we can’t even figure this out ourselves-the Merrill results in the 10-Q don’t map directly to those of BofA’s books. This all just creates more complexities for a bank that still floats on $63.1 billion in various government subsidies.

When it wants to, it appears that BofA can merge and then break out Merrill’s numbers. Under the “Global Wealth & Investment Management ” classification, we discover that Merrill contributed three-quarters of the $12 billion BofA took in over the first nine months of 2009. According to Silvestri, “The numbers of the old Merrill are there because the brand name was kept, vestiges of the old Merrill Lynch exist.”

Talk about semantics. Why not also break out the area where revenues tripled and trading account profits jumped significantly (from a $6 billion loss in 2008 to an almost $14 billion gain in 2009)? Something is clearly going on there: the best measure of trading risk, VaR (”value at risk” or a firm’s daily trading variation) doubled between 2008 and 2009. If I was the CEO, I’d want to see this critical comparison on my merged company filing.

Elsewhere, the sum of Bank of America’s quarterly figures doesn’t quite add up to the nine months totals. (A few hundred million of discrepancies between friends.) Another item “all other” is off by nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. And so on. The firm also declared, that it “may periodically reclassify business segment results based on modifications to its management reporting methodologies and changes in organizational alignment.” In other words, whenever it feels like it. Comforting, isn’t it?

Citigroup: Another balance-sheet renovation, this time because of a sale (Smith Barney, which it offloaded to Morgan Stanley) rather than a purchase, and another trading miracle. Citigroup’s main trading arm, housed in what it calls the Institutional Clients Group (ICG), made $31.5 billion in net revenue for 2009, compared with a $7.8 billion loss in 2008. Its average daily value at risk jumped too, though “only” by 15 percent or so.

That’s a huge and extremely fast trading rebound for the main recipient of government subsidies (at $373.7 billion). But, there is no overall breakdown present in the summaries of Citigroup’s latest filings. And the sum of the trading totals doesn’t equal the parts, because the firm also noted that certain numbers deemed an “integral part of profitability” weren’t included in those computations, without giving any apparent reason. (After adding the missing number, it still didn’t add up.)

Again, it’s “just” a couple billion of discrepancies, but with books this massive at banks this big and risky, accuracy matters. Plus, such nuances make it extremely difficult to understand its books for regulators or the public.

Citigroup’s Danielle Romero-Apsilos said that they periodically change reporting. “ICG existed, but after Smith Barney, we decided to divide it-we call one part securities and banking, one part global transaction services, etc.”

That describes the chain of events, but doesn’t get closer to determining trading related revenue. Romero-Apsilos said, “We don’t break up the financials specifically for those businesses. Over the years, we may have broken out different things.”

Wells Fargo: Yet more innovative accounting maneuvers. For example, the innocuous sounding category, “wholesale banking” which provides traditional lending, finance and asset management services, was expanded (following the Wachovia acquisition that completed on December 31, 2008) to include more speculative activities like fixed-income and equity trading. But, those activities aren’t broken down in the firm’s SEC filing, making it difficult to determine which portion comes from trading vs. commercial or investment banking.

Wells Fargo spokesperson, Mary Eshet (who still has a Wachovia email address) confirmed there is no separate Wachovia 10-Q (like there is for Merrill Lynch), but that it wasn’t the case that “Wells Fargo broke out trading related revenue previously either.”

In fact, Wells just provides totals for their four main business segments, each of which increased sharply, Community banking rose from $33 billion in 2008 to an annualized $59 billion in 2009. Wholesale banking shot up from $8.2 billion in 2008 to $20 billion in annualized 2009. And, wealth, brokerage and retirement quadrupled from $2.7 billion in 2008 to $11.6 annualized for 2009. (The fourth segment is called ‘other.’) Yet, all these rosy numbers come with no specific breakdowns for their various trading business areas.

Separately, Wells states in its filing that its management accounting process is “dynamic” and, not “necessarily comparable with similar information for other financial services companies.” This statement should give lawmakers pause: if banks are so complex as to constantly fluctuate their own reporting, deciphering figures just before a crisis won’t exactly be a walk in the park.

With taxpayers now on the hook, we need an objective, consistent evaluation of bank balance sheets complete with probing questions about trading and speculative revenues, allowing for comparisons across the banking industry. This lack of transparency leaves room to misrepresent risk and trading revenue.

The long-term solution is bringing back Glass-Steagall. Being big doesn’t just risk bringing down a financial system-it means you can also more easily hide things. Remember the lesson from the Enron saga: when things look too good to be true, they usually are.

© 2009 The Daily Beast

Nomi Prins, a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, is a senior fellow at the public policy organization Demos and the author of “Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America [1].”

Another Afghanistan Conflict for General McCaffrey to Disclose

by Matt Gertz

Yesterday, Media Matters pointed out that MSNBC has repeatedly hosted NBC News military analyst and retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey in recent days. McCaffrey has used his appearances to criticize possible “deadlines” to the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan and highlight the importance of training the Afghan security forces. But at no point have McCaffrey or the MSNBC anchors hosting him disclosed a substantial conflict of interest McCaffrey has with regard to the U.S. government’s presence in Afghanistan and focus on troop training: McCaffrey serves on the board of directors of  DynCorp International — a company under contract to provide support to U.S. bases in Afghanistan for up to five years, as well as to train a portion of those security forces McCaffrey is calling  ”the center of gravity of the entire war.”

NBC and MSNBC should be ashamed, and it also brings into question the integrity of McCaffrey. What frauds! Why is he on these boards? Because he is being paid for his contacts and influence within the Pentagon. And we worry about the drug trade in Afghanistan! How about weeding out our own corruption first? How about firing all the mercenaries like the corrupt Blackwater outfit. Our lack of oversight of war funds is criminal. And of course, the politicians do nothing about it because they are on the take as well, getting their brokering commissions in all sorts of devious sleight-of-hand tricks.

Our war machine is corrupt with friends of friends of friends in high places filling their pockets while our kids fight unwinable wars. Hey, what good is an Army if we don’t use it?

Retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey in one of his countless appearances on NBC news. McCaffrey has used his appearances to criticize possible “deadlines” to the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan and highlight the importance of training the Afghan security forces, but MSNBC rarely reminds its viewers of McCaffrey’s business contact with many of the same private contractors performing this training.

But DynCorp isn’t the only company linked to McCaffrey that has received government contracts in Afghanistan. McCaffrey also serves [1] on the board of directors of McNeil Technologies, a company [2] whose “core competencies include language, intelligence, information technology, records management, and aviation services.” According to the company’s website, ‘The Directors of McNeil Technologies bring a wealth of unparalleled experience and expertise. They are internationally recognized experts on military and business issues. Their experience, wisdom, and counsel are made available to McNeil clients.” And, luckily, MSNBC viewers as well.

McNeil lists [3] the following among the “Recent Contract Awards” posted on its website:

August 26, 2009: U.S. Army (USA) — Army Material Command (AMC)
Subcontract to provide aviation support to LOGCAP program in Afghanistan

August 7, 2009: U. S. Central Command (CENTCOM)
Classified contract supporting CENTCOM mission in Afghanistan

May 18, 2009: U. S. Central Command (CENTCOM)
Classified IDIQ contract to support CENTCOM mission in Afghanistan

MSNBC lists McCaffrey’s position with McNeil on his bio [4] on their website, but does not note that they contract with the federal government in Afghanistan (they do note that DynCorp “provides support to the U.S. Government in countries including Afghanistan and Iraq”). In any case, very few people watching McCaffrey on MSNBC are likely to immediately rush to the MSNBC website to determine whether he has conflicts of interest. Those conflicts should be disclosed on-air every single time they host him.

BY JOHN CONYERS JR.

This week marks an important anniversary that will go unnoticed in many corners. Ten years ago, a little known Depression-era law known as the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed. It passed with large margins in both houses of Congress and was signed by President Bill Clinton. On Wall Street, the titans of capitalism cheered while it went unnoticed by most Americans that an important guard against financial instability and conflict of interest had been wiped away.

The Glass-Steagall Act had a simple premise: America’s banking sectors and investment houses need to remain separate to prevent banks from gambling on the stock market with our savings. President Franklin Roosevelt knew that banks, like other institutions, could not be trusted to police themselves. After witnessing the widespread failure of financial institutions in the Great Depression he recognized a firewall was needed between the casino on Wall Street and the private investment engines of Main Street

Unfortunately, we forgot this lesson. Without Glass-Steagall serving as a critical check on the power of banks, the floodgates of speculation were opened. The banks leveraged personal savings accounts to trade in exotic securities and assets. Banks, insurance companies, and investment firms merged at an astounding pace. No longer content to simply finance home mortgages, these new hybrids began creating and selling securities based off of the speculative value of shaky mortgages. The banks took on more risk because risk was profitable. No one paid much attention to what would happen when the speculation bubble burst.

Now we know. Just as in the Great Depression, when bank investments in securities caused the market to fail, present day reckless investing caught up with Wall Street. Because the banks had become “too big to fail,” the American taxpayer was forced to step in and save the titans of capitalism from themselves, subsidizing the losses and privatizing the gains.

This 10-year anniversary of Glass-Steagall’s repeal could not serve as a better reminder.

Currently, the Obama administration is working with both houses of Congress on legislation aimed at preventing a third major calamity in the banking industry. I am concerned, however, that their preferred method seems to focus on empowering our financial regulators to manage and mitigate some level of “acceptable risk” within the present system, instead of correcting the structural flaws that make a collapse likely to recur.

It is critically important that this debate on financial services reform directly assess the fundamental problems that led to last year’s meltdown. We must ask ourselves whether it is enough to address the symptom and not the disease. Should we think bigger? And can we learn from our mistakes and the lessons of the past?

I am a believer in this latter approach. And I am not alone.

President Barack Obama’s chief outside economic advisor and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, and Nouriel Roubini, the economist who correctly predicted the financial crash, all agree that some form of the Glass-Steagall firewall must be restored if the architecture of our financial system is to be sound. That is why, in the coming weeks, I will introduce a modernized and updated version of the Glass-Steagall Act.

We must view a once-in-a-generation collapse of the capital markets as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to address the recurring dangers that threaten our system. A return of Glass-Steagall is an important part of this discussion and an example of what the federal government can do when confronting a big problem with a core solution.

I am hopeful that my colleagues in the Congress and my fellow Americans will consider the merits of such an approach in the coming months and will have the strength to consider the benefits of fundamental reform. Our country and our economy cannot afford to revisit this issue 10 years from now.

U.S. Rep. http://conyers.house.gov/“>John Conyers Jr., D-Detroit, represents Michigan’s 14th congressional district.

Dear Equality Utah Supporter,

One of my friends who majored in gender studies once asked of me “what does it mean to you to be a man?” If you haven’t had the privilege of meeting a gender studies major, you might not recognize the trap that had just been set for me. Whether I talked about biology, psychology, ideology, or sociology, there was no way that I could answer my friend’s question without seeming specious.

So often in my life, especially during my time at Equality Utah, I’ve been asked questions that I wasn’t quite sure how to answer. Whether it was a legislator asking if he could sponsor LGBT friendly legislation and still be re-elected, or a parent asking how the law could justify protecting one of her children but not the other, or a transgender Utahn who called to say she was about to lose her job because of her gender expression and asked what her options are. These questions linger long after the conversations conclude.

Fortunately, there are some questions that are easier to answer. When someone asks what I think about Equality Utah’s new Executive Director, Brandie Balken, my answer is that she is amazing and brings skills and savvy that will lead Equality Utah into the next decade. When I’m asked what my plans are, my answer is that starting December 1st, I’ll begin work as a prosecutor for Salt Lake City under the leadership of Sim Gill.

After the amazing victories of the 2009 election and Salt Lake City’s passage of the nondiscrimination ordinances, I feel a bit like Seinfeld leaving the show when it’s at its peak. Just yesterday, Senator Buttars told me he would like to run a bill to protect LGBT Utahns from discrimination in housing and employment. What a great way to end my work at Equality.

Really though, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll continue to serve on Equality Utah’s legal panel. And I’ll continue to work for a fair and just Utah.  I will just be here as a volunteer, which is how I began working with Equality Utah. And one thing I’ve learned in my time here is that volunteers are the lifeblood of the equal rights movement.

One of my heroes tried to answer what it means to be a man. Malcom X said “nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.” I think Malcom X was off the mark for defining a “man.” I know some women, youth, and gender queer superstars who recognize that freedom, equality, and justice are already ours to claim. Such a realization doesn’t take a gender role, but I do think it takes vision. And I appreciate Equality Utah for helping me see that freedom, equality, and justice are never up for debate. They are ready and waiting for us as soon as we’re ready to claim them.

Working for a fair and just Utah,

Will Carlson
Manager of Public Policy

Deseret News

Published: Monday, Nov. 16, 2009 9:48 a.m. MST

Many Americans have become so effective at covering themselves from the sun that they don’t get enough Vitamin D, which may be putting them at increased risk not only for cardiovascular disease but for depression.

That’s the finding of a new study of more than 27,000 patients tracked by researchers at Intermountain Medical Center, who found that healthy levels of Vitamin D contribute to a strong and healthy heart.

This advice should be taken to heart. As we generally get the necessary amounts of vitamins in our normal diet it is not suggested that we should just dose up on vitamins, but in the case of Vitamin D it should be added to our diet through a supplement, especially in the winter months.

The sun is the greatest source of Vitamin D and we need to expose our skin to the sun as much as possible without burning. Sunscreen will prevent skin cancers, but they may very well reduce significant benefits from sunshine and thus increase the risk of other cancers, heart disease, and depression. The  sun is critical to all forms of life on earth and we shouldn’t be hiding from it. Lap it up without burning! That’s a tough balancing act for light skinned people and they may need to resort to higher dosages of Vitamin D3 pills.

They also found that inadequate Vitamin D levels may significantly increase the risk of stroke, heart disease and death — even among those who’ve never had heart disease.

The study’s findings were to be presented Monday at the American Heart Association’s annual scientific conference in Orlando, Fla.

Researchers also found a lack of Vitamin D may contribute to depression in both men and women.

“This was a unique study because the association between Vitamin D deficiency and cardiovascular disease has not been well-established,” said Dr. Brent Muhlestein, director of cardiovascular research of the Heart Institute at IMC and a lead researcher on the study.

“Its conclusions about how we can prevent disease and provide treatment may ultimately help us save more lives.”

Muhlestein said the research team began thinking about recent Vitamin D studies in conjunction with the fact that kidney failure patients usually die of heart disease or heart attacks, rather than kidney failure.

Those patients also “don’t make enough Vitamin D,” so when doctors were able to supplement the kidney patients with the vitamin, “they’re less likely to die of heart attacks.”

Researchers working on a variety of studies with Vitamin D had discovered that “it’s a co-factor in more than 200 different processes in the body,” including glucose metabolism, as a component of managing blood pressure and as a factor in the body’s inflammatory response. “All three of those have been found to be critically linked to heart disease,” he said.

“We’re not the first to have ever looked at this, but I think this is the largest general population study” on the topic.

While researchers have documented the association between Vitamin D deficiency and heart disease, they still don’t know whether it’s a “cause and effect” relationship at this point, he said.

Dr. Heidi May, one of the study’s co-authors, said there is also a strong association between Vitamin D deficiency and the risk of developing depression. From the larger database, researchers examined those who were low on the vitamin who also had cardiovascular disease, and found that 8,600 of them had about a 40 percent higher risk for depression.

“We didn’t quantify how it happens, but you’ve heard of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) in places where they don’t see the sun a lot, so I think common sense would say it might be because you get a lot of Vitamin D from the sun. But we didn’t get into the patho-physiology,” she said.

The research team followed 27,686 patients who were 50 or older with no prior history of cardiovascular disease who had their blood Vitamin D levels tested during routine medical care. The patients were divided into three groups based on their Vitamin D levels: normal (over 30 nanograms per milliliter), low (15-30 ng/ml), or very low (less than 15 ng/ml).

Researchers then followed the patients to see if they developed some form of heart disease, and found those with very low levels were 77 percent more likely to die, 45 percent more likely to develop coronary artery disease, and 78 percent were more likely to have a stroke than patients with normal Vitamin D levels.

Patients with very low levels of Vitamin D were also twice as likely to develop heart failure than those with normal levels.

Muhlestein called Vitamin D deficiency “an epidemic” based on the thousands of patients whose tests were part of the study, which showed 10,000 were at normal levels, but 13,000 were low and 4,500 were very low.

“That means about two-thirds are deficient,” he said, adding he tested his own level and found it to be very low.

Most people think milk is the best source, but “you don’t get much out of milk, per se, except that it’s fortified. The best source is actually in a plant that you have to get a prescription for,” he said.

The next best natural source is cod liver oil, which is available over the counter in 1,000 unit or 2000 unit pills. “It used to be thought that 400 units per day was the right level, but for most people I think it takes a lot more than that. I have to take 5,000 units per day.”

e-mail: carrie@desnews.com

Salt Lake Tribune

A group of earth scientists at conservative Brigham Young University has sent a stinging rebuke to state lawmakers on their recent handling of climate-change science.

The 18 scientists wrote the governor and legislators Oct. 26, urging them to “consider separating the science from the policy issues.” They challenged lawmakers for giving the “fringe” position of a climate skeptic equal weight to that of the broad, scientific consensus that climate change is happening, largely because of human activities.

“We have no specific political agenda to support but agree that whatever action is taken, it should be informed by the best available scientific evidence,” the scientists said. “We encourage our legislators not to manipulate the scientific evidence to suit any political agenda.”

The scientists sent the letter five days after the Public Utilities and Technology Interim Committee heard from Roy Spencer, an Alabama climatologist who doubts human activities are largely responsible for climate change, and Jim Steenburgh, chairman and professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah.

Summer Rupper, a BYU climate scientist, led the letter-writing effort. She said participants agreed it was “extremely important” as citizens and scientists to underscore that there is ample and solid evidence that humankind is driving the unusual increase in greenhouse gases that are affecting the complex climate systems and that the changes pose risks to people and the environment.

“We did not receive any acknowledgement that they received it,” she said.

The co-signers said they agreed with the scientific consensus, but noted that their political views vary, as do their ideas about “how society ought to respond to threats posed by a warming climate.” They noted that Utah scientists have for decades studied how climate change can be expected to impact the region.

Underscoring that their views are their own and are not intended to represent their university’s position, the 18 Ph.D.’s specifically refuted Spencer’s claim that his critics have ignored natural cycles. The BYU scientists called that assertion “patently false” in light of the fact that natural climate variability has been “extensively studied.”

They also took issue with Spencer’s allegation that researchers were simply “jumping on the climate-change bandwagon for prestige and monetary gain.”

“When members of the Legislature give this kind of testimony too much weight, it puts all of us at risk by promoting poorly informed decisions,” the letter said.

Geochemist Barry Bickmore, who also signed the letter, agreed the BYU scientists were concerned that the legislative discussion had been “unproductive” and “ideological.” A Utah County Republican delegate, he noted that there were political disagreements among the scientists represented “but we all agree this is a problem, and we need to do something about it.”

Calls Friday to several key members of the legislative committee, including Rep. Mike Noel, a Kanab Republican and the panel’s co-chairman who invited Spencer to address the panel, were not returned.

Noel complained to Utah State University President Stan Albrecht last month that a physics instructor at that university had criticized Spencer’s work and called his views on climate “fringe” — the same phrase the letter writers used.

Because BYU is a private institution owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its faculty and staff are insulated from legislative pressures that public universities could be subject to.

Rep. Christopher Herrod, a Provo Republican and member of Noel’s committee, doubted that all the scientists who signed the letter had actually listened to the panel’s discussion. He said they misunderstood Spencer’s science and misquoted Herrod as painting “the movement to address global warming as ‘the new religion to replace Communism.’ ”

Those words aren’t his, but come from Vaclav Klaus, the current president of the Czech Republic and a noted skeptic of human-caused climate change, Herrod noted. Meanwhile, the BYU scientists are allowing the science to be “used by the other side” for political purposes.

“The problem is the other side is already making policy that will cost trillions of dollars,” Herrod said.

“The more they say there is consensus, the more they lose credibility,” said Herrod, a real estate developer and entrepreneur who received a master’s degree in organizational behavior from BYU.

“There is no consensus,” he said. “Send us a study that addresses all the points that were made. [Without that] they are hurting their case.”

fahys@sltrib.com

This is a corrected version of a story that first was published Friday. The climate change skeptic referred to was Vaclav Klaus, current president of the Czech Republic. The Tribune originally misidentified this critic.

Read the scientists’ position on climate change

Read a PDF of the letter scientists sent to Utah lawmakers.

> www.sltrib.com/ utahpolitics/ci_13733043

Herbert says Salazar has requested to meet with the council, which includes liberals and conservatives who have been on opposite sides over public-lands use.

The council is led by former Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson, a Democrat, but also includes two former Bureau of Land Management directors and state Rep. Mike Noel, a Republican who has fought for more access to federal lands.

Governor Herbert’s appointment of Ted Wilson, a prominent Utah Democrat, to lead the panel was a noteworthy effort for bipartisanship and will assure an objective and thorough discussion of the issues. It is in the mold being exhibited at the national level by President Obama and Governor Herbert is to be commended for assuring that diversity of opinion will be heard. It gives the panel much greater credibility than it would otherwise have.

Herbert said after a meeting with Salazar this week that the secretary was interested to see how the council would work and wanted to meet with its members.

“He liked the idea of what we’re doing there,” Herbert said, “and I think what he’d like to do is sit down with them and have this continuing dialogue here, which was great.”

Kendra Barkoff, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, said Salazar and Herbert had a productive meeting Tuesday and discussed public-lands management and conservation. She added that the secretary hopes to visit Utah again soon but gave no specifics of whether a meeting would be set up with the Balanced Resource Council.

Herbert, who opposed Salazar’s decision earlier this year to pull back 77 leases for oil and gas development on federal lands, said the meeting between the two was fruitful and that both officials vowed to work together on land issues.

“He wasn’t just like, ‘Thanks for stopping by.’ ” Herbert said of the meeting. “It was, ‘Hey, I liked that you reached out a hand and I’m going to reach a hand back and see if we can’t work together.’ ”

tburr@sltrib.com

Salt Lake Tribune

Members of the grass-roots group, Utahns for Ethical Government, took their reform message to Capitol Hill Wednesday, unveiling a ballot initiative they hope will accomplish what legislators have not yet done themselves.

Former lawmakers Kim Burningham and David Irvine — both Republicans and vocal opponents of the now-overturned school voucher law — led the charge to tighten existing ethics policies.

“Our system is riddled with laws and the absence of laws, which not only allow but encourage unethical behavior in our Legislature,” said Burningham, a state Board of Education member.

Burningham cited Utah as one of 10 states that lack an independent ethics commission. Instead, lawmakers police their own. He also decried the absence of caps on campaign contributions.

The initiative’s chief thrust — if approved by majority vote in 2010 — is to establish a five-member independent commission to investigate ethics complaints against lawmakers and make subsequent recommendations to the legislative body.

Rep. John Dougall, co-chairman of the Ethics Interim Committee, said he welcomes the public involvement but questions some of the initiative’s aims.

“Only the politically connected get appointed to these commissions,” Dougall said. “When they’re beholden to someone to appoint them, independence is lost.”

The initiative would also end the flow of corporate contributions to legislative candidates and impose caps of $2,500 on individual donations and $5,000 on contributions from political action committeesover each two-year period.

Notably, it would also ban all lobbyist gifts of meals and admission to events, allowing lawmakers to accept only “light refreshments of negligible value.”

“I have no concerns with that,” Dougall said. Gift bans have previously passed in the House, only to die in the Senate.

However, Dougall believes that the group — now more than 300 strong — is missing the real problem.

“The bigger the government’s scope, the greater the chance of corruption,” Dougall said.

In the noonday sun, Rob Ence, executive director of Utah’s 220,000-plus member AARP, threw the nonprofit organization’s support behind the volunteer initiative drive.

“We do this not just for our members but for our children and our grandchildren,” Ence said. “We believe that influence should come from the voice of the people and by the ballot box.”

Following the Capitol steps announcement, initiative organizers filed the petition with Lt. Gov.-designee Greg Bell and now must hold seven public hearings across the state and gather close to 95,000 signatures to get the measure on the 2010 ballot.

More information on the initiative drive can be found at www.utahethics.org

cmckitrick@sltrib.com

The new ballot initiative would:

Establish a five-member independent ethics commission chosen randomly from 20 names unanimously approved by the Senate president, House speaker and two minority leaders.

Prohibit lawmakers from donating campaign funds to other legislative candidates.

Ban legislator-lobbyists, also require a two-year cool-down before former lawmakers become paid lobbyists.

Ban lobbyist gifts except for “light refreshments of negligible value.”

Ban lawmakers from exerting influence on courts and employees in state agencies.

Nix campaign contributions from corporations, nonprofits, partnerships and unions.

Cap individual campaign donations at $2,500, Political Action Committee donations at $5,000 in a two-year cycle

Prevent legislators from serving as paid members on corporate boards when their elected positions contributed to their appointments.

For more information » www.utahethics.org

Source » Utahns for Ethical Government

In Defense of the ‘Balloon Boy’ Dad

by Frank Rich

FOR a country desperate for good news, the now-deflated “balloon boy” spectacle would seem to be the perfect tonic. As Wolf Blitzer of CNN summed up the nation’s unrestrained joy upon learning that the imperiled boy had never been in any peril whatsoever: “All of us are so excited that little Falcon is fine.”

Then came even better news. After little Falcon revealed to Blitzer that his family “did this for the show,” we could all luxuriate in a warm bath of moral superiority. No matter what our own faults as parents, we could never top Richard Heene, who mercilessly exploited his child for fame and profit. Nor could we ever be as craven as the news media, especially cable television, which dumped a live broadcast of President Obama in New Orleans to track the supersized Jiffy Pop bag floating over Colorado.

Or such are the received lessons of this tale.

Certainly the “balloon boy” incident is a reflection of our time – much as the radio-induced “War of the Worlds” panic dramatized America’s jitters on the eve of World War II, or the national preoccupation with the now-forgotten Congressman Gary Condit signaled America’s pre-9/11 drift into escapism and complacency in the summer of 2001. But to see what “balloon boy” says about 2009, you have to look past the sentimental moral absolutes. You have to muster some sympathy for the devil of the piece, the Bad Dad. And you can’t grant blanket absolution to those in the American audience who smugly blame Heene and television exclusively for the entire embarrassing episode.

It would be lovely, for instance, to believe that cable audiences doubled in size that afternoon because they were rooting for little Falcon’s welfare. But as Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler would say on Weekend Update at “Saturday Night Live,” “Really?!?” Many of those viewers were driven by the same bloodlust that spawns rubberneckers at every highway accident: the hope of witnessing the graphic remains of a crash, not a soft landing.

It would also be nice to think that the “balloon boy” viewers were the innocent victims of a dazzling Houdini-class feat of wizardry – a “massive fraud,” as Bill O’Reilly thundered. But even slightly jaundiced onlookers might have questioned how a balloon could waft buoyantly through the skies for hours with a 6-year-old boy hidden within its contours. That so few did is an indication of how practiced we are at suspending disbelief when watching anything labeled news, whether the subject is W.M.D.’s in Iraq or celebrity gossip in Hollywood.

“They put on a very good show for us, and we bought it,” the local sheriff, Jim Alderden, said last weekend, when he alleged that “balloon boy” was a hoax. His words could stand as the epitaph for an era.

In this case, the show wasn’t even that good. But, as usual, the news media nursed it along, enlisting as sales reps for the smoke and mirrors. While the incident unfolded, most TV anchors hyped rather than questioned the aeronautical viability of a vehicle resembling the flying saucers in Ed Wood’s camp 1950s sci-fi potboiler, “Plan 9 From Outer Space.” But no sooner had the balloon been punctured than the press was caught in another flimflam. Reuters and CNBC delivered the bombshell that the United States Chamber of Commerce had abruptly reversed its intransigent opposition to climate-change legislation. The “spokesperson” source turned out to be the invention of liberal activists who had attempted to stage a prank press conference at Washington’s National Press Club.

Next to the other hoaxes and fantasies that have been abetted by the news media in recent years, both the “balloon boy” and Chamber of Commerce ruses are benign. The Colorado balloon may have led to the rerouting of flights and the wasteful deployment of law enforcement resources. But at least it didn’t lead the country into fiasco the way George W. Bush’s flyboy spectacle on an aircraft carrier helped beguile most of the Beltway press and too much of the public into believing that the mission had been accomplished in Iraq. The Chamber of Commerce stunt was a blip of a business news hoax next to the constant parade of carnival barkers who flogged empty stocks on cable during the speculative Wall Street orgies of the dot-com and housing booms.

As “balloon boy” played out, the White House opened fire on one purveyor of fictional news, Fox News, where “tea party” protests are inflated into a national rebellion rivaling the Civil War and where Glenn Beck routinely claims Obama is perpetrating a conspiracy to bring fascism to America. But the White House’s argument is diluted by the different, if less malevolently partisan, fictions that turn up on Fox’s competitors. On CNN, for instance, Lou Dobbs provided a platform for the nuts questioning Obama’s citizenship. When an ABC News correspondent insisted that Fox was “one of our sister organizations” in an exchange with the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, last week, he wasn’t joking.

Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking. Norman Lear, about the only prominent American to express any empathy for little Falcon’s father, vented on The Huffington Post, calling out CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS alike for their role in “creating a climate that mistakes entertainment for news.” This climate, he argued, “all but seduces a Richard and Mayumi Heene into believing they are – even if what they dream up to qualify is a hoax – entitled to their 15 minutes.”

None of this absolves Heene of blame for the damage he may have inflicted on the children he grotesquely used as a supporting cast in his schemes. But stupid he’s not. He knew how easy it would be to float “balloon boy” when the demarcation between truth and fiction has been obliterated.

There’s also some poignancy in his determination to grab what he and many others see as among the last accessible scraps of the American dream. As a freelance construction worker and handyman, he couldn’t find much employment in an economy where construction is frozen and homeowners are more worried about losing their homes than fixing them. Once his appetite had been whetted by two histrionic appearances on “Wife Swap,” an ABC reality program, it’s easy to see why Heene would turn his life and that of his family into a nonstop audition for more turns in the big tent of the reality media circus.

That circus is among the country’s last dependable job engines. More than a quarter of prime-time broadcast television is devoted to reality programs. And so, with only a high-school education, Heene tried to reinvent himself as a cable-ready tornado-chasing scientist. Robert Thomas, a Web entrepreneur who collaborated with Heene on a pitch to ABC for a science-based reality show, saw the “balloon boy” stunt as a sad response to his economic plight. “I think in this case the desperation was too much for Richard to bear,” Thomas said in an interview with Gawker.com. (It’s no less desperate a sign of the times that Thomas insisted on being paid for his interview.)

Heene is a direct descendant of those Americans of the Great Depression who fantasized, usually in vain, that they might find financial salvation if only they could grab a spotlight in show business. Some aspired to the “American Idol” of the day – “Major Bowes Amateur Hour,” a hugely popular weekly talent contest on network radio. Others traveled the seedy dance marathon circuit, entering 24/7 endurance contests that promised food and prize money in exchange for freak-show degradation and physical punishment. Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel memorializing this Depression milieu was aptly titled “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”

In 1939, the year that John Steinbeck published “The Grapes of Wrath,” his Depression classic about dispossessed Dust Bowl sharecroppers migrating to California’s Salinas Valley in search of work, Nathanael West published “The Day of the Locust,” about those equally destitute Americans who traveled to Hollywood hoping to land in the movies. “They have been cheated and betrayed,” West wrote. “They have slaved and saved for nothing.” He could have been describing Americans who lost their jobs, homes and 401(k)’s in our own Great Recession.

The role models for today’s desperate fame seekers are “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” not Gable and Lombard. But even if they catch a break, as Heene did on “Wife Swap,” they still may end up betrayed by a stacked system. As The Times reported in August, many reality shows are as cruel as the old dance marathons. The usual Hollywood workplace rules allowing breaks for rest or meals often don’t apply. Nor, sometimes, does the minimum wage. Let ‘em eat fame.

If Heene’s balloon was empty, so were the toxic financial instruments, inflated by the thin air of unsupported debt, that cratered the economy he inhabits. The press hyped both scams, and the public eagerly bought both. But between the bogus balloon and the banks’ bubble, there’s no contest as to which did the most damage to the country. The ultimate joke is that Heene, unlike the reckless gamblers at the top of Citigroup and A.I.G., may be the one with a serious shot at ending up behind bars.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

The son of the couple at the center of the sex scandal that has engulfed Sen. John Ensign was being paid by National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2008 at the same time his mother was having an affair with the Nevada Republican.

Both Doug and Cynthia Hampton were already working in senior positions for Ensign when their son Brandon Hampton was hired to do “research policy consulting” for the NRSC in March 2008.

The younger Hampton, 19, was paid $5,400 before he left the Ensign office in August last year, Federal Election Commission records show.

That means during March and April 2008, three members of the Hampton family were working for Ensign. Both Doug and Cynthia Hampton stopped working for Ensign at the end of April 2008.

According to people familiar with the matter, Ensign’s affair with Hampton took place between December 2007 and August 2008.

A trusted political aide, Cynthia Hampton served as the treasurer for both Ensign’s reelection campaign and for his leadership fund, Battle Born PAC. She received $10,620 through the Battle Born PAC during January to April 2008 – a pay rate that was far higher during that four-month period than the $11,767 she received from the committee during all of 2007.

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Cynthia Hampton was also paid $11, 912 by Ensign’s reelection campaign between Jan. 2007 and April 2008, with her monthly salary doubling later in the year.

According to Senate payroll records, Doug Hampton served as Ensign’s administrative assistant in his personal office from November 2006 to May 2008, departing around the same time Cynthia Hampton left Ensign’s political committees. After leaving Ensign’s office, Doug Hampton went to work for a Las Vegas political consulting firm called November Inc. which is run by several former Ensign aides.

Doug Hampton was paid about $101,000 for seven months of work in fiscal 2008 – a higher monthly rate than he was previously paid. He made $144,000 in all of 2007.

By Paul McDonnold Dallas

Christian Science Monitor

Published: Sunday, June 14, 2009 12:32 a.m. MDT

Is capitalism fatally flawed?

Recessions, like hurricanes, leave wreckage behind — bankrupt businesses, high unemployment and sometimes even tattered philosophies.

The philosophy of economic conservatism has long been one of unquestioned deregulation. Conservatives have considered it as a way of unhooking government leashes that the economy strains against, setting it free to run at full speed and lead us to wealth.

But this philosophy seemed to collapse in the moral and financial wreckage of today’s recession. Like many conservatives, I was left facing uncomfortable questions, chiefly: Is capitalism itself fatally flawed? I decided to consult a few past thinkers.

In “The Communist Manifesto” (1848), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels propose that capitalism has inherent weaknesses. Marx said these would lead capitalist economies to collapse and become government-run socialist economies, and eventually utopian systems that he called communist. Today his words sound eerily current, like answers on a Sunday morning political show:

Interviewer: “Mr. Marx, not that long ago, lovers of capitalism pronounced your ideas dead. Now, according to at least one source, we are all socialists. What changed?”

Marx: “It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society.”

Interviewer: “Nowadays we call these ‘crises’ recessions. You predicted that over time, capitalism would become dominated by larger and larger firms.”

Marx: “The concentration of capital and land in a few hands.”

Interviewer: “And how does this concentration bring on socialism?”

Marx: “By paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.”

Interviewer: “So the bigger firms become, the harder they fall. In the U.S. economy, some firms have become ‘too big too fail,’ and the government has moved in. As this plays out, what will happen to capitalism?”

Marx: “Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

Marx’s disturbing words seemed even more prescient to me when I thought about what has happened in the U.S. banking industry.

As recently as 1980, the United States was a nation of mostly small- and medium-sized banks. Employees knew, often on a personal basis, both the depositors and the borrowers. Deposits that were not loaned out had to be kept in low-risk investments such as government bonds.

People who claimed the mantle of conservatism dismantled the regulations behind this system. This shook the industry. Through mergers and acquisitions, resources were centralized. The number of banks declined. Huge conglomerates arose and created the complex world of global finance that later collapsed. This is capitalism’s dark side of impersonal corporations, recessions and class conflict.

Another famous thinker, Adam Smith, saw a different side of capitalism. Seven decades before the “Manifesto,” he wrote “The Wealth of Nations,” about the capitalism of his day. It was one of small, decentralized firms — butchers and bakers. The driving force was not blind greed but a healthy interest in improving one’s own lot by helping others. It was a capitalism that looked a lot like the banking sector before deregulation.

Marx and Smith each saw a piece of the truth — two different sides of the coin of capitalism. Capitalism itself is not fatally flawed. But a hyperconservative approach to it is. Regulations that promote decentralized competition on a human scale are regulations that conserve Smith’s side of capitalism. These regulations should not be the enemy of conservatives; they should be our aim.

Many conservatives will want to stick to the dogmatic ideological line of deregulation. But the capitalism produced by blind support of deregulation is one of bureaucratic corporations, greed-fueled booms and fear-riddled busts. If conservatives do not embrace regulations that preserve Smith’s capitalism, we might just wake up one day to see it gone and socialism in its place, just as Marx predicted.

Paul McDonnold is a freelance writer. He has taught economics courses at several universities.