The Ugly Truth Behind Michigan’s Budget Surplus

Governing For Profit
Patricia J. Williams
| February 15, 2012
Michigan is a model of fiscal recuperation. At least that’s what the headlines said as I stepped off a plane in Detroit recently: its spending was slashed so ruthlessly in the past few years that the New York Times quoted a former state budget director as moaning, “We were so far down that the floor looked like up to us.” But now there is a budget surplus projected for 2013, of anywhere from half a billion to a billion dollars, with yet sunnier fiscal predictions ahead. This apotheosis is generally credited to the enactment of Republican Governor Rick Snyder’s stern austerity policies, which include replacing “a business tax with a corporate income tax that is expected to save businesses $1.5 billion a year,” according to the same Times article. “To make up lost dollars, lawmakers agreed to tax public workers’ pensions, reduce the state’s Earned-Income Tax Credit for the working poor, and remove or reduce other tax exemptions and deductions.”

On the ride from the airport, my friend Dee gave me an earful about what he described as “Snyder’s for-profit governance, while for us ordinary non-corporate humans, things just get bleaker.” The schools are decimated, he told me. Infrastructure is crumbling, zoos and parks are being eliminated, libraries closed and daycare all but nonexistent. Snyder has slashed funding for the state’s colleges and universities by 15 percent in the past year alone.

Moreover, Detroit is on the verge of financial ruin, in no small part because since 1998 it has been hobbled by a law requiring all cities to cut personal income taxes every year, for residents as well as nonresidents. Exemptions are given only if a city is in financial distress—a status virtually guaranteed by such cuts. “Financial distress” in turn triggers Public Act 4, an insidious law—detailed by Chris Savage on page 6 of this issue—that permits the governor to appoint an “emergency manager” (EM) whose job is, no joke, to displace elected officials and run local governments as though they were private, profit-driven corporations. Yet for all their considerable power, EMs lack the one thing that cities like Detroit need most (Republican dictum notwithstanding): the power to raise taxes. (Not that one would want a trickle-down executive branch boss like an EM tackling taxes, in addition to disappearing local legislative structures like city councils and school boards.)

EMs are balancing budgets by gutting government itself: selling off water and sewer lines (Flint), “redeveloping” public parks into private golf courses (Benton Harbor) and threatening to dissolve school districts (Highland Park). Detroit public schools, 80 percent of which fail to graduate any students with a college-qualifying ACT test score, have been taken over by GM’s former vice president for North American vehicle sales.

Meanwhile, in response to Governor Snyder’s recent intimation that funding for public universities may eventually depend on their graduation and student retention rates, the third-largest school in the system, Wayne State University, hastily revamped its admissions policy to include what a corporation might call “dashboard” measures that evaluate learning and retention as a matter of “value added.” “Value added” is a term widely introduced to the world of education as part of the Bush administration’s determination to turn learning into a business. Derived from economics and contract law, it ordinarily refers to the difference between production costs and sale price. While such arithmetic works well in the manufacturing of steel ball bearings, it’s somewhat less utile when grading an archaeology seminar or the translation of a poem.

“Value added,” snapped Dee, “is the ultimate emblem of a ‘knowledge economy’ rather than regard for actual knowledge.” He fears it will push Wayne State further from its mission as the only urban campus in the system, one that has historically served predominantly blue-collar students who may be working multiple jobs and supporting families while going to school. Like the City University of New York, Wayne State has served as a portal for generations of strivers whose circumstances might constrain them to a trajectory of eight, ten or even fifteen years to earn enough credits to graduate. Such hard-working students will now be written off as failures for dragging down the value-added goal of four-year graduation rates. The Detroit Free Press reports that in screening for applicants most likely to graduate in the requisite amount of time, Wayne State plans to create three groups: “those accepted, those who first need to complete an eight-week summer ‘bridge’ academic program, and those who will be counseled to attend a community college, trade school or even the military.”

Not surprisingly, many fear that students in Detroit’s already underserved public high schools will be passed over in even greater numbers as university seats are outsourced to wealthier students from out of town, from out of state or from other countries—from anywhere primary education is better funded.

But what of the budget surplus? I asked Dee. Surely that found money could be put to the rescue? Alas, no. Of more than $1 billion in cuts to school budgets last year, Snyder is restoring less than half—and not to per capita expenditure on pupils but for incentive programs. Schools that perform best will get the most money; those that “fail” could be eliminated. In other words, those with the most troubled students or least experienced teachers or children who speak little English or with high percentages of learning disabilities—those are the schools most likely to be assigned less assistance, less investment, less hope.

“Michigan’s future is dependent upon the education system,” says Michigan State Representative Jeff Irwin, who has called for funds taken from K-12 to be reappropriated. And to those in the Snyder administration who would prefer to squirrel the bulk of the surplus away for a rainy day, Peter Spadafore, who sits on Lansing’s school board, has a curt riposte: “It’s raining.”

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/166293/ugly-truth-behind-michigans-budget-surplus

Culture of Death: Who Gets to Be a Person in Mississippi?

Patricia J. Williams 

The Nation Online,  blogpost of November 3, 2011 – 12:38pm ET, http://www.thenation.com/blog/164299/culture-death-who-gets-be-person-mississippi

On November 8, Mississippi is set to vote on Measure 26, a ballot initiative that would redefine the state’s Bill of Rights to extend the protections of personhood to include “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” It is striking that the measure, which is largely motivated by religious concerns about the sanctity of human existence, crops up in a state that has one of the lowest indices for overall quality of life—whenever it might begin—in the entire country: the infant mortality rate over the last decade is about 10 per 1,000 live births, with black babies dying at twice the rate of white babies. Mississippi leads the country in obesity and ranks forty-sixth in the number of state residents who have health insurance. It suffers from high death rates from cancer and heart disease. Twenty-three percent of the population lives below the poverty level, giving Mississippi the unenviable distinction of ranking dead last in the nation.

With the odds of survival so relatively skewed, it is no wonder that there might be some anxiety over preserving the very idea of life. Then, too, the legal category of “personhood” seems particularly capacious since Citizens United; if such a label protects corporations, banks and homeowners’ associations—and don’t they seem to be thriving!—what blessings might it extend to a zygote, that abstracted conception of future stock, human capital, mortal enterprise?

As I write, the seven billionth person is said to be entering this earthly dimension. That statistic has been reported with Malthusian apprehension, as well it might. The resources of the world are not infinitely replenishable; much of the planet’s ecology risks systemic collapse as a result of habitat degradation, global warming, invasive species and thoughtless exploitation; and the superpowers continue to go to war with one another over dismally non-sustainable energy sources like oil, gas and coal. Add in the uncertain-to-teetering economies just about everywhere, and it isn’t hard to fathom the dangerous contradictions of those who feel both deep resentment about the mad global competition to make ends meet, and simultaneously, a frantic “need” to propagate more of “our kind” because “we” are too few—regardless of actual numbers or common well-being. It’s as though we are walking a tightrope stretched between fetishism of the fetus and an abyss of human disposability.

When, during a recent Republican debate, the audience cheered the fact that Rick Perry had overseen more executions than any governor in modern history, there was at least a momentary shudder among the punditocracy. What did it mean that a numbered batch of bodies was cause for such applause? Perhaps this is the new metric for presidential success: executions and summary assassinations, as though the scales of justice were measured in people-poundage, with some being heavier or lighter, depending on strangely monetized equivalences. There have been too many events of late that have been framed by our political and media spokespeople as measured by some curious human exchange rate. Does the targeted killing of unindicted US citizens like Anwar Al-Awlaki and his 16-year old son “equal” resolution for the violence he may have preached? Does the grisly display of Muammar Qaddafi’s body flung in a refrigerated meat locker “account” for the lost lives in Lockerbie? And whether you deem the late Troy Davis guilty or innocent, his execution was a stark example of how much habeas corpus has been whittled away in recent years, his death an indirect product of curtailed access to judicial appeal and substantive justice—limitations that are justified with reference to “time spent,” and “tax dollars.”

Indeed, Davis’s legal representation was severely compromised by crippling cuts in state and federal funding for the Georgia Resource Center, which represented him and other indigent prisoners in post-conviction hearings. His appeal was also hobbled by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which prohibits prisoners from raising, post-conviction, evidence that they might have presented at trial, no matter how probative or substantive.

Embryos notwithstanding, we seem less and less invested in protections for the sanctity of life in the here and now. Can’t let things go on forever, after all. Costs a bundle.

Recently, the state of Texas decided to do away with the last meal for death row inmates, that terminal rite of agency, of choice, of taking leave of the sensory. From now on, the condemned will have to eat whatever hash is being dished up in the commissary. Of course, the tradition of granting requests in one’s last meal is premised on a superstition of sorts, a fiction of making peace, of showing mercy, of stilling spirit. In Louisiana’s Angola Prison, for example, the warden shares that meal with the doomed, a kind of final communion. In other places and times, a last drink or a coin to the executioner might serve as the bridge between life and impending death, a marking of the day as Unlike Any Other. The killing of a human being, whether considered legally justified or not, is momentous, mysterious, a repercussive tragedy no matter how reprehensible the record of that life. There will always be those who wreak havoc in society, and who then sneer from the grave or the brink of it; there is, no doubt, a very human urge to give them a little shove into the great beyond. But the entire purpose of just governance is to model respect and to provide restraint in the face of such urges.

When, instead, our government is viewed solely as something to protect “us” against “them” to the exclusion of it being a constitutive force as well, the social world turns into a zero-sum game, in which others’ success at survival means less for you. That mindset engenders a mean little flare of relief every time there’s news of one less ne’er-do-well post-born mouth to feed. That not-so-subtle channeling of emotion toward the facile rendering of death distracts us from the policy choices that might make life more tolerable—preventive healthcare, basic housing, public education—even in our unnatural numbers. It allows us to ignore the inconsistency between gracing the mute quiescence of a fertilized egg with personhood while failing to endow the more lively political quests of the American Dream.

Zero Sum Games

Is Anti-White Bias a Problem? 

A new study says whites think discrimination against them is a bigger problem than anti-black bias. Is this surprising?

5/22/11 10:29 PM

When Prejudice Is So Malleable – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/05/22/is-anti-white-bias-a-problem/when-prejudice-is-so-malleable

Room for Debate: A Running Commentary on the News

When Prejudice Is So Malleable

Updated May 22, 2011, 10:05 PM

Patricia J. Williams is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University. She writes the column “Diary of a Mad Law Professor,” which appears monthly in The Nation.

[This piece is part of a roundtable responding to a study by Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers, "Whites See Racism As A Zero Sum Game That They Are Now Losing."  It is published in the journal Perspectivs on Pyschological Science.  The online version can be found at http://pps.sagepub.com/content/6/3/215.] 

The finding that white Americans see blacks’ progress as an insult or a diminishment of their status is not entirely surprising. Zero-sum formulations of prejudice tend to emerge in lean economic times, fueling cultural or historical rivalries of all sorts. I have a hunch that if the study had included questions about whether whites feel threatened by “reverse racism” among Asians, Latinos and immigrants, the results would be much the same. Those perceptions notwithstanding, data show that white Americans remain the most privileged human beings on the planet.

The world is changing, however, and the realignment of wealth, power, jobs and resources has been deeply challenging to the notion of American exceptionalism. That exceptionalism, consciously or unconsciously, is infused with racialized hierarchies — normative whiteness and masculinity still marking the “worthiest” inheritors of the American dream. Moreover, the downturn in all our fortunes has been relentlessly and poisonously exploited by certain segments of the media. The language of “us” versus “them” dominates far too much of our radio and television discourse. The litany of scapegoats who are supposedly fouling “our” trough includes not just blacks but those of Mexican, Japanese, Korean or Hawaiian descent, non-born-again Christians, the entire People’s Republic of China, Canadians, the French, liberal elites and the elderly.

The trickiest thing about prejudice is that it is so malleable, so capable of reinvention. Susan Fiske, a professor of psychology at Princeton, has documented the varied and fluctuating presentations of social biases like race, class, disability, gender. She points out that there are nuanced differences in how prejudice is expressed against the disabled as opposed to Asian-Americans, or as against high-status blacks versus poor blacks, or the homeless or those with low-status accents. Elements like pity, resentment, competition, revulsion, paternalism, or fear play against one another in complicated ways.

Fiske employs a grid to predict how social groups will be ranked, using attributed vectors of warmth/coldness and competence/incompetence. In the simplest terms, her metric is as follows: 1. Those stereotyped as high competence and high warmth are met with pride and admiration (like most white people). 2. Groups who rank as high warmth and low competence are treated with pity, sympathy, paternalism (like the elderly). 3. Those stereotyped as high competence and low warmth are met with envy (like Jews and Asians). 4. Those perceived as low competence and low warmth are greeted with contempt, anger and resentment (like the homeless).

Through much of American history, blacks have been viewed as low on the competence index (negative feelings), but warm enough to be pitied (which is usually felt not as a negative but a protective, “pro-black” fuzzy emotion). As blacks have made greater symbolic strides in the last few decades, that ranking seems to have shifted: there is envy, suspicion, resentment — despite numbers, despite empirical documentation to the contrary — that blacks are “taking over” as the recipients not of due process but of undue “favoritism.”

This projected fear is a danger to the nation. For all the gains of the civil rights movement, blacks remain among the poorest, most segregated and most unemployed of all Americans. There can be no commonweal when such grim reality is invisible to white fellow citizens who are driven instead by fantasies of competitive victimhood. A house divided cannot stand.