The Blog

Eric X. Li: The Invasion of Hong Kong -- the Law, Maids, and Locusts

2012-02-09T03:32:55Z

This piece was published in the South China Morning Post on Feb. 9, 2012.

Hong Kong -- A specter is haunting Hong Kong. And it is not communism. It is the sight of undesirable women roaming the streets of this acclaimed world city. They exhibit specific physical attributes. First were the Filipino maids of dark complexion, three-hundred-thousand strong along with the Indonesians. Then came pregnant women from the mainland. Both are making unwanted claims on the good life which Hong Kongers seem to feel is their own and look determined to guard jealously.

The demands for residency status by foreign maids who toil day in and day out for this city's rich and middle class alike are held up in court and regulatory tussles. The attacks on pregnant mainland women have just begun. Full-page advertisements can be found in major newspapers such as the Apple Daily calling the women "locusts" that must be driven out. The language deployed can only be called hysterical sectarian slurs. Such expressions are hardly acceptable in normal polite company, let alone being printed for Hong Kong's much-touted "civil society." However, the protests seem to be in line with public sentiments -- and the advertisement is paid for by public donations. The politicians are responding. The SAR government is initiating rules to cap the number of nonresidents giving birth.

There is only one problem. The law. Yes, the much-cherished "rule of law" and the self-evident "human rights" it is supposed to protect. Hong Kong is a place held captive by an ideological narrative conceived and propagated by a few political and intellectual elites. It goes as follows: Hong Kong is superior to mainland China. It has rule of law; it respects human rights; its open market capitalism is among the freest economies in the world; it has a flourishing civil society and a free press; its people deserve a full democracy in which they vote on everything. And this enclave of modernity must be defended against the encroachments of an authoritarian and unsophisticated central government. Better yet, if the mainland people could overthrow its authoritarian regime the rest of China would be as good as Hong Kong -- paradise on earth.

This narrative is now in full collision with the needs of the people of Hong Kong. What the people of Hong Kong are saying seem plainly sensible: If all the foreign maids who have worked here for more than seven years are granted residency as stipulated by law, and all the babies born by visiting mainland mothers are given the same status as those by Hong Kong mothers, the resulting economic and social burden would bankrupt the city.

But are these the same Hong Kong people who turn up by tens of thousands on every fourth of June to condemn Beijing on human rights? If so, why are they denying what seem to be the most basic human rights to hard-working maids, pregnant women, and the new-born? Indeed, these rights are protected by Hong Kong's Basic Law and/or its common law legal system -- both prized assets that the propagators of the Hong Kong narrative want to defend at all costs against Beijing's interference.

Are all the annual candle-holders in Victoria Park saying that maids who meet legal requirements to be residents must be kept out just because they are Filipinos, pregnant women with full legal rights to enter Hong Kong must be segregated and mainlanders refused entry while other races are welcomed with open arms, mothers who happen to deliver when they are in Hong Kong must be denied health care just because they are mainlanders, and babies so born by actions of their parents must not be given the rights all Hong Kong people are entitled to?

In the same vein, could Hong Kong's "free capitalist economy" deliver much benefit to its people without the myriad of favorable trade and financial benefits supplied by a not-so-free socialist mainland economy?

The "anti-locust" protestors are in effect calling for a change in the Basic Law. There is only one route to realizing such a change, and it leads to (guess where?) Beijing. Their advertisement is found in the media vanguard of the Hong Kong narrative, the Apple Daily. It is an irony worthy of a Shakespearean stage.

Perhaps it is high time for the people of Hong Kong and its elites to self-reflect. Is the law an abstract principle that exists above and beyond society, like the commandments received by Moses, or an organic part of society at the service of its people? Should politics be conducted based on ideological correctness or pragmatic functionality?

In a healthy and well-functioning polity, practical issues such as immigration can be deliberated and resolved in practical ways. But the state of Hong Kong is such that since 1997 an ideological narrative constructed by a few has been sold to the people of Hong Kong by means of demagoguery. Now the Hong Kong people are in an unenviable quandary: give up on a narrative that has been baked into their self-identity to protect the actual welfare of their society, or hold high that ideological banner and risk their way of life. To do both would be hypocrisy of the highest order.

When common sensibilities are held hostage by abstract ideology they find expressions in racial and sectarian extremism. Such is the nature of the "anti-locust" movement. Can such a people in such a state be entrusted with self-government?

Christopher Holshek: America: Let's Re-Invent It

2012-02-09T01:47:44Z

Mitt Romney, the likely challenger to President Obama this fall, has had a few public-speaking gaffes. There is one theme, however, that Romney has hit on -- and will likely many more times -- that should be taken much more seriously. It is the conservative contention about American decline. Beyond outright denial, the spin has fast become Manichaean. It's become un-American to talk about national decline. Even Obama has bought into this, saying in this year's State of the Union speech: "Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned doesn't know what they're talking about." In other words, anyone who thinks America is in decline is not, to use the Merrill Lynch tag, "bullish on America."

Bull.

The American decline argument is a false one, and not because American decline is false. The complete denial, while understandable, is dangerous. It not only presents the greatest danger to achieving the collective wisdom to rise above the pointless bickering and move on; ironically, it contributes to it.

Fareed Zakaria, in last week's GPS, albeit somewhat apologetic about a word that appears in the title of his latest book, explained it well. In addition to his well-known "rise of the rest" mantra, to put American decline in perspective, he noted what we were witnessing was not American decline as much as the end of American dominance.

Fair enough, even for the staunchest of conservatives, who may recall that President Reagan, in the 1987 National Security Strategy, remarked that "The United States no longer ha[s] an overwhelming economic position vis-a-vis Western Europe and the East Asia rimland." In 1990, his successor similarly observed: "It was inevitable that our overwhelming economic predominance after the war would be reduced."

Of course: When you start off, in 1945, owning 50,000 combat aircraft, 5,000 naval ships, 96 divisions, the world's only atomic weapon, and possessing the only intact economy in the world comprising nearly half its gross national product, there's nowhere to go but down -- in relative terms. We've been dominant for so long that now we think we're entitled to it.

The "rise of the rest," which has been going for more than a half a century, is the product of how successful a job the United States has done as Chairman of the Board of Planetary Management. We are victims of our own success, having globalized everything but ourselves.

But something even larger than that is afoot. What we're witnessing now is a grand sweep of history that will ultimately force us to change our individual as well as national behavior. Consider this: Since the war of 1812, Americans did not have to care much about the rest of the world -- we could afford our ignorance and "splendid isolationism"; since the Civil War, the U.S. looked to win its wars, deter its adversaries, and assure its allies through overwhelming industrial and technological superiority predicated on an abundance of cheap resources, cheap labor, cheap energy, and cheap capital -- we could afford a wasteful, surplus mentality; and because of our dominance since 1945, we could afford our unilateral freedom of action and archaic view of sovereignty while everyone else was internationalizing.

Now we have to say goodbye to all that.

In all walks of life, Americans have to learn to look at things more globally and with a longer view. In other words, more strategically. Strategy is fundamentally about making choices about the future, and a strategic mindset is driven, more than anything, by scarcity. Because Americans once had everything, like adolescents, we didn't have to make choices. Now, as aging adults, we had to choose more in advance, set priorities, and make tradeoffs. Not such a bad thing, because in many ways it means we'll be able to do more with less, and still live very well if not better than before.

The real danger is not from those who say our place in the world is diminished and that we should somehow better manage it, but those who interpret this as weakness, looking rather to fill us with happy talk about restoring American greatness and glory. It's living in the past and not the future (where Americans have traditionally looked toward). It also detracts from a sober confrontation with those things that threaten real decline -- our dysfunctional government, especially our national security system, fiscal insolvency, inferior education and infrastructure, etc. Among the greatest threats to the long-term national security of the United States is widening socioeconomic inequality, to the point of national instability, and the decline of the middle class.

America cannot be restored; it can only be re-invented. Which is why the Obama re-election committee would be wise to transcend the whole issue of American decline by focusing on American reinvention.

Among America's greatest strengths is its ability to re-invent itself and spare itself from a fate shared by others. Want some good examples of has-been powers that can't seem to move on? Just take a look at Putin's Russia. Or Japan. Even, perhaps, to some extent, Europe.

America has yet again arrived at a time that it must re-invent itself, wholesale and not retail. We can remain in denial about the transformed global landscape and our changed abilities, and fail to heed Tom Friedman's 2011 warning that we need to choose between a "bad decade" of painful reforms or face a "bad century" of real decline and loss of control of our destiny. Or, like Rip Van Winkle, we will awake to discover ourselves in a world we can neither comprehend nor live well in, the reality eviscerating our over-inflated self-image of American omnipotence and entitlement to greatness -- and fueling a public anger and frustration that will make the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street look like walks in the park.

From individuals from coast to coast who have lost their careers and found new livelihoods, to sports teams that rise from mediocrity to become champions, automakers once left for dead, and governments at local, state, and federal levels, we are called to re-invent ourselves. Because change is a constant, reinvention is a process as natural as rise and decline, in both senses.

The difference between decline and reinvention is this: What we refuse to experience positively we will most assuredly experience negatively.

Amy Ephron: Me and My Keurig

2012-02-08T23:56:56Z

I have a complicated relationship with my Keurig. It was given to us at Christmas by my husband's children. It was an amazing gift, thoughtful, inventive, and big. It is big. It is also streamlined and beautiful. I'd never seen anything like it before, which made them laugh hysterically (as it did half my friends). Confession: I don't work in an office and when I do go to offices, they don't usually invite me into the kitchen. The fact that I'd never seen anything like it before made me feel a little bit like Abe Simpson.

I also felt a little bit the way someone probably felt in the '50s when they got their first blender. "Wow, I can actually make a margarita at home. I can make a milkshake. I wonder if I can make gazpacho?" The waring blender was probably invented in the '30s and someone is probably about to correct me. Yep. I just looked it up, the blender was invented in the '30s and the waring blender was named after Fred Waring, a musician who financed the fine tuning of the Hamilton Beach invention. (Don't ask me about the patent rights.) But I wonder if my grandmother wanted to buy stock in the Waring company. (My grandmother bought stock in Campbells' Soup when they invented Campbell's Cream of Tomato Soup -- I don't know how she did with that, but there was no way you could get her to sell that stock.) I have a friend who wanted to buy stock in Keurig and is mad at her husband because they didn't. Apparently it was a good stock buy. I'm not sure I would want to buy stock in Keurig because I'm not sure it's ecological and I have an issue with that. Also, I missed the boat. The time to buy the stock was when the Keurig came out, not when it arrived in my kitchen last December.

I had no idea how to work it. It's simply really but it's also quirky. The little container has to be lined up just right, the disposable coffee thing dropped in after it's heated. There's an eco-friendly filter, too, but the one we have doesn't work so well. My friend who wanted to buy stock says there's another one that works better and she just sent me the link. It's red, though. I'm not sure why. I still think eco-filters should be gold but I'm old-fashioned. It also makes tea. And apparently hot chocolate, but I haven't tried that yet. Sometimes I pour a little half and half into the bottom of the cup just as it starts brewing in an effort to make a faux latte. This only sort of works. But it's fun.

It also talks to you in the morning, ready, not ready, and the little display tells you when it's time to add water. Sometimes it says "Prime." (Yes, I realize I'm starting to anthropomorphize my Keurig.) "Prime" apparently means you're supposed to dump the water out and refill it but since we only use bottled water that feels wasteful so I figured out how to game it. If you just unplug it and plug it back in, the "Prime" message goes away, making me wonder how smart it is really. I am happy that I'm smarter than my Keurig. I'm thinking about naming it. I will start to worry about one of us though, if it starts to respond to its name.

Brian Rooney: Radicalized by Saul Alinsky

2012-02-08T23:44:25Z

When I hear former House Speaker Newt Gingrich rail against the "radical" Saul Alinsky, I just smile. Gingrich has reached into the past to find an enemy for the present, but I know something about Saul Alinsky.

In the late 1960s I was a student at The Loomis School, a prep school just north of Hartford, Conn. The outside world was breaking loose with protests against the war in Vietnam and it was the golden age for sex, drugs and rock and roll. But students at Loomis were required to wear jackets and ties to class and attend mandatory chapel twice during the week and again on Sunday.

We had to get up early, dress like gentlemen, then stay awake in the stiff pews. The chaplain at the time was a podium-pounding fundamentalist who famously gave a sermon titled "You Can't Make Love Out of a Second Story Window," which has left those who heard it scratching their heads for the rest of their lives. In a school of smart, and smart-assed, kids, mandatory chapel was not getting through with a message anyone remembered.

Try as the school did to mold us into upright young men, you could smell marijuana smoke drifting from dormitory bathrooms where boys exhaled into the ventilation grates. The Stones and Jimi Hendrix blasted from windows. We were straining to be allowed to grow our hair long and wear blue jeans to class, to be free.

Yet even while holding on to the Edwardian Age, the school exposed us to ideas and change with great visiting speakers: The Rev. William Sloane Coffin, the anti-war chaplain at Yale; Roger Hilsman, the veteran of Merrill's Marauders who advised Kennedy on Vietnam; and the radical organizer Saul Alinsky.

He was an owlish, balding man in rumpled clothes who spoke in a forceful voice. He was unlike anything we had ever heard, a Jewish rabble rouser who spent his life making other lives better. The entire student body listened quietly while he described a life organizing workers and communities. Then Alinsky said he got his start organizing a rebellion against mandatory chapel at The University of Chicago. A roar went up from the students. They whistled, cheered and stomped and it was a good five minutes before Alinsky was able to speak again.

Alinsky challenged us to examine who we were and what was important. He told us to care for the poor and stand up to the rich. He told us to value peace, education and equality. He showed us how to get rid of traditions that held us down. He reached us in a way that chapel sermons never did.

Saul Alinsky stood up for the poor, the abused workers and lower classes drafted into war. He stood for what any good presidential candidate should stand for today.

I don't think anyone in the hall that night ever forgot Saul Alinsky. Within weeks of his appearance, our own student rebellion freed us from mandatory chapel. Jackets and ties disappeared and we grew our hair. I registered for the draft as a conscientious objector and never wore loafers again. I was lucky. I was radicalized by Saul Alinsky.

Clay Farris Naff: Jesus Concerned About The Poor? You Must Be Joking, Says The Christian Right

2012-02-08T23:44:02Z

When President Obama used the occasion of the National Prayer Breakfast to say that for the fortunate to pay a little more to help the less fortunate "coincides" with Jesus' teachings, he must have touched a nerve.

How else to explain the volcanic eruption of hate that has spewed from the right in response? Exposure to the pyroclastic flow of rightwing political lava for more than a moment can cause severe brain tissue burns, so I'll offer a few quick samples.

Geoff Ross, a retired naval man and self-styled president of the Rogue Patriot Group, writes:

I am correcting the record, Sir. You [are] a degenerate immoral hack that has no values or moral fiber or glue. ... It is not your job to give Americans a fair shot at anything. It is up to us Americans to be able to go out and find prosperity and happiness and financial independence. It is you sir with your BOOT on the neck of this nations carotid artery that is shutting off blood flow to freedom and liberty we used to enjoy. When you remove your boot then we will prosper. ... You stated Mr. President "Living by the principle that we are our brother's keeper. Caring for the poor and those in need. These values are old. They can be found in many denominations and many faiths, among many believers and among many non-believers. And they are values that have always made this country great." You make this statement yet you remove millions of dollars in federal aid from Catholic charities because they refuse to bow down to your demand that they send rape victims for mandatory abortions...

Mandatory abortions? I guess they must have been authorized by the Obamacare Death Panels when we weren't looking. Now, you might be tempted to dismiss the above drivel as just typical Internet raving. But that would be a mistake. For the fanatics of Old Time Religion, this is mainstream stuff. Here's Fox News regular Steven Crowder:

OK, you might say, this guy with his "Obama's Burning Taxpayer-Funded Incense To Whatever Pagan, Foreign Deity He's Worshiping" nonsense is just another attention-seeking rightwing rent-a-ranter. But it doesn't stop there. On the floor of the Senate, Orrin Hatch of Utah took up the cudgels to berate the president about the Gospels.

Short version: Hatch blasts the president for injecting a "tax-the-rich scheme" into the prayer breakfast, says the Gospels are concerned about "weightier matters," and cautions him to remember that only one person ever walked on water. Apparently, in today's GOP to even mention making a little financial sacrifice to help the poor is to compare yourself to the messiah. See for yourself.

Why are the reactions so venomous? The answer, I think, lies in an asymmetry of belief. For mainstream believers across the political spectrum, religion is an important but limited dimension of their lives. It fosters altruism, a sense of community and a reassurance of meaning in their lives.

The hotheads of the Christian Right have a completely different orientation to religion. Forget about charity, mercy or love. As far as they are concerned if Jesus said, "Blessed are the poor," he must have meant in the afterlife. As they see it, this life is all about war. Theirs is a tribal god who bears a remarkable resemblance to the angry, vengeful and often merciless Yahweh of old. The defenders of Old Time Religion see themselves in an existential fight to the finish with Satanic enemies. And clearly they believe that Satan's plan is to tax them into hell.

It is a worldview strangely detached from the Gospels. Otherwise, you might think that when President Obama says, "if I'm willing to give something up as somebody who's been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that's going to make economic sense. But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus's teaching that 'for unto whom much is given, much shall be required,'" it might ring true.

But then again, maybe that would come uncomfortably close to reminding them of something else Jesus is quoted as saying, in the Gospel of Matthew:

...for I was hungry, and ye gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in ... Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me.

Or this: "...sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

Or, worst of all, this: "Verily I say unto you, It is hard for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."

No, that will never do. Better book some TV preacher on Fox News to explain it all away.

Stanley A. Dashew: How to Succeed in Small Business Even During Hard Times

2012-02-08T23:32:35Z

I entered the job market at the height of the Great Depression, and launched my first business in 1950 -- five years after the end of World War II.

Points of reference: Boomers, this was before color TV and rock 'n' roll. Gen Xers, this was before video games and the Internet. Millennials, a "smart mob" would have been an oxymoron.

Since then, I have launched a half-dozen successful businesses and been responsible for a score of inventions (and more than 40 patents) in fields as diverse as credit card processing, mining, mass transit, medical equipment and off-shore oil transportation. I've also weathered a dozen recessions.

You could say that when it comes to free enterprise, I've been around the block. A few times.

My first piece of advice for those thinking about starting a small business: Don't wait. There's never a right time.

You might think that the current hard times would be the time to hunker and wait for the passing storm before testing your entrepreneurial mettle. Don't fool yourself. A tough economy can present as many opportunities for a great -- and profitable -- business idea as when the good times are rollin'.

Here, then, are my five sure-fire steps for becoming a successful entrepreneur, even during hard times:

1. Identify The Problem: What bothers you? I mean, what really grates on your nerves? Chances are, whatever the problem, others feel the same way. I made my first fortune in starting a company that automated the credit card industry, because paper cards were very problematic and really grated on the nerves of bankers.

Now, I knew nothing about high finance much less retail, but beginning in 1957 I began reading about new-fangled "charge cards" that some banks were beginning to offer their customers. And when I began talking to bankers who were offering the cards, what really bothered them was what they were made of: paper. The paper cards would tear and fray, and become difficult to read both at the merchant and bank-processing levels. Yep, I had an early Diner's Card made of paper and they were exactly right.

Rightly so, banks also were predicting a huge market for credit cards so they wanted a way to issue cards in large volume at low-cost and then be able to maintain faster files and accounts on the state-of-the-art technology at the time: IBM punch cards. Bing! Problem identified.

2. Find The Fix: In the case of credit cards, the solution was clear: Create durable credit cards with data lines such as account number and expiration dates, name, street, address, city and state.

Like the Dustin Hoffman character in the movie The Graduate, it was revealed to me that the answer to all my problems -- well, at least this one - was "plastic." I had to find a way of creating a plastic credit card. About that time, I had heard through my old contacts at Addressograph-Multigraph (the company that gave me my first job during the Great Depression), that a young man, Dunstan Sheldon, had come up with a plastic material that could be embossed upon. Fortunately for me, my ex-employer was sitting on the idea.

I tracked down the material, which hadn't been patented, and next, set to work devising a way to fulfill the banks' other requirement.

3. Connect The Dots: OK, problem identified. Check. Material (emboss-able plastic) found. Check. Now what about all that data processing the bankers were wanting for their customers' credit cards?

Here's where I had to really jump into the skin of a banker and see why this whole processing thing was so important to them. After doing more research, I learned that the flow of credit card paperwork began with the merchant at the point of sales. If that starting point couldn't be automated, the entire system would fall like a house of (credit) cards.

4. Gather The Troops: OK, I'm not an engineer, but I have some engineering genes in me. Also, I knew some very talented engineers. This is why it is so important to form strategic partnerships with people who have skills which you lack. I hired then to work with me on reproducing and embossing a keyboard embosser that embossed plastic credit cards with their name, account number, and expiration date. This machine was operated by punch cards, one for each customer. It was able to emboss 1,000 cards per hour. We also developed an imprinting machine which imprinted all the information on a plastic card, which was inserted into the imprinter and printed out all the info on the card, and was then signed by the customer.

These machines printed account numbers, dollar amount, merchant number and date onto a sales draft that could later be scanned and read by optical character readers. The results were not only faster but foolproof. The problem of human error -- caused by sales clerks writing down the wrong information or bank clerks misreading the right information -- was eliminated.

We used existing technology to build these machines. However, it was the application of this technology in a new way that met the bankers needs that proved decisive.

In 1958, Dashew Business Machines received an initial order from 300,000 BankAmericard plastic credit cards and 3,000 imprinters and 1 electronic Databosser to emboss the credit card information on the plastic credit card and from the IBM punch cards.

Here's the takeaway: When you lack the skills or experience to overcome a roadblock to your success, don't be afraid to ask -- you friends, family, existing clients, vendors or colleagues -- for help.

5. Roll With The Punches: Business looked good for Dashew Business Machines in 1958, if only all the players remained in place. Of course, they did not.

Joe, the Bank of America executive who had helped me secure my deal, was out. He lost his bid to be president and along with his departure, we were shown the door. And the final kick in the pants was that we had just ordered costly parts for 10,000 credit-card imprinters in anticipation of the millions of BankAmericards we were going to be making.

Rather than throw in the towel (and I did think about it, more than once), I eventually came up with what I thought was a pretty original strategy. I hired Joe, now newly unemployed, to find a way of creating an entirely new credit card that could be used nationwide -- an 'unheard of' concept at a time when bank charge cards, like banks themselves, were restricted by law to do business in only one state.

It was an enormous undertaking and truth be told, we never accomplished it. (The first "national" credit card would not emerge until 1966 with MasterCharge, which would later become MasterCard.) But something even better happened. While speaking with Chase Manhattan Bank (now Chase Morgan), Joe got us a deal to take over its failing charge card operations. Chase was, and is today, such a blue-chip brand name in the banking industry, that it was relatively easy to raise financing on Wall Street to cover the deal.

And here's the cherry on top: Soon, American Express came calling and bought the company we had created to handle the Chase operations. The deal called for cash and a generous amount of Amex stock. Within a year, following the successful conclusion of a lawsuit, Amex stock skyrocketed.

It was now 1965, and I was in the thick of the revolutionizing the financial habits of middle America. It was BIG and we knew it.

Matthew Bowman: 5 Things You Should Know About Mormonism

2012-02-08T22:10:17Z

1. What should I call them?

The official name of the church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is a mouthful. "Mormon," of course, is a nickname from the church's original work of scripture. However, a lot can be gleaned from looking at the church's official title. Mormons call themselves "The Church of Jesus Christ" because they believe that Jesus did in fact organize a church while he was on the earth, an institution with a priesthood and sacraments. Mormons call themselves "Latter-day Saints" to distinguish themselves from previous iterations of that church. As he believed there was too long to wait before Jesus's second coming, "Latter-day" seemed to Joseph Smith an appropriate distinction.

The term "saint" derives from the New Testament; Paul uses it to describe any believer.

2. Who are they?

Mormonism has been, from the beginning, a not particularly American religion. In the early 1840s, 10 years after he founded his church, Smith had nearly as many followers in Britain as he did in the United States, thanks to missionaries he sent to Europe. Not much has changed. There are more Mormons outside the United States than there are inside it, about 8 million of the church's 14 million members. Spanish is close to becoming the mother tongue of a plurality of Mormons in the world. This is one reason why the church's leadership has publicly resisted the harsh immigration laws popping up in Western states with a high Mormon population. At least one lay Mormon leader has been deported from Utah, and undocumented Mormons called as missionaries have occasionally been caught in visa and immigration nets.

3. Why are they so conservative?

That said, most Mormons in the United States -- two thirds, if the recent Pew survey of Mormons can be believed -- identify with the Republican party. This has been true for a long time; it was the Republicans, after all, who shepherded Utah along the path to statehood in the late 19th century.

More recently, the Mormons have, like other conservative religious groups, found issues like abortion, the sexual revolution or the feminist movement threatening to the traditional culture to which they had given religious imprimatur, and have accordingly become social conservatives. They deeply prize the idealized vision of the nuclear family that the 1950s bequeathed us. But deeper than these issues, near their bones Mormons have an instinctive distrust of the federal government. In part, this makes them typical Westerners, inheritors of the myth of the rugged individualists who settled the plains (although they settled Utah in part with financial assistance from the federal government). But it also derives from the experience of the 1880s, when federal marshals invaded Utah with a mandate to stamp out the practice of polygamy and arrested hundreds of Mormons -- for, the Saints believed, little more than practicing their religion.

4. What do they believe?

Nonetheless, it is a mistake to assume that Mormonism is a monolithic whole. Like any faith the Mormon tradition includes within it a wide range of theological opinion.

Most Mormons tend to be theologically conservative, the result of a lack of education as much as anything else. The church runs nothing like the seminaries of other faiths, and has no trained theologians. Thus, Mormons have remained insulated from the controversies over translation, historicity and redaction that undermined confidence in biblical authority in the past 200 years. It is commonly believed within Mormonism that Moses wrote the first five books of the Old Testament, that Jesus' miracles occurred precisely as the Bible describes, and that Adam and Eve were actual people. The church officially takes no stand on the question of evolution, but most lay Latter-day Saints are sympathetic to creationism. Mormons add to these their own particular orthodoxies: the historicity of the Book of Mormon's narrative of an ancient Christian civilization in the Americas, the veracity of Joseph Smith's divine call, and other such issues. Dissent or disagreement is often met with defensiveness, or, perhaps more precisely, puzzlement. Nonetheless, the number of Mormons with academic training in religious topics is growing, and more and more Mormons seek to bring their tradition into dialogue with modern biblical scholarship, history and theology.

The Mormon tradition also contains within it a number of churches who trace their legacy to Joseph Smith. The Community of Christ, the largest of these, claims some quarter of a million members, and the best known, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, tens of thousands. Both diverge rather radically from the LDS Church theologically -- the Community of Christ having proclaimed itself a "peace church" deeply committed to social justice and less so to theological literalism, and the FLDS Church holding to 19th century theology and practice the LDS Church has largely left behind.

5. What does it mean to be Mormon?

The LDS Church's active membership, according to a 2008 Pew survey, is 56 percent female and 44 percent male. This is somewhat more even than many other Christian churches, which may well be due to the church's lay leadership. The Mormon priesthood is restricted to men, and more, the church's organizational structure is deeply, if unconsciously, patriarchal. Victorian-era language crediting women with superior delicacy and spirituality and consequent lack of need for real leadership roles is common. However, both men and women are given frequent and demanding opportunities to work. Men serve in general leadership positions while women run a large women's organization and children's programs. On the local level, there is no professional clergy; all the jobs, from teaching Sunday school to leading the choir to preaching on Sunday, are taken up by lay members of the congregation. Most governance is done through small committees, a system that is the inheritance of a mid-20th century churchwide reorganization called "correlation," which drew its inspiration from the corporate world.

This church culture is simultaneously demanding, exhausting and, for some, hugely rewarding. It has largely shaped Mitt Romney's character: he has worked all his life for a church with international aspirations, a deeply bureaucratic leadership marked deeply by the starchy corporate culture of the 1950s, and a wildly complicated relationship with American society. For better or for worse, this is the inheritance he would bring to the White House.

Gavin Shulman: Abortion Shmashmortion: Defending Planned Parenthood

2012-02-08T22:09:09Z

So last week the Susan G. Komen Foundation decided (then fishily undecided) it would stop funding cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood because, apparently, Planned Parenthood is a very divisive issue in this country. I guess if you're going to be a parent, it is imperative you do not have a plan. You just have to go with it. No big deal. You'll figure it out along the way. Because, face it, you've got no other choice. We've officially reached a point where Planned Parenthood is a public menace, and unplanned parenthood gets you a show on MTV.

But obviously, captain, the war on Planned Parenthood is a proxy for the war on abortion. It doesn't matter what percentage of their services actually go to performing abortions, or mainly doesn't, they definitely do them. That's a fact. They provide abortions quickly, efficiently, affordably, and with only enough emotional strain to last a lifetime. But here's the thing I've never understood about the war on abortion -- who cares?

Is there some sort of baby shortage in America? Or more to the point, is there some sort of unwanted baby shortage? Last time I checked there were plenty of babies. My sister just had one. That family on TLC has 33 or so. Your friends that moved out of the city now have two. Celebrities pop them out like Pez. Daycare centers and Facebook are full of them. I feel like everywhere I look these days there's a baby. Crying. And annoying everyone else on the train.

You can literally have as many babies as you want. And there is literally nothing stopping you. Including sex. A nun could get pregnant if she was willing to pay the priest. Y'know, for his spermon. There is no law in this country prohibiting you from having a baby. Or 50. Or giving a few away. There is only a law that doesn't force you to have one. It's not that I'm pro-choice, it's that I'm anti-all-these-babies. Unless they're going to fix my spine.

Plus, they're just babies. It's not like they can do anything. They can't even walk. They just sit there and gurgle. What good does that do anyone? And even worse, they're other people's babies. Isn't that the most obnoxious kind? Who actually cares about someone else's baby? That's not Christian, it's creepy. That's not protective, it's perverse. That's not righteous, it's wrong. And weird. No one should take that keen an interest in someone else's baby. You should bop them on the nose, take a picture, and go about your day.

Don't get me wrong, I'm gonna love my baby. I love my sister's. I even love my friend's. I just don't care about yours. And I never will. No matter how many mini-movies you make. And I certainly don't care if you don't have one. I'd actually prefer you didn't. Because then if we ever met we might be able to talk in our outside voices. I promise you, I don't give a turd about your baby, even when I'm making you look at a picture of mine.

Yet, people do. Some people out there are very passionate about other people's babies. In fact, in simplest terms, Republican people are very passionate about non-Republican people's babies. Mitt Romney, for example, is "not concerned about the very poor" except, apparently, that they have babies. Presumably so they can be very poor, and he cannot concern himself with them as well. The fact that those who wage the war on abortion are the same that wage the war on the poor is more ironic than a steel beam.

But that's where we find ourselves. An organization that doesn't tell anyone whether to have a baby or not is under attack by the very people who want the government to get out of our lives. Conservatives are all for individual liberty, except when it comes to producing individuals. Which, ironically, they think should be done liberally. Planned Parenthood doesn't tell anyone whether to become a parent or not. Just as the Susan G. Komen Foundation doesn't tell anyone whether to get breast cancer or not.

I'm not here to defend abortion. In fact, I'm not here. I'm just a narrative voice. But I will use that voice to reiterate one point about abortion -- who cares? It's not your baby. And, really, it's not even a baby. But just as I can feed my baby go-go juice and have her dance in a diaper to win a crown, you can opt to not have a baby that could someday shill for stock-trading software. Yes, as humans we should care about one another. But let's wait on that caring until we're humans. We're not all God's children. We're our parent's children. And let's hope they have a plan for that.

Barbara Becker: The Swastika in Our Neighborhood

2012-02-08T21:33:22Z

Across the nation, anti-Semitic bias cases have been capturing news headlines. Last month, two men from Farmington, New Mexico were sentenced to time in federal prison for branding a swastika on the arm of a Navajo man who suffers from mental disabilities. Swastikas were found graffitied on storefronts and homes across the New York metropolitan area, and a teenager has been charged with throwing Molotov cocktails at a synagogue in New Jersey, igniting a fire in the residence of the rabbi and his family.

The recent rash in anti-Semitic incidents prompted many leaders to talk about the need to "speak up and condemn these vulgar crimes" and to "respond forcefully." But how do you respond to bias when you're with your young child, and the crime is in your own neighborhood?

I was recently faced with this question while walking with my eight-year-old son down a street near our home in downtown Manhattan. He was the first to spot it -- a purple swastika scrawled across the forehead of a man on a billboard advertising a cruise line.

"Isn't that a swastika?" he demanded, pointing.

"Yes -- it definitely is," I answered. "Where have you seen one before?"

"Raiders of the Lost Ark," he said, staring up at the graffiti.

I was quickly taking in the complexities of the situation and what to say next when he said sadly, "The person who did that hates me, and he doesn't even know me."

You don't have to be raising a Jewish child to understand the heartbreak in those words. As I took his hand and we continued on our way home, I told him a somewhat disjointed story about my own understanding of the swastika and what it stands for.

I told him about how confused I felt when I first saw an ancient swastika carved on a temple in Thailand in my post-college backpacking days. And how the symbol, which originally had a positive, sacred meaning in Hindu, Buddhist and other traditions, was turned on its side (literally) by the Nazis and became a mark of Aryan supremacy.

This led to a discussion of Hitler's view of a master race, which is pretty tough to explain to a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jewish child (a friend fondly refers to him as "the Jewish Viking"). I was careful not to alarm him, but I wanted to be accurate and honest.

I am admittedly not an historian nor an expert on current day hate symbols, but we seldom wear our professional hats when talking to our children anyhow. What I began to see was that he needed to have a of sense of control over what he had just seen. My telling him I was going to call the City's 311 hotline to report it wasn't going to be enough.

"So what do you want to do about the swastika?" I asked.

"Let's get a can of black spray paint and cover it over," he suggested.

"That might feel good," I said. "But wouldn't we be destroying something that doesn't belong to us?"

"We could put something good over it," he said thoughtfully.

I couldn't imagine what that could be, but listened anyhow. Sometimes a child's internal compass points them to their own true north, and it's best for us adults to get out of their way. Armed with colored paper and markers, he came up with this...

Which I lifted him up to tape on the billboard the following day...

Clearly this is just a beginning. Anti-Semitic acts will not vanish over night, and our conversations and responses will evolve with each passing day. But the important thing is to keeping talking and to always, always respond.

For more information:

The Anti-Defamation League has an on-line resource called Discussing Hate and Violence with your Children which includes advice from Dr. Donald J. Cohen, Director of Yale Child Study Center and Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics and Psychology at Yale University.

Barry Levinson: Don't Know Much About Oil

2012-02-08T21:16:04Z

I don't know much about the business world, I don't know much about economics. So you'll have to take what I say with a grain of salt. It's more about what I don't know than what I do know.

Here's my question: why does the gasoline price at the pump vary from day to day? You see this change on the signs. Suddenly it's up three cents. Up seven cents. Down four cents. It's always in flux. Why?

The answers we're always hearing are, "Government upheavals in the Middle East," or "Issues with super tankers." Or, "Nervous about the economic health of the global economy." All those issues may in fact be real, but why does the price of the oil at your nearby station suddenly jump at the first sign of oil company anxiety?

The oil at the gas station is sitting under the pump. It's been bought at a certain price. So why does it change daily, based on the fears of the oil company?

If you went into a car dealership and you were interested in some Buick at a given price, the salesman doesn't suddenly come in and say the Buick went up $36 today because they're having difficulty with supplying enough grills to the front of the car. They bought the car at a certain price, therefore they sell it at a certain price. Sometimes at a lower price. But one thing is for certain, the price of the Buick does not go up and down throughout the course of the week.

To take it one step further, the earthquake in Japan, which disrupted the entire Japanese auto industry, did not set off an uptick in the cost of a Nissan or Toyota or Honda. The oil industry doesn't need a natural disaster to actually happen though. Just their anxiety over the possible disruption of the Straits of Hormuz can cause the gas to increase in your neighborhood by four or five cents overnight.

Another analogy. You decide to go for a big purchase. You hear that art is a good investment. You gather your courage and you go to your local gallery. You see a painting, a Julian Schnabel that catches your attention. You're interested in it. You see the price. You wonder if you could afford it. Suddenly the gallery gets a phone call. "Schnabel has sprained his thumb on the hand that holds the brush. He may or may not be able to paint full time." Suddenly the gallerist quickly hangs up the phone, crosses the gallery, and increases the painting's cost by $183. "Why?" asks the potential buyer. The gallery man responds, "We have anxiety over Julian Schnabel's thumb."

And then the oil industry has the other gimmick they throw in there. Look carefully. Gas is $3.87.04. Or $3.87.05. It is the only commodity I know of that you pay a percentage of a penny on. You don't go for a Big Mac and it costs $3.37.03. Whatever is happening in the cattle markets, cows coming down with diseases or what have you, does not shake the price of the Big Mac or the Big Whopper or whatever Wendy's calls its beef patties on any given day. Same price. Every day. The fries do not fluctuate no matter what's going on in the potato world. Coke and Pepsi hold the price line. Nothing fluctuates daily in price like oil. And for whatever reason, we have accepted it.

One final thing: In your local area, why is all gasoline almost the exact same price? Exxon Mobil. BP. Shell. At the local pumps, almost identical price. Why is that? You would think one of them would be known as "The Low Price Oil Company." Their slogan: "The highest performance gasoline at the lowest price." As opposed to other types of companies, oil companies never have special sales. Never the "Winter Sell-Off." Never the "Spring Clearance." Never "The Back-to-School Sale." All other businesses have some kind of sale celebrations going on periodically. Not when it comes to oil.

Years ago there used to be price wars. One station undercutting another. But that's when real people used to own the gas stations. That's when hardworking men maintained their service station and provided services, like checking your tire pressure. Your oil. Cleaned your windows. Pumped your gas. And were happy to see you. And actually kept their toilets clean, just as a bonus. Just because they cared. That's when gas was probably around 29 cents a gallon at the pump.

Any way, these are just a few questions. Unfortunately, I have yet to find one intelligent answer. Or at least one that I can comprehend.

Marc Mauer: I Was Stopped, But Not Frisked

2012-02-08T21:09:09Z

Behind the searing light, a man yelled. "This is the police. Put your hands up."

I was only five minutes from home, walking through an unlighted stretch on my way to the community center to work out in my Silver Spring, Maryland, neighborhood, an MP3 of Stevie Wonder crooning in my ear. The light hit me in the face and I fumbled to turn down the music, but raised my hands.

Since I hadn't been able to get the music turned down, I foolishly reached in my pocket to try again, prompting a louder warning: "Get your hands up!"

The officer appeared out of the dark, shining the light beam in my face. All business, he said: "What are you doing out here?"

"I'm on my way to the community center," I said.

"Okay," he said. "Move on."

A few minutes later, I was inside the center walking on the treadmill when the officer walked in.

"You shouldn't be walking around in the dark, listening to music," he said. "You're an easy mark for an attack."

I explained that I'd lived in my multi-cultural neighborhood for two decades. I felt comfortable.

He looked around the center. "Did you see some kids running up the hill?"

I hadn't and told him so. He said that as he had approached them in the parking lot, but they ran away from him. He chased them up the hill, but they got away again. The officer didn't say that the kids had done anything wrong, only that they ran away from him.

He never said so, but I can't help but believe that the kids in question were African American. That's who plays basketball at the community center and that's who congregates in the parking lot. So the problem seemed to be that black kids ran away from a (white) cop.

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem terribly surprising to me.

I happen to be the executive director of a national criminal justice reform organization, but I'm also a middle-aged white guy. We all know that lots of privileges go along with that status, but I was reminded of it by my encounter with this officer. Just the thought of what might have happened without that white privilege the second time I foolishly put my hand back in my pocket to try to turn off the music gives me chills.

It's hardly a secret that the relationship between African American communities and law enforcement over many years has been fraught with conflict. From the old days of station-house beatings to get a confession to today's "stop and frisk" practices in New York City, an awful lot of mistrust has been engendered.

Much has changed in recent years, of course. It's not unusual anymore to have a person of color as chief of police and many jurisdictions are doing an admirable job of collecting racial data on police activity to head off any inappropriate behavior by law enforcement agents. This is all very encouraging. But at the same time, we shouldn't be surprised that some of the long-term animosity between police and communities of color hasn't dissipated. So, while I have no idea whether the kids in the parking lot were doing anything wrong, I can certainly imagine the thought process that might have led them to run from the police.

My encounter also reminds me of the racial dynamics I see in the justice system overall. For many years I've delivered a guest lecture each semester at a Washington-area college class on criminal justice. Most of the students in the class are white. In discussing drug policy, I survey them informally regarding their experiences by asking how many of their friends use drugs, have been arrested for doing so, or are currently incarcerated on a drug offense. Every hand goes up on drug use, a few for the arrest question, and hardly any for the prison issue. When I then ask why there is so little criminal justice intervention when the campus is seemingly overrun with drug users, they show great sophistication in analyzing these dynamics. They recognize that as a community, we have an investment in their future and we generally can count on them to graduate from college and enter the ranks of the productive middle class. Thus, we're all better off acknowledging that these are "youthful indiscretions."

I can't disagree with such a response, or lack thereof, by the criminal justice system. But I'm quite troubled by the responses I get to these same questions when I speak to a group of mostly African American students, where all hands remain raised for all three questions. As long as we maintain a two-tiered system for public safety -- harsh punishments for some, second chances for others -- the prospects for achieving a full democratic society will be quite troubling.

Radley Balko: The New Panic Over Prescription Painkillers

2012-02-08T20:47:54Z

"I don't want to be doped up all the time," says Mary Maston. "I want to be able to function. I have to be able to function for my kids. But the pain prevents me from doing so."

In 2008, Maston, 37, was diagnosed with Medullary Sponge Kidney, a congenital disorder that causes her to form large, painful kidney stones. She has since had three lithotripsy surgeries, all of which she says were unsuccessful, and has had to be hospitalized to drain the blood from her kidneys. She has also been diagnosed with stage two Chronic Kidney Disease.

For the first few years after her diagnosis, Maston lived in Tennessee. There, she says, "my doctor was pretty good about writing me a prescription for pain medication when I needed one." But in March 2011, Maston and her family moved to Florida to be closer to her husband's family, and her condition worsened. Florida doctors, she says, were much less willing to prescribe the level of medication she needed. In September, the daily pain from her condition forced her to quit her job. She says she's been to the emergency room seven times in the last eighth months, all due to overwhelming pain.

"I always wait until the last possible second, until the pain is so unbearable I am in tears and can't walk," Maston says. "I have a background in Human Resources, so I know [ER visits] drive up everyone's insurance costs. My husband literally carries me to the car to get me to the ER. This is no way to live."

Maston's many ailments are exacerbated by a purely man-made condition. Patients with high cholesterol levels are used to dealing only with their doctor, and not with law enforcement officials, because Lipitor can't get you high. Pain patients, meanwhile, are in the drug war's crosshairs.

____________________________________________________________________________ HuffPost readers: Do you live with chronic pain and face difficulty getting proper medical treatment? Email radley.balko@huffingtonpost.com and include a phone number if you're willing to be interviewed. ____________________________________________________________________________

The most recent campaign against opioid painkillers began last year, when media outlets began reporting an apparent climb in overdose deaths in the state of Florida. As with the scare in the early 2000s (see part one of this series), politicians and law enforcement officials scrambled to action, promising new laws and policies to dry up the state's supply of oxycodone. By one estimate, more than twice as many oxycodone pills were prescribed in Florida as the next closest state. Governor Rick Scott signed laws imposing tighter regulations on physicians and pharmacies, testing requirements for patients, limits on overall supply of the drugs, and dedicating more money to law enforcement to fight the alleged epidemic.

Over the last year, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has put out several similar alarming reports using the same term, epidemic, claiming a three-fold increase in opioid painkiller overdose deaths across the country since 1999. The agency has compared overdose deaths to traffic fatalities (which have been falling steadily for several decades). The CDC believes the significant increase in opioid painkiller prescriptions over the last 10 years is to blame for these deaths, writing in one report, "The unprecedented rise in overdose deaths in the US parallels a 300% increase since 1999 in the sale of these strong painkillers."

But at the same time, studies also consistently show that chronic pain is tragically undertreated in the U.S. (and around the world). Last June, an Institute of Medicine report called undertreated pain a "public health crisis" that affects 116 million Americans, and costs the economy around a half-trillion dollars per year in medical bills and lost productivity. The same month, three pain-related articles in the Lancet focusing on post-operative, cancer related, and non-cancer related pain, respectively, found mass undertreatment in all three areas. The journal ran an an accompanying editorial pointing to another study from Human Rights Watch showing that the problem is global, and more because of bad policy than because of a supply. In one recent study of 40 countries, 27 didn't consume enough opioid drugs to treat even 1 percent of patients with terminal cancer or HIV/AIDS. " Furthermore," the editorial added, "in 33 of 40 countries, governments had imposed strict restrictions on prescribing morphine, beyond the requirements of UN drug conventions to prevent misuse."

So what's going on? How can we be facing an epidemic of overdose deaths wrought by too many prescriptions for painkillers and, at the same time, be facing a public health crisis of undertreated pain? There are a couple of explanations. The first involves taking a more skeptical look at the numbers the government is touting related to alleged abuse and overdose deaths. The other is to examine how both claims can be simultaneously accurate, and why.

The Government Makes Its Case for a Crisis

The CDC (along with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)) throws out a number of statistics in making the case for a crisis of painkiller abuse. The first and probably most alarming involves the overdose figures. According to the CDC, painkiller-related overdose deaths have swelled from 4,000 per year in 1999 to nearly 15,000 per year in 2008. The CDC also reports, "The misuse and abuse of prescription painkillers was responsible for more than 475,000 emergency department visits in 2009, a number that nearly doubled in just five years." Most government agencies also classify "abuse" of painkillers as any "non-medical" use, which means any use of a painkiller other than that for which it was prescribed.

But both these figures don't actually mean what they're commonly understood to mean. The emergency room data, for example, is taken from the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), which compiles the data from the information emergency room patients give to their doctors. Marijuana reform activists have long been critical of how the government manipulates these figures. The government counts any drug a patient mentions having taken, regardless of whether taking the drug is the reason why the patient is in the emergency room. It's possible that painkillers sent twice as many people to emergency rooms in 2009 as in 2004, but it's also possible that a good percentage of that increase is simply due to the fact that more people are taking painkillers, and that therefore any given person in an emergency room--for whatever reason--is more likely to mention having recently taken a painkiller. So you twist your ankle in a pick-up basketball game. A relative gives you a Percocet they have left over from an old dental surgery to help with the pain. The injury continues to swell, so you visit the emergency room. The government would likely count this as a painkiller-related emergency room incident.

There are similar questions about the overdose figures. In his 2006 Cato Institute paper "Treating Doctors as Drug Dealers: The DEA's War on Prescription Painkillers," Ron Libby explains how determining overdose deaths is often a guessing game. Back in 2001, Libby notes, the DEA concluded that there were 464 "Oxycontin-related" deaths in 2000 and 2001 based on reports from 750 medical examiners across the country. But Libby points out that "Oxycontin-related" merely means that the drug was present in an apparent overdose death. If the drug was found in the gastrointestinal tract, it was determined to be a Oxycontin-verified death. Mere mentions of the drug by family members, or its presence at the death scene, were also enough to count the death as verified. Libby notes that in 40 percent of the deaths in the DEA study, the deceased had also consumed anti-anxiety drugs like Valium, 30 percent had taken anti-depressants, and 15 percent had consumed cocaine.

Libby continues:

"Indeed,the March 2003 issue of the Journal of Analytical Toxicology found that of the 919 deaths related to oxycodone in 23 states over a three-year period, only 12 showed confirm evidence of the presence of oxycodone alone in the system of the deceased. About 70 percent of the deaths were due to 'multiple drug poisoning" of other oxycodone-containing drugs in combination with Valium-type tranquilizers, alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, and/or other narcotics and anti-depressants."

According to the headline-generating CDC report released last November, there were 36,450 overdose deaths overall in 2008. Of those, 74.5 percent specified one or more drugs that were involved in the death. Of those, 73.8 percent involved "one or more" prescription drugs. And of those, 73.8 percent (oddly enough) involved prescription opoids. That likely means that in a high percentage of overdoses attributed to opioids, other prescription drugs were present. In one study of 295 overdose deaths in West Virginia, 80 percent had multiple "contributing" drugs in their system.

The drug that has shown the biggest jump in contributing to overdose deaths over the last 10 years is methadone, which is used not just for pain relief, but also as treatment for heroin addicts. Methadone stays in the body longer than commercial opioid painkillers, meaning that without careful attention, it's more likely to lead to an overdose. But it's possible that government policy more than careless doctors has driven any rise in methadone overdoses. Last December, the Seattle Times ran an investigative series on the use of methadone in the state. The paper found that state policies for patients who use government-subsidized health care strongly encouraged doctors to prescribe methadone over more expensive brand-name opioids. The result: Methadone made up only 10 percent of opioid prescriptions, but contributed to over half the state's overdose deaths. The drug was prescribed a third as often as OxyContin, but was three times more likely to contribute to an overdose death. If there has been a spike in overdose deaths, it may as much due to states trying to save money than to doctors who are too loose with the prescription pad.

There's also reason to suspect the raw overdose statistics in and of themselves. Dr. Steven Karch, who has written a widely used textbook on drug abuse and pathology, says because tolerance for opioids can vary so much from person to person, there's no scientific way to definitively say that a death was caused by an opioid overdose. "There are plenty of people walking around with levels of opioids in their bodies that would be declared toxic if they were dead on a slab in a medical examiner's office," Karch says. "Toxicology is the least important part of making a diagnosis."

In other words, many of the deaths classified as overdoses in recent years may in fact have been caused by something else, but were called overdoses simply because the decedent had what appeared to be an abnormal amount of opioids in his system. Karch adds that opium levels can appear more concentrated after death, and can even vary depending on the part of the body from which the sample is taken. It's true that more people than ever are getting prescriptions for opioid painkillers. And as they take them, most people need to titrate up as they build up tolerance. That means a higher percentage of people who die today--of any cause--will have opioids in their systems at the time of death. That doesn't mean they died of an opioid overdose, or even a drug overdose. Many chronic pain patients suffer from a variety of other ailments; it's often those other ailments that cause the pain.

"I don't know where they got their numbers," Karch says of the CDC estimates. "There's no peer review of those figures. You follow the footnotes, and it looks like they're getting the information from medical examiners. But it doesn't say how the medical examiners are concluding that these were overdoses--if, say, they're just relying on toxicology results." Asked if that's usually how overdoses are diagnosed Karch says, "That fits my experience." That the government is using questionable overdose diagnoses in formulating public policy is bad enough, but it's particularly troubling when you consider that some physicians have been charged with manslaughter, even murder, because prosecutors used the same indicators to argue that the painkiller prescriptions caused a patient's overdose death.

The are other reasons to be cautious about the CDC's alarms. For example, look at Figure 2 of this report. Between 1999 and 2006 overdose deaths from cocaine increased at about the same rate as those from prescription opioids. Over that same period, the percentage of youth using cocaine dropped dramatically. The percentage of adults who had used cocaine in the last month stayed about the same. And the number who admitted to using the drug in the last year increased slightly (from 1.7 percent to 2.1 percent, but enough to explain a doubling in overdose deaths), but the number reporting cocaine addiction was down. This suggests that the increases could be due more to changes in methodology, or more awareness and willingness to look and screen for overdose deaths. It could also mean that people who use illicit drugs like cocaine are more likely to use painkillers recreationally because they're more available. But the fact that cocaine-related overdoses have increased at the same rate as opioid-related cuts against the theory that there's been a surge in legitimate pain patients overdosing and dying on painkillers.

Despite the scare stories about teenagers increasingly experimenting with prescription drugs to get high, according to the 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health,"non-medical use" of prescription painkillers in the last year among people aged 12 to 25 has actually dropped since 2002. The same report says overall painkiller "abuse or dependence" is up over the same period, but as explained in part one of this series, "abuse" doesn't necessarily mean using the drug to get high, and "dependence" isn't the same thing as addiction. But the government doesn't make that distinction.

Abuse and Under-Treatment

For all the flaws in the data behind the most recent prescription painkiller scare, there's no question that that many, many more people are taking them than ever before. It's also likely that plenty of opioid painkillers are making their way to addicts and drug dealers. There are likely more overdose deaths now than in years past, even if there may not be as many as the government claims. Even the most strident advocates for pain patients concede that there are an increasing number of unscrupulous doctors and "pill mills" writing scripts for patients they haven't adequately examined. So how can there be such an abundant supply of painkillers, yet still such a shortage of pain treatment?

The answer lies in some of the government's own data. From a recent CDC "Policy Impact Brief:"

Most prescription painkillers are prescribed by primary care and internal medicine doctors and dentists, not specialists. Roughly 20% of prescribers prescribe 80% of all prescription painkillers.

But the reason so few painkillers are prescribed by pain specialists is likely that after a decade of policies targeting doctors with costly investigations and criminal charges, there simply aren't many conscientious pain specialists left. In his paper for Cato, Ron Libby includes multiple warnings from palliative care specialists that this was exactly what was happening. In 2003, for example, David Brushwood, who is both an attorney and a professor at the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, told the Decatur News that physicians once had a cordial relationship with drug cops--that if a doctor suspected a patient was diverting, he would cooperate with the police to turn in the patient. But for the DEA, doctors became high-profile targets, and thanks to asset forfeiture, lucrative targets as well. Since the DEA campaign, Brushwood said, the cops "watch as a small problem becomes a much larger problem . . . [then] they bring the SWAT team in with bulletproof vests and M16s . . . with charges [of] murder and manslaughter."

After a series of high-profile prosecutions of doctors, one pain specialist told the Wall Street Journal in 2004, "I will never treat pain patients again." Another told Time, "I tend to underprescribe instead of using stronger drugs that could really help my patients. I can't afford to lose my ability to support my family. The Village Voice reported in 2003 that medical schools had begun advising students, "not to choose pain management as a career because the field is too fraught with legal dangers."

Federal prosecutors compared pain specialist William Hurwitz to the Taliban. Other prosecutors and DEA officials have over the years compared doctors to drug kingpins, and likened doctors' offices to crack houses. Some doctors were subjected to SWAT raids on their offices, and had all of their assets seized before trial, making it difficult for them to put on an adequate defense. Prosecutors have called press conferences in which they held up big bags of pills the doctor allegedly prescribed, eliminating all context, and effectively convicting those doctors in the press.

At the same time these high-profile investigations and prosecutions have been going on, the federal government has provided no safe zone for what is and isn't an acceptable way to treat pain with opioids. In fact, they've deliberately blurred the line between acceptable pain management and felonious criminal behavior. In August 2004, for example, the DEA posted a set of pain management guidelines on its website. The guidelines were the product of a three-year collaboration between the agency, several health care organizations, and specialists in the pain management community. They were intended to put at ease doctors and patients who worried that the agency's heavy-handedness was casting a chill over pain treatment. Three months later, the DEA removed the guidelines from its website. The DEA offered no explanation, but the likely reason is that William Hurwitz, the pain specialist the federal government was prosecuting in a high-profile trial at the time (see part one), was seeking to using the guidelines in his defense. The guidelines were replaced with an interim statement that emphasized enforcement.

The message was clear. There would be no safe harbor in which pain specialists could operate with worrying about an investigation. There would be no guidelines, and no set policy. What was and wasn't criminal would be decided on an ad hoc basis, worse yet, what was criminal versus what was acceptable medical practice would be determined not by other medical professionals, but by drug cops and federal prosecutors.

The DEA's move was so disconcerting that the National Associations of Attorneys General sent the agency a letter signed by 30 state attorneys general expressing alarm at the revocation of the guidelines, warning that the new policy would "have a chilling effect on physicians engaged in the legitimate practice of medicine."

But there was and still is a big demand for these drugs. And there's a big supply of them. That has opened a niche for less reputable, less conscientious doctors to open the pill mills and strip mall pain clinics that have sprung up, outfits that dispense hundreds of prescriptions per day. Even the legitimate, careful pain specialists who choose to risk their careers in order to continue to treat pain patients are likely to be overwhelmed with people needing treatment, again making them prime targets for investigation. The successful management of chronic pain requires careful treatment by attentive doctors. The DEA and federal prosecutors gone a long way to prevent that from happening. Instead, patients get rushed care from inattentive doctors, which is not only less effective, not only more likely to cause drugs to end up in the hands of dealers, it's also dangerous for patients.

Florida's New Law

Lawmakers and law enforcement officials have responded to a crisis created by bad policy with more potent versions of the same bad policy. Even if these new restrictions on how doctors can prescribe pain medication do reduce the amount of the drugs that make it to the streets, addicts and dealers will merely turn to other prescription drugs, or to street drugs. Pain patients don't have that option. (Pain patients could turn to street heroin, but that isn't exactly a desirable outcome.)

Since the new Florida legislation took effect, the pain patient Mary Maston says, "My doctors here very rarely prescribe any type of pain medicine for me, and on the few occasions they do it is for 15 pills. The last time I went to the ER, which was in January, the doctor wrote one for 20 pills, and said that is the maximum the state will allow. When they are gone, they are gone, and I am left to suffer until the pain gets so bad I am forced back to the ER."

Pain patients in Florida and across the country are often asked to regular drug tests, which they or their insurance are required to pay for, even if they have no history of drug abuse. The few good pain doctors left often err on the side of caution, understandably fearing a possible career ending investigation. Some require patients to sign a contract promising not to see any other doctors for treatment, even if that doctor concludes that they aren't really in pain. Patients must see their specialist each month to get their prescriptions refilled (assuming they can find one to treat them), and must pay for an office visit each time. There's only a short window to act between the time one prescription runs out and they're legally allowed to obtain a new one. Patients say they're made to feel like addicts. "I'm afraid they have labeled me as a 'drug seeker,'" Maston says.

According to Dr. Albert Ray, president of the Florida Academy of Pain Medicine, the recently enacted Florida law is already having unintended secondary effects, as the major players in pain care show extra caution in deference to the current political climate, which can again leave patients in the lurch. "Baptist Hospital in Miami, one of the best hospitals in town, has a spine care program, with excellent pain doctors directing it," Ray says. "They have decided, however, that they do not want chronic pain patients who need to be maintained on medications." (Ray emphasized that his opinions for this article are his own, and not necessarily those of any organization with which he is affiliated.)

Ray says medication distributors are also limiting the supplies of painkillers they send to pharmacies, and pharmacies have responded to the latest panic with their own new policies. "Some pharmacies, CVS in particular, are now deciding how much medication a patient is allowed to have, not the doctor," Ray says. "These pharmacies won't announce the criteria that they use, but they are sending doctors letters that they will no longer fill their prescriptions for controlled substances. This creates another hurdle for patients."

But it's hard to blame the pharmacies. Even as Ray and pain patients say they're presenting a new hurdle to pain treatment, last week the DEA shut down four Florida pharmacies that the agency says were filling prescriptions they should have recognized were suspicious or fraudulent. More disturbing, the agency also attempted to revoke the license of the drug wholesaler that supplied those pharmacies, a move that threatens to interrupt the supply of medication to 2,500 pharmacies across the south. Any patient who gets controlled medication from those pharmacies could be affected, not just pain patients. (A federal judge has stopped the suspension until a hearing next week.)

Law enforcement agencies have created a system where doctors, pharmacists, manufacturers, and wholesalers have been forcibly deputized to police one another. Given the severity of the penalty--loss of livelihood, even prison time--the overwhelmingly prevailing incentive is to err on the side of control, to halt distribution and report the slightest of suspicions. Some towns and counties in Florida have gone even further, passing yet more restrictions, many of which Ray says, "would bring legitimate pain care to a grinding halt on a day to day functional level."

Ray says pill mills and unscrupulous doctors are definitely a problem, but the reaction to them is not only excessive, it overshoots its intended target. "All legitimate doctors want to stop drug diversion and abuse and to close down the pill mills that are violating good medical practice principles for the sake of their greed," Ray says. "But these restrictions are costing the majority of legitimate patients and doctors much frustration, fear, time, energy, and discomfort."

But in that sense Florida's new law is really no different the laws that have come before it that have been aimed at controlling drugs with a legitimate medical purpose. The controlling abuse side of the ledger takes priority, even when it means restricting access to the drug for the patients who need it.

"We need to view this through the lens that the patient comes first--what they need, and what the best ways are to get it to them," Ray says. "How to get the system to respond in that way remains a frustrating problem."

Mary Maston just wishes the war would be fought elsewhere. "Just because there are people out there that abuse prescription drugs," she says, "that doesn't mean everyone should be punished for it."

(This is the second part of a three-part series.)

Bruce Ackerman: How Congress Can Overrule Citizens United

2012-02-08T20:11:24Z

Refusing to give his Republican opponents an edge, President Obama has just blessed a Super PAC to rally his own billionaires for election year combat. While it's only natural for him to maintain parity, the president should also call upon Congress to pass a statute that forces the Supreme Court to reconsider its extreme position in Citizens United.

It's a mistake to treat Justice Kennedy's opinion for the Court as written in stone. To the contrary, Kennedy explicitly says that it "surely" would be a "cause for concern" if "elected officials succumb to improper influences from independent expenditures." He simply found that Congress hadn't established that improper influence was a real problem, and even suggested that he would give "due deference" to such a finding.

The president should call on the House and Senate to take up Kennedy's invitation. Congress no longer needs to speculate on how "independent" Super PACs, controlled by each candidate's loyalists, might degrade our politics. The latest figures already show Super PACs allied with Republican presidential candidates have collected $70 million -- almost half the $155 million the candidates have collected on their own. In the cases of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, the "independent" Super-PAC is the dominant financial player. If Mitt Romney fails to win a clear majority by the time he gets to Tampa, the financial backers of these minority candidates will have real weight in defining the deal that puts Romney over the top. With Obama joining the fray, Super PACs will be playing a very large role in the general election as well.

While this is inevitable, the president should call for a statute that urges the Supreme Court to make this the last election that lurches toward plutocracy. Congress should pass a law that puts the Court on notice of emerging realities. After formally finding the facts, the statute should grant the Attorney General standing to urge the judiciary to issue a declaratory judgment repudiating Citizens United in the light of changed conditions.

Congress has used this strategy before. Section Ten of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 took aim at the Breedlove case, in which the Supreme Court had squarely upheld the poll tax in federal elections. Section Ten responded by finding, after lengthy hearings, that the tax "imposes unreasonable financial hardship" and "precludes persons of limited means from voting." It then directed the Attorney General to urge the Justices to overrule Breedlove in the light of its factual findings. On signing the act, President Johnson followed through, announcing that "tomorrow at 1 p.m., the Attorney General has been directed to file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the poll tax."

The strategy proved remarkably successful. While lower courts generally treat Supreme Court precedent as binding, the Justice Department used the Congressional findings to convince the courts of appeal to ignore Breedlove and declare the poll tax unconstitutional. The Supreme Court then dealt the final blow by declaring all poll-taxes unconstitutional in its landmark decision of Harper v. Board of Elections. The Court announced its decision just as the Section ten cases were reaching its docket. But its great turnaround cannot be understood without recognizing the role of Congress and the president in shifting the terms of the constitutional debate. (See the detailed study by Bruce Ackerman and Jennifer Nou, Canonizing the Civil Rights Revolution: The People and the Poll Tax, 103 Nw. U. L. Rev 63 (2009).)

Congress should take the same path today. Perhaps the five judge majority in Citizens United will be unimpressed by Congress' statement of real-world facts, and its assessment of the dangers of pervasive corruption that lie ahead.

But perhaps not. It is very likely that Justice Kennedy simply didn't predict the revolutionary implications of his decision. While constitutional revolutionaries like Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia might dismiss Congressional findings, Justice Kennedy is of a Burkean disposition -- attentive to the facts, and reluctant to endorse radical change. If given the opportunity, he may well lead the Court to rethink Citizen's United basic premises.

It is in nobody's interest to see the Court's legitimacy damaged as Super PACs increasingly erode Americans' fundamental commitment to democracy. The Court should be given a second-chance to engage in a collaborative effort with the president and Congress to define the meaning of free speech after confronting the hard truths of American politics.

Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres are professors of law at Yale, and the authors of Voting with Dollars: A New Paradigm for Campaign Reform.

Gregory Ferenstein: A Conference That Entertains, Inspires and Has Impact: Summit Series

2012-02-08T19:40:00Z

"Davos has the older generation of world-changing people and I think Summit has the people who are going to change the world in the next 30 years," says Leila Janah, CEO of Samasource, who flew in early from the elite gathering in Switzerland to join her peers in Tahoe for the annual Summit Series conference. In just four years, an invite to the breakout annual conference has become a coveted opportunity for emerging leaders in business, art, and government to co-mingle with their peers in adventurous activities and dream up ways to solve pressing social issues.

The idea of Summit is that a friend is more valuable than a colleague, both professionally and personally. The eclectic mix of activities and talks, from shark tagging on a private island to small lectures from the likes of Bill Clinton, encourage participants to discuss ideas, not interests. The result is a conversation more focused on impacting others, more comfortable exploring latent goals, and a greater willingness to offer prized personal resources.

The pricey ticket and elite gathering allows Summit to spend the whole year dreaming up an unusually ambitious conference, and fully stock the weekend for an immersive experience.

Experience

"Intimacy is accelerated through vulnerability," says Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone. Summit Series, he says, has found the sweet spot of unorthodoxy and appeal, which helps get participants out of their normal shell. From rebuilding coral reefs to lucid dreaming classes, memorable experiences build far stronger bonds than a handshake and business card swap. This year's Summit in Squaw Valley, Tahoe was no exception. Technology CEOs walked out of custom-built mountain top night club, sweat drenched and laughing with federal bureaucrats. Social entrepreneurs swapped videos of their close encounter with a mountain lion during an interactive lecture on the fragility of local wildlife. Little shop-talk was recognizable as participants shared stories about snowboarding, falconry classes, and a lecture on rebuilding public education.

"Its been a transformative thing for me personally and professionally" says Shervin Pishevar, a social gaming pioneer and influential Silicon Valley investor.

In my own experience at Summit Series, conversation is more professional than personal. But, there is an unusually strong drive to be as inclusive as possible in conversations, and for those conversations to be much longer and more personal. At the end of three days, I returned with more business cards than Facebook friend requests, but certainly more of both than I usually do at a conference.

Service

Social impact is ubiquitous at each Summit Series conference, from activities to lectures. A top-notch political communications consultant led a seminar on how to advance gay rights, activities, such as falconry, educates participants on environmental issues, and auctions, such as a trip to build clean water wells in Ethiopia with Charity: Water, try to inspire life-long service. As such, nearly every hand-picked attendee, from directors at Fortune 500 companies to keynote speakers, such as Richard Branson, must have a charitable history.

Interestingly, the charitable orientation begets more charity. One attendee Joe Mahon unexpectedly raised $35,000 when Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh dared him to shave his head at the makeshift barbershop. Mahon countered offered that he would shave his locks if Hsieh donated to Movember, a prostate cancer charity. Hsieh agreed to match up to $10,000, which inspired a viewing party that raised nearly four times his initial offer.

Style

Frequent conference-goers have become all-too familiar with bland hotel carpet patterns and convention stadium lighting. At this most recent Summit Series, the organizers bought out most Squaw Valley Tahoe so that they could build two dance clubs (one at the top of a mountain), turn a meeting room into a Yoga studio, and construct a geodesic dome for IMAX-style movies.

The walls were refitted with custom art, including the designs of Lumi, founded by a young female industrial engineer who created a new type photo-receptive die. Jessica Genet's innovation permits images to be superimposed on any service (including couches and canvass).

A life-size, hand-painted infographic by Jane Kim of a marine zone that Summit Series had raised money to protect also adorned the walls.

Across from the lobby, a secret speakeasy was constructed, complete with early 20th century instruments. The entrance was in-closed with a lifelike broom closet, staffed with vest-fitted bartenders and whiskey-tasting teachers.

Despite a few gripes about isolated instances of lackluster lectures, every single participant I spoke to raved about their experience. The usually high reviews could be expected from a corporation dedicated to producing one conference all year-long. Last year, Summit Series was on a private cruise. This year, Summit bought out a ski resort. If the trend continues, next year should raise the bar again on what a group dedicated to one event all year can accomplish.

Shen Tong: Lessons Learned From #OWS

2012-02-08T19:28:06Z

The American public has been curious, interested, and at times confused about Occupy Wall Street since its birth last fall, and especially given the recent perceived tactics in Oakland. They've watched with some fascination and some uncomfortableness a series of social, political and organizational experiments unfolding in the middle of a widespread, if not yet very large-scale, protest movement. Most well-known have been the general assembly with a set of unique facilitation procedures and hand signs which became somewhat iconic, the poetic and effective people's mic, emphasis on being leaderless with the intent to set the lowest possible entry barrier for everyone to get involved, emphasis on non-conventional demands with the intent that all demands are possible through changes of laws and votes only when we change enough hearts and minds, and militant non-violent civil disobedience. These and many others have been lessons for me about values and about code of conduct, and ultimately about beliefs of which I have been reminded sometimes, and challenged at other times.

Lession No. 1: I am because we are -- a civic revival

Coming from collective cultures of both traditional Chinese culture, and the violent modern implant of the communist revolution, being individualist had saved me from "conventional wisdom" and "hive mind" when our society had gone through the madness of the Cultural Revolution, rampant government corruption, and heartless gold rush. My individualism has faced a surrealist challenge coming to America after I was exiled from China. The extreme individualist in Nietzsche's superman with willpower, or more directly the influential Ayn Rand, seem to have so successfully produced the myth of a corrupt version of the American Dream. Instead of an America being the land of the free and equal opportunity; the myth tells American youth that even though billionaires are few, and getting fewer and richer, in fact, you can be one of them tomorrow.

Joe the Plumber did not have a business that makes over $250,000 a year; he was making $40,000. But why someone like him would worry about higher tax for $250,000 earner and above? I don't know Joe the Plumber, or the McCain metaphor. but I have known similar behavior and speech. I think many like him sincerely believe that given some hard work and a little bit of luck, only the sky is the limit for their personal wealth accumulation, if only the government does not get into the way of the magic of a free market that self-regulates.

This extreme individualist triumph measured almost exclusively by monetary success has more than one cause, chief among which is the decline of the collective and the decline of the commons. This myth is not just a daydream, but a nightmare when it fosters a culture of political apathy. The apathy I speak of here is not lack of political ambition -- there is plenty of that in extreme individualism and elitism. The apathy is the decline and even distrust of civic virtue as a participatory common citizen, as seen in our low voter turnout, and as seen in almost complete lacking of sustained grassroots mobilization to tackle the worst problems with broad impact this country has faced.

When I first stepped into Zuccotti Park last fall, I immediately felt that the magic was in the communal participation. It's the communal connection, not so much who these individual occupiers were before the movement that was inspiring, that was transformative, and that was even transcending. I had thought, on my way over there, that with a life of experience in social movement and philosophical deliberation about what constitutes a just society, I've had a lot to teach the first-time young activists. Instead, I quickly realized that I had little to teach the movement. (The only speech I've made at Occupy Wall Street eventually was to repeat the most successful and inspiring memes of OWS to Liberty Plaza occupiers on Thanksgiving Day 2011.) I had realized the power of the park is for anyone who cares to go there to have a conversation about our common problems and shared future (and doing so in a way outside the current system symbolically and physically -- this is another lesson to be discussed separately). I have noticed that there are many others who have more profound ideas than I, and more thorough understanding about movement tactics, and about the sophistication of the policy, legislative, and electoral issues. I've also noticed that so many of them are eager to teach the occupiers the best thing the occupiers should do. There are many more well-meaning, politically conscious people who didn't come to the park, but wish that occupiers come up with solutions that fit nicely in their comfort zone. To them, the movement is only meaningful and mature if OWS carries out this or that demand and agenda.

I have buried the lede with this long rambling. I'm one of the early converted who felt that "to step up and occupy with fellow citizens" is a clear enough demand for now, and should be the most important demand for the foreseeable future.

The movement has called for communal conversations in hundreds of American cities to successfully shift national dialogue from hypocritical austerity discussion to social and economic fairness, and achieved a moral high ground that's rarely associated with political campaigns. The fact that all of these took place in a short two to three months' time has not been enough for the broader population who are curious, interested, or even supportive of OWS to feel connected, a challenge for the movement if OWS is to build a broader base and to continue to inspire and mobilize. It indicates to me the profound apathy of the American general public. We have long failed to translate our own guts' feeling of a deep problem related to money and politics into civic participation; and we can only relate to politics in the form of policies, votes, and electoral candidates. We have so comfortably lived in a loser mentality of being treated as consumers, voters, and viewers in commerce and in politics, retail or wholesale. We don't know yet that we are all part of this, collectively. We bought the lunacy of this corrupt version of the American dream, thinking that if we kept our heads down and moved long, and if we worked hard and were lucky, we would do better, we would get ahead, way ahead as a triumphant super individual.

There is a deeper realization in this amazing and much-needed civic revival. The individualist culture succeeded in protecting The Private. But when it has gone to the extreme as the last decades have trended, it kills The Public. The PUBLIC good, such as saving a democracy, the PUBLIC virtue, such as justice and fairness, needs more than charity and philanthropy; it needs more than argument and counter-arguments; it needs more than clever messaging. Given the heightened political awareness during these short few months, I've learned so much about existing efforts that many have made, libertarians, liberals, and deeply political independents. In the past three to four decades they have made great efforts to set this country back on the correct democratic track. But when I ask the obvious questions of why all these efforts by and large fail and our country ended up in such a troubled times, I've gotten either no answer or long-winded deliberation. OWS has taught me the simple but profound answer. The Public Good needs a foundation for all these service-y good deeds to stand upon. Without that, all the volumes of books, talk shows, billions of charitable donations are just a mirage. Without that, all good intentions have to make the tired old sales of "lesser evil" next to sheer thirst for wealth and naked power.

For those who fault these forms of direct democracy for its naive belief that with enough talking and communal participation, misunderstanding and honest disagreement will simply give way for collective wisdom and consensus, you have missed the point. Naivete? Maybe. Useless experiment? Absolutely not. Somethings are better done privately, somethings, individually. To reclaim our Commonality, and to rebuild our Public Good from corrupt politics, public and collective participation is the necessary means that will produce the desired results. It is the foundation that is missing for many other legislative and electoral causes.

I felt then, and I know now, I am part of that foundation ever since I was in the first general assembly meeting through people's mic at Liberty Plaza. It was immediately poetic, immediately emotional, and decisively political and powerful. I was reminded my best civic virtue education through the writings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. I was reminded the interconnectiveness I felt in Tiananmen and the best of social movements I've had the privilege to be part of. The connectiveness that Gandhi and King talked about. The connectiveness that is the very soil Public Virtue and Public Good can take root, grow, flourish, and bear fruit. Different from 1980s China, when our student movement turned massive demonstration, America has no shortage of sophistication on issues and policy options. They seem as if they are potted plants in a greenhouse at best, or a museum at worst. What this country needs, I believe, is a flood that will grow all these wonderful seeds into a jungle of flourishing. Only then can we change the apathetic political environment. Only then we can have a new atmosphere of civic revival. And only then will all the policy issues have a chance to be deliberated and implemented in a functional democracy.

The flood has been held back by the flood gate of political apathy fostered by the strange myth of ultra-individualism. OWS needs to continue its efforts to bust the flood gate open by massive grassroots participation. For all patriotic Americans who are part of this, whether you realize it now or not, stay curious, stay interested, stay supportive, or even stay critical if that's the way you stay connected to OWS. For OWS is busy creating the space for your demands to have a shot of success. OWS is doing so by changing hearts and minds, so you can change laws and votes, especially when you step up and becoming part of it.