as i go ramblin’ round

D.C. pictures can be seen here. On a related note, Flickr continues to be awesome. On an unrelated note, Pandora also is awesome.

been around, seen a thousand places

Going to D.C. for a week.  Blogging will resume thereafter.

Cherokee Freedmen pt. 3

I said before that I was going to comment on my own reactions to the Cherokee Freedmen dispute, but I was having trouble finding a point of entry. I admit my first response on hearing about the vote was disappointment with the Cherokees. Despite the protests of Cherokees and the conclusions of the AIPMI report, I saw it the same way many in the mainstream media did, as racism. Researching the background did little to change my initial reactions.

Yet I was still wary. I do have some Cherokee ancestry, but I have never identified myself with the tribe or participated in their community. And the Cherokees, and all Native Americans, have understandably had enough of outsiders’ judgments of what is best for them. I can very well understand the sensitivity of a people whose history has been characterized by repeated abuse and betrayal from white Americans and the U.S. government.

Though the uneasiness remains, I was spurred to finally comment on it by an op-ed from Kevin Noble Maillard in Indian Country Today:

Tribal life for Black Indians can be difficult. Mixed-blood Indians have been told to ”go back to Africa.” Tribal meetings escalate to roaring sessions of racist rhetoric, with animal noises, stomping feet and cow calls for ”blacks to get the hell out.” Blatant proponents of exclusion have no shame in publicly declaring, ”We’re trying to keep the black people out.”

While such behavior has been shunned since the civil rights era, it thrives in some parts of Indian country. This is sovereignty.

Maillard goes on to point out that the very idea of “Indian blood” was invented by, as he puts it, “white Northeasterners on vacation,” to help break up tribal land into individual plots. It is a sad irony that the Cherokees today point to the Dawes Roll as their defining mark of identity, when at its creation it was rightfully seen as a severe blow to Indian sovereignty and tribal customs.

The exclusion of anyone who honestly has grown up identifying as Indian and participating in the community is a travesty, and to base it on blood rules invented by white men in the 19th Century is the definition of racism. As Maillard writes:

The journey of the Allotment Act from a destructive policy conceived by whites to an irreproachable doctrine fortified by Indians is nothing short of a remarkable transformation. This dogged loyalty to membership rolls and blood quantum confounds the idea of self-determination and self-identification. In relying on these papers as a prerogative of liberty and a symbol of independence, tribes fail to escape the state power they claim to be sovereign from.

In a video interview with the Cherokee Phoenix, Prinicipal Chief Smith does not come off as a sympathetic figure. In a classic bit of politician double-speak, he describes the referendum as “vote of inclusion, not exclusion,” because it includes those with demonstrated Indian blood. The case can certainly be made that excluding Freedmen is appropriate to protect the identity of the tribe, but to spin it based on a totally misleading premise puts even the defensible justifications into doubt. If he cannot honestly make his case, perhaps the accusations of racism are not off the mark.

Whatever the tragedies and extenuating circumstances of history, in this case we can know an injustice when we see it.

earth everywhere

The Planet Earth DVD box set arrived the other day. I had seen one of the episodes on the Discovery Channel and right away was awed. I usually am a fan of nature shows anyway, but this was on a whole other level.

It’s not only the stunning images they have captured from all over the world. Most shows of this type are interesting, but they always seem to be presenting something far away. We see footage from Africa or South America or even the US, but it has the same effect as visiting a national park. Nature exists in those places, not in our homes and neighborhoods.

It’s strange that Planet Earth would have a different effect, as it in no way features familiar environments. Quite the opposite; it is perhaps the most ambitious nature series ever produced, with a huge production and the latest technology being used to capture spectacular images from the farthest corners of the world.

But the emphasis is different. Episodes are not set in a location, like Yosemite National Park or the Serengeti. Instead, the settings are ecosystems: mountains, the deep ocean, the great plains. As the title of the series implies, they aim to capture the wonders of the whole planet. The sweeping scope helps us to see that this is our world, fabulous and strange as it may be.

Watching the episode on forests this afternoon, I noticed that some of the bird songs coming from the tv exactly matched those outside my window. We are surrounded by media and other man-made environments that do their best to separate everyday life from an abstract, external concept of Nature. But these documentaries give a powerful response to that idea: nature is both the most glorious and exotic places of our world, but it also right outside, and inside, our windows. We breathe the same air, and live the same life, as every other creature on this planet.

flashback from small times

Bear with me; I will be filling my nerd quotient for the week with this post.

I devoured the Lone Wolf books as a kid. They were sort of a “choose your own adventure plus.” It was the same format, where you turned to different sections of the book based on whatever decision you made, but they had more rpg elements like an inventory that you could carry from book to book, special abilities, and combats done with a random number table.

It turns out the author, Joe Dever, has allowed free online distribution of the whole series at Project Aon. There is no more flipping between pages due to the wonders of hyperlinking. They even have a handy StatsKeeper program that saves your progress and automates a lot of stuff that used to involve closing your eyes and jabbing a pencil eraser at the random number table (a method not without its charm).

Sometimes when you rediscover things you loved as a kid, they turn out to be quite awful from the perspective of an adult. But Lone Wolf books are still a fun read. Sure, they have the all the tropes and cliches of the pulp fantasy novel. But the battles are paced remarkably well, and there are plenty of cool monsters. I’m a bit surprised at how violent and bloody they are at times, but that just adds to the fun.

The online version is now more like an interactive fiction game, a la Infocom. I am a bit of a fogey in this regard, but I still think that none of today’s games, with all of their fancy graphics, have ever been able to capture the atmosphere of interactive fiction. The best of these games were genuine literature, and they engaged the imagination like only good literature can. All the old games, and even a lot of new ones, can be found at the interactive fiction archive. It’s a great time-waster, and you don’t feel quite as guilty as when you vanish a day into the stimulus-response abyss of most video games. Because you are reading!

Cherokee Freedmen pt. 2

The recent controversy is only the latest in a dispute going back to the 19th century and described by the Tulsa Tribune in 1960 as a “judicial jungle.”¹ Following the Civil War, in which the Cherokee Nation allied with the Confederacy, the Treaty of 1866 officially extended “all the rights of Native Cherokees” to the tribe members’ former slaves. The tribe never fully accepted the Freedmen, and in 1883 the Cherokee Tribal Council passed a statute excluding them and others who did not have Cherokee blood. The U.S. Congress responded in 1888 with a law that required the tribe to share its assets with the excluded groups. The Wallace Roll identified 3,524 Cherokee Freedmen in 1889, and in 1890 Congress gave the federal courts jurisdiction over their claims.² In Whitmire v. Cherokee Nation and the United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the Freedmen were owed a portion of $903,365 from the sale of tribal lands. The tribe said all of the funds had already been distributed among blood members, so it fell on the federal government to pay as the other defendant in the lawsuit. In the 1986 Kern-Clifton Roll, the United States identified 5,600 Freedmen and distributed the money among them.³

At the same time, the Dawes Commission had begun making its own roll of all Cherokees in the Indian Territory. The Dawes Roll came as part of the process set up by the 1887 Dawes Act and 1893 Indian Appropriations Act. The legislation, which was seen as a severe blow to Indian sovereignty, sought to convert tribal lands to individual ownership and increase federal control over their territory. The Dawes Roll categorized the Cherokees into three groups: Indians by blood, Freedmen, and intermarried whites.

The most recent opinion on this issue from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia highlighted the difficulties in relying solely on the Dawes Roll for proof of Indian blood:

An individual possessing any African blood was placed on the Freedmen Roll, whereas an individual possessing any Indian blood was placed on the Blood Roll, as long as that individual did not possess any African blood. For example, an individual who was half Black and half Cherokee was placed on the Freedmen Roll, whereas an individual who was one-quarter Indian but three-quarters White was designated Cherokee by blood.⁴

In the end, out of 41,798 listed, 4,924 were identified as Freedmen. This group excluded 1,659 of those who had been listed on the Kern-Clifton Roll, setting the stage for the next episode of the dispute.⁵

In Whitmire v. the United States, in U.S. Court of Claims initially ruled in favor of the Freedmen, but in 1912 the Supreme Court reversed that decision. In 1924, Congress passed legislation allowing the Cherokee Nation to sue the United States for money distributed under Kern-Clifton. Litigation continued until 1937, when the U.S. Court of Claims denied recovery of the money but also ruled that Kern-Clifton was a one-time only process that would not affect future questions of reimbursement or citizenship. In 1946, the Indian Claims Commission Act established another possible forum for the Freedmen. The Cherokee Freedmen’s Association was established in the late 1940s, and in 1951 filed their first petition with the Indian Claims Commission in Tulsa. That litigation lasted for another 10 years. The ICC finally denied their claim, ruling that it had no jurisdiction in what was deemed an internal tribal matter. Thus the last avenue was closed to Kern-Clifton Freedmen who had been excluded by Dawes.⁶

Congress passed the Principal Chiefs Act in 1970. The Act required that the Five Civilized Tribes elect leaders based on established procedures, and “such established procedures shall be subject to approval by the Secretary of the Interior.”⁷ The uneasy legal resolution in the Cherokee Nation lasted until 1983, when Roger Nero and four other freedmen were turned away when they tried to vote for principal chief. New regulations were implemented under the Cherokee Constitution of 1976, which stated that “all members of the Cherokee Nation must be citizens as proven by reference to the Dawes Commission Rolls.” While the language does not mention limiting by blood, and freedmen were clearly listed on the Dawes Rolls, Cherokee officials interpreted it to mean they could require a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood along with a Dawes Roll ancestor to register as a citizen or voter. Nero had voted as recently as 1979, but that was the last election that allowed members to use older registration cards.⁸

Nero and five others filed a complaint with the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, and in 1984 they launched a class-action lawsuit for $750 million in damages and a voiding of the election. In Nero v. Cherokee Nation, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the dispute was an intratribal matter in which it had no jurisdiction.⁹ The opinion of the court stated that “‘No right is more integral’ to a tribe’s self-governance ‘than its ability to establish its membership.’”¹⁰ In 1988, the Cherokee Tribal Council approved the new regulations by statute.

Another constitution was approved in 2003, along with a change removing the requirement that all amendments be approved by the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs. A letter was sent in by Chief Smith 2001 to notify the BIA of the planned amendment. Neal McCaleb, at that time the assistant secretary of Indian Affairs, at first responded that he would not oppose the amendment, as long the Freedmen’s right to vote was protected and their citizenship was not taken away without Congressional authorization. However, McCaleb wrote to Smith several months later that, “I did not sign the March 15 letter and did not authorize the use of the autopen to engross my signature on the letter. The letter is of no validity or effect and should be disregarded.” He wrote that he had no problem with the amendment, but, referring back to the Principal Chiefs Act of 1970, said the tribe would still require Secretarial approval for election procedures. It was not explained how the original letter was sent without his approval.¹¹

In 2006 the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court found the language found in both previous constitutions was too vague to exclude Freedmen, but said it could be established with a constitutional referendum. The referendum took place on March 3, 2007.¹² Principal Chief Chad Smith and a majority on the Tribal Council supported the expulsion, and referendum results were extremely lopsided, with 6,702 for expulsion to only 2,041 against. Although the turnout sounds small compared to the total Cherokee Nation population of more than 260,000, it is comparable to previous constitutional referendums. Cherokees are spread all over the United States, but elections are likely dominated by those living in the tribal territory in Northeast Oklahoma. Approximately 2,800 Freedmen descendants stand to be affected by the amendment.¹³

1As cited in Sturm, C. (2002). Blood politics: Race, culture, and identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Berkeley: University of California Press.

2Sturm, C. (2002). Blood politics: Race, culture, and identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Berkeley: University of California Press.

3Sturm, C. (2002). Blood politics: Race, culture, and identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Berkeley: University of California Press.

4Marilyn Vann, et al. v. Dirk Kempthorn, et al. (2006). United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Retrieved May 9, 2007, from http://www.indianz.com/docs/court/freedmen/order121906.pdf

5Sturm, C. (2002). Blood politics: Race, culture, and identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Berkeley: University of California Press.

6Sturm, C. (2002). Blood politics: Race, culture, and identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Berkeley: University of California Press.

7Marilyn Vann, et al. v. Dirk Kempthorn, et al. (2006). United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Retrieved May 9, 2007, from http://www.indianz.com/docs/court/freedmen/order121906.pdf

8Sturm, C. (2002). Blood politics: Race, culture, and identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Berkeley: University of California Press.

9Sturm, C. (2002). Blood politics: Race, culture, and identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Berkeley: University of California Press.

10Cherokee Nation. (2007). We are Cherokee. Retrieved May 8, 2007 from http://www.cherokee.org/docs/MISC/Diversity-Hi.pdf

11Marilyn Vann, et al. v. Dirk Kempthorn, et al. (2006). United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Retrieved May 9, 2007, from http://www.indianz.com/docs/court/freedmen/order121906.pdf

12Daffron, B. (2007, March 30). Freedmen descendants struggle to maintain their Cherokee identity. Indian Country Today. Retrieved April 22, 2007 from http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096414754

13Chavez, W. (2007, March 28). Voters amend constitution in special election. Cherokee Phoenix. Retrieved April 22, 2007 from http://www.cherokeephoenix.org/News/News.aspx?StoryID=2480

Factory? What factory?

Via Shakesville:

Farmers in this poor rural area 400 miles northwest of Shanghai had complained to local government officials since 2004 that Mao’s factory was spewing noxious fumes that made their eyes tear up and the poplar trees nearby shed their leaves prematurely. Yet no one stopped Mao’s company from churning out bags of food powders and belching smoke — until one day last month when, in the middle of the night, bulldozers tore down the facility.

It wasn’t authorities that finally acted: Mao himself razed the brick factory — days before the investigators from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration arrived in China on a mission to track down the source of the tainted pet food ingredients.

With the caveat that it is also extremely terrible, I have to say that the image of the villain bulldozing his factory in the middle of the night is darkly hilarious. It has been said that American reality outpaces fiction, but I would be willing to bet that this is a global phenomenon.

Cherokee Freedmen pt. 1

This was originally a paper for a political science class, but it is an interesting topic so I thought I would repurpose it as a blog post. This is the first of three parts. The second will provide some legal and historical background, and the third will give my own views.

On March 3, Cherokee Nation citizens voted by a large margin to amend their constitution to limit citizenship to descendants of Indians by blood as listed on the Dawes Rolls, excluding those whose descendants were listed only as Freedmen or intermarried whites. Strong protests to the amendment were given by representatives of the Freedmen and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, both in Congress and the Oklahoma State House. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has yet to issue a response to the vote and to other changes made in the Cherokee Nation constitution since 2003.¹

The Cherokee Nation’s annual budget is about $300 million, of which about 80 percent is provided by the federal government.² The government is composed of three branches: an executive headed by the Principal Chief, a legislature composed of the Tribal Council, and a judiciary including the Cherokee Nation District Courts and the Judicial Appeals Tribunal.³ While leaders within the government have been primarily responsible for initiating the push to expel Freedmen, factions exist within and between branches.

Chief Smith and other supporters of the amendment have defended their views primarily on the basis of tribal sovereignty. Smith has denied that the rationale behind the amendment was to conserve economic resources, such as housing and health care subsidies. In an editorial for Indian Country Today, he writes, “The vast majority of Cherokees do not use the services of health care, housing and education. It seems that many Cherokees chose to exclude non-Indians because of a sense of identity.” Smith argues that the vote was a defense of Cherokee cultural heritage as the “indigenous and aboriginal people of this land.”⁴ Other supporters have echoed this sentiment. Jodie Fishinghawk, one of the leaders of the referendum drive, told NPR, “It’s an Indian thing, we do not want non-Indians in the tribe, our Indian blood is what binds us together.”⁵ In a letter to the Native American Times, Chris Russo wrote that “the Cherokee people have voted three times over the last three decades regarding citizenship criteria. They have voted consistently that you must be ‘Indian’ to be a citizen of our Indian tribe.”⁶

On the other side are the descendants of the Freedmen. Their organized efforts have been led by Marilyn Vann, president of the non-profit corporation, Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes. Vann and other Freedmen descendants have sought citizenship rights primarily through lawsuits, in both Cherokee and federal courts. Most recently, Vann and four other Freedmen descendants filed an injunction in federal court to prevent the special election. The judge denied their claim but said they could continue to pursue a lawsuit if they were denied citizenship. “We will pursue the legal remedies that are available to us to stop people from not only losing their voting rights, but to receiving medical care and other services to which they are entitled under law,” Vann told the Cherokee Phoenix.⁷

The Freedmen descendants argue that a 1866 Treaty between the Cherokee Nation and the federal government required the tribe to guarantee citizenship to their former slaves after the Civil War. They say that this treaty overrides the otherwise sovereign rights of the Cherokee to determine their own citizenship. “You know there never was such a thing as the Cherokee race. Cherokee was a citizenship,” Vann told NPR. “The federal government doesn’t have government-to-government relations with races, only nations.”⁸ Their argument is not without precedent. In 2000, the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma voted out Freedmen descendants but let them back in after the federal government cut off funds to the tribe.⁹ Two years later, the BIA deposed the administration of Principal Chief Ken Chambers and replaced him with former Principal Chief Jerry Haney, a decision related to disputes over the Seminole Freedmen.¹⁰

Another strong voice in support of the Freedmen descendants’ claim has been the Congressional Black Caucus, which represents 43 African-American U.S. Senators and Representatives. Rep. Diane Watson (D-Calif) and two dozen other members of the CBC recently sent a letter to the Interior Department asking the government to intervene on behalf of the Freedmen descendants. “It’s blatantly apparent that the Cherokee Nation violated their constitution,” Watson told the Associated Press. “The Department of Interior has a fiduciary duty to act … They should be going after them. It shouldn’t take me and the other members of the Congressional Black Caucus to pursue the issue.”¹¹ Watson told the AP that she is authoring legislation to cut off federal funding for the Cherokees and plans to introduce it next week. While many CBC members are supporting Watson, the organization has not yet taken an official position.

Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn has spoken out strongly in favor of the Freedmen. “I think a commitment was made to them, and not keeping that commitment is entirely immoral,” Coburn told KGOU News.¹² Democratic Representative Dan Boren, on the other hand, has not taken a position on the issue. “That’s an issue that the Cherokee Nation is working on,” Boren told KGOU News. “No one from the Congressional Black Caucus has talked to me about it.”¹³ A spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also commented on the issue, saying “discrimination in any form is troubling. We hope that the Department of Interior would look at this issue closely.”¹⁴

The American Indian Policy and Media Initiative is a project funded by tribal, philanthropic and corporate grants and located at Buffalo State College in New York. Their stated mission is to “provide an independent, academic and dignified venue to address the intersection of (1) the concerns and journalistic practices of mainstream media, and (2) a range of public policy issues affecting American Indians.”¹⁵ In March, AIPMI released a report examining media coverage of the Cherokee-Freedmen story. While the media’s handling of the story is not directly relevant to our decision, the report effectively illuminates the principles involved. Amendment supporters welcomed AIPMI’s conclusion that coverage emphasizing racial discrimination was “another instance of mainstream media failing to understand the complexity of an issue involving American Indians and their oversimplification of a complex situation.”¹⁶ However, the report overall provides a more even-handed perspective than the partisans of either side. Author Ronald D. Smith writes:

Few saw it as the case of two distinct and mixed disenfranchised groups pitted against each other 100 years ago by the federal government that had little interest in either side, a struggle that is still being played out today. Fewer still saw it as a complicated story rooted in the importance of lineage within a wider society in which lineage does not have the political weight it does in Native America.¹⁷

Data from the 2005 American Community Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau provides a good example of the difficult economic situation in which these disputes play out. Per capita incomes in American Indian areas are somewhat commensurate with the states in which they are located. However, looking at the American Indian population alone reveals another drop, with all populations showing significantly lower incomes than the states as a whole. Per capita income shows a steady decline associated with race: $20,709 in Oklahoma as a whole; $18,727 in the Cherokee Oklahoma Tribal Statistical Area; $14,072 among American Indians alone in the Cherokee OTSA; $13,809 for those descending from two or more races in the Cherokee OTSA; and $12,728 among blacks or African Americans alone in the Cherokee OTSA.

It is difficult to take anything but the most general conclusions from this data, as the census categories are not subtle enough to account for the complex distinctions of race that this whole dispute is about. While mixed race individuals show a lower per capita income that Indians alone, it is not clear from the data what races these people may belong to. Nonetheless, the data reinforces the claim that inequalities are rooted in race, not simply geography. We can see that blacks on Cherokee lands are the most deprived group in an already poor region, and the action of the Cherokees may be somewhat motivated by a desire to conserve limited economic resources.

1The Associated Press. (2007, April 13). Vote to remove Freedmen not yet approved. Indian Country Today. Retrieved April 22, 2007 from http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096414835

2Evans, B. (2007, April 22). Black lawmaker eyes funding cuts for Cherokee Nation. The Associated Press via the Montgomery Advertiser. Retrieved April 22, 2007 from http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070420/NEWS02/704200317/1009

3Carroll, A. (2002/2003). Cherokee Nation tribal profile. Tribal Law Journal, 3. Retrieved April 22, 2007 from http://tlj.unm.edu/articles/volume_3/carroll/content.php

4Smith, C. (2007, March 9). Smith: Cherokees vote for Indian blood. Indian Country Today. Retrieved April 22, 2007 from http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096414628

5Morris, F. (2007, March 10). Freedmen question divides Cherokees. National Public Radio. Retrieved Aprill 22, 2007 from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7819829

6As cited in Cherokee Nation. (2007). We are Cherokee. Retrieved May 8, 2007 from http://www.cherokee.org/docs/MISC/Diversity-Hi.pdf

7Chavez, W. (2007, March 28). Voters amend constitution in special election. Cherokee Phoenix. Retrieved April 22, 2007 from http://www.cherokeephoenix.org/News/News.aspx?StoryID=2480

8Morris, F. (2007, March 10). Freedmen question divides Cherokees. National Public Radio. Retrieved Aprill 22, 2007 from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7819829

9Bazar, E. (2007, March 4). Cherokee Freedmen to fight for inclusion. USA Today. Retrieved April 22, 2007 from http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-04-cherokee_N.htm

10Court decision rocks Seminole Nation. (2002, May 8). Indianz.com. Retrieved May 8, 2007, from http://www.indianz.com/News/show.asp?ID=pol02/05082002-1

11Evans, B. (2007, April 22). Black lawmaker eyes funding cuts for Cherokee Nation. The Associated Press via the Montgomery Advertiser. Retrieved April 22, 2007 from http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070420/NEWS02/704200317/1009

12Oklahoma lawmakers weigh in on Cherokee Freedmen dispute. (2007, April, 3). KGOU. Retrieved May 8, 2007, from http://www.kgou.org/content/mp3/20070403_cherokee_freedmen.mp3

13Oklahoma lawmakers weigh in on Cherokee Freedmen dispute. (2007, April, 3). KGOU. Retrieved May 8, 2007, from http://www.kgou.org/content/mp3/20070403_cherokee_freedmen.mp3

14Evans, B. (2007, April 22). Black lawmaker eyes funding cuts for Cherokee Nation. The Associated Press via the Montgomery Advertiser. Retrieved April 22, 2007 from http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070420/NEWS02/704200317/1009

15American Indian Initiative. (n.d.). Communication Department, Buffalo State College. Retrieved April 22, 2007 from http://www.buffalostate.edu/communication/x798.xml

16Smith, R. D. (2007, March). The Cherokee-Freedmen story: What the media saw. American Indian Policy and Media Initiative. Retrieved April 22, 2007 from http://www.buffalostate.edu/communication/documents/Cherokee2007.pdf

17Smith, R. D. (2007, March). The Cherokee-Freedmen story: What the media saw. American Indian Policy and Media Initiative. Retrieved April 22, 2007 from http://www.buffalostate.edu/communication/documents/Cherokee2007.pdf

everyone likes cake

Ezra Klein on France:

The French like not working incessantly. They are consciously sacrificing a bit of economic growth in order to devote more time to leisure. It’s a perfectly legitimate choice for a society to make. But it’s never represented that way in domestic punditry, as we exclusively evaluate policy decisions based on their effects on measurable economic indicators. [...] in contemporary American discourse, it’s almost impossible to justify any policy that won’t plausibly increase economic growth.

Clive Crook on the American Dream:

The American model has been regarded as proposing a kind of bargain. This is not Europe: Here, idleness and incompetence are sternly punished—but merit gets rewarded. Much more than elsewhere, your class background will neither prop you up nor hold you back. If you deserve to succeed, you will.

It is an inspiring, energizing offer—and still a profoundly influential one. It colors the national debate about taxes, health care, and other aspects of economic policy. But it is false advertising.

[...]America stands lower in the ranking of income mobility than most of the countries whose data allow the comparison, scoring worse than Canada, all of the Scandinavian countries, and possibly even Germany and Britain. [...] According to one much-cited study, for instance, more than 40 percent of American boys born into the poorest fifth of the population stay there; the figure for Britain is 30 percent, for Denmark just 25 percent.

And finally, Andrew Leonard on preschool:

University of Chicago economist James Heckman (a Nobel Prize winner in 2000) and University of Michigan doctoral candidate Dimitriy Masterov marshal an impressive argument in support of early intervention preschool programs for children from disadvantaged backgrounds as the best tool for ensuring later success in life. The evidence compiled is conclusive. Children from such backgrounds who gain access to such programs are more likely to graduate high school, less likely to end up in jail, and will score higher on aptitude tests. And the longer society waits to try to fix the problem — by boosting funding for secondary school education, or by providing tuition help for college, for example — the less of a positive effect you will have.

[...] For a civilized society, that should be enough, right? Helping out disadvantaged children at the point in their lives where it can do the most good is the obvious moral thing to do, isn’t it? As the authors note, “most analyses have cast the issue of assisting children from disadvantaged families as a question of fairness or social justice.”

But not Heckman and Masterov. For them, the real challenge is that the U.S. economy is facing a looming shortage of skilled workers.

[...] Not only are the baby boomers becoming decrepit, but “educational attainment rates” are stagnating. “College-going rates have stalled out” and “the high school dropout rate has increased over time if one counts GEDs as dropouts, as one should, because GEDs earn the same wages as dropouts, and graduate from college at the same rate as dropouts.”

In short: The United States is faced with a dire crisis that needs no elaboration by tiresome moral or social equity considerations: “The growth in the quality of the workforce, which was a mainstay of economic growth until recently, has diminished.” So get those poor kids from single-family households in the ghetto some quality preschool care! We need better workers!

So America has traded leisure time and social supports for economic opportunity. But we don’t actually get greater opportunity out of the trade. And the penalty for failing social supports may be a worse economy. Meanwhile, a few smart investments can both help the worst off and increase prosperity for everyone.

Seems like now would be a good time to start having our cake and eating it too.

steal this post

Neat story in today’s NY Times about a copy-protection disabling number that is being spread all over the web to spite the lawyers. One caveat. Brad Stone writes:

The broader distribution of the code may not pose a serious threat to the movie industry, because only sophisticated technologists can use it to tailor the decryption software capable of getting around the copy protection on Blu-ray and HD DVD discs. But its relentless spread has already become a lesson in mob power on the Internet and the futility of censorship in the digital world.

The missing part to that argument is that it doesn’t matter one bit if only sophisticated technologists can use the number. It only takes one person to rip the dvd and put it online to be downloaded by anyone with a minimum of technical savvy. So the phenomenon is even worse for the entertainment companies.

Not that we should care. As the article implies, the industry is fighting a losing battle against file-sharing, and companies will have to adjust to the new media environment or go the way of vaudeville. Their domination is imperiled, and they will certainly fight that tooth and nail, but we should resist the idea that communication of intellectual property is equivalent to theft.

These arguments are familiar to most people acquainted with this issue, but I will repeat them because nobody is reading this. The original intent of copyright law was not simply to protect the rights of the creator, but to balance the tension between a creator’s need to be rewarded for work with society’s right to our common intellectual heritage. Ideally, it recognizes that no work can ever be called totally original, because it rests on a foundation of everything that has ever been said and thought. There lies the justification for the public domain. Cultural artifacts should return to the common culture once artists have been suitably, and moderately, remunerated.

But the entertainment industry is not interested in moderate remuneration. And it is not run by the artists. They are businessman out for profit, and thus operate under a very different moral calculus. But they should not be allowed to force that value system on the rest of us.

The new media environment may be one where large corporations cannot prosper. But we won’t be deprived of art, music, or films. Quite the opposite. Drastically cheaper means of production and distribution will, and already have, allowed a million individual creators to find a medium and audience. They may not be able to directly sell everything they make, and they will never gather enough profit to keep shareholders happy. But they may collect enough, through various means, for a moderate living. Or they may be content with the status rewards of fame and admiration. Either way, the needs of both society and the artist are being met.

If that gets in the way of a few executives and media superstars’ multi-million dollar dreams? Oh well…