Understanding Nonprofit Mergers and Acquisitions: A Primer

August 15, 2011 Leave a Comment

“Merger-mania” has come to be a prominent defining characteristic of the nonprofit sector in the first decade of the 21st Century, as a growing level of organizational consolidation provides strong evidence that a wide-spread restructuring of the sector is underway. The article linked below provides an executive overview of contemporary literature on nonprofit mergers, with cites and references to support continued study, as well as a summary of the ways in which nonprofit organizations can consolidate, key considerations before such actions are taken, and an overview of the due diligence process required to bring a merger to fruition. At bottom line: such actions are not for the faint of heart, though when executed with caution and care, they may provide immense improvements in efficiency and the quality of services that nonprofits can offer to their communities.

Understanding Nonprofit Mergers and Acquisitions: A Primer

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Where The Air Is Sweet? Valuing American Public Broadcasting

June 24, 2011 Leave a Comment

This is a feature-length piece derived from the research I conducted while earning my Masters of Public Affairs and Policy. While I love the concept of public broadcasting, I think its modern incarnations in the United States are not necessarily true to the vision of the idiom’s founders . . . and not for the ideological reasons often cited by those who perceive public broadcasting to have a political slant or agenda. Clink the link below to open the PDF file and learn where I believe public broadcasting’s true shortcomings lie.

WHERE THE AIR IS SWEET?

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How to Keep a Secret

April 26, 2011 Leave a Comment

There are dozens of quasi-secret, secret and top secret facilities scattered about the Capital Region, employing tens of thousands of workers. Do you know what they do at their jobs all day? No, of course you don’t. It’s a secret. But I know what happens at a few of them, because I worked there, and at a few other highly secured facilities throughout the United States. What did I do there? I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.

Which meant that I couldn’t tell my wife or my daughter or my parents or my closest friendly confidants either. I was sworn not to. That’s part of the process of being authorized to have access to secrets, a sense on the part of your employer that you can keep your lips, your briefcase and your laptop closed once you leave you office each and every day. Which isn’t as hard as it might seem, since one of the paramount rules of working at a secret installation is that you don’t carry work in and out every day. Instead, you start and end your workday with a clean desk, and overnight, all your working materials are locked in strong safes, then locked behind strong doors, then guarded by strong men and women with (sometimes) strong weaponry.

So compartmentalization is king. At a secret facility, you can’t bring the office home with you. In many cases, you can’t even stay in office after quitting time. And there are no 10 PM phone calls to your staff or your boss to review the day behind or the day to come, because, hey, who knows, something might be bugged, or someone might overhear, or it might not even be your boss at the other end of the line. Sounds paranoid, sure, but as Peter Gabriel once sang: “How can we be in, if there is no outside?”

And your outside life and your inside life must remain truly distinct. In one job, I spent most of the day doing, uh, secret stuff with a group of engineers who happened to be on the other side of the negotiating table. Well, if we had a negotiating table, I mean, hypothetically speaking. But anyway, by day, these guys were in, and by night, they were neighbors, on three sides. By day, we talked secrets. By night, sports, the weather, gardening, home repair, family. Ne’er the twain could meet. Ne’er they did.

So it was paranoid and schizophrenic in that regard. But in the same way that delusional people are often quite happy in their delusions, there was a comfort in having a divided life. I mean, think about it . . . you can’t bring work home. You can’t be working at 10 PM each night. You can’t sit at your home office designing, uh, secret stuff. And that’s not a bad thing in this day and age when 24/7 workaholics rule the world, is it? A: No it’s not. And keeping to such a schedule also makes you exceedingly efficient during the time that you’re working at your office, since you know that if it doesn’t get done when it’s supposed to get done, then it isn’t getting done at all.

Discretion becomes the better part of valor when you’re outside, too. Most secure facilities require ornate security passes and badges, but like an army of robots, workers know to remove them from their lanyards or their pocket pencil protectors and stuff them in wallets or purses when they leave each day. Or at lunch. Or when you run an errand. No need to advertise the fact that you’ve got access to a place that few others do. You never know who might be interested in such facts. I mean, other than your wife and kids, who you don’t let visit your office because, well, it’s a secret. And loose lips sink, um, secret things, so you need to make sure that you keep your own under control, which means that you need to be darn careful about what you drink and smoke, and how much, and where you do it, and with whom. Blackouts are no excuse for trading secrets to the other team.

There are other ways to ensure that secrets are kept, too, of course, but I can’t tell you about them, because they’re secret. And no amount of cajoling, or bribing, or teasing, or influence peddling should be able to change that, because above all else, keeping a secret is a trust — bestowed not only by your employer, but by all the taxpayers or customers or clients who fund your work. You owe it to them. Shhh.

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Understanding Immigration: A Primer

April 12, 2011 Leave a Comment

Immigration policy in the United States has always hinged on two key questions: who is allowed to enter the country and, once here, who is then accorded the rights of citizenship?

Today, immigration falls under Title 8 of the US Code. It’s volatility over the years is notable in that chapters 1-5 and 7-10 of Title 8 have been repealed or transferred over the years, while only Chapters 6 and 11-14 still govern.

From 1870 to 2003, immigration policy was administered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which at different times in its history was part of the Departments of Treasury, Commerce and Justice. Most of its functions were subsumed into the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, where it is now known as the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

Questions about citizenship and immigration were pressing even at the dawn of the Republic; the United States Constitution (1787), Article One, Section Eight states “Congress shall have the right . . . to establish a uniform rule of naturalization.” The Naturalization Law of 1790 responded to Article One, Section Eight by allowing naturalization of “free white persons” “of good moral character” who had been in the country for two years and in their claimed state of residence for a year. While it was racially restrictive, it was considered radical in its day for its inclusion of people of all religious faiths.

The residency time limits for citizens were expanded by the Naturalization Laws of 1795 and 1798 (the latter, one of John Adams’ infamous Alien and Sedition Acts, was later over-turned); today the time limits are generally five years, (three years if married to a U.S. Citizen).

In the Supreme Court case Dred Scott vs. Sandford (1857), Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote a decision ruling, among other things, that slaves and their descendents could never become citizens of the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1868) over-turned the Dred Scott decision, making former slaves born in the United States citizens, and guaranteeing equal protection under the law for all persons.

Since the Civil War and the Fourteenth Amendment, immigration policy has tended to be cyclical; during periods of economic prosperity requiring an expansion of the labor force, policies tend to reduce barriers to immigration; during periods of economic malaise when labor forces contract, xenophobic reactions tend to fester, and pressures for more restrictive policies increase.

Take for example the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which suspended immigration from China, after large numbers of Chinese laborers and their families has come to the United States to work in the California gold fields and on the Transcontinental Railroad. This act was not repealed until 1943.

European immigration rose in the years that followed, which, again, resulted in restrictive legislation once the economic situation led to rising unemployment among native-born citizens and the resultant xenophobia that followed it; The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and Immigration Act of 1924 established quotas for numbers of immigrants from selected nations, typically Asian, African, and Southern/Eastern European ones.

The quotas were reaffirmed by McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, but were finally abolished by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which was both an attempt to right past wrongs (paired with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights of 1965), and an attempt to curry favor in the Third World and among the “Non-Aligned Nations” during the peak years of the Cold War; the provisions of this act are still largely in effect, though numbers of visas issued, etc., have changed.

Key immigration legislation since then has included:

  • Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986): Made it a crime to knowingly hire illegal aliens, while providing amnesty to those already here.
  • The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (1996): Significantly tightened processes for prosecuting and deporting illegal aliens.

Today, the primary issues associated with immigration have to do with the differences between immigrants who entered and remain in the country legally, and those who either entered legally, but remained past the expiration of their visas, or those who entered the country illegally and still remain.  The Center for Immigration Studies notes that immigrant population in the U.S. (legal and illegal) reached an all-time high of 37.9 million in 2007. Immigrants tend to be less educated, are younger, have larger families, and earn less than native-born citizens also per Center for Immigration Studies research.

Pew Hispanic Center estimates there are about 12 million illegal aliens (nearly 1/3 of all immigrants) currently in the United States, a number supported by independent GAO analysis. Of these, 57% are from Mexico, 24% are from Central America, and the remaining 19% are from the rest of the world.

Note that illegal immigration from Mexico is not a new issue; in 1954, the INS embarked upon “Operation Wetback,” designed to deport 4 million illegal Mexicans from the country. Ultimately, they deported ~130,000, while another 1.2 million fled the U.S. rather than be deported.

Today, there are two primary fears driving the illegal immigration debate today: (1) post 9/11 fears of terrorists illegally entering the country to cause harm to its citizens, and (2) economic fears about native-born workers losing jobs to illegal immigrants, who also consume an inordinate amount of social service resources.

Interestingly, given the press this issue has received in recent years, the Center for Immigration Studies conducted a survey in 2008 which revealed that most voters in the Presidential elections generally didn’t know what their chosen candidates’ positions on immigration were—and often disagreed with them when they were informed.

The bottom-line fact of the matter today is that it would be physically and economically impossible to deport 12 million illegal aliens; even finding and identifying them would be an immense task. We can close the gates now, but we can’t remove those who have already arrived.

The legal side of the immigration issue also has its share of policy problems today, first and foremost involving the H1B Visa, which is issued to highly skilled immigrants. There are only 85,000 issued per year. Last year, 163,000 applications were received. The USCIS uses a lottery system to decide who gets them, so they are all consumed immediately each year. The most skilled workers often simply lose out to luckier applicants who may not be the best candidates.

Ultimately, the key issue for America’s policymakers is to identify how to incorporate illegal and legal aliens into the fabric of American life in a way that doesn’t cause undue hardship either to the government, the taxpayers, the social service and educational infrastructure or the aliens themselves. We can wall off the border with Mexico to our heart’s content (at absurd expense), but there’s no way a modern “Operation Wetback” is going to reverse sloppy controls of the border over the past quarter-century.

Recommended Further Reading:

  • Urrea, Luis Alberto. The Devil’s Highway, Little Brown and Company, 2004.
  • Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, Rutgers University Press, 2002 (originally published in 1963).
  • Swain, Carol (editor). Debating Immigration, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
  • Tichenor, Daniel J. Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America, Princeton University Press, 2002.
  • Ford, William F. “Immigrationomics,” Economic Education Bulletin, Vol. XLVII, No. 10, American Institute for Economic Research, October 2007.
  • Hing, Bill Ong. Defining American Through Immigration Policy (Mapping Racisms), Temple University Press, 2004.
  • Center for Immigration Studies Website, www.cis.org.

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Understanding Retirement Policies: A Primer

March 30, 2011 Leave a Comment

Most of the significant policy issues associated with retirements and pensions in the United States today hinge on the relative responsibilities of Government, employers and employees in providing for the well-being of workers and their families after they retire. These three interconnected sources of retirement income are all governed by Federal legislation and statutes, each of which offers its own issues, opportunities and challenges. I’ll briefly review each of the three and provide an overview of the policy considerations involved with each.

Government Funded Programs: The Federal Government provides social insurance programs under the Social Security Act of 1935, as amended, and as implemented in Title 42, Chapter 7, of the U.S. Code. These programs originated in the Great Depression, when over 50% of elderly, retired people in the United States lived in poverty.

Title 42, Chapter 7 governs a variety of social insurance programs (including Medicare, Medicaid, TANF, etc.) , though when we use the term “Social Security” we are generally referring only to the Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program. OASDI provides monthly benefits to retirees, dependants, widows, spouses, divorced spouses and disabled workers. In the United States today, workers contribute via mandatory payroll deductions under the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA), which are then matched by their employers.

These funds are held in, and dispersed from, the Social Security Trust Fund. OASDI is a “pay as you go” program, meaning that today’s workers pay for today’s retirees, not for their own future retirements. The problem with this approach in the United States today is obviously a demographic one: the ratio of current workers to retirees is decreasing rapidly as the baby boom generation reaches retirement age, and people are living longer as birth rates decline. By most forecasts, if nothing changes, the Social Security Trust Fund will run dry sometime between 2030 and 2040.

None of the policy options available to remedy this situation are likely be popular among voters (e.g. suspend the program, allow private employee-directed investments, reduce benefits, increase minimum retirement age, raise Social Security taxes, borrow to pay OASDI benefits, make riskier investments with the trust fund in the hopes of increasing investment gains, etc.), hence the decisions tend to just keep getting deferred. This is one of the most profound socioeconomic issues facing our country today, especially as other entitlement programs grow and expand.

Employer Funded Programs: The traditional employer funded pension was a defined-benefit plan, in which employees, in exchange for set periods of employment, were granted certain payments and benefits for the remainder of their lives after they left the work force.

Defined-benefit plans are rapidly dying out everywhere except for in Government and larger, older, more unionized companies and corporations. They are being replaced with defined-contribution plans, like 401(k)s, where employers, employees or both make contributions that go into individuals’ retirement accounts.

The most important piece of legislation governing employer or employee funded programs is the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), as amended. ERISA was designed to protect the interests of pension plan participants by requiring disclosure of information concerning plans and by establishing standards of conduct for plan administrators.

ERISA also established the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), an independent Government agency designed to provide uninterrupted pension benefits in cases where employers can no longer meet their obligations to their retired employees. The Pension Protection Act of 2006 sought to strengthen the PBGC and ERISA in general by eliminating loopholes and penalizing companies that under-fund their pension programs.

Defined-benefit plans are also typically “pay as you go” type arrangements, and they have run against the same sorts of demographic pressures that assail Social Security. From a government policy standpoint, lawmakers must balance provisions that protect employees with realistic assessments of what businesses can bear; if the government mandates pension provisions that bankrupt businesses and cause all of their employees to lose their jobs before they get a chance to retire, has the net utility to society been increased?

Employee Funded Programs: Given the resource pressures noted above, the Government and businesses have a vested interest in encouraging employees to help fund their own retirements.

In addition to ERISA, the Internal Revenue Codes of 1954 and 1986, as amended, are the primary laws influencing employee funded programs, as they provide tax incentives for employees to set aside funding for their retirement; “401(k),” for example, refers to a chapter in the tax code.

Employees may contribute to defined-benefit plans such as 401(k)s that are sponsored by employers, or they may contribute to individual retirement accounts (IRAs); there are several different types of IRAs (Roth, Traditional, SEP, Simple, etc.) that have different tax provisions associated with them.

As originally constituted, IRAs were essentially cash vehicles, but the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 made it easier to use other types of assets to fund retirement accounts.

From a policy-making standpoint, lawmakers must balance a desire to have employees fund their own retirements with a realization that the tax incentives being offered to encourage such investment also results in reduced tax revenues to the federal government; it would be simple to write tax law that would encourage employees to dramatically increase their contributions, but that would dramatically increase the budget deficit by lowering revenues.

Recommended Further Reading:

  • The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America’s Economic Future, by Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, MIT Press, 2005.
  • Coming Up Short: The Challenge of 401(K) Plans, by Annika Sunden and Alicia Haydock Munnell, Brookings Institution Press, 2004.
  • Fundamentals of Private Pensions (Eighth Edition), by Dan McGill, et al., Oxford University Press, 2005.
  • The Economics of an Aging Society, by Robert L. Clark, et al., Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.

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A Model for Municipal Management

March 16, 2011 Leave a Comment

I wrote this article in 2008 as part of an urban and regional planning seminar. It attempts to provide a modeled framework within which municipal managers may maximize the civic impact of their planning and financial decisions. Click on the link below to open the PDF version of the article.

A MODEL FOR MUNICIPAL MANAGEMENT

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Freedom and Liberty, Rights and Privileges

February 22, 2011 Leave a Comment

As a longtime public servant of sorts, I’ve found it personally and ethically important to steer well clear of partisan politics when declaiming from the public soapbox that my blog offers. When I have written on political matters, I’ve sought to straddle a middle ground, by encouraging civil discourse between those of differing views, or asking that both the left and the right be able to justify their “research”, or imploring people to not use intentionally provocative words like “socialist” or “Nazi” or “teabagger” in such tense civic times as these.

Such central positions tend to come naturally to me, I think, because I’m a native Southerner, well and happily raised in an Evangelical Christian, Marine Corps household, a proud military veteran myself, and with a household income that puts me in one of the most-heavily taxed brackets (all of these traits commonly viewed as defining “tags” of the contemporary conservative), but yet I’ve also spent most of the past quarter-century north of the Mason-Dixon line, much of it working for nonprofit organizations associated with either the social services or arts or educational sectors, all viewed as bastions of extreme liberalism. I move easily in both worlds. And I respect those who work for common good, locally, at a State level, or nationally, from either side of the political spectrum, if that work is done in good faith, without bias or prejudice.

Unfortunately, as you move further from the center in either direction, it seems increasingly rare to find work being done for the common good without such bias or prejudice. I, frankly, find it appalling to ponder how many citizens of this Nation want to see our President and other elected officials fail miserably. And I found that sort of sentiment equally appalling during the last administration as well. As a political centrist, I yearn for nothing less than the greatest successes from the men and women who are duly elected under the rule of law to lead us, whether I agree with them politically or not.

I love the concept of the loyal opposition, but I fear it’s dying out in our Nation, which is terrifying to me. In the same way that strident left-wingers licked their chops and rubbed their hands with ill-concealed glee as President Bush struggled with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, so today do strident right-wingers relish the struggles of President Obama in dealing with the despoiling of the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon accident.

How tragic and shameful this is, when political operatives seek to gain advantage from the suffering of their fellow citizens! How poorly media charlatans and hucksters like Michael Moore, Glenn Beck, Anne Coulter, Janeane Garofalo and Rush Limbaugh serve the public good with their cheap shots from the fringes, while never actually doing anything themselves to improve anything except their own bank balances. While I don’t much care for Al Franken, either, he earns my respect for having put his money where his mouth was by running for office, and actually seeking to work within the system to effect the changes he believes in. Good for him.

One of the things that bothers me the most in today’s political discourse is the never-ending series of claims from both extremes of the political spectrum that our “freedoms” and “liberties” are methodically and intentionally being taken from us. For what it’s worth, I don’t use those words as plural nouns myself, but prefer to think of specific rights and privileges (plural) that engender the more ephemeral concepts of Liberty (singular) and Freedom (singular). Pluralizing and de-capitalizing “freedoms” and “liberties” creates what I consider to be a false sense that they are just long laundry lists of specific items, so that any time any item is removed from the list, Liberty (singular) and Freedom (singular) are compromised. I think that’s a self-referential and dangerous postulate, and I am sick and tired of the glib “we are all frogs in a pot, slowly boiling to death” analogy that defenders of this viewpoint trot out ad nauseum when this topic comes up. I’m not that stupid. Please don’t say that to me again. Or the Kool-Aid thing. Thank you.

I’m also a political scientist by training, so I tend to take long, macro views, and when I look at the rights and privileges available today to every citizen of the Nation, compared to the rights and privileges available at the time of the Constitution’s adoption, I see a long, steady enhancement and expansion of Constitutional protections granted either by amendment or by legislation or by rulings from the Supreme Court. At the opposite end of the spectrum, if I take the shortest and most narrow political view, meaning how I live my own life, I also have no sense that the rights and privileges I experience as a citizen have been diminished in any meaningful way during my lifetime.

I’ve asked here and in other online venues for people to tell me, personally, what “freedoms” and “liberties” have been denied to them by either the Bush or Obama or other recent administrations, and the answers tend to come in one of two forms: (a) scary things that could, hypothetically, happen, but haven’t actually happened to the people writing about them, or (b) piddly-to-churlish things like “I have to wear a seat belt when I drive,” or “I have to take my shoes off at the airport” or “I can’t smoke in my office anymore.” Me? I don’t mind ceding such rights and privileges to the greater good and safety of my fellow citizens.

And I think that’s the fundamental rub I have with all of the “freedoms” and “liberties” talk: much of it comes across as selfish whining from people who just want to be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want, to whomever they want, regardless of how it might or might not impact their fellow citizens. And that doesn’t feel, to me, like living under the rule of law, or being party to a social contract, or anything else beyond a petulant, foot-stomping, childish, “me me ME” view of the world around us. And that, in turn, makes me feel like we have become a Nation of Whiners, unwilling to work selflessly for the common good, concerned only about ourselves, and routinely electing politicians who are pathologically terrified of asking us to sacrifice. Few of us want to be inconvenienced. Few of us want to be told “no.” Few of us want to work hard to improve our Nation, if doing so involves something more than gathering occasionally to wave signs and shout platitudes at each other.

I think one of the worst examples of this in recent years was the Bush administration’s recommendation after September 11th that we should all continue shopping and going about business as usual, because if we didn’t, then the terrorists would have won. The attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center were the most grievous assaults on our Nation since Pearl Harbor. After the original day of infamy, the Nation joined together to ration, sacrifice, enlist, enroll, volunteer, home-garden, black-out and otherwise do what needed to be done to win the war against fascism in Asia and Europe. But after September 11th? Nothing. Just keep shopping, running up debt, and trying to flip your house for fun and profit. Fast forward ten years, with the economy in shambles in large part due to the debt crisis and housing bubble having popped, and consider how well that socioeconomic strategy worked out for us all.

As a former military officer, I grieve not only for those lost on September 11th, but also for those whose fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, and brothers and sisters have spent much of the past decade fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while we continue shopping and whining. My admiration for those people and their families is boundless. We are all so fortunate to benefit from their sacrifice, and it does them no justice for us to stay at home and carp about seat belts, regulations against salt in food, soda taxes, and shoe screening while they fight, and suffer, and die to defend our freedom to throw ugly words and ill-formed sentiments and half-facts at each other.

I am proud to live in a Nation that continues to provide me and my fellow citizens with a rich tapestry of rights and privileges. And I am proud of those who fight to defend us, and of those who work to support and nourish the rule of law, the common good, and the social contract that binds us as a Nation. And I am most proud of the Freedom and Liberty that I possess, for which, sometimes, I must sacrifice “freedoms” and “liberties.”

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Better Angels

February 8, 2011 Leave a Comment

“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend it’ . . . We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Those are the final words of Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, one of the most eloquent and elegant evocations of the sanctity of the American Union ever put to paper. His words resonate with me, 150 years after he delivered them. Like President Lincoln, I once swore an oath as a military officer to support and defend the United States Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and it remains “registered in heaven” all these years later, even though my time of active service is over.

Given that fact, it honestly pains me how glib many people have become in their use of secessionist language within contemporary political discourse, especially when the Confederate States of America (CSA) are evoked and lauded as part of that discussion. It has become fashionable in some circles to dress up and romanticize the Confederacy today in terms of States’ rights or pride in Southern heritage, but the fundamental bottom-line is that the “general welfare” and “blessings of liberty” that the leaders of the CSA desired hinged solely on the disenfranchisement of millions and millions of slaves.

Regardless of one’s political views, I can see no combination of current social, cultural or governmental ills coming anywhere close to the raw evil of a government that went to war to preserve the utter debasement of human life and dignity implied and enacted by institutional slavery. I’m proud to be a native Southerner, I’m proud of my deep South Carolina roots, but I’m ashamed of the role that my ancestors played in attempting to perpetuate and preserve the miseries of human slavery for economic gain. I view the Confederate flag with every bit as much antipathy as I view a Swastika accordingly. I hate seeing it displayed publicly today, no matter what the rationale for hanging it may be. It’s a tarnished symbol, beyond restoration or rehabilitation.

So I grieve for the soul of my Nation when this most shameful chapter in our collective history is often glossed over for the sake of political expediency in contemporary political debate, and the model of the CSA is upheld as a viable, admirable solution to current events. The way I see it, the question of whether or not healthcare should be considered a public good (to cite but one example) is in no way, shape or form comparable to the question of whether or not one human being should be able to treat another as chattel. Media and political operatives who make such romanticized and sanitized connections to the Confederacy as they cry for the dissolution of the Union do a grave disservice to us all. It’s one thing to be educated about and vigilant toward our government’s actions, but it’s quite another thing to call for the sundering of the Nation when the government doesn’t pursue the political agenda we might prefer it advance.

Lest you think this is a partisan screed aimed only at right wing demagogues who use fearful incitement as a blunt instrument to whip their followers into a frenzy, I should note that I hold left-leaning operatives who play to their listeners’ senses of victimization by evoking the specter of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or the Stalinist Soviet Union in exactly the same disdain. Holding up the CSA as an admirable model is grievously wrong-minded, but so is comparing anything going on in the United States today to the systematic genocide of millions of Europeans. The Nazi exaggeration is just as provocative, and just as incorrect, as the myth of the noble Confederacy. Frankly, I’d be just as happy to see Michael Moore and Janeane Garofalo go away as I would be to see Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck disappear. Propaganda is propaganda, no matter which side of the political spectrum it serves. Discourse doesn’t thrive when you’ve got a waggling finger shoved in your face.

And what we need more than anything else today is discourse. Not ranting, not hyperbole, not finger-pointing, not name-calling, not personal attacks, not insinuations, not skullduggery and certainly not a fantastic rewriting of American or European history to create a sense of fait accompli pointing us toward some particular contemporary outcome.

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Implementing Idealism: HIV Testing and Confidentiality in New York State

January 9, 2011 Leave a Comment

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is a disease of the immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which renders people vulnerable to life-threatening infections and cancers. In the early 1980s, during the nascent days of the AIDS epidemic, there was significant social stigma and fear associated with AIDS infection, as the disease first manifested itself through outbreaks of rare cancers among young gay men in California and New York. HIV was discovered and identified as the AIDS-causing virus in 1984, and prevention education efforts thereafter have focused on HIV testing as a key tool for enabling individuals to best protect themselves and others from infection or transmission. Given the ongoing social stigma associated with AIDS, however, privacy and confidentiality provisions associated with HIV testing remained paramount, and had to be addressed before testing could become widely useful among populations who were fearful that they could be harmed, persecuted, institutionalized or otherwise discriminated against as a result of a positive HIV test.

New York State enacted a seminal piece of legislation in 1989 as Public Health Law Article 27-F (Pub. Health L. §§ 2780-2787): “HIV Testing and Confidentiality Law.” The initial Article 27-F provisions have been amended since their passage, and were significantly supplemented in 1998 with the passage of New York State Public Health Law Article 21, Title III, (Pub. Health L. §§ 2130-2139): “HIV Reporting and Partner Notification Law,” the provisions of which went into effect in 2000. These laws specifically applied to, and had to be implemented by: physicians and others authorized to order lab tests or make medical diagnoses; persons who receive HIV-related information in the course of providing health or social services; persons who receive HIV-related information pursuant to a release; or health care providers or other medical services plans.

The seemingly simple concepts behind these laws were subject to a great deal of interpretation and ambiguity. While both Article 27-F and Article 21, Title III have been successfully implemented, the machinery required to support their provisions is far more complicated and loophole-ridden than that originally envisioned by the pioneering legal and social activists who first advocated for the confidentiality provisions now embodied in the New York State’s health laws. In the 2007 article connected to the link below, I discuss the challenges, complicating factors, approaches taken in the implementation process, and outcomes associated with applying the noble idealism embodied in Article 27-F in the crucible of the “real world” in which State and nonprofit agencies operate. The article also provided broad lessons learned and strategy recommendations for those tasked with implementing public policy, especially when they will be blazing trails while they do it.

Implementing Idealism: HIV Testing and Confidentiality in New York State

Filed under Education, Government, Nonprofits, Planning Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Compassionate Grounds

October 1, 2010 Leave a Comment

Jim was my best friend in junior high school. He was a Navy brat, I was a Marine Corps brat, and we were fortuitously thrown together by the fates when our families both moved to Mitchel Field before the start of our seventh grade year. We were both placed in a “Talented and Gifted” program at our friendly neighborhood junior high school, where they basically sequestered us and some other bright kids away from the mainstream of the school, likely turning us into odd ducks, if we weren’t so already. I suspect that Jim and I were in the latter category.

We essentially functioned as a two-person intellectual tag-team unit for the next three years at school and in our neighborhood, generally hanging out together except for during the six weeks in summer when he went to camp in Virginia, and we wrote long, elaborate, coded letters to each other laying out of plans for the year following his return. I still have a lot of those letters from him, most of them written with a fountain pen, blobs of ink all over them, preserving one of Jim’s more persistent (and eccentric) preferences at that time.

Jim and I first connected over our shared obsessions with the early music of Steely Dan and Jethro Tull, and we would spend hours and hours playing, discussing, analyzing and dissecting their albums. He was a bit more cosmopolitan than I was, and introduced me to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Monty Python, and Perrier. I think I introduced him to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom Series, Jean-Michel Jarre, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer (via a copy of Tarkus that I pilfered from the library of a nearby community college).Whatever we got into, we got into deep, and my cultural tastes today are largely similar to those that I forged with Jim during those formidable, formative years.

We did many of the things that smart junior high school boys do, and some that many don’t: we skateboarded, we smoked things we shouldn’t have, we figured out how to deal with girls, we wrote pretentious poetry, we worked on the school’s closed-circuit television show, and we designed elaborate linguistic and wargaming systems that combined Burroughs, Tolkein, and our own rather off-kilter senses of humor. We also liked to set things on fire, and once almost burned Jim’s house down while igniting model airplanes in his basement. (I still have scars on my left leg where molten model plastic splashed me).

Soon after the accidental fire, Jim hand-delivered a note to my house, which I still have. On the outside, it said “Special Bulletin to Eric Smith (Only)”. Inside it read:

“Though you may have guessed already, I will tell you that on the Friday 19th, after I took Wendy out (yup! yup!) my mother discovered her bottle of Sobo (TM) glue in the “small” room (basement) and also other things (hint: [some drawings of candles, model airplanes and fire appear here]). I made sure your mom didn’t find out, so things went a little easier, and I was heavily restricted for one night, for which I compensated by reading my (and Tolkein’s) companion. So, you guessed, fate has destined our pyromaniacal phase to terminate and I accept his decision on the matter and have decided that we now must enter a more conservative phase, where we must seek peace of mind, keeping within the limits, being subtle, yet radical, and settling down to more time with Wendy and Maria (yup!). But we must stay tactical, shrewd, uncanny, as we battle our foes. Also, we must be a team without civil war. I have drawn up a file to record and index anything or anyone concerning our organization(s).”

Of course, as happens with all organizations built around or for military brats, eventually duty calls for the military members, and their kids go with them. Jim left Mitchel Field first, the summer before our tenth grade year, moving to New Jersey, where (like me) he grew a foot in a year or so, and took up fencing, because he was the type of guy who just looked right with a sword in his hand. We continued to correspond regularly, and got together a couple of times that year before I moved to Newport, Rhode Island, for a year, and then to Jacksonville, North Carolina, at which point our letters tended to become less frequent, though more florid. I have a six-page, handwritten letter, for example, containing an epic poem called “Green Dragon Friday” that Jim sent me during the first semester of our senior year in high school. It’s really a spectacularly clever and creative piece, and it’s one of the reasons that I consider Jim one of the best writers (and smartest people) I’ve ever had the pleasure to know.

College time came, and I went off to the Naval Academy, and Jim was accepted to a prestigious Ivy League school, where he went on to become an All-American fencer. His school and my school were rivals on that front, so whenever he came to Annapolis to compete, we would get the chance to catch up. I made it through college in four years, but Jim’s wanderlust took him, and he left school before graduating, and headed off to Europe to explore, travel, think, and write for a couple of years before finishing his degree.

Just before Christmas of 1988, Jim boarded a plane in London to return to the United States. But he never made it home, perishing instead with 269 other people when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, and plummeted to the ground, 31,000 feet below. Jim had a window seat, just above the wing. According to the investigation report:

“. . . when the cockpit broke off, tornado-force winds tore through the fuselage, tearing clothes off passengers and turning insecurely-fixed items like food and drink trolleys into lethal objects. Because of the sudden change in air pressure, the gases inside the passengers’ bodies would have expanded to four times their normal volume, causing their lungs to swell and then collapse . . . A minute after the explosion, the wing section containing 200,000 lb (91,000 kg) of fuel hit the ground at Sherwood Crescent, Lockerbie. The British Geological Survey at nearby Eskdalemuir registered a seismic event measuring 1.6 on the Richter scale as all trace of two families, several houses, and the 196 ft (60 m) wing of the aircraft disappeared . . .”

I think it’s safe to say that Jim would have liked to have lived another several decades, and to have spent his final moments not as described above, but rather in the presence of his loved ones, as will Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the man convicted of killing him, who was released from his life sentence on “compassionate grounds” in August 2009, returning home to a hero’s welcome in Libya. He is still alive at the time of this writing.

I lost only a childhood friend over Lockerbie and I’m viscerally appalled by the Scottish judge’s decision, so I can’t comprehend how those who lost children, parents, brothers, sisters, husbands and wives must feel. There are strong ties to Pan Am Flight 103 in the Capital Region and other parts of Upstate New York (especially Syracuse), and I grieve for those families here and elsewhere as they watch mercy being dispensed to the person who unmercifully robbed them of their loved ones.

Those families are the ones worthy and deserving of relief on compassionate grounds, though there is none to be granted them.

Filed under Communications, Government Tagged with , , , ,

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