Half Changed World

I usually don’t do book reviews of books that I read a long time ago, but since we’ve been talking about Paul Robeson, I though I’d make a plug for Martin Duberman’s wonderful biography of Robeson.  It’s a long book, but it illuminates a fascinating and complicated man, as well as what it meant to be a successful black man in pre-civil rights America  (he was born in 1898 and was the third African-American man ever to attend Rutgers), and the Red scare.

The anti-communist hysteria of the 50s certainly caught up many people who weren’t really communists, but Robeson wasn’t in that category.  He may or may not have ever been a formal member of the Community Party USA (he always denied it; Gus Hall claimed he was), but there’s no doubt that he was a communist sympathizer.  To his credit, he truly believed in the universal brotherhood of man; to his shame, as Dave noted, he continued to insist that Stalinist Russia was an exemplar of that ideal, even when confronted with evidence to the contrary.  Duberman doesn’t shy away from that failing in Robeson, but he makes a convincing argument for how a proud and idealistic man could avoid confronting a truth that would give aid and comfort to those who had persecuted him for years, and embarrass the people who had stood up for him.

If you didn’t listen to the song I posted last week, go back and listen.  His voice is awesome.  This is the CD of Robeson singing that I have.  It’s an eclectic album that doesn’t quite hold together, but shows off the range of his repertoire.  It has his version of Ol’ Man River, as well as the House I Live In, and Joe Hill.  It also has him singing Motherless Child, Ode to Joy (in German), a Yiddish folksong, a song from The Magic Flute, discussing how "hello" sounds the same in many languages, and reciting the final speech from Othello. 

I understand that A-list bloggers are used to getting all sorts of schwag to review, but I’m far from that, so I was pretty surprised last month to check my inbox and discover that Nintendo was sending me a DS Lite and games to review.  It’s part of their campaign to market the DS to women, which also includes a promo where people who rent a high end purse can receive the use of DS at the same time.

I emailed the marketer back to say that I’d give it a try, but that their games would need to knock my socks off to justify the space in my purse.  Given that I can already play a number of games on my iPod touch, why would I want to carry something else around?  And indeed, none of the games they sent with it were as addictive to me as trism.

There’s no question that if you’re serious about playing games, the DS is still a better machine.  For one thing, its battery life far exceeds the iPod’s (which frankly stinks in game playing mode).  And it has two screens, and more than one button, which gives you a lot more options for controlling a game.  And it’s cheaper, and less breakable, and has a user-replaceable battery.  But for having something handy when I’m bored on the metro, or get stuck waiting on line somewhere, the iPod does just fine.

It also didn’t help their case that the selection of programs they sent was largely based on the assumption that women don’t actually want to play video games.*  So, they sent a yoga trainer (confusing controls for selecting programs, and no audio directions), a weight loss coach with a pedometer (great concept, clunky implementation), a crossword program (fine except that you had to solve a bunch of easy ones to get to the ones that were interesting), Brain Age 2 (clever), Carnival Games (a hit with my son), and a puzzle solving game (MillionHeir, which was pretty good).  And none of these shows off the capacity of the system half as well as the Pokemon game that my son has been busily playing since the minute I handed over the system.**

So, I’m dubious about this marketing push, even as I think they’ve got a pretty good product.  I just don’t see a lot of grown ups playing with a DS. Am I missing something?  Any of you play with one of these?

*This article quotes someone from Nintendo as saying that half of the DS systems sold last year belong to women.  Sorry, but I can only believe that if: a) "women" is defined to mean "female, regardless of age" or b) "belong" is defined to mean "purchased by" regardless of the primary user.  I know some women who play computer games,*** but 50 percent just isn’t plausible to me.

** D has been asking for a DS for a long time, and we told him that we wouldn’t buy him one, but he could save up for one. And he’s been dutifully saving his allowance for over a year.  So once I tried the system enough to write a fair review, I let him buy it from me for half price.  He knows that we still retain the right to put the system in time out if he misbehaves.

***For some interesting discussion on gender differences in online games, see Geeky Mom.

An organ transplant — especially when it’s a repeat job — is never a simple operation, but all things considered, Annika seems to be doing pretty well.  I’m still keeping her and her family in my thoughts and prayers.

On one of the posts about her (not here, on another blog), someone posted a comment urging people to join something called LifeSharers.  Their stated goal is to increase the number of organs donated and reward the people who choose to donate, by giving people who commit to donate organs higher priority to receive organs themselves.  They’re doing this by creating a free membership organization, where the condition to belong is that you commit to a) donating your organs and b) specifying that other members should get priority for those organs.

There’s an interesting logic here.  It gets around the primary objection to paying people for their organs (e.g. that the amounts involved could be coercive, and might motivate your next of kin to make decisions that were in their best interest rather than yours).  They explicitly don’t require that you be in good enough health for anyone to use your organs to join, so there’s no discrimination in membership.  (Although, as T points out, since they seem to be mostly recruiting through the internet, there’s a procedural bias towards the populations that are more likely to use it.)  And this doesn’t appear to be one of the predictably irrational cases where you make people less altruistic by offering an external reward.

But, in looking at their site, it seems like many of the people who are endorsing it are at least as motivated by a desire to show that incentives and free markets can produce a better outcome than government solutions as they are by they desire to have more organs transplanted.

Because there’s another very simple way to increase the number of organs that are available for transplant, that they don’t mention at all.  Make organ donation opt-out, rather than opt-in.  In other words, rather than having to specify that you want to donate your organs (and then have your next of kin confirm that intention), it would be assumed that you gave consent for donation unless you specified otherwise.  This sounds like a radical concept, but  a bunch of European countries do it, and they have donation consent rates between 85 and 99.9 percent*, compared to less than 30 percent in countries that have opt-in policies.

Fundamentally, these alternative approaches to increasing donation are based on very different hypotheses about why more people don’t donate.  LifeSharers is based on the hypothesis that there’s not enough of an incentive to donate.  Opt-out is based on the hypothesis that thinking about dying freaks people out and so they avoid doing it as much as possible.  I’d put my money on the latter.

The UK is considering moving to a system of presumed consent.  Does anyone think it has a chance in the US?

*Sweden is the outlier here, at 85.9 percent, with no other opt-out country at under 88 percent.  I wonder if there’s some cultural issue here against organ donation, or if they’re more aggressive than the other countries in making sure people know of their right to opt-out.  Either way 85.9 percent is a heck of a lot higher than 30 percent.

I went to the homeowner’s association meeting tonight and, as is their custom, a number of politicians and their representatives were invited to speak.  Connolly and Fimian were both at a previously scheduled event, but they both sent people to speak on their behalf.  Connolly’s representative did a generally solid job, though he went on for too long.  Fimian’s representative was a young man, perhaps 20 years old, who began his speech by admitting that he usually spoke to groups of high school student and this was a step up for him.  It was pretty painful listening to him, as basically the entire pitch was that Fimian’s not a Washington insider and he knows what it’s like to be us.  Since we had just recognized Tom Davis for his years of service to the district, this was perhaps not the best note to hit.

At the question and answer period, one of my neighbors tossed him a bit of a softball, asking about the mailings that she’d been getting about Fimian, and weren’t they just accusing him of being Catholic?  (Note that Connally is also Catholic.)  He responded with a long answer about how they were making these accusations based on links on the Legatus website, even though the webpage includes a disclaimer that they didn’t constitute an endorsement.

Well, this ticked me off, because it sounded to me like Fimian was trying to hide his strong social conservative positions.  So I asked him about the info from Left of the Hill, that Fimian’s company amended its health insurance plan to exclude coverage of abortion, even in cases where the health or life of the mother was at risk.  (I found this via Anonymous is a Woman.)  The speaker had no idea, and so we moved on, but I found myself arguing with my neighbor about how common this is.

When I got home, I started googling, and I found this 2003 Kaiser Family Foundation survey that found that 46 percent of firms that provided health insurance included abortion coverage.  (I checked, and while KFF conducts this survey every year, they seem to have dropped the question about abortion coverage.)  Large employers were far more likely to provide abortion coverage than small ones.  Interestingly, 26% percent of employers did not know whether their insurance plan covered abortion, which makes me think that this is usually a cost-cutting provision rather than an ideological one.

What I can’t tell from this is whether plans that don’t cover abortion generally have life and health of the mother exceptions.  I can’t find this online — anyone have a source?  Or, if your plan doesn’t cover abortion, can you look it up in your benefits handbook?

The background for this story is that we went to Simchat Torah services tonight. Since it’s a weeknight and lots of people were coming straight from work, the congregation ordered pizza and we had dinner before services.  And while we were getting ready, the half dozen or so kids in attendance were chasing each other around in circles.

One of the members of the congregation gave me this learning as a gift.  R said that he had been studying a section of talmud with a partner, and that they had worked through a long section about what you should do if you’re praying, and need to use the bathroom.  In particular, the rabbis addressed the question of if you’re wearing tefillin and you need to use the latrine, what should you do with the tefillin.  If you wear them into the latrine, it seems disrespectful, but what if you leave them outside and they’re lost?  The rabbis concluded that it was better to somewhat disrespect the teffilin than risk that they be lost.

So, R said, he and his partner were trying to figure out what lesson they could take from this section of talmud.  And they concluded that maybe the children of the congregation were like the tefillin.  Better that the purity of the ritual be somewhat compromised, than risk that they be lost from the community…

Because I felt needed to wash my ears out (and maybe my brain) after listening to Michelle Bachmanns ranting about "anti-Americans" in Congress, let me offer another vision of America, Paul Robeson singing "The House I Live In."

(Also available at Remix America, which has some other interesting stuff.)

Here’s a link to donate to El Tinklenberg, who is running against Bachmann.

And I join with Cecily in saying: "Do you hear me? I am a pro-choice East Coast liberal elitist and I am PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN. Stop saying I’m not.
"

update:  My mother asked me whether my readers know who Paul Robeson was.  I said I’d ask.  Do you?

Picking up on Thursday’s discussion…

Our voter registration system is inherently messy.  In general, without some sort of a national voter registry, it’s almost impossible to come up with a system that:

a) doesn’t impose massive burdens on people who move a lot*;
b) doesn’t penalize people who don’t vote every year; AND
c) ensures that no one can be registered to vote in more than one place.**

I know that for years and years after I moved away from New York (and registered to vote elsewhere), I remained on the voter rolls in my old precinct.  (My parents still voted there, so could see my name on the list.)  Not sure if my changing my name when I married confused them, or if they just never processed the form that Virginia sent them when I registered here.

I understand the appeal of matching voter registration records against other databases, but the problem is that it’s really easy for perfectly valid registrations to get bumped because people use different variants of their names, or someone can’t read their handwriting, or just plain computer errors.  This is a bigger issue this year than in the past, precisely because in the wake of the 2000 debacle, states were required to clean up their lists.  (As bj said, the issues in 2004 were mostly about the reliability of electronic voting machines, and ballot and machine shortages that led to huge delays in heavily minority areas.)

And the fact is, there are no modern US examples of election fraud happening as the result of widespread false registrations.***  It would be a pretty inefficient way to steal an election, compared to getting election officials to stuff the ballot box (either literally or with electronic tampering), as happened in the 1948 Senate victory by LBJ, which pretty much everyone agrees involved election fraud on both sides.  I’m actually far more worried about the increasing use of mail-in ballots, as that makes it a lot easier for people to either impose social pressure on their friends/family, or to downright buy votes.

So, yeah, when McCain and his surrogates say that improper voter registrations are threatening American democracy, I just don’t buy it. 

* I assume it’s obvious to everyone who reads this why poor people and young people are more likely to move a lot, but if you want me to explain, let me know.  They’re also less likely to have government issued ID.

** Although my friend who is a dual US-Canadian citizen, living in Montreal, assures me that it’s legal for her to vote in both US and Canadian federal elections, although she can’t vote in a US state or local election.

*** Of course there are specific cases of people voting in districts they didn’t live in, or in multiple districts.  And it’s a testimony to most people’s honesty that there aren’t a ton more, given how easy it is to get on the rolls in more than one state.

In the comments on yesterday’s post, Sue asked about the claim "that ACORN had been part of some issues with the subprime mortage crisis."   The short answer is no, not really.  But the full answer is important, so I’m giving it its own post.

Promoting homeownership for low-income families is certainly one of the things that ACORN has worked on over the years.  They’ve done this both through legislative work, primarily the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), and through direct work with families.  Let’s look at both of these.

CRA was a response to many banks’ historic practice of redlining — of refusing to make ANY  home loans within certain areas, defined both on the basis of income and of race.  I’m not 100 percent clear on the exact requirements, but the intent was to force banks that wanted things from the government (mostly approvals of mergers and acquisitions) to meet standards with respect to the number (or share?) of loans made in low-income and underserved communities.  And from 1977, when it was passed, to the early 2000s, it caused a slow and steady increase in such loans.

Banks objected to the CRA, because they believed that they couldn’t possibly make money by issuing home loans in low-income areas.  But CRA forced them to look at their criteria and do their best to distinguish between moderate-income people who were bad credit risks and ones who were actually pretty good.  This is where the second part of ACORN’s work came in.   They did a lot of financial education for their members, and negotiated with deals with banks where they’d provide reduced points, or other lower fees, for people who completed these courses.  The banks benefited because it helped them make loans that met their CRA requirements, and because the people who were willing to complete the courses were in fact better risks than similar people who didn’t.  ACORN benefited because these courses were a way to recruit members.  And the low-income people benefited, because they were able to buy homes.

So, what happened in the 2000s?  For one thing, people were convinced that home prices were only going to go up.  So it didn’t really matter if people were bad credit risks, because if they defaulted, the banks thought they’d get houses that were worth more than they had loaned.  For another thing, banks had come up with all these fancy ways to resell the mortgages they made, so they believed that they had made the risk go away.  Suddenly, there was a ton of money to be made making loans to poor people.  And lots of institutions rushed in — including things that weren’t "banks" and so weren’t subject to CRA.

My sense is that ACORN had pretty mixed feelings about this.  On the plus side, lots of people were able to buy houses.  But on the negative side, they could see that a lot of people were being given crappy high cost loans.  But as a little nonprofit — and one that made people jump through hoops before helping them get loans — they had a lot of trouble competing with the sleazy mortgage brokers who were promising people easy loans and low monthly payments.

So, in the sense that banks experience under CRA taught them that it was possible to make loans to low-income people without losing money, I suppose you could argue that it "contributed" to the subprime mess.  But that’s like saying if agriculture had never been invented, we wouldn’t have to worry about the spread of obesity.

But don’t take my word for it.  Here’s Ellen Seidman’s explanation of why CRA isn’t the cause of the subprime mess.  She ran the Office of Thrift Supervision under the Clinton Administration, among other things.

I sometimes work in legislative coalitions with the folks at ACORN, and I can tell you they’re feeling pretty shell-shocked right now.  For decade they’ve been quietly going about their work, organizing low-income people to fight for things like job training, affordable housing, and child care.  It’s not glamorous work, and the wins come in small increments.  And now they’re suddenly Republicans’ public enemy number one.

I really do think the concerns about voter registration are overblown.  Enough registration forms get lost in the system that there’s a real incentive to submit multiple times until you’re sure one took.  And they’re legally required to submit any form they’re given, because there have been in the past cases of people doing voter registration drives and then tossing all the forms in the trash.  I wonder if, after the election, we could get a bipartisan agreement that allowed for election day registration but required a government issued ID.  Or maybe we could borrow the purple ink from the Iraqis.

But, what’s really bothering me is that the rhetoric that McCain and his supporters are using undermines people’s faith in the system.  I raised the same concern four years ago, when Democrats were worrying about Diebold voting systems.  It’s good and fine to fight hard in elections, but it’s not ok to undermine the legitimacy of the winner.  I’m hoping that Obama wins by big enough margins, in both electoral votes, and in the individual states, that there’s no possibility that anyone could believe that fraud changed the results.

Continuing the conversation:

• ACORN and housing

• more on voter registration

This year, the theme for Blog Action Day is Poverty.  Check it out.