Narnold's Argument Gym

Get it, gym, for exercise? I have this both to see who I was when I'm older and to validate any shifts of position with the context of time. 

[econarnold]

Liberal Deification of Activist Celebrities

I was going to try and snarkily tweet this, but I realized I had deeper thoughts than a few 280 character messages could contain.  

To start, this was catalyzed by Jennifer Lawrence announcing she’ll be taking the year off acting to work with Represent.Us on rooting out political corruption.  She has joined the ranks of many celebrities who recognize the moment we’re in and are choosing to use their platforms for good, and we should all recognize how amazing that is.

However, we also shouldn’t be deifying these celebrities for these actions.  I hate that I’m the kind of person who has this experience to speak from, but we all know how lavish these celebrities’ lives are because we follow them on Instagram or Snapchat and see their enviable lives of delusional wealth.  Good for them, they do great work in an industry that collective humanity has decided is worth being paid absurd amounts of money for good work.  But that also means this class of people, “celebrities”, could have been wielding their influence and wealth in ways comparable to the Sheldon Adelsons & Koch Brothers of the world.  

We talk often about the gap between conservative campaign finance and liberal campaign finance, but we don’t ascribe blame nearly enough to those who occupy both liberal and elite identities for the way they have abdicated their role as the elite.  

This moment has woken up a whole bunch of people, including these celebrities, to the importance of civic engagement.  Because this is a new movement of activism, we should be skeptical of deifying new leaders, because all leaders are flawed and will inevitably disappoint us without proper safeguarding of expectations.  

Jennifer Lawrence is not going to eliminate political corruption in a year and she probably has said or done some things liberals will find objectionable. She’s a Kentucky native, after all, and odds are her developmental childhood exposed her to deep conservatism.  

I just want us to be cautious, because the audiences that liberal celebrities influence politically/civically probably have very little background in the issues or civics and are therefore deeply malleable.  We can’t go from a world of disengagement where Christian Conservatism could coordinate a political strategy to a world where the same disengagement is painted over with lazy cultism around faces, not ideals.  Bernie was a good first lens at this: while his ideas have moral, economic, and cultural clout, the aftermath of the campaign reveals a lot more cult of personality than devotion to policy proposals than one would hope for a true “Political Revolution”.  Imagine how much worse our politics and legislation could get if that same principle trickles down to celebrity cults of personality.  

Let us embrace our liberal elites and the help that they’re finally offering us foot-soldiers of democracy, but let us also remember they’ve been out of the fight for so long, and should not be granted carte blanche on political influence. 

[econarnold]

Getting It Right

After a small amount of whiskey, I was reading the short biography of the first-term legislator whose career brought me into politics and whose reelection campaign is now my first political employer.  It brought me to happy tears usually reserved only for re-watching Season 8 of Parks & Rec.   This is a woman who started the Environmental Law Certificate Program I once aspired to completing. The woman who helped start the Environmental Law Journal for which I once hoped to contribute.  She’s run a state’s Environmental Protection Division of an Attorney General’s office, literally written the book chapters on Environmental Federalism, and teaches a new generation of legal defenders of the planet.  

And now, in small thanks to my volunteering in 2016, she’s sponsoring bills to improve my state’s energy efficiency codes and fuel standards, to help teachers supply their classrooms and get due compensation, to help fix my state’s terrible incarceration structure to give chances to people who need a leg up, not be behind bars.  

I am so lucky and even more grateful that I am able to occupy this part of making the world a better place, even in such a small way.  I am so optimistic about what this means for the rest of my life.  If this is the good I can do in these dark times, with this emotional canine dependency, at only 24 years old, who knows what limits exist for my positive influence on the world.

[econarnold]

Performative Compassion from Purity Leftists

This is a topic I’ve only recently been able to give a name, but has been affecting me for almost two years now.  To start, let me define “performative compassion” and provide an anecdote of the purity leftist demonstration.

Performative Compassion is when someone uses the language of compassion or social media-advocates for a compassionate position, but fails to do the work that would implement more compassion.  In the context of politics, this means the many, many people who will share an article about something we should all care about or critique a politician or a policy position, but don’t lift a finger beyond sharing the article or offer a path to an alternative politician or policy position.  

I want to be clear: I am not critiquing the compassion.  For most, it is human nature to feel empathy and sympathy for others, particularly those who we recently learned to be disadvantaged in some way.  What bothers me is that, thanks to the accessibility of sharing information, demonstrating that compassion can be simply performative.  There is a vast chasm between sharing information about an injustice and taking action to mitigate or eliminate that injustice.  

It is additionally important to specify “Purity Leftists” as opposed to generic committers of performative compassion because of the implicit political education claimed by outspoken members of an ideology.  I have friends who perform political awareness, yet don’t know their Congressional District.  They bother me and I strive to educate them on actionable ways to be politically aware, but they aren’t portraying themselves as political activists with an emoji in their social media profiles.

No, Purity Leftists are a special brand of Compassion Performers.  Whether they’re affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America or simply a “Leftist, never a Democrat”, these “politically aware” people have carved out a voter bloc modeled after the worst parts of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Presidential Campaign. The intellectually dishonest parts, like attacking the Affordable Care Act as insufficient despite the reality that a better option was not achievable, or attacking Hillary Clinton for her connections to Wall Street despite her voting record reflecting an entirely different person, that allowed them to rationalize and message a false equivalency between her and Donald Trump.  

Their critiques are, I used to assume, in good faith. I fully appreciate and share aspirations for a world where humans aren’t illegal, our resource economy is perfectly circular, the wealth gap is zero across all demographics, and nobody has to worry about healthcare emergencies bankrupting them.  Unfortunately, the practicalities of a complex world do not make it a simple choice between reality and that utopia.  What we do have is a democratic system that is deeply flawed, but the only non-militia method for creating change.

I specify non-militia because I do have “leftist” acquaintances whose arguments seem to find a logical conclusion in violent revolution, but no plans or capacity to achieve such a task.

After that unnecessarily indulgent exposition, the anecdote: “Doug Jones is a Terrible Candidate”.  This Medium piece was written by a member of the Alabaman DSA Organizing Committee, a role which assumes a level of understanding of politics as well as some responsibility for the success or failure of electorally accomplishing the policy goals of DSA.  I’ll save you the time and patience, her essential argument is: While Roy Moore is a credibly accused pedophile*, Doug Jones hasn’t committed explicitly to Medicare-for-all & a $15 minimum wage**, therefore I won’t vote.

*Additionally, Moore has advocated either the imprisonment or deportation of marginalized groups, blamed 9/11 on lack of religious faith, and has done countless other repulsive things.

**In the piece, “Alex” acknowledges that Doug Jones’ website includes his belief that healthcare for all and a living wage are rights, and also included Bernie’s name in case you forgot the only political mold for whom she’d be willing to vote. 

On Twitter, this has become a bit of a topic for the left.  The exact interaction that triggered me to word vomit this thought, is as follows: 

In this interaction, you see Mee-ya-gan Perform their Compassion by lamenting that Ralph Northam cow-towed on the Sanctuary City debate and calling the celebration of his victory “privileged”.  Now, I agree with them, protecting immigrants is important and I would’ve preferred Northam to now have cow-towed to that debate.  However, the reality of context must remind you that if Ralph Northam wasn’t celebrating, Ed Gillespie would have been and people of color would be even more at risk.  Additional reminder: Virginia has no sanctuary cities and the fact that Northam took a position at all was because Gillespie used it to stoke racial tension. 

You again see this performance in “While you pontificate, families are being torn apart by ICE”. This is perfectly reasonable compassion to have, and I do worry about the families destroyed by a government that deems human beings illegal.  But let’s move down to where they are asked “What was the better option?” and here we see that the compassion is truly performative.  “A better candidate...to begin with”. Hmm. Certainly you understand the problem with this as an alternative, given the forward motion of time and all.  

When pressed on the impossibility of this “alternative” by election day, Mee-ya-gan takes a very defensive position in order to absolve them self of any responsibility in finding and electing a preferable candidate.  So let’s lay this out once again, to belabor the point to a death we all may find early because Hillary Clinton wasn’t pure enough.

Identify a problem that deserves compassion, thus showing how compassionate your politics are.

Lament the results of an election because the winner failed to check all boxes for your compassionate position.

Ignore the zero-sum game theory of politics in which the candidate who checks zero of those boxes was the ONLY other option.

Absolve yourself of any and all role you could play in pushing this imperfect victor to checking the rest of the boxes. 

Blame those who put the work in to make sure that the candidate with some boxes checked beats the candidate with no boxes checked, continue absolving yourself of any responsibility of work to implement your compassionate politics.

You see, this is effectively as useful as doing literally nothing at all.  A person who doesn’t subscribe to compassionate politics (either via ignorance of a problem or a more malicious intent) is contributing approximately the same amount to a more compassionate political system as Mee-ya-gan.  In the case of Alex, despite having a firm grasp on the political realities of the Alabama Special Election race, is similarly having no more impact on the outcome than a simple non-voter with no information, by choosing not to vote at all. 

At the end of the day, our political system is what it is, and it’s all we have in the United States of America.  Policy and the legislative process can be moved in the margins, but elections are necessarily zero-sum, a binary decision between two candidates where one wins and gets to govern, and the other loses and has no authority.  

From the view of my compassionate politics, I’m going to show up to make sure I have a voice in who gets to govern, and I’m going to vote for the better candidate.  Call it “Lesser of Two Evils”, but one of the two “evils” will be elected so you’re damn right I’m voting for the lesser one. 

[econarnold]

Thoughts on Potential Benefits from a “The Circle”-esque Future of Social Media

I saw “The Circle” a month or so ago.  The movie explored various techno-sociological themes but left me without a conclusion on what its goal was, though I suspect that open-ended nature was deliberate.  I’ve been thinking about some of the messages in the time since, especially as it relates to our current problems in global politics and general discourse.  

I’ll start with some of the themes I picked up on that will frame my thoughts:

Role of Social Media Companies in Society

Pros/Cons of Radical Transparency

Accessibility Expansion due to Social Media

Power/Influence Dynamics 

Overview:

These are obviously very broad themes and interrelate quite extensively, but they’re all important components of how our relationship with politics and each other have been and will continue to be shaped by our participation in social media.  The internet changed the way the world turned by striking arguably one of the last blows to the limitations of geography, a fight that began with the development of postal systems, unmeasurably advanced by Alexander Graham Bell’s innovations, and codified by the entire field of telecommunications.  Our ability to discuss and evolve has been dramatically improved thanks to these innovations and social media is the logical conclusion of that increased capacity.  

On any given social medium, users are granted the ability (and expectation) to represent themselves electronically in an easily shared technological package through text, multimedia, reactions, networks, and connections.  This may seem second-nature now that we’re decades in, but as a species we have developed a new, technological dimension to identity.  You can share your thoughts with numerous others, “like” the thoughts of others, follow celebrities, politicians, comedians, strangers with whom you agree, etc. and access all of that information via an interface that provides accessibility to many who could never have participated in these types of interactions and connections between people who may never meet each other “in real life”. 

That might be a grandiose way of viewing social media, but it is hugely significant to laud the benefits before discussing the stark detriments.  In theory, this enhanced communication system would be wonderful for breaking down barriers to information, making obsolete many physical constraints to communication for those with physical, emotional, or social disabilities, and raising the level of discourse and understanding by expanding the pools of conversation. 

Problem 1: Corrupted Discourse via Anonymous & Programmed Participants

As we all are tragically aware, only some of that has happened and all of it is dependent on the way we use social media.  Discourse can be soured by a “troll” seeking only to fill a role of provocateur or corrupted by anyone with an agenda feeding unsourced information that is often accepted as valid to those seeking confirmation of their bias.  There are algorithms developed to emulate “trolls”, creating feedback loops of misinformation with precise demographic targeting and cultivating the concept of echo chambers to a dark extreme.  We see this with a variety of ideological backgrounds but most recently in the elevation of the “alt-right”, new-age nationalists whose lack of coherence seems to be complemented by extreme tunnel vision.  

It is because of these unintended consequences that the fiction-adjacent social media company featured in “The Circle” offers an intriguing look into where we could be heading.  One of the parts of their social medium I think is the strongest is what appears to be the vetting/verification process in order to obtain and cultivate a profile, resulting in a basic requirement that any presence on the medium is derived from a real human with traceable roots. That might seem a little extreme, but the basic premise that anyone participating in online discourse must A) be an actual person and B) cannot hide behind memes or pictures that aren’t themselves would offer HUGE strides in mitigating the dark underbelly of e-discourse.  We already suspect many incoherent or illogical provocations to be from “trolls” or “bots”, why not implement policies to eliminate that as a concern?  It would raise concerns about potential abuse of power for a social medium to have a database of verifiable information about its users, but I suspect there would be great potential for public-private sector collaboration on how to regulate such information.

Problem 2: Civic & Community Engagement

The “vetting process" could also facilitate a mechanism for public engagement yet untapped.  If a person’s profile was not subjected to self-reported information, it would be far easier to cultivate discussions within people of a certain locality on local issues, of people within a demographic community to find each other and discuss solutions to shared problems, to engage constituents with those representing or regulating them.  The movie shows the dark side of this power -- the scene where they discuss mandatory voting and an assimilation of voting databases with the social media company’s databases is a great example of dangerously inflated influence and control -- but there are many civic engagement strides we could make, presuming regulating such a system is plausible.  

Facebook has already made headway on parts of this with their new “Town Hall” feature and I commend that effort and the many friends I have who have engaged with it.  It should be as easy as any other comment or expression on Facebook to contact your representative, even if it must be distilled into a tally to be useful influence for federal representatives. 

Problem 3: What Needs to Be Transparent But Isn’t

Much of the disenfranchisement from politics (and most everything else) comes from an understanding that we, the little people, have no idea what goes on behind the closed doors of Congress or even City Council.  “Radical transparency” is demonstrated well in the movie, both from the Congresswoman who publishes every single professional communication and from Emma Watson’s character wearing the “SeeChange” at all times & installing cameras in her parents’ home.  It seems obvious that the average citizen owes no transparency to the rest of the world so I won’t argue for that, but what extent do public officials and those responsible for governance owe us transparency? 

I’d venture to guess the answer to that question varies highly, dependent on political ideology and experience with authority (both from within and without). Personally, I straddle the line between understanding the importance of secrets as they relate to national security and some contentious negotiations and knowing that the best way to hold officials accountable is to know what they’re doing with that authority.  We don’t need to know about the weekend plans of a Senator, but we do need to know with whom they’re meeting during those plans if they involve even .000001% professional discussion.  We don’t need to see Hillary Clinton’s emails about Chelsea’s wedding but we do need to know what conversations were had with foreign nationals donating to the Clinton Foundation.  

The movie delves into this a little bit, lauding the action of the “radically transparent” Congresswoman and affording celebrity status to Mae (Watson) for her delve into total transparency but also condemning the selective transparency of The Circle itself in the form of programmer Ty (played by John Boyega).  The message of the movie is essentially that information is power, but how much and from whom is a much messier calculation.  

Problem 4: Accessibility of Experience & Conversation

In spite of how deeply I’ve thought about the other components of the movie, I think the element that touched me the most emotionally was discussion around applications for the “SeeMe” camera.  Essentially the camera is a fly-on-the-wall technology that can remotely stream what it is viewing at all time and run real-time analytics, and can either be clipped onto a person like a body cam or placed inconspicuously in a space.  When the company presents it, it is lauded as the key for humanitarian efforts across the globe in order to expose injustice and offer a view into any number of experiences.  

Additionally, the body cam component is depicted as a means for access to experiences, so those restricted by disabilities or disorders could have a person’s point of view while climbing a mountain, exploring the ocean, kayaking under a bridge, etc.  The idea is incredible, despite the very abundant problems related to excessive surveillance capacity, because accessibility is such an important element of living in an equitable society and having robust discourse.  

It reminded me starkly of Twitter, whose 140 character limit and minimally demanding interface has become a huge asset to social media accessibility. Members of the disabled community have, for likely one of the first times, access to each other and the ability to organize themselves within any number of networks specific to them or, within Twitter, hashtag communities to discuss their experiences and obstacles.  The discourse provided by this access is incredibly important and gives a voice to those easiest for society to ignore.  

Expanding that to an experience in the world through an able-bodied person’s point of view would be huge for a child in a wheelchair who may want nothing more than to see the top of a mountain or the depths of the ocean.  

It would be phenomenal for human rights attorneys to have footage of abuses for evidence or for the United Nations’ Human Rights Council to see the kinds of brutal oppression with an almost a first-hand account.  Certainly that footage wouldn’t make obstacles like sovereignty and geopolitics less intense, but it would eliminate any speculation on validity of reports on abuse and would hopefully play an enormous role in bringing together the global community. 

Regulation, again, would be the difficult part of bringing such technology and its data to the world, especially if by way of a multinational private corporation.

Problem 5: Dynamics of Power & Influence

While discussion of this theme has been present throughout all the “problems”, I felt like this deserved some conclusive thoughts.  

Influence is, in my mind, a broader form of power that has less tangible correlation to how society is shaped.  Everyone harbors influence but the sphere of influence varies greatly between me and my Mayor & City Council, and between them and my Congressional Representative and Senators.  Social media allows us to quantify our sphere of influence in terms of “friends” for individuals or “likes”/”follows” for public figures and I think that quantification is important for understanding a more grassroots element to power dynamics.  

If we had a social medium in which every individual was verified as a real person with a real vote and real consequences from changes in governance, the number of followers would be much more meaningful and the conversations on posts by public figures could be treated as similarly valued as public commentary at a Congressional Town Hall or City Council meeting.  That not only goes hand in hand with enhanced accessibility (not just to those with disabilities but also the economically disadvantaged who need good governance the most but can’t take the time off work or parenting to offer input), but also offers a much more varied and comprehensive discourse over time.  

For example, my favorite Arizona State Senator and recently filed 2018 Gubernatorial candidate Steve Farley regularly uses his public figure Facebook page as a forum to discuss proposed legislation and issues with constituents. Even with the current social media system, he has been swayed on a few issues and has convinced dissenters of merits on other issues.  He has engaged with “the little people” about how he should perform his role as a public figure and has served the state and his constituents much better because of it.  Imagine if we had a social medium to facilitate that type of conversation without the trolls, the anonymous provocateurs, the algorithms, and anyone else not seeking coherent and honest debate?

Overall, the message behind The Circle is nuanced and a measured look at the way technology and information relate to society and politics.  It leaves you feeling that, yes, maybe you should examine your participation in social media but not that it is categorically a good or bad tool.  But the specifics of this alternate reality (or possible future?) leave us with much broader ideas about how we interact and what technology offers us, both good and bad.  

[econarnold]

The Importance of Policy-Making

In relation to the shootings that happened yesterday, I think it's incredibly important to remind everyone what policy-making is and why it is so important.

We have governments because we have society that must be organized. In our Constitutional Republic, we are granted the right to elect government officials through democratic elections, and those officials are entrusted with creating, fixing, and implementing policy, as well as determining those whom we trust to evaluate those laws in the judicial system.

At its core, policy-making is about improving the organization of society. It's about identifying society-level problems (on various scales), figuring out root and proximate causes, and crafting legislation that seeks to rectify the problem's causes. Policy-making is about fixing society's problems.

What does it say about the trajectory of our society when we experience such tragedies (the Congressional & the UPS shootings, the 153rd and 154th of the year, if I'm reading correctly - http://fortune.com/…/06/14/steve-scalise-mass-shooting-2017/) and policy-makers seek only to address the toxic political rhetoric at the expense of comprehensive public policy discussion?

Certainly, rhetoric is a problem in this country and is something every single one of us can think about and improve upon. But politics and policy, while inextricably linked, are not one in the same. We should be able to have a conversation about failures in policy without being demonized for "politicizing" a tragedy, most especially when that tragedy may be reflective of a society-level problem with unaddressed causes.

This isn't a call for any one policy change or solution, but to remind everyone why we discuss policy in the first place. There are complex problems that are deeply rooted in the United States and not one of them will be solved by ignoring the causes in order to be "less political".

[econarnold]

The Reality and Conservative Narrative of College Campus Discourse

I watch Fox News when I am with family members who have cable, I regularly discuss issues with a deeply conservative college friend, and I know why I believe in liberal policies enough to also understand a conservative perspective.  From that understanding I discuss this topic, accepting the premise that the addressed manifestations are not in the original spirit I will discuss.

Over Winter Break of 2016, while my side was in ruins and the right was elated, I spent some time with family and thus was able to cycle among the right (FNC), the left (MSNBC), and the sensationalist middle (CNN).  In that time, I witnessed an “Outnumbered” episode in which the 4-female, 1-male panel discussed “safe spaces” on campus.  While most of the panel approached it from a perspective interested in constructive disagreement and the reality of political discourse, there was at least one panel member that treated the topic with such arrogant disgust it was hard to take the topic seriously.  I understand from the “pull-yourself-up-from-your-bootstraps” conservative side, it seems ridiculous. But if this panel member had set aside her “get-to-it”-iveness (that came across as cruel condescension) long enough to sort the root from the manifestation, they would hopefully have a tone less betrayed by contempt.  

The purpose of a safe space, as I understood it, was to prevent victims of trauma from having an experience forcing them to relive that trauma.  That verbiage was then distilled into the term “trigger”, one I’m sure you recognize with either empathy or hostility.  A “safe space” was one where people didn’t refer to victimizing actions, some of which may involve crude objectification or threatening bigotry.  I should hope that, to a degree, we all have the empathy to understand the virtue in a place in which victims of trauma do not need to worry about reliving their experiences.

Unfortunately, through the echo chamber effect of the internet, ideas of empathy have evolved into levels that can be argued as detrimental to societal progress and discourse.  The concept of victimhood is one that should be unenviable, yet some view it was a platform for equitable treatment in society and thus exploit the unique societal stature fought for by more ubiquitously-recognized victims.  Cascading into college campuses, this has led to some notably liberal colleges to permit “safe spaces” that expand the definition of traumatic triggers far beyond a reasonable limit, some reported even to the brink of political disagreement.

I pause to say that there is a difference between reasonable political disagreement and the unreasonable expectation of debate between marginalized communities and those whose political positions seek to do them harm on the grounds of their differences.  I do not believe a white supremacist or nationalist is entitled to political discourse because their “political” views seek to keep non-white people beneath them in society despite decades of movement toward equitability. I do not believe someone who is prejudiced on the basis of sexual preference or identity is entitled to their opinion when that opinion would require the limitation of human rights for people based on their sexual preference or identity.  

But, someone advocating small government or expanded military as a conservative is not in the same vein as a bigot.  College campuses are where teenagers are cultivated into educated, curious adults.  One cannot claim education nor curiosity if they only allow themselves exposure to friendly ideas; a campus culture that permits or encourages insulation from clashing ideas does not produce educated or curious adults.  

In such polarized times, it might be easier and normal to treat a Republican with arrogant contempt, believing them to be too ignorant, too unconcerned with the disadvantaged, too cruel to be worth your debate.  It might reassure you to treat a Democrat as a “snowflake”, someone who might fracture at your first criticism, or someone whose heart does not come with a proportional budget.  But this country has not been successfully cultivated on extremism.  It is the understanding that a liberal perspective has as much place as a conservative perspective in the process of governing that has perpetuated what was once called the greatest historical experiment in democracy.  

Let us hope and push our college campuses to remember the merits of civil disagreement and the merits of conflicting discourse.  But, let us also remember the compassion for those who simply wish to live a life protected from their trauma. 

[econarnold]

Corporate Taxes: Why They’re Better High

I was never a history buff growing up. In fact, I threw multiple tantrums during a “People to People: Washington, D.C.” trip because I was surrounded by so much in-your-face history and was resilient to absorb any of it.  

And then I grew up and started getting into policy and, inevitably, politics.

A country is the aggregate of its history and the informed improvements it can make from that past.  For this piece, I would like to point with a very expensive, flashing neon arrow to the 1950s (or, as supporters of the current President may posit, “back when America was great”, though I imagine they’re more interested in the widespread and accepted societal bases of misogyny, homophobia, and racism than what I’m interested in). 

The 1950s are a significant economic period for 2017 Americans to consider, as it was a time when the middle class was thriving, job creation rarely a concern, and (except for the blatant bigotry) people were living fairly comfortably (up until the Vietnam War).  One needs not venture further than the tax rates to understand why.  

The top tax rate in the 50s was in the 90 percent range (with an effective rate around 70%)[1]. That’s right, the wealthiest of wealthy were actually expected to pay the government all but <10% of their earnings.  That seems dramatic because it is, but it also proved very functional because of simple economics.  

Corporations and the private sector at large do not like sharing their revenue, especially with the federal government.  When the federal government is taking most of their profits, corporations are proportionately more inclined to reinvest those profits into expansion, job creation, training, etc. and pay themselves a high salary instead of paying taxes and then receiving profit shares after.  That reinvestment is good for the collective economy because it promotes job growth, ensures sustainable businesses that are much less likely to go out of business, and elevates the quality of work output for both executives and employees. 

When a CEO is able to take an exorbitant paycheck when profit revenue is huge, why would they bother reinvesting more in their company than needed? They can supplement their own life, insulate themselves from their company’s potential death, leaving the company and its employees to flounder.  Maybe that’s why the pay ratio of CEO to employee has from from 20:1 in 1965 to 303:1 in 2015 (with a peak of 376:1 in 2000, which likely can’t be extricated from the financial crisis not a decade later)[2].  

If we ever truly want a thriving, dynamic economy back, we cannot continue adding loopholes and subtracting tax rates for the top bracket.  If we ever want to reverse trends of income inequality and achievement gaps, we cannot continue letting those who already have more than enough to accumulate more at the expense of those who have never had enough. And if we ever want to be able to keep our country safe while also providing our agencies with adequate funding, we need to have the tax revenue from high corporate taxes to do so.

[econarnold]

Third Party Presidential Candidates & “Spoilers”

My opinions on this subject have fluctuated wildly in the past few months, which is very reflective of both the 2016 cycle and my faith in Hillary Clinton.  What I have concluded on is mired in cynicism and practicality, but not so much so that my idealism and belief in a future, truly democratic system has been quashed.

In 2016, the third parties with the loudest presidential candidates are the Libertarians with Gov. Gary Johnson and my old favorite, the Green Party with Dr. Jill Stein.  Each provide actual platforms that reflect their party interests without the corruption of partisan antics or corporate money buying their own interests into the platform.  Libertarians may have a nihilistically conservative approach to government that no society could possibly function under and the Greens may never be equipped to fulfill their political beliefs while simultaneously running the military branch of the government, but at least each of them have a belief system they truly believe in.

Unfortunately, none of that matters in a Presidential election.  And no, not just because “Donald Trump is so evil we can never let him win” or any other “lesser of two evils” arguments that generally denounce the potential for a third party win.  The problem is the electoral college and the requirement of a Presidential candidate not just to win a simple, but an absolute majority of the 535 electoral votes.  In an ideal world, we could have a tiered voting system or a simple majority over an absolute, but neither of those are in place (nor will they ever be for reasons I will explain later).  Therefore, without the literal death and non-replacement of one of the two main party candidates, there is barely even a theoretical path for either Gary Johnson or Jill Stein to obtain 270 electoral votes.

Accepting that inevitability as a premise, this means that any electoral votes they may (against all odds) obtain will be subtracted from whichever candidate had been banking on those votes for their math.  While this doesn’t actively help the other candidate, the end result could be no candidate with 270 electoral votes.  In this scenario, Congress determines the two highest Executive seats, a Congress currently dominated by Republicans.

This is where the “spoiler” title may come into play more accurately.  Not because of the “Nader effect” where a split in popular vote led to a different electoral winner than popular vote winner; while Ralph Nader did, in effect, help George W. Bush become the 43rd President, it was not those voting for him that elected Bush 43, but the slightly less-than-half of the country that did.  It was the lowered bar for Gore that Bush was able to reach that cost us global stability, which is blame to be shared among Nader and Bush voters, not either singularly.  In this election, however, the unfavorability ratings interacted with the two extra candidates people are treating as viable has the distant potential to allow a Republican Congress to choose our next leader.

I will never tell someone not to vote third party.  If someone has a reason to get out and vote, I will never discourage their participation.  As I’ve explained it in other social media forms, if 10% of a population vote 3rd party and 40% of them would not have voted if they weren’t offered the alternative choice, we gained 4% in the electorate.  However, my issue with people being invested in the third parties and their presidential candidates is an entirely political issue.

Say we did elect a non-major party to the White House.  They would have 0 party infrastructure in the entirety of the government, from federal down to local, they would have 0 party support in Congress and 535 others who are left to their own reactions on how to deal with a real outsider in the White House. With the situational exception of the Libertarian ticket, they would have no or insufficient experience in actual governing, especially a world super power, and would struggle to adapt to the job.  And arguably worst, because of all those detriments, they wouldn’t even be able to lead the country in the right way, much less an efficient or effective way. 

The path to a diversified political system has never been and will never be through the Oval Office.  No party will ever see a representative sitting in the White House before they see multiple representatives at the local, then state, then federal levels. It may be difficult, if not impossible, in the modern system, but democracy is designed to be a bottom-up approach to innovation.  Local innovation provides a roadmap of ideas for state innovation, and then national.  The Green Party needs to take seats in state legislatures, city councils, school boards to not only show that their platform has teeth for the greater good, but that there exist pockets of support in communities that will be the bedrock for future federal runs.  

Only when the make-up of Congress isn’t 95-99% Democrat or Republican will the pipe dream of a third party President breach reality.  They can complain about the 15% debate poll rule until they’re blue and red in the face, but unless they can have even 15% representation in federal government, it will mean nothing.  That is why I hate the “spoiler” identity, but I comparably hate the idea that, out of nowhere, a third party has any business running for or winning a Presidential election.  

[econarnold]

2016 Candidates

I have nothing comprehensive or analytical to write about Hillary Clinton, Ann Kirkpatrick, or many other candidates I support for office.

What I do have is undying love and support for the two amazing women I currently intern for. 

Victoria Steele is everything I want out of a candidate.  She isn’t taking PAC money (even the good ones) and is running on a campaign that directly reaches out to voters for their interest, their concerns, their struggles.  She has worked as a servant to the public through broadcast journalism, mental health and domestic relationship counseling, and a state legislator.  She represents everything I believe in: protection for the environment, inclusion and protection of women, and honest representation.  She has raised a gay son as a single mother and they are both highly contributing members of society. In short: she’s perfect.  It’s almost irrelevant that she’s also part Native American and (in my opinion) more entitled to legislate this country than any descendant of an inhabitant later than the indigenous populations.

Kirsten Engel is everything I want out of a human. Raised by two brilliant minds, one of whom is a personable expert on environmental social ethics, she became an environmental lawyer immediately out of school and worked for the EPA, ran a state AG Environmental Protection Division, and ALSO sued the government for failing on environmental policy.  She is brilliant but personable, honest but tough, and environmentally progressive while pragmatic.  To top it all off, she has no desire to be a politician, much like Victoria.  She’s running because she believes in the public education system and sees the detriments related to AZ’s insufficient funding of it.  Even feeling fairly different about education policy, I love everything about her campaign, her beliefs, and the things she will fight for.

I know I’ve been lucky, privileged, and any other synonym describing disproportionate benefits.  But to be able to work for such incredible, honest, and deserving women running for office is more than I could’ve expected out of an entry-level political internship. 

And on top of that, the Democratic Coordinated Campaign I’m also now working for will be almost entirely female candidates.  There is no better, and more critical, time to be alive and politically active, thank whatever extra-human entity that has given me these opportunities. 

[econarnold]

Agriculture Policy & Environment

Our planet is dying.  Whether it be the calcification of oceans, slash-and-burn agriculture destroying forests, or pollution from any number of sources, we are actively threatening the viability of the planet for life.  I am writing this first opinion piece just under a week after Earth Overshoot Day of 2016, the earliest yet with a jump six days earlier than 2015.  This is not opinion nor speculation, it is definitive that as a species, we have consumed the full amount of a year’s worth of natural resource production with about a fourth of a year left. 

The biggest issue with the way we as a governed, relatively organized species interacts with the climate is as simple as complexity. The climate system is the most complex system any living being interacts with, involving innumerable variables and subsystems that are affected by almost all the other components around them.  The ocean cannot exist independently of the atmosphere, nor can land use, water use, or air pollution exist independently of either. Historically, the associated damages related to far too many moving pieces in an increasingly complex system has been referred to as “The Tragedy of the Commons.”  

“The Commons” is a general statement encompassing all of the finite resources we depend on to both survive and thrive.  “The Tragedy” can be directly associated to capitalism and lack of comprehensive regulation. If there is a pool of resources large enough that no single consumer can comprehend the limits (such as soil quality, groundwater, etc.), there are effectively no external limits to what they consume.  So, for example, if a farmer has a plot of land with 10 cows grazing on it, his “profit” (in capitalism and any market-based system) is the difference between revenue from those cows and the cost of raising, maintaining, and eventually selling the by-products of those cows. But what happens when that farmer adds another cow or two? The revenue improves correspondingly but the shared cost of land and resources does not increase quite as much.  However, the cost to the land’s soil quality from extra grazing, the air & water pollution from extra cow waste and methane release, and the food and water needed to upkeep the extra cows are external costs that do not directly, or at least immediately, affect the farmer’s framing of economic profit.

That is obviously just a simple example, but when applied to the industrialized agriculture system, the “Tragedy of the Commons” becomes far more visible.  Communities have polluted air from the waste of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, water suffering from eutrophication due to fertilizer run-off, and soil that has been degraded so badly it likely won’t be fruitful in any reasonable amount of time.  The Western (and expanding) demand for meat and animal products has driven up the profit incentive for food producers to (both metaphorically and literally) “add cows” to their production for higher profits, ignoring the long-term and disproportionate costs that we collectively share. 

I’m not here to argue that everyone needs to go vegan, or at least vegetarian.  While I have been vegan for two years at this point and can’t imagine ever integrating animal products back into my diet, I recognize that culturally and socially a world without animal agriculture will never exist.  What I do wish to argue is the subsidies and market incentives that create the disconnect between added profit and added cost.  

Presently, agriculture is heavily subsidized.  There are subsidies for corn, alfalfa, and other useful crops to be grown en mass, usually using heavy fertilizer use and monocropping techniques that also destroy soil quality and add to the chemical composition of our soil and diets.  However, because these subsidies exist out of historical precedent and continued lobbying, they are not simply market off-sets to incentivize a necessary industry that is no longer economically beneficial.  In some cases such as Arizona, we are using 70% of our water on agriculture, much of which is later exported to feed livestock outside of the country.  Excluding trade implications, by what logic does using a majority of an arid state’s water resources to grow crops that will be shipped somewhere else to then ultimately provide 1/10th the nutritional value (approximately 10 lbs of plant-based ag produces 1 lb of animal-based ag nutrition-wise) make sense?  I will conclude by reiterating that this is not an easy shift. We won’t wake up one day as a population and recognize that it is no longer acceptable to drain our planet’s precious resources at a rate that far exceeds the rate they replenish.  But, if we can start shifting our economic systems to more accurately reflect the resource inputs to output ratios, much of the damage will naturally decline.  There is no logical, scientifically-sound, or economically viable reason why it doesn’t cost a non-vegan 10 times the amount it costs a vegan for a single meal despite the fact that it took 1/10th the input to produce the vegan meal.  When subsidies and economic incentives are guided by sound logic and not powerful lobbying, we will find progress in protecting our planet. 

[econarnold]

Environment & Energy Overview

In the interest of full disclosure, I believe it is important to initially state my views as of now are largely influenced by the beliefs of John Muir & biocentrism. I recognize that this means some of the rationale I employ for my policy views can be considered extreme, but I hope the supplemental logic and reasoning will still hold.

PREMISES upon which my positions depend, and that I accept as valid short of definitive support to the contrary.

1. Climate change is at least 50% anthropocentric.

2. While the changes in climate are patterned in deep time, the rate by which we are exacerbating climate change is dangerously and recklessly faster than the rate it has happened preceding the past five Mass Extinctions.

3. There is no way to effectively stop or solve climate change.  Because this is an inevitable consequence of life and activity, the existing magnitude of feedback mechanisms, and continued degradation and pollution, I recognize that at most, we will be preserving stability of life for a finite period of time.

4. Human life (as well as all other Earth life) is wholly contingent upon a livable climate. Without access to basic, quality resources such as food, water, and clean air, the foundation of society, government, and economy crumbles.