Karen Weldin Stewart: idiocy or hypocrisy?

"OMG ... look at the time! I'm late for
my morning meeting with my
corporate overlords to rubber-stamp
whatever plans Highmark has for
screwing Delaware customers today!"

Today's inane op-ed by Delaware Insurance Commissioner Karen Weldin Stewart perfectly exemplifies why even the Libertarian idea of voting for "none of the above" and leaving the office empty would be better than having her in power.

First, here is KWS explaining her idea of her job:

DOI exists to regulate the state's insurance market, protect consumers, and ensure that the insurance carriers who operate in our state are able to generate enough income to remain solvent and pay claims when claims come due. It is my duty as the Insurance Commissioner to strike a balance between protecting consumers and ensuring that the insurance companies are able to operate a stable business model. When insurance companies see that Delaware provides a fair and balanced approach to regulating the insurance markets, it attracts and retains good companies that compete for your business.

Notice that protecting consumers is NOT a primary mission of her office, as interpreted by KWS--she is to strike a balance between the interests of consumers and insurance companies, because then Delaware attracts and retains good companies that compete for your business.

Really?  Then explain, please, Karen, why 93% of the private health insurance market in Delaware belongs to a single company--Highmark Blue Cross/Blue Shield--and why you just forced another company out of the Medicaid market to allow Highmark access to another 230,000 captive customers in that market?  (A foonote:  Aetna, the company that KWS and others drove out, actually planned far lower rate increases than Highmark.)  Where, exactly, is all this competition?

That's what makes this platitude particularly offensive:

What can you do to keep your rates low? The most important thing to do is to shop around and compare prices. 

Uh, Karen?  There is no competition in health insurance in Delaware.  Delaware is nationally recognized as having the 4th least competitive health insurance market in the US.

So if that's what we can do to lower costs, then you're a f--king failure.  Unless, of course, your definition of success is (as it seems to be) pimping for corporate interests:

How exactly do the insurance companies come up with the rate requests that they submit? The various insurance sectors (life, health, auto, home, etc.) use complex formulas to predict future costs. Insurers consider data from past claims and other state-specific factors, such as state-required minimum levels of coverage, the percentage of uninsured drivers, the likelihood of severe weather that can cause accidents or damage buildings, the state's legal climate, and the level of competition among insurance companies. 

This is such utter horsecrap that I'm surprised even the News Journal would print it (wait, no I'm not).

Highmark of Delaware's parent company last year recorded $14.9 BILLION in revenues and had a bad year of only racking up a $372 million profit.  Still, not bad for an empire supposedly built on non-profit enterprises.  Highmark uses a very simple, very traditional formula for calculating next year's rates:  whatever the market will bear (which is a LOT when you're a monopoly) and whatever your tame Insurance Commissioner will approve (in this case about 9.9%).

Karen has done such a great job as Insurance Commissioner that, besides having no competition, Delaware has suffered the highest insurance rate increases in the nation under the Affordable Care Act:

For the individual insurance market (plans sold directly to consumers); among the ten states seeing some of the sharpest average increases are: Delaware at 100%, New Hampshire 90%, Indiana 54%, California 53%, Connecticut 45%, Michigan 36%, Florida 37%, Georgia 29%, Kentucky 29%, and Pennsylvania 28%.

 In Delaware, folks we have exactly the government we deserve and that the corporations paid for:

--An Insurance Commissioner gouging customers as a proxy for corporate interests ...

--A Secretary of Education destroying our schools for corporate interests ...

--DNREC committed to the continued gutting of the Coastal Zone Act for corporate interests ...

--A Department of Homeland Security and Public Safety that spies on law-abiding citizens and shares the information with corporate interests ...

If you're beginning to see a pattern here, you're correct.

Unfortunately, you're too late, because you just voted the bastards back into office again, and they're confident that you'll keep doing so.

A Time to be Unpopular: on riots and Ferguson

it's a really good thing I didn't get elected, because I'd talk about issues like Ferguson and protests, and I'd get my own constituents all upset.

Here's the idiotic first paragraph of the WNJ's "editorial" on the subject:

Ripples from the Michael Brown tragedy continue to spread doubts about our justice system across the nation. An immediate harm comes from the rioting and violence that erupted after the Missouri grand jury's decision was announced. Rioting is never justified. In fact, it threatens to make matters worse. It shifts attention from the tragedy of a young man's death and from the facts of what happened in August in Ferguson, Missouri.

Why would I call this pablum "idiotic"?

Three reasons:

1) Rioting is never justified.  In fact, it threatens to make matters worse.  This is the pious platitude that always grates on my nerves, particularly right after I teach the course in American history wherein our textbook authors encourage teachers to venerate the Founding Fathers who participated in the Stamp Act Riots, the riots after the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party ... These same "patriotic" interpreters of American history then proceed to either soft peddle, condemn, or ignore the Whiskey Rebellion, Shays' Rebellion, the Dorrite Rebellion in New Jersey, the Renter's Rebellion in New York's Albany River Valley, Nat Turner's Rebellion, the Landry Plantation insurrection, "Beecher's Bibles" in Kansas, the John Brown raid, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877,

and so on and so forth ...

We are, ironically, a country birthed upon the notion that political violence in the face of rank oppression IS justified after you've suffered and tried for years.  That's the "patriotic" message from the period 1763-1783, at any rate.

The real message is that after the Founding Fathers stopped being rebels and started being The Establishment, the idea of political violence (except as studied when they did it, in the past) as an acceptable response to oppression went right out the window and became downright anarchistic and treasonous.  It threatens to make matters worse.  Really?  For whom?

Go ahead, get hacked off, but he's
a militiaman bearing arms ...

A second unlovely fact:  my friends (and I do have them, I am not speaking rhetorically here) in the 9-12, "Liberty," and "Tea Party" movements are quick to employ the "pry my guns from my cold dead hand" and "the 2nd Amendment is intended to provide the means of resistance against government tyranny" and to praise all those armed militiamen etc. who headed out to the Bundy Ranch and drew a bead from snipers' positions on Federal marshals ...  But people rioting and looting (no, I'm not about to deny that's happening) in Ferguson cannot have principles, cannot be fighting oppression, cannot be patriotic because, because, because ... Well, let's see?

2) It shifts attention from the tragedy of a young man's death and from the facts of what happened in August in Ferguson, Missouri.  Wake the f**k up, WNJ!  It was NEVER actually about what happened in August in Ferguson, Missouri.  Michael Brown's death was what is called a catalyst.  If there had not been years upon years upon decades of it being acceptable for law enforcement to treat African-American lives as worth less than the lives of middle-class white people, the death of Michael Brown would have been an isolated incident.  We could all wait for "the facts" to come out. We could all tell everybody to be calm.  The blunt reality of Ferguson is that the death of Michael Brown was not a first straw, or a second straw, or even a 249th straw, but (quite possibly) the last straw.

What do Americans do when they become viscerally convinced that the system does not give a flying f**k at a rolling doughnut about them, won't protect them, will kill them, and will not even allow them to be part of the political process to change things?

If they are named RAMBO they fight back and people cheer in the movie theaters.  (How much "collateral damage" do you figure Sly did to that town, with half-drunk theater-goers all fantasizing about being enough of a bad-ass to do it themselves if the cops ever came for them?)

If they are black and live in Ferguson they are savages, animals, barbarians and, yes, niggers, who are simply showing how uncivilized they are.  They should probably first be fenced in ("Escape from New York:  African-America Edition") and then ... no, I'm not going to say it, but there are people out there who will and who are and who have said it.

3) Then there's this:  Ripples from the Michael Brown tragedy continue to spread doubts about our justice system across the nation. "Doubts"?  You gotta be kidding me.  Stand in front of a class of students aged 18-23 at DSU and ask the question about how many of them have lost a loved one to law enforcement, how many have personally been threatened or harassed by the police--listen to it year and and year out and discover ...

... they don't live in the same America that you and I think we inhabit.

(At least 2-3 times a year I will have a student on scholarship come tell me s/he have to miss class for a week to go home to NJ, NY, DC, or other locations to bury a relative who has been shot--as much as 50% of the time by law enforcement.)

It's easy, ridiculously, reflexively easy to condemn rioters and looters, to draw false moral equivalences ("nobody ever gets upset when a black thug kills a white teenager"), or to reflexively "come to the defense" of "our" police officers.

"Violence never solves anything!" scream the people whose tax dollars go, hundreds of billions at a time, to kill people all over the world for the crime of being in proximity to people our government doesn't like.

Here's the interesting part of this all:  about six weeks into the Occupy protests I remember going to an event at UD campus and meeting several of the active Wilmington Occupiers.  One of them (I will leave him nameless), said quietly that he didn't think the movement would ever go anywhere or change anything unless--ultimately--the Occupiers were willing to engage in some violence, either to protect themselves, provoke a real confrontation with law enforcement, or destroy some of the property of the 1%.  His exact quote was:  "Until somebody is willing to break something, nobody is going to take us seriously.  Even Martin Luther King got something broken--his own people's heads."

There's a political logic there that goes against the feel-good bland crap we've all been sold for many many years, and it leads to an unlovely truth:

If nobody in Ferguson had rioted, the death of Michael Brown would not today be a national story.  Because Michael Brown alive--like John Brown in 1860--was very probably an unlikeable man who most of us wouldn't want to be around.  Michael Brown dead--on the other hand--might become the lever that changes history in ways (good or bad) that we cannot yet imagine.

But I'm through tolerating "riot-shaming" for the African-Americans in Ferguson, and closing ranks behind a law enforcement system who wants this whole case to be nothing but a speed bump to a full-scale police state wherein we will all be "safe" just as long as we do exactly what the people with guns and badges tell us to do.

If you don't recognize these women, neither (apparently) do "eminent" American historians

Let's think about the following lists of American women in modern history:

In Literature:

Maya Angelou
Pearl S. Buck
Emily Dickinson
Gertrude Stein
Virginia Woolf







In Politics:

Madeleine Albright
Hillary Clinton
Barbara Jordan
Condoleeza Rice
Margaret Chase Smith







In Science and Technology:

Elizabeth Blackburn & Carol Greider
Marie Curie
Gertrude Bell Elion
Janet Rideout
Janet Rowley




In Media and Popular Culture:

Margaret Bourke-White
Isadora Duncan
Annie Leibowitz
Madonna
Oprah Winfrey







Just because:

bell hooks
Billie Jean King
Rosa Parks
Hazel Scott
Ida B. Wells



By the way, if you don't recognize some of them, I'm not going to provide the links, because you should go look them up for yourself.

Now take a look at this list:
Jane Addams (64)
Rachel Carson (39)
Mary Baker Eddy (86)
Betty Friedan (77)
Margaret Mead (81)
Eleanor Roosevelt (42)
Margaret Sanger (51)

You may be wondering what the numbers are.  Recently, The Atlantic commissioned "ten eminent historians" (three of whom were women, to develop a list of the 100 "most influential figures in American history."  In the modern era (and with Mary Baker Eddy I'm really stretching a point), only seven women made the list, with the highest (Rachel Carson) coming in at #39.

For curiosity's sake, let's see how well you do with the names of some of the men from the top 100:
James Gordon Bennett (69)
George Eastman (94)
Walter Lippman (89)
Horace Mann (56)
Louis Sullivan (59)
James D. Watson (68)

I know, I know, it's only a list, in a culture that dotes on lists.  But here's the thing:  ten "eminent" historians looked at American history to find the 100 "most influential" people and completely ignored the woman who set off the Civil Rights movement, the first woman to host her own TV show (who happened to be African-American and married to the first modern African-American US Representative); the first woman to become an entire entertainment conglomerate in her own right ...

When supposedly made by "eminent historians," such lists are supposed to tell us something about what we think "influential" means, and what we value in the study of our history.  Sixteen of the men on the list were US Presidents, including the top four names (Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, FDR), but do you really think that in the grand scheme of things that James Knox Polk had a better claim to a spot in the Top 100 than Marie Curie, Pearl S. Buck, Hillary Clinton (love her or hate her), or even Madonna?

And once you look up Elizabeth Blackburn & Carol Greider, Gertrude Bell Elion, Janet Rideout, and Janet Rowley--not to mention Marie Curie--you may wonder how Enrico Fermi or Robert Oppenheimer made the list instead of any of them.

Maybe we need to think about redefining what we mean by "influential," or maybe we need to rethink the idea of who gets to do the defining for us.

And, if you're up for a challenge, identify the ladies beneath the fold, each of whom also has strong case for inclusion in any list of "most influential" (one's a dead easy giveaway, the others should make you work a little):

"Americans All"? The Bracero Program and the roots of illegal immigration

Ronald Reagan once said, "Facts are stubborn things."

It is way too easy to bloviate about immigration in this country and ignore the facts of our history.

Fact: Latino immigration into this country to do primarily agricultural work in the 20th Century required both a "push" (economic conditions in Mexico and points south) and a "pull" (aggressive advertising from employers in the US).

Witness;  the Bracero program, that from 1942-1964 legally allowed 4.5 million Mexican workers to come to the US to labor under conditions that most historians agree were little more than legalized slavery.  The Bracero program began due to labor shortages during World War II, and was promoted with wonderful, patriotic posters like this:

Wow.  "Americans All"? That included Mexicans?

Some states refused to participate initially--like Texas, which preferred an "open borders" policy to allow pretty much anybody in to work at any time without papers.  Why?  Because Texas employers didn't like the requirements of the Federal program that you had to pay certain levels of wages, offer housing, and basic public health medical care, etc.  Texas liked the "Free Market" approach.

But other employers, as you can see by the advertisement below, were more than happy to get as many Mexican workers as possible:

In fact, there were major advertising blitzes throughout the wartime and immediate postwar period:

Curiously, large agricultural concerns in the US had absolutely no interest, right after the war, in stopping the program, and it continued in various forms until 1964.  It was not an entirely happy chapter in labor relations, as there were horrible exploitations of the Mexican workers as well as awful accidents that killed thousands:

But the primary reason that American employers chose to push for an end to the program is that it cost too much, and illegal immigrants were cheaper:

These new illegal workers could not be employed "above the table" as part of the program, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation. This resulted in the lowering of wages and not receiving the benefits that the Mexican government had negotiated to insure their legal workers' well-being under the bracero program. This, in turn, had the effect of eroding the U.S. agricultural sector's support for the program's legal importation of workers from Mexico in favor of hiring illegal immigrants to reduce overhead costs. The advantages of hiring illegal workers included such workers' willingness to work for lower wages, without support, health coverage or in many cases legal means to address abuses by the employers for fear of deportation.

The grim reality from the 1960s forward is that American agricultural interests (including many of our favorites--like Monsanto, Archer-Daniels-Midland, and other mega agribusinesses) used their clout to shut down programs that provided for legal immigration with statutory protections for migrant workers because the Bracero program forced them to pay the true costs of their labor.

What they preferred to do was privatize their profits while socializing the costs by importing cheap immigrant labor at cut rates, often paying below starvation wages, and tacitly encouraging these immigrants to apply (illegally) for government assistance.  Thus they kept the above-board costs of their products low, and passed on the costs to American citizens in the form of higher taxes to cover the food stamps, medical benefits, etc. etc. that the newer generations of illegals were accessing.

So it may be true that, in a legal sense, Mr. Obama yesterday proposed "tearing up the Constitution," in the use of Executive Orders to delay deportation of up to 5 million undocumented aliens.  After all, if the Washington Post says so, it must be true, right?

But facts, again, are stubborn things:  illegal immigration exists in this country NOT primarily because wetback parasites want to access our welfare state, but because American businesses large and small want the cheapest possible labor and are willing to spend the big bucks in campaign contributions to keep it--even if it requires them to tear down perfectly legal solutions.

So they bought a President.  Wouldn't be the first one.

The Vampire Children of Lancaster Court

Reading the petition of the so-called "Cooke Elementary community" (how there is a community when the school has yet to open is beyond me); scanning the blog comments of Meesh, Pseudo-elitist, and John Done; and listening to the comments of (I suppose) parents at last night's Red Clay Consolidated School District School Board meeting causes several different thoughts to spawn in my brain.

This first is that we need an image to frame this debate over 105 children--K-5--traveling 4.4 miles a day this fall to attend Cooke Elementary instead of Marbrook.  I thought of two possible images.  The first, created by Norman Rockwell, would be "Little Rock," which came to mind after I read this comment by MEESH at Delawareliberal:

So the schools have historically tried de-segregation based on raced and were unsuccessful now the focus is bridging a gap in academic achievement by desegregating socioeconomic status , the bottom line is this there will always be a difference! When this fails, as the desegregation of race did, what will we try next hair color?

Ironically, however, instead of Federal marshals, the escorting officials at Cooke Elementary would be RCCSD staff.  But then I read the comments from Pseudo-elitist about how as few as four poor children per class in a school in an upper middle class neighborhood would destroy the potential quality of Cooke Elementary like a vampire sticking fangs into our chidden;s throats:

Here is a breakdown of what is happening.  Our tax dollars already are paying for both city schools and suburban schools. I’m not complaining for this in particular, since it is already going on, and who else would pay for those poor city kids anyway (not like their parents, if they have one, would), so for the country and those kids’ sake, I accept that. Now you are saying the city schools are not nice, so better get them into nice suburban schools (which by the way only become nice because of the composition of the students). So now in addition to paying for both schools, I have to pay for my kids to get out of that supposedly nice suburban school. How nice! Congratulations again. You WON! Triple times! As long as there is someone else picking up the bills! 

--snip-- 

Do you know how much teacher’s attention those 4 kids would suck up? By my imagination, it may well be 50%. Yes, that is not acceptable in my world.

So I thought that THIS would be a better graphic for those horrible vampire children of the Lancaster Court Apartments:

Little fiends!  We'll need to get out crosses, garlic, silver bullets, and wooden stakes to keep a bunch of undead vermin (aged 5-9) out of our suburban schools.

And then I thought, where do vampires spawn?  This is what Pseudo-elitist tells us about Lancaster Court Apartments at Delawareliberal:

I was there for lunch one day recently, and when I was waiting in the car, some guys came around and were gesturing to me trying to deal drugs to me. Unbelievable.

This is what MEESH reported about Lancaster Court Apartments at Kilroy's Delaware:

I walked around LCA today to find some people of the community to speak with because this I am not racist or classist as someone on Delaware Liberal referred to our group. I wanted to see how many people actually were aware that their children were now going to a different school as previously proposed , whether or not any of them were asked by the Board members how they felt about the change because you know someone from Westwoods said they wanted to stay at NSE because that is where their kids friends are. So does that mean kids from LCA haven’t built friendships at their school? No one asked me or my kids how they felt about it either. Btw those that I conversed with had no idea what I was talking about nor did they have kids, everyone must of been working.

So what I was expecting is something like this:

And I'm sure that's what Pseudo-elitist and MEESH felt like they were seeing, even though the reality is this:

Trying to make sense of this all--how people could fear little kids because they come from poorer families (Is it contagious?  Will some 2nd-grade slut seduce my junior into a life of crime and crack houses? What happens when Harvard finds out that my daughter was once in a reading group with a child on Food Stamps?), I thought of one more image:

This is William "Buzzy" Cooke, old upper-middle-class white guy and the former principal of Forrest Oak and Brandywine Springs for whom the new Cooke Elementary is named.

I've known Buzzy for years, as have thousands of Red Clay parents.  Buzzy fervently believes (and practiced based on that belief for over thirty years) that the purpose of public schools is to love, cherish, and teach every child who walks through the doors.  No matter where they come from, no matter what baggage they've been saddled with ...

I remember the dedication ceremony for Cooke Elementary where many people (including my wife) spoke about Buzzy's values and how fitting it would be to have a new school named after this gentle man ...

... which makes me think that sometime soon Buzzy will call up the district and ask to have his name removed from a school whose surrounding community is so fearful of a few dozen small children from"the other side of the tracks" that they've lost their minds.

Then we could rename the building in a more appropriate manner (because the name has suddenly become available):

Two ways to improve SNAP benefits without significant government intervention

My Libertarian friends, by and large, don't like the idea of SNAP (Food Stamp) benefits.  In a non-corporatized society I probably wouldn't, either, but we don't live in such.  So until we take away the BILLIONS in corporate welfare I'm not going to spend my time decrying the people getting pennies out of the other end of the system.  As we improve the overall economic system into a true non-capitalist free-market affair, the need or even the demand for things like SNAP will die along with the  protected oil leases and corporate personal immunity from prosecution.

Until then ...

IDEA NUMBER ONE came as a result of this article about how "Double Bucks" can be used to stretch the food stamp benefits of people who choose to shop in farmer's markets.

Basically what happens is that the farmer's market gets a grant (not my preference) or a donation (bingo) that allows it to double the buying power of SNAP benefits spent on fresh produce.  You come in and give the people behind the counter, say, $25 worth from your EBT card and they give you $50 worth of tokens that can be redeemed anywhere in the farmer's market for their products.

This has several key benefits:  (1) obviously, it stretches the food dollar of recipients; but also (2) it allows them a way around the "end of month" evaporation of the funds on an EBT card.  You could come in on the last day of the month with $30 left that would expire when you got your next benefits; the cashier would cash out those benefits with $60 in tokens that don't necessarily have to be spent that day, so you could keep the benefit going across months.

There is also (3) (and a lot of my non-libertarian friends may wonder about this one)--this process improves the black/gray market salability of SNAP benefits.  Many people find the need to convert their SNAP benefits by selling them for cash at a 50% discount so that they can pay their electric bills, or whatever.  This raises the potential that--assuming they can find somebody else (yuppie suburban) who wants discounted fresh veggies, they pull off the following:  take $30 in for $60 in farmers' market token and then sell the $60 in tokens for $30 in cash.  I know, I know--there will a lot of people out there horrified at the thought that I am advocating gaming the system, but I have no moral qualms about people doing so on this level--particularly if it keeps the lights on.

(Yeah, I know--somebody's going to pipe up with "but what about the people who use that money to buy drugs or booze?"  Not my problem.  Those people are already locked in their own self-destructive spirals, and I'm not minded to penalize everybody because a few people are determined to take themselves out of the gene pool.)

IDEA NUMBER TWO is one I got about three months ago when I was speaking at the Delaware Food Bank.  Here's the thing:  in the world of EBT cards and accounts there is no reason (or there should not be) that the government cannot have it set up so that I can donate cash directly to a specific person's EBT card.  There are a lot of people out there with relatives and friends receiving SNAP who would like to help, but are unwilling to send them a lot of cash only to find it squandered at Taco Bell or buying lottery cards.  I know--I've had an adult daughter on SNAP, and I would love to have been able to put money on her card that had at least the minimal set of restrictions that SNAP comes with.

(Again:  it's not perfect.  If somebody wants to sell those benefits for cash, I can't stop them as a donor.  But that's on you as donor to make a personal judgment about that particular risk.  Here's my yardstick:  I am unwilling to allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.  If the majority of people receiving SNAP would use such additional funds that friends or relative might donate, then I consider the program a success.)

Moreover, I'd make 50% of all the money that any individual donates to another individual function as a Federal tax credit.

You would probably have to take a look at what Wal-Mart or McDonalds might attempt--paying part or all of salaries in EBT additional benefits in order to get a tax credit for just paying salaries, but I think that could be handled.

Governor Markell as Scrooge: millions for Bloom Energy, nothing for "Charity Care"

If you think it a coincidence that this announcement by DHSS Secretary Rita Landgraf was timed for a week after the elections, you need to think again.

Delaware is cutting the $478,000 program that provides charity health care services for the "near poor"--people who don't quite qualify for Medicaid and undocumented workers:

Delawareans pinching pennies near the federal poverty level – making from $16,100 for an individual to a maximum of $47,700 for a family of four – will lose health coverage through the state's Community Healthcare Access Program (CHAP) starting Feb. 1, state officials said late Monday afternoon. 

CHAP is a state-run program that offers discounted medical services for those not eligible for Delaware's Medicaid program. The state earmarked $478,000 in tobacco settlement funds for the program this fiscal year. 

CHAP recipients are ineligible for Medicaid either because they are undocumented immigrants or make more than 138 percent of the federal poverty level, Delaware's cutoff for Medicaid assistance. The federal poverty level is $11,670 a year for an individual.

It's really worth listening to the rationale for this decision:

"This is charity care and charity care more or less will be going away based on the mandate that everyone must have health insurance," said Rita Langraf, secretary of Delaware's Department of Health and Social Services, referencing the 2010 Affordable Care Act's requirement that everyone should have health insurance. 

Now let's consider this decision from three perspectives:

1.  It was made without reference to any feedback from the medical community of Delaware--even the Medical Society of Delaware (a DHSS lapdog if there ever was one) was neither consulted nor informed in advance.

2.  It was framed in such a fashion as to build support by denying benefits to illegal immigrants undocumented workers--6,000 of the 7,060 people who were receiving this charity care fall into that category.  Notably, one wonders (from a public health perspective, primarily), exactly how somebody without legal residence would sign up in the health insurance exchange and receive a Federal subsidy,  since undocumented individuals are specifically denied those subsidies under the ACA. So Secretary Landgraf's assertion that these folks can get subsidized coverage under the ACA is nothing less than a bald-face lie.

3.  The cost of providing this charity care is ludicrously low:  for 7,060 people at $478,000 this actually works out (stop, I'll wait while you do the math) to $67.70 per person per year.  Yep, that's right:  $67.70 per person per year.

Recently I noted that Bloom Energy has received over $80 million in taxpayer-subsidized corporate welfare only to fall $3.45 MILLION short of its employment targets.  Delaware Economic Director Al (not so HappyHarry any more) Levine made it explicitly clear that the faux "clean energy" company will not be penalized for this shortfall:

“While I’m disappointed they didn’t hit their number, I am not discouraged because I see them making steady progress,” Levin said.

Now compare this to Rita Landgraf's statement about the people who are profligately consuming $67.70 each of the state's resources each year:

"We've been informing [them] of this transition for probably a year. Now we are actually giving them a hard stop," Landgraf said. 

This is government accountability in the Delaware Way:  holding the "near poor" accountable for pennies while the corporate heads continue to receive millions even though they don't live up to their agreements.

Please, PLEASE don't become distracted by the immigration status of the people receiving this charity care.  That's a distraction that is consciously intended to divert you from realizing that what the government of the State of Delaware is about is NOT taking care of the poor but subsidizing the rich.

And make no mistake about it:  Secretary Landgraf is only carrying out the orders that have come from Governor Jack Markell.

The Final Assault on the Coastal Zone Act ...

... is getting started.

Whether you are an advocate for the Coastal Zone Act or not, you need to recognize the early two-step of the Delaware Way in preparing to gut it.  (Because, sooner or later, if you stand by for this one without comment, the corporations will come for what you hold dear.)

Today's WNJ story begins with this set of quotes from NCC Chief Executive Tom Gordon:

"I believe we need to make use of our coastline, safely, cleanly. We don't have much left but that now" for economic development, Gordon said days ahead of Monday's planned release of a joint economic development plan for Wilmington and the County. 

"When [former Gov.] Russ Peterson wrote the Coastal Zone Act, it was a really great thing. We had a corporation on every corner and we were the number one city in the world in the '60s," Gordon said. "Wilmington's environment is full of bullets right now. That's a concern, too."

I have a lot of respect for Tom Gordon, even when I don't agree with him, but it is important to parse these quotes very carefully:

We don't have much left but that [the coast] now for economic development.

In other words:  we've given up on developing great swathes of Wilmington and New Castle County.

[The Coastal Zone Act] was a really great thing, way back when.

But, in other words:  today we have to choose between jobs and environmental damage.

We were the number on city in the world in the '60s ... Wilmington's environment is full of bullets right now.

Incredible false equivalency:  [a] that Wilmington's decline is irreversible without development of coastal areas; and that [b] development of the coastal areas will lead the way to economic renaissance and the end of urban violence.

But Mr. Gordon is hardly alone.

"It's obvious it's not going to be a park," Delaware State Chamber of Commerce President A. Richard Heffron said of areas just south of Marcus Hook. "We need to take a serious look at these things."

This is Chamberspeak for "whatever our member businesses tell us is good for them is what we will advocate for."  The fact that Chamber President Heffron is even quoted as a reputable source, rather than an industrial sector lobbyist, is indicative of which way the wind (full of the smell of the refinery) is blowing.

Here. according to Mr. Heffron and the Delaware Way network, is how it will happen:

"It's been my argument for a while that we need to relook at the Coastal zone, look at those industrial areas and see what kind of clean industries we can attract, and redefine what a heavy industry is," Heffron said. Government willingness might have increased since the election, he said, with lawmakers having more than a year before the next campaigns heat up, and Gov. Jack Markell having only two years left in his tenure. 

"I think maybe now is the time to do it," Heffron said. "You need to get some environmental groups on board, and you need to sit down and discuss planning" and economic development and environmental goals. 

It happens by

[a] controlling the definitions:  redefine what a heavy industry is

[b] taking advantage of the two years between now and the next elections:   Government willingness might have increased since the election, he said, with lawmakers having more than a year before the next campaigns heat up, and Gov. Jack Markell having only two years left in his tenure.

[c] get some environmental groups on board--which is code for bringing in the National Wildlife Foundation under former DNREC chief Collin O'Meara to give the imprimatur of an environmental group sign-off.  Everybody who thinks it is an accident of timing that Mr. O'Meara returned to Delaware to grab a WNJ headline this past week, go to the back of the class.

[d] begin the conversation with the assumed end as your starting point:  you need to sit down and discuss planning--this means that we are no longer going to discuss whether the Coastal Zone Act should be relaxed gutted, but that we should start by discussing to what extent the CZA will be weakened.  This is a neat Delaware trick.  By starting with the presumption of the ending, when any environmental group puts up an objection or a position, that will be considered a starting point for negotiations, and immediate public pressure will be placed on that group to compromise like everyone else is doing.

State officials are taking great pains to look neutral at this point, so as to be able to present themselves later as "honest brokers" of the eventual "compromise":

Neither Delaware Economic Development Office Director Alan Levin nor Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control Secretary David Small responded to questions about the issue last week.

The trick here, of course, is that the role of the State is supposed to be to enforce the law as written until legislators change it.  But if they can just tinker with the definitions, the necessity of dealing with that unpredictable old General Assembly might go away.

Then there's the Committee of 100, whose Executive Director seems more than happy to support the idea of deals made behind closed doors in smoke-free (this IS Delaware) rooms:

Paul Morrill, executive director of the Committee of 100 business group, said talks on Coastal Zone issues are "hard to broach without setting off alarm bells." 

"First of all, there's a recognition that it's very important environmental legislation, and nobody wants to mess with it," Morrill said. "Having said that, we think it's worth seeing whether there are any uses that might be compatible with the Coastal Zone as it's evolved over time. We just know it's a very tricky thing." 

"If there's no project that triggers constructive conversations, there's still going to need to be some offline conversations," Morrill said, "almost confidence building diplomacy, so there's a sense that people's motives aren't questioned." 

Parsing again:

[a] public talks set off alarm bells

[b] redefining the existing law:  the Coastal Zone as it's evolved over time

[c] conversations off the public record:  there's still going to need to be some offline conversations

[d] because what's good for Corporate Delaware is good for all Delawareans:  so there's a sense that people's motives aren't questioned.

I should not suggest here that the environmentalist position was ignored.

First, Professor James May:

"Do I think there will be people who push for amending the act. Of course. There always are," said James R. May, a law professor and co-director of the Environmental Law Center at Widener University who believes the act should be tightened and expanded to include residential land uses in the zone, in addition to industry.

"I think it will happen again. There will be proposals for conversations first, which will turn into proposals to change regulations which potentially will be proposals for changing the act." 

Let's read that last sentence again, because May has it exactly correct:   "There will be proposals for conversations first, which will turn into proposals to change regulations which potentially will be proposals for changing the act." 

Likewise David Carter of Delaware Audubon:

David Carter, conservation chair for Delaware Audubon, rejected suggestions that the law is too restrictive, and said that it has plenty of defenders. 

"Go ahead and go after it. It will reinvigorate Delaware's environmental movement in a way they haven't seen in 35 years," Carter said. He said that financial barriers are to blame for holding back job-creating clean-ups and redevelopments of under-used and polluted brownfields outside the zone, rather than environmental laws protecting sensitive areas.

I'm not sanguine that the reinvigoration of Delaware's environmental movement is going to hold of the calm, inevitable deliberations of what I figure will be the new Coastal Zone Development Task Force, but I am intrigued that the WNJ at least printed Carter's assertion that businesses want to go after the pristine Coastal Zone because it is not nearly so attractive an idea to clean up earlier brownfields outside the Zone.

Here's the thing:  You can expect that in his State of the State Address, Governor Jack Markell (who last year discovered that Delaware rivers and streams were polluted) will call for the creation of a task force to draw up guidelines for the environmentally sound development of the Coastal Zone, and that the membership of that Task Force or Commission has already been selected in large measure.  The Delaware Nature Society, as the local arm of the National Wildlife Federation, will be seated as the sole representative of "environmental concerns."

This is important not just in terms of the gutting of the Coastal Zone Act, which will--all things being equal--now take place within 12-18months, but in understanding how corporate interests have been made a fourth branch of Delaware's government.

Corporations and their lobbyists, you see, are stakeholders.  You and I are not.

This is right out of the Rodel playbook for education.  Instead of addressing real issues of lack of opportunity in Wilmington and NCC, our leaders have grabbed hold of the last remaining area of Delaware not already awash in pollution and brownfields, and the same people who presided over the pollution of 90% of our freshwater rivers and streams are promising to do the same for our coast.

Besides, pursuing the chimera of massive Coastal Zone development does more for corporate stock options than actually fixing downtown Wilmington every would.

This is where I come back in ...

... with apologies (or appreciation) to kavips.

So I ran and lost, and knew I was going to lose well before the event, but not how badly.

So I learned that no matter how well they make think of you personally, people (at least humanoids in Delaware) will not pull the lever for a third-party candidate in great numbers.  There were several other examples of this on the ballot, from Catherine Damavandi (the most qualified Attorney General candidate, who couldn't break 5%) to Rose Izzo (about whose qualifications the less said the better, but a GOP label netted her 35%--certainly wasn't her debate performance).

A lot of other things I learned, the most valuable of which were not political.

I learned that even had I won the election it would not have substituted for time I should have been spending with the 11-year-old grandson that Faith and I are raising.

I learned (or at least had re-emphasized) that you don't have to be in office to affect policy in Delaware (although it sure does help when the money is being passed about).

I learned that you can't beat an incumbent who represents the cadillac of constituent services, and who--even when he is dead wrong in his votes--is such a nice guy that nobody can campaign against his record.

I learned that I am interested and passionate about a lot of things I really wanted to talk about or blog about, but didn't, because they had nothing to do with winning.

I learned that winning is overrated, even when losing still sucks.

And, most importantly (at least today, this hour), I learned that I cannot contain or express my worldview within the confines of any particular ideology, although the ideology with which I still feel the most affinity would be libertarianism.

I'm coming to grips with the fact that no ideology--not libertarianism, not conservatism, not progressivism--is actually a tool for solving problems.  At best they are intellectual focusing devices, and at worst they are straightjackets that not only cut off most conversations, but almost all circulation at the neck.

Purity tests are for Puritans, as are tall black hats and big belt buckles, none of which interest me.

Ideologies, inherently, simplify your world view.  Unfortunately, the world is a complex, nuanced, complicated, dirty, messy place, wherein there are good people in the service of bad ideas, and good ideas defeated by their earliest encounters with reality.

I'd rather have a system of ethics than an ideology.

So I'm starting over here, in a sense.  As a historian I know that all phenomena involve both continuity and change.  I'm still the same person, with the same background, the same interests, the same flaws, and the same leanings, that I was about seven years ago when I first started publishing The Delaware Libertarian.  I'm just unwilling to confine my ideas, my observations, or my potential solutions to that framework any more.

So, in what will probably be fits and starts, I'm going to try the next step of my personal evolution, and just be ... Steve Newton.  If my ideas and observations have any merit, such merit will remain no matter what the title; if not, Libertarians shouldn't take the fall for my transgressions (not that you can fall too hard from a distance of 1-2%).

I will endeavor to be interesting, but I will not worry a great deal about consistency (thank you, Ralph Waldo Emerson), and I will write what pleases me.  If anybody reads, great.  If not, that's also fine.  I don't expect to make a living, or even a side income, from blogging.

I liked the rather bizarre title when kavips accidentally put it together a couple of years ago, and it has niggled at the back of my brain (brane) ever since.  The best whiskey is blended, then carefully aged, and consumed neat.  Not everyone will like it.  It doesn't matter because (at least for the moment) I don't care.  I hope my friends will stick around for awhile to see if this ages into something good, but if they don't, I'll understand.