I Approve My Tax Dollars to do That: Provide Natural Disaster Relief

I know most of my recent posts have related to things I approve or need my tax dollars to do. Although I originally planned to write this post about an expenditure I do not approve of, I was so appalled by what I read in this NY Times editorial that I needed to share it.

When a natural disaster like Hurricane Sandy strikes the United States, a federal body called the National Response Coordination Center heads recovery efforts. The umbrella organization of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Coordination Center decides how to allocate and distribute various forms of aid. It also assists with any evacuations. As a federal body, it has vast resources and authority at its disposal. Furthermore if states are already distressed or without means of communication during or after a storm, it is one fewer things the state has to deal with. The state is already in enough trouble; it should not have to orchestrate aid efforts as well.

Flooding of the subway system has brought New York City to a standstill: schools are closed, Wall Street vacant, hospitals evacuated and people trapped in upper-story apartments without power. Under Romney's plan, how is a state capital under water supposed to coordinate an effective emergency response without power and transportation? 

Photo credit: http://inhabitat.com/nyc-public-transit-system-crippled-after-hurricane-sandy-causes-widespread-flooding/ 

Romney, however, wants to eradicate the National Response Coordination Center and shift emergency management not even to the states but to the private sector. Consequently “profit-making companies,” rather than the federal government, would control the emergency response. Because it makes a lot of sense to have people’s safety, evacuation and aid be in the hands of businesses out to make a buck. Who’ll get the bottles of water, blankets and protein bars? Those who can pay for it.

Yes, because Massachusetts expect to experience hurricane-strength storm surges and thus it's our fault the coastline got slammed. (Winthrop, MA)

Photo credit: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/hurricane-sandy-strikes-east-coast-gallery-1.1194577 

The author, whose name was nowhere to be found on the editorial itself, explained why Republicans despite nationally-overseen emergency management: “Many don’t like the idea of free aid for poor people or they think people should pay for their bad decisions, which this week includes living on the East Coast.”

Excuse me!?  

Hurricane Katrina crippled Louisiana. The West confronted massive wild fires all last summer and into the fall. Tornadoes rip through the Midwest. Earthquakes vex the West Coast. Blizzards shut down much of the North. Every part of the country experiences some form of natural disaster; there is no “safe” state. A natural disaster is no one particular person’s fault. Yet when their states get affected, they come crying for federal aid and financial assistance. How totally hypocritical. You don’t want federal aid? Fine, then don’t take it. See how effective the response is. Like health care, emergency management is not something that belongs in the private sector. It belongs to the federal government.

Even the city that never sleeps is no match for a hurricane. 

Photo credit: http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/10/hurricane-sandy-after-landfall/100396/

I approve my tax dollars to do that: fund FEMA and the National Response Coordination Center.

Romney and My Tax Dollars

Opening Safari this morning, I noticed that my homepage, nytimes.com, displayed an intriguing headline: "The Mitt Romney Who Might Have Been"

Huh?

He’s the Republican presidential candidate and a former governor. He is already a very well known and publicized figure. As such, most if not all Americans around or above voting age know his name. What else could he have been? Curious, I shoved my current homework aside, clicked on the link and began to read.

In a two-second summary of the article, author Robert Draper evaluated Romney’s role as an informal McCain advisor during the 2008 race and his performance as Massachusetts governor. The point? Romney aimed to please.

I highly recommend reading it if you wish to see a preview of President Romney. 

Rather than remain steadfast to his promises or convictions, Romney preferred to go along and do what would win him support and favor. A perfect example of this is his revelation about Roe vs. Wade. Once the potential of a presidential campaign emerged mid-way through his term as governor, his position on a woman’s right to choose reversed from support to opposition. His loyalty never lay with Massachusetts. One of his environmental officials told the Times, “Clearly, in retrospect, he was weighing what was right for Massachusetts with how it would play nationally." (nytimes.com) 

Melanie's Law, a law targeted at getting more drunk drivers caught repeatedly off the road, is seen as one of the big success stories of Romney's term as Massachusetts governor. While it has been successful at getting repeat offenders off the road, seeing as it was introduced as a result of the tragic death of a young girl by a repeat offender drunk driver, there was little political resistance to its enactment. IID stands for ignition interlock device: you must blow into it and pass or else the car will not start. 

photo credit: http://www.mass.gov/rmv/rmvnews/2008/iid_removals.gif

Now imagine a president weighting what was right for the United States with how it would play on the international stage. Not good. 

I do acknowledge that the Times tends to lean toward the left and therefore this evaluation of Romney is somewhat biased. However, as a Massachusetts resident, much of its criticisms about his performance ring true. Who wants a governor who spends the last two years of his term away forwarding his own presidential campaign? Should he get elected, will he spend the latter years of his term focused on his re-election campaign instead of our nation’s current crises? I want my president here and actively engaged in the needs of the United States. I want him to take a decisive stand on issues and not allow his hopes for re-election to taint his decisions. He must preside in the present: not in the prospects of the 2016 race.

Funny how he approved a similar health care system in Massachusetts that took effect while he was governor that is viewed as one of his other big successes and he now rejects such a system on a nation-wide scale. You no longer hear Bostonians complaining about the state-wide health insurance requirement. Massachusetts also has some of the best health statistics in the nation. 

Photo credit: http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-TO311_0628sc_G_20120628120827.jpg

Obviously the 2012 presidential election is a huge determinant in the future of my tax dollars over the course of the next four years. I make no secret about the fact that I am a liberal: I favor big government, I support a woman’s right to choose and I applaud universal health care. But in some ways, I view myself as a fiscal conservative. I dislike when my hard-earned tax dollars are wastefully and ineffectively spent. I especially grapple with the concept of welfare systems. My philosophy is simple: live within your means. If you fail to do so, then that is your financial problem, not mine and certainly not my tax dollars’.

That being said, obviously I will not vote for Romney.  But in addition to our ideological differences, I do not trust him to be responsible with my tax dollars because he flip-flopped so many times on issues and policies as governor. If elected president, which Romney are we actually going to get?

Follow Up: Elephant Poaching and the Ivory Trade

“It is difficult to know exactly how many people have died.”

This weekend the New York Times posted another article about elephant poaching and the ivory trade. While not an extension of the article described in my blog post from September 12^th, it does further investigate the consequences of such a lucrative “sport.” The author of the Op-Ed column, Louisa Lombard, examines the loss of human life in addition to that of the majestic elephant.

The spoils of an ivory seizure in Kenya. The 1,550-plus pounds of ivory, valued at an approximately $750,000 US dollars, was guessed to have come from 50 adult male elephants. DNA testing can be used to determine from where the elephants had originated. 

Photo credit: http://www.awf.org/blog/huge-ivory-seizure-two-men-arrested/ 

One of the most sobering figures in her article is the lack thereof. As the first line of this post implies, no one knows exactly how many people have lost their lives by getting involved on either side of the war for ivory. Some groups keep track of how many guards are lost. No one even attempts to record the number of poachers killed.

What can be done to effectively stop the slaughter of both human and elephant life in the name of ivory? Lombard acknowledges that “human management” of the crisis (ie wildlife conservation) is relatively futile. She instead claims that, “curbing the demand for ivory is, in the end, the only way to curb both elephant and people life.” Yet I do not understand how such reduction in demand is possible. The countries with the highest demand for ivory cherish it for its religious connotations, not its construction properties or beauty.

Intricately carved ivory religious figurines. The notion that ivory honors God is evident in Buddhism and Catholicism.

Photo credit: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2009/06/19/illegal_ivory_trade_in_thailand/

Asking the Chinese to relinquish their love of ivory equates to asking Americans to omit “one nation under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance: it’s simply not going to happen.

I wholeheartedly support freedom of religion (though I myself am unreligious). But in a situation like this, where religion is tied up in other global conflicts, I feel hypocritical. Pretend such ivory demand existed in the United States. I believe I would advocate for regulations restricting the import and sale of ivory, whether it be used for religious purposes, piano keys, trinkets, etc in order to protect the elephants. But if ivory is believed by some religions to honor God, then are restrictions on its import and sale a violation of the First Amendment? Is asking a person to reconsider what he or she uses to honor God imposing upon his or her religious freedom? To me, it feels like it does.

In that case, how do we attempt to balance the two?  One solution I thought of was using elephant meat to feed starving villages. At least in that respect, the death of an elephant serves a bigger purpose than fueling the ivory trade. Yet that solution fails to protect elephants as a species and inevitably would create a whole assortment of other problems.  No answer will be the perfect solution. Sadly, more humans and elephants will have to die until that solution emerges.

I Approve My Tax Dollars to do That: Prevent Another Attack

It is no secret that the illegal drug trafficking persists between Latin America, the Caribbean, South America and the United States. From breast implants to teddy bears, smugglers have concocted creative guises to evade authorities and shuttle drugs across nation borders. Now a new even more covert courier has emerged: a fully submersible submarine.

Described as “the Super Bowl of counternarcotics” by Commander Mark J. Fedor of the Coast Guard in a recent NY Times article, these aquatic crafts have been increasingly detected in the Caribbean within the last year.  Semi-submersible submarines are not rookies in the narcotics game; it is their fully submersible cousins that are now startling and worrying authorities. Only required to surface at night to recharge their batteries off the onboard diesel engine, they can travel underwater and therefore virtually invisible from South America all the way to the United States.

In addition to the challenge posed by their imperceptibility, authorities also face the problem of the submarines’ increased carrying capacity compared to their predecessors. The more commonly employed high-powered fishing and leisure boats can transport approximately one ton of cocaine. The fully submergible vessels, meanwhile, can haul upwards of ten tons, which are then ferried to shore by small boats once in shallow enough water.

Of the potential drug shipments identified by the Joint Interagency Task Force South, the group at the helm of American counternarcotic efforts, only one-fourth is ever intercepted. Manpower, aircrafts, and ships simply cannot respond to every shipment. Increasing the number of shipments seized involves working with local South and Central American authorities to prosecute the drug trafficking networks.

But there’s another unique aspect of these fully submersible submarines weighing on the minds of American authorities: the potential use of these vessels by terrorists to transport attackers or weapons. Though such use of submersibles by militants has yet to be detected, no one though a bomb could be smuggled through airport security in someone’s shoes or in a Gatorade bottle (for fact citations, see NY Times article above). Obviously air travel is a much more popular method of travel by the typical citizen, as 48% of adults in the US having flown for business or leisure in 2009 (http://www.ustravel.org/news/press-kit/travel-facts-and-statistics). But it seems both naïve and careless not to protect our ports and coasts from an attack. The United States has been caught unprepared twice within the last 75 years. I personally do not want to see another terrorist attack in my lifetime.

The $15 billion Obama allocated toward combating the drug war in 2010?  (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37134751/ns/us_news-security/t/us-drug-war-has-met-none-its-goals/#.UFSiNu0ZdSo). Yes, I approve of my tax dollars going toward that if it means combating these sneaky submarines.

At The Trailhead

Two months out from the November presidential election, it seems as though all anyone can talk about is the campaign. Engaged in a transcontinental game of “he said, she said,” both Obama and Romney pledge reforms neither can realistically make while they simultaneously denounce their opponent and his party. Scanning the headlines on NYTimes.com yesterday, I saw election coverage, election coverage and what a surprise more election coverage. Thus I wanted to take this opportunity to remind Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney (as well as the American media) that there is more going on in September 2012 than who will next inhabit the White House. 

Exasperated, I clicked on the “World” tab and browsed the article titles, finally settling on one that fell under the “Most E-mailed” category. The five-page article, Elephants Dying in Epic Frenzy as Ivory Fuels Wars and Profits, revealed the disturbing escalation of violent elephant poaching as a result of increased demand for ivory in Asia. I’ll expand upon my thoughts about the article in the next post but in the meantime, check out the full article here. Most upsetting to me however wasn’t the loss of elephant life: it was the fact I’d indirectly facilitated it.  More specifically, it was my tax dollars designated to support underfunded ally African governments that enabled the deaths of hundreds and hundreds of elephants for their precious tusks.

That’s funny…I never approved my dollars to do that.

            This November, I will join the many previously ineligible voices in casting my first vote in a presidential election. With Election Day rapidly approaching, it is our responsibility to be educated voters.  As part of an assignment for my World Politics class at Mount Holyoke College, I’m making it my mission to investigate and track down my federal tax dollars on all seven continents. Where exactly do they go? Who benefits from them? Do people actually benefit from them? Are the recipients really deserving of aid? And most importantly, where do I want them to go?

 photo credit: http://www.jessehora.com/index.php?/ongoing/somethin-somethin-series/