Archives for October, 2006
Turning Free Speech Upside Down
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Thomas Jefferson once wrote that “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.” A similar principle is rooted in the First Amendment, which generally prohibits the government from forcing people to pay for speech with which they disagree.
Federal law nevertheless permits states to impose “agency shop” arrangements under which every employee in a unionized workplace, even though not a union member, must pay to the union, as a condition of employment, a compulsory service charge equal in amount to union dues.
The Supreme Court rejected non-union employees’ challenges to such coerced charges on freedom of association grounds in Railway Employees v. Hanson (1956). But it softened that harsh result by ruling in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education (1977), that such compelled charges cannot be used over an employee’s objection for political causes he opposes, citing the First Amendment freedom from compelled speech.
Now the Washington State Supreme Court has turned upside down the latter ruling protecting First Amendment rights. In Washington v. Washington Education Association, it declared unconstitutional a Washington State law that barred public employee unions from spending a teacher’s service charges on political causes, absent affirmative consent from the teacher. The court ruled that forcing the union to get affirmative consent for such political spending, rather than putting the burden on the teacher to formally make an affirmative objection, burdened the union’s own First Amendment rights.
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal of that ruling, and will hear arguments that it be reversed on January 10.
There is something very peculiar about the Washington Supreme Court’s holding that the First Amendment creates not just a floor, but a ceiling, on the First Amendment rights of public employees over the use of their compelled union dues.
In essence, the state supreme court seems to have believed that everything not mandatory under U.S. Supreme Court precedent must be forbidden.
But the U.S. Supreme Court has never said that states cannot give dissenting employees additional safeguards against political use of their coerced dues, such as requiring affirmative consent. Nor has it ever suggested that public employee unions are entitled to have the state give them the maximum amount of union dues they are not forbidden to collect under U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
Indeed, the Supreme Court has made clear that states are free to ban “agency shop” arrangements altogether, as many “right to work” states have done, in protecting non-union employees from having to pay any dues to the union in their workplace. And the federal appeals courts have consistently upheld paycheck protection statutes like Washington’s, which protect a non-union employee from political use of her coerced dues absent her affirmative permission.
The fact that the First Amendment itself does not give non-union employees a blanket right to withhold compelled dues absent an affirmative objection to their use for political causes does not mean that state law cannot give the employees additional protections.
It is well established that a state law can give citizens broader free speech rights than federal law gives them, and states frequently do just that.
For example, under the Washington State Constitution, content-neutral restrictions on speech are subject to tougher scrutiny than under the federal First Amendment.
Under California state law, students have free speech rights in what they say in a school-sponsored newspaper, even the federal First Amendment confers no such rights, under the Supreme Court’s Hazelwood decision.
Similarly, under the Massachusetts courts’ Pyle v. South Hadley decision, students have a state constitutional right to use offensive language to express a political point of view, although such language lacks federal First Amendment protection.
A state is thus free to expand the rights of its citizens, such as students or teachers, even when doing so reduces the power of government officials or the state-conferred privileges of public employee unions.
The Sweetest Urban Legend of All
Keeping the holiday theme going, we now turn to the perennial Halloween boogieman, the anonymous candy poisoner. For decades, parents have been warned to check their kids’ candy carefully, lest a cyanide-laced Sugar Daddy make in into junior’s mouth. As Iain has taught us, however, the record books are mighty slim when it comes to any children actually being harmed by psychos intent on taking advantage of the candy-giving season:
Every year, newspapers and television programs warn parents about the “threat’ [from poisoning trick-or-treat candy, along] with grave reminders to check apples for razor blades and needles.
This year [2003], the Food and Drug Administration has joined in the tale-telling, warning parents to inspect commercially wrapped treats for signs of tampering, such as an unusual appearance or discoloration, tiny pinholes, or tears in wrappers. Throw away anything that looks suspicious.
But the FDA is telling just another scary tale, with as much truth as the legend of Hookhand: Halloween candy-tampering is a myth. University of Delaware sociologist Joel Best studied national criminal data going back to 1958 and found only 76 reports of any kind of tampering, of which almost all turned out to be mistaken or fraudulent.
In other words, parents, relax. Snopes, by the way, also has the low-down on mythical poisoned Halloweencandy.
What Is All the Hyperventilating About?
If you haven’t read it already, treat yourself to a radically reasonable op-ed by Prof. Richard Lindzen of MIT on why global warming is the last thing that you should be scared of this Halloween season:
Yes, there does appear to be warming, but the amount is hardly certain or indisputable. And the amount found does not appear that alarming.
The alarm, I would suppose, comes from the notoriously inadequate climate models.
As the primary “consensus” document, the Scientific Assessment of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change notes, modellers at the United Kingdom’s Hadley Centre had to cancel two-thirds of the model warming in order to simulate the observed warming.
So the warming alarm is based on models that overestimate the observed warming by a factor of three or more, and have to cancel most of the warming in order to match observations.
You will, of course, want to read the whole thing here.
Better Halloween Through Science
It turns out that Monsanto, the occasionally controversial biotech company, is hard at work on more than just wheat and maize. They’re also experimenting with how to improve other crops like…pumpkins:
[Monsanto scientist Bill] Johnson said customers want deep orange colors and dark green stems that don’t snap off when you use them to carry the pumpkin. His job is to breed varieties with those qualities with other strains that are resistant to certain viruses or the dreaded powdery mildew.
Monsanto has thousands of breeding lines of pumpkin stock, Johnson said. Most [of] the work is done in California and Florida greenhouses using traditional breeding techniques of mating the best plants with one another over generations.
We don’t always realize it, but even as we go about our day-to-day life, there are people striving to make our pumpkin stems greener, sturdier and spookier. Bless those people. Of course, that isn’t the only Halloween connection going on:
Monsanto’s critics call genetically engineered crops Frankenfoods. In spite of the natural appeal such a label might have for Halloween sales, Johnson said there aren’t any plans to splice pumpkin genes.
“It’s not something that’s on the radar right now,” he said.
A reasonable choice on Monsanto’s part, I think. For the back story on biotech foods and their public reputation, see Greg and Henry’s book, The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution (Praeger, 2004).
What balance?
When a journalist publicly declares he doesn’t believe in balance on a particular issue, you know things are really bad. When I was a journalist, I had it beat into me to get both or however many sides of the story there might be. Well, ABC News’ Bill Blakemore (a network reporter!) told an audience at the recent Society of Environmental Journalists conference that he doesn’t “like the word ‘balance’ much at all” in global warming coverage. Blakemore was debating Senate Environment and Public Works communications director, Marc Morano, who reported on the dialogue in today’s Majority Fact of the Day. Seems to me that Blakemore has been hoodwinked by the liberal enviros and he doesn’t even realize it.
Correction: Blakemore made the comments above at a different panel earlier in the day at the SEJ conference, not during the debate panel with Morano.
Kazman vs. Cupcake
CEI’s Sam Kazman had the quote of the day. It happened during a debate on CNBC’s Morning Call over whether NYC should ban restaurants from using artificial trans-fats. His opponent showed a 25-year-old cupcake as proof that trans-fats are bad for us. Sam’s classic response? Press play to find out!
The world will not end tomorrow
Or in a hundred year’s time, for that matter. Today’s Stern Review from the British government has been marketed as saying global warming means economic catastrophe if we do not decarbonize our economy now and is therefore being used to justify green taxes in the near future.
Well, let’s take a look at what the Review actually says. I applauded the announcement of the review because it was obvious that the economic assumptions on which global warming models are based needs to be questioned. Yet the review missed the point and just took these assumptions as read. Actually, they did even less than that. As Tim Worstall show, they only picked one economic scenario (IPCC SRES A2 for the cognoscenti) and measured the effets of global warming from that, before adding one with worse feedbacks than the UN “consensus” currently forecasts (see where this going?). That model just happens to be one with very high – 15 billion – population and low amounts of globalization, precisely the opposite of current trends. As Tim concludes:
Their entire report and justification is based upon the following:
1) Mitigating climate change will cost more than business as usual in the short term.
2) Mitigating climate change will cost less than business as usual in the long term, as the costs of mitigation will, in the longer term, be outweighed by the costs saved of adaptation (or to be more precise, the damage to economic output caused by climate change).
3) We need to make some unusual assumptions about discount rates to show this to be so.
OK, I was certainly willing to believe them, willing to give it a try. But, that appalling faliure in their own modelling: only taking a medium high emissions scenario and then one with further feedback mechanisms to do your sums on.
Here: Page 61 in chapter 3. Before I believe any more of this I’m going to have to have explained to me why projecting savings from a 15 billion people world, with a medium high emissions scenario, creating global GDP of $ 243 trillion, and being able to save 20% (or c. $50 trillion) by spending lots of money now is a better idea than other options such as A1 F1 (world markets, 7 billion people, $550 trillion….note that people are not two times richer here, they are four times richer than in the A2 scenario) or B1 or even B2….where we don’t spend any money now.
It’s almost as if that model were deliberately chosen isn’t it? The one that shows the lowest future wealth and thus makes the discounting make current expenditure look good?
Surely not?
Good question, A2 is clearly the outlier scenario, producing by far the worst results in terms of temperature rise at the end of the century. That’s an irresponsible choice of model.
Yet even under the A2 scenario, what Stern is saying is that, with all the negative consequences he has added on top of the scenario, the world will still be 4.25 to 9.5 times richer than it is now, instead of 5 to 10 times greater. Catastrophe canceled, if you ask me.
Meanwhile, Stern asks us to believe that stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at 550 parts per million (we’re at 430 now) would only cost 1 percent of global GDP. There have been huge numbers of economic studies looking at the cost of stabilization at 650 ppm and they suggest a cost of 2-5 percent. It’s inconceivable we could achieve 550 ppm for lower cost (there haven’t been nearly as many studies done at that level).
In short, Stern missed the point of his own review. Unless, of course, the whole point was to provide justification for a series of tax rises. Perish the thought.
Meanwhile, ConservativeHome has a wry take on the whole thing.
*cross-posted from NRO
The U.S. Secretary of Shady Land Deals
Judith Burns of Dow Jones’ MarketWatch reports on the latest shareholder activism from our friends Steve Milloy and Tom Borelli over at the Free Enterprise Action Fund:
Goldman [Sachs’] donation of 680,000 acres of remote Chilean forest in 2004 continues to chafe the pro-business Free Enterprise Action Fund, which says the gift hasn’t benefited Chile or Goldman shareholders. Fund managers, who raised concerns about the deal at Goldman’s 2006 meeting, petitioned the Wall Street investment bank on Friday to have its board review the gift next year as part of a broader study of Goldman’s “sustainability” projects.
[…]
Goldman’s decision to donate the land to a preservation group appears “inconsistent with its own environmental policy,” which calls for creating value for shareholders through market-based approaches, including sustainable forestry, according to the Free Enterprise Fund petition. It also questions the value to shareholders from the deal, saying the tax deduction Goldman received is far less than the $150 million of annual revenues that might have been possible under a “sustainable” forestry plan. Chile itself would be better off with such an approach, which would have brought jobs and industry to a depressed local economy, the petition states.
At the center of this questionable land deal is the former chairman of both Goldman Sachs and The Nature Conservancy, current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. We made a point of raising similar concerns about Paulson in May, during his confirmation.
World Series the model to follow?
George Monbiot – the green activist whose perceived wackiness inspired the label “Moonbat” – is at it again. This time he says sport is killing the planet. In this respect, surely Monbiot should give America some credit. After all, we always hear how no-one outside America is interested in Football, Baseball or Hockey. It’s soccer, cricket and rugby that involve the most international travel, to say nothing of Track and Field and Formula One. If more countries played only their own sports, perhaps shared with a couple of close neighbors, this problem wouldn’t be as significant. Of course, Brits and Australians would have less understanding of India and Africa, but that’s a small price to pay, surely.
Monbiot has a recommendation for a sport instead: Ultimate Frisbee. That “Moonbat” label becomes a bit clearer now, doesn’t it?
The UK Takes An Alarmingly Stern Look at Global Warming
The international media is in a tizz this morning (afternoon in the UK) over the release of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. The British government commissioned advisor Sir Nicholas Stern to assess the economic impact of global warming and boy, did they get their money’s worth. According to his projections, disruptions from a changing climate could end up consuming as much as 20% of global GDP. That’s serious.
Except that maybe it’s not. We sent out a statement earlier today on the Review, and in it, Myron has this to say:
The report’s estimates for reducing greenhouse gas emissions are laughably rosy, while the assumptions about the impacts of global warming are ridiculously overblown. The Stern Review may look professionally done, but it doesn’t pass the laugh test.
In other words, be extremely skeptical of the British government’s official position on the future impacts of global climate change.
Broadcast media note: Global TV viewers will be able to catch Myron on BBC TV 4 tonight at 20:00 GMT and Marlo sometime tonight on Sky News. And for the first time, Myron will also be a news guest on Al Jazeera, to be filmed shortly on the sidewalk in front of Open Market world headquarters here in D.C.
Another American Bird Species Faces Extinction
It’s been a popular visitor and resident in many American front yards for decades, but there is now the very real chance that the pink flamingo may be going the way of the dodo. AP business writer Mark Jewell reports that the Massachusetts company which has manufactured the iconic plastic lawn ornaments since the 1950s may be going out of business:
[T]he original version of the plastic flamingo may be singing its swan song after inspiring countless pranks — and being alternately celebrated as a tribute to one of nature’s most graceful creatures and derided as the epitome of American pop culture kitsch.
Union Products Inc. stopped producing flamingos and other lawn ornaments at its Leominster factory in June, and is going out of business Nov. 1 — a victim of rising expenses for plastic resin and electricity, as well financing problems.
The small privately held firm has been in talks with a pair of rival lawn ornament makers interested in buying the molds and resuming production of the flamingos, designed in 1957 by local son Don Featherstone.
Here’s to hoping that some creative financing and nostalgic marketing can bring the plastic flamingo back from the brink. If we work together as private stewards of lawn ornament biodiversity, I know we can succeed.
Thanks to CEI alumna Liz for passing along.
I’d Have Settled for a Statue in Antwerp
According to The Wall Street Journal this morning, Al Gore and his take on global warming have become all the rage in…Belgium. It’s seems the Belgian Prime Minister was so taken with Mr. Gore’s recent visit promoting An Inconvenient Truth that he invoked the former VP’s name when introducing a package of new “enviromentally friendly” taxes. This package has been dubbed “the Gore tax,” which I can only assume pleases him mightily.
Bean Counters Caucus in DC
The American Financial Services Association is holding its 90th annual meeting here in Washington this week, and attendees are tackling a number of challenges including the threat of identity theft to customers, the multiple levels of regulatory control over member companies and calls for the industry to “do good” in addition to doing good business.
A lot of these are issues CEI has worked on as well. For more, see Wayne and Brooke’s paper on identity theft, Wayne’s latest installment of 10,000 Commandments on regulatory overkill, Isaac’s take on “corporate social responsibility” and business do-gooders, and John’s work on financial regulation in general at the Center for Entrepreneurship.
One particualr highlight for those attending the conference today - our friend Walter Williams will be giving the lunch keynote address “The Role of Government in a Free Society.” I assume it’ll be the shortest speech of the week.
SEJ 2006: Marc Morano Takes on Alarmist Reporting
We’ve known that Marc Morano was a brave man for some time, but he proved it again last night at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ conference here in Burlington. He was the lone critic on a panel about the media and global warming entitled “And Now a Word from Our Critics…” Not only was he the only critic of the mainstream reportage of climate change on the five-member panel, but I seemed to be one of the only people in the packed ballroom not actively hostile to his point of view.
The panel lineup had changed significantly from the original plan - Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein was sidelined due to an illness in the family (although was later noted to be listening to the proceedings via cell phone). The final lineup consisted of Oregon Public Radio producer Christy George, ABC News correspondent Bill Blakemore, New York University professor Dan Fagin, Marc and New York Times environment reporter Andrew Revkin.
Moderator Christy George started by noting in her introduction that Marc serves as communications director to Sen. James Inhofe, saying “he is sort of his Karl Rove, or maybe his Dan Bartlett.” Given the political leanings of the crowd, this cannot exactly be considered a compliment.
Marc started by making his point that many news stories about global warming science apply uneven labels to the advocates vs. the skeptics of catastrophic global warming theory, and that some more marginal media outlets have gone much farther, explicitly comparing climate skeptics to Holocaust deniers. Despite Marc mentioning it repeatedly, no one on the panel would comment on whether they thought such an outrageous comparison was justified.
It was especially disappointing that no one else on the panel thought that the Holocaust denial comparison was worth commenting on, because it has emboldened the rise to an even nastier and more offensive rhetorical trick. Not only have climate skeptics been referred to “deniers” in order to generate the (frequently) unconscious mental association, but recently one publication went further and called for Nuremberg-style war crimes trials for people who challenge the alleged “consensus” on climate change. See how that works? In one bold move Holocaust deniers become Holocaust perpetrators. Is that really the level of debate to which we’ve descended?
I won’t give a blow-by-blow of everyone’s comments (you can watch the whole thing on Google Video if you like, shaky camera work and all), except to say that the standout comments of the evening came from Andy Revkin. He drew an excellent difference between reporting on the science (a new study on hurricanes just came out) and reporting on the politics (Tony Blair calls on U.S. to embrace Kyoto Protocol). There are different standards and expectations for each, and those are sometimes forgotten.
Also good, and rather surprising, was Revkin’s choice to take some of his colleagues to task for over-hyping the results of individual scientific studies by claiming the latest paper out of whichever journal is conclusive proof that we are even now in the midst of catastrophic climate change. It was good to hear.
SEJ 2006: Open Source Journalism
There was yet more cool action from the Society of Environmental Journalists’ conference this afternoon as Amy Gahran and Adam Glenn explained what Gahran called “open source journalism.” She and Glenn encouraged their audience to become more involved blogging (and commenting online) on issues that they cover, both for professional development and to begin turning their readership into an extended community. Both of those goals, of course, come with significant personal rewards.
A journalist who blogs, they explained, will reap the rewards of the distributed intelligence of everyone interested in their topics. Comments on reporter’s posts are a great way to suggest story ideas or introduce a corrective point of view. This is also true in the policy world - a think tank or advocacy person who is engaged (and engaging) online will be better informed, and at a lower cost, than someone who limits their experience with “conversational media” to reading the letters to the editor in The Wall Street Journal.
They also suggested a number of inexpensive tools for getting one’s message out there, including TypePad (which Open Market is was built on) and blog search sites like Technorati and Icerocket for finding out what people are talking about, and making sure you end up as part of the conversation.
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