The Southern State Fast Becoming Ayn Rand"s Vision of Paradise

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The following article is part of AlterNet"s ongoing series on poverty, Hard Times, USA. 

If you"re worried about where America is heading, look no further than Tennessee. Its lush mountains and verdant rolling countryside belie a mean-spirited public policy that only makes sense if you believe deeply in the anti-collectivist, anti-altruist philosophy of Ayn Rand. It"s what you get when you combine hatred for government with disgust for poor people.

Tennessee starves what little government it has, ranking dead last in per capita tax revenue. To fund its minimalist public sector, it makes sure that low-income residents pay as much as possible through heavily regressive sales taxes, which rank 10th highest among all states as a percent of total tax revenues. (For more detailed data see here.)

As you would expect, this translates into hard times for its public school systems, which rank 48th in school revenues per student and 45th in teacher salaries. The failure to invest in education also corresponds with poverty: the state has the 40th worst poverty rate (15%) and the 13th highest state percentage of poor children (26%). 

Employment opportunities also are extremely poor for the poor. Only 25% have full-time jobs, 45% are employed part-time, and a whopping 30% have no jobs at all. 

So what do you do with all those low-income folks who don"t have decent jobs? You put a good number of them in jail. In fact, only Louisiana, Georgia and New Mexico have higher jail incarceration rates.

From the perspective of Tennessee legislators, it"s all about providing the proper incentives to motivate the poor. For starters, you make sure that no one could possible live on welfare payments (TANF: Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). Although President Clinton"s welfare reform program curtailed how long a family can receive welfare (60 months) and dramatically increased the work requirements, Tennessee set the maximum family welfare payment at only $ 185 per month. (That"s how much a top hedge fund manager makes in under one second.) As a result, the Volunteer State ranks 49th in TANF, just above Mississippi ($ 170). 

Kick "em when they"re down or tough love?

In the Randian universe, it"s not enough to starve public education and the poor. You also must blame the poor both for their poverty and for the crumbling educational system. If a poor child is failing it must be the fault of low-income parents. So how do you drive the point home? You take away their welfare checks if their kids don"t do well in school, which is precisely what the Tennessee House and Senate are about to do. TheKnoxvilleNews.com reports:

The bill is sponsored by Sen. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, and Rep. Vance  Dennis, R-Savannah. It calls for a 30 percent reduction in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits to parents whose children are not making satisfactory progress in school.

More amazing still, the bill originally applied to all children of TANF parents, even if they were severely disabled. Realizing that they had gone too far, the bill was amended so that, “it would not apply when a child has a handicap or learning disability or when the parent takes steps to try improving the youngster’s school performance — such as signing up for a parenting class, arranging a tutoring program or attending a parent-teacher conference.”  (Imagine the uproar if those provision were applied to upper-income parents, assuming any still use the public school system.)

Dennis told the House Health Subcommittee the measure now only applies to “parents who do nothing.” He described the measure as “a carrot and stick approach.”

Obviously, this is insane, right? Not if you"ve already started down the road of whipping the poor into shape. The proposed draconian cuts are just an extension of previous policies that already made welfare contingent on school attendance. As Travis Waldron reports in ThinkProgress: 

When Campfield introduced the legislation in January, he said parents have “gotten away with doing absolutely nothing to help their children” in school. “That’s child abuse to me,” he added. Tennessee already ties welfare to education  by mandating a 20 percent cut in benefits if students do not meet attendance standards, but this change would place the burden of maintaining benefits squarely on children, who would face costing their family much-needed assistance if they don’t keep up in school.

By the way, the Tennessee legislature is lily-white: One percent is Latino, 6% AfricanAmerican and 91% Caucasian. But the complexion of poverty is darker. Nearly 80 percent of Tennessee"s poor children are black and brown.

Attacking the poor as the answer to the Wall Street crash?

These attacks on the poor, rather than on poverty, are not peculiar to Tennessee. In fact, similar concepts circulate among political and policy elites in Washington. For Ayn Rand acolytes, Wall Street"s reckless, greedy casinos couldn"t possibly be the real reason the economy crashed. After all, the rich get rich because they are terrific at what they do. We should reward these creators, not blame them for their foresight, their ingenuity and their obvious success. The blame instead should fall on the poor — the takers — and on the collectivist government liberals who cater to them. Didn"t the government force banks to put unqualified poor people in homes they couldn"t afford? (It doesn"t matter that the data shows that low-income buyers who gained loans through the Community Readjustment Act didn"t default in higher numbers than anyone else. The idea of blaming the poor has power.)

Blaming low-income people for chronic unemployment is the next move. As the rate stays stubbornly high (precisely because all Republicans and even a few Democrats don"t want the government in the business of job creation) we hear talk of “structural” unemployment. That"s code for the jobs would be there if only the workers were qualified. But you know, those lower-income workers just don"t have the skills and work habits to compete in our globalized economy. Even older middle-class workers are hopelessly out of date. So there"s really nothing government can do about it.

The final twist is to claim that the richest country in human history doesn"t have the means to eradicate poverty. Instead, we are told, rising debt is forcing us to tighten our belts — rather, we need to tighten the belts of the poor by taking away a few more dollars from Medicaid and Social Security.  

How to justify meanness?

It"s not easy to be cruel to someone who is down and out. After all, most of us feel ashamed when walking by a homeless person or watching kids crammed into over-crowded classrooms. It requires several psychological twists and turns to make life even harder for low-income Americans.

• You have to blame low-income parents for their own economic problems. Even if the unemployment rate is sky-high it must be the poor person"s fault.


• You need to feel superior — that somehow you got to where you are today not by an accident of birth but rather by your own hard labors. Anyone not as successful as you, by definition, is inferior.


• You have to believe that meanness really is tough love — that by taking benefits away from the poor you are actually helping them on the road to self sufficiency. 


• It"s helpful to have access to the broader Randian/libertarian philosophy that argues all forms of collective government action are an attack on freedom. In this view, altruism is seen as a curse that justifies collective government programs which essentially steal money from the makers and to waste on the takers. All collective caring by the state, therefore, is evil, so that all support for the poor via government is evil as well.


• It"s psychologically crucial to have your prejudices confirmed by charismatic alchemists like Ayn Rand, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan who peddle selfishness as the highest form of morality (although only Ayn Rand had the guts to say it so bluntly).

Is Washington locked into increasing inequality?

While the Republicans in Congress are committed to supporting the rich and crushing the poor, smug Democrats can too easily look down upon the bumbling Tennessee legislators. Tie welfare to school success? How crude. But many of these same Democrats also are totally in sync with the Wall Street hucksters who have, for a generation, siphoned off America"s wealth into their bottomless pockets. In fact, both parties again are in competition for Wall Street campaign cash as if nothing much has happened. And both parties clearly are unwilling to break up the big banks, cap obscene financial incomes, or create public banks to serve the public interest.

Washington politicians and pundits from Obama on down (with very few exceptions) are enthralled by Wall Street wizardry. Making a million dollars an hour no longer seems strange or repugnant. Too big to fail, jail and regulate are just the natural order of things. In fact, more than a few public servants can"t wait to race through that revolving door to get in on the big casino games. 

This should tell us that the path to social justice requires a new political movement that operates outside the two great corporate parties.

Is it too late?

I ran into a young woman who is very concerned by the enormous gap she sees between life on campus and the hardships of the low-income people. She wants to know what she can do with her life to really change things.

What can we say? I look back over a lifetime in the cause of social justice and I don"t have much to show for it — more war, more poverty, more inequality, more disinvestment in critical human infrastructure. Yes, we"ve made great strides on gender, sexual preference and overt racial discrimination compared to a generation ago. But how can we explain why America has the world"s highest incarceration rates? Why couldn"t we prevent a criminal justice system from sending 40% of young black males to prison? How, on our watch, did our relatively egalitarian country develop the most obscene wealth gap in the world? How is it possible that so many of our cities are in worse shape than a generation ago? It"s almost to impossible to comprehend, and even harder to change.

But that young woman already senses that we have no choice but to try. And that requires building a movement that targets the core of the problem — the systems that allow the economic royalists and their political minions to hijack our country.   

It"s a long-term project. After all, it required almost two generations of painstaking work for the Ayn Rand right to take over the national debate. It may take just as long to recapture it. Let"s hope there are enough caring young women and men who still have a sense of the common good. Altruism may have died in Galt"s Gulch, but it"s still alive and well in the hearts of those who share a passion for justice, even in Tennessee. 

 

 

Wed, 04/10/2013 – 10:04

 
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The Southern State Fast Becoming Ayn Rand"s Vision of Paradise

Are Some Men Born Pedophiles? New Science Says Yes, But Sexologists Say Not So Fast

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Pope Benedict’s legacy will be forever tied to it. Penn State’s lawyers are offering legal settlements over it. Adults who knew perpetrators for years still struggle with it. And now new research suggests that some people are born with brains ‘wired’ for sexual attraction to children—or pedophilia—a propensity that’s further shaped by life experiences and often cannot be controlled.

“Whatever the chain of events is, the chain begins before birth,” said James M. Cantor, a University of Toronto professor of psychiatry whose research team has made a series of startling correlations finding that pedophiles are likely to share physical attributes, such as slightly lower IQs, shorter body height, left-handedness and less brain tissue.

“There is no way to explain the findings that we get for pedophelia without mentioning or without including biology,” he recently told Canada’s Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers. “It is inescapable at this point. We cannot rule out psycho-social influences, but we cannot have a complete theory that cannot explain these non-obvious but but exquisitely important biological findings.”

Cantor’s findings have become big news not just because pedophilia is seen as one of the worst crimes—and its scandals and cover-ups don’t seem to end, whether in the Roman Catholic church or football-protecting universities. The idea that moral—and immoral—behavior has a basis in biology is the latest twist in the age-old debate of whether nature or nurture drives human action. For much of the 20^th century, psychologists looked more to the nurture side of the equation. But 21^st century science, with brain-scan imaging and computing power to analyze big data, are suggesting that both factors—one’s genes and one’s upbringing—shape human sexuality.

“It’s another ride on the nurture-nature merry-go-round,” Cantor told AlterNet, when asked what his findings portend. “It comes to the same point. We can’t take them apart. For scientists, the question of what portion is nature and what portion is nurture is incredibly interesting… Ninety-five percent of men are attracted to adult women. But looking at the exception, we can better understand the dynamics of sexual attraction for all.”

Like all science, research like Cantor’s can be cited to bouy one’s political beliefs—that people are born with bad genes must be treated harshly, as those on right say; or if people cannot help their genes they must be helped to manage, as liberals say. But in the 21^st century, a new intellectual paradigm—or fad—is emerging implying that once scientists find a problem has genetic roots, then it will eventually be traced and fixed.

The New York Times magazine has this recent report on how teenage abilities to cope with stress may have a “genetic component” that turns on one gene that’s been identifid. This Canadian television show discusses how feelings of romantic love originate in specific brain regions, reducing that life mystery to mechanics. Futurist Ray Kurzweil, now at Google, has this TED Talk video—seen by 1.1 million people—describing how human illnesses will be cured in coming years by reprogramming one’s genes; essentially by treating cell-mutating diseases as a “software” issue.

Cantor’s talk to Canadian therapists who treat sex addicts and abusers held out a similar promise—that research was approaching a day where pedophiles could be identified early and prevented from acting out. He was mindful that such an ability was filled with political and legal implications, but he was bullish nonetheless.

“There is nothing in anything that we are learning that changes anybody’s right to treatment or right to refuse treatment,” he told colleagues. “Now it is my hope that as we go on, that we will pinpoint very precisely the exact place where things start to go off. And then we might have the greatest opportunity to change it… If the brain research is successful, then instead of preventing the second offense, we can prevent the first offense, which would be extremely, extremely exciting.”

Cantor said that he led one of three research teams worldwide—the others are German—doing new analyses of large data sets that looked at pedophile’s neurological and physical attributes. Some of these data sets are based on brain scans using MRIs, which is far more detailed than CT scans. Others are based on medical records of sex offenders, including so-called phallometric monitors, where the blood flow in a penis is measured as a man is shown different graphic images. Asking individuals about their sexual preferences will not always reveal true answers; hence the blood flow metering.   

The MRI brain-scan surveys found that pedophiles often have IQs in the low 90s, which is slightly below average, Cantor said. Pedophiles also have lower visual memory scores, he said, adding that many were put in special education classes as they were growing up. Cantor also said that many were an inch shorter than the average height of men, and also are more prone to being left-handed than the general population. The physical traits were “present before they conducted their offenses,” he said. “It doesn’t rule out that there are social or more psychological contributors… but there is no psycho-social way to explain height or handedness.”

The MRI data led to another striking finding, Cantor said—one that comes from his team as opposed to reanalyzing others’ data sets—that pedophiles have less of the connective tissue that sends electrical signals between areas of the brain. Several regions of the brain become activated when a person is sexually stimulated, he said, but in pedophiles that “wiring” between these regions is skewed or operates differently.

“No area of the brain is the sexual center,” Cantor explained. “In theory, what it looks like is the thing that goes wrong is there is a problem, not in the sex centers, but in the network that is responsible for identifying what in the environment is a potentially sexual object.” He said, “This is a metaphor. It is as if there is a literal cross-wiring and when a person perceives a child in the brain, instead of triggering the nurturing instinct, it is triggering the sexual instinct… That is a very helpful way, so far, that explains the data.”     

“How we react in particular situations is likely, at least to some extent, hard-wired,” said Russell Swerdlow, a neurologist who was cited in a recent Los Angeles Timesreport that discussed Cantor’s findings and how scientists were increasingly seeing pedophilia as a physical condition. A decade ago, Swerdlow had a famous patient in science circles: an ex-teacher convicted of molesting children who a day before his sentencing was found with a tumor growing in a brain lobe tied to sexual desire. After it was removed, his sex drive receded. And as the tumor grew back, so too did his unmanagable sex drive.

“We"re dealing with the neurology of morality here,” Swerdlow told NewScientist.com in 2002. “He wasn’t faking,” his co-researcher, Jeffrey Burns, said. “The difference in this case was that the patient had a normal history before he acquired the problem.”

The ‘Nurture’ Explanation

A decade after that case made international news, reporting that pedophilia is being seen in mainstream science circles as a consequence of natural causes and not entirely as the result of one’s upbringing and life experiences, as believed by psychologists and many in the indisciplinary sexology field in the 20^th century is, to say the least, controversial.

“That’s totally absurd. It’s again somebody trying to say, ‘Hey, I’ve found the golden thread and I can manage sexuality,” said Rev. Ted McIlvenna, founder of San Francisco’s Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, a graduate school, who entered the sexology field in 1962 after the Methodist Church asked him to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals. “I haven’t found the grail.”

McIlvenna, an octogenarian who has spent five decades studying sexuality through the nurture lens—or how life experience molds behavior—says the scholarship that links pedophilia with one’s genes barely explains anything. Instead, he explains pedophilia by drawing on insights gained from years of taking personal sexual histories. McIlvenna says human sexual behavior has several basic but key bottom-lines: people are sexual, have desires, express them differently, and those desires evolve over a lifetime—as relationships to one’s body and as the stories they tell themselves about sex change.

“One of the problems we’ve had in sexology is that you have to look at what people do sexually and how they feel about it, and not what they should or shouldn’t do—but what they really do,” McIlvenna said. “You need to do profiles of people. You need to know everything about them. We need to know the provenance of people and their sexual behavior. Everybody is so different. So what you have to do is find a way to look at it.”

McIlvenna believes taking thousands of personal sex histories has revealed surprising psychological traits about pedophiles. They generally do not seek out images of adults having sex with children, he said, but are likely to seek images of children in “poignant poses.” That is because their sexuality has not evolved past key stages in otherwise healthier childhoods, he said.

“One of the problems is we didn’t research people as they were growing up,” he said. “We don’t look at children and do sex histories and profiles on them. We don’t do it with teenagers. We think that suddenly you’re an adult and that’s the thing we look at. We can tell very early where a person is, the stories they tell themselves, how they feel about their bodies and other people’s bodies, because it really depends on how they feel.” 

Humans are “pleasure-seeking creatures,” McIlvenna said, saying that sexuality evolves first in relation to one’s own body—as a child and adolescent—and then as an experience with other people. Pedophiles, like all people, have irrepressible desires, he said, but they have not been able to evolve past a child’s early phases of experiencing sexual feelings. “My experience of watching what happens with people who talk about pedophilia is that they’re people that really focus much more on their own bodies—and finding something that’s like their bodies—and they stop there.”

McIlvenna said he has no patience for “preachers who say ‘the devil made me do it’” or “doctors who say, ‘Well, something happened…’” He said, “Is the question sexual health or is the question to find somebody or something to blame or justify because somebody likes little kids? It hasn’t changed behaviorly at all in 3,000 years. Statistically, it has not—I don’t care what that guy in Toronto says.”

However, that guy in Toronto—James Cantor—who also is the editor-in-chief of Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, told AlterNet that the most recent data and analyses “doesn’t necessarily rule out nurture hypotheses.” If anything, Cantor said both factors are at play, and the sexology field seems to be recognizing that.

“The basic idea that pedophilia is in the biology in the brain is more than 100 years old,” he said, saying that perspective took a back seat to the development of psychology led by Sigmund Freud. “But now we have new data sets that we can look at.” 

Swerdlow, the neurologist who had that famous patient with a brain tumor a decade ago that increased his sexual desires for children, said that there was no single factor that accounted for behavior—such as genes condemning men to become pedophiles. “Many things undoubtedly affect the wiring—genes, experience, aging, disease,” he said.

But, as Cantor told Canada’s Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, brains of pedophiles are physically different from most other men.

“Pedophilic brain structure does indeed appear to be different from the non-pedophilic brain structure,” he said. “We are not exactly sure where yet. And we are not exactly sure how yet. And the differences are slight. We can pick them up when we have large groups to sample. But we can’t see it on an individual brain scan.”

 

Thu, 02/21/2013 – 11:29

 
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Are Some Men Born Pedophiles? New Science Says Yes, But Sexologists Say Not So Fast

Universal Preschool? Not So Fast

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On Tuesday, President Obama first proposed to “make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America.” Like many ideas that get floated during the State of the Union, the plan could’ve withered from there. As Gail Collins described in the New York Times, one of the earliest victories of the new right was destroying a preschool proposal that made it through Congress in 1971. No president has seriously tried to pitch universal preschool, or a similarly ambitious plan for early education, since.

But the president promoted universal pre-K again during a visit to an early childhood center in Decatur, Georgia, on Thursday, as the White House rolled out an ambitious plan to give states money to expand preschool access for kids from low- and middle-income families, and grow several federal programs that focus on health and early education for infants, toddlers, and pregnant moms.

Mounting research indicates that preschool pays off for kids from low-income families, not just in terms of better grades and academics in school but also, as Kevin Drum noted, in important life gains. The kids who who attended the HighScope Perry pre-K program in Ypsilanti, Michigan—which Obama was likely referencing during SOTU when he threw out that early education provides a $ 7 return on the dollar—were as adults more likely to be employed, less likely to have committed crimes, and made more money than a control group. The idea that pre-K is a good public investment, even “a better investment than the stock market,” as the Washington Post argued yesterday, is becoming increasingly popular in Washington. But some experts argue that there are better ways to improve pre-K for kids from low-income families than the White House’s new strategy.

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Universal Preschool? Not So Fast