Those Are The Rules

By Madeleine Kando

When I first came to America many many decades ago, I was appalled at the "live or let die" attitude of American society. I felt that free education and free health care were a citizen's birthrights. And I have always felt that America could learn from the Dutch approach to taking care of its' citizens' health.

I am again visiting my 96 year old mother in beautiful Holland. How clean and civilized it is here. Such a contrast with our dirty, pothole-studded streets in Boston. I am glad we 'parked' our mother here. Of all the places in the world this is paradise for the elderly. Or so I thought until my most recent experience with the Dutch Healthcare system.

I will not bore you with the details of my mother's medical condition other than to say that her eye specialist recommended a series of injections for her macular degeneration. Very encouraging news, I thought to myself. We caught the evil monster in time before it wreaks havock with my mom's vision. Don't wait too long, the doctor said. Next month at the latest.

So we go to the front desk to make an appointment. Yes, time is of the essence here. 'Oh, but you have to wait until the secretary is back from vacation to make an appointment' says one of the assistants. I am astounded. My mother is gradually turning blind and we have to wait for a secretary sitting somewhere on a beach getting a tan!? I hear my own voice escalate to a new level of irritation: 'Hold on here' I say in my rusty Dutch. 'We were just told by your boss not to wait too long with this treatment.' 'Miss Tan is the only one who sets up appointments of this kind, those are the rules. She will call you when she gets back.' 'When will that be, prey tell?' 'Next week.. sometime.'

I must have been a terrier in my previous life, because situations like this make me dig in my heels and really go for whatever I am after. Next day I call and ask to speak to the specialist. 'No, you cannot speak to him.' 'Why?' 'Those are the rules.' 'Can YOU ask him why we have to wait when he recommended not to wait.' 'No, I cannot do that.' 'Why?' 'Those are the rules.The tanning lady will call you back when she returns from her beach in Spain. But don't hope too much: there is a waiting list you know.'

A reality check with Dutch friends reveals that this is fairly customary here. Waiting lists are everywhere. I discover the hard way, that the words: 'don't wait too long' are meaningless. It is like the fuse of a dynamite stick. It fizzles out when it reaches the morass of the bureaucratic process.

In order not to commit murder and blow off some steam I go to the local swimming pool for a swim. I see a whole stack of swimming fins and ask the attendant if I can borrow a pair. 'No, we don't lend out swimming fins. Those are the rules.' I am tempted to ask her how many years hard labor she would get if she broke the rules, but resign myself to do without.

Refreshed I call the hospital for a third time and ask if my mom can go to another hospital where secretaries are not getting a tan while the patients are slowly turning blind. 'You can go anywhere you like, Miss.' Good! So I call another eye center. I go through my rusty, lengthy explanation and the lady on the phone is very patient. She explains to me that my mom has to be screened and has to come in for an initial evaluation. 'Why cannot the patient's records be faxed over from one hospital to another?' 'Oh no. We cannot do that. Those are the rules.'

There seems to be a general agreement amongst everyone that health care in this country is bare bones. That people are put on waiting lists, even when it is urgent. Unless it is life threatening people are left to deteriorate. Somehow the Dutch health care system is rated as one of the best in the world. But I don't think it applies to 96 year old women who suffer from multiple ailments. The 'egalitarian' mantra of the Dutch system has created more inequality than anything else. The old and the really sick are sent home packing and are told to live with it and not come back. Because those are the rules.leave comment here Read more...

How to Solve the California Budget Crisis - again.

By TomKando

By the time you read this, California may have a budget, and it may no longer be paying people with IOUs, but then again, you never know. So let me try to help the legislature and the governor once more:

1. The Budget deficit is $26 billion. There are 37 million people in California. If every Californian were to pay a one-time $700 surcharge, the deficit would be wiped out. Or if you prefer, there are 12 million households in California. To wipe out the deficit, each household would have to pay a one-time average (=mean) surcharge of $2,200.

2. Unfair, you say. Some could afford this, but for many it would be hard. Okay, so the surcharge could be progressive, like the income tax. The rich would be hit with a larger tax surcharge than the poor.

3. Also, using average(=mean) income is unfair. The median (half are under it, half over) is fairer. Median annual household income in California is $50,000. There are 6 million households making less than $50K a year, and 6 million who make more. To erase the $26 billion deficit would require that every household under 50K pay $1,100, and every household over 50K pay $3,300.

4. But wait, it’s not like we need to raise $26 billion: The legislature has already agreed about many cuts. Let’s say that only half the deficit still needs to be funded. This reduces the liability to a one-time $550 surcharge for every household that makes under $50K, and $1,650 for households earning more. This raises over $13 billion.

5. By the way, average household size is three, so for those making under $50K, the liability would be $183 per person, those making over that would pay $550 on average. People could pay installments:The poor would be hit with a $15 monthly bill for one year, and the rich with a $46 bill. And if you wanted, you could make the surcharge more progressive, and use more than two income categories.

6. If everyone else chipped in, I wouldn’t mind sending the Franchise Tax Board an extra $67 per month for a year (my half of my household’s liability. I am in the rich half of the population). That’s less than my fax bill, less than a dinner for two at Frank Fat’s. That way California would not collapse, and 37 million people would have a life.

7. ...Oh yes, what about future years? Well, first of all,don’t ever ask me to do this again. Furthermore, make sure you set aside a safety-net fund. Finally, index the state budget to population growth and inflation. The only problem is: This plan is far too simple and reasonable to have the remotest chance.leave comment here Read more...

Is America the Greatest Polluter?

Tom Kando

I wrote this a while back, when anti-Americanism was still more virulent that it is now, since Obama took over the presidency.

But it is still fashionable to blame America for being the world’s greatest polluter, for making a greater contribution to global warming than any other country, and for our weak environmental consciousness. Now, don’t misunderstand me: I am acutely aware of the environmental catastrophe which faces our planet. I just finished reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse, and I am afraid that he is right: the world is in deep ecological trouble. I am an environmentalist through and through, and I feel that the world must radically alter (= reduce) its consumption and reproduction patterns, or else we will soon experience the fate of the dinosaurs.

The only thing to which I object is the perennial tendency to single out the US as exceptionally guilty of destroying the planet.

For example, take our failure to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Treaty. We have been terribly vilified for this, and presumably our stance will soon change now that Obama has replaced Bush. Fine. But it is rarely noted that we were by no means alone in refusing to ratify Kyoto (Australia and several others did likewise), and that our refusal was based - some might say reasonably - on exemptions from Kyoto requirements granted to China and other “developing” economies - even though they already pollute and warm up the planet more than we do.

In an excellent article reprinted in McGraw-Hill’s 2007-2008 Sociology Annual Edition, Lester Brown points out that in ABSOLUTE AMOUNTS, China has in many ways overtaken the US, consuming more raw materials and energy than we do in many areas. Only in oil consumption are we still ahead. Otherwise, in coal, steel production, grain consumption, paper, and in most other respects China is now ahead of us - as it is in overall CO-2 emissions and in general pollution.

But the blame-America crowd then retorts that on a per capital basis we are still far “guiltier.” After all, China has four times our population, so they should be allowed to pollute more.

Besides, they add, what moral right does the affluent West have, to prevent China and other rising societies from achieving the same standard of living as we enjoy? Isn’t this a case of “do as I say, not as I did”? I don’t know about morality, but I am certain that if 1.3 billion Chinese (plus 1 billion Indians, plus Indonesia, Brazil and the rest of the “rising” world) reach the West’s per capita level of consumption, humanity will simply die.

But back to the US role: Much as anti-Americans would like to overlook this, our country does NOT have the highest per capital energy consumption either. Canada is ahead of us, and so are some of the very affluent small Middle Eastern States - I forget which, some Gulf States such as Qatar maybe, Kuwait perhaps. And some small and very rich European countries may be vying with us in this regard as well. Sweden or Norway perhaps. Of course, the reason for Canada, Scandinavia and some Gulf States’ very high energy consumption is their climate. The former need to warm themselves a lot for much of the year, and in the Middle East they need to cool themselves down year around.

But my point is this: The anti-Americans want to hold America responsible BOTH ways: 1) if they can’t blame America for being the world’s Number One polluter in absolute terms, they say, “Oh, well, on a per capital basis we are still the worst,” an 2) if some other countries have a higher per capita energy consumption than we do, then the America-blamers turn around and say, “oh well, don’t worry so much about Canada, it doesn’t have as many people as America does, so their collective contribution to pollution isn’t as bad.
So America gets it both ways, when in fact it is (1) neither the world’s largest polluter in absolute terms, (2) nor so on a per-capita basis.

Anyway, now that I got this off my chest, let’s all get back to saving the planet. This is a problem for which all countries are responsible and a responsibility from which no country should be exempt.leave comment here Read more...

Living in Limbo

By Madeleine Kando

I am not a very organized person, I am the first one to admit it. Probably because deep down I know that trying to create order in one’s life is futile and a total waste of time. There is such a thing as the law of entropy (if you haven’t heard of it yet, it means that if things are left to their own devices, they will always revert back to chaos). So there you have it: proof that organizing, dusting, cleaning and putting things away is a never ending task. If God had meant us to be organized he would not have created the law of entropy.

Cleaning up and putting things away reminds me too much of the story of Sisyphus, the Greek king who had to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout eternity.
I am comfortable with my messy nature. I have accepted the inevitability of having to spend a large portion of my day looking for things but I am pretty good at remembering where I misplace them (except my glasses - looking for some misplaced item without being able to see is a challenge). At times when a friend comes over, I can tell by their shocked expression that not all is as it should be in my house.

There is some reason to my madness though. I am messy because it allows me to pretend I am a butterfly. I like to flutter from one idea to another, from one mess pile to another. Leave a little bit of things unfinished and then go back to it so it’s fresh and messy. Once something is organized, it’s done, dead, finished. No more room for growth. I am secretly messy because I like the adventure of finding something undiscovered. A messy world is a world of discovery, change and surprise. An organized world is a static world, safe, boring.

I was living my little disorganized life, not being too bothered by my messy nature. The problem only started when I got married. I had the good fortune of marrying a man that appreciates me: my sense of humor, my intelligence, my beauty… my modesty. But my misfortune is that this wonderful man is also a very organized person and takes great pleasure in placing things where they belong. At first it was a welcome change in my life. He was like Cinderella’s little animal friends: the chipmunks do the sweeping, the mice to the dusting, the birds lift heavier items in unison to place them on shelves. I could hear the background music as I watched my new husband metamorphosize our house.

Now that I think back, I should have seen the warning signs of what happens when two people at opposite ends of the ‘orderly/messy’ spectrum get together. At first the symptoms were harmless: boxes containing old sunglasses quietly disappearing. Newspaper clippings of half-read articles vanishing overnight. But as more and more items started to disappear from where I had carelessly left them in my usual messy way, I began to think that I was suffering from early symptoms of alzheimer: ‘I swear I left my keys here yesterday’. One day, when my wallet was removed from it’s usual misplaced location I panicked: ‘Oh no! Somebody broke in and stole my wallet!’ When my car keys vanished from the spot where I had negligently tossed them, I almost had a heart attack. ‘Oh my God. I locked my keys in the car!’

So you see, living with an organized person is like living in limbo. The stress it causes to never be sure where things will be when you wake up in the morning requires a strong dose of valium. To hope that your glasses will be where you left them so you can make that first cup of coffee (hoping the cups have not mysteriously moved too). I have seriously considered going to couples therapy, not because I am ‘domestically challenged’ but in the hopes that my dear husband could be weaned off his well-intentioned but lethal desire to clean up.

If only all my possessions could be like my cell phone: equipped with a ringer. I would ‘call’ my keys, my glasses, my wallet, and presto, no more wasted hours looking for things. But for now I am resigning myself to the inevitable. Searching has become my middle name.leave comment here Read more...

Iran’s War on Women: What is going on in Iran?

by Tom Kando

Simple: The male regime is waging war on women. My friend Abram de Swaan, Head of the Sociology department at the University of Amsterdam, has made it clear (See his 'De Botsing der Beschavingen en de Strijd der Geslachten'- The clash of civilizations and the battle of the sexes) that much of the conflict emanating from the Muslim world today is basically a male reaction against the world-wide modernization of women.

For the past few decades, we have grown accustomed to news about terrorism, about Muslim criticism of the West, and Western criticism of Muslims. There has been violence - 9/11, at least two wars raging for seven years already. There has been talk of a “clash of civilizations” (see Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Oder). Let’s leave aside the question as to what proportion of the Muslim population consists of anti-Western zealots, and accept the politically correct cliche that most Muslims do not want to be terrorists, but want the same sorts of wholesome things as everyone else, namely a reasonably comfortable and happy life on earth.

So then, what do we make of such theocratic movements as Mullah Mohammed Omar’s Taliban in Afghanistan, or the violent repression of freedom in Iran by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s Supreme Spiritual Leader?

When the Taliban takes over a district, one of the first things it outlaws is schooling for women. In the streets of Teheran recently, the protesters and the victims of the paramilitary Basij forces were more often women than men. Once in a while we read about the “honor killing” of a woman by some father, brother or husband in Pakistan, or in a Muslim suburb of Paris.

But historically, Muslims have no monopoly on the repression of women. Yes, today, the epicenter of that repression seems to be located in that culture - although widespread female genital mutilation in Africa makes life for women there equally unenviable.
The West had its turn before. We had our witch burnings, in Europe and in America. At one time, we too, used this great formula which combines religion and the repression of women.
In Ancient Rome, honor killings were cool, as long as they were perpetrated by the patriarch.

Now don’t misunderstand me - I am not one of those lame-brains trying to relativize everything, and to argue that we are just as bad, because we did these things hundreds of years ago ourselves. Obviously what matters is the evil that is perpetrated today.

Why, then, do some men, Muslim men as well other men, hate women? Because women are getting jobs. Women are earning money. Women are getting an education. Women are gaining power. Women are catching up with men. Women are becoming more equal. It is becoming more difficult for men to feel superior to women.

We, in the West, got used to it. Elsewhere, they have yet to do so. Today, hatred of women and the war on women occur primarily in countries such as Iran. That is the meaning of the current turmoil in that country and the repression of freedom at the hands of men like Supreme Spiritual Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and their Basij thugs.leave comment here Read more...

Military Spending Continues to Grow

By Tom Kando
Read this and cry: According to the annual report of the Stockholm Peace Research Institute,(SIPRI), the world’s governments spent a combined total of $1.46 trillion on defense in 2008. Despite the worldwide recession, defense spending rose by 4% from 2007 in real dollars, and by 45% over the past 10 years.
Military spending declined briefly after the end of the Cold War. However, it underwent a gigantic increase after 9/11. Under President Bush, US military spending rose to the highest level since World War Two.

The US share of world military spending is 42%. The war on terror has also caused other countries to increase military spending.

Other rising regional superpowers are also contributing to the steady increase in world military spending. In 2008, China became, for the first time, the world’s second most powerful military power. Last year, China’s military budget rose by 15%, to $$46 billion. Over the past 19 years, China’s military budget has increased by more than 10% every single year.

The world economic recession has no impact on the amount of money countries devote to defense (NRC Handelsblad, June 10, 2009).

I suppose this calls for some comments. But what is there to say? Some will argue that the numbers prove America’s exceptional culpability (42% of the world total). Others will say that this is as it should be: There are terrorists and other bad guys out there, so we have no other choice than to defend ourselves and to be strong. Someone has to be the world’s cop, right?

Then there is the euphemistic fraudulence, unmasked long ago by George Orwell: Nowadays it’s always called “defense,” right? A century ago, governments were at least a bit more honest. It was called the Ministry of War, not the Ministry of Defense.

Calling aggression self-defense is old hat. Hitler was only the best-known practitioner of this, as when he justified the invasion of Poland by claiming that Poland was attacking Germany.
Orwell’s future governments went a step further, calling them Ministries of Peace. But we are already there. Countries nowadays engage in Police Actions, they dispatch Peace Keeping Forces, and they fire missiles called “Peace Keepers.” The killing of hundreds of women, babies and other non-combatants is called collateral damage.

And another thing: The countries which can afford it the least are the ones which spend the most on the military. Here are some rankings, from the World Fact Book:

Middle Eastern countries spend the highest percentage of their GDP on the military, namely between 9% and 11%
Israel is also high: 7%
Next are a host of African countries: 5% to 6.5%
China: 4.3%
The US and Russia: about 4%
France: 2.6%
Germany: 1.5%
Most other European countries: 0% (Iceland) to 1%
Japan: .8%leave comment here Read more...

GHOST SPEAKERS

By Madeleine Kando
One of the more disorienting experiences in my life was when I first heard my own recorded voice. I heard myself as someone else hears me. And it was a total shocker. After that, I was never too thrilled to be asked to speak in public. There is really nothing wrong with my voice, mind you. I express myself well, good choice of words and all that, but it’s the tone of my voice. Like the color and pattern of a dress. It just doesn’t work sometimes. Which brings me to the real subject of this essay…I am a radio junkie. Mostly because I am so bored driving to work. Since I teach dance for a living I have enough music in my ears to last me a lifetime and that leaves talk radio as the only other option. Believe it or not, in a country of over 300 million people, there are not too many options out there in that category. Yes, you guessed it: I listen to NPR. Every so often I give other talk radio stations a half-hearted try, but somehow I always revert back to my home station. I am a creature of habit I guess.

As all self-respecting groupies I could identify NPR voices in one second flat. I have my favorites of course, Tom Ashbrook for instance, but I won’t bore you with those details. I just want to say that, in my humble opinion, we should introduce some kind of entrance exam to decide which voices we allow on talk radio. I mean, us poor listeners have to fill in the rest of the persona whose voice we are subjected to. We can be forgiving when we see a gorgeous blond on tv speak with a squeaky little voice but there are no visuals on radio, my friend. Only the damned voice! So it better be a good one.

You have ghost writers so why not have ghost speakers? I cannot tell you how many times I had to turn off the radio in the middle of an extremely fascinating discussion because the voice of the commentator was so annoying. The newscaster who has a chronic cold announcing that‘Doo beoble died yesderday id a gar accidend’. That really takes away from the severity of the announcement, don’t you think? Read more...

Slumdog Millionaire, Belatedly

Tom and Anita Kando

The movie is admittedly excellent, and real. What gets us, though, is the nearly unanimous use by reviewers and commentators of happy words like "uplifting" and "exhilarating" to describe this movie. Instead, we would use words such as "scary" and "nightmarish."

The conditions depicted in this film are like Dante's inferno. The poverty and squalor of vast tracts of Mumbai, a typical Indian mega-city. Shanty cardboard towns as far as the eye can see. What we are shown is the Armageddon to which the world may be coming, due to over-population and a globalized growth economy. People living on giant waste disposal dumps the size of mid-size American towns, like scavenging vultures. Human anthills. The horror of garbage-infested streams in which people bathe, a child escaping through feces. The terror of murderous tribal strife, in which people torch each other to death. Child kidnappers who burn out their victims' eyes to make them more effective beggars. Then the grotesque contrast with billion-dollar luxury skyscrapers inhabited by millionaire gangsters. This is uplifting? Yes, the movie deserves its Oscar. But uplifting? No. Frightening and horrific, yes.leave comment here Read more...

Jury Duty

Tom Kando

I just completed a three-week tour of jury duty. It was a criminal case. A serious violent felony. I am not going to tell you about the case. Neither am I going to pontificate about crime, laws, justice and injustice, even though I could, since I have taught criminology at the University for several decades, and I also worked at the California State prison in Vacaville. I just want to make a few comments about our judicial system, and how I experienced it as a citizen-juror and as an observer:

The Courthouse is bustling with hundreds, maybe thousands, of citizen-jurors, lawyers, cops, clerks, judges and criminals.The amount of resources our society devotes to justice and law enforcement is staggering. I estimate the case on which I served cost up to half a million dollars. The salaries, the fees of lawyers, judges, expert witnesses, the facilities, the transportation, the feeding and housing of defendants. Hundreds of prospective jurors spend day after day milling around in the courthouse, waiting to be called for jury duty, but most of the time being dismissed by the end of the day, sent back home, after having missed days on the job.
The utter lack of productivity! After being empaneled, jurors still spend more time waiting and breaking for coffee than in the courtroom, listening to and dealing with their case.

This is no one's fault. The most striking aspect is the impressive civility and intelligence of nearly everyone. Hardly anyone is irritable or impolite. From judges to attorneys to citizen-jurors, people are friendly and well-spoken. When witnesses, cops, victims and others take the stand, their mastery of the English language is excellent. When you chat with another juror over coffee, the conversation is intelligent and the words are well chosen.

The one slightly negative "vibration" is a perhaps slightly exaggerated deference shown all around, a shyness which may betray fear. Of course, upon entering the courthouse, you are bombarded with security procedures, armed personnel giving out polite but firm orders, signs with dozens of rules. Once a case gets under way, the judge admonishes the jurors and the audience about do's and don't's - upon penalty of severe fines and incarceration.

This is not a place of jest - at least not too much of it. But that's just the point: To some degree, joking is okay! The place does definitely not remind one of Stalinist Russia. There is room for some levity. People do smile and laugh, at times.

In other words, it is not fear which one feels floating around, but respect. Citizens respecting each other, civilians respecting cops and judges, and judges and cops respecting civilians. There are strict protocols as to who may talk to whom and about what, but common-sense goes a long way towards eliminating this as a serious problem. For the rest, you see people interacting, chatting, indeed having a relatively good time with each other, while waiting in hallways and anti-chambers, eating doughnuts, and then back to work in courtrooms, where business is conducted extremely professionally, diligently and without acrimony.

What I saw was a civilized and well-intentioned society working hard at maintaining the rule of law. Everyone does his best, and everyone understands what is going on, and knows how to do things right. The system may be cumbersome and inefficient, but the people in it, at all levels, are the salt of the earth.leave comment here Read more...

The Little People

By Madeleine Kando

I teach little people. Very little people. In fact, I don’t think they qualify as humans yet. They are more like puppies or kittens or cubs. They call me Miss Madeleine (since my hair turned grey I have graduated from a Ms. to a Miss, don’t ask me why) and when they call me ‘teacher’ I explain to them that I prefer to be called Miss Madeleine because they would not like it if I called them ‘girl’ instead of Mary or Jane or Agatha. But of course my puppies don’t understand that. They just obey because they see the frown on my face, not because of my argument.Well, of course they don’t understand. Puppies don’t understand anything do they? I have tried to see the world from the perspective of little people and realized that it takes an entire reversal of self.

Take their size for instance. I tried to go about my day on my knees once (that’s how high you reach if you are 4 years old). It is as if the world were chopped off from the waist up. All the stuff we find interesting and important in the world we usually don’t put on the floor but on tables, desks, shelves etc. The only thing that little people experience without being lifted up to our level are dirty shoes, old boxes, trash cans etc. No wonder they cannot wait to grow bigger.

And what about the volume of their voice? Tiny squeaks, most of them. Which they HAVE to amplify by screaming all the time. They have to compete with grown-up barritones just to be heard. And their poor little legs. You cannot blame a child for running around, bumping into things, breaking items, falling down all the time. They have to go the same distance to the park as mom, but their legs have to work a lot faster to get there.

Let’s not even start on the size of their brain. Granted it is relatively big compared to the rest of their apparatus, but still.. how do you expect a little puppy to understand what ‘recital’ means? Every June my little people have to do a ballet performance for their adoring parents. So I ask them: ‘Does anyone know what a recital is?’ 4 year old Samantha volunteers to share her knowledge and explains to the group with a patient tone of voice that a recital is when you don’t throw out garbage but recital it. Read more...