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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Friday, January 3, 2014 | A9
OPINION
The Year of the Washington Power Grab
T
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his past year will be remembered for many things,
but let 2013 be hailed
mainly for this: It was the year
that the genius of George Orwell’s
“Animal Farm” became clear in
America. Efforts to centralize control in the name of “fairness” have
led to a society that is ever more
at the mercy of a
federal power—
one that decides
who does and
does not succeed. The winners are favored
POTOMAC special
interests,
WATCH
political cronies
By Kimberley
and wealthy lobA. Strassel
byists. The losers
are everyone else.
Consider: Maryland authorities
last week launched an investigation into the shootings of two bald
eagles in Montgomery County. It
isn’t clear if the federally protected
birds were shot on purpose, or if
some poor soul mistook them for
vultures. No matter. The Maryland
Natural Resources Police (there is
such a thing) has gone full vice
squad—publicizing a hotline number, dangling a reward, and reminding folks that the federal penalty is a fine of $5,000 per eagle
and up to a year in prison.
This behavior contrasts with a
very different headline, from a
month ago. “U.S. to Allow Eagle
Deaths—to Aid Wind Power,” read
a Dec. 6 Associated Press story
about a new federal rule that allows wind companies favored by
the Obama administration to avoid
the law. These select companies
can kill bald and golden eagles,
free of prosecution, for 30 years.
Within minutes of 2013’s beginning, Congress had passed its huge
new tax-cliff increase, which President Obama crowed would ensure
that “millionaires and billionaires”
The president briefs White House reporters on ObamaCare, Nov. 14.
will “pay their fair share.” Yet included in that bill was $40 billion
in exemptions for the politically
powerful—Michigan Nascar-track
owners, rum distillers, renewable
energy firms, and so on.
ObamaCare was passed in the
name of equalizing health care. Yet
it was Congress and its staffers
who got special dispensation to
keep a generous health subsidy—
when no other Americans did. It
was powerful corporate America,
with its influential lobbyists, that
got an additional year to meet the
insurance mandate—when individuals did not. It was the unions that
got a reprieve from a health-insurance tax—when individuals and
small businesses were left to pick
up the tab.
In August, the Environmental
Protection Agency issued a new
ethanol mandate, though it exempted one lucky refinery in Louisiana, out of 143 nationwide. That
refinery happens to be under the
patronage of Democratic Sen.
Mary Landrieu, up for re-election
this year.
Congressional Democrats ad-
vanced measures in 2013 to pile
new taxes on fossil fuel companies.
This, as the Energy Department
continued to absorb the losses of
Solyndra, A123 Systems, and other
taxpayer-funded
green-energy
firms, some of which are owned by
political donors to Mr. Obama.
The Justice Department in November settled with J.P. Morgan
for $13 billion, for the sin of dealing in “toxic” mortgage-backed securities. Some of that payout will
go to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,
sources of the housing collapse
that are nonetheless wards of the
state—and thus, apparently, safe
from Justice lawsuits. Citibank, so
immersed in subprime as to require a bailout, also escaped
Obama prosecutors. But Citibank is
the producer of—and landing spot
for—key Obama appointees, including Treasury Secretary Jack
Lew.
In April, the IRS was outed for
targeting conservative political
groups. The Obama administration in December issued new rules
that will institutionalize this silencing of conservative free
speech under the guise of regulating 501(c)(4) organizations.
Unions, which file under a different IRS nonprofit category, will
continue unmolested.
The EPA this summer conducted an armed raid of a mining
facility in Alaska, over putative violations of the Clean Water Act.
The Federal Trade Commission harassed a nonprofit representing piano teachers, over ginned up antitrust violations. The Occupational
Safety and Health Administration
began cracking down on small,
family farms, operations meant to
be exempt from that agency’s regulation. By contrast, the administration has yet to announce a single prosecution of a single
individual at the IRS. Mr. Obama
explained in December that IRS
employees were simply victims of
a “difficult law to interpret.”
Maybe like the Clean Water Act, or
antitrust laws, or OSHA rules?
Maybe not.
There’s plenty more, but you
get the picture. In “Animal Farm”
George Orwell set out to show
how power inevitably corrupts, no
matter how noble the intention. A
group of animals initially centralize control over the farm to ensure that “All animals are equal.”
Yet the novel ends with the barnyard commandants—high on their
righteousness—reducing the commandments to just one: “All animals are equal, but some animals
are more equal than others.”
Indeed, in ObamaWorld, many
millionaires, health-care buyers,
energy companies, subprime dealers, political groups, and bird killers are more equal than others.
Our new elite is ever more defined
by who has the best pull with the
administration. So long as government grows, so too will this government-created inequality.
Write to [email protected]
Is 13-Year-Old Jahi McMath Alive or Dead?
he sad story of Jahi McMath,
a 13-year-old girl in Oakland, Calif., who went into
cardiac arrest after complications
from a tonsillectomy last month
and was declared brain dead on
Dec. 12, has brought public attention to the difficult moral, legal
and spiritual
HOUSES OF questions that
all families face
WORSHIP
By Brendan P. when a loved
one is dying. A
Foht
judge has ordered that after Jan. 7, Children’s Hospital can
take Jahi off life support.
To Nailah Winkfield, Jahi’s
mother, the insistence by doctors
that her child has already died
clashes with her belief that, in
God’s eyes, as long as her child’s
heart is beating, Jahi is still alive.
As family members search for
another facility to care for her,
they have also pursued a legal battle to stop doctors from removing
the ventilator that keeps her
breathing. The family argues that
the hospital’s decision to declare
Jahi dead is a violation of Ms.
Winkfield’s religious freedom.
Determining when a patient has
died is just one of the controversies
surrounding end-of-life medical
care. Belgium is on the verge of
enacting a law that will extend
legalized euthanasia to minors,
which would allow doctors to kill
terminally ill and suffering children
who, with their parents’ approval,
request death. Catholic groups
there argue that better palliative
care, not killing, is the best way to
respect the dignity of terminally ill
and suffering patients. In the U.S.,
Vermont legislators passed a bill in
May allowing doctors to prescribe
lethal doses of medication to terminally ill patients. A case challenging
Minnesota’s ban on assisted suicide
has recently reached the state’s
supreme court.
The question in Jahi McMath’s
case is different, since the disagreement is not over ending the
child’s life or even whether to
withdraw futile treatment—but
whether she is alive at all.
In the case of Terri Schiavo—
the comatose woman who died in
2005 when her husband won a
legal battle with her parents to
remove life-support—no one disputed that Schiavo, in what doctors called a “vegetative state,”
was alive at the time. In this case,
Jahi McMath’s family believes
she is alive. But doctors at the
hospital have ruled that she is
dead, because her entire brain,
including the brain stem, has entirely failed.
Similar issues arose in the case
of Motl Brody, a 12-year-old boy
from an Orthodox Jewish family
who in 2008 was declared brain
dead after a struggle with cancer.
Though there is disagreement in
the Orthodox community over
whether to accept brain death as
the standard for determining
when a person has died, the
Brody family believed that Motl
was still alive and that they had
an obligation to do whatever they
could to care for him until they
were sure he had died. Arguing
for religious freedom, the family
challenged the hospital’s decision
to declare Motl dead and withdraw life support. He died when
his heart stopped before a court
could rule.
The legal question of whether
parents can disagree with a medical declaration of death as a
matter of religious liberty remains
unsettled. New York is one of the
few states whose laws on the
Doctors say there’s no
hope. Her mother, with
faith that God will decide,
has gone to court.
determination of death allow for
“reasonable accommodation” of
the family’s or the patient’s religious beliefs.
Doctors and ethicists seek to
define death on a firm scientific
basis. Yet while declaring a
patient dead on the basis of total
brain failure has become a widely
accepted standard for medical
practice and American law, for
some it remains controversial.
One concern is that it allows doctors to keep recently deceased,
brain-dead patients on ventilators
before removing their organs for
transplantation. This raises the
troubling question of whether the
new definition is meant in part to
increase the number of eligible organ donors.
There have been a number of
cases when apparently brain-dead
patients have made miraculous recoveries, in some cases even after
doctors had prepared to remove
their organs. Such recoveries are
rare, perhaps in part because patients declared brain dead do not
generally receive the aggressive
treatment that might save them, or
because these patients were never
actually brain dead but merely
misdiagnosed.
Many religious communities
have come to accept the medical
consensus that total brain failure
can be used to declare patients
dead. The late Christian bioethicist Paul Ramsey argued that
since “the Scriptures know no life
that is not embodied life . . . no
Biblical theologian should take
umbrage at the suggestion that a
pronouncement of death is a medical question.”
But not all religious believers,
and certainly not Jahi McMath’s
family, accept the medical community’s definition of death. Though
there is lingering uncertainty
about when a life has ended, and
reasonable people can hold different beliefs about what compassion
demands in these situations, the
faith of these families and the hope
and love for their children it inspires deserve our respect.
Mr. Foht is assistant editor of
the New Atlantis: A Journal of
Technology and Society.
Common Core Doesn’t Add Up to STEM Success
The high-school math
standards are too
weak to give us more
engineers or scientists.
College, Mr. Zimba admitted: “If
you want to take calculus your
freshman year in college, you will
need to take more mathematics
than is in the Common Core.”
As Stanford mathematics professor James Milgram noted in
“Lowering the Bar,” a report the
two of us co-wrote for the Pioneer
Institute in September, the Common Core deliberately leaves out
“major topics in trigonometry and
precalculus.” Contrast that with
the status quo before the Common Core, when states like Massachusetts and California provided precalculus standards for
high-school students. The implications of this are dramatic. “It is
extremely rare for students who
Composite
A
s a former member of the
Common Core Validation
Committee and the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and
Secondary Education, I am one of
the few mothers to have heard
the full sales pitch for this latest
educational reform, which has
been adopted by 45 states.
I know the Common Core buzz
words, from “deeper learning” and
“critical thinking” to “fewer,
clearer, and higher standards.” It
all sounds impressive, but I’m
worried that the students who
study under these standards won’t
receive anywhere near the quality
of education that children in the
U.S. did even a few years ago.
President Obama correctly
noted in September 2012 that
“leadership tomorrow depends on
how we educate our students today—especially in science, technology, engineering and math.”
He has placed a priority on increasing the number of students
and teachers who are proficient
in these vital STEM fields. And
the president’s National Math and
Science Initiative is strongly supported by people like Suzanne
McCarron, president of the Exxon
Mobil Foundation, who has said
she wants to “inspire our nation’s
youth to pursue STEM careers by
capturing their interest at an
early age.”
Yet the basic mission of Common Core, as Jason Zimba, its
leading mathematics standards
writer, explained at a videotaped
board meeting in March 2010, is
to provide students with enough
mathematics to make them ready
for a nonselective college—“not
for STEM,” as he put it. During
that meeting, he didn’t tell us
why Common Core aimed so low
in mathematics. But in a September 2013 article published in the
Hechinger Report, an education
news website affiliated with
Columbia University’s Teachers
begin their undergraduate years
with coursework in precalculus or
an even lower level of mathematical knowledge to achieve a bachelor’s degree in a STEM area,” Mr.
Milgram added.
Common Core’s deficiencies
also plague its English standards,
though its proponents have been
selling the opposite line. Under
the Common Core, complex literary study—literature close to or at
a college reading level—is reduced
to about 50% of reading instructional time in high school English
class. The rest of the time is to be
spent on “informational” texts,
and more writing than reading is
required at all grade levels.
Excerpts will have to do when
reading “The Great Gatsby” so
students can spend more time on
the Teapot Dome Scandal. Yes,
that’s a real suggestion for informational reading from the National Council of Teachers of English, the professional organization
of English teachers that aims to
support teachers under the Common Core.
In its November 2013 Council
Chronicle, a teacher argued that
learning about this 1920s government oil scandal is the proper
way to “contextualize” Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age characters. But reducing the time students spend
studying complex literature
means fewer opportunities to
learn how to read between the
lines—the fundamental way teenagers learn how to analyze a text.
Still, no major English or hu-
manities organizations have endorsed the Common Core state
standards for English language
arts. Not so in mathematics.
Despite the dramatic mismatch
of the Common Core math standards with the White House goal
of preparing more students for a
STEM career, all the heads of
major professional mathematics
associations expressed “strong
support for the Common Core
State Standards for Mathematics”
in a July 2013 letter solicited and
posted by William McCallum, professor of mathematics at the University of Arizona and a Common
Core math standards writer. Other
signers include the presidents of
the American Mathematical Society, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the Association for Women in Mathematics,
the Benjamin Banneker Association, the Society for Industrial and
Applied Mathematics and TODOS:
Mathematics for ALL.
Why leaders of these organizations would endorse standards
that will not prepare students for
college majors in mathematics,
science, engineering and mathematics-dependent fields is a puzzle. But no educational reform
that leads to fewer engineers, scientists and doctors is worthy of
the name.
Ms. Stotsky was a member of
Common Core’s Validation Committee from 2009-10. She is professor emerita at the University of
Arkansas.
Everything Is
Not Illuminated
The Crooked Mirror
By Louise Steinman
(Beacon, 224 pages, $26.95)
W
hen Louise Steinman was invited in 1999 to
participate in a retreat at Auschwitz aimed at
fostering Polish-Jewish reconciliation, she
responded viscerally. She had grown up with the knowledge that many of her relatives on her mother’s side had
perished in the Holocaust, and she had no interest in
what she viewed as “a communal identity based on a
legacy of victimhood” or in “meditating on the train
tracks” outside the death-camp complex. What could she
possibly say to the current inhabitants of Poland, or they
to her, that would yield anything beyond outrage on her
part and defensiveness or denial on theirs?
Yet the author’s nagging curiosity about her family’s
history prodded her to take that initial trip to Poland
from Los Angeles, and there she discovered the lively curiosity among
many younger
Poles about their
country’s Jewish
past and the fate
of the more than
three million Jews
who had lived there
before World War
II—a subject
deemed taboo under
Communist repression. Much to her astonishment, she also
witnessed the
beginnings of a small
Jewish revival, with
growing numbers of
Poles identifying
themselves as Jews.
Ms. Steinman is no stranger to the
struggle to reach back into history’s abyss. Her 2001
memoir, “The Souvenir,” recounted her discovery of a
frayed Japanese flag that her father had claimed from a
Pacific battlefield on which he had fought—and her subsequent journey ostensibly to return it to Japan, really to
understand her father and the impact of war trauma.
“The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish
Reconciliation” is Ms. Steinman’s provocative account of
her first encounter with the traumatic Polish-Jewish past
and of her later trips to Poland, Germany and Ukraine.
More than just a tour of death sites, the book is a chronicle of her discovery of, and engagement with, the
growing effort to bring Jews and Poles together to find
what one Israeli she meets describes as “a new language
to talk to each other.”
To Ms. Steinman, it appears as if Jews and Poles
today view each other through a crooked mirror, with
both struggling to make sense of what they see. She
travels to Wannsee—the Berlin suburb made infamous
by the 1942 conference whose agenda was the “final
solution to the Jewish question”—to attend the
biannual conference of One by One. The organization
facilitates “dialogue groups,” bringing together “survivors, perpetrators, bystanders and resisters” and their
descendants. Among the attendees in her group are a
white-haired former member of the Wehrmacht, a
woman whose father died at Auschwitz and Cheryl,
another American Jew of Polish heritage, who pointedly
The Polish-Jewish past remains clouded by
Soviet lies and by shame, guilt and a residual
refusal by some to admit any responsibility.
asks: “Do the Poles want us back?”
Cheryl joins Ms. Steinman on trips that take them to
the small towns where their ancestors had lived before
the Holocaust. In Sejny, Poland, they watch volunteers
renovate the ruined Jewish cemetery. The two also visit
Krakow’s Center for Jewish Culture. Since it opened in
1993, it has become a place where Jews who had previously hidden or not known about their Jewish
background meet one another, as well as non-Jews. In
Radomsko—the town in central Poland where Ms. Steinman’s family had lived before the Holocaust—the
citizens raise funds to install a commemorative marker,
in Hebrew and Polish, on the site where the synagogue
once stood before the war.
Ms. Steinman also tours Kazimierz, the old Krakow
Jewish quarter now revived as a cultural district; there
she attends a klezmer concert in the restored synagogue’s
packed sanctuary. Among the performers that night are
“Polish actors dressed like Hasids in black silk jackets.”
The audience is enthusiastic. Ms. Steinman’s affable guide
and translator, Tomek, who isn’t Jewish but is a serious
student of Jewish history, is enchanted. But sensibilities
diverge as Ms. Steinman inwardly fumes: “Was this some
kind of minstrel show?”
The trips ultimately leave Cheryl cold, plaguing her
with images of “my grandfather burned alive in the
synagogue, my female relatives marched out of town, shot
and buried in a mass grave.” The extent to which reconciliation is a work in progress is driven home for Ms.
Steinman when she learns that the last known home of
some murdered relatives is occupied by a “xenophobic
pensioner who listened to anti-Semitic broadcasts.” On
the same street, however, she also meets an “urbane law
professor who spoke proudly of his grandfather rescuing
a Jewish child.”
How to explain such contradictory encounters? Ms.
Steinman frames her experiences by tracing how the
Polish past was systematically obfuscated by Soviet lies
and further clouded by shame, guilt and a residual refusal
by some to admit any responsibility. She refers throughout to works that document the participation of Poles in
anti-Semitic violence during and after World War II, such
as historian Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands: Europe
Between Hitler and Stalin” and Jan T. Gross’s “Neighbors:
The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne,
Poland”—a book that remains controversial in Poland.
The mirror, then, remains askew. But readers can be
grateful to Ms. Steinman for bearing witness to those
seeds of understanding being planted in lands where so
much blood flowed.
Ms. Cole, author of the memoir “After Great Pain: A
New Life Emerges,” is a faculty member of the Skirball
Center for Adult Jewish Learning at Temple Emanu-El in
New York and a contributing editor of the Psychotherapy
Networker.
Coming in BOOKS this weekend
A maestro of the phobia • The first U.S. economic
prognosticators • Thalassic history • The painter of light
• A Turkish masterpiece • A Russian mystery • and more
P2JW003000-0-A00900-1--------XA
By Sandra Stotsky
BOOKSHELF | By Diane Cole
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