Et Tu, DuPont?

We raised our kids in southeastern Pennsylvania, which was still largely rural, although the influence of the DuPont Company radiated powerfully from its Wilmington base 18 miles away. Many family members and company executives lived in Chester County, whose jewel is Longwood Gardens, once the country estate of Pierre du Pont and now one of the world’s botanical wonders. DuPont was considered a good corporate neighbor. Family members and employees served on many community boards, and earlier generations had created foundations that were particularly active in land conservation and environmental protection. The company itself had the reputation of being a leader in industrial sustainability and corporate best practices.

That reputation fell apart this month with Nathanial Rich’s revelation of DuPont’s decades-long efforts to conceal the environmental and human costs of its chemical pollution. “They knew this stuff was harmful,” said attorney Rob Bilott, “and they put it in the water anyway.”

You’d think we’d be inured to these stories by now. From the cigarette companies to Dan Fagin’s Tom’s River, 60 years of a single, numbing plot line: cover-ups, bullying and lying through their teeth. “I always thought [DuPont] was among the ‘least-worst’ of the polluters,” the former editor of the local newspaper wrote me. “Turns out they were horrendous” – not in their own backyard, of course, but in West Virginia where they thought nobody would notice.

I don’t think DuPont set out to be a bad neighbor, but before succumbing to the siren song of deregulation, it’s worth pondering how it became one.

Gasoline Prices Are Dropping Now (Hurrah! Hurrah!)

24/7 Wall Street recently reported a nationwide fall in gas prices – always good news for the sluggish U.S. economy, which depends on low energy costs and on subsidizing the American consumer and his automobile. And it’s particularly good news for the poor and middle class whose stagnant real income is most sensitive to gas prices. Right?

Well, we need more than cars to drive; we also need things to drive on, like roads and bridges, which are in deplorable disrepair across the country. And perhaps, instead of subsidizing consumption with cheaper fuel, we should encourage conservation by bringing gas prices into line with social and environmental costs. But such changes require two very bad things: public works and higher taxes.

Right now, the highway trust fund is fast going broke, jeopardizing hundreds of thousands of both projects and jobs, because House Republicans won’t touch anything that might be perceived as a tax and don’t think the government should be responsible for anything except their pensions and health care. Never mind that only Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have lower gas taxes than America, and that almost half our states haven’t raised the gas tax in ten years.

Still, we continue to crush high-speed rail and any other innovations that might be more efficient and might leave in the ground some of the fossil fuels damaging our climate.

What if instead we rebuilt our crumbling infrastructure, tripled the price of gasoline, and subsidized the transition for those hit hardest by the changes?

Three Institutions (Part III)

There was no happier man than the one who walked out of Fort Lee on Sept. 1, 1970, honorable discharge in hand. In truth, my three-year army tour had been pretty undemanding, spent mostly at NATO’s military headquarters trying to catch spies. And we almost caught one, in a top-secret operation reminiscent of the Keystone Kops, that featured my friend Red (6 feet 5 inches and 240 pounds, including the shrapnel he had acquired in Korea) and me posing as Belgian road workers – although Red spoke not a word of French and we arrived at “the job” in a black Peugeot with a radio antenna on its roof. In the midst of our stakeout, the German suspect was transferred home to avoid an international incident, and we went back to our desk jobs. The army didn’t like me much more than I liked the army, preferring a more gung-ho specimen. Yet stories like mine, I believe, help make the case for universal service – not military service, solely, but a country in which everybody contributes a couple of years to the greater community. Career officers, here as elsewhere, can lose sight of the military’s role in a republic, and millions of inept civilians remind them not to take themselves too seriously. Thrown together from all over, those recruits also help democratize an increasingly divided country.

And don’t underestimate their valor. Most of those who hit the Normandy beaches 70 years ago today were not career soldiers, and far too many of them never came home.

Just Wondering

The growing chorus about the evils of government can be very confusing: If rich people use their money to support government programs, is that a good thing because it isn’t government money or a bad thing because it reinforces government policies? For example, when John and Leigh Middleton, who made $2.9 billion from cigars, donated $30 million to help Philadelphia’s homeless, were they addressing a vital human need or promoting dependency. They gave their money to Project HOME (Housing. Opportunities. Medical. Education), an organization run by a nun, whose mantra – “None of us are home until all of us are home” – has that old community-organizing ring, and indeed, HOME works aggressively “to impact public policies, educate elected officials, maximize resources for housing and services, and advocate for human and civil rights for persons who are poor, homeless, and/or disabled.” It seeks to improve public welfare not replace it.

Likewise, should people be able to use their private wealth to effect public policy? Take Roxanne Quimby, who made a fortune in lip balm (Burt's Bees) and has spent most of it buying large chunks of land – over 100,000 acres – in Maine’s north woods. She wants to create a national park, an idea that has put property-rights advocates in a quandary. The Quimbys “can do whatever they want with that land,” said the leader of a group opposing the national park. “It’s their land.” Well, everything except give the federal government “a toehold in the northern Maine woods.” That would ruin the neighborhood.

A Call to Service

At my daughter’s high-school graduation a decade ago, one member of her class was singled out for special notice. He would enroll in the United States Naval Academy that fall, and a Captain, in dress whites, had traveled all the way from Annapolis to hand him his diploma and publicly praise him. He was by all accounts a very good guy and is now a Marine officer who has more than earned the Captain’s commendation. So why did singling out a young man committed to serving his country bother me? There are many paths to service, and the graduation ceremony elevated one, that of warrior, above the others. In doing so, the school tacitly acknowledged a troublesome trend in America: the evolution of a separate caste of men and women we send to fight our wars so we won’t have to. We praise their courage and send them again and again into battle while we go about our business. In exchange, we let them board airplanes early and enable politicians to demagogue their gratitude. Last week, for example, only three senators – Republicans Dan Coats and Jeff Flake and Democrat Tom Carper – had the courage to vote against reversing a one-percent reduction in veterans’ cost-of-living raises already approved by the military.

I believe two things: (1) there are many ways to serve this country, and (2) everybody should do so. There is so much to do, not least of which is instilling a sense of community that only universal service can provide.

A Question of Charity

Let us give thanks for the Obama administration’s proposal to regulate the “non-profit” front organizations that funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into clandestine political campaigns. Let’s hope it’s a step toward getting rid of the fraudulent 501(c)4s that have poisoned American politics. Their $300 million in annual contributions have neither edified the public conversation nor enlightened the public. But why stop there? Perhaps it’s time to rethink the non-profit concept entirely. What was once a creative incentive for charitable giving has become big business. American non-profits now have assets in excess of $4.3 trillion, almost twice the net worth of the continent of Africa. The largest foundations, which control billions of dollars, behave like independent countries, setting their own domestic and foreign-policy agendas. Universities, once citadels of free inquiry, are increasingly wedded to lucrative commercial contracts clouded in secrecy and dependent on proprietary information. America’s taxpayers subsidize elite private schools where they couldn’t possibly afford to send their children but to which donations are tax deductible. At the other end of the spectrum, small social-service agencies are so strapped for money that they often must alter their mission to meet a donor’s demands. Fundraising in the non-profit world has become an end in itself.

Collectively, these organizations do enormous good. Often they take on responsibilities that governments, employers, even neighbors have abdicated in a society that undervalues the public good. In doing so, however, do they also risk shrinking the commons by substituting private charity for our communal commitment to each other?

Dateline: Glasgow

As I was waiting to board my plane to Glasgow, an elderly woman from rural Maine talked about her fear of the impending implementation of Obamacare. She is self-employed and has never had health insurance. “I don’t know how we can afford the premium’” she said. “We are really scared about what will happen.” I thought, if you can't afford the premium, what will you do when you get sick? This is precisely the reason that the Affordable Care Act makes health insurance mandatory – an idea, we should remember, that came out of the conservative think tanks in the 1990s and, however much he tried to deny it during the last campaign, was the cornerstone of Mitt Romney’s policy in Massachusetts. I have come to Glasgow to visit a childhood friend who was recently diagnosed with cancer. He is a painter, with little money, living in a country where health care is free – and where taking care of the sick is considered a national responsibility, not an unwelcome burden. To people here, the American model of health insurance is simply unfathomable, as is the ferocity of the attack on Obamacare as an infringement on individual freedom. When we do get sick, as all of us will, we feel vulnerable, scared and alone. Knowing that good care is both available and affordable is not just a medical benefit for us as individuals, it is a reaffirmation of the importance of community in each of our lives.