A Fence at all Costs

A Fence at All Costs

Now that Homeland Security's plan to build a 470-mile fence has run into many obstacles during the past few months including: angry property-holders who don't want a fence running through their homes or land without reasonable compensation; angry environmentalists who want to know why the fence cannot be built without protecting fragile habitats, and for those following the story, angry voters, who wonder why well-connected individuals and business are having their properties exempted from the fence-building while small property owners, some of whom have held the same land in their families since before the existence of the U.S. are now being told to give it up.

On Tuesday, April 1^st, Michael Chertoff declared that he would use his authority to bypass many laws in order to get the fence built by the end of 2008. While Mr. Chertoff argues that the fence is necessary to prevent illegal activity and drug violence from spilling over the Mexican border into the U.S., one can only question the willingness of a public official to run roughshod over so many basic American rights, including: the right not to be deprived of one's property without adequate compensation and due process and the right to allow challenges to laws to proceed through the court system to determine whether or not they are constitutional. Mr. Chertoff's actions would short-circuit these legal protections and due process all in the name of building a fence that is not even a contiguous barrier against entry.

The deprivation of individual property rights is particularly galling because it is being selectively applied, mostly to small property owners, while resort owners and those who are closely connected to the Bush administration are not having to fence their properties. One of the most egregious examples, is the exemption of 6,000 acres of property owned by Dallas billionaire, Ray L. Hunt and his relatives, one of the wealthiest oil and gas dynasties in the world. Hunt, a close friend of President George W. Bush, recently donated $35 million to Southern Methodist University to help build Bush’s presidential library.

In keeping with the general secrecy that pervades the Bush administration, the Department of Homeland Security has refused to release information on its selection process, its environmental investigations, or any part of the process by which some property owners lose their land rights and others remain exempt.

Once again, the Bush administration is taking a “father knows best” approach to the security of our nation's borders and tell those citizens who actually live on the border and face the daily burden of illegal crossing to put up and shut up when it comes to sacrificing their land rights for a fence whose utility and whose costs, both economic and environmental, are still a subject of debate.

Before Americans let this happen, it is time to call for Congressional hearings into the ways Homeland Security is implementing the legislation to build a fence on the U.S-Mexican border and to open up to public scrutiny their rationale for their efforts to compel property owners to allow the construction of a fence on their land without due process.

Consumer Debt - The Next Credit Crisis?

Consumer Debt: The Next Credit Crisis?

Economists and public policy researchers have been saying the same thing for years. Americans cannot go on spending the U.S. economy into continued prosperity and themselves into hock. And yet recent history seems continually to thumb its nose at these gloom and doom prophesies.

First, it was the combination of a bull stock market and low interest rates that made it seem as if one could borrow forever, invest in the latest hot stocks, and make money.

Then home equity lines and rising housing prices turned the family homestead into a convenient piggy-bank, not just for actual home improvements, but for new cars, vacations, and paying off credit card balances that had gotten a little out of hand.

Now the market has been down for four straight months, the values of homes are falling, and people are finding that their net equity may be zero or worse, they may actually owe more on their mortgage than their home is worth.

So far most pundits have focused on the crisis in the housing market as the most significant aspect of this economic downturn, but there are worse scenarios ahead to keep you up at night.

Consumer spending accounts for a substantial amount of the U.S. gross domestic product; it counted for as much as 72 percent of GDP as recently as April 2007. Yet in February of 2008 consumers turned in their weakest spending performance in 17 months, suggesting that this key component of the U.S. economic engine is also slowing down significantly. If you think of the average American consumer as the “little engine that could,” imagine what the economic impact will be if that consumer turns into the “little engine that can't any longer.” Few public officials want to acknowledge that we may be in a recession now, but a fall-off in consumer spending may make recession inevitable and not necessarily the mild contraction everyone keeps hoping for.

At the same time, many U.S. credit card holders are finding themselves deeper and deeper in debt, amounting to nearly $1 trillion as of 2007. And what are credit card companies doing to help the American consumer? They're shortening the time to pay, increasing fees for late payments, piling on the fine print of their contractual agreements and laughing themselves all the way to the bank.

It used to be that credit card companies made most of their money on the interest owed by consumers who didn't pay off their balances in full each month; those who do pay the full amount monthly are referred to “deadbeats” by these companies. But increasingly, credit card companies are making far more money off the fees they charge. According to RK Hammer, a bank-card advisory firm, card issuers took in $13 billion in fees [in 2006], not counting $12 billion in late fees (Kiplinger, February 22, 2007).

You may feel like you're the only one who ignores the the fine print on your credit card or those supplemental “changes to your account” that you get with your monthly bill, but don't feel stupid or lazy because you just can't take the time to figure out what your contract with your credit card issuer really means. Professor Elizabeth Warren of Harvard's law school gave her third-year law students the exercise of figuring out what the fine print on an average credit card really meant, and they found it far more challenging than they expected. If Harvard law students cannot figure this out, how can the average consumer be expected to understand the fine print, especially if it includes language like “we reserve the right to change the terms of this Agreement at any time”?

Although Congress has periodically investigated these abuses and even wrung their hands over the way credit card companies take advantage of the most vulnerable consumers, it has done little to prevent them. That may finally be about to change with the introduction of legislation by Senator Carl Levin and Representative Carolyn Maloney who have put forward a cardholder's bill of rights. This bill would require such consumer protections as a ban on collecting interest for amounts already paid, timely notice of changes in interest rates, and the ability to cancel a card if rates suddenly rise. Professor Warren has also advocated for a Financial Product Safety Commission to regulate the industry, which so far has largely operated on its own terms.

These are useful first steps. But in the meantime, consumers should follow the old Latin adage: caveat emptor, or let the buyer beware, whenever they are tempted to open a new credit card account to get an extra 10% off the next purchase, or get money back on their gas purchases, or any other seeming “freebie.” In most cases, you're better off using your debit card and not paying the annual fee or any other “hidden” fee in your credit card contract. If you do want a credit card, try getting one through your local credit union or savings and loan, where you can talk to a real human being if you run into any kind of trouble.

Credit card users should also realize that in a troubled economy they hold far more power than they might think. If the U.S. economy depends so heavily on consumer spending to stay healthy, now is the time for U.S. consumers to exercise their voting and lobbying power by letting Congress know they want a level playing field for credit card holders, and at least enough regulation to ensure that someone who borrows a little money to buy a dishwasher or a stereo system is not paying many times the value of that purchase by falling into the credit card trap.

If the U.S. wants to avoid the next credit crisis, it needs to take a pro-active approach to consumer credit card debt and not wait for the housing bubble to be followed by a wave of credit defaults and bankruptcies as consumers fall back on the plastic as their last resort for making ends meet.

Saving Wall Street - Failing Main Street

Saving Wall Street; Failing Main Street

The headlines just seem to get gloomier with each passing week of 2008. Housing prices keep falling, gas prices rise, and consumer confidence is at a five-year low.

But where are the tax-payers' efforts being directed? Not at the average consumer or at the home-owners no longer able to keep up with adjustable-rate mortgages. Instead millions of dollars of government credit has been extended to keep banks lending money to one another and to bail out investment firms like Bear Stearns.

The extension of credit makes sense in an environment where banks are suddenly distrustful of one another and how much more bad debt will surface as the full extent of the sub-prime mortgage crisis becomes known. One can even make the argument that arranging the shot-gun marriage of Bear Stearns and JP Morgan Chase can be justified if it helped to contain a sudden run, not just on Bear Stearns but other firms with similar investments.

However, since it is not merely the U.S. Government, but ultimately U.S. taxpayers, namely you and me, who are financing these transactions, it also makes sense to ask what are the risks and benefits for us? UC-Berkeley public policy professor and commentator, Robert Reich, points out that when the British government bailed out one its largest failing banks it took shares of stock so that British taxpayer would reap the gains if the shares became sufficiently valuable. In the case of the JP Morgan-Bear Stearns deal, U.S. taxpayers are essentially providing a kind of corporate welfare, in which they lose if the JP Morgan acquisition proves a bust, but if the acquisition pays off, JP Morgan shareholders win and U.S. taxpayers still lose. Why voters tolerate this kind of lose-lose situation over and over again as the government steps in to handle various financial bubbles from the savings and loan scandal to the current credit crisis is a mystery.

Capitalism is supposed to be a zero-sum game, but in the current U.S. political and economic system, it's a rigged game where individuals can lose but corporations and corporate bankers always seem to come out ahead. Conservative politicians have always argued that what is good for business is good for the average American, but recent economic developments increasingly call that into question, and the increasing burden of business bailouts on the American taxpayer may finally bring these issues to the foreground for debate in the upcoming election.

Bush and Cheney in Wonderland

Bush and Cheney in Wonderland

Since the fifth anniversary of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq on March 19^th, 2008, both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney have been working overtime to justify not only the reasons for starting the war in Iraq but also for claiming that it has been a success rather than a failure. These endeavors come at the same time as a substantial portion of the American public now judges the war to be “not worth” the efforts that were undertaken to launch it.

I do not use the “wonderland” metaphor lightly in describing the methods of the Bush Administration for justifying its action. In Lewis Carroll's fantastic tale, Alice literally falls down a rabbit hole (a seeming “dead end”) and finds herself instead in a world defined by logical inversions.

The first of these, with respect to Iraq, may be found in President Bush's assertion that Iraq is part of the “war on terror.” Now that it has been proven, unequivocally, that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with directly supporting Al-Qaeda in the September 11^th attacks on the U.S., the Bush administration has been confronted by the awkward problem of trying to explain why our invasion of Iraq resulted in the creation of a new Al-Qaeda training ground and the creation of a new terrorist insurgency, hitherto unknown.

The response of the Bush Administration has been to claim that we are fighting the “war on terror” over “there” (Iraq and Afghanistan) so that we don't have to fight it over “here” (on U.S. soil).

The attractiveness of this illogic cannot be overstated. As long as there are no major terrorist attacks within the continental United States, the government can maintain that this is because we fighting a “terrorist” war elsewhere. This focus on the absence of a major attack on U.S. soil also allows the Bush administration to ignore the 607 percent spike in the average yearly incidence of terrorist attacks worldwide after the U.S. invasion of Iraq (28.3 attacks on average the year before and 199.8 attacks the year after) (See the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, http://www.terrorismknowledgebase.org/).

Even though most of these attacks occurred in Iraq as the result of an increasingly active insurgency, incidents of terrorism were up all over the world. The idea that we're fighting terrorists overseas to prevent them from attacking us at home obscures the fact that millions of dollars now have to be expended to fight a terrorist insurgency that we ourselves helped to create by our invasion of another country that had no intention of attacking us.

Indeed, in the intervening years since the beginning of the Iraq war, the American public has learned that nearly all of the information given by the Bush administration to justify the war has turned out to be wrong, including the most incendiary claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and was ready to use them at a moment's notice.

The mushroom cloud alleged by Condoleeza Rice, Vice-President Cheney, and President Bush, has vanished into thin air, and yet we still have hundreds of thousands of combat troops on the ground: not to fight Saddam Hussein, nor to liberate Iraqi citizens, but simply to hold together a nation that was patched together after World War I by European powers and that a coalition of U.S. and European allies now struggle to keep from the brink of civil war.

Many academics and policy analysts¹ now consider that some form of civil war in Iraq is inevitable and that the U.S. “surge” in troop deployments has done nothing more than keep the combatants at arm's length, a situation that cannot be prolonged indefinitely, although some politicians like presidential candidate John McCain, seem inclined to spend whatever it takes to keep this stalemate in place. Even the Pentagon's quarterly report issued on March 15^th, 2008 now uses the term “civil war” to describe the violence plaguing the country.

An even more recent example of the Wonderland logic pervading the White House was exemplified by the President's decision to send Vice-President Dick Cheney to the Middle East, in part to urge progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. "His goal is to reassure people the U.S. is committed to a vision of peace in the Middle East," Mr Bush said. (“Cheney to tour Middle East States, BBC News, March 10, 2008).

Reassure people, indeed, by sending the most virulent neo-con hawk still residing in the Bush administration to press for peace. One could only wonder what the President was thinking, except that Cheney's itinerary also included a four hour plus meeting with Saudi King Abdullah about high oil prices as well as a range of Middle East issues including Iran, which Cheney has long painted as an aggressor in the region (“Cheney Meets with Saudi King, Discuss High Oil Prices” The Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2008).

Cheney's most visible “wonderland” moment occurred in Baghdad. "If you look back on those five years it has been a difficult, challenging but nonetheless successful endeavor ... and it has been well worth the effort," said Vice President Cheney, after meeting with Iraqi leaders on March 17^th (“Iraq invasion was "successful endeavor": Cheney,” Reuters). A few days later, when confronted by ABS correspondent Martha Raddatz with the statistic that
“two-thirds of Americans think that it's not worth fighting,” the Vice President responded with a succinct and dismissive: “So?”

A few days later on Easter Sunday, when the number of American soldiers killed in the war reached the 4,000 mark, Mr. Cheney was a little more chastened but quicker to pass the buck, noting that “the biggest burden is carried by President George W. Bush, who made the decision to commit US troops to war.”

But Cheney, like his Commander in Chief, has clearly committed himself to tunnel vision when it comes to Iraq, and this view of the war brooks no inconvenience of opposing public opinion, loss of American lives, or facts on the ground, like the female suicide bomber who killed herself and forty others on the day of his visit, or his inability to venture beyond the “green zone” or the complete failure of the Iraqi government to meet any of its political power-sharing commitments: "It's important to achieve victory in Iraq. It's important to win, to succeed in the objective that we've established," says Dick Cheney, and nothing will change his mind.

Like President Bush, who prides himself on being the “decider” and feels that it is a “weakness” to second-guess any decision he has taken, no matter how ill-considered it turns out to be, Cheney has committed the country to a “stay the course” military adventure in Iraq from which neither he nor the President see any turning back, at least not while they remain in office.

One might almost admire their resolve and determination were it not for one small and painful fact: these same war hawks and self-proclaimed patriots have projected not one penny of appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan beyond 2008. It's as if the war mysteriously disappears off the books the moment they leave office.

If you had any doubts that this administration really is living in Wonderland, just look at the way they pursue a war and then suddenly refuse to fund it, as soon as it becomes someone else's problem. NPR reporter Guy Raz noted that the Pentagon budget for next year, which was recently unveiled in Congress amounts to nearly $500 billion, larger than any military budget since World War II. “But one thing is missing,” notes Mr. Raz, and that is “most of the money to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defense officials now say they'll only ask Congress to provide enough money to fund the wars through the end of the Bush administration,” “Pentagon Budget May Put Next President in a Pickle,” All Things Considered, January 28, 2008.

Why suddenly pretend the war requires no funding at the end of this year? Well, it is true that this administration has tried to fund the war “off the books” all along by requesting supplementary appropriations instead of having the budget reflect the true cost of the war, just as they have funded these appropriations by sending the nation deeper and deeper into debt instead of making today's taxpayers feel the real pinch of these expenditures.

But there may be an even more cynical reason for the funding sham – At the beginning of the year, President Bush unveiled a $3.1 trillion budget plan for fiscal 2009 that will leave deficits of more than $400 billion this year but claims to bring that deficit to zero by 2012 – by once again leaving the war funding off the books.

So Bush and Cheney go on living in Wonderland, certain that history will vindicate their invasion of Iraq, and apparently even believing that they can hoodwink the public into thinking that they can have their cake and eat it too – fight a war and not acknowledge its costs – at least until they can ride off into the sunset like the cowboy heroes they imagine they are.

1See James D. Fearon writing on “Iraq's Civil War” in Foreign Affairs (March/April 2007) or Kenneth Pollack, “Apres-Surge: The Next Iraq Debates,” The New Republic, December 2007.

Supporting the Troops

Supporting the Troops

Every day I drive my car around town and observe cars with those ubiquitous slogans in support of our military. Often they take the shape of yellow ribbons; other times they use the standard rectangular bumper sticker shape. Either they state unequivocally: “Support our troops” (and these often also sport a military affiliation) or they say “Support our troops. Bring them home” (and these may have more explicitly anti-war stickers as well).

I have nothing but respect for those who feel their support for the women and men serving in Iraq and Afghanistan strongly enough to make such a public statement in favor of those fighting the war, no matter how they feel about the war itself. But lately, after five years of this fighting overseas and enough time to see what has become of returning veterans, I have begun to wonder: What actual good do these bumper stickers do?

These professions of support for the troops have come to seem increasingly “gestural” -- they acknowledge a debt to those serving our country, they may assuage the conscience of those left behind or those who have chosen not to send their sons and daughters to fight, but ultimately they have little tangible effect on the fates of the soldiers fighting in the field, and more importantly on the lives of the soldiers returning home.

Today's Iraq and Afghanistan veterans will not suffer the fate of those who served in Vietnam and returned to domestic hostility on U.S. soil. They will not be spat upon; they will not be called “baby-killers.” But they are just as likely to be subject to the insensitive question - “How many people did you kill?” or to the equally insensitive response, “Oh, you served in Iraq. That's great” --followed by silence and indifference.

But beyond the ways that we greet these soldiers upon their return, I also can't help wondering about a more fundamental economic question: how ready are these vets to find a job?

As someone who has been on the hiring end of the job market these past few years, I can tell you that I have received many resumes from returning vets, and most of them wanted to make me weep. They usually arrived without cover letters and with an emphasis on “leadership” as their leading job qualification. I never doubted the leadership skills of these job-seekers, but I did wonder who in the world was advising them on how to seek a job in the private sector, when these generic resumes were so clearly setting them up to fail.

In addition to the hope of finding a better job when they return home, many of those serving in today's military signed up, at least in part, because of the promise of educational benefits. Serve your country today, these young people were told, and you'll get enough money to go to college. That too has turned out to be a less than reliable promise.

My fourth-grade teacher served in World War II and was designated as two-thirds disabled after losing his leg to a land mine. He attended Yale University on the G.I. Bill and went on to become the headmaster of a fine private school (he was teaching my fourth-grade class in his “retirement.”)

By contrast, today's vet has a snowflake's chance in hell of attending an Ivy League university on current G.I. benefits. Those same benefits that were created to allow World War II vets to attend college without incurring substantial debt, now cover only sixty percent of a public college education in 2008. Attending a private university is out of the question under these circumstances, when the maximum payment per year is $9,600 for each returning vet, and the average cost of a public college education is $16,000 per year, even for in-state students.

For Thomas Sim, a Korean-American, who returned to attend UC-Irvine after his service in Iraq, the transition from military to college life has proven to be considerably more difficult than he had anticipated. “The GI bill is--to be blunt—it's chump change...School is very expensive and as much as the GI bill helps, I still have to rely on myself,” Sim told NPR correspondent, Alex Cohen. Sim has also been surprised by how little students talk about the war outside of his classes: “I would rather have someone, even an antiwar demonstrator, I would rather have someone come up to me, and start ranting to me...I would rather confront that than confront a shrug of the shoulders and someone saying, 'Marines, oh that's cool” and then have them walk away with their iPod,” (“Marking the Transition from Serviceman to Student,” Day to Day, March 17, 2008).

For as much as our political and military leaders voice constant and often vociferous support for our active military, their policies, and the bureaucratic decision-making that determines how disabled a returning veteran might be, have sent a far different message, not just with respect to a diminishing support for college education benefits but also with respect to more basic needs like health care.

For example, because of medical advances, today's soldier is much more likely to survive the explosion of an IED (“improvised explosive device”). These soldiers will receive state-of-the-art medical attention in Iraq and later when they are removed from the scene of an attack to Germany for immediate surgery.

The problems for these soldiers come later when they reach the stage of needing follow-up care, particularly if that care involves psychological as well as physical trauma.

Daniel Zwerdling, a veteran NPR reporter, first broke the story of how returning soldiers were being denied and even punished for requesting help with mental help problems, especially PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder), as early as December 2005. That ground-breaking reporting led to Congressional investigations of problems at Fort Carson, Colorado, as well as sub-standard conditions, including infestations of rats and roaches, at Walter Reed Hospital.

However, these scandals have proven to be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the obstacles put in the path of veterans seeking care for disabilities incurred during their military service. For example, a recent NPR report discovered that “Colonel Becky Baker of the Army Surgeon General's office told the Veterans Administration to discontinue counseling soldiers on the appropriateness of Defense Department ratings [of their disabilities] because 'there exists a conflict of interest,'” (“Document Shows Army Blocked Help for Soldiers,” Morning Edition, February 7, 2008).

The Defense Department's reluctance to rate soldiers' disabilities accurately may be explained by the realization that medical care for a returning vets over his or her lifetime may be as high as $700 billion according to a recent Harvard University study. Over 200,000 soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been treated at VA medical facilities thus far, with 900,000 still deployed on active duty. The Harvard study predicts that the cost of medical care and compensation benefits for returning veterans will skyrocket once those troops return home, (Linda Bilmes, “Soldiers Returning from Iraq and Afghanistan: The Long-term Costs of Providing Veterans Medical Care and Disability Benefits,” (http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP07-001).

So if you support the troops because you believe the Iraq War is worth fighting, or if you believe we simply need to bring our troops back to the U.S. and end the fighting in Iraq, you can do something that will truly benefit them.

Write your representatives and demand that our federal budget include sufficient appropriations to cover the treatment of psychological as well as physical damage to these men and women; demand that the military stop underestimating the disabilities of returning vets, and finally, ask that the GI bill cover the full cost of education at a public university.

The least we can do for the women and men returning from service in Iraq and Afghanistan is not just to meet them with yellow ribbons, but to insist that our government provide them with the medical, psychological, and educational services necessary to help them make the transition to civilian life.

If we are truly patriots, we will be stop at nothing less than this.

Gender Matters: What Evolutionary Biology Can (and Can't) Tell Us

Gender Matters – What Evolutionary Biology Can (and Can't) Tell Us

With the recent resignation of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer because of sexual scandal and the admission by the incoming Governor Patterson of his own sexual infidelities, pundits and scientists have raced to give the American public their views on why men so often stray even when the risks of discovery are so high. “Why do they do it?” the public wonders, and psychologists and evolutionary biologists are quick to provide answers, if not always nuanced ones.

It is true that recent studies of sex differences in genetics, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience show that biological differences between the sexes are real, although what those differences mean in a species affected perhaps as strongly by culture (nurture) as by selection (nature) is a vexed question.

But both the researchers and the media who relay these findings in “sound-bite” format are all too ready to apply them with a broad brush. This can lead to rash generalizations about men and women that reinforce long held stereotypes, without any consideration of the extraordinary complexity of the contexts in which human beings now live and reproduce.

For example, in a recent Los Angeles Times opinion piece, David Barash, an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington, notes that the discovery of “extra-pair copulations (EPC)” among animals long thought to be monogamous, can offer one explanation of Governor Spitzer's sexual infidelity. He argues that human males who are sexually unfaithful to their mates are “responding to the biological pressures that whisper within [them]” (“Want a Man or a Worm?” March 12, 2008).

While Barash specifically states that his characterization of homo sapiens as EPC-inclined does not justify adultery, because humans “are presumed capable of exercising control over their impulses,” his argument still suggests strongly that adultery, at least among human males, is “natural,” and something that human females should accept unless they marry a truly “monogamous” creature like the parasitic worm, Diplozoon paradoxum, whose body literally fuses with that of its mate upon their first copulation.

However, in his opinion piece, Barash enacts a sleight-of-hand elision between species and sex that is telling of a cultural tendency to take male behavior as paradigmatic. Professor Barash refers first to EPCs among animals in the general sense but then goes on to give only male examples of EPCs in creatures ranging from elk to seals to chimpanzees, and, of course, humans. What Barash doesn't mention, doesn't even apparently think worthy of mention, is what role female EPCs play in the evolutionary biology of these different species.

For presumably, these male “adulterers” are having sex with a female partner, and let us not forget that many biologists have also found evidence of opportunistic female infidelity among different species. With apologies to Barash and Spitzer, it's not just the males who fool around when they get the chance.

However, there is something more insidious in Barash's application of evolutionary biology to human behavior than his simple occlusion of the role played by females in his examples, and his assumption that what males do suggests a paradigm for the entire species.

Professor Barash also commits the logical fallacy of comparing apples and oranges, when he suggests that elephant seal harems, Maori tribesman, and modern-day call girls' sexual liaisons with high-status men can all be compared without doing violence to the many important cultural differences between them.

For what separates humans from other animal species is not simply biology but culture. The egg/sperm differential that puts a biological premium on males to spread their seed as widely as possible, and the opposing care that females take in choosing who may fertilize their eggs are important factors in how humans choose a mate, but the social and cultural contexts in which this reproduction takes place are equally important.

In a state of nature, humans may only be concerned with ensuring the success of the species; but at the level of the tribe, the village, and the state, human societies are also concerned with reproducing social structures, and in particular, the family unit.

At the species level, it doesn't matter how many sex partners a male has as long as he reproduces with as many females as possible; in society, the sex partner does matter, because societies are just as concerned with the inheritance of livestock, goods, and land, as they are with the generation of children.

At the societal level, the impulses of evolutionary biology run headlong into the biological fact that for most of human history, only maternity could be known for certain; a man could merely assume that he was the father of his children and his legitimate heirs.

It is this cultural organization that creates what anthropologist Gayle Rubin famously called the “traffic of women” in a seminal article of the same name (“The Traffic of Women: Notes on the political Economy of Sex” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, 1975).

Rubin noted that women were traditionally the means of exchange that cemented ties of kinship and that this exchange ensured the reproduction of a family structure based on patriarchy. A father chose a husband for a daughter based on the family's best interests, not her individual desires, and it was the woman who became part of the husband's extended family upon her marriage. Such relations also created the ideal of female “virginity” and female “chastity” in order to ensure that a “legitimate” heir inherited the family wealth and not the progeny of some other male interloper.

Patriarchy also tended to legitimate both sexual and physical violence against individual women, since the family's “honor” was now invested in the “honor” of the woman whose sexual desires were subordinated to the family's interests. Rape, abduction by another man, even being in the wrong place at the wrong time, could all make it “appear” that a woman's chastity was in question and thus justify her punishment and even death at the hands of her husband, or her own family.

Further, the very subordination of women's individual sexual desires in this system of patriarchy generated a cultural fear that women might not be able to guarantee their own chastity out of physical weakness or that they might fall prey to their own suppressed and therefore uncontrollable sexual appetites.

Thus a French churchman, Michel de Pure, wrote in the 17^th century of the Roman heroine Lucrece, who was said to have committed suicide to restore her family's honor after she had been raped: “Her blood was nothing more than the color of pride that she poured out over her unbound desire to deceive us and make us believe that she had not died of pleasure,” suggesting that even one of the most-cited examples of a woman defending her chastity with her life, was nothing but a hypocrite and a fraud.

It is no accident either that as late as the eighteenth-century in England, rape was literally a crime of property, and the injured party was not the woman, but the man legally responsible for her – either her father, husband, or male guardian. For centuries women had scarcely any legal identity at all: they could not initiate a divorce, own property, or maintain custody of their children, much less cast a vote.

“What does this have to do with men and women in the U.S. In the 21st-century?” you may ask. Well, scratch the surface of contemporary discourse about sexual relations in this country, and you will find the same prevalent sexual stereotypes underlying both Professor's Barash's commentary (it's “natural” for men to cheat) and media coverage of Governor Spitzer's “high-priced” call girl (what does she have to complain about – she was getting paid).

Hardly any reporters asked how much of the money Governor Spitzer spent actually made it into the hands of the young woman in question, or raised the issues of physical violence many sex workers endure, or even asked why these women were selling their bodies (a number of the call-girls in the ring turned out to have serious drug habits). Thus what seems like a simple sexual exchange – high status man pays beautiful young woman a lot of money for non-reproductive and possibly unprotected sex – turns out to be a more complicated tale--not just of biological “whispering” but of cultural taboos, that both men and women violate at their peril, even in the free-wheeling twenty-first century where the sexes are presumably equal.

All in the Family: Love, Loyalty and Racism

All in the Family: Love, Loyalty and Racism

Today Senator Barack Obama gave a powerful speech to a small group of his supporters in Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love.” Unfortunately, the topic the Senator had to address was not about unity or compassion, but about racial division. He was there in Philadelphia to publicly repudiate some remarks made by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who had used what Obama termed “ incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation, and that rightly offend white and black alike.”

Yet even though Senator Obama unequivocally rejected the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, he did not reject the man. Instead he said, “As imperfect as he may be, [Jeremiah Wright] has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children.” Senator Obama said that he could no more reject the man, Jeremiah Wright, who had been like a father to him, than he could reject his white grandmother, “a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Like many Americans, Barack Obama has a family he loves deeply, but whose members may well hold racist attitudes that do not accord with his own. And who among us has not had the same painful experience of hearing loved ones voice opinions at the dinner table that make us cringe, even as we debate whether or not to challenge them or to let things go in order to preserve family harmony or at least not to raise a long, painful, and ultimately fruitless subject of debate? We may not be able to convince them that their views of those with a different religion, or ethnicity, or skin color are wrong, but we cannot help but love them just the same.

I loved and respected my parents, but I recognized their racist attitudes even as a young child. It was brought home to me painfully one afternoon, when the son of our neighbor's black maid drove up beside me to ask if he had the right address for the home where his mother worked.

We all loved his mother, Rosa, who was one of the kindest, warmest human beings I ever knew. But here I was on the sidewalk confronted not just by a stranger, but by a black male stranger with a Southern accent I could barely understand. I took one look and all of my parents' underlying fears of blacks, particularly young black men in the late 60's took hold of my heart, and I fled like the devil was at my heels.

My mother was mortified and scolded me heartily in front of everyone- Rosa, her son, and our neighbors. But I looked at her and saw the fear and the hypocrisy written on her face. If this young man weren't Rosa's son, she would have fled at my heels just as fast.

In later years when I heard Mollie Ivins say, "Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything," I remembered that moment and realized I had found a kindred spirit.

At that moment as a young girl I started to question, if only in my head and my heart, what my parents said about Blacks, Asians, Jews, Catholics – just about anybody who didn't belong to the “right” group – German Lutherans (and even then they had to be “Missouri” Lutheran).

Yet I was also struck by the contradictions Senator Obama noted in his former pastor because they suggested the same contradictions I saw in my parents: “Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect," Senator Obama said of Jeremiah Wright. "He contains within him the contradictions — the good and the bad — of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.”

My parents also often treated individuals of different races, creeds, and ethnicities, far better then they talked about those groups in general. When the first black family moved in across the street from us in our modest home on the east side of Detroit, I trembled at how my mother would behave. But she walked across the street, welcomed them, and mentioned that she had been a school teacher and was available for tutoring if any child needed her. My father's funeral was attended by men he had worked with who were from other races and religions, even though he supported the candidacy of a man like Alabama Governor George Wallace because of his stands against integration of public schools.

It was as if my parents could kept two concepts of race simultaneously balanced in their minds and hearts-- their negative views of Blacks, Latinos, Jews etc. in general-- and the exceptions that they made for so many individuals in those groups whom they welcomed as colleagues and even friends.

It is for this reason that I sympathize with the dilemma of Senator Obama who will have to pay a political price for the snippets of Pastor Wright's sermons that get played over and over on YouTube.com and Fox Television.

But before Americans condemn Senator Obama for his loyalty to his former pastor, they should ask themselves: How many family dinner conversations would I be comfortable posting on YouTube.com? How many racist comments by family members have I let slide? Can we ever get past the issue of race without acknowledging that many of those we love and respect as individuals occasionally express views we would disavow, even though we could never reject them as members of our family?

If we begin to consider such questions honestly, we may have a chance of going into the 2008 presidential election without making a race a divisive issue but rather a fruitful one: an opportunity to address our past and our prejudices openly and without fear, no matter what the color of our skin.