New America Foundation Weekly Wonk | Vox Our world has too much noise and too little context. Vox helps you understand what matters. 2019-03-05T02:12:45+00:00 https://www.vox.com/authors/new-america-foundation-weekly-wonk/rss https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/vox_logo_rss_light_mode.png?w=150&h=100&crop=1 New America Foundation Weekly Wonk <![CDATA[The real reason tensions are rising in the South China Sea]]> https://www.vox.com/2015/5/24/8646571/the-real-reason-tensions-are-rising-in-the-south-china-sea 2019-03-04T21:12:45-05:00 2015-05-24T11:00:02-04:00
Racing on the South China Sea | Amory Ross/Team Alvimedica/Getty Images

By Emily Meierding

This piece was originally published in New America’s digital magazine,The Weekly Wonk. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox each Thursday here, and follow @New America on Twitter.

A year ago this month, China moved its oil drilling rig, the HD-981, into waters around the Paracel Islands. China’s exploratory drilling provoked a confrontation with Vietnam, which also claims the area. Both countries deployed coast guard vessels and fishing fleets to the drilling site. Ships collided and turned water cannons on each other, sinking a fishing boat. In Vietnam, the incident sparked popular protests; over 20 people were killed.

The rig withdrew in July, after two months of drilling. But it left an unresolved question in its wake: is competition over the South China Sea’s oil and natural gas resources a threat to regional security? This question resonates across the region, as the Paracel Islands are not the only area where hydrocarbon exploration could lead to clashes. In addition to its disputes with Vietnam, China is also involved in disagreements over resource authority with Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Could these countries’ attempts to exploit oil and gas spiral into outright conflict?

The answer, happily, is probably not. The risk of regional “resource wars” has been overstated. Sure, hydrocarbon competition can inspire international spats, but as the HD-981 incident demonstrated, governments are quick to contain them.

When it comes to maritime disputes, islands, not oil, are the greater threat to international stability. Why? Because resources can be shared but islands cannot. In a winner-takes-all environment, leaders have little choice but to dig in their heels. If one country obtains sovereign control over contested territory, the other loses it. But through joint development, resources can be shared.

Over the last few decades, this difference has been particularly evident in the East China Sea. There, Japan and China are contesting control over a group of islands—known as the Senkakus in Japanese and Diaoyus in Chinese—along with oil and natural gas fields, over 100 nautical miles to the northeast of those islands. The dispute over the islands has generated intense hostility between the two countries. The struggle over oil and gas fields, by contrast, has inspired constructive dialogue.

That path to restraint, admittedly, hasn’t always been linear. Chinese oil companies began operating in the East China Sea in the late 1970s, where they made their first discovery, the Pinghu field, about a decade later. Pinghu’s development was uncontroversial; the field is almost 40 miles west of where Japan draws its international boundary. In the late 1990s, Japan even co-financed the construction of pipelines from Pinghu to the Chinese mainland.

But friction increased as China’s search for hydrocarbons moved closer to the border. In 2003, oil companies set up a production platform above the Chunxiao gas field, one mile from the maritime boundary. Japanese authorities demanded access to the field’s geological data to ensure that China wasn’t siphoning off Japanese reserves. When the companies refused, Japan launched its own exploration program. A seismic survey ship was deployed to the border zone in July 2004. Beijing responded by sending in its navy. Surveillance ships harassed the survey vessel and, in November, a Chinese submarine was spotted in Japanese waters. Two months later, two Chinese destroyers moved into the contested area.

Yet Japanese and Chinese authorities managed to contain the dispute. In October 2004, the countries launched a series of bilateral talks on the East China Sea issue. Four years of negotiations eventually produced an agreement to exploit hydrocarbon resources cooperatively in the border zone.

The agreement has not led to significant resource cooperation, but China and Japan have avoided further confrontations around the fields. This outcome stands in stark contrast to the dispute over the islands, which continues to provoke tensions, as yet unaddressed by bilateral agreements.

The Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute also emerged in the 1970s, when China started challenging Japan’s authority over the islands. It has gone through periods of escalation, as activists from both countries have attempted to land on the uninhabited islands to reinforce their governments’ territorial claims. In 1978 and 1996, Japanese nationalists landed on the islands and erected lighthouses, prompting diplomatic protests from Beijing and deployments of Chinese fishing boats. Activists from Taiwan and Hong Kong attempted their own landings, some of which succeeded, in spite of resistance from Japan’s Coast Guard. In 2004, activists from mainland China reached the islands for the first time.

These incidents did not spiral into militarized clashes. However, they provoked intense hostility and made the islands a flashpoint for nationalist sentiment on both sides. The populations of both countries were primed for further conflict—such as in 2012, when the Japanese government acquired three of the islands from private owners. In China, the nationalization was met with major anti-Japan protests. Beijing also retaliated by increasing its military presence in the area. Violations of Japan’s territorial waters skyrocketed from almost none to over seventeen per month over the next year. In November 2013, China declared an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) that included the islands.

In the past 18 months, violations have declined, but Japan is still reporting an average of eight per month. Japanese and Chinese officials have also made little progress toward resolving the island dispute. Last November, the countries jointly issued a four-point consensus, aimed at improving bilateral relations. One of the points addressed the Senkakus/Diaoyus, observing that China and Japan had “different views” of the situation, but would attempt to prevent it from escalating. Yet Japan still refuses to acknowledge the existence of a dispute, and neither country has offered concrete proposals for resolving it. Relations between Xi and Abe may be thawing, but a cooperative island agreement is a very long way off.

Chinese and Japanese officials are constrained by their countries’ shared history. The islands issue has acquired enormous symbolic significance in both countries, so attempts to reach a compromise settlement will provoke intense domestic opposition. Consequently, island disputes are likely to remain a thorn in government’s’ sides, persistently at risk of escalation.

Countries have many incentives to compete for authority in the East China Sea and South China Sea, including islands, oil and natural gas, fisheries, sea lanes of communication, and national pride. However, when it comes to inspiring conflict, not all causes are created equal. Hydrocarbon resources, alone, are not a significant threat to regional stability.

Emily Meierding is a visiting fellow at the Center for International Environmental Studies (CIES) at the Graduate Institute, Geneva.

]]> New America Foundation Weekly Wonk <![CDATA[The race to build the better battery the world desperately needs]]> https://www.vox.com/2015/2/22/8084703/powerhouse-steve-levine-review 2019-03-04T11:16:06-05:00 2015-02-22T10:30:02-05:00
We're going to have to do better than this. | David Becker/Getty Images

By Jane Greenway Carr

Jane Greenway Carr is an ACLS Public Fellow and Contributing Editor at New America.

This piece was originally published in New America’s digital magazine,The Weekly Wonk. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox each Thursday here, and follow @New America on Twitter.

“It’s meant to be a thriller,” says Steve LeVine of his new book, The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World, that “takes the reader into the world of the battery scientist.” While a bit tongue-in-cheek, this description underscores the high stakes involved in the global dash to create a battery powerful enough to run an electric car 300 miles on a single charge. The current sprinters? Japan, South Korea, China and the United States.

There aren’t very many inventions that can do substantial good in the world and help their makers get wildly rich in the process. But according to LeVine, Washington correspondent for Quartz and a Future Tense Fellow at New America, a superbattery-one that will improve upon the lithium-ion battery and thereby take electric cars mainstream-is just that kind of invention. Those who bring it to market will cash in to the potential tune of $300 billion and the rest of us will breathe progressively less polluted air as we traverse the roadways in our all-electric vehicles.

In The Powerhouse, LeVine reveals the drama generated by the lithium-ion battery by tracking two parallel narratives: the work at Argonne National Laboratory’s battery program, home to scientists LeVine calls the world’s “battery geniuses,” and efforts of Silicon Valley start-ups like EnVia Systems (the first licensee for Argonne’s material). Researchers in both settings are racing to build a product marketable enough to secure contracts and a billion-dollar IPO. The book, says Levine, is “reflective of that environment…where so much hope and buzz and really a fever had come to center on the battery.”

As these dual stories unfold, LeVine explained at a recent event at New America, “It’s not quite a collision course, but they’re driving down the same lanes.” As a storyteller, he added, it was important to him for the book “not to be a hagiography about technology and invention,” but rather an account of how innovation happens, viewed through the lens of a colorful set of characters.

One of those characters is Jeff Chamberlain, manager of the Argonne battery program, who is “this evangelistic motivator, painting the stakes in very large colors.” Those brush-strokes add up to a portrait of fear, notes LeVine, because the pressure is fierce to hit the finish line first. Since Sony commercialized the lithium-ion battery in 1991 and Toyota unveiled the Prius in 1996, transformative battery innovations have been scarce, and both President Obama and China’s Minister of Science and Technology have vowed publicly to put one million electric cars on the road in 2015 (a goal that neither will achieve this year but to which both remain committed in the longer term, though China recently saw a surge of electric vehicle sales in 2014 ). The idea that China might win the battery race is, to LeVine’s mind, the “bête noir” for scientists like Chamberlain.

Another theme that LeVine emphasized in his conversation with Donna Harris, co-founder of the start-up hub 1776, was the effect of what could be called the “Bell Labs diaspora.” Alumni of Bell Labs, which developed the transistor in the late 1940s, populate the entire ecosystem of the battery race, from university laboratories to government agencies to industry. Between Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s proposed creation of “Bell Lablets” and the widespread realization that Bell’s managerial system could be conducive to greater innovation, previously bitter rivals like Matt Thackeray’s Berkeley lab and Chamberlain’s team at Argonne managed to forge collaborations that made them both more competitive in the superbattery sprint.

It’s important to remember that neither the electric car nor the superbattery are fait accompli, LeVine pointed out: “Just because we want them and the stakes are so high doesn’t mean they will happen.” To reap the dividends, all the stakeholders in the race need to re-think their assumptions. For Chamberlain and his compatriots, this meant admitting that they need a new roadmap, to “understand the science [of batteries] at the atomic level” and work from there.

For those in business and government, LeVine argues, re-thinking things means putting together a format for participation that “jettisons our allergy to violating [a] free market ethos and coming up with a formula of intellectual property-sharing that involves industry and the inventors.” He dismisses as “foolhardy” the industry forecasting that predicts that 25 years from now, electric, fuel-cell, natural gas, and plug-in hybrid cars will only comprise 5 percent of the market. “We live in an age of utter disruption,” he marveled, citing shale oil and gas as two examples of game-changers that no one predicted.

Along with cutthroat competition and the promise of future innovation in the race for the superbattery, warns LeVine, comes a healthy dose of bullshit, which he says is often the cost of doing business in technology-no matter whether you’re in a lab or a start-up. Looking back on his research for The Powerhouse, LeVine was surprised by the pervasiveness of the “exaggeration, hype, and lies.” He reflected to Harris, “Edison famously said in the 1920s that batteries-especially rechargeable batters-are a special province of liars. And there is a twist in the book where we learn that law. That was a very big shock to me.”

But when you’ve published a book about a technology race that’s still being run, twists and turns come with the territory.

]]> New America Foundation Weekly Wonk <![CDATA[The underrepresentation of women in foreign policy is a huge problem]]> https://www.vox.com/2015/2/16/8039675/foreign-policy-interrupted 2019-03-04T09:08:37-05:00 2015-02-16T08:30:02-05:00

Jane Greenway Carr is an ACLS Public Fellow and Contributing Editor at New America. She holds a PhD from NYU and is the founding editor of The Brooklyn Quarterly.

When it comes to the opinion-makers and experts we listen to on matters of foreign policy, it’s neither new nor enough to ask: where are the women? We also have to ask where they aren’t.

We need not go very far for an answer: The Washington Post recently compiled data from events hosted by six leading think tanks in Washington, DC. They found that not a single woman spoke at more than 150 events on the Middle East. Of the 232 total events included in the Post’s data set, fewer than 25 percent of the speakers were women. According to the Op-Ed Project, women author only 10-20% of op-eds. Another way to look at the status quo: women over 65 (a group that currently includes a presumptive frontrunner in the 2016 presidential race) are less likely to be cited as an expert in the media as are boys between the ages of 13 and 18.

Elmira Bayrasli and fellow journalist Lauren Bohn, co-founders of Foreign Policy Interrupted (FPI) are asking: why? Bayrasli cited the Washington Post’s numbers at a recent event to punctuate FPI’s mission as an organization dedicated to “amplifying the voices” of women in foreign policy.

As a “visibility platform,” newsletter, and information clearinghouse for new voices, FPI does not, co-founder Bohn said, see its mission as “saying we need women in the conversation for diversity’s sake.” Instead, the eponymous interruption FPI seeks to make is on behalf of all groups who are underrepresented when it comes to talking about foreign policy. “When you have more voices at the table,” Bohn said, “you have a more likely environment for possible solutions.”

Bayrasli and Bohn are “advocating” to hear more commentary and see more column inches from women, people of color, and thinkers from outside the United States.

“It’s about adding value,” she emphasized, an approach that resonates with Ben Pauker, executive editor of Foreign Policy magazine. He realized that Foreign Policy readers were “seeing a lot of the same voices” and made a dedicated push to increase the number of women among their regular columnists-a tally that is now up to 11 from only one. “It just makes us a better publication,” Pauker told the audience. “There’s no other way to say it.”

Why does injecting previously unheard voices into the mix add value? “You find it in small, little, fine-grained ways,” said Pauker. Women may have different types of sources from their male counterparts, for instance. Bayrasli singled Kim Barker’s book, The Taliban Shuffle, as a good example of work done by a female journalist was able to gain access to women as sources as well as to male politicians-many of whom felt comfortable saying things to a woman that they likely would never have said to a male journalist. As a woman or a person of color, agreed Media Matters fellow and former MSNBC host Karen Finney, there are any number of reporting situations where “I might see something someone else might not pick up on.”

Finney quoted a Media Matters report coming out this month that finds about 22% of the experts talking about foreign policy in the media are women. This number that takes on even greater significance because it doesn’t reflect the instances when women are invited onto a television panel and don’t get equal opportunities to talk-a situation that to Finney and New America president Anne-Marie Slaughter pointed out occurs all too often.

“Yes, foreign policy used to happen in oak-paneled rooms with gray-suited diplomats, but it’s not like that anymore.”

Having more voices at the table also matters now more than ever, contend both Finney and the founders of FPI, considering that for most people, what counts as “foreign policy” has changed. “Foreign policy is not just war,” noted Bayrasli. “Yes, foreign policy used to happen in oak-paneled rooms with gray-suited diplomats, but it’s not like that anymore.” Education, health care, economics, and entrepreneurship all inform foreign policy these days, making the need for multi-dimensional approaches — and therefore more voices at the table — ever more pressing.

Slaughter observed that this more integrative understanding of foreign policy became a mainstream idea under Hillary Clinton’s leadership at the State Department, where thinking about foreign policy in terms of development, diplomacy, and defense became “the norm in how we’re talking about these issues.” The process of finding common ground between national security and development in post-conflict countries, for example, changes when diplomats involve women on the ground, versed in the realities of people’s lives, into decision-making dialogue.

If enriching foreign policy discussions with a wider variety of perspectives is why we need more women, FPI is chasing down how we get there. Bayrasli and Bohn identify two central issues that perpetuate the problem. First, academics and experts who are women have a tendency toward internalized perfectionism. They don’t want to speak unless they know they can get it exactly right, whereas, says Finney, “I love men, I really do, but they’ll talk about anything.” Bohn says that FP is focused on eradicating this “confidence gap.”

The second problem touches on the same issues raised by the HeForShe campaign, because it requires the intervention of male producers, editors and bookers to solve. In this age of fast-paced, 24-hour media, the people who need content go to writers and commentators who have performed for them in the past-most of whom hail from the intellectual cul-de-sac of old-school Washington. This dynamic keeps the ideas about foreign policy that get circulated in public discourse stuck in the past as well, says Bohn. But Bayrasli finds that men-once they understand challenges faced by women doing foreign policy work-are highly receptive to supporting their female colleagues, in many cases by recommending them to producers and editors.

Bohn and Bayrasli realize that changing the paradigm will take time. “This is a movement,” Bohn acknowledged. Producers and editors have an opportunity to “interrupt” as well, said Finney, by making diversity a priority. FPI wants to help them do that, by “highlighting the women who are opining” in their newsletter and with a fellowship program that provides editorial mentorship.

FPI has dissected and diagnosed a problem and developed tools to fix it. When asked by Slaughter what success will look like to them, Bohn replied without hesitation: “not existing in five years.” In the meantime, she and Bayrasli will keep right on interrupting.

]]> New America Foundation Weekly Wonk <![CDATA[The case for paternity leave]]> https://www.vox.com/2015/2/8/8001119/paternity-leave 2019-03-04T07:26:39-05:00 2015-02-08T09:24:00-05:00

Jane Greenway Carr is an ACLS Public Fellow and Contributing Editor at New America.

If you were a prospective father 20 years ago, getting paternity leave was almost universally a tricky business, no matter where you lived or worked. Often, men who tried to get it faced skepticism, bewilderment, or worse -outright hostility or retaliation-from their employers. Even in cases where men successfully arranged for time off after the birth or adoption of a child, they felt isolated and uncomfortable during the process. For Joe Jones, the founder of the Center for Urban Families who worked at the time for the Department of Health in Baltimore in maternal and child health, “it just felt so awkward.”

These days, the situation is different, to say the least. Countries like Germany have boosted paternity leave participation from just five percent to 30 percent with “use it or lose it” policies for dads, who are understandably reluctant to leave money (in the form of paid time off) on the table. Dad bloggers like Doug French of Dad 2.0 and Simon Isaacs of Fatherly populate an increasingly vibrant internet community around fatherhood in the U.S., which also includes sites like Mocha Dad. During this year’s Super Bowl, several examples of what Isaacs calls “Dadvertising” lit up America’s television screens. For French-who along with Isaacs spoke during a recent event at New America-the era of the “doofus dad” on TV is over. Borrowing from the oft-cited title of Hanna Rosin‘s book, Isaacs contended, “It’s not about the end of men. What we’re seeing is the rise of dad.”

Well, of some dads. The experts agreed that though we’ve made great strides, there is much still left to be done to make paternity leave a universal-and universally acceptable-option for dads around the world. ­

One strategy to get there: make the economic or business case for fathers taking leave. There’s a growing trove of evidence that suggests robust parental leave policies are good for the bottom lines of businesses and countries. On the country side, in just one example offered by Promundo founder Gary Barker, if women in Brazil worked outside the home in the same numbers as men (a situation for which a paternity leave policy could create the conditions), the country’s GDP would increase by 13 percent.

On the business side, both Liz Peters, who directs the Urban Institute’s Center on Labor, Human Services and Population, and Latifa Lyles, director of Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau, pointed to research that shows that strong leave policies reduce turnover and foster morale for employers and support workforce retention for employees. Although more and more companies are acting on this data, states have been slower to adapt. Only California, New Jersey, and Washington now mandate paid leave for both parents. Notably, the data coming from California (where the policy has been in place longest) indicate that businesses of all sizes-many that opposed the law before it took effect-are seeing positive results (or at least not negative ones).

“I think paternity leave is going to have big payoffs,” said Barbara Wankoff, Director of Workplace Solutions at KPMG, a company that has offered a parental leave to fathers since the early 2000s. According to Wankoff and Lyles, one of those payoffs is that paternity leave helps women stay in the workforce. Not only are women whose partners have the ability to take leave less likely to opt out of the workforce, says Lyles, but they are also less likely to experience adverse health outcomes such as postpartum depression and other complications.

The takeaway for experts in business, government, academic research, and nonprofit work is that when mothers can return to work knowing that their child is in the care of another parent, everyone benefits.

That includes the dads themselves. Mike Feigelson, executive director of the Bernard van Leer Foundation in The Hague, said that fathers who were early caregivers were healthier overall than those who weren’t, a subject about which Barker has also written about extensively.

And of course, when both parents have a turn as primary caregiver, the kids benefit, too. New America President Anne-Marie Slaughter mentioned her husband’s creative and fun parenting techniques, which expose her kids to a masculine role model who works as a professor and shares his extensive knowledge of movies and poker around the house while taking care of them. And Feigelson cited a study that found that when young children saw fathers doing domestic work, they would be more likely to choose a career in engineering or other STEM fields. To laughter and cheers from the audience, Feigelson reported that since reading this study, he has been ironing in front his 9-month-old daughter, just in case she’s picking up on those signals early.

Critically, the case for paternity leave is housed within the case for paid family leave, which would extend benefits to an even more expansive swath of the population. At the end of the day, this debate is about getting leave for anyone who has to care for someone who needs them at some point in their lives-not just parents who must bond with their children, said Liza Mundy, the Director of New America’s Breadwinning and Caregiving Program.

Even though the U.S. remains one of a handful of countries without mandated paid family leave and two recent campaigns for expanded paternity leave in the U.K. and Brazil ended in defeat, there was a prevailing positive attitude for the future. For one thing, said Barker and Adrienne Burgess of the Fatherhood Institute in the UK, even policy failure can be productive by challenging cultural narratives about fatherhood and garnering media attention. To keep that forward momentum, noted Slaughter, Wankoff, and Barker, women must also confront their own reverse sexism about mothers being superior primary caregivers.

This piece was originally published in New America’s digital magazine,The Weekly Wonk. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox each Thursday here, and follow @New America on Twitter.

Further reading:

]]> New America Foundation Weekly Wonk <![CDATA[It’s time to start talking about pregnancy discrimination]]> https://www.vox.com/2015/1/31/7953641/pregnancy-discrimination 2019-03-04T05:00:38-05:00 2015-01-31T15:00:02-05:00

Latifa Lyles is the Director of the Women’s Bureau at the Department of Labor.

As a mother of a young child today, I know much has changed for mothers in the workforce since my mother and her mother had children. But there’s one thread that ties our narratives together — a subject that’s too often fleeting in the broader discussion of working moms: the discrimination women experience during pregnancy, and after they return to work.

Every year, thousands of women file charges against employers for acts of pregnancy discrimination. In fact, charges of pregnancy discrimination filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) actually increased by 71 percent between 1992 and 2011.

What does pregnancy discrimination look like, exactly? It occurs when an employer treats a job applicant or an employee unfavorably due to her pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition. It could involve refusing to hire or promote a qualified individual because she is pregnant, firing a woman because she missed a few days of work to give birth, or forcing a pregnant employee to take unpaid leave. Sure, this behavior hurts pregnant women and their families, but it also hurts employers: In addition to breaking the law, these companies may be failing to retain some of their most highly qualified employees – losing out on their skills and productivity.

The bottom line is that women comprise a significant proportion of the nation’s talent pool, and when their contributions are constrained by patronizing and outmoded notions of what motherhood should look like (even well-intentioned ones), our workforce, our economy and our families suffer. At present, women serve as the sole or primary breadwinners in 40 percent of American households. In other words, women’s sustained participation in the labor force is critical to the economic security and stability of millions of individual families.

And yet, here we are in 2015, and some employers still view child-bearing and employment as mutually exclusive activities. Just last year, the EEOC announced a $30,000 settlement to a pregnancy discrimination lawsuit a woman brought against her former employer, Triple T Foods in Arkansas, which fired her the day she announced she was pregnant. This is only one example of the $3.5 million the EEOC recouped in damages for victims of pregnancy discrimination between 2011 and 2014.

We have a long way to go. But we’ve made progress in some ways. For example, just a generation ago, many women left the workplace when they became visibly pregnant. In the 1960s, almost half of women who worked during their first pregnancy left the workforce by the time they were about 6 months pregnant. Today, only about 12 percent do.

And we’re certainly better off than we were. In 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Muller v. Oregon, upheld a state statute restricting the number of hours per day a female employee could work and thereby set a precedent for paternalistic laws intended to “protect” women from the hazards and indignities of the workplace. While the Court acknowledged that the statute treated workers differently on the basis of sex, it also found that that a woman’s “physical structure” and “maternal functions” justified such unequal treatment.

Although the precedent established in Muller had unraveled by the late twentieth century and its discriminatory assumptions are no longer formally codified in law, they still permeate the cultural expectations surrounding women-especially pregnant women-in the workplace. These expectations can affect women even before they enter the workplace. Pregnant women face discrimination at job interviews and face much greater discrimination than other workers with short-term disabilities who may need minimal accommodations. For example, in a survey funded by the W.K Kellogg Foundation, 69 percent of respondents who reported being denied a pregnancy-related accommodation felt that their employers had honored similar requests from coworkers with other limitations or disabilities.

Knowing that this culture exists can and often does discourage women from requesting accommodations from or disclosing her pregnancy to her supervisor. In the same survey, more than half of respondents reported needing scheduling accommodations for prenatal visits and the like, but more than a quarter reported failing to request such an accommodation. That’s a shame, because the truth is that employers should be able to accommodate these requests with minimal expense and inconvenience.

How do we ensure that women who work during pregnancy are treated equitably, and begin to break down this discriminatory culture? That requires a combination of more progressive employer policies coupled with a set of robust legal and regulatory protections. At the federal level, women are protected by laws like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA), the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), but there is more we can do.

In June, at the White House Summit on Working Families, President Obama called for federal legislation that supports pregnant workers. Some states like Delaware and Illinois have taken the lead and passed their own versions of the proposed federal Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

The EEOC has stepped up, too, releasing new enforcement guidance last year to clarify the applications of the PDA and the ADA, as they apply to pregnant workers. This guidance “requires that employers treat women affected by pregnancy or related medical conditions the same way they treat non-pregnant applicants or employees who are similar in their ability or inability to work.” This means that employers have to make reasonable accommodations for pregnant workers if they also make such accommodations for other employees who have a temporary disability. The EEOC’s notice also includes women who undergo fertility treatments, are nursing mothers, or are discriminated against based on stereotypes and assumptions about motherhood.

Outside of government, workplaces across the nation are already teeming with examples of managers and employees alike who are dismantling outdated assumptions about the needs and abilities of pregnant workers, as well as the responsibilities of the employers who hire them. Combining statutory and regulatory protections with voluntary actions by employers can amplify this groundswell of progress. From the classroom to the board room to the factory floor, we see daily evidence of the powerful alignment of workplace policy, statutory protections and individual determination in ensuring that women can, in fact, do and be just about anything.

Building a workplace culture that aligns with the demographic realities of today’s labor force allows employers not only to stay on the right side of the law, but, as a growing body of evidence suggests, shows that employers can still do well with their bottom line by treating all of their workers fairly. After all, support for pregnant workers doesn’t simply benefit this generation of workers; it’s an investment in generations to come.

This piece was originally published in New America’s digital magazine,The Weekly Wonk. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox each Thursday here, and follow @New America on Twitter.

]]> New America Foundation Weekly Wonk <![CDATA[The State of the Union as Netflix]]> https://www.vox.com/2015/1/24/7877139/sotu-netflix 2019-03-04T02:58:55-05:00 2015-01-24T10:00:03-05:00

Heather Hurlburt is the Director of New America’s New Models of Policy Change initiative.

In the week leading up to this year’s State of the Union, the question of whether the speech and its rituals still matter seemed to get almost as much air time as the policy proposals the Obama Administration was previewing all over the country. Is the SOTU dead? Did Obama kill it? And what does all of this say about the state of our politics?

Answers: No, no, and the American spirit of adaptation is alive and well. Rather than the end of the State of the Union, what we saw may just have been (with apologies to President Clinton’s 2000 speech, which I helped write) the first 21st-century SOTU.

A week ahead of time, POLITICO’s Edward-Isaac Dovere asked whether the President was killing the State of the Union and answered “sort of.” What this seemed to mean was killing the big reveal – inside Washington, this was the moment on the morning of the speech when the White House press office released its themes and began briefing chosen insiders in the press and policy communities on the contents. Later in the day came , the release of excerpts, which were eagerly passed around, first hand-to-hand and later electronically, among those slated to write or comment on the speech.

Sounds a little like sharing a cigarette before there was vaping, doesn’t it?

For most of the country, the big reveal was always the next morning, when the local newspaper or TV station told you what the President had said while you were watching sports or sitcoms.

Instead, what we got this year just may be the State of the Union equivalent of Joe Biden showing up in your inbox every day promising another chance to win lunch with Barack Obama. News media reported daily on Obama’s key themes for more than a week in advance. For those of us who geek out on policy areas deemed less central to the national narrative – cybersecurity, say, or trade – our specialty publications got previews that we could Tweet and blog about amongst ourselves. And we did.

This year’s speech had a number of additional made-for-Twitter qualities, from subtweeting (dissing someone without using his or her name)to posting the entire text of the speech on Medium ahead of time to the dropping in of words trending in on-line debates and culture (transgender).

For his part in POLITICO, Dovere suggested the SOTU was turning “from a moment into a movement.” But this misses the point. Increasingly we consume media on demand, not on the schedule of the producers. Think of this year’s speech as a Netflix series – House of Cards: SOTU Edition. You could read about the policy proposals, then watch the speech, then listen to the commentary, then read it yourself. Or you could binge-watch it all at once, following along from the pre-released full text, watching on TV and checking out the pundits on blogs or Twitter. Or you could go all meta and follow Twitter without watching the speech, as several commentators I follow kept bragging they were doing.

Writing at Time, Maya Rhodan describes the SOTU as having slipped from the Super Bowl of American political media to the Golden Globes or American Idol. In other words, it’s a major television production with a declining viewership that nonetheless continues to drive conversation on social media. What she fails to note is how much influence those shows still wield in their respective industries, shaping marketing strategies and stars’ career trajectories. Biden and Boehner are the Fey and Poehler of our days. Ernst, McMorris-Rogers, Jindal et al? Those hapless early-round contestants who tried to sing something too big for their voices. Some day, maybe one of them will break out and make it big.

None of this, though, ultimately answers these questions: who watched, and how successful was the strategy in shaping the year’s political conversations? CNN’s quick-reaction polling had 72% of viewers say Obama was taking the country in the right direction – a number you could not match in many coffee shops or think tanks, and one most governors would envy.

Outside the U.S., the rest of the world listens for rhetoric and symbolism in our State of the Union. Global audiences also still read newspapers and more lengthy analyses – and so the coverage abroad looked much as it might have any other year. BBC highlighted Obama’s declaration that the economic crisis is over, striking a discordant note in Europe and the many other regions of the globe whose growth lags behind the United States. France’s Le Monde, still following multiple stories stemming from the recent terror attacks, didn’t fit the speech on its homepage. Israel’s Haaretz, with a 12-victim bus stabbing filling the news, posted video of Obama’s snappy election comeback (“I know because I won both of them”) rather than his rhetoric on Iran, ISIS, or anti-Semitism. Indian outlets noted with pride the presence of an Indian-American Ebola doctor as one of Michelle Obama’s guests, though American wonks critiqued the lack of a mention of the world’s largest democracy shortly before Obama travels there. Russia’s foreign minister described the speech as “a course for confrontation.” None found it worth mentioning that the economic rhetoric had been rolled out in the Midwest a week ago, or the Ebola initiative recycled from last year.

Here at home, dial-polling of independent voters and women organized by Democracy Corps found the two groups, so coveted for 2016, more enthusiastic about proposals that would explicitly benefit them, less so about those that wouldn’t.

Which brings us to the key point. Much to the chagrin of this and every speechwriter (and many listeners), the State of the Union is not about gorgeous, soaring rhetoric. It’s not about surprising new policy proposals. It’s about three things: tradition and ritual; packaging a year’s themes and picking a year’s battles; and getting in the faces of media, opinion leaders and voters who have a hundred channels of choices to focus on.

Smaller chunks on more channels. Long-form on demand for those who want it. Diffusion of experiences to different platforms, capturing different eyeballs, facilitating arguments and, perhaps, new kinds of agreement. The morning after the State of the Union brought two quite surprising developments in American national security politics. GOP House Speaker John Boehner issued an unprecedented invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress just a month before that country’s hotly-contested election. Liberal Barbara Boxer and libertarian Rand Paul announced they’d join forces to oppose new sanctions on Iran that many of their Senate colleagues are proposing.

Put the State of the Union down in the category of American institutions that technology transforms but doesn’t destroy. And get used to it.

]]> New America Foundation Weekly Wonk <![CDATA[One is not born, but rather becomes, a citizen]]> https://www.vox.com/2015/1/10/7522105/citizenship-jane-greenway-carr 2019-03-03T09:55:16-05:00 2015-01-10T12:00:02-05:00

Jane Greenway Carr is an ACLS Public Fellow and Contributing Editor at New America. She holds a PhD from NYU, where she has been a lecturer and done research at the intersections between U.S. literary and cultural history and social and political activism.

The more technology they accumulated, the more profoundly powerless they felt. That was the paradox Hahrie Han and Elizabeth McKenna discovered as they interviewed political organizers and operatives, researching the impacts of the increasingly complex digital tools available to activists. The more she talked to organizers in particular, Han could hear how “they were struggling to make it all add up into something bigger.”

Why was this happening? And what should civic participation in the digital age look like? Han and McKenna, associate professors of political science at Wellesley College, set out to explore those questions and the technology disempowerment paradox on two fronts. They co-wrote Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America, which, instead of detailing the tired narrative of the Obama campaign’s data and technology capacities, focused instead on the stories of volunteers on the ground; she found their work to be symbiotic with the campaigns’ data and technology innovations. In another recently-published book, How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century, based on two years of research trying “to get into the guts” of organizations, Han attempts to “to understand what make some better able to generate and sustain activism than others.”

Her conclusions? Quoting de Tocqueville, she said at a recent New America event that the most vibrant and successful civic associations are those that act as “great free schools of democracy.” In our 21st-century moment, Han says, this means “blending contemporary online and offline tools” and “build[ing] breadth and depth of activism by developing citizens” through a combination of transactional mobilizing-hitting the numbers of volunteers, donations, and registered voters you need to win-and transformational organizing-expanding participants’ capacities for future activism by empowering them in ways that endure after election day.

Although she wrote both books before the surge of protests around the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, Han pointed out, “I think of what we’re seeing right now in response to those events is emblematic of a larger sense that power in our society is becoming increasingly concentrated.” This transformational element, the ability to create spaces for individuals to change their feeling of agency in the world, is the key to engaging people in “activism that hat actually builds power.”

One challenge to organizing effectively in the face of consolidated power is that, as digital tools have proliferated and electoral participation in presidential elections jumped 10 points from 1996 to 2008, the number of available spaces for people of differing viewpoints to meet each other and discuss issues has dwindled, explained Mark Schmitt, director of New America’s Political Reform Program and Anna Burger, former Secretary-Treasurer of SEIU.

Creating those spaces is critical, according to Schmitt, to building the personal connections and trust that make organizing possible. For Burger, who began her career as a social worker, these spaces are also key to finding new ways to foster consistent political engagement, “day in, day out.” Han gave two examples of how investment in creating spaces for discussion yields results, pointing to Alex Watters, a paraplegic recruited to be an organizer for Obama’s 2012 campaign. When Watters expressed incredulity at his ability to organize from his wheelchair, his supervisor let him know that Watters’ job wasn’t to pound the pavement. “He said, ‘Your job is to inspire commitment in your neighbors,’ Han says Watters-one of the campaign’s most impactful organizers-told her, ‘so that your neighbors are the ones talking to their neighbors, organizing the community.'” Han also cited an example from her book, in which she compares two different letter-writing campaigns. One organization designed an e-mail template that was easy to use but impersonal, while the other paired up two community members who both wanted to write letters to work on one together in their own words. The latter organization, because it invested simultaneously in advocacy and community-building, had greater long-term success.

So where are the barriers to creating those opportunities to activate citizens and give them agency? For Jeremy Bird, National Field Director for the 2012 Obama Campaign, the “biggest problem in our democracy right now” is the systemic effort to hinder access to voting rights. “To come to this event, if you had to – 30 days ago – print something out from a DMV-like web site, fill it out, put a stamp on it, and mail it in in order to be registered to participate, none of you would be here,” he said.

Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that undid government restrictions on organizational campaign spending, has also impacted opportunities for organizers. Schmitt warned that catastrophizing Citizens United has done a disservice to organizers by dismissing and de-valuing the effectiveness of volunteering and making small donations. When you tell people that what they do won’t matter, he said, “don’t be surprised if they don’t do anything.”

What about forcing them to do something – in other words, mandatory voting?

“We have to do more than make it easier to vote, we have to make people want to vote,” Han said. One way to do that could be through creating “civic ecosystems,” where an array of opportunities for political engagement-such as civic lotteries, which have been used in Canada-converge, explained New America Civic Innovation Fellow Hollie Russon Gilman. The Gettysburg Project on Civil Engagement, which Burger co-chairs, is one current effort to centralize such experimentation collectively among academics, political operatives, and experienced organizers.

Whether democracies are established or emerging, Han says they share a question in common: where is it that people learn to be citizens? “Being a citizen isn’t something you’re born with,” she says. “It’s something you learn.”

This piece was originally published in New America’s digital magazine,The Weekly Wonk. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox each Thursday here, and follow @New America on Twitter.

]]> New America Foundation Weekly Wonk <![CDATA[What you should know about the ABLE Act]]> https://www.vox.com/2014/12/19/7418291/able-act 2019-03-03T04:37:14-05:00 2014-12-19T07:30:02-05:00

By Justin King

For many Americans living with disabilities, it has been a good week: now that the Senate passed the Achieving a Better Life Experience (ABLE) Act this week (following the House’s passage in early December) it is now on its way to the President to be signed into law. The ABLE Act creates tax-advantaged savings accounts for use by individuals with disabilities. Critically, savings in ABLE accounts won’t disqualify those individuals from receiving public assistance. While the bill is a win for many individuals with disabilities and their families, there are millions of others who are left out and need additional measures to pursue the same goals — financial security and upward economic mobility.

What does the ABLE Act do for disabled Americans?

The ABLE Act (H.R. 647/S. 313) creates savings accounts for use by individuals with disabilities where deposits are able to grow tax-free. ABLE builds off of an existing part of the tax code that allows states to offer similar accounts, dedicated to post-secondary education, called 529 College Savings Accounts. When ABLE Accounts are created (starting in 2015) qualifying individuals and their families will be able to open an ABLE Account and deposit up to $14,000 annually. As in the 529 model, those funds can be invested with more or less risk and growth potential, according to the vendor, state, and choice of the account holder. ABLE Accounts are effectively limited to $100,000, as larger amounts would cause the account holder to lose eligibility for public assistance.

Funds in the ABLE Account can be used for “qualified disability expenses,” which means “any expenses related to the eligible individual’s blindness or disability.” These uses explicitly include: education, housing, transportation, employment training and support, but include a fairly broad array of other expenses.

Why is this necessary?

Living with a disability is more expensive than living without one. There are added costs for wheelchairs, accessible vans, medical supplies and care, as well as myriad other unpredictable costs. In addition, savings are a key tool to promote family financial stability and upward economic mobility for children. The ABLE Act is a recognition of these additional costs, and the importance of savings, and creates a tool to satisfy these needs for those with disabilities.

You might be asking – what’s stopping people with disabilities and their families from saving right now? Existing bureaucratic rules in Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Medicaid (the primary means of assistance for the severely disabled) restrict individuals from having a meaningful savings cushion. In the case of SSI, this level is set at $2000 in financial assets for an individual or $3000 for couples. Those asset limits have not been adjusted since 1989 and their value has been cut in half by inflation. On top of managing life with a disability, these individuals have to live with the fear that an extra dollar in the bank will cut them off from their medical and financial lifeline and have had to watch that threshold shrink by the year. To see what this all means in real life, read this Vox excerpt of Andrea Campbell’s remarkable book, Trapped in America’s Safety Net, or watch her talk about it when she visited New America.

Will these accounts make a difference?

Some disability rights advocates are calling ABLE a major victory for individuals with a disability and their families. As the asset building field has long maintained, savings matter. They allow families to handle the ups and downs of everyday life, fixing a car, replacing a broken hot water heater, effectively. More importantly, savings are strongly connected to the long-term well-being of all members of the household. Children are more likely to be economically mobile if they grow up in households that save; they’re also more likely to go to college if they have some savings. Asset limits in disability programs don’t just afflict the individual with the disability, they impact every member of that household negatively. ABLE takes a bite out of asset limits for the disabled for the first time in 25 years.

Are ABLE accounts going to work for all people with disabilities?

There are real shortcomings to reaching savings goals through tax-advantaged account structures, as we’ve seen with 529s. Fees can be high and opaque. Opening an account can be daunting. The tax benefits give more to those with high incomes. Less than three percent of American families save in a 529, and those that have 529s have about 25 times the median financial assets of those without an account. These issues are likely to be replicated with ABLE accounts. Those with family members who can afford to make $14,000 per year in contributions are more likely to benefit than others.

In order to save money, Congress limited access to ABLE Accounts to those who become disabled before their 26th birthday, excluding millions of disabled individuals from owning accounts. The disabled are often excluded from mainstream aspects of life, now this new tool to empower individuals with disabilities is available only to some. Others, for example a 31-year old who was paralyzed in a car accident, will still have to live with the same asset limits as if the ABLE Act never passed.

What Comes Next?

Speaker of the House John Boehner, upon passage of the ABLE Act, said:

This won’t just make it easier for individuals with disabilities to save — it will help build a stronger economy and secure a better future for our country. After all, the principle that anyone can succeed no matter where they start is what gives the American Dream its staying power. The problem is, we’re letting outdated laws place arbitrary limits on the very people who show us what can be done with perseverance.

The Speaker is correct, our laws place arbitrary limits on the ability of all manner of Americans to save and pursue the American Dream. Asset limits are intended to serve as a check to keep the well-off from receiving public assistance, but the real impact of these rules is to prevent savings, discourage work, and increase red tape for people who are struggling. The ABLE Act offers a way out for some, however millions of disabled individuals will not benefit from ABLE. Millions more struggling against poverty are discouraged from saving by asset limits in assistance programs for the non-disabled. Encouraging savings can build a stronger economy and secure a better future for our country. It is time we started acting like it.

Justin King is policy director of the Asset Building Program at the New America Foundation.

]]> New America Foundation Weekly Wonk <![CDATA[Why Congress is broken: tax extenders edition]]> https://www.vox.com/2014/12/6/7341491/tax-extenders-broken-congress 2019-03-03T00:44:17-05:00 2014-12-06T10:00:02-05:00

By Lee Drutman.

Drutman is a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America and the author of the forthcoming book, The Business of America is Lobbying

Once again, Congress will be renewing the tax “extenders.” As always, a last minute deal is miraculously appearing. The special interests that benefit from an array of breaks can, once again, breathe a sigh of relief. As they do every two years about this time.

The “extenders” are a package of 50 or so special interest tax breaks (55 this year, at an estimated cost of $45 billion over 10 years) that go through the same strange ritual over and over again. First, Congress dithers and explores the ever-elusive goal of comprehensive tax reform. Companies that benefit from the loopholes promptly panic and they hire lots of lobbyists. Then, just as the session is about to end, Congress renews the tax breaks. But just for a year or two. So we can do it again at the end of the next Congress.

Tax experts generally think some breaks that have been perpetually extended should be made permanent (the ones that make decent policy sense, like the R&D tax credit, or the child tax credit) but most should just allowed to lapse (like the giveaways for NASCAR tracks or racehorse owners which are harder to justify).

But it’s not likely any will be made permanent any time soon. And it’s not likely that any will lapse either. Instead, we’ll just keep doing this again and again, every two years. Here’s why:

Tax extenders are great for lobbyists

By my count, there were 183 different lobbying firms and 222 different lobbying clients who mentioned either “tax extenders” generally or the R&D tax credit (which is the biggest credit) specifically in their 2014 lobbying filings.

This is almost certainly an undercount since these disclosures only go through the first half of 2014 and disclosures rely on voluntary reporting. In terms of dollars, the lobbying disclosures reports mentioning tax extenders or the R&D tax credit through the first half of 2014 cover $208 million worth of lobbying contracts.

Tax extenders are great for politicians

What better way to keep a bunch of big donors coming to your fundraisers than by keeping the fate of their favorite tax breaks up in the air until the very last minute? Once Congress agrees to a deal, individual members lose the ability to tell companies and donors: “we’re not sure what’s going with those tax extenders this time around, and hey, by the way, we’d love to see you at the next fundraising breakfast.” And nobody in Congress wants that to happen.

Tax extenders are a great accounting gimmick

As a bit of basic math, a tax break extended permanently will cost the government a lot more than a tax break that is extended for only two years. Since Congress always loves to pretend to be fiscally responsible, it looks a lot better to score the tax extenders at a mere $45 billion, as opposed to the hundreds of billions that their long-term extension or permanence would cost. It’s the same brilliant logic that a payday lender once gave me. He said: APR is meaningless, since the term of our loans is a single week.

In other words, it seems pretty unlikely that the two-year tax extender charade will ever go away. Lobbyists love them as they are, and politicians love them as they are. For them, the accounting works perfectly.

]]> New America Foundation Weekly Wonk <![CDATA[The cult of kiddie danger]]> https://www.vox.com/2014/11/23/7269383/cult-kiddie-danger 2019-03-02T20:51:21-05:00 2014-11-23T10:00:02-05:00

Lenore Skenazy is a public speaker and founder of the book and blog Free-Range kids. Her show “World’s Worst Mom” airs on Discovery/TLC international.

The Richland, WA, school district is phasing out swings on its playgrounds. As the district’s spokesman recently told KEPR TV: “It’s just really a safety issue. Swings have been determined to be the most unsafe of all the playground equipment on a playground.”

Ah yes, those dangling doom machines. All they sow is death and despair.

But while this sounds like yet another example of how liability concerns are killing childhood (seen a see-saw anywhere in the last 20 years? A slide higher than your neck?), it’s deeper than that. Insurance underwriters are merely the high priests of what has become our new American religion: the Cult of Kiddie Danger. It is founded on the unshakable belief that our kids are in constant danger from everyone and everything.

The devout pray like this: “Oh Lord, show me the way my child is in deathly danger from __________, that I may cast it out.” And then they fill in the blank with anything we might have hitherto considered allowing our children to eat, watch, visit, touch, or do, e.g., “Sleep over at a friend’s,” “Microwave the macaroni in a plastic dish,” or even, “Play outside, unsupervised.”

The Cult’s dogma is taught diligently unto our children who are not allowed to use Chapstick unless it is administered by the school nurse, nor sunscreen, lest they quaff it and die of poisoning, nor, for the same reason, soft soap in pre-k. It doesn’t matter that these fears are wildly at odds with reality. They are religious beliefs, not rational ones.

What’s more, this is a state religion, so the teachings are enforced by the cops and courts. Those who step outside the orthodoxy face punishment swift and merciless.

You can’t step outside at all, in fact. Americans are not allowed to believe any public place is safe for their children, ever, without constant supervision. Trust is taboo.

The logical under-current is illogical, as it’s based on a hapless understanding of basic statistics. How many children are kidnapped by strangers in a year? About one in 1.5 million — those are incredibly great odds. But odds don’t matter when we’re evangelizing about a vision of death and destruction.

That’s why, last winter, when a New Jersey mom left her sleeping 18-month-old in the car for 5-10 minutes while she ran an errand at an upscale shopping mall, she returned to find herself under arrest. Though the child was completely fine — he seems to have slept through the whole “incident” — the mom was found guilty of abuse or negligence. An appeals court of three judges upheld this conviction with the comment, “We need not describe at any length the parade of horribles that could have attended [the child’s] neglect.”

In other words: The judges need not spell out their Boschian fantasies. If an authority can envision something “horrible” happening — and even turn that adjective into a noun — it doesn’t matter how farfetched any actual scenario is. (In fact, the danger of dragging your child across the parking lot is larger than letting him wait in the car a few minutes.) Anyone doubting constant danger is a heretic. The mom is now excommunicated — that is, she’s on the New Jersey Child Abuse Registry. Good luck to her if she hoped to work with kids, at least while the case makes its way to the New Jersey Supreme Court.

And if you can stand to hear another one of these, a similar case concerns a Chicagoland mom who let her young son wait in the car for less than five minutes this September while she, too, ran an errand. An onlooker alerted the authorities, which brought not only the police but also the paramedics, who proceeded to examine the child as if he had been in grave danger. Sure, it’s the same grave danger any of us face when sitting in traffic — four minutes in an unmoving car. But magically, because the mom was not directly supervising the child, it transmogrified into a near-death experience.

Zero Tolerance laws are another code of the Cult, stemming from the same belief that while the danger to a child might seem minimal to the point of non-existent, to true believers it looms large and immediate. And so children have been suspended around the country for a plastic gun the size of a toothpick, a Lego gun the size of a quarter, and the infamous “gun” made out of a Pop Tart. And by “made” I mean “bitten into the shape of, by a 7 year old.”

How can we explain any of this hysteria if not by religious fervor? To see danger where there is none is no longer considered crazy, it’s a mission. Many authorities seem to believe the more danger they can imagine, the holier they are. In a letter home to parents, the principal at the Pop-Tart school wrote, “While no physical threats were made and no one [was] harmed, the student had to be removed from the classroom.”

Had to? Because…he had a Pop Tart? Or because the boy with the pastry pistol was magically dangerous, like a witch with her cat?

In a society that believes children are in constant danger, the Good Samaritans are often terrible people. So, recently, when a woman in Austin noticed a 6-year-old playing outside, she asked him where he lived, walked him home (it was just down the hill), and chastised the mom, Kari Anne Roy, for not being careful enough. Then this Samaritan called the Inquisitors. Er…cops.

An officer showed up at Roy’s doorstep and despite the fact that the crime rate today is at a 50-year-low, a CPS investigator was also dispatched to interview all three of Roy’s children. She asked Roy’s 8-year-old if her parents had ever shown her movies with people’s private parts. “So my daughter, who didn’t know that things like that exist, does now,” says Roy. “Thank you, CPS.”

It was almost seven years ago that I let my 9-year-old ride the subway alone and wrote a newspaper column about it. The result? A media firestorm. Back then I thought my crime, in the eyes of the public, was putting my child in danger.

But gradually I’ve come to realize my real crime was that I publicly disavowed the state religion. Talk show host after talk show host tried to get me to recant, asking: “How would you have felt if he didn’t come home?”

I could have sobbed and fainted, claiming it had been only a momentary lapse when I’d trusted my son in the world. Instead I said, “I wasn’t thinking that way. If I did, I could never let him do anything.”

Today it is a sin — and sometimes a crime — NOT to imagine your children dead the moment we take your eyes off them. The moment they skip to school with a Chapstick, wait in the car a minute, or play at the park.

We think we are enlightened in this quest to keep kids completely safe. Actually, we have entered a new Dark Ages, fearing evil all around us.

If we want the right to raise our kids rationally, even optimistically, it’s time to call the Cult of Kiddie Danger what it is: mass hysteria aided and abetted by the authorities. But as earlier holy books so succinctly instructed us, there is a better way to live.

“Fear not.”

This piece was originally published in New America’s digital magazine,The Weekly Wonk. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox each Thursday here, and follow @New America on Twitter.

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