Citizen Cartwright

Making your voice heard on legislation, regulations

I've come across two Web sites that may be particularly useful for informed and want-to-be informed citizens: opencongress.org and regulations.gov.

OpenCongress merges official government data with news and blog coverage, social networking, and public participation tools to give the public "the real story behind what's happening in the Congress."

I'm putting the link to opencongress.org at the top of my site. If you come across a site you think is better, let me know.

And with the prospect of lots of new financial regulations that may have a big impact on your family's future, I thought I'd link to regulations.gov, too. (Of course, there are plenty of other regulations — on health issues and product safety, for example — that you may want to weigh in on.)

Opencongress.org is a project of the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation.

The goal of the Participatory Politics Foundation is to develop Web sites that create new ways for the public to engage with the government; opencongress.org is its first —and, so far, only project.

The Sunlight Foundation seeks to make government transparent and accountable by digitizing government data and creating Web sites and other tools to make the data easily accessible to the public.

Regulations.gov is a project of the government's eRulemaking initiative to enable the public to "shape rules and regulations that impact their lives."

Blue-collar intelligence: Is your waitress smarter than you?

I thought I'd follow up yesterday's item on political polarization with one on a kind of cultural polarization: the divide between white-collar and blue-collar workers.

"Although we rightly acknowledge and amply compensate the play of mind in white-collar and professional work, we diminish or erase it in considerations about other endeavors — physical and service work particularly," says Mike Rose, a faculty member of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. "We also often ignore the experience of everyday work in administrative deliberations and policymaking."

Rose's mother, Rose Meraglio Rose, quit school in the seventh grade to help raise her brothers and sisters. She "shaped her adult identity" as a waitress in coffee shops and family restaurants, Rose says. His father, an Italian immigrant, finished just a grade or two of school in the old country.

Rose has been studying for nine years the thought processes involved in blue-collar and service jobs.

In an article awhile back in The American Scholar (published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society), Rose chronicled the on-her-feet intelligence his mother exhibited. He also wrote about the shop-floor smarts of his Uncle Joe, who left school in 9th grade and became a supervisor in a General Motors factory.

Rose concludes that everyday work is anything but mindless.

And, he says: "If we think that whole categories of people — identified by class or occupation — are not that bright, then we reinforce social separations and cripple our ability to talk across cultural divides.

"To acknowledge a broader range of intellectual capacity," he says, "is to take seriously the concept of cognitive variability, to appreciate in all the Rosies and Joes the thought that drives their accomplishments and defines who they are. This is a model of the mind that is worthy of a democratic society."

In the news

Another member of Aquino dynasty sworn in as Philippine president BBC News

Documents suggest that regulators were overly forgiving of banks during AIG bailout The New York Times

Kagan insists she didn't block military at Harvard The Associated Press

Poll: Favorable views of health care overhaul law increasing The Washington Post

Some doctors say 'toning' shoes don't deliver on hype, may cause injuries USA Today

Note to readers:

I'm in day-long seminars through Thursday; and I can't both be awake all day and in the middle of the night to compile my usual news summary!

So for today I've prepared an item on something I've been wanting to tell you about, along with a quick news rundown.

Liberals, conservatives live in different moral universes

At least, that's the view of Jonathan Haidt, who says he wants to "help both sides understand the other, so that policies can be made based on something more than misguided fear of what the other side is up to.”

Haidt, a University of Virginia psychology professor, says his research shows that liberals feel strongly about ensuring fairness and not harming people, and conservatives feel strongly about loyalty to one's group, sanctity, and respect for authority. While conservatives also feel it's important to be fair and not harm people, they're not as passionate about it as liberals, he says.

So let's apply Haidt's theory to the debate over closure of the Guantanamo detention center, for example. Liberals would want to close it because of their values of fairness and not harming people. Conservatives would be leery about closing it because their sense of loyalty to one's group makes them take a proactive approach to outside threats.

Haidt's data suggests that a person's views on sanctity predict their attitude toward abortion and gay marriage.

"I see liberalism and conservatism as opposing principles that work well when in balance," he says, with authority upheld as conservatives want yet challenged as liberals want.

In his effort to “help people overcome morally motivated misunderstandings,” Haidt has created two Web sites, civilpolitics.org and yourmorals.org.

The goal of the civilpolitics.org site is to promote "politics in which power and ideas are hotly contested but opponents are respected as fellow citizens who are assumed to be sincere in their beliefs. We hope to publicize the lastest research in moral psychology and political science to help Americans understand why people are so prone to demonize others and form hostile, self-righteous coalitions."

The site invites you to sign a pledge to take into account a candidate's civility when voting and to model civil politics in your own life.

Don't miss the 18-minute video on the site! 

You can test Haidt's theory by taking the "moral foundations" quiz on yourmorals.org and seeing if you show up as liberal or conservative as you are.

Haidt's advice to policy advocates: Frame your argument to appeal to as many points as possible on the moral spectrum.

In the news

Moscow wants U.S. explanation of arrest of alleged Russian spies The Associated Press

Supreme Court's expansion of gun owners' rights Los Angeles Times

Byrd's death may delay vote on financial overhaul bill Bloomberg Businessweek

Hurricane Alex to hamper BP's spill containment Reuters

FDA urges less use of antibiotics in animals to keep them effective for humans The Washington Post

How to tell the difference between typical teen moodiness and serious problems The Wall Street Journal

Daydreaming is getting some respect The New York Times

Reaction to the financial overhaul bill

Of course, the Senate and House need to vote before the bill becomes law, but lawmakers and President Obama have expressed confidence that the necessary compromises have been made to get the votes. (The death early Monday of Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., could complicate that.)

Here is a quick look at what the bill (HR 4173) would do.

Would it prevent future panics? The Washington Post editorialized on Sunday: "No one should entertain the idea that this bill, whatever its pluses and minuses, has banished the specter of financial crisis — because financial crisis is, ultimately, rooted in human folly."

That's true, of course. Just read the classic book, "Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises," which recounts, in a fairly gripping way, financial crises dating back to 1618. "Investors seem not to have learned from experience," author Charles Kindleberger writes drolly.

President Obama says the bill would put in place "the strongest consumer financial protections in history" and would "end the days of taxpayer-funded bailouts, and help make sure Main Street is never again held responsible for Wall Street's mistakes."

Most Republicans and business groups don't like the final bill any better than they did the previous versions.

Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., says it "will not encourage much-needed stability and confidence in our financial markets. It will not significantly reduce systemic risk in our financial sector."

John J. Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, which represents big U.S. companies, says: “Far from effective reform, this legislation includes provisions totally unrelated to the financial crisis which may disrupt America’s fragile  economic recovery and increase instability and risk."

Even bill advocates see gaps and tradeoffs, The Wall Street Journal says. The bill restrains banks but doesn't break them up. It doesn't end banks' reliance on short-term borrowing. The mechanism to put failing banks out of business doesn't ensure their failures won't be disruptive.

Republicans complain the bill doesn't address the problems posed by mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The bill counts on international talks to harmonize national responses to the crisis into a global whole, leaving concerns that U.S. competitiveness could be undermined.

Wall Street historian and finance professor Charles Geisst says the bill's effects won't be as fundamental as those made in the wake of the Great Depression. “It doesn’t go anywhere near,” he says. “It doesn’t change institutional behavior like that did. This is business as usual, with some moderation.”

Cornelius Hurley, a professor at the Boston University School of Law and former counsel to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, says, "This is a bill, despite its length and complexity, that’s more geared to the elections than the financial system.” He adds, “In no way does it address the too-big-to-fail issue.”

Sixty-four percent of Americans aren't confident that the bill will avert another meltdown, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll.

To paraphrase Bette Davis: Keep your seatbelts fastened; it may continue to be a bumpy ride.

Writing the regulations to implement the financial bill

Brett Barragate, a partner in the financial institutions practice at the law firm Jones Day, estimates that Congress has put in place no more than 25 percent of the details of the bill.

“Congress is doing this in broad strokes,” says Scott Talbott, a lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable. “Where the rubber meets the road is the regulatory process.”

Writing the regs is "out of the public eye, so a natural advantage that we benefit from — public outrage — we lose that a little,” says Cristina Martin Firvida, a lobbyist for AARP. “We know there’s still a lot here left to do.”

And regulators need data to justify their decisions. Historically, industry groups have dominated those information wars, The New York Times says.

Elena Kagan's 'nationally televised job interview' begins

There aren't many clues to her judicial philosophy, experts say. “She may be the second coming of Thurgood Marshall; she may be the first coming of Elena the moderate," says Dennis Hutchinson, a law professor and Supreme Court historian at the University of Chicago. "That may not come out in all the questioning, but it is a huge difference.”

Looking at the broader picture, Democrats will use the hearings to put the Roberts court on trial as beholden to corporate America, The New York Times says. And Republicans will put the Obama administration on trial as expanding Big Government and will question whether Kagan, Obama's  solicitor general, is independent enough to rein in that agenda.

Here is a primer on the senators who will be judging the prospective justice.

Results of the G-20 summit

In what a U.S. official called a "combo deal," the United States agreed to make the goal of cutting deficits in half by 2013 a G-20 initiative, in exchange for G-20 support for language making growth the top priority.