Driving While Texting

Christmas time replete with "Jingle Bells" and the feeling of peace on earth good will toward men is quickly replaced with the race to New Year: a festive atmosphere of resolutions, fireworks and partying with Akon's "Smack That" in the background.

Thinking about this often intoxicating atmosphere made me question an electric freeway sign I saw driving to Sacramento from the Bay: "No Texting while driving on Jan 1". I thought to myself: the cops must be worried about people driving and suddenly overcome with the urge to text HIPPY NEW YARE! to their friends. Surely this phenomenon would be limited to these days of celebratory devotion where party-goers blur their good judgment and reality with a panoply of gleeful hedonisms.

Seriously: why the heck would any one text while they are driving unless they deft?

Apparantly many more than I would have thought.

The warning is not just FOR new year ringers, it is a new law coming into force on January 1st.

What struck me as the most bizzare: the penalty is $20 for a first offense, and $50 for a second. There may be additional raises, based on a point system. Here is the kicker: there is no record of the violation on an offendor's DMV record.

This made me wonder: if texting was such a problem, if it causes so many car accidents that it warrants a ban: why does the offense render such miniscule punitive measures? After all: getting caught drunk driving and you lose your license and go to jail. I am not arguing texting for 10 seconds and being a drunk-driver are equivalent, but rather, why would a law with such a puny punishment actually deter someone from committing the infraction?

It is true that the NTSB found a deadly L.A. train wreck caused by an engineer losing track while texting.

California is not alone in banning motorists from Driving While Texting (DWT). New York state has also passed legislation to stop DWTs after five high school students were killed while speeding and texting.

While I could not find statistics on DWT related accidents from the NTSB or the CA DMV, I am interested to find out what incentives motorists would see fit to keep them from texting while driving. If common sense is not enough: will losing a $20 bill actually do the trick?

No softballs for Kashkari, Merry Christmas for Auto-industry

I do not readily admit (and since my blog has a readership of 2, this doesn't count) to being an avid fan of C-SPAN. Generally taking a loathsome approach to 99% of T.V., CSPAN is one of those channels where I can simultaneously avoid commercials and dodge the media's analysis (forming my own) of the hot potato in the political world. CSPAN is the Sesame Street to MSNBC and Fox's telenovela styled drama.

Today's letter is: B. B is for Bailout.

1. TARP in the Financial Services Cmte.

The story in the U.S. Congress today was especially nail-biting, especially for a lame-duck session.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters, among others, tore into Neel Kashkari - the Indian whizkid up at treasury managing TARP. Essentially lawmakers grilled him over why the Treasury has spent half of the $700 billion on what Robert Reich calls the worst kind of trickle down economics.

At one point I thought Representative Manzullo would jump out of his seat and give Kashkari one of those tough-guy chest pokes. Instead: he called for the Assistant Secretary's resigation. To quote the Honorable Manzullo (R-IL): "You sit here in charge of all this money, and you can't say if a $3 million bonus is excessive. If you cant take a position on a $3 million bonus in a failed company who is owned by the government ... on the basis of your answer I think you should step aside."

He charged that Kashkari (whose parents are from Kashmir) simply could not identify with his constituency (with a media income of 41K/annum and an unemployment rate of 11%). While this may have gone too far, you wouldn't have known it from Kashkari: he was the icon of Teflon Don. Perhaps he had to keep reminding himself where he was: the halls of a congress that passed a 400 page bailout bill complete with goodies and pickings and then expected proper oversight and 100% answers to what are undoubtedly complex. Perhaps Treasury should have appointed a comedian instead of a former NASA engineer.

Notwithstanding the house shows of frothing and anger: they got little from Kashkari who maintained that the bailout has made significant process despite having to make continuous changes based on "events on the ground." Another sign this TARP has been turned into a hot-air ballon and is now soaring above the rest of us who are mostly stuck with our bad assets and credit.

2. The Auto Industry may get their check with strings attached

After reading the full text (nearing 40 pages) of the bill, approved by some playing around with the House rules (of which I didn't fully understand), I felt not the least bit sorry for the thick strings and demands that lawmakers impose for the 14 billion "bridge loan" (to know where?) they are offering the auto manufacturers.

I do however feel that the bill fell short of what could have been specifics - especially with their wording on seeing progress toward "environmentally sustainability." Yesterday's testimony by Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook made it ever clear that if fuel economy targets and standards are not in the law, but are simply promises: they will not be adhered to. Unfortunately not one target was put in the bill. While this may not have been the venue for such an action, one thing is clear: congress had flights to catch back home. Rather than hash out the details for specific targets and incentives, they decided to defer this to a designated official by the President who will watch over the auto companies who receive loan monies.

While I am no expert, and therefore withhold comments on what I think of the to-be "President's designee" (Car Czar), if the bill passes the Senate, all I can hope for is someone who will not sit on their hands and let the auto companies take the money and drive off. While this seems unlikely to happen (as there are several stipulations in the bill to prevent this : I worry that we could soon be choking on the noxious combustion fumes of an auto industry that can't get its act together even with oversight. When this happens they'll be back (maybe in a new Escalade Hybrid) with, yet again, cap in hand.

I ponder who will be the next to line up as apparently the Christmas holiday has decided the needy are yesterday's zeitgeist and now 'tis the season to be charitable to failed big business. Congress may just give the big three a nice Christmas gift in their corporate stocking. They did it to save hundreds of thousands of jobs, so I hope it works. Lets hope the manufacturers don't return taxpayer money with coal.

Learning to Speak American (P1)

One of those melting pot sequences

Driving down Telegraph Avenue through Berkeley to Oakland and you might notice a slew of Ethiopian restaurants. If ones ventures toward the South Bay, opposite San Francisco, you'll hit the town of Fremont. With the sunroof down, you shouldn’t miss the rich smell of curry cooking if you go down a main drag. Keep driving south, taking a bit of a detour through Watsonville and Gilroy (home of the Garlic festival) and you'll pass strawberry and tomato fields filled with Latino-immigrant workers. A National Public Radio report today noted that Cupertino, a Silicon Valley city, just recently became majority Chinese. Veer off of the I-405 Santa Monica Freeway down Magnolia Street and you might find 80% of the signs are in Vietnamese. These immigrant enclaves in California, indeed America, are endless: anyone who has been to Queens , NYC can spot a Dominican, Russian, Colombian, Italian and Jamaican in one blink (though the may not know it).

There is no indicator better than immigration to refute any claim that America is something other than a bastion of hope, a beacon of possibilities. If such is the case, the 57.4% increase in immigration from 1990 to 2000 (some 11 million legal immigrants) is a telling sign In times of economic uncertainty, this has been cause for consternation - with anti-immigrant fervor always an incremental increase in the unemployment rate away.

Perhaps us Americans, fueled by our media, are prone to look at the huddled masses in the near-future, seeing a dismal increase in the unemployment rate, and bring up that tireless worry: will some foreigner get my job?

My job, as immigration paralegal for a prominent law firm, is directly related to this question. For some it is a question of a shot at the land of milk and honey; for those who see immigrant communities as a threat, or nuisance, they might wonder if our milk might sour and our honey disappear.

As a general blood-letting of the world economy ensues, the stock market indices continue to decline, firms suffer layoffs - of foreigners and otherwise - some wonder if, even done legally, its such a good time to allow porous borders.

In a three part series, I'll address what I have experienced as the concerns of both citizens and foreigners of immigration in a time of economic uncertainty. First: personal reflections on growing up with immigrants. Second: an in-depth view of those larger looming questions of immigration as "homeland security". Third: some hopes for our immigration system in this hybrid-mixed melting pot named after an Italian cartographer.

The White Guy

I grew up in a typical WASP household: Our church songs were morose and somber, “Get out ma’ grill” meant “Retrieve the grill, I’m gonna BBQ,” the word ‘gracias’ was made into a funny joke about hairy rear-ends, shoes stayed on in the house, we ate everything but 'finger foods' with silverware, hip-hop and rap were discouraged, and we buttered our rice.

Yet, unequivocally, most of my friends growing up and to this day have been from immigrant families/minorities. This circumstance has allowed me the pleasure of evaluating my norms along side others: church can have soul, you took your shoes off at the door, hip hop and rap are awesome, ‘get out my grill’ means ‘leave me alone’ I now speak very descent Spanish, know how to eat with the correct hand, and soy sauce, not butter, goes with rice.

At least since the beginning of Junior High, I have gravitated to people of other cultures. Perhaps it was my mother’s insistence that I learn some of my distant native peoples’ heritage, her own diverse group of friends, or maybe my Californian upbringing: for some reason I was usually the only white guy in the group. I quickly learned that this meant my friends of the same background could talk about me in their native tongue and refer to me as the whitty. Gorra, guero, gringo, nguoi tay, pute: they all refer to the peculiar state of being a fair-skinned person of a foreign connotation.

What’s in a name?

My culturally divergent counterparts seemed to gravitate to what I thought was typically American. Nowhere more than given names has this been driven into me. For instance: my friend Anoop of Indian decent (before I knew the difference in Indian) became ‘Snoop’ (after the Dogg himself), Sanjeet became Sonny, Asad is Sid, Huy became Danny, A-Qi morphed to Alphonse, Gustavo turned into Gus. As I noticed these distortions, I wondered what deeper sense propelled people to change their names. So, in my many years of being one of the few white guys in the group, it has never struck me as strange at all: everyone, it seemed, was in some way trying to integrate with what might be more largely perceived as the “dominant” ‘white’ culture. While this does not hold true for everyone, and certainly my buddies Jamal and DeShaun offer a different correlation (explored more by the Freakonomics guys), I gradually noticed that integrating in this Western Democracy meant practicing some creative license with ones name.

For more mainstream examples, I offer two up and coming public officials – Governor Piyush “Bobby” Jindal and Anh “Joseph” Cao. Both immigrated to Louisiana and, perhaps not so coincidentally, are Republicans. To top it off one need only consider President-elect Barack Obama, son of a Kenyan, used to go around calling himself Barry.

Code-crackers and Meat-packers

It is important to note that these prominent figures, as well as most of my friends’ families, have mostly immigrated to the United States legally. However, if the good graces of the United States had not allowed such legal immigration to take place, we would surely have a much less diverse populace representing Americans from jobs ranging from Secretary of State (Albright and Kissinger, both from immigrant families) to your typical software engineer from your computer conglomerate (of which I work with everyday).

Most assuredly, economics tells us, so long as they can get away with it and there remain profit incentives, there would still be a steady flow of people from other lands flooding ours - legally or not. Economic progress will always and forever be a driver for the movement of labor. Absent lawful ways of traversing national boundaries would mean a steadier stream of illegal aliens. These flows of ‘illegals’, however, would be relegated to the shadow economies of which millions do currently exist in – tidying up your gardens, slaughtering and shipping your meat, selling you ‘discounted’ perfume (and the best tacos), rearing our kids as nannies and building our bridges.

In order to explore some of the differences between legal and illegal immigration, prime examples of blunders for both, and where immigration fits under Homeland Security: you’ll have to wait until part 2.

Drug Policy under Obama?

I am currently studying drug policies and trade law in their correlation with harmful chemicals that affect rural population. As such, I decided to look to see what Drug Policy under an Obama administration might look like. The results of my brief search will likely disappoint progressive and conservatives alike.

"I've got two kids, so I don't want anyone pushing drugs on them. And we have to take that seriously as a crime... but we also have to recognize that if you have a non-violent drug offender... [especially a kid].. the worst thing you can do is lock them up for a long period of time, without education... without any skills or training where they can get a real profession," President-elect Obama began his answer to a question on 'drug policy' at a September election rally.

Obama candid in his response, clearly disdains drugs (though he admitted to enjoying them in his youth), but believes that the incarceration rates reflect discrimination saying that "If we are going to have drug laws, it shouldn't matter that you are dealing in public housing or in the suburb out of your moms back yard, that has to be a basic precept."


Shortly after his tenure to the senate began in 2004, Senator Obama made a statement (which the Washington Post re-published) in support of marijuana decriminalization, he also rebuked legalizing it; and switched positions 3 years later during a Democratic primary debate - joining the rest of his colleagues opposed to decriminalization. Elections are of course well known for their ability to inspire conformity, and while politically this was a smart move by the President-elect, it is also telling that perhaps he may not fully have an opinion on drug policies past his train of logic that: prison sentences mean you can't get a job, having no job means it is easier to turn to crime and that "at bottom or even the middle of the industry, drug dealing is a minimum wage affair," to cite from Obama's Audacity of Hope.

It is important to note that the President has considerable authority over federal drug enforcement: a 1983 Supreme Court ruling put federal drug funding discretion directly into the hands of the Executive. Therefore: while the Reagan, both Bush and the Clinton administrations appointed "drug warriors" who lead the Drug War to the "utter failure" as Obama once called, even if more sensible voices prevail, the enforcement authority ultimately lies with the White House.

So, if Obama is loth to disclose or has yet to form a solid opinion on where drug laws should go, perhaps taking a look at a few of the people likeley to be influencing his authority over the matter will give us a sniff of what a first-term administration may bring to the table.

First, VP-elect Biden was a gung-ho drug warrior in the 1980s. Among other tidbits he was a co-sponsor of the anti-drug abuse act of 1983 which lead to failed fumigation and interdiction policies as well as mandatory sentencing minimums, but was also landmark legislation to fight against money-laundering. In the 20 years since Biden championed drug policies, he has since reversed position on some of the minimum sentencing laws. Citing poor information, Biden called his 1986 legislation support a mistake, making comments that seem to be along the lines of his new boss: “The past 21 years has also revealed that the dramatically harsher crack penalties have disproportionately impacted the African American community: 82% of those convicted of crack offenses in 2006 were African American."

Second, Attorney General nominee Eric Holder has advocated for sentencing minimums for simple posession. Executive Director of NORML recently commented that [Holders]
"attraction to the myth of ‘fixing broken windows’ and using law enforcement to crack down on petty crimes will swell an already overburdened, bloated, expensive and failed government prohibition against otherwise law-abiding citizens who choose to consume cannabis." To his credit, Holder represented the NFL during its dog-fighting investigation against former Atlanta Falcon Michael Vick.

Third, and least confirmed, is the rumored pick for Obama's "Drug Czar" (DC) spot - outgoing retiring Representative Jim Ramstad. The DC, who will run the office on national drug control policy, has those two R words which should get him in the door as a confirmation: Republican and Recovering. According to Politico.com, Ramstad is a recovering alcoholic - and a long time advocate of treatment for abuse. While this should point Ramstad in the right direction and give him the confirmation, according to the few articles I have read on the honorable representative, he has consistently supported federal raids on "medical marijuana clubs" and other places where the certain instances of marijuana selling is deemed legal (12 states in all). While this may change under an Obama administration that has flown towards the center, it would be nice to see Obama stick to one of his campaign promises to end such raids, saying that federal agents have better things to do like catching criminals and stopping terrorists.

The President-elect has tipped his hat at some of the policies he would prefer to see, citing the increased use of "drug courts" who assign treatment for substance abusers, signaling a relaxing minimum sentencing; and a criminal justice system that emphasizes training and literacy programs. The President-elect also discussed drug abuse as a public health problem, and would likeley support a resurgence of the 'harm reduction' debate especially concerning needle-exchange programs (which was killed by Clinton's drug Czar). Unfortunately, if the Ramstad rumors are correct, he may be trying to convince his boss otherwise.

In Summary:

The drug reform community is going to be frustrated with this first four years. A first term President with an economic crisis and two press-level wars will be tricky enough to handle. Decrminalizing marijuana, or really, veering much from the concocted but ultimately flawed narrative of a strong drug policy office as de-facto would put newly-elected Obama at risk. President Clinton's err of 'Dont ask, dont tell' out of the gates was a slaughter - providing enough red meat to check him in 1994. Even if the GAO gives current drug policies failure ratings, do not expect Obama to radically reform this part of his government first term.

Lets assume that Obama can keep some of these progressives happy, and does not alienate several of the blue dog Democrats and Bush-back-lash Republicans that voted for him and he is elected to a second term. Without fear of reprisal, Obama could cautiously and quietly decriminalize marijuana at the federal level - essentially telling his AG not to prosecute for non-dealing intent posession, at all - period. Moreover, President Obama could step up border-level interdiction but cut funding to DEA and DOD ineffective international drug erradication operations - a move if played right, could be shown as an anti-corruption move. These bold steps, combined with promoting research through NSF grants on addiction and drug research and a promotion of the top two or three state 'harm reduction' strategies and vet them for federal attention would be a huge step in the right direction.

Only time will tell whether Obama moves ahead with some slow and steady drug policy reformation, or we see his campaign overatures on the issues go up in smoke.