Don’t be a reptile this election

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

You’re not a reptile, so don’t let yourself be treated like one this election cycle.

In legal circles, the “Reptile Theory” is the basis for many plaintiff’s attorneys’ cases. According to a report by Dr. Ann Greeley that’s posted on the American Bar Association’s website, lawyers across the country have stopped trying to focus on building sympathy for their clients and instead are focusing on rousing anger toward the defendant.

The practice got its name from a 1960s theory of evolutionary biology by neuroscientist Paul MacLean, who said the brain at its most primitive core is “reptilian” and focused on survival.

Regardless of whether or not plaintiff’s lawyers believe that theory makes any sense biologically, they want jurors focused on safety – theirs and others. Lawyers aren’t just building a case against the defendant; they’re identifying a source of danger facing the entire community, including the jurors. A tire blowing out and causing an accident could happen to anyone, so the lawyer wants to give jurors a chance to punish the danger itself and hopefully eliminate it by punishing the defendant.

If a plaintiff’s lawyer focuses on the plaintiff’s suffering, on the other hand, then juries might find fault with that person’s actions. Maybe the driver bears some responsibility for the tire blowing out because he drove over a broken glass bottle. Besides, why should that guy get rich just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Plaintiff’s lawyers are not the only ones relying on the Reptile Theory. Political campaigns do it, too, especially this year. The unfavorable ratings for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are so historically high that the Reptile Theory is either’s best path to victory.

That’s a big reason why this year’s Republican National Convention was so much an exercise in Hillary fear-raising rather than Trump praising. Like a plaintiff’s lawyer, the party tried to make voters focus on their fears and punish the defendant – this week, Clinton. It’s why the first night’s theme was “Make America Safe Again.”

Of course, the Reptile Theory is only part of the reason for the party’s focus on Clinton. There are legitimate concerns about her candidacy. At the same time, some Republicans can’t bring themselves to say much positive about their own nominee, even if they should. In a seven-minute speech, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton mentioned Trump’s name one time, and then only his last name. Sen. Ted Cruz, whose wife Trump had insulted and whose father Trump had suggested was involved in the John F. Kennedy assassination, didn’t even endorse the candidate, instead encouraging his audience to “vote your conscience.”

I have no doubt that the Reptile Theory will be alive and well at the Democratic National Convention, when Trump will become the defendant.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with criticizing an opponent. A majority of Americans have serious concerns about both Trump and Clinton, so of course the opposing campaigns will try to use those concerns to their advantage.

The problem is that fear alone, unless you’re in imminent danger, is a terrible basis for making decisions. As those plaintiff’s lawyers know, frightened people are more easily manipulated. When we’e afraid, we’re more likely to surrender our freedom, we stop thinking logically and creatively, and we start looking for people to blame. And then really bad things can happen.

Moreover, the two major parties use these fears to maintain their shared control. Republicans and Democrats make us believe we must vote for one or the other – the one we fear the least – rather than give a third party or independent a chance.

Reptiles have been around a long time. They are good at individual survival – eating and avoiding being eaten. But they don’t advance, they don’t make the world a better place for their young, and they don’t do anything great.

So, yes, this election, vote your fears. But also vote your hopes and dreams, and your logic and reason.

Most importantly, as Cruz said, vote your conscience. It’s something that reptiles don’t have but humans do, which helps us invent things like democracies and elections.

Good news: Schools getting connected

Like all Arkansas public school students, Warren students Jackson Denton and Breize Fellows are being connected to high-speed broadband internet.

Like all Arkansas public school students, Warren students Jackson Denton and Breize Fellows are being connected to high-speed broadband internet.

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Ready for some good news? Do you remember a few years ago when Arkansas’ public schools had inadequate internet connections, and there was a big controversy, and it seemed like this was going to be another one of those huge political fights requiring a lot of taxpayer dollars?

Problem solved. Seriously.

Mark Myers, director of the state Department of Information Systems (DIS), told the House and Senate Education Committees Monday that by July 2017, Arkansas will be one of three states where every school is connected to high-speed broadband internet. The fiber network will give schools speeds of 200 kilobits per second per student, which is twice the generally accepted minimum standard of 100 kbps. The network is ready to expand those speeds to 1 megabit per second per student without having to buy new equipment.

Let’s review the back story. Back in 2013, it became obvious that many Arkansas schools didn’t have the broadband they needed to use the internet as a learning resource or to administer online tests associated with the Common Core. Arkansas received a “D” in the 2013 “Digital Learning Now” report from the Foundation for Excellence in Education.

The state was spending huge dollars and getting terrible results. An report by the Quality Digital Learning Study Committee had found the state had invested almost $160 million in vendor costs since 1992 on the Arkansas Public School Computer Network (APSCN), a backbone that was offering schools a measly 5 kbps. At a time when everyone was moving to high-speed options like fiber, the state was still spending 70 percent of its budget on copper wiring – basically, a stagecoach on an interstate highway.

Individually, schools were doing a much better job of connecting to the internet than the state was. APSCN was costing an average of $286 per month per megabit – the equivalent of a household paying $2,800 to $5,700 for cable modem service. Meanwhile, schools were paying about $13 to private providers to supplement their connections. Because of that, according to a 2014 report by the nonprofit group EducationSuperHighway, 58 percent of Arkansas districts were meeting the 100 kbps standard, largely through their own efforts. However, 17 percent offered speeds of only 10-49 kbps, while 5 percent were even slower.

Naturally, there was a big argument about what to do about all of this. For a time, some wanted schools to hook up to the state’s Arkansas Research Education Optical Network, or ARE-ON, a private network used by universities and hospitals. Schools were prohibited by state law from connecting to it, and private internet providers were opposed because they didn’t want to compete with the government. There was talk of a special legislative session.

Then a consultant, CT&T, found that connecting to ARE-ON was not cost-effective and that instead the state should partner with those private providers. The move to connect to ARE-ON lost steam. Newly elected Gov. Asa Hutchinson ordered DIS to create a high-speed backbone for schools. The state worked with than 20 private providers. The timing was good because more fiber was being laid. In some cases, schools were let out of contracts that extended past the July 2017 goal.

The state is connecting to high-speed internet for about the same cost it was spending on those old slow connections. The annual total cost is just under $13 million a year, a fraction of the $2.19 billion budgeted for the public school fund in fiscal year 2017. E-rate, a federal program that provides funding for schools and libraries, will pay for 80% of the $6 million in transport costs. School districts don’t have to pay anything to be part of a secure statewide network.

So now, by the start of the 2017-18 school year, every public school student in Arkansas will have access to fast internet connections. Those connections will enable them and their teachers to use the internet for instruction and for school projects. Districts will spend less or, eventually for some, nothing on textbooks, which are extremely expensive, inflexible, and quickly become outdated. And as demands increase, so can the network. The big political fight never happened, and everybody got what they wanted.

Told you this was some good news.

Related: How two sisters and a cup of coffee changed a school.
In West Memphis, it’s all connected.

Spend less to tax less

Lt. Governor Tim Griffin says tightening state government's finances is the necessary first step to cutting taxes.

Lt. Governor Tim Griffin says tightening state government’s finances is the necessary first step to cutting taxes.

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Lt. Governor Tim Griffin is pushing an idea: Cut spending first and then cut taxes. It’s so crazy it just might work, which is why he wants to try it in Arkansas and why, hopefully, someone will try it in Washington, D.C.

Griffin, who has announced he is running for re-election in 2018, points to the state’s ranking in the high 40s in many areas. Sitting across the table from me in a Little Rock coffee shop, he said the state can’t get to the top by tweaking. “Bold is the only option” he said.

A top priority would be the state’s income tax. It ranks in the middle of the country, according to the Tax Foundation, but the top rate, 6.9 percent, is tied for 14th highest and hits all filers with incomes of $35,099, which is not exactly Walton money.

Arkansas’ top rate is higher than all its surrounding states, including Texas, which has no income tax. Thus the state is at a competitive disadvantage, which is one reason Gov. Asa Hutchinson wants to cut income taxes next year, as was done in 2015. Hutchinson probably will propose relatively modest cuts. Griffin wants to go big.

The problem, Griffin says, is that elected officials who talk about tax cuts run into a brick wall erected by those who argue that the state won’t have enough revenues to meet critical needs. To get past that, the state must make reforms to meet those needs with fewer dollars.

The simplest way of looking at how the state spends money is its general revenue budget, which in fiscal year 2017 is $5.3 billion. Griffin says making government 10 percent more efficient, which is really doable, would free up $530 million – enough for a substantial income tax cut along with increased spending in other areas, such as highways.

Griffin is talking about not just cutting waste, fraud and abuse, but instead undertaking systemic reforms of state agencies, many of which he says were designed before the remote control was invented. He says if a boat is designed to require six rowers, it does no good to try to propel it with four. Instead, change the boat so it only needs four.

“Make smart government your focus. … If you just cut, you still have the same inefficient systems in place that require the inefficient resources,” he said.

Last year, Griffin undertook a review of the state’s massive Department of Human Services, which takes care of a lot of the state’s neediest residents and is a mess. Its new director, Cindy Gillespie, now is reorganizing it. Griffin wants to see the same effort undertaken across state government. He started by cutting one position from his three-person office.

Griffin says state government has a moral obligation to spend taxpayer dollars efficiently. He says Arkansas must be competitive with other states. And, it must prepare for the day when the debt-ridden federal government starts sending less money to Arkansas.

And that brings us to Washington, D.C., where Republicans adhere to two entrenched beliefs that are very different from what Griffin, a former Republican congressman, is describing. One, “starve the beast,” says government can be shrunk by depriving it of money through tax cuts. The other belief is that tax cuts generate so much economic growth that spending cuts aren’t really necessary. Donald Trump’s plan reflects that belief – tax cuts without spending cuts – which is why the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says it could add $11.5 trillion to the national debt.

Republicans in Washington over the past few decades have pledged allegiance to those two beliefs, enthusiastically cutting taxes without insisting on cutting government. Democrats shook hands on that bargain because they like to spend without taxing, too. The result has been the national debt ballooning from $1 trillion in 1981 to $19.4 trillion today. Unfortunately, money did not grow on trees, and the beast wasn’t starved because it could reach across the table into the future and steal food from the plates of our children and grandchildren.

All of this should make perfect sense to those of us who live on a budget. If you are struggling to make ends meet, you look for waste and inefficiency in your spending first, and certainly before you switch to a lower-paying job.

It makes sense in government, too, where being smart should be the focus, and where the state of Arkansas is a good place to start.

Related: If Trump or Clinton succeed? More debt.

When were the good old days?

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

All the bad news and societal changes lately probably have a lot of people yearning for the good old days. When exactly were those?

If someone invented a time machine to transport you and me to other eras, imagine what we would see.

Let’s start our trip in the 1700s, as the nation was being founded on democratic ideals. Traveling to that time period, we might land in the middle of a slave auction where people were being sold as property. Picture the cries of sorrow we would witness as husbands and wives were separated and as children were yanked forever from their families. Around us, the buyers would not be troubled enough by the scene to stop what they were doing. Meanwhile, society continued to compromise its values to allow it to continue.

Maybe the time machine might then take us to 1838-39, when the Cherokees were forced by the government to march west from their native land across the Mississippi River, trudging through Arkansas along the way. Of the 15,000 who started the Trail of Tears, 4,000 died.

A couple of decades later came the Civil War, in which 620,000 men died, or about 2 percent of the population or the equivalent of 6 million today. At Gettysburg, 51,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed or wounded in one battle. The wholesale indifference to human life would be striking. We would watch troops line up across an open field from each other and then just start shooting, until someone gave the order to advance. According to the Civil War Trust, almost as many troops on both sides died while prisoners of their once and future countrymen as the number of Americans killed in the entire Vietnam War.

Our time machine might then take us to the Industrial Revolution, where in the latter 1800s and first part of the 1900s, children instead of going to school toiled unceasingly in terrible factories that employed them because they worked cheap and were easier than adults to control.

Along the way, the time machine might stop in Elaine, Arkansas, in 1919. An organizational meeting of a farmers’ union led to a race-based shootout and then days of bloodshed. Whites descended on Elaine, along with troops sent by the governor. According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “Although the exact number is unknown, estimates of the number of African Americans killed by whites range into the hundreds; five white people lost their lives.”

From there, the time machine might take us to the 1950s – seen by many as an idyllic era. But for many Americans, it wasn’t exactly Mayberry. Society was set up on a separate but unequal foundation, and African-Americans, including World War II veterans, were forced to live second-class lifestyles. Suddenly transported to that environment, you and I would be shocked at the injustices and inequalities suffered by people who, in many cases, are still alive today.

Would you really want to go back to that? Would you really want to go back to any of those earlier eras?

The point is not that things have always been terrible. It’s that every era has had its troubles and persecutions – this one no more and in many ways far fewer. Children today spend their days in schools (yes, imperfect ones) instead of working for pennies in squalid factories with little hope of lifelong advancement. Likewise, the United States remains an imperfect union, but progress has been made in creating a more just society for people of all races. Even the problems that seem so bad today are not as bad as they were recently. Violent crime dropped 16.2 percent from 2005 to 2014, the FBI says. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy created 287,000 jobs in June, which is really good. The unemployment rate in Arkansas is the lowest it’s ever been at 3.8 percent. True, that’s partly because many frustrated workers have left the workforce. But still.

Ecclesiastes 7:10 says, “Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For you do not inquire wisely concerning this.” Pining for the past is pointless and ignores the past’s problems.

Anyway, no one has invented a time machine yet, so we can’t go back even if we wanted to. We can only learn from history, live in the moment, and try to make the future better.

One of us for president?

Elections aheadBy Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

What would happen if the president were an average person, not a member of the country’s political and wealthy elite? Matthew O’Connor would like to give Americans a chance to find out.

The Ohioan is trying to mount an independent presidential campaign and wrote me recently looking for someone in Arkansas to collect signatures. Prospective presidential candidates in this state must collect only 1,000, which is pretty doable, but the deadline is August 1.

What led a father of three with no real political experience, no support and no name recognition to run for president? His big issues are corruption, the national debt, and the failure of the country to produce the right kind of candidate. His website is www.darkhorse2016.com.

“I just felt like no one was doing it for the right reason,” he told me. “I felt that a lot of people felt like … either they deserved it, or it was their turn, or they could buy it, and I thought it was about time that somebody did it because they wanted to serve the country and serve the people.”

A lot of Americans are looking for the same thing right now, considering the two major party nominees, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, have historically high unfavorable ratings. It seems the current system is not producing humble, service-oriented candidates like the famed Cincinnatus, who in 458 B.C. left his small farm to lead Rome through a crisis and then returned to the farm.

O’Connor won’t get very far in 2016. While the bar for making the ballot in Arkansas and some other states is low, in many states it is impossibly high for all but the best-connected candidates.

Maybe it should be. Every walk of life includes a system for winnowing out the wannabes. In business, you move up the corporate ladder. In sports, you prove yourself in college and in the minor leagues. And in politics, candidates are elected to something less than president, make a name for themselves, and then run for the nation’s highest office. On rare occasions, someone with success in another walk of life – Trump, President Dwight Eisenhower, President Ulysses S. Grant – has gotten a shot at the title. There’s no “American Idol” for presidents, and thank goodness.

O’Connor is not a billionaire business mogul or a famous general. He says he’s been able to balance life’s important areas – as an information technology professional, a father of three and a happily married husband who the day after our interview was planning to celebrate his 20th wedding anniversary.

“I know that sounds like a strange thing to say, but there’s a lot of success in that,” he said. “A lot of people don’t manage those things.”

Could someone like that be president? Could America benefit from leadership by competent, moral persons plucked temporarily from Main Street? Would those people be better at balancing budgets and serving the people than the political and cultural elite? Or would Main Street Americans be like decent high school baseball players suddenly facing Major League pitching? A lot of us probably could read a speech off a teleprompter. Could we sit across the table from Vladimir Putin?

If you’re thinking you’d like to write in O’Connor as a protest vote on Election Day, you can’t. There is no provision in Arkansas law for write-in presidential candidates. He must collect 1,000 signatures, which is a steep hill to climb for someone without Arkansas roots or campaign donations.

If he doesn’t, there’s still enough time for Arkansans to qualify a favorite son or daughter for the ballot. They wouldn’t win, of course, but at least they would offer another choice.

Some suggestions?

– Sam Sicard, president of the First National Bank of Fort Smith. In an age of self-promoters, he cares about ideas and doing the right thing.
– Kevin Kelley, head coach of the Pulaski Academy Bruins, the high school football team that doesn’t punt. He’s a creative, data-driven thinker.
– Mark DeYmaz, pastor of Little Rock’s Mosaic Church, where people of all races and income classes worship under one roof. He brings people together.
– Mary Carol Pederson, founder of The CALL in Arkansas, which recruits families to foster and adopt children. She focuses on kids and the future.

Want to vote for one of those people, or Matthew O’Connor, rather than Clinton, Trump, or one of the third party candidates? The deadline for collecting signatures is August 1.

Related: It’s OK to vote for someone else.