China repossesses giant panda as first installment of debt payment

Washington, D.C.—The Chinese government announced on Friday that as a first step in the process of calling in the United States’s debt of approximately $800 billion, it will repossess the National Zoo’s giant panda cub.

            “We will credit America $5 million dollars for the panda,” said Wang Liabo, spokesman for the Chinese ambassador.  “That means your country only has $799.995 billion left to go.”

            The National Zoo learned that the panda, four-year-old Tai Shan, one of fourteen such animals living in zoos across the United States, will be leaving for China by the end of the year.  “We don’t want to take Tai Shan away from the people of America who love him, but we would very much like our money back, please,” said Wang.  He added, “I don’t know if you have heard, but there is a recession going on, after all.”

            The Obama administration reacted calmly to the news, playing down fears that the panda recall will portend more hostile demands from the nation’s largest creditor.  “The United States is in no danger of losing all its money,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.  “That being said, the president would like the country to know that these next couple of months are going to be a bit hard.  We might all have to get used to having a little less to eat, or not being able to go to the movies like we used to, or maybe having to move in with Aunt Edna and Uncle Dave for a little while.”

            Gibbs paused.  “But the president wants America to know that he loves you more than ever and doesn’t want to let you down…” he said, his voice trailing off and a tear running down his left cheek.

            Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner worked through the weekend with their Chinese counterparts to try and negotiate acceptable terms for debt repayment.  “Obviously, this isn’t an ideal context because we don’t exactly have the money at the moment,” said Clinton.  “However, we are exploring a number of items that could be of potential interest to China.  We could probably knock off several billion dollars by giving them the Empire State Building, the state of Texas, or Miley Cyrus.”

             She added that if worse comes to worst, the U.S. could simply open up the Smithsonian and host a yard sale.  “I mean, we’ve got tons of crap in there we aren’t using.  We’ve got gaudy clothes, old dinosaur bones, and the most blasé artwork.  What were we thinking when we bought all that junk?”

Same-sex marriage and democracy

            For the past year or so, the District of Columbia’s city council has been engaged in a tug-of-war between factions as it has attempted to conduct the people’s business: first, it was a meddlesome Congress that tried to supersede all local direction of the city’s gun-control policy.  Then, an ongoing proxy battle with an arrogant mayor resulted in clashes related to education, recreation, and contracting policy.  Now, the Archdiocese of Washington is threatening to withdraw from its Catholic Charities partnership with the city—in which the Church provides social services to some 68,000 homeless and poor residents—if the council proceeds with its plan to legalize same-sex marriage next month.

            There are plenty of freedom-of-conscience provisions built into the bill: the Church would not be required to marry same-sex couples or allow them access to non-public spaces of their property.  They would, however, be required to follow non-discriminatory guidelines for entities receiving government money—e.g. extending health insurance to and facilitating adoptions for gay couples.  Since Catholic Charities would not, out of moral reservation, be able to meet those requirements, it would thus not be eligible to do business with the city.

            Reactions have been mixed: some council members say that the Church is not indispensible to the city and should not dictate its policy.  Other people are sure that more concessions could be made to satisfy Church tenets without subjecting gays to wholesale prejudice.  Still others have argued that the measure should be put on the ballot, as has been the case in dozens of states.  Mostly, this argument has come from gay marriage foes, confident that a law will be rejected if submitted to voters (a board of elections and ethics has twice denied a ballot initiative or referendum to go forward). 

            One recent opinion article in The Washington Post presented an alternative version of that argument: a gay man in D.C. who writes, “I yearn, too, to be married someday, but at what cost? To force same-sex marriage into law through the caprice of judges, the sympathies of a majority of various legislatures or even the fiat of a president can be viewed as a kind of tyranny.”  While it’s common for parties who are on the losing side of policy fights to rail against “activist” judges and legislators that don’t respect the “will of the people,” it is strange to see that sentiment from someone who is benefitting greatly from those two sources of legal redress.

            There are two main points to be made about this controversy: one, is that not all opinions are equal.  I can, at a basic level, understand why the Catholic church would deny religious services to gay couples: for the reason that spiritual beliefs cannot be legislated out of existence, nor are they something that the believer can choose to have.  To have faith or not is hardly a free and simple choice for most believers—although the same can be true about being homosexual.  (And yes, I realize that the religious community is not monolithic—there are undoubtedly Catholics who would gladly marry two homosexuals.)  However, governmental protection to practice one’s beliefs does not mean that discrimination is legal.  To say that the Church’s views on sexuality should be given equal consideration as should views on sexuality from a scientific, cultural, or human rights perspective is erroneous.

            Secondly, the will of the people is a fickle protector of civil rights.  Even though it is our duty to resist governmental encroachment on our liberties, the legislatures and the courts were never intended to be a reflection of popular opinion.  As dysfunctional as our Congress appears at times, the elected men and women always have to take a view of what the greater good to society is when they cast their vote, which sometimes entails offending their constituents.  The courts, to an even greater degree, do not merely affirm and clarify policy that the legislature has passed, but they sometimes must overturn it when it violates the Constitution.

            People (conservatives in particular) abhor the notion that one unelected judge can alter the course of history by deciding which laws are appropriate or inappropriate by the principles of our society.  Take these words of an ambivalent Supreme Court justice in the early 1950s: “how is it that the Constitution this morning forbids what for three-quarters of a century it has tolerated or approved?”  The case he was reviewing was Brown v. Board of Education.  The man was Robert Jackson, a liberal who was having doubts about overturning segregation laws (even though a decade earlier he was in the minority of justices who voted to uphold the rights of Japanese-American citizens who had been placed in internment camps).

         In the end, of course, he voted to end segregation.  But for him and others like him who have spurned the popular will to uphold the Constitution, I would hope that the people who are elected or appointed to run the government are chosen not just for their knowledge of policy, but for their ability to listen to all sides and create laws that demonstrate the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

When urban planning goes bad

         When the District of Columbia constructed a $40 million parking garage under a new shopping center in Columbia Heights, the assumption was: build it and they will come.  It comprises two levels and 1,000 spaces underground—plenty of room to park and shop.  And come they did.  Except there was one problem.

            They didn’t drive.  The garage has never been more than 30 percent full, even though the stores above it are well-trafficked.  People instead have come to the mall by Metro (one block away), by bus, or by foot, leaving the District with a money-losing cavern and egg on its face.  What was the design problem?  Planners applied a suburban model—where shopping malls and big box stores are located in such a way that people have no choice but to drive to them—to an urban area, not taking into account that the vast majority of customers may not have or need cars to access the store.

            This problem is emblematic of how suburbs have become the gold standard in the past few decades for land usage.  All throughout the Washington region, interstate lanes are being added, development is occurring in farther-west counties, and roads are being built through wooded areas to ease congestion on other roads.  In Virginia the problem is more pronounced: our roads are broke.  We are soon going to have no money to construct new ones—which isn’t so bad until you remember that if new road funding is cut to zero, new funding for more sensible forms of transit will also be nonexistent.

            This is all because of the shape that our suburbs (and those across the country) have been given by unscrupulous developers and planners.  Fairfax County is the largest jurisdiction in Virginia, but seemingly 90 percent of the developed portion consists of subdivisions, office parks, and shopping centers—all of which require miles of roads or acres of parking lots.  The county is home to the western and southern tips of Metrorail, but they only barely penetrate the county.  The vast majority of residents have no easy access to rail. 

         Yes, in a few years the Dulles corridor will see an extension of Metrorail, in conjunction with a redevelopment of Tysons Corner.  But in reality, that should have taken place decades ago.  And if it had, maybe upper Fairfax County would look more like Arlington, rather than like Loudoun County.

         It will not be easy to fix what has been done in Virginia.  The legislature is notoriously averse to raising taxes to provide Northern Virginia with transportation funding, making the prospect of a new transit network impossible to implement, even if Fairfax and the other counties had a plan—which they don’t.  That highlights the other problem: the local governments have acquiesced to the haphazard and inefficient designs of developers who seek to build upscale townhouses and McMansions to turn a profit.

         This passage from the Board of Supervisors’ comprehensive plan on land use sums up the situation:

“The pattern of land use in Fairfax County reflects a distinct separation among large areas of residential and non-residential uses. This separation of housing and employment further burdens the roadway system as people must commute long distances between home and work. Transit has not proven a viable alternative for a major portion of these commuters because the housing and employment areas not only are spatially separated from each other, but developed at low densities. Thus, transit service is inherently less efficient and productive than would be likely in more concentrated, mixed-use settings.”

Notice how the Board is excused of any culpability—as if this “less efficient and productive” mess suddenly sprouted out of nowhere.  It didn’t.  It took many politicians over many years not thinking about the long-term effects of jamming people into non-integrated sections of the region.  Thus, it’s not surprising when interstate highways and feeder roads are jammed in the suburbs while parking lots go unused in the city.

            Hopefully, with the Obama administration’s renewed focus on urban planning, energy use, and environmentalism, common sense will return to how our communities are organized.

The Metro crash: shocking in its mildness

            When we take a look back at mass murders and tragic accidents—the D.C. Metro and Air France flight crashes of last month or the Virginia Tech shooting of 2007, for instance—what outrages us the most?  Is it the fact that so many people needlessly died in a preventable accident?  Or is it because we knew that the tragedy could have befallen us and we are selfishly demanding, out of fear, that it never be allowed to happen again?

            To me, the Metro crash is many things: a warning to a society heavily dependent on computers that even the most fail-safe systems may indeed fail; a case of possible managerial neglect of passenger safety; an egregious example of what can happen when crowded public transportation is starved of funds to buy reliable equipment; and the personification of heroism among both the passengers and the train operator, who did everything they could to minimize the tragedy.

            Although the National Transportation Safety Board will not release its painstakingly thorough analysis for several months, the apparent cause of the crash seems to lie in a trackside circuit which flickered on and off so rapidly that its failure could not be detected by dispatchers.  In the “off” mode, the circuit could not relay information about a train parked on a curve to the following train, causing it to rear-end the parked train under the control of computers.  The train’s operator dutifully applied the emergency brake; but alas, since the train was traveling nearly sixty miles per hour and the curve limited her reaction time, not only did the train not have time to stop but she also did not have time to escape from the driver’s compartment.

            Even though only nine people were killed in the crash, the number is dangerously misleading: this was a reverse-flow train during rush hour, meaning there were probably only a dozen people per car.  Had it been two rush hour trains that had collided, casualties could potentially have numbered in the hundreds.  And that is the most unsettling factor: the failed track circuit could have been anywhere at any time.  There is no guarantee of safety.

            True enough, there is no guarantee of safety anywhere.  Each day in the United States, 119 people die in vehicular accidents.  Considering that this is Metro’s first crash in which passengers were killed since 1982 (and that annual rail fatalities on occasion don’t exceed double digits), taking the train is way safer than driving.  And undoubtedly more lives would be saved through programs that promote safer driving, rather than spending millions of dollars overhauling public transportation.  But we have become acclimated to high road deaths because we understand that humans are directly responsible for most of them; on subways and airplanes and trains, everything is highly choreographed by computers.  When a failure happens, it rattles our faith in the system.

            I don’t necessarily think that lack of funding is a direct cause of the Metro crash, in the sense that throwing more money at the problem might not have prevented it.  However, Metro also has to fix crumbling platforms, deal with increasingly crowded trains, and perfect its communication network.  Those items could potentially cause a disaster in the future if not fixed.  Metro is unique among mass transit systems: it has no dedicated source of funding, and each year it is involved in a tug of war between the District, the suburban Maryland and Virginia counties, the federal government, and the legislatures in Annapolis and Richmond.  Political infighting and grandstanding are part of the reason why President Obama did not include Metro funding in next year’s budget—he wants to see some stability before opening the money faucet.

            My point is that while certainly there are some tragedies which are preventable, terrible things can happen at any time and in the most controlled of environments.  Part of the solution is to take the necessary precautions to ensure that disaster is not repeated; but the other part is an acceptance that the risk inherent in common behaviors can never be eliminated, only minimized.  Millions of people taking minimal risks each day is what makes society work; the fact that we are so outraged when a handful of people die is a sign that the system is working.  Nine deaths in 17 years is an accident; 119 deaths every day is a regrettable fact of life.

Why Fairfax County should get the ultimate makeover: cityhood

            *Unless another Republican governor besmirches his/her office and brings embarrassment to his/her state, this week’s posts will be devoted to local issues.*

            Last week, The Washington Post reported that Fairfax County executive Anthony Griffin has suggested that it could be tactically beneficial to change our orientation.  He recommends that we transform ourselves Fairfax City or, simply, Fairfax—a chartered city of 1.1 million residents that is the largest jurisdiction in the Washington metropolitan region and where one in seven Virginians lives.  It is proximate in population size to the cities of San Diego and Dallas.

            The move is mostly political: Virginia treats chartered cities differently from counties.  Most notably, cities benefit by having control over their own road funding and road maintenance; all county roads are owned and maintained by the Virginia Department of Transportation, with which local governments sometimes have a love-hate relationship.  Ostensibly, Griffin is implying that Fairfax would be able to implement new taxes to pay for new and existing road capacity.  What is not clear is whether a new Fairfax City would be able to retain a larger percentage of the tax dollars currently sent to Richmond for dispersal throughout the state.

            That last point is a huge contention among Northern Virginians, who note that the wealth and vibrancy of the D.C. suburbs (largely defense contracting, communications, and IT firms) is disproportionately meted out to the rural parts of the state—with the result being that Route 29, which runs through some of the least populated counties of central Virginia, is in pristine condition.  Meanwhile, there are too few lanes and too many potholes on the feeder roads into the District, as well as unreliable funding for Metro and the Virginia Railway Express.

            Northern Virginians feel that even though we are home to one-third of the state population, hillbilly legislators who have no sympathy for the plight of the suburbs refuse to raise statewide taxes or provide adequate funding for roads and rails in the North—even though it truly is a statewide problem.  Many people who work in D.C. who either choose to live beyond Northern Virginia or who cannot afford to buy a house there commute for hours each day of the week from as far away as Richmond, making it more than just our responsibility to pay for our infrastructure.

            The Chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, Democrat Sharon Bulova, said she is open to the idea of cityhood.  But her predecessor, now-Rep. Gerry Connolly, says that with a multimillion-dollar budget hole, “This is not the time to be talking about taking on new responsibilities.”  This is coming from the man who, when he first ran for chairman, said that the way the Dillon Rule inextricably links the local governments to partisan infighting in Richmond is a “terrible impediment” to innovation.

            Basically, I think this a good idea, provided some basic conditions are met.  First, I would have to wonder if cityhood would allow Fairfax to retain a larger percentage of the tax dollars sent to Richmond, which will increase revenues without triggering a rise in taxes—even if they are of the non-real estate variety (like cigarette or hotel-occupancy taxes).  Counties have limited weapons in their arsenal to combat rising expenditures, and the common remedy (done, to my knowledge, in all Washington metropolitan counties this year to balance the budget) is to raise the real estate tax.  Second, I do not want the Democratic majority on the Board of Supervisors to use this as an excuse to raise taxes whenever a new project needs funding.  I don’t doubt that Fairfax residents are used to having excellent social services and public safety programs and would willingly pay to keep these.  But the Board proved this year that millions of dollars can be cut from the budget relatively painlessly with only a slight increase in taxes.

            There are also questions for which I don’t have answers but will surely need to be considered before cityhood is made a reality.  First, we already have chartered cities and towns within the county—Vienna, Clifton, and a 23,000-person Fairfax City.  I have read that although Virginia does not currently have any townships, this label would be conferred upon such independent entities within the city.  If that is the case, will each of these municipalities readily accept their new status or will they lobby against cityhood?

            Second, cityhood would not only expand the jurisdiction of the Board of Supervisors when all of the existing town and city councils are eliminated, but it would revise our governmental organization.  Currently, we have the Board, which is the chief policymaking body—with the chairman wielding the most power.  We also have the two other branches, in the form of the District and Circuit courts and a county executive.  The executive, who is appointed by the Board and serves at its pleasure, is purely an administrator—working with the budget and ensuring that laws are carried out.  (In Maryland, the county executive—who is elected, not selected—also has policymaking powers and is the head of government.) 

         But cityhood would require a city council and a mayor, along with his/her appointed administrators.  Would current supervisors be willing to yield some of their influence and exposure to a single individual in charge of 1.1 million people, and be prepared to butt heads when eventual turf wars and episodes of egotism arise?

         Third, where would the new Fairfax City’s “downtown” be?  The existing Fairfax City would be the obvious location, but it is not readily accessible by transit.  Tyson’s Corner would become more viable once the Metrorail extension and redevelopment is complete.  But the relatively new government center is on a semi-secluded campus that is not within walking distance of any major urban center.

         Fourth, if Fairfax declares itself a city, will the other jurisdictions in Northern Virginia (or elsewhere) follow suit?  Granted, it is far from certain that the legislature or the voters will approve of cityhood, but will the General Assembly be offended that the more populous counties are using this mechanism as a means of retaining revenue that would otherwise be diverted to rural districts without the larger, wealthier tax base?  Or will they say good riddance to the snobs in the North, acknowledging that regional tensions are beyond repair?

         Lastly, will cityhood change the way in which County residents see the County’s mission?  The County as it stands is diverse developmentally—there are rural enclaves (I live down the street from a horse pasture), cul-de-sac neighborhoods, historic “old town” stretches, and rows of condominiums and “new urbanist” development connected by bike lanes and bus stops.  If we see ourselves as a single city, will we want to homogenize development by producing more smart growth opportunities (a dereliction of duty by the Board of Supervisors for many years)—extending Metrorail, possibly introducing light rail, demolishing strip malls and bedroom communities and installing tightly-packed, walkable residential-business enclaves?  Or do we come to terms with the fact that diversity of development precludes us from taking such progressive actions in developing our region to be more efficient and less prone to creating endless traffic jams?