Orient’s comment policy stifles authentic conversation

Home In All Lands: Americans abroad should not be forced to pay United States taxes

At the State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Obama proposed a change to the tax code that, in his words, “truly helps working Americans trying to get a leg up in the new economy.” Whether or not you agree with the president’s plan, it is clear that America’s tax policy is far too complicated and unfair to millions. Perhaps the most staggering aspect of American taxes is the concept of taxation by citizenship rather than residency. In other words, US citizens and green-card holders must pay the IRS no matter where they live. The US essentially stands nearly alone in practicing this bizarre approach to taxation; Eritrea is the only other country with a similar policy, according to the Wall Street Journal.
There is no compelling argument that justifies penalizing Americans who have made the decision to work and live overseas. A large number of US citizens abroad are ambassadors for American enterprises, researchers at the forefront of their fields or retirees enjoying their post-work years. They are not all, as the Democratic Party would have you believe, fat-cat billionaires seeking to use offshore havens to hide their money. There seems to be an illusion amongst the political class, both left and right, that the sole purpose of moving abroad is tax avoidance. Now, I do not dispute that Americans who reside permanently in the United States should pay taxes based on their wealth, no matter where it may be held in the world. But to suggest, as this policy essentially does, that a tycoon is somehow analogous to a middle-level manager at a major international firm is laughable.
Americans who live overseas are unnecessarily burdened by a tax bill twice over: once from their country of residence and once again from the IRS. In some cases, treaties between the United States and other countries help to mitigate the yoke of double-taxation. But this does not change the fact that these hard-working Americans are subject to a financial cost greater than that of their neighbors and of their compatriots stateside. Unfortunately, a recent law has only made their lives more difficult. In 2010, the Democratic-controlled Congress passed FATCA, the “Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.” Ostensibly, the law sought to prevent US taxpayers from concealing their wealth in offshore accounts and shell corporations. This is, in and of itself, an entirely reasonable proposition. If you live in a country, you should pay the taxes that are required of you. But the law has had an unintended consequence: Global News has reported that this act has made it more difficult for millions of Americans to open bank accounts, begin mortgages, or take out loans overseas. Indeed, FATCA includes extremely harsh penalties for banks that, in the IRS’ determination, have allowed Americans to avoid paying taxes, an issue The Economist has reported on. Again, I wish to emphasize that Americans residing in the United States have to pay their fair share, and the financial institutions that enable them to dodge their due should be rightly punished. By making it tougher for overseas Americans to support themselves, Congress has essentially said that Americans should just stay home. What kind of message is that for the small startup that wants to expand? Or for the young woman recently promoted to her company’s head office in Singapore?
In response to these growing challenges, many Americans have decided to follow a drastic path: renouncing their citizenship. As the vice has tightened, more and more Americans are casting aside an important part of their identity. At U.S. diplomatic posts in several countries, the waiting lists for renunciation are many months long, according to Forbes. Rather than recognize that an idiotic tax policy is at the heart of Americans coming to this painful decision, the government recently increased the fee for renouncing citizenship by 422 percent from $450 to $2,350; which strikes me as a cynical attempt to squeeze out every last dime before you stop feeding the IRS. In recent years the number of renunciations has exploded, from only hundreds annually in the 1990s to a record 3,000 in 2013, according to the Washington Post. It is unreasonable and cruel for the government to place so many Americans in such a difficult position.
Some may argue that paying taxes is a sign of continued patriotism to the United States. But if we are going to be using tax payments as a metric for loyalty, then quite a few individuals and corporations should probably be charged with treason! And besides, if you are not using the fruits of taxation on a regular basis, why should you have to pay for them? Except for Eritrea, every other country on Earth knows that this is too much to ask in our modern, interconnected world. It is time that the United States realized that as well.

Home In All Lands: The U.S. must give medical marijuana a chance

After Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Alaska, is Maine next in line to completely legalize marijuana? That’s the hope of the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana like Alcohol, an activist group petitioning for marijuana regulation in this state. Last week, the group filed initial paperwork to get the question on ballot papers in the 2016 election. Whether or not Mainers ever vote on the issue is contingent upon the Secretary of State’s approval and the proponents collecting 62,000 signatures. If current national trends play out here as they have in other states, it seems very likely that Maine will legalize marijuana next November.
At a federal level, by contrast, legalization is a long way off. Under current law, marijuana is classified as a Schedule I substance, the category reserved for the most dangerous narcotics that, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, “have no currently accepted medical use in the United States, a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision, and a high potential for abuse.”
When we talk about marijuana legalization, we should not approach the issue from the standpoint that it will only help people who want to get high. To think about marijuana purely in terms of its psychoactive properties is to ignore the plant’s extraordinary medical potential. Cannabis-derived medicines are used to treat chemotherapy-induced nausea, cancer cells, migraines, Crohn’s disease and multiple sclerosis. Studies overseas are currently underway to determine the effectiveness of high-CBD strains of marijuana in treating childhood epilepsy; thus far, the results look promising.
Associate Professor of Visual Arts Mike Kolster and his wife Christy Shake have seen the impact of high-CBD marijuana on their son, Calvin, who has suffered from epilepsy since he was two years old. Over the years, they tried different diets and countless drugs, none of which helped to effectively reduce the occurrence of his seizures. When Calvin was on one of his most powerful cocktail of antiepileptic drugs, he still suffered up to 12 seizures a month. Although the drugs help mitigate the worst effects of seizures, they also smother brain activity and in some cases exacerbate epilepsy’s impact on cognitive development. Since switching to a mix of two drugs and two cannabis oils, Calvin suffers far fewer seizures (down to three or four a month). What’s more, Shake says that he now enjoys “improved sleep, improved mood, improved focus and less hyperactivity,” which has allowed her to “wean him off of 70 percent of his benzodiazepine.” While one family’s example cannot compare to the rigors of a thorough clinical study, Shake and Kolster have noted that medical marijuana has had a noticeable impact on their son’s well-being.
For now, however, anecdotes are really the only gauge of medical marijuana’s effectiveness. Because marijuana shares the same schedule as heroin, LSD and ecstasy, research in the United States is highly regulated and in order to acquire research-grade marijuana, scientists have to have their projects approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the DEA and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. In August 2014, the New York Times described the byzantine process that researchers have to follow in order to conduct clinical trials, many of which are rejected because they have the potential of portraying marijuana in a positive light.
Despite the popular push for a relaxation of marijuana’s status, neither Congress nor President Obama has an appetite for change. To their credit, Congress recently (and quietly) approved a change to federal marijuana regulations. Under the new law, federal agents are prohibited from raiding medical marijuana dispensaries in states where the drug has been approved for therapeutic use. It is an encouraging move from the federal government, but it is far from what is necessary to expand research into cannabis-derived medicine. Unfortunately for marijuana advocates, the shift in marijuana policy necessary would require changes that neither Congress nor President Obama are willing to make. In a recent interview with Vice News, the President commented, “legalizing marijuana shouldn’t be young people’s biggest priority.” Young people, Obama said, should be “thinking about climate change, the economy, jobs, war and peace.” It’s true that there are many important issues facing our world today and it can seem that the right to light up a joint falls fairly low on the list of priorities. But the legalization (or at least the decriminalization) of marijuana has significant implications that go far beyond just getting high. For every moral or ethical reason that may be presented to maintain the status quo, there are dozens of Calvins, countless victims of PTSD and innumerable people in pain who need the research. For their sake alone, legalizing marijuana is a cause worthy of being a priority.

Home In All Lands

Orient’s comment policy stifles authentic conversation

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Jean-Paul Honegger

Columnist

February 12, 2015

This edition of “Home in All Lands” is co-authored by Hannah Arrighi ’15.

As you may have read in the pages of this newspaper last week, the editorial board has decided to change the way in which readers can leave comments on bowdoinorient.com.

Where before comments had been largely free, from now on the editors will be the moderators of what deserves to appear at the bottom of each article. It is especially concerning to see that a small clique of editors have elevated themselves to be the lone arbiters of what is and isn’t offensive.

While we acknowledge that the Orient should exercise a certain degree of oversight when it comes to the comment section—as is the case on nearly every news website—we feel that its recent decision will stifle authentic conversation on a campus already too hesitant to speak its mind.

Given that the Orient has always had ultimate control in terms of which comments are shown on the website, you could easily think that this isn’t a significant deviation from previous practice. To the contrary, it is a major shift in accountability.

Under the new guidelines, if the editors find a comment merely distasteful, they can prevent it from entering public discourse. Whereas before oversight was shared between the editors and the readers, we are now faced with an unaccountable process whereby an editor could easily preclude the admission of an unsavory comment on a whim.

Even if this new policy will not have a direct effect on which comments appear on controversial articles, it establishes a symbolic paradigm that the editors—not the readers—are the sole judges of a comment’s worth. The issue is not that they have the final say, but that they’re the only ones who have a say at all.

To be clear, we are not suggesting that commenting on the Orient should be unrestricted. Although freedom of expression here enjoys perhaps the most robust protections of any country, even in the United States it is by no means absolute.

There are limits already in place that prevent people from expressing themselves, including laws preventing the dissemination of military secrets and restrictions on obscene publications. In other words, to suggest that the Orient should have a no-holds-barred approach to comments would be at odds with the realities of free speech both in the public domain and in the media.

What is at issue are the broad terms that the editorial board has established to moderate comments, which essentially describe anything that, broadly speaking, could be termed offensive speech.

As the definition of what is offensive becomes broader, we are at risk of cloistering ourselves amongst voices that only agree with our own; thus isolated, the slightest deviation from the norm becomes anathema. We must not be afraid to be offended. Indeed, we must allow people to be offensive because, in doing so, we protect our own rights.

“Implicit in the affirmation of your right to voice your views is your obligation to protect the rights of others to their views,” noted Ruth Simmons in a speech at Smith College last year.
She described the experience of attending a talk by a scholar at Brown University who maintained “that blacks were better off having been enslaved.” Simmons maintained that her “conviction about the absolute necessity of permitting others to hear him say these heinous things” trumped any personal distaste regarding his abominable views.

When choosing between the value of free expression and her personal comfort, “hearing his unwelcome message could hardly be judged as too great a cost.”

So what does this mean for this newspaper and the college community it serves? You always have the right to be offended or to find a statement egregious. And you don’t have to engage with every perspective on an issue in order to gain a reasoned opinion on it. But the broader issue with restrictions on free speech is that we lose the opportunity to engage with views that do not align with our own—views that become offensive by virtue of not being ours.

Our opinions are sharpened through interactions with others, especially those we disagree with. And when the Orient takes it upon itself to regulate what speech is worthy of admission, before the public even has a chance to evaluate it, we are at risk of further isolating ourselves.

Only through open, honest, vigorous debate can you “gain a standard for the appreciation of others’ work, and the criticism of your own,” to borrow from the “Offer of the College.” President Hyde recognized that Bowdoin should provide such an opportunity, and the Orient, through its decision, only does this college an injustice.

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