Sam Smith
A friend recently tweaked me for having supported John Edwards for president. Which raised a familiar question in my mind: why do the bad guys sometimes have the best politics?
After all, Edwards was the only major candidate who was pressing programs that might have eased, though not prevented, the fiscal crisis and the only one with serious ideas about what to do to set the country on a better economic course.
He was also a shmuck who couldn't control his shmuck.
Then there was Lyndon Johnson who once told Richard Burton he reckoned that between the two of them they had screwed more women than anyone. Yet it was LBJ, with the equally undisciplined Adam Clayton Powell Jr. who got more good legislation passed in less time that at any point in our history.
And there is the totally disintegrated Marion Barry, long time mayor of Washington, whose first term still was probably the best for the city since it got partial home rule in 1974.
To be sure, this is not typical of the ill behaved. For example, the Clintons never thought of doing anything significant to redeem themselves. The Clintons were instead the harbinger of the contemporary style of corrupt politician who felt no need to tithe to the people.
Neither does there seem to be any theoretical principle behind all this, save that it is far harder to find bad guys doing good things in politics any more.
Barry, for example, continues to stand out, because he is a holdover from an early age of corruption, in which the politician got little more than power and press, while his buddies and his constituents go the favors and the bucks. While Barry can't even pay his taxes, he is currently under attack for the money he got the city council to give organizations in his ward.
But one of the things I learned while covering Washington for many decades, however, is that the corruption hasn't disappeared, it just had a new name: economic development. As you watched the multimillion payoffs to developer campaign contributors, it made you long for a time when bribes were delivered in paper bags and a politician's misbegotten sex life was more entertaining than a losing baseball team brought to town at the voters' expense to please some pals of a mayor.
Because the media is so heavily into the business of enabling, rather than busting, political myths these days, we repeatedly are encouraged to fall for good looking, nice talking candidates who turn out to be far from what they promised. And we've been taught to accept the idea that the mere existence of a Clinton or Obama is a reasonable substitute for a good political agenda.
But life doesn't work that way. As William Riordan wrote of an earlier time:
"The Tammany district leader reaches out into the homes of his district, keeps watch not only on the men, but also on the women and children, knows their needs, their likes and dislikes, their troubles and their hopes, and places himself in a position to use his knowledge for the benefit of his organization and himself. Is it any wonder that scandals do not permanently disable Tammany and that it speedily recovers from what seems to be crushing defeat?"
Sure, it was corrupt. But we don't have much to be priggish about. The corruption of Watergate, Iran-Contra, Wall Street, Whitewater or the S&Ls fed no widows, found no jobs for the needy or, in the words of one Tammany leader, "grafted to the Republic" no newly arrived immigrants. At least Tammny's brand of corruption got down to the streets. Manipulation of the voter and corruption describe both Tammany and contemporary politics. The big difference is that in the former the voter could with greater regularity count on something in return.
Today, we are repeatedly disappointed by politicians who look and talk good and turn out quite the opposite. There's no better formula for detecting this than making personality take a far back seat to the politics. And bearing in mind that sometimes even bad guys do things better.
July 28, 2009
July 27, 2009
WHAT IF OBAMA IS WRONG?
Sam Smith
America has a population of over 300 million. If the only people who really know how to run healthcare, revive the economy or teach our children are our president, the people he appoints and those who work for them, we are in deep trouble.
Even worse, Barack Obama and his appointees are not immortal, so there is every chance that some day they will be replaced by people of the likes of Richard Cheney or Alberto Gonzalez. If the powers that the Obama administration has assumed, or wants to assume, for itself are passed on to those of such ilk, we are in even deeper trouble.
Our founders, some of whom were possibly brighter than Obama's czars, czarinas, cabinet secretaries, and TARP ayatollahs, understood this. That's why they set up three supposed equal branches of government and thought they had reserved to the states and citizens those rights not enumerated in the Constitution.
Obama and his aides don't seem to understand this. Without even entering the matter of whether they are really as smart as they think they are, this purported benefit will last about seven years at best, which is - by way of example - three years short of when we'll know whether Obama's healthcare plan costs what he claims.
There is an underlying theme of concentration of power in Obama's economic, health and education plans. In more than a few cases, the concentration is unprecedented, witness the attempt to dismantle local control of public education. The implicit - albeit unspoken - justification for these changes is that those making them are among the smartest people in our society and therefore will best look after our interests.
I think about this every time I drive the five miles of road between my house and downtown Freeport, Maine. I have never seen the road in such lousy condition and I keep asking myself, where's the stimulus when you need it? All over the state, roads are hurting and though we have spent more money in less time to get the national economy going, unemployment is at near record levels while such basic and once simple projects seem beyond the capacity of Washington to do anything about.
One of the reasons is that while Freeport is shovel ready, Barack Obama isn't. His administration has set up a maze of bureaucratic and technocratic obstacles to getting money to where it can make a difference in a short period - thanks in no small part to the assumption that the federal government is our best guardian of money and quality.
Of course, one need to look no further than the Pentagon or the Department of Housing & Urban Development to know that this isn't true.
In fact, when it comes to money, the feds have always done best moving it from one place to another - i.e. Social Security and Medicare or to the state and local level. There will be inefficiency and corruption at both levels, but they are usually less costly and easier to spot.
One of the reasons we don't realize this - and thus casually lump a bridge to nowhere into the same category as some congress members' bill to help fund a local arts center - is because of the liberal hostility towards devolution.
This didn't used to be the case. The New Deal and Great Society didn't have this hang-up and the left in the 1960s had a strong devolutionary bent. But in more recent years there has been a growing liberal disdain for decisions made at the state and local level.
Part of this, I suspect, has to do with liberalism become an increasingly upscale politics with more of its constituency educated to believe in the exceptionalism of their education. A sort of edocracy has developed, where it is assumed that if you have the right people and the right research, democracy just doesn't matter than much any more.
This view is reflected in the prevailing assumption that schooling to the test is the best way educate our young. Missing from this, among other things, are subjects not often taught like working well with others, gaining consensus, and melding sources of information. How often, for example, does an economist ever listen to a farmer?
And so the road I travel remains unusually bumpy and cracked. If anyone in Washington had asked me, I would have said, just send them the money and worry about something else, like getting out of stupid wars.
And I might point them to an article I did for the Washington Post 22 years ago about how Freeport handles the snow compared to nation's capital. In it I noted
||||
Al Thompson is superintendent of roads in Freeport, Maine, with a population about one percent of that of the District. But what Maine lacks in people, it makes up in roads, so Al Thompson has about 12 percent of Washington's asphalt mileage to look after.
Now Al doesn't have anything like the equivalent of Connecticut and Wisconsin avenues in his charge, and the local politicians tend to realize that nature often is impervious to memos, directives and policy guidelines. On the other hand, he works without the benefit of Snow Command Centers, Computerized Cancellation Centers and Codes Yellow. What he does have is five trucks with 12-foot dustpans and 11-foot wings.
How long does it take his trucks to cover 130 miles? Says Al: "An hour and a half, an hour and three-quarters." Then it takes another three hours for a second "cleanup" trip.
To put it in D.C. terms, that would mean, with the number of vehicles we've got (if properly equipped), you theoretically could sweep through the city in a couple of hours. Since it is clear our trucks are outmoded and not properly equipped, let's look at it another way: 25 good snow plows could, using the Maine standard, run through every street in the city in nine hours.
I picked 25 because that's the number of snowplows D.C. gave the National Guard back in 1980 to help in emergencies but which the Pentagon said it couldn't use because of liability problems. The trucks never were given back and disappeared from sight until Thursday, when it was announced that the National Guard would be using 25 plows to help keep D.C. clear.
Now, before someone at the District Building picks up the phone to tell The Post about "complex urban problems," let me tell you about George Flaherty. He's director of parks and public works for Portland, Maine. Portland is about one-tenth the size of D.C. but has nearly 30 percent of its street mileage. He uses about a quarter of D.C.'s equipment and expects to have the job done in 8 to 10 hours. . .
Here are some figures that will give you a rough idea of the costs of closing down D.C. for a day: the D.C. government spends $3 million a day on its payroll; the federal government spends close to $20 million a day for its D.C. payroll; private businesses spend another $30 million. What did D.C. budget for snow removal? Just under $1 million. Calculate the odds yourself.
|||
Now Al Thompson has retired as highway director, but I still suspect his successor and people like him all over the country have a better handle on their roads than the president's Small Town Road Czar or whoever is keeping the money from coming this way.
It might help if the Obama people would trade in a few of their pie charts for some humble pie and accept the idea that in this fair land are many who know more about some things than they do, give them some money to help them do it, and then step back and enjoy the resulting success instead of just still more problems.
America has a population of over 300 million. If the only people who really know how to run healthcare, revive the economy or teach our children are our president, the people he appoints and those who work for them, we are in deep trouble.
Even worse, Barack Obama and his appointees are not immortal, so there is every chance that some day they will be replaced by people of the likes of Richard Cheney or Alberto Gonzalez. If the powers that the Obama administration has assumed, or wants to assume, for itself are passed on to those of such ilk, we are in even deeper trouble.
Our founders, some of whom were possibly brighter than Obama's czars, czarinas, cabinet secretaries, and TARP ayatollahs, understood this. That's why they set up three supposed equal branches of government and thought they had reserved to the states and citizens those rights not enumerated in the Constitution.
Obama and his aides don't seem to understand this. Without even entering the matter of whether they are really as smart as they think they are, this purported benefit will last about seven years at best, which is - by way of example - three years short of when we'll know whether Obama's healthcare plan costs what he claims.
There is an underlying theme of concentration of power in Obama's economic, health and education plans. In more than a few cases, the concentration is unprecedented, witness the attempt to dismantle local control of public education. The implicit - albeit unspoken - justification for these changes is that those making them are among the smartest people in our society and therefore will best look after our interests.
I think about this every time I drive the five miles of road between my house and downtown Freeport, Maine. I have never seen the road in such lousy condition and I keep asking myself, where's the stimulus when you need it? All over the state, roads are hurting and though we have spent more money in less time to get the national economy going, unemployment is at near record levels while such basic and once simple projects seem beyond the capacity of Washington to do anything about.
One of the reasons is that while Freeport is shovel ready, Barack Obama isn't. His administration has set up a maze of bureaucratic and technocratic obstacles to getting money to where it can make a difference in a short period - thanks in no small part to the assumption that the federal government is our best guardian of money and quality.
Of course, one need to look no further than the Pentagon or the Department of Housing & Urban Development to know that this isn't true.
In fact, when it comes to money, the feds have always done best moving it from one place to another - i.e. Social Security and Medicare or to the state and local level. There will be inefficiency and corruption at both levels, but they are usually less costly and easier to spot.
One of the reasons we don't realize this - and thus casually lump a bridge to nowhere into the same category as some congress members' bill to help fund a local arts center - is because of the liberal hostility towards devolution.
This didn't used to be the case. The New Deal and Great Society didn't have this hang-up and the left in the 1960s had a strong devolutionary bent. But in more recent years there has been a growing liberal disdain for decisions made at the state and local level.
Part of this, I suspect, has to do with liberalism become an increasingly upscale politics with more of its constituency educated to believe in the exceptionalism of their education. A sort of edocracy has developed, where it is assumed that if you have the right people and the right research, democracy just doesn't matter than much any more.
This view is reflected in the prevailing assumption that schooling to the test is the best way educate our young. Missing from this, among other things, are subjects not often taught like working well with others, gaining consensus, and melding sources of information. How often, for example, does an economist ever listen to a farmer?
And so the road I travel remains unusually bumpy and cracked. If anyone in Washington had asked me, I would have said, just send them the money and worry about something else, like getting out of stupid wars.
And I might point them to an article I did for the Washington Post 22 years ago about how Freeport handles the snow compared to nation's capital. In it I noted
||||
Al Thompson is superintendent of roads in Freeport, Maine, with a population about one percent of that of the District. But what Maine lacks in people, it makes up in roads, so Al Thompson has about 12 percent of Washington's asphalt mileage to look after.
Now Al doesn't have anything like the equivalent of Connecticut and Wisconsin avenues in his charge, and the local politicians tend to realize that nature often is impervious to memos, directives and policy guidelines. On the other hand, he works without the benefit of Snow Command Centers, Computerized Cancellation Centers and Codes Yellow. What he does have is five trucks with 12-foot dustpans and 11-foot wings.
How long does it take his trucks to cover 130 miles? Says Al: "An hour and a half, an hour and three-quarters." Then it takes another three hours for a second "cleanup" trip.
To put it in D.C. terms, that would mean, with the number of vehicles we've got (if properly equipped), you theoretically could sweep through the city in a couple of hours. Since it is clear our trucks are outmoded and not properly equipped, let's look at it another way: 25 good snow plows could, using the Maine standard, run through every street in the city in nine hours.
I picked 25 because that's the number of snowplows D.C. gave the National Guard back in 1980 to help in emergencies but which the Pentagon said it couldn't use because of liability problems. The trucks never were given back and disappeared from sight until Thursday, when it was announced that the National Guard would be using 25 plows to help keep D.C. clear.
Now, before someone at the District Building picks up the phone to tell The Post about "complex urban problems," let me tell you about George Flaherty. He's director of parks and public works for Portland, Maine. Portland is about one-tenth the size of D.C. but has nearly 30 percent of its street mileage. He uses about a quarter of D.C.'s equipment and expects to have the job done in 8 to 10 hours. . .
Here are some figures that will give you a rough idea of the costs of closing down D.C. for a day: the D.C. government spends $3 million a day on its payroll; the federal government spends close to $20 million a day for its D.C. payroll; private businesses spend another $30 million. What did D.C. budget for snow removal? Just under $1 million. Calculate the odds yourself.
|||
Now Al Thompson has retired as highway director, but I still suspect his successor and people like him all over the country have a better handle on their roads than the president's Small Town Road Czar or whoever is keeping the money from coming this way.
It might help if the Obama people would trade in a few of their pie charts for some humble pie and accept the idea that in this fair land are many who know more about some things than they do, give them some money to help them do it, and then step back and enjoy the resulting success instead of just still more problems.
July 24, 2009
WHERE BAD COPS COME FROM
Sam Smith
Whenever anything like the Gates incident arises, we spend an inordinate amount of time assessing blame and hardly any discussing remedies.
Calling someone a racist doesn't cure anything. In fact, racism is normal. That isn't to say that it's nice, pretty, or desirable. Only that suspicion, distrust, and distaste for outsiders is a deeply human trait. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote that "all primitive tribes agree in recognizing [a] category of the outsiders, those who are not only outside the provisions of the moral code which holds within the limits of one's own people, but who are summarily denied a place anywhere in the human scheme. A great number of the tribal names in common use . . . are only their native terms for 'the human beings,' that is, themselves. Outside of the closed group there are no human beings."
Many attempts to eradicate racism from our society have been based on the opposite notion -- that those who harbor prejudice towards others are abnormal and social deviants. Further, we often describe these "deviants" only in terms of their overt antipathies -- they are "anti-Semitic" or guilty of "hate." In fact, once you have determined yourself to be human and others less so, you need not hate them any more than you need despise the fish you eat for dinner. This is why those who participate in genocide can do so with such calm -- they have defined their targets as outside of humanity.
What if, instead, we were to start with the unhappy truth that humans have always had a hard time dealing with other peoples, and that much ethnic and sexual antagonism stems not from hate so much as from cultural ignorance and narcissism? Then our repertoire of solutions might tilt more towards education and mediation and away from being self-righteous multi-cultural missionaries converting yahoos in the wilds of the soul. We could turn towards something more akin to what Andrew Young once described as a sense of "no fault justice." We might begin to consider seriously Martin Luther King's admonition to his colleagues that among their dreams should include that someday their enemies would be their friends.
Even if racism played a major role in the Gates incident, it probably wasn't the only factor. For example, one reader asks if there wasn't the smell of a class divide in the confrontation between a Cambridge cop and Harvard professor, with the white guy on the lower end of the economic ladder.
The most common form of police misbehavior is bullying. The target need only be someone who is perceived as vulnerable, with blacks, gays and young teens all in the pool. Blacks are extremely common victims but they are far from the only ones.
As our policing has increasingly moved to a military model and with cops often being from the lower economic and social strata, the bullying approach has tremendous appeal. One's size and blanket of weaponry reorganize one's place in society and are tempting to use in full force.
Unfortunately, neither scolding nor paper regulations have much effect. If the officer in the Gates case were to be punished, it would probably just increase the hostility of other officers towards those perceived as weak and who have no access to the national media.
Having been briefly a federal law enforcement officer while in the Coast Guard and having covered the ethnically divided town of DC for many decades, this is a matter that has long fascinated me. If you strip away the cliches and watch actual behavior, you start to see things easy to pas unnoticed.
For example, the DC police department changed from having only one top level black officer and with white cops refusing to share their cars with black officers to a department run by a series of black chiefs. On average these chiefs did a better job than the white ones (including the current white woman) in part because they had an instinctive feel for creating better ethnic relations and the officers under their command soon learned the sort of behavior that was expected. I suspect, however, that it made another difference: it increased the respect black officers had for themselves and with which white officers treated black citizens.
Sometimes things slipped back, as when a bunch of white West Virginia officers were hired to overcome a shortage on the force. It wasn't that the West Virginia officers couldn't have been better; it was just that at the time no one really cared that much.
It is part of the liberal canon that wrong thinking people stay that way. In fact, people tend to behave the way they are trained to behave and the way those leading them tell them to behave.
Obviously, there will be exceptions but in a normal community these people become social rogues rather than the norm.
So the first way to get a good police officer is to have good lieutenants, captains and chiefs.
The second necessity, and one that is massively ignored, is good and continuous training and the self respect that it encourages.
It shouldn't stop at the police academy. If it does you end up with a cable TV version of law enforcement in which the cop drifts easily into the role of a bully.
I have argued for decades that every police precinct house and headquarters should have a lawyer - given the rank of captain or above - to be on hand to train the force, mediate conflicts and help officers do their job better.
I watch this in action at a Coast Guard district headquarters where I was stationed. A Lieutenant Commander was the legal officer, but he was much more. Enlisted personnel such as boarding officers would casually drop by his office to discuss problems they had encountered. He was right on top of every little legal issue that arose and he had the autonomy to act based on legal wisdom and not the district commander's say so.
Only a tiny number of police officers in this country have any access - let alone easy access - to good legal advice. Yet they are supposed to be first government officials enforcing the law. It is bizarre, dangerous and it doesn't work.
There would be a further advantage to such an approach. As police officers see themselves as well educated agents of our system of law, they would start to have more respect for themselves and, as a result, treat others better.
But as long we treat cops as society's hired bullies, we shouldn't be surprised by some of the results.
Whenever anything like the Gates incident arises, we spend an inordinate amount of time assessing blame and hardly any discussing remedies.
Calling someone a racist doesn't cure anything. In fact, racism is normal. That isn't to say that it's nice, pretty, or desirable. Only that suspicion, distrust, and distaste for outsiders is a deeply human trait. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote that "all primitive tribes agree in recognizing [a] category of the outsiders, those who are not only outside the provisions of the moral code which holds within the limits of one's own people, but who are summarily denied a place anywhere in the human scheme. A great number of the tribal names in common use . . . are only their native terms for 'the human beings,' that is, themselves. Outside of the closed group there are no human beings."
Many attempts to eradicate racism from our society have been based on the opposite notion -- that those who harbor prejudice towards others are abnormal and social deviants. Further, we often describe these "deviants" only in terms of their overt antipathies -- they are "anti-Semitic" or guilty of "hate." In fact, once you have determined yourself to be human and others less so, you need not hate them any more than you need despise the fish you eat for dinner. This is why those who participate in genocide can do so with such calm -- they have defined their targets as outside of humanity.
What if, instead, we were to start with the unhappy truth that humans have always had a hard time dealing with other peoples, and that much ethnic and sexual antagonism stems not from hate so much as from cultural ignorance and narcissism? Then our repertoire of solutions might tilt more towards education and mediation and away from being self-righteous multi-cultural missionaries converting yahoos in the wilds of the soul. We could turn towards something more akin to what Andrew Young once described as a sense of "no fault justice." We might begin to consider seriously Martin Luther King's admonition to his colleagues that among their dreams should include that someday their enemies would be their friends.
Even if racism played a major role in the Gates incident, it probably wasn't the only factor. For example, one reader asks if there wasn't the smell of a class divide in the confrontation between a Cambridge cop and Harvard professor, with the white guy on the lower end of the economic ladder.
The most common form of police misbehavior is bullying. The target need only be someone who is perceived as vulnerable, with blacks, gays and young teens all in the pool. Blacks are extremely common victims but they are far from the only ones.
As our policing has increasingly moved to a military model and with cops often being from the lower economic and social strata, the bullying approach has tremendous appeal. One's size and blanket of weaponry reorganize one's place in society and are tempting to use in full force.
Unfortunately, neither scolding nor paper regulations have much effect. If the officer in the Gates case were to be punished, it would probably just increase the hostility of other officers towards those perceived as weak and who have no access to the national media.
Having been briefly a federal law enforcement officer while in the Coast Guard and having covered the ethnically divided town of DC for many decades, this is a matter that has long fascinated me. If you strip away the cliches and watch actual behavior, you start to see things easy to pas unnoticed.
For example, the DC police department changed from having only one top level black officer and with white cops refusing to share their cars with black officers to a department run by a series of black chiefs. On average these chiefs did a better job than the white ones (including the current white woman) in part because they had an instinctive feel for creating better ethnic relations and the officers under their command soon learned the sort of behavior that was expected. I suspect, however, that it made another difference: it increased the respect black officers had for themselves and with which white officers treated black citizens.
Sometimes things slipped back, as when a bunch of white West Virginia officers were hired to overcome a shortage on the force. It wasn't that the West Virginia officers couldn't have been better; it was just that at the time no one really cared that much.
It is part of the liberal canon that wrong thinking people stay that way. In fact, people tend to behave the way they are trained to behave and the way those leading them tell them to behave.
Obviously, there will be exceptions but in a normal community these people become social rogues rather than the norm.
So the first way to get a good police officer is to have good lieutenants, captains and chiefs.
The second necessity, and one that is massively ignored, is good and continuous training and the self respect that it encourages.
It shouldn't stop at the police academy. If it does you end up with a cable TV version of law enforcement in which the cop drifts easily into the role of a bully.
I have argued for decades that every police precinct house and headquarters should have a lawyer - given the rank of captain or above - to be on hand to train the force, mediate conflicts and help officers do their job better.
I watch this in action at a Coast Guard district headquarters where I was stationed. A Lieutenant Commander was the legal officer, but he was much more. Enlisted personnel such as boarding officers would casually drop by his office to discuss problems they had encountered. He was right on top of every little legal issue that arose and he had the autonomy to act based on legal wisdom and not the district commander's say so.
Only a tiny number of police officers in this country have any access - let alone easy access - to good legal advice. Yet they are supposed to be first government officials enforcing the law. It is bizarre, dangerous and it doesn't work.
There would be a further advantage to such an approach. As police officers see themselves as well educated agents of our system of law, they would start to have more respect for themselves and, as a result, treat others better.
But as long we treat cops as society's hired bullies, we shouldn't be surprised by some of the results.
July 14, 2009
NO STORY HERE
Sam Smith
Like any good lawyer, Sonia Sotomayor can take either side of a case - even when it's about something she said. Thus she excused her remark that "a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion" than a white male as a play on words that fell flat. She added: "It was bad because it left an impression that I believed that life experiences commanded a result in a case, but that's clearly not what I do as a judge."
To a writer who is not a lawyer this is pure crap. On the other hand, it means she will get along quite well in Washington because as a wise lawyer with the richness of her experiences she knows how to speak in tongues.
After all, any potential justice who can get headlines around the country because she claims to believe in "fidelity to the law" doesn't have much to worry about. There was a happier time when that was taken for granted.
The truth is that Sotomayer - except for her ethnicity - is an absolutely mundane, even boring, centrist judge from whom no surprises should be expected. Like her appointer, she has been elevated to sanctified status simply because the elite - many decades late - decided it was okay to have someone of her background in such a high position. And she seemed safe.
She has thus benefited from a form of atomized affirmative action that fools a lot of people into thinking there's been a real change.
But as the cops say, that's it, folks. You can leave now. Clear the area. There's no story here.
Like any good lawyer, Sonia Sotomayor can take either side of a case - even when it's about something she said. Thus she excused her remark that "a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion" than a white male as a play on words that fell flat. She added: "It was bad because it left an impression that I believed that life experiences commanded a result in a case, but that's clearly not what I do as a judge."
To a writer who is not a lawyer this is pure crap. On the other hand, it means she will get along quite well in Washington because as a wise lawyer with the richness of her experiences she knows how to speak in tongues.
After all, any potential justice who can get headlines around the country because she claims to believe in "fidelity to the law" doesn't have much to worry about. There was a happier time when that was taken for granted.
The truth is that Sotomayer - except for her ethnicity - is an absolutely mundane, even boring, centrist judge from whom no surprises should be expected. Like her appointer, she has been elevated to sanctified status simply because the elite - many decades late - decided it was okay to have someone of her background in such a high position. And she seemed safe.
She has thus benefited from a form of atomized affirmative action that fools a lot of people into thinking there's been a real change.
But as the cops say, that's it, folks. You can leave now. Clear the area. There's no story here.
July 13, 2009
MODERATE EXTREMISM
Sam Smith
Barack Obama has promised a major, moderate health plan.
Which is like urging climactic abstinence.
Real moderates don't do major things. They fiddle with stuff, fix a part of it, or change a number or two.
In fact, whatever Obama finally comes up with will probably be the most radical and bizarrely complicated health plan we've ever seen. Meanwhile, the rest of the political world is divided into two decidedly non-radical camps: conservatives who don't want to do anything and independent progressives who favor a well tested public system strange in the western world only to Americans.
Then there is Obama's medical records act, a massive example of database overkill, that makes every patient in America vulnerable to snooping by law enforcement, employers and insurance companies. And the remarkable illusion that the voters want Obama to decide when they should die. Yes, his administration has seriously argued that whether a patient continues to receive medical care should be left to a government organized system of doctors, scientists and ethicists rather than to individual doctors, the patient and their families.
A true moderate would suggest something like lowering the Medicare age to 55, something that would keep us headed in the right direction even if falling far short of what many would like, something that would not badly twist health policy into programs that nobody actually wants and which will take at least another decade to unravel politically.
Similarly, a true moderate might have suggested that revenue sharing - passing federal funds down to the state and local level with their use to be decided there - should be a major part of a stimulus package. There would be few faster ways to get things going. Instead we find programs that are physically shovel ready but not bureaucratically pencil ready because of restrictions applied by Washington. The Obama people say this will make it all more transparent and honest. In fact, there is no evidence that the federal government is any less prone to corruption, inefficiency and favoritism than governors or mayors.
But Obama is not a true moderate. Nor is he an ideologue. He is rather representative of a class of autocratic professional technocrats that has increasingly gained power in America, creating a constantly mutating adhocracy while proportionally adding to the country's woes. He is a moderate extremist, a member of the radical center.
It is a group long on education and short on wisdom and judgment. A 19th century writer decribed people like this as having been educated beyond their intellect. The skills of this class center around matters like the law or economics, formerly considered professions supportive, but not determinative, of things that others did.
It's not a matter of someone's training but the role it plays in their thought and action. One might easily be a good politician and a lawyer, but not a good politician simply because one was a lawyer. In fact, one study found that from 1780 to 1930, two thirds of the senators and about half of the House of Representatives were lawyers. Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln were both lawyers but that did not define their place in history.
The difference has been the change of the role of the law in society. The law has moved from being a necessary tool to help us organize our society and restrain its excesses to becoming a major obsession - witnessed by the fact that we have passed more laws since 1976 than we did in our first two centuries.
Key to this has been law schools that - at least before the fiscal crisis - were churning out 40,000 new attorneys a year. Jim Barlow, a former columnist of the Houston Chronicle, compares it to locusts: "The locust is a fairly benign form of grasshopper until we get too many of them. Then they swarm, eating their weight every day and devouring the countryside."
It is easy to the see whatever is happening around us as a traditional norm, especially when scholars and media don't bother to follow the changes. But a few examples suggest the trend:
- Since 1996 the number of employees in private legal services in Washington has risen almost 30% while those in publishing & broadcasting have declined and employment in the retail trade has remained constant. There are twice as many people in the capital city's legal services industry as in retail trade or janitorial services. By contrast, legal services jobs nationally are a quarter of those in retail sales and a half those in janitorial services.
- One of the major tasks of the legal profession is to lobby Congress and the administration on behalf of major corporations. William Greider reported that in 1970 only a handful of Fortune 500 companies had public affairs offices in Washington; by 1980, 80% did.
And it's just not the law. Business schools have been a major culprit. In the 1950s America turned out less than 5,000 MBAs a year; by 2005 this number had soared to 142,000. In seven years we could produce a million MBAs and still face huge trade and budget deficits, a disappearing auto industry, one of our most costly and disastrous wars, a growing division between rich and poor, a constantly projected inability to care for our ill or elderly and a near depression lurking just around the corner.
Back in the 1980s, when I was doing a magazine story on the National Air & Space Museum, I was surprised to discover that it was the only contemporary structure in federal Washington to come in on time and under budget. One reasons seems to have been that it was built not by conventional Washington bureaucrats but by engineers who had a substantially different approach to getting things done. How many engineers were consulted by the White House and the Congress before approving the stimulus package?
Everywhere you look in government these days a gap keeps appearing between the work that is supposed to be happening, what is actually happening and who has been assigned to see that it happens.
This was a problem once mainly limited to a few political bonus enclaves such as those ambassadorships based on the money one gave to a president's campaign.
But since the 1980s, pragmatically deficient MBAs have taken over American business, lawyers and economists have taken over politics, pseudo CEOs have taken over school systems and over-professionalized journalists have taken over the media. Further, spin has replaced reality and action at ever level.
We have assigned a wealth of practical tasks to those who think in abstractions, speak in cliches, use paperwork as a pacifier, and convert morality, policies and human aspiration into a bunch of numbers or legal restrictions. Perhaps most sadly - and most dangerously - they have learned their values from sources far removed from the thinking of those philosophers, writers and politicians who gave America its greatest moments.
With this shift, the country has been changing from being a democracy into being just another corporation - and one that its leaders feel entitled to run in the manner of an executive rather than as an elected representative of the people.
Barack Obama is not the worst, merely the most famous, of the current lot.
He has demonstrated few practical skills, his social intelligence fades once out eyesight of a teleprompter, and he has little interest in true democratic discourse other than at carefully managed town meetings. He sees himself as America's boss, leaving everyone - from a constitutionally equal Congress to the citizens who elected him - in the implicit role of consumer or staff.
Obama is paraded as among the best and the brightest but this ignores two problems:
- Intelligence is much like muscle. It is an undeniable asset but can be used for either good or evil. Possessing intelligence does not grant you wisdom, morality or the ability to play well with others. It does not tell you how to fix something that is broken or other skills based on practical experience. And like muscle, it easily raises the temptation to use its force as a substitute for such other skills.
- The best and the brightest brought us the Vietnam, environmental, Mid East and economic disasters. Joseph Califano recently wrote fawningly that the recently departed Robert McNamara was "known for his extraordinary intelligence." But, as 58,000 American (and many more Vietnamese) victims of that extraordinary intelligence discovered, it also did extraordinary evil.
Obama hasn't come close to being as bad as McNamara but he belongs to a similar culture that is characterized by autocratic values, indifference to constitutional and democratic concerns, excessive reliance on procedures and systems as a false guarantee of desired results, and a technocratic obsession in data assessment as a substitute for wise observation of what's really going on.
And he has relied heavily on financial advisers who form a collective McNamara of the fiscal collapse; as in Vietnam, the solution is being sought by those who created the problem in the first place.
There is further, as suggested here before, a sort of elite Asperger's Syndrome at work in Washington, with a disconnect between the information piled inside the capital's collective brain and the reality of the world outside it.
Thus one can spend more money on a stimulus in less time than at any point in American history and still have the unemployment rate go up 25% in under six months. By comparison, in FDR's first year, the unemployment rate declined nearly 14%.
One can launch an economic rescue program that saves huge banks but leaves ordinary homeowners and tenants out in the cold. You can claim to be ending the war in Iraq even as you leave a large military there and send more troops to Afghanistan. Or you can reorganize education by demoralizing teachers, replacing learning with tests, and putting corporate figures in charge of school systems - and then calling it reform.
Meanwhile our leaders give themselves ever more power even as that power serves ever less purpose.
All this is quite deceiving to the public because, though the results may be absurd, the manner, the language and methods are seemingly moderate - concealing the dangerous extremism of the modern American center.
This is not an ideological problem; it is a class and cultural one. And Obama is merely the most visible reflection and most prominent beneficiary of the day.
MSNBC and Fox News would have you believe there is a great political battle going on; in truth it is more like sibling rivalry, fighting over who gets the window seat in the broken down, low gas mileage car that America has become.
And because cultural divides are far more difficult to cross than political ones, America will have a terrible time overcoming this one. It would be wondrous if the House of Representatives could replace its engorgement of attorneys with more teachers, chemists, small business owners, social workers, engineers, labor leaders and artists, but it's not likely. The best and the brightest know one thing extremely well: how to hold on to their power, whatever its cost to the rest of the country.
Barack Obama has promised a major, moderate health plan.
Which is like urging climactic abstinence.
Real moderates don't do major things. They fiddle with stuff, fix a part of it, or change a number or two.
In fact, whatever Obama finally comes up with will probably be the most radical and bizarrely complicated health plan we've ever seen. Meanwhile, the rest of the political world is divided into two decidedly non-radical camps: conservatives who don't want to do anything and independent progressives who favor a well tested public system strange in the western world only to Americans.
Then there is Obama's medical records act, a massive example of database overkill, that makes every patient in America vulnerable to snooping by law enforcement, employers and insurance companies. And the remarkable illusion that the voters want Obama to decide when they should die. Yes, his administration has seriously argued that whether a patient continues to receive medical care should be left to a government organized system of doctors, scientists and ethicists rather than to individual doctors, the patient and their families.
A true moderate would suggest something like lowering the Medicare age to 55, something that would keep us headed in the right direction even if falling far short of what many would like, something that would not badly twist health policy into programs that nobody actually wants and which will take at least another decade to unravel politically.
Similarly, a true moderate might have suggested that revenue sharing - passing federal funds down to the state and local level with their use to be decided there - should be a major part of a stimulus package. There would be few faster ways to get things going. Instead we find programs that are physically shovel ready but not bureaucratically pencil ready because of restrictions applied by Washington. The Obama people say this will make it all more transparent and honest. In fact, there is no evidence that the federal government is any less prone to corruption, inefficiency and favoritism than governors or mayors.
But Obama is not a true moderate. Nor is he an ideologue. He is rather representative of a class of autocratic professional technocrats that has increasingly gained power in America, creating a constantly mutating adhocracy while proportionally adding to the country's woes. He is a moderate extremist, a member of the radical center.
It is a group long on education and short on wisdom and judgment. A 19th century writer decribed people like this as having been educated beyond their intellect. The skills of this class center around matters like the law or economics, formerly considered professions supportive, but not determinative, of things that others did.
It's not a matter of someone's training but the role it plays in their thought and action. One might easily be a good politician and a lawyer, but not a good politician simply because one was a lawyer. In fact, one study found that from 1780 to 1930, two thirds of the senators and about half of the House of Representatives were lawyers. Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln were both lawyers but that did not define their place in history.
The difference has been the change of the role of the law in society. The law has moved from being a necessary tool to help us organize our society and restrain its excesses to becoming a major obsession - witnessed by the fact that we have passed more laws since 1976 than we did in our first two centuries.
Key to this has been law schools that - at least before the fiscal crisis - were churning out 40,000 new attorneys a year. Jim Barlow, a former columnist of the Houston Chronicle, compares it to locusts: "The locust is a fairly benign form of grasshopper until we get too many of them. Then they swarm, eating their weight every day and devouring the countryside."
It is easy to the see whatever is happening around us as a traditional norm, especially when scholars and media don't bother to follow the changes. But a few examples suggest the trend:
- Since 1996 the number of employees in private legal services in Washington has risen almost 30% while those in publishing & broadcasting have declined and employment in the retail trade has remained constant. There are twice as many people in the capital city's legal services industry as in retail trade or janitorial services. By contrast, legal services jobs nationally are a quarter of those in retail sales and a half those in janitorial services.
- One of the major tasks of the legal profession is to lobby Congress and the administration on behalf of major corporations. William Greider reported that in 1970 only a handful of Fortune 500 companies had public affairs offices in Washington; by 1980, 80% did.
And it's just not the law. Business schools have been a major culprit. In the 1950s America turned out less than 5,000 MBAs a year; by 2005 this number had soared to 142,000. In seven years we could produce a million MBAs and still face huge trade and budget deficits, a disappearing auto industry, one of our most costly and disastrous wars, a growing division between rich and poor, a constantly projected inability to care for our ill or elderly and a near depression lurking just around the corner.
Back in the 1980s, when I was doing a magazine story on the National Air & Space Museum, I was surprised to discover that it was the only contemporary structure in federal Washington to come in on time and under budget. One reasons seems to have been that it was built not by conventional Washington bureaucrats but by engineers who had a substantially different approach to getting things done. How many engineers were consulted by the White House and the Congress before approving the stimulus package?
Everywhere you look in government these days a gap keeps appearing between the work that is supposed to be happening, what is actually happening and who has been assigned to see that it happens.
This was a problem once mainly limited to a few political bonus enclaves such as those ambassadorships based on the money one gave to a president's campaign.
But since the 1980s, pragmatically deficient MBAs have taken over American business, lawyers and economists have taken over politics, pseudo CEOs have taken over school systems and over-professionalized journalists have taken over the media. Further, spin has replaced reality and action at ever level.
We have assigned a wealth of practical tasks to those who think in abstractions, speak in cliches, use paperwork as a pacifier, and convert morality, policies and human aspiration into a bunch of numbers or legal restrictions. Perhaps most sadly - and most dangerously - they have learned their values from sources far removed from the thinking of those philosophers, writers and politicians who gave America its greatest moments.
With this shift, the country has been changing from being a democracy into being just another corporation - and one that its leaders feel entitled to run in the manner of an executive rather than as an elected representative of the people.
Barack Obama is not the worst, merely the most famous, of the current lot.
He has demonstrated few practical skills, his social intelligence fades once out eyesight of a teleprompter, and he has little interest in true democratic discourse other than at carefully managed town meetings. He sees himself as America's boss, leaving everyone - from a constitutionally equal Congress to the citizens who elected him - in the implicit role of consumer or staff.
Obama is paraded as among the best and the brightest but this ignores two problems:
- Intelligence is much like muscle. It is an undeniable asset but can be used for either good or evil. Possessing intelligence does not grant you wisdom, morality or the ability to play well with others. It does not tell you how to fix something that is broken or other skills based on practical experience. And like muscle, it easily raises the temptation to use its force as a substitute for such other skills.
- The best and the brightest brought us the Vietnam, environmental, Mid East and economic disasters. Joseph Califano recently wrote fawningly that the recently departed Robert McNamara was "known for his extraordinary intelligence." But, as 58,000 American (and many more Vietnamese) victims of that extraordinary intelligence discovered, it also did extraordinary evil.
Obama hasn't come close to being as bad as McNamara but he belongs to a similar culture that is characterized by autocratic values, indifference to constitutional and democratic concerns, excessive reliance on procedures and systems as a false guarantee of desired results, and a technocratic obsession in data assessment as a substitute for wise observation of what's really going on.
And he has relied heavily on financial advisers who form a collective McNamara of the fiscal collapse; as in Vietnam, the solution is being sought by those who created the problem in the first place.
There is further, as suggested here before, a sort of elite Asperger's Syndrome at work in Washington, with a disconnect between the information piled inside the capital's collective brain and the reality of the world outside it.
Thus one can spend more money on a stimulus in less time than at any point in American history and still have the unemployment rate go up 25% in under six months. By comparison, in FDR's first year, the unemployment rate declined nearly 14%.
One can launch an economic rescue program that saves huge banks but leaves ordinary homeowners and tenants out in the cold. You can claim to be ending the war in Iraq even as you leave a large military there and send more troops to Afghanistan. Or you can reorganize education by demoralizing teachers, replacing learning with tests, and putting corporate figures in charge of school systems - and then calling it reform.
Meanwhile our leaders give themselves ever more power even as that power serves ever less purpose.
All this is quite deceiving to the public because, though the results may be absurd, the manner, the language and methods are seemingly moderate - concealing the dangerous extremism of the modern American center.
This is not an ideological problem; it is a class and cultural one. And Obama is merely the most visible reflection and most prominent beneficiary of the day.
MSNBC and Fox News would have you believe there is a great political battle going on; in truth it is more like sibling rivalry, fighting over who gets the window seat in the broken down, low gas mileage car that America has become.
And because cultural divides are far more difficult to cross than political ones, America will have a terrible time overcoming this one. It would be wondrous if the House of Representatives could replace its engorgement of attorneys with more teachers, chemists, small business owners, social workers, engineers, labor leaders and artists, but it's not likely. The best and the brightest know one thing extremely well: how to hold on to their power, whatever its cost to the rest of the country.
July 08, 2009
OF PORCUPINES & SEX
Sam Smith
I was on my way home the other evening and had just passed through the woods when I found my way blocked by two porcupines in the middle of the road, sitting on their hind legs and embracing each other. I carelessly leapt to the conclusion that this was how porcupines dealt with the peculiar problem posed to reproductive recreation by a plethora of quills surrounding one's target orifice. Perhaps all one needed was a slight readjustment in the location of the respective organs.
Then my mind swept back to an evening when I thought I would explain sex to one of my then little sons using the less provocative example of a non-human. The only problem was, thanks to the book we were reading together at the time, I chose a walrus as my example. No sooner had I started then I realized that I had no idea how walruses had sex and that, frankly, the idea seemed absurd.
But for walruses at least, it was mainly a problem of excessive blubber that appeared to interfere with the enjoyment - not an arsenal of quills situated like a ring of ABMs around the aperture of bliss.
My flashback was interrupted by the porcupines, one of which departed to the weeds at the edge of the road while the other boldly approached my immobile car as if it were going to chastise me for having spoiled the evening. The creature then stopped, turned 180 degrees, and raised its posterior slightly as if to say, "You come any closer, you're going to need a new tire."
I got the message and sat quietly until the porcupine decided it was all right to leave.
Safely at home, I googled for some information on what I had just seen and, sure enough, the ever reliable Cecil Adams of Straight Dope set me straight:
|||| An account of porcupine romance (in North American Porcupine, Uldis Roze, 1989) does begin this way: "Somewhere ahead, a porcupine is screaming." However, it's not what you think. The screaming porcupine is a female letting an ardent male know she's not in the mood. Male porcupines may give vent to the occasional scream as well, but it's from frustration, not pain: the female is only sexually receptive 8-12 hours per year.
Porcupine sex is not the exercise in S&M you might imagine but it does have its kinky aspects. I quote from Roze: 'Perhaps the strangest aspect of the interaction is male urine-hosing of the female. The male approaches on his hind legs and tail, grunting in a low tone. His penis springs erect. He then becomes a urine cannon, squirting high-pressure jets of urine at the female. Everything suggests the urine is fired by ejaculation, not released by normal bladder pressure. . . In less than a minute, a female may be thoroughly wetted from nose to tail."
So much for foreplay. If the female decides now is the time, she hoists up her rump a bit and raises her tail, the underside of which is quill-less, and curves it up over her back, covering the quills thereon and exposing her genitalia. The male then approaches in a gingerly manner from the rear, walking on his hind legs and taking care to touch nothing with his forepaws but the safe part of the tail. . . The act lasts 2-5 minutes and may be repeated several times during the half-day window of opportunity. . .
The real problem for a male porcupine is not getting intimate with the female but surviving the bar fights with his male rivals beforehand. Researcher Roze reports coming upon the scene of an interporcupine slugfest where three males had fought it out for the favors of one female. The ground was littered with nearly 1,500 quills and a few more could be seen in the nose of the apparent victor. ||||
Elsewhere, I learned that the few critical hours of porcupinial reproduction typically occur in November and December, further suggesting that what I had spotted had been convivial but not consummated. Still, even the sight of two porcupines hugging was a cheerful reminder of how many possibilities in this world we haven't even imagined.
I was on my way home the other evening and had just passed through the woods when I found my way blocked by two porcupines in the middle of the road, sitting on their hind legs and embracing each other. I carelessly leapt to the conclusion that this was how porcupines dealt with the peculiar problem posed to reproductive recreation by a plethora of quills surrounding one's target orifice. Perhaps all one needed was a slight readjustment in the location of the respective organs.
Then my mind swept back to an evening when I thought I would explain sex to one of my then little sons using the less provocative example of a non-human. The only problem was, thanks to the book we were reading together at the time, I chose a walrus as my example. No sooner had I started then I realized that I had no idea how walruses had sex and that, frankly, the idea seemed absurd.
But for walruses at least, it was mainly a problem of excessive blubber that appeared to interfere with the enjoyment - not an arsenal of quills situated like a ring of ABMs around the aperture of bliss.
My flashback was interrupted by the porcupines, one of which departed to the weeds at the edge of the road while the other boldly approached my immobile car as if it were going to chastise me for having spoiled the evening. The creature then stopped, turned 180 degrees, and raised its posterior slightly as if to say, "You come any closer, you're going to need a new tire."
I got the message and sat quietly until the porcupine decided it was all right to leave.
Safely at home, I googled for some information on what I had just seen and, sure enough, the ever reliable Cecil Adams of Straight Dope set me straight:
|||| An account of porcupine romance (in North American Porcupine, Uldis Roze, 1989) does begin this way: "Somewhere ahead, a porcupine is screaming." However, it's not what you think. The screaming porcupine is a female letting an ardent male know she's not in the mood. Male porcupines may give vent to the occasional scream as well, but it's from frustration, not pain: the female is only sexually receptive 8-12 hours per year.
Porcupine sex is not the exercise in S&M you might imagine but it does have its kinky aspects. I quote from Roze: 'Perhaps the strangest aspect of the interaction is male urine-hosing of the female. The male approaches on his hind legs and tail, grunting in a low tone. His penis springs erect. He then becomes a urine cannon, squirting high-pressure jets of urine at the female. Everything suggests the urine is fired by ejaculation, not released by normal bladder pressure. . . In less than a minute, a female may be thoroughly wetted from nose to tail."
So much for foreplay. If the female decides now is the time, she hoists up her rump a bit and raises her tail, the underside of which is quill-less, and curves it up over her back, covering the quills thereon and exposing her genitalia. The male then approaches in a gingerly manner from the rear, walking on his hind legs and taking care to touch nothing with his forepaws but the safe part of the tail. . . The act lasts 2-5 minutes and may be repeated several times during the half-day window of opportunity. . .
The real problem for a male porcupine is not getting intimate with the female but surviving the bar fights with his male rivals beforehand. Researcher Roze reports coming upon the scene of an interporcupine slugfest where three males had fought it out for the favors of one female. The ground was littered with nearly 1,500 quills and a few more could be seen in the nose of the apparent victor. ||||
Elsewhere, I learned that the few critical hours of porcupinial reproduction typically occur in November and December, further suggesting that what I had spotted had been convivial but not consummated. Still, even the sight of two porcupines hugging was a cheerful reminder of how many possibilities in this world we haven't even imagined.
July 01, 2009
FROM VICTIM TO PERP
Sam Smith
It used to be easy to tell the enemy. All you had to do was to check their uniforms and nationality. But after 9/11 it became a lot more difficult. We started fighting a war against an attitude and a concept instead of a country. How do you invade terror? if the identifying mark of a terrorist is hatred of America how can you tell when you've won? Who signs the surrender papers?
Of course, we did have some experience in this. We had already declared war on all sorts of things: cancer, drugs, pants slung too low on the hips - none of which had borders, a government or tanks.
Our metaphors had already spun out of control.
And few counted the bodies.
For example, prior to the World Trade Center attack, Al Qaeda was reported to have killed something less than 500 people. Another 3,000 were killed on 9/11. To retaliate it has so far cost us about 4,000 dead troops in Iraq and another 700 in Afghanistan.
Of course there have been others involved, such as innocent Iraqis and Afghans. The estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths range from around 100,000 (based only on those deaths reported in the media) to the medical journal Lancet's 2006 estimate of 600,000 and the one million listed by Opinion Research in 2007. The civilian Afghan tally is far more modest - somewhere around 8,000 - but still more than double the number killed in 2001.
Dylan Thomas noted, "After the first death there is no other." But how can we become so incensed at the deaths of 3,000 innocent Americans and yet feel justified in taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people who just happened to be in our way as we futilely sought out bin Ladin and his small band of guerillas?
How can we not even question it? Or not mention it in the media?
And now it's gotten worse. Wall Street the victim has turned into Wall Street the perp.
According to the director of the World Health Organization some 200,000-400,000 women and children can be expected to die each year as a result of the fiscal collapse. And UN officials have added another hundred million to the ranks of the global hungry due to the crisis.
In other words, Wall Street will kill a hundred times as many women and children as were killed when it came under attack and it hardly makes the news.
We are infuriated by Bernie Madoff for stealing from the rich, but pay virtually no attention to what is going on to ordinary citizens around the world as a result of conventional fiscal greed of the past few decades.
We may assume that, unlike bin Laden or Richard Cheney, the traders and manipulators acted without malice aforethought. They were, after all, only thinking only of themselves.
But if they had been driving a car instead of trading a derivative, it would be a criminal offense called negligent manslaughter. We don't have such a crime in markets or politics.
And so the president listens to fiscal advisers who are treated as wise men rather than as fiscal terrorists and the media respectfully quotes them with not one sign that they were among those who helped Wall Street do to the world what Bernie Madoff did to his clients and in a far more deadly fashion than even bin Laden.
Meanwhile a malevolent man who thought he could bring America down by attacking Wall Street sits somewhere in the mountains of Pakistan, watching as his intended victim do his work for him.
It used to be easy to tell the enemy. All you had to do was to check their uniforms and nationality. But after 9/11 it became a lot more difficult. We started fighting a war against an attitude and a concept instead of a country. How do you invade terror? if the identifying mark of a terrorist is hatred of America how can you tell when you've won? Who signs the surrender papers?
Of course, we did have some experience in this. We had already declared war on all sorts of things: cancer, drugs, pants slung too low on the hips - none of which had borders, a government or tanks.
Our metaphors had already spun out of control.
And few counted the bodies.
For example, prior to the World Trade Center attack, Al Qaeda was reported to have killed something less than 500 people. Another 3,000 were killed on 9/11. To retaliate it has so far cost us about 4,000 dead troops in Iraq and another 700 in Afghanistan.
Of course there have been others involved, such as innocent Iraqis and Afghans. The estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths range from around 100,000 (based only on those deaths reported in the media) to the medical journal Lancet's 2006 estimate of 600,000 and the one million listed by Opinion Research in 2007. The civilian Afghan tally is far more modest - somewhere around 8,000 - but still more than double the number killed in 2001.
Dylan Thomas noted, "After the first death there is no other." But how can we become so incensed at the deaths of 3,000 innocent Americans and yet feel justified in taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people who just happened to be in our way as we futilely sought out bin Ladin and his small band of guerillas?
How can we not even question it? Or not mention it in the media?
And now it's gotten worse. Wall Street the victim has turned into Wall Street the perp.
According to the director of the World Health Organization some 200,000-400,000 women and children can be expected to die each year as a result of the fiscal collapse. And UN officials have added another hundred million to the ranks of the global hungry due to the crisis.
In other words, Wall Street will kill a hundred times as many women and children as were killed when it came under attack and it hardly makes the news.
We are infuriated by Bernie Madoff for stealing from the rich, but pay virtually no attention to what is going on to ordinary citizens around the world as a result of conventional fiscal greed of the past few decades.
We may assume that, unlike bin Laden or Richard Cheney, the traders and manipulators acted without malice aforethought. They were, after all, only thinking only of themselves.
But if they had been driving a car instead of trading a derivative, it would be a criminal offense called negligent manslaughter. We don't have such a crime in markets or politics.
And so the president listens to fiscal advisers who are treated as wise men rather than as fiscal terrorists and the media respectfully quotes them with not one sign that they were among those who helped Wall Street do to the world what Bernie Madoff did to his clients and in a far more deadly fashion than even bin Laden.
Meanwhile a malevolent man who thought he could bring America down by attacking Wall Street sits somewhere in the mountains of Pakistan, watching as his intended victim do his work for him.
June 30, 2009
SHOP TALK
Sam Smith
I almost missed it. I just realized Review started 45 years ago this month as The Idler, at a time when there were less than a dozen alternative progressive publications around - like the Village Voice, Realist, IF Stone's Weekly and Carolina Israelite. Today, according to the latest Alexa and Netcraft stats, the Review is in the top three percent of all US websites (news and otherwise) and the top three tenths of one percent of all global ones.
My near miss can be attributed perhaps to something I noticed as people asked me whether I was sad about leaving Washington and moving to Maine. I realized that journalists don't think like that. Once you've finished a story, no matter how good, it's time to think about what you'll have for the next deadline. In a strange way, reporters are among both the most cynical and most optimistic people on earth, because no matter how bad the news is, they assume there will be plenty of other bad news in the future.
And there's a precedent for my anniversarial indifference. I once was American correspondent for the illustrated London News, where I distinguished myself by being the first writer to get the word 'fuck' published in the magazine during its entire 150 year history. The top editor did not discover the affront until after publication when he demanded of my immediate editor, "how the fuck" the word "fuck" had defaced his jewel in the crown.
But it wasn't the first time he had missed the boat. When a competing publication celebrated its 2,000th issue complete with a well publicized party and a program on the BBC, the chief editor told his associate that the ILN ought to consider something like that. "When's our next big issue?" he asked. My editor said he wasn't sure. So the chief editor pulled out the current edition and found it was number 5,000.
I almost missed it. I just realized Review started 45 years ago this month as The Idler, at a time when there were less than a dozen alternative progressive publications around - like the Village Voice, Realist, IF Stone's Weekly and Carolina Israelite. Today, according to the latest Alexa and Netcraft stats, the Review is in the top three percent of all US websites (news and otherwise) and the top three tenths of one percent of all global ones.
My near miss can be attributed perhaps to something I noticed as people asked me whether I was sad about leaving Washington and moving to Maine. I realized that journalists don't think like that. Once you've finished a story, no matter how good, it's time to think about what you'll have for the next deadline. In a strange way, reporters are among both the most cynical and most optimistic people on earth, because no matter how bad the news is, they assume there will be plenty of other bad news in the future.
And there's a precedent for my anniversarial indifference. I once was American correspondent for the illustrated London News, where I distinguished myself by being the first writer to get the word 'fuck' published in the magazine during its entire 150 year history. The top editor did not discover the affront until after publication when he demanded of my immediate editor, "how the fuck" the word "fuck" had defaced his jewel in the crown.
But it wasn't the first time he had missed the boat. When a competing publication celebrated its 2,000th issue complete with a well publicized party and a program on the BBC, the chief editor told his associate that the ILN ought to consider something like that. "When's our next big issue?" he asked. My editor said he wasn't sure. So the chief editor pulled out the current edition and found it was number 5,000.
June 29, 2009
INDENTURED LIBERALS & INDEPENDENT PROGRESSIVES
Sam Smith
Barack Obama didn't kill liberalism; he's just doing a nice job of burying it. The end of liberalism as a meaningful ideology came with the nomination of Bill Clinton. The argument was - although hardly phrased so accurately - that it was far better for liberals to dump their policies and become the indentured servants of an elected Democrat than to continue to press for their beliefs and miss out on all the power and the parties.
This same willingness to go with icons rather than ideas drove liberals quickly into the Obama camp, especially since he had the added advantage of looking the way he was supposed to believe.
It was apparent from the start, however, that Obama wasn't what the liberals thought. During the campaign, for example, I listed over two dozen positions and statements of Obama's that clearly were in conflict with what liberals once believed.
But of course, belief was no longer the issue. Liberalism had long ago become more of a secular church than a cause, and based more on socio-economic demographics than on actual politics. To the extent it had issues, these issues were, like abortion and gay rights, ones that appealed to its core demographics. Long gone was the liberal concern for doing the most for the most; economic issues had faded; and the base that had helped build the New Deal and Great Society were now dismissed as red necks, racists, gun nuts and crazy church goers.
The factor of class was both immense and silent. But you could tell it by listening to liberals talk. The little folk had simply disappeared from their concerns.
Thus it is that we came to have a Democratic Congress and president that pressed a bailout for bankers with virtually no help for homeowners, who promised to leave one war but then escalated another and who couldn't bring themselves in majority to support the sort of universal healthcare the rest of the western world had long adopted.
As Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report put it the other day: "The first Black president has racked up some impressive victories. Barack Obama has quarantined single-payer healthcare advocates, crushed dissent against the war in Congress, and transferred more money to the finance capital class than at any time in planetary history. Not bad for just five months in office."
Liberals became part of the new center right; they became the modest conservatives the Republican reactionaries had kicked out of their own party. Instead of going to hell noisily in the manner of Rush Limbaugh, you were to proceed thoughtfully, cautiously, and in a measured manner inspired by a thoughtful, cautious, and measured president. But we are still going to hell.
Tom Hayden caught a moment of the measured madness, noting in the Nation:
"MoveOn.org resumed its historical antiwar stance this week, symbolically breaking with the Obama administration for the first time.
"After being criticized for abandoning the antiwar stance that won it millions of activist supporters, the organization sent targeted mailings supporting the demand for an Obama administration exit strategy report contained in HR 2404, by Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. . .
"Despite its modest nature, MoveOn's entry into the debate could be an important factor in legitimizing antiwar criticism of the Obama policies among Democrats. Antiwar sentiment at the grassroots is smothered by the unwillingness of several organizations to openly oppose the war escalation, despite their roots in the antiwar movement against Iraq.
"The silent organizations thus far include Democracy for America and its founder, Howard Dean, Ben Cohen's True Majority, and the Obama campaign's offshoot, Organizing for America. The Feminist Majority even supported the $80 billion war supplemental with an amendment supporting women's programs in Afghanistan."
This lethargy, cowardice and compliance to the top dogs has been repeated with issue after issue. The sell out on the bailout and single payer perhaps top the list, but the failure of liberals to defend public education from control freaks like Arne Duncan or Obama' replication of the Bush war on civil liberties, while getting less attention, are just as bad.
If liberals had paid more attention to what the far right was up to, rather than just using it as a punching bag to make themselves feel better, they might have noticed that the GOP reactionaries hardly ever caved into their party's mainstream. Instead they redefined that mainstream. Liberals, on the other hand, surrender before they even enter the ring.
Our political labels are largely assigned for us by the media. There is thus hardly an inch of space allowed between center right liberalism and socialism. Proposing policies of the sort that gave America its greatest days over the past century is dismissed as radical.
But that doesn't change reality, which is that the liberal power brokers are essentially following traditional conservative policies, that Obama is the most conservative Democratic president since Woodrow Wilson, and that there is a growing gap between what liberals are today and what they were when they were truly making a better America.
That doesn't mean there isn't an alternative. It would help if we made a clear distinction between indentured liberals and independent progressives - a major difference being that the latter understand that ideas are still more important that icons.
To an independent progressive, the issue is not support of Obama but a set of policies that Obama may or may not support. My scorecard, for example, finds me agreeing with Obama about 30% of the time, which is pretty dismal, especially when you consider that it is among the alienating 70% that much of American history will be written. And why is Obama so alienated from the progressive path (and so much more so then when he was just representing Illinois in the Senate)? Simply because he is driven not by conscience but by calculation. And in Obama's calculations, liberalism now equals zero.
The media insists that we define what is happening in terms of whoever is in the White House. Here's how I put it in "Shadows of Hope" fifteen years ago:
"Congress has lost power relative to the White House not merely for various political reasons, but because 535 legislators are simply too many for the media to handle. TV, in particular, treats politics much as it does wide screen movies; it snips off the right and left sides until the frame fits comfortably within the more equilateral shape of its eye. The edges of our experience are lost and we find ourselves staring at a comfortable center -- which in the case of politics, means we find ourselves endlessly watching the President while much of the rest of American democracy passes unnoticed.
"This preoccupation with the presidency not only exaggerates the importance of the position, it distorts the constitutional division of political power, denigrates the significance of state and local government and creates pressures for presidential action when such action may be neither wise nor even lawful. We can not, even out of seemingly harmless celebrity worship, imbue our president with supra-constitutional virtues or powers without simultaneously damaging the Constitution and the democratic system it was established to protect.
"Besides, our presidential fetish badly skews our view of our country and the changes occurring within it -- not only elsewhere in government but beyond politics entirely. It trivializes our own collective and individual roles in creating social and political change. And, conversely, it can create the illusion of great change when far less is really happening."
Independent progressives understand this instinctively and struggle - with sadly little help - to help keep our eyes on the real game, which is the change that is occurring as a result of the political puppet show we watch on the nightly news yet which are usually ignored or treated as of minimal importance. An example: the foreclosure crisis is enormous but you would never know it listening to the news or the Democrats.
You can tell independent progressive groups because they will actually challenge the Democrats in power on their policies. They will oppose imperial wars even if a Democrat is leading them. They will fight the coddling of the welfare fathers of Wall Street even if the chief coddler doesn't look the part. They will worry about how our politics affect the weak and not just the comfortable, and they will spend more time opening doors for the powerless than in cracking glass ceilings for the few.
No one in the conventional media is going to tell you about these distinctions, but they are real. The independent progressive story is not about how bad some reactionary politician or commentator is, but how good we all could be if we did things differently and if we pursued real policies of true worth rather than worshiping false heroes.
Barack Obama didn't kill liberalism; he's just doing a nice job of burying it. The end of liberalism as a meaningful ideology came with the nomination of Bill Clinton. The argument was - although hardly phrased so accurately - that it was far better for liberals to dump their policies and become the indentured servants of an elected Democrat than to continue to press for their beliefs and miss out on all the power and the parties.
This same willingness to go with icons rather than ideas drove liberals quickly into the Obama camp, especially since he had the added advantage of looking the way he was supposed to believe.
It was apparent from the start, however, that Obama wasn't what the liberals thought. During the campaign, for example, I listed over two dozen positions and statements of Obama's that clearly were in conflict with what liberals once believed.
But of course, belief was no longer the issue. Liberalism had long ago become more of a secular church than a cause, and based more on socio-economic demographics than on actual politics. To the extent it had issues, these issues were, like abortion and gay rights, ones that appealed to its core demographics. Long gone was the liberal concern for doing the most for the most; economic issues had faded; and the base that had helped build the New Deal and Great Society were now dismissed as red necks, racists, gun nuts and crazy church goers.
The factor of class was both immense and silent. But you could tell it by listening to liberals talk. The little folk had simply disappeared from their concerns.
Thus it is that we came to have a Democratic Congress and president that pressed a bailout for bankers with virtually no help for homeowners, who promised to leave one war but then escalated another and who couldn't bring themselves in majority to support the sort of universal healthcare the rest of the western world had long adopted.
As Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report put it the other day: "The first Black president has racked up some impressive victories. Barack Obama has quarantined single-payer healthcare advocates, crushed dissent against the war in Congress, and transferred more money to the finance capital class than at any time in planetary history. Not bad for just five months in office."
Liberals became part of the new center right; they became the modest conservatives the Republican reactionaries had kicked out of their own party. Instead of going to hell noisily in the manner of Rush Limbaugh, you were to proceed thoughtfully, cautiously, and in a measured manner inspired by a thoughtful, cautious, and measured president. But we are still going to hell.
Tom Hayden caught a moment of the measured madness, noting in the Nation:
"MoveOn.org resumed its historical antiwar stance this week, symbolically breaking with the Obama administration for the first time.
"After being criticized for abandoning the antiwar stance that won it millions of activist supporters, the organization sent targeted mailings supporting the demand for an Obama administration exit strategy report contained in HR 2404, by Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. . .
"Despite its modest nature, MoveOn's entry into the debate could be an important factor in legitimizing antiwar criticism of the Obama policies among Democrats. Antiwar sentiment at the grassroots is smothered by the unwillingness of several organizations to openly oppose the war escalation, despite their roots in the antiwar movement against Iraq.
"The silent organizations thus far include Democracy for America and its founder, Howard Dean, Ben Cohen's True Majority, and the Obama campaign's offshoot, Organizing for America. The Feminist Majority even supported the $80 billion war supplemental with an amendment supporting women's programs in Afghanistan."
This lethargy, cowardice and compliance to the top dogs has been repeated with issue after issue. The sell out on the bailout and single payer perhaps top the list, but the failure of liberals to defend public education from control freaks like Arne Duncan or Obama' replication of the Bush war on civil liberties, while getting less attention, are just as bad.
If liberals had paid more attention to what the far right was up to, rather than just using it as a punching bag to make themselves feel better, they might have noticed that the GOP reactionaries hardly ever caved into their party's mainstream. Instead they redefined that mainstream. Liberals, on the other hand, surrender before they even enter the ring.
Our political labels are largely assigned for us by the media. There is thus hardly an inch of space allowed between center right liberalism and socialism. Proposing policies of the sort that gave America its greatest days over the past century is dismissed as radical.
But that doesn't change reality, which is that the liberal power brokers are essentially following traditional conservative policies, that Obama is the most conservative Democratic president since Woodrow Wilson, and that there is a growing gap between what liberals are today and what they were when they were truly making a better America.
That doesn't mean there isn't an alternative. It would help if we made a clear distinction between indentured liberals and independent progressives - a major difference being that the latter understand that ideas are still more important that icons.
To an independent progressive, the issue is not support of Obama but a set of policies that Obama may or may not support. My scorecard, for example, finds me agreeing with Obama about 30% of the time, which is pretty dismal, especially when you consider that it is among the alienating 70% that much of American history will be written. And why is Obama so alienated from the progressive path (and so much more so then when he was just representing Illinois in the Senate)? Simply because he is driven not by conscience but by calculation. And in Obama's calculations, liberalism now equals zero.
The media insists that we define what is happening in terms of whoever is in the White House. Here's how I put it in "Shadows of Hope" fifteen years ago:
"Congress has lost power relative to the White House not merely for various political reasons, but because 535 legislators are simply too many for the media to handle. TV, in particular, treats politics much as it does wide screen movies; it snips off the right and left sides until the frame fits comfortably within the more equilateral shape of its eye. The edges of our experience are lost and we find ourselves staring at a comfortable center -- which in the case of politics, means we find ourselves endlessly watching the President while much of the rest of American democracy passes unnoticed.
"This preoccupation with the presidency not only exaggerates the importance of the position, it distorts the constitutional division of political power, denigrates the significance of state and local government and creates pressures for presidential action when such action may be neither wise nor even lawful. We can not, even out of seemingly harmless celebrity worship, imbue our president with supra-constitutional virtues or powers without simultaneously damaging the Constitution and the democratic system it was established to protect.
"Besides, our presidential fetish badly skews our view of our country and the changes occurring within it -- not only elsewhere in government but beyond politics entirely. It trivializes our own collective and individual roles in creating social and political change. And, conversely, it can create the illusion of great change when far less is really happening."
Independent progressives understand this instinctively and struggle - with sadly little help - to help keep our eyes on the real game, which is the change that is occurring as a result of the political puppet show we watch on the nightly news yet which are usually ignored or treated as of minimal importance. An example: the foreclosure crisis is enormous but you would never know it listening to the news or the Democrats.
You can tell independent progressive groups because they will actually challenge the Democrats in power on their policies. They will oppose imperial wars even if a Democrat is leading them. They will fight the coddling of the welfare fathers of Wall Street even if the chief coddler doesn't look the part. They will worry about how our politics affect the weak and not just the comfortable, and they will spend more time opening doors for the powerless than in cracking glass ceilings for the few.
No one in the conventional media is going to tell you about these distinctions, but they are real. The independent progressive story is not about how bad some reactionary politician or commentator is, but how good we all could be if we did things differently and if we pursued real policies of true worth rather than worshiping false heroes.
June 23, 2009
BAD ADVICE & THE CRASH
Sam Smith
Almost totally ignored in the coverage of the financial crash is the role of poor investment advice. Not the Bernie Madoff version, but run of the mill standard advice that left endowments of non profits and 401Ks down 40%.
At the heart of this bad advice was the absence of a single word: sell.
This is not unique to the fiscal crisis. Investment advisers hate that word. Try to find good discussions on when to sell a stock and you'll be hard pressed. It's there, but just not anywhere near as handy as its opposite: buy and hold.
Part of the problem may be a loyalty to the overall market as opposed to the individual investor. After all, if everyone played the market smart, it wouldn't be anywhere near as good a place to put your money. If, say, everyone tried to sell a stock when it declined a certain amount, only the lucky early traders would be ahead of the collapse as the stock headed like a cigarette butt to the floor.
But as long as you have a huge constituency of the placid, predictable and permanent, traders can have their profits without the amateurs spoiling their fun.
Some of this is what Catherine Austin Fitts calls "pump and dump," -"artificially inflating the price of a stock or other security through promotion, in order to sell at the inflated price," and then making even more by short-selling." In fact, Fitts thinks the whole American economy is being pumped and dumped.
But if you think about it, any form of gambling depends heavily on a large number of reliably gullible participants. The financial markets are no exception.
Where there is a difference is that the federal government does not pretend to regulate the rules of poker the way it claims to control the markets.
Let's imagine that we were to turn over the regulation of markets to the EPA or FDA. One of the first things these agencies might do is figure out how to have average participants adequately informed of the hazards they face and what to do about it. This would be in contrast with federal market regulators whose first concern is the market itself.
There are, to be sure, some non-governmental sources of such information and while they are a bit hard to find, they are well worth pursuing.
One is the amazing Mark Hulbert who years ago decided to keep track of how well investment newsletters actually did their job. He follows over 180 newsletters and the results can be pretty glum. For example, in the past year only less than ten percent of the newsletters have made suggestions that have produced a net gain. Over five years, almost precisely half have made no money. Hulbert tracks both long term and short term results and parses them by different categories. Imagine if the federal government required every registered investment advisor to report their personal score with the same accuracy as, say, a baseball team.
Hulbert's work also points to newsletters that have good records in dealing with timing such as Timers Digest, the Chartist and Cabot Market Letter. Timers Digest, for example, keeps close tabs on the timers with the best records and Cabot offers some good and simple advice on when and how to sell, such as
- When to cut losses
- Never let a solid profit turn into a loss
- Remember that you can always buy a stock back
How much and what sort of regulation there should be to allow investors to be better informed about dealing with bear markets and when to sell is a worthy topic for considerable debate, but what isn't debatable is that, in the face of 40% market collapse, untold numbers of investors ended up in trouble because they had been taught to buy and hold.
To give an idea of the effects of such advice, consider two investors: one who sells a stock when it drops 20%, the other who holds on to the stock as it declines 40%. The first investors' portfolio needs to rise 25% to get back to where it was; the second's portfolio will have to go up by two thirds. This is not an insignificant difference.
As things stand now, the average investor gets neither good basic information about the reliability of their investment advice nor is the government interested in slightest in doing something about it. And so these investors buy and hold and while others, who aren't called traders for nothing, make their profits.
Almost totally ignored in the coverage of the financial crash is the role of poor investment advice. Not the Bernie Madoff version, but run of the mill standard advice that left endowments of non profits and 401Ks down 40%.
At the heart of this bad advice was the absence of a single word: sell.
This is not unique to the fiscal crisis. Investment advisers hate that word. Try to find good discussions on when to sell a stock and you'll be hard pressed. It's there, but just not anywhere near as handy as its opposite: buy and hold.
Part of the problem may be a loyalty to the overall market as opposed to the individual investor. After all, if everyone played the market smart, it wouldn't be anywhere near as good a place to put your money. If, say, everyone tried to sell a stock when it declined a certain amount, only the lucky early traders would be ahead of the collapse as the stock headed like a cigarette butt to the floor.
But as long as you have a huge constituency of the placid, predictable and permanent, traders can have their profits without the amateurs spoiling their fun.
Some of this is what Catherine Austin Fitts calls "pump and dump," -"artificially inflating the price of a stock or other security through promotion, in order to sell at the inflated price," and then making even more by short-selling." In fact, Fitts thinks the whole American economy is being pumped and dumped.
But if you think about it, any form of gambling depends heavily on a large number of reliably gullible participants. The financial markets are no exception.
Where there is a difference is that the federal government does not pretend to regulate the rules of poker the way it claims to control the markets.
Let's imagine that we were to turn over the regulation of markets to the EPA or FDA. One of the first things these agencies might do is figure out how to have average participants adequately informed of the hazards they face and what to do about it. This would be in contrast with federal market regulators whose first concern is the market itself.
There are, to be sure, some non-governmental sources of such information and while they are a bit hard to find, they are well worth pursuing.
One is the amazing Mark Hulbert who years ago decided to keep track of how well investment newsletters actually did their job. He follows over 180 newsletters and the results can be pretty glum. For example, in the past year only less than ten percent of the newsletters have made suggestions that have produced a net gain. Over five years, almost precisely half have made no money. Hulbert tracks both long term and short term results and parses them by different categories. Imagine if the federal government required every registered investment advisor to report their personal score with the same accuracy as, say, a baseball team.
Hulbert's work also points to newsletters that have good records in dealing with timing such as Timers Digest, the Chartist and Cabot Market Letter. Timers Digest, for example, keeps close tabs on the timers with the best records and Cabot offers some good and simple advice on when and how to sell, such as
- When to cut losses
- Never let a solid profit turn into a loss
- Remember that you can always buy a stock back
How much and what sort of regulation there should be to allow investors to be better informed about dealing with bear markets and when to sell is a worthy topic for considerable debate, but what isn't debatable is that, in the face of 40% market collapse, untold numbers of investors ended up in trouble because they had been taught to buy and hold.
To give an idea of the effects of such advice, consider two investors: one who sells a stock when it drops 20%, the other who holds on to the stock as it declines 40%. The first investors' portfolio needs to rise 25% to get back to where it was; the second's portfolio will have to go up by two thirds. This is not an insignificant difference.
As things stand now, the average investor gets neither good basic information about the reliability of their investment advice nor is the government interested in slightest in doing something about it. And so these investors buy and hold and while others, who aren't called traders for nothing, make their profits.
June 17, 2009
END OF AN AFFAIR
Sam Smith
I was raised on Chryslers. I can only remember one General Motors machine ever being granted resident parking permission in my parent's driveway and the only Ford I ever drove was a farm tractor.
Admittedly, my first car was a 1941 Oldsmobile Hydromatic. But it was 20 years old, had just 26,000 miles on it and was too cheap and nifty for a twenty-something to resist. Besides it really was owned by the little old lady who only drove it on Sundays. I actually talked to her. But it only lasted six months thanks to its novel but unperfected transmission, so I sold it to a fellow Coastguardsman who somehow transformed it into a clutchless yet shiftable vehicle.
Including three cars handed down by a similarly inclined grandfather, my parents' fleet over the years included a 1936 Plymouth, a used 1939 Plymouth laundry van, a 1941 and 1946 Plymouth station wagon, a 1946 Army surplus six wheel personnel carrier with winch that required double clutching and in which I learned to drive at 14, a 1949 Chrysler coupe, and a 1952 Desoto. My own collection included a 1952 Chrysler New Yorker dubbed Gloria because it was sick transit, a 1985 minivan (a sister model is now in the Smithsonian's Museum of American History) which my sons found too embarrassing to take on dates, and its 1995 successor. The other day I sold my last Chrysler, getting $400 for a 1995 Cirrus whose constant stalling had befuddled all repair shops but which I kept going through the simple expedient of turning on the air conditioner to reve up the idle.
But I'm afraid that's it. I just can't see myself buying a Chrysler built by Obama fiat and Italian Fiat. I'm afraid that each time I would put on the brakes, I would see phantom images of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner in the road ahead telling me that the problem was all just a matter of corporate readjustment.
We live in a time when reorganization is substituting for reality, answering multiple choice questions on school exams has replaced learning the way things attached to each other actually work, and cliche-ridden management patois has eliminated the need for actual competence. If those at the top understand marketing, mission and finance, what more does one want?
The problem is that cars don't work like that. Management is the least of their problems. Getting people from place to place, not spending too much fuel in the process, creating a little piece of happy solitude in the midst of five lane chaos, and knowing the best place to put the cup holders is what really matters.
If I want sleep-inducing rhetoric, Barack Obama is my man; if I want some funny car stories, Fiat is my vehicle. But if I'm looking for something that really works, that will make me happy, and keep working until someone else in my house says, "Can't we buy a new car yet?" then I'm going to seek elsewhere.
Jeff Barlett of Consumer Reports seems to agree. Last May he wrote:
"For those Americans who recall when Fiat cars were sold here, the brand made a less-than-stellar impression. Looking back at Consumer Reports reliability ratings from the late 1970s, Fiat models typically had more dreaded solid black blobs than most car shoppers would prefer. . . Back then, Fiat was sometimes referred to as 'Fix It Again, Tony.'
"A lot can happen in 30 years, but don't get your hopes up. . . The annual Which? Car survey is the largest survey of its kind in the U.K., and it is conducted by a publication that, like Consumer Reports, does not accept advertising and delivers the straight facts from its findings. . .
"When the brands are ranked, Which? Car finds Honda and Toyota at the top of the 2008 reliability list, followed closely by Daihatsu, Lexus, Mazda, and Subaru. . . Among the 38 brands featured in Which? Car, Fiat ranked 35th, followed by Renault, Land Rover, and Chrysler/Dodge. . .
"Fiat, Chrysler, and Dodge are categorized as 'Very poor.' In total, Fiat, Chrysler, and Dodge provide similar reliability, and it isn't good."
So, if I was raised on lousy Chryslers, what's so much worse about a Fiat? Only this: in six decades of Chrysler cars, I only had one lemon (the 1995 Cirrus). The worst thing that ever happened with the other cars was when the hood flew up on the 1941 Plymouth station wagon as I was driving to college and when the tire fell off the 1952 DeSoto driving down a highway, probably the result of a bad mechanic rather than of bad mechanics.
I beat the averages all those years and one thing about averages is that only in Lake Wobegon can you always do better than average. So I think I'll start trusting Consumer Reports rather than my luck. Besides, I can't get an image out of my mind: that of Barack Obama, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers looking under the hood of my car and telling me not to worry, it's just a matter of a different approach to financing and changing the management structure. I've never had a car that worked like that.
I was raised on Chryslers. I can only remember one General Motors machine ever being granted resident parking permission in my parent's driveway and the only Ford I ever drove was a farm tractor.
Admittedly, my first car was a 1941 Oldsmobile Hydromatic. But it was 20 years old, had just 26,000 miles on it and was too cheap and nifty for a twenty-something to resist. Besides it really was owned by the little old lady who only drove it on Sundays. I actually talked to her. But it only lasted six months thanks to its novel but unperfected transmission, so I sold it to a fellow Coastguardsman who somehow transformed it into a clutchless yet shiftable vehicle.
Including three cars handed down by a similarly inclined grandfather, my parents' fleet over the years included a 1936 Plymouth, a used 1939 Plymouth laundry van, a 1941 and 1946 Plymouth station wagon, a 1946 Army surplus six wheel personnel carrier with winch that required double clutching and in which I learned to drive at 14, a 1949 Chrysler coupe, and a 1952 Desoto. My own collection included a 1952 Chrysler New Yorker dubbed Gloria because it was sick transit, a 1985 minivan (a sister model is now in the Smithsonian's Museum of American History) which my sons found too embarrassing to take on dates, and its 1995 successor. The other day I sold my last Chrysler, getting $400 for a 1995 Cirrus whose constant stalling had befuddled all repair shops but which I kept going through the simple expedient of turning on the air conditioner to reve up the idle.
But I'm afraid that's it. I just can't see myself buying a Chrysler built by Obama fiat and Italian Fiat. I'm afraid that each time I would put on the brakes, I would see phantom images of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner in the road ahead telling me that the problem was all just a matter of corporate readjustment.
We live in a time when reorganization is substituting for reality, answering multiple choice questions on school exams has replaced learning the way things attached to each other actually work, and cliche-ridden management patois has eliminated the need for actual competence. If those at the top understand marketing, mission and finance, what more does one want?
The problem is that cars don't work like that. Management is the least of their problems. Getting people from place to place, not spending too much fuel in the process, creating a little piece of happy solitude in the midst of five lane chaos, and knowing the best place to put the cup holders is what really matters.
If I want sleep-inducing rhetoric, Barack Obama is my man; if I want some funny car stories, Fiat is my vehicle. But if I'm looking for something that really works, that will make me happy, and keep working until someone else in my house says, "Can't we buy a new car yet?" then I'm going to seek elsewhere.
Jeff Barlett of Consumer Reports seems to agree. Last May he wrote:
"For those Americans who recall when Fiat cars were sold here, the brand made a less-than-stellar impression. Looking back at Consumer Reports reliability ratings from the late 1970s, Fiat models typically had more dreaded solid black blobs than most car shoppers would prefer. . . Back then, Fiat was sometimes referred to as 'Fix It Again, Tony.'
"A lot can happen in 30 years, but don't get your hopes up. . . The annual Which? Car survey is the largest survey of its kind in the U.K., and it is conducted by a publication that, like Consumer Reports, does not accept advertising and delivers the straight facts from its findings. . .
"When the brands are ranked, Which? Car finds Honda and Toyota at the top of the 2008 reliability list, followed closely by Daihatsu, Lexus, Mazda, and Subaru. . . Among the 38 brands featured in Which? Car, Fiat ranked 35th, followed by Renault, Land Rover, and Chrysler/Dodge. . .
"Fiat, Chrysler, and Dodge are categorized as 'Very poor.' In total, Fiat, Chrysler, and Dodge provide similar reliability, and it isn't good."
So, if I was raised on lousy Chryslers, what's so much worse about a Fiat? Only this: in six decades of Chrysler cars, I only had one lemon (the 1995 Cirrus). The worst thing that ever happened with the other cars was when the hood flew up on the 1941 Plymouth station wagon as I was driving to college and when the tire fell off the 1952 DeSoto driving down a highway, probably the result of a bad mechanic rather than of bad mechanics.
I beat the averages all those years and one thing about averages is that only in Lake Wobegon can you always do better than average. So I think I'll start trusting Consumer Reports rather than my luck. Besides, I can't get an image out of my mind: that of Barack Obama, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers looking under the hood of my car and telling me not to worry, it's just a matter of a different approach to financing and changing the management structure. I've never had a car that worked like that.
June 02, 2009
SHOP TALK
Your editor and his historian wife did a farewell interview with Kojo Nnambi on WAMU, DC's NPR station,about their decades in local Washington prior to their move to our New England regional headquarters in Freeport, Maine. Click to hear
June 01, 2009
FIREFIGHTERS ARE NOT LAW CLERKS
Sam Smith
The real problem in the Ricci v. DeStefano case is neither the white nor the black firefighters but the law and its technocratic application. For the past six years - as the lawyers have had their fun - no one of either ethnicity has been promoted in the New Haven fire department.
This is not a good way to run a fire department or improve ethnic relations. Yet because we have become so accustomed to depending upon legal and technocratic solutions to our problems, because so many assume that verbal skills equal pragmatic competence, few even bother to ask whether there might be a better approach to such situations, such as mediation and arbitration or subduing our obsession with tests.
I was never a firefighter but I was the operations officer on a Coast Guard cutter that handled aids to navigation and heavy weather search & rescue. Among the men on our ship were a number who hadn't even completed high school. I knew this not because they were any less competent but only because they were studying for the GED and had asked me for help. And at the top of the list of qualified officers on our ship was not this Ivy League educated product of crash officer candidate training (including 40 tests in 13 weeks) but two warrant officers - enlisted men who had fleeted up to officer status through their experience and performance far more than their test taking skill.
If these officers had been trying to get promoted in the New Haven Fire Department, their experience and performance would have been submerged in examinations designed by large corporations profiteering on government and business assessment addiction. It is, after all, so much easier to read a test score than to judge the true nature of someone's performance.
Which is why we are giving up educating our kids in favor of just preparing them for tests. And which why our public vocational training is so poor. We assume everyone is going to be a law clerk or other desk bound manipulator of words and data.
But running a ship or being a firefighter is quite a different matter than being school superintendent, politician or lawyer.
As Joseph Conrad noted, "Of all the living creatures upon land and sea, it is ships alone that cannot be taken in by barren pretenses." Firefighters similarly deal daily with unforgiving reality. Yet these days they also face exams that, in the case of the New Haven firefighters, cost some of them upwards of a $1,000 for study materials, tutoring and similar preparation. As the white firefighters put it, "We gave up three months of our lives to intense study and preparation during the three-month study period preceding the exams. We studied many hours a day and rarely saw or spent little time with our families and friends during this period. Some of us took leave from second jobs, or our wives did so to assume childcare responsibilities while we studied, so the economic loss was even greater than the out-of-pocket costs of the exams."
The black applicants struggled, too. Said Donald Day, former regional director of the International Association of Black Professional Firefighters, "Historically, as African-Americans, we don't do as well on strictly written exams." Reported the New Haven Independent, "Oral exams are fairer, he argued, but they're also more expensive to administer. He said that written exams can't really determine who will make a good leader. 'Some of the worst officers you/ve ever had were book smart officers.'"
To get some idea of what these guys were up against, I checked out one of the cram programs firefighters use. Bearing in mind that you are looking to hire someone who can get you out of a smoked filled, fifth floor bedroom, consider the following test taking advice:
|||| When evaluating answer choices, the words to be on the lookout for are the little words that tend to either "harden" or "soften" statements. Words which "harden" statements, and make them difficult to defend, are strong words like: all, every, always, will, must, certainly, invariably, surely, no one, ever, any, no matter, nothing, etc. Words which "soften" statements, and make them easy to defend, are words like: some, many, sometimes, may, possibly, generally, probably, usually, often, can, could, might, occasionally, etc. . .
When answering test questions, you must base your answer solely on the information contained in the test question. The test for a Firefighter requires no previous knowledge of the job. The test questions do not have to reflect the way the job is really done or the actual procedures of the Fire Department. . .
Problems arise when a person who is familiar with procedures of the fire department encounters a test question based on something that contradicts actual practices. It is in this kind of situation that you must ignore actual practices and answer on the basis of what the test question says. For example, you might know that kitchen stove fires are usually extinguished with a portable fire extinguisher; but a test question might describe a stove fire being put out with a fire hose attached to a hydrant. In this kind of test situation, never mind the actual practice; go by the information in the question. . .
A skillful test maker tries to make two or three of the answer choices look very good. All the answer choices may contain some truth, which make them tempting. Or all may look wrong. But the test maker has to have put some detail into the "fact pattern" of the question to justify the claim that one of these answers is better than the others. If reviewing the answer choices themselves has not helped, the clue to which answer is correct is likely to be in the question stem or "fact pattern" rather than in the answer choices. So go back to the question stem and the fact pattern the look for the deciding factor. ||||
This is not advice for someone seeking to clerk for a judge or win some cable quiz show but for someone who is expected to stop fires and save lives. Yet, "the test questions do not have to reflect the way the job is really done or the actual procedures of the Fire Department." And: "Problems arise when a person who is familiar with procedures of the fire department encounters a test question based on something that contradicts actual practices. It is in this kind of situation that you must ignore actual practices and answer on the basis of what the test question says."
Somehow I feel a lot less safe.
The New Haven case is a mess caused by infatuation with the law, mistaking verbal dexterity for practical skill, and an obsession with examinations. It has protected neither people's safety nor their civil liberties.
It would, for example, be interesting to know how much has been paid lawyers (especially white ones) in this case, because I suspect it might have supported increasing the number of job openings so that black firefighters could have been hired along with the higher scoring whites. As older white officers retired, the bubble could deflate again. Black mayor Walter Washington used this approach to integrate the whole DC government during the 1970s and no one got mad. Mediation might have worked out a deal where most of the whites got promoted along with some of the blacks, with the remaining whites with passing scores being placed at the top for the list for the next promotion.
Such approaches could have gotten New Haven through its immediate crisis, which it could avoid repeating by developing a much fairer way of choosing officers for its fire department.
A successful multiethnic community is one that works well for everyone. It is not one in which government puts members of one of the most honorable trades at each other's throats.
The real problem in the Ricci v. DeStefano case is neither the white nor the black firefighters but the law and its technocratic application. For the past six years - as the lawyers have had their fun - no one of either ethnicity has been promoted in the New Haven fire department.
This is not a good way to run a fire department or improve ethnic relations. Yet because we have become so accustomed to depending upon legal and technocratic solutions to our problems, because so many assume that verbal skills equal pragmatic competence, few even bother to ask whether there might be a better approach to such situations, such as mediation and arbitration or subduing our obsession with tests.
I was never a firefighter but I was the operations officer on a Coast Guard cutter that handled aids to navigation and heavy weather search & rescue. Among the men on our ship were a number who hadn't even completed high school. I knew this not because they were any less competent but only because they were studying for the GED and had asked me for help. And at the top of the list of qualified officers on our ship was not this Ivy League educated product of crash officer candidate training (including 40 tests in 13 weeks) but two warrant officers - enlisted men who had fleeted up to officer status through their experience and performance far more than their test taking skill.
If these officers had been trying to get promoted in the New Haven Fire Department, their experience and performance would have been submerged in examinations designed by large corporations profiteering on government and business assessment addiction. It is, after all, so much easier to read a test score than to judge the true nature of someone's performance.
Which is why we are giving up educating our kids in favor of just preparing them for tests. And which why our public vocational training is so poor. We assume everyone is going to be a law clerk or other desk bound manipulator of words and data.
But running a ship or being a firefighter is quite a different matter than being school superintendent, politician or lawyer.
As Joseph Conrad noted, "Of all the living creatures upon land and sea, it is ships alone that cannot be taken in by barren pretenses." Firefighters similarly deal daily with unforgiving reality. Yet these days they also face exams that, in the case of the New Haven firefighters, cost some of them upwards of a $1,000 for study materials, tutoring and similar preparation. As the white firefighters put it, "We gave up three months of our lives to intense study and preparation during the three-month study period preceding the exams. We studied many hours a day and rarely saw or spent little time with our families and friends during this period. Some of us took leave from second jobs, or our wives did so to assume childcare responsibilities while we studied, so the economic loss was even greater than the out-of-pocket costs of the exams."
The black applicants struggled, too. Said Donald Day, former regional director of the International Association of Black Professional Firefighters, "Historically, as African-Americans, we don't do as well on strictly written exams." Reported the New Haven Independent, "Oral exams are fairer, he argued, but they're also more expensive to administer. He said that written exams can't really determine who will make a good leader. 'Some of the worst officers you/ve ever had were book smart officers.'"
To get some idea of what these guys were up against, I checked out one of the cram programs firefighters use. Bearing in mind that you are looking to hire someone who can get you out of a smoked filled, fifth floor bedroom, consider the following test taking advice:
|||| When evaluating answer choices, the words to be on the lookout for are the little words that tend to either "harden" or "soften" statements. Words which "harden" statements, and make them difficult to defend, are strong words like: all, every, always, will, must, certainly, invariably, surely, no one, ever, any, no matter, nothing, etc. Words which "soften" statements, and make them easy to defend, are words like: some, many, sometimes, may, possibly, generally, probably, usually, often, can, could, might, occasionally, etc. . .
When answering test questions, you must base your answer solely on the information contained in the test question. The test for a Firefighter requires no previous knowledge of the job. The test questions do not have to reflect the way the job is really done or the actual procedures of the Fire Department. . .
Problems arise when a person who is familiar with procedures of the fire department encounters a test question based on something that contradicts actual practices. It is in this kind of situation that you must ignore actual practices and answer on the basis of what the test question says. For example, you might know that kitchen stove fires are usually extinguished with a portable fire extinguisher; but a test question might describe a stove fire being put out with a fire hose attached to a hydrant. In this kind of test situation, never mind the actual practice; go by the information in the question. . .
A skillful test maker tries to make two or three of the answer choices look very good. All the answer choices may contain some truth, which make them tempting. Or all may look wrong. But the test maker has to have put some detail into the "fact pattern" of the question to justify the claim that one of these answers is better than the others. If reviewing the answer choices themselves has not helped, the clue to which answer is correct is likely to be in the question stem or "fact pattern" rather than in the answer choices. So go back to the question stem and the fact pattern the look for the deciding factor. ||||
This is not advice for someone seeking to clerk for a judge or win some cable quiz show but for someone who is expected to stop fires and save lives. Yet, "the test questions do not have to reflect the way the job is really done or the actual procedures of the Fire Department." And: "Problems arise when a person who is familiar with procedures of the fire department encounters a test question based on something that contradicts actual practices. It is in this kind of situation that you must ignore actual practices and answer on the basis of what the test question says."
Somehow I feel a lot less safe.
The New Haven case is a mess caused by infatuation with the law, mistaking verbal dexterity for practical skill, and an obsession with examinations. It has protected neither people's safety nor their civil liberties.
It would, for example, be interesting to know how much has been paid lawyers (especially white ones) in this case, because I suspect it might have supported increasing the number of job openings so that black firefighters could have been hired along with the higher scoring whites. As older white officers retired, the bubble could deflate again. Black mayor Walter Washington used this approach to integrate the whole DC government during the 1970s and no one got mad. Mediation might have worked out a deal where most of the whites got promoted along with some of the blacks, with the remaining whites with passing scores being placed at the top for the list for the next promotion.
Such approaches could have gotten New Haven through its immediate crisis, which it could avoid repeating by developing a much fairer way of choosing officers for its fire department.
A successful multiethnic community is one that works well for everyone. It is not one in which government puts members of one of the most honorable trades at each other's throats.
May 27, 2009
MULTICULTURALISM ON THE CHEAP
Sam Smith
If there's one thing I've learned from the Puerto Rican branch of my family it is that all Puerto Ricans don't agree. So when Sonia Sotomayor was nominated to the Supreme Court, my first question was: which one of my Puerto Rican relatives does she most resemble. After considerable research I reached two conclusions: (1) None and (2) my nephews, nieces and sister-in-law are far more interesting.
The reason is simple: Sotomayer seems yet another boring lawyer. The three institutions that most endanger the preservation of any culture are Wal-Mart, TV and law school. Each imposes its own style, values and habits on those it influences making it hard, as Harvard Law School
This, of course, does not dissuade the conventional media from its infatuation with ethnic iconism, turning any rising public figure who doesn't look like David Gregory into a totem of multicultural triumph while ignoring such facts as the paucity of blacks and latinos in the Senate.
To someone who's voted almost all his life in Washington, which means making repeated choices between black candidates, this obsession always seems peculiar, as I was reminded recently when a couple who are longtime friends recalled Mayor Marion Barry's first run for reelection in 1982. The husband, another man and I had sponsored a fundraiser for Barry, but our wives - turned off by Barry - refused to join us. That was 27 years ago and in the capital, ethnicity was already taking a back seat to more important things such as drug and sex habits and whether someone was lying to you. Furthermore, despite our disagreement, we're all still married.
Our present black mayor, who won every precinct in the city, three years later garners only big bucks from business contributors but scarcely a kind word from anyone else, black or white. That's the way multicultural progress is meant to work, although I'm not sure that Judge Sotomayor would agree with it. She once said:
"Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. . . I am not so sure that I agree with the statement. First. . . there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina
When I read that, I asked myself just which one of the wise Latina
But at least she said something controversial. The media has been struggling to make her story interesting, a desperate NY Times even using as a large type pull quote this gem:
"Congress has already specified the relationship between cost and benefits in requiring that the technology designated by the EPA be the best available."
Scanning her decisions, they are a pretty bland lot. Some good, some bad, with few signs of eloquence or particular insight. Thus I wasn't surprised to read that "Judge Sotomayor's culinary tastes range from tuna fish and cottage cheese for lunch with clerks in her chambers, to her standard order at the Blue Ribbon Bakery: smoked sturgeon on toast, with Dijon mustard, onions and capers."
I suspect that she will please progressives in some decisions and annoy the hell out of them on other occasions. The rest of the time I imagine she'll be a bit like Obama: a fading symbol of something a lot of people thought they were getting on the cheap, with a single election or appointment, instead of through the far harder but more meaningful path of real political and cultural change.
May 26, 2009
ARGUMENT WITHOUT HONOR
Sam Smith
Obama and his aides have been repeatedly praised for their intelligence. Unfortunately, intelligence is not all that useful an indicator of good leadership. After all, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin and Tim Geithner are quite smart and look where that's led us.
As Jonathan Alter put it, "Obamaworld is loaded with . . . policy wonks who have experienced little in life but sound unfailingly articulate and confident about their elegant economic models . . . One senior Obama official says he feels a bit inferior. He went to Harvard Law School, but his undergraduate degree is merely from Georgetown."
Go back a few decades and you have the Bay of Pigs disaster being inspired and bungled by intelligent people of the likes of Jack Kennedy, Richard Bissell and Allan Dulles. And Vietnam had more Harvard intellectuals making disastrous governmental decisions than at any time in our history.
The problem is that intelligence is just a skill, not unlike a good backhand, which can either be used to whop an old lady and steal her purse or to win a tournament at Wimbleton. Talent is only as good as the purpose to which it is put.
Lyndon Johnson once described the CIA as being filled with graduates of Yale and Princeton whose daddies wouldn't let them into their brokerage firms. Why? No doubt because of the huge difference between the exam at the end of the semester and the endless tests of life.
To work well, intelligence has to be joined with things not well taught at universities, things like judgment, wisdom, understanding of other people and cultures, and, at the top of the list, honor.
Honor and integrity are critical because without their direction and restraint, intellectuals easily become just professional wrestlers of the mind, bright bullies getting their way at the expense of others.
In the end, such people can even add themselves to their list of victims, because they have placed so much trust in the strength of their mind that they have no warning when it is leading them drastically astray.
Such thoughts occurred as I read Obama's scary arguments in defense of preventive detention and as the debate on torture becomes stripped of moral context as though we were arguing over Coke vs. Pepsi. In both cases, arguments have been based on a logic that assumes we no longer care who we are, individually or as a country, only how we might win a particular contest.
In fact, even the proposed course in these cases is pragmatically faulty, but what is truly frightening is that those pressing torture or preventive detention have no more moral grounds for their behavior than did, say, Bernie Madoff. For example, all you have to do with Obama's argument for preventive detention is change a few words and you can dismantle our whole justice system.
Of course, Madoff knew he was doing wrong; the Obamas of the world get trapped by their training in the art of argument without honor, losing the ability to see the dangers of their own logic.
Worst, the media and the public tend to be impressed by such arguments and so we drift quietly further and further from what intelligence is meant to help us achieve: a decent society for all its members.
This drift from honor started well before Obama and no end is in sight. But precisely because current mythology declares him a particularly moral man, Obama's indifference can actually be more dangerous than that of a George Bush and Richard Cheney. If either of them had suggested preventive detention, Democrats and the media would have been immediately up in arms. With all too few exceptions Obama has gotten a pass.
Sadly, it is people like Obama who can make evil or injustice seem reasonable. And when they move on, the bad laws and precedents remain, and the next crowd may no longer be interested in even the appearance of decency. This is what happened when liberals sat quietly as Bill Clinton opened the door for Bush's excesses in support of financial deregulation and against civil liberties.
We have been taught that authoritarianism comes with bombs and guns. But it can just as easily come incrementally and without violence - through a constant and subtle rearrangement of our own view of what's right, fostered by a system that seeks such a change.
This was true in even Hitler's violent Germany as movingly described by Milton Mayer in his book, They Thought They Were Free. Mayer quotes a college professor:
"The crises and reforms (real reforms too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. . .
"To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted.' . . .
"Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. . . Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."
Rosencratz, before disappearing and dying, says something similar in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildernstern Are Dead:
"What was it all about? When did it begin? . . . Couldn't we just stay put? . . . We've done nothing wrong! We didn't harm anyone. Did we? . . . There must have been a moment, at the beginning, when we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.. . . Well, we'll know better next time."
For us, there still remains that moment; we are near enough the beginning that we can still say no. And a good place to begin is to reject arguments without honor.
Obama and his aides have been repeatedly praised for their intelligence. Unfortunately, intelligence is not all that useful an indicator of good leadership. After all, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin and Tim Geithner are quite smart and look where that's led us.
As Jonathan Alter put it, "Obamaworld is loaded with . . . policy wonks who have experienced little in life but sound unfailingly articulate and confident about their elegant economic models . . . One senior Obama official says he feels a bit inferior. He went to Harvard Law School, but his undergraduate degree is merely from Georgetown."
Go back a few decades and you have the Bay of Pigs disaster being inspired and bungled by intelligent people of the likes of Jack Kennedy, Richard Bissell and Allan Dulles. And Vietnam had more Harvard intellectuals making disastrous governmental decisions than at any time in our history.
The problem is that intelligence is just a skill, not unlike a good backhand, which can either be used to whop an old lady and steal her purse or to win a tournament at Wimbleton. Talent is only as good as the purpose to which it is put.
Lyndon Johnson once described the CIA as being filled with graduates of Yale and Princeton whose daddies wouldn't let them into their brokerage firms. Why? No doubt because of the huge difference between the exam at the end of the semester and the endless tests of life.
To work well, intelligence has to be joined with things not well taught at universities, things like judgment, wisdom, understanding of other people and cultures, and, at the top of the list, honor.
Honor and integrity are critical because without their direction and restraint, intellectuals easily become just professional wrestlers of the mind, bright bullies getting their way at the expense of others.
In the end, such people can even add themselves to their list of victims, because they have placed so much trust in the strength of their mind that they have no warning when it is leading them drastically astray.
Such thoughts occurred as I read Obama's scary arguments in defense of preventive detention and as the debate on torture becomes stripped of moral context as though we were arguing over Coke vs. Pepsi. In both cases, arguments have been based on a logic that assumes we no longer care who we are, individually or as a country, only how we might win a particular contest.
In fact, even the proposed course in these cases is pragmatically faulty, but what is truly frightening is that those pressing torture or preventive detention have no more moral grounds for their behavior than did, say, Bernie Madoff. For example, all you have to do with Obama's argument for preventive detention is change a few words and you can dismantle our whole justice system.
Of course, Madoff knew he was doing wrong; the Obamas of the world get trapped by their training in the art of argument without honor, losing the ability to see the dangers of their own logic.
Worst, the media and the public tend to be impressed by such arguments and so we drift quietly further and further from what intelligence is meant to help us achieve: a decent society for all its members.
This drift from honor started well before Obama and no end is in sight. But precisely because current mythology declares him a particularly moral man, Obama's indifference can actually be more dangerous than that of a George Bush and Richard Cheney. If either of them had suggested preventive detention, Democrats and the media would have been immediately up in arms. With all too few exceptions Obama has gotten a pass.
Sadly, it is people like Obama who can make evil or injustice seem reasonable. And when they move on, the bad laws and precedents remain, and the next crowd may no longer be interested in even the appearance of decency. This is what happened when liberals sat quietly as Bill Clinton opened the door for Bush's excesses in support of financial deregulation and against civil liberties.
We have been taught that authoritarianism comes with bombs and guns. But it can just as easily come incrementally and without violence - through a constant and subtle rearrangement of our own view of what's right, fostered by a system that seeks such a change.
This was true in even Hitler's violent Germany as movingly described by Milton Mayer in his book, They Thought They Were Free. Mayer quotes a college professor:
"The crises and reforms (real reforms too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. . .
"To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted.' . . .
"Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. . . Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."
Rosencratz, before disappearing and dying, says something similar in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildernstern Are Dead:
"What was it all about? When did it begin? . . . Couldn't we just stay put? . . . We've done nothing wrong! We didn't harm anyone. Did we? . . . There must have been a moment, at the beginning, when we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.. . . Well, we'll know better next time."
For us, there still remains that moment; we are near enough the beginning that we can still say no. And a good place to begin is to reject arguments without honor.
May 18, 2009
WHY WASHINGTON DOESN'T WORK
Note: The Review will soon be moving its headquarters from
Sam Smith
The years I have spent in
I use 1980 as a rough turning point. Rough because Watergate, the Vietnam War, urban riots and the disco drum machine all came earlier. Still we had at least partly recovered from the first three by the time the Reagan era began.
Then the city really began to change as I noted an 1981 article for the Washington Post Outlook section. The change, of course, was far from complete as indicated by the fact that the Post was still willing to publish something that began:
Could you stop the renaissance of
The two preceding decades had been among the most remarkable in American history, a time when blacks, women, gays, the environment and peace movements made unprecedented progress. There were miles to go, but seldom have so many gotten off to such a good start. Further, we had ended a terrible war and gotten rid of a crummy president.
But it was not just the rebels. The establishment responded as well. One of the country's most impressive political scoundrels - Lyndon Johnson - got more good legislation passed in less time than at any point in our history.
Included were civil rights laws, Medicare, Medicaid, the war on poverty, a major urban mass transit program, protection of the wilderness, food stamps, more money for higher education, improved voting rights, a ban on age discrimination in employment and fair housing legislation.
Even that otherwise egregious character, Richard Nixon, still practiced domestic affairs in a tradition of social democracy that we have not seen since. He was, in fact, our last liberal president, an amazing claim until one considers that he favored a negative income tax; revenue sharing; a guaranteed income for children; supplementary programs for the aged, blind, and disabled; better health insurance programs for low income families; aid to community colleges; aid to low-income college students; the creation of the National Endowment for the Humanities; and increased funding for elementary and secondary schools. Today ,someone of Nixon's domestic political tendencies might be considered too radical for C-SPAN - let alone the White House.
How was it that two such personally questionable politicians could do so much good while the sainted Barack Obama is having a hard time even finding the gate and, when he does, keeps getting second thoughts about going through it?
A key factor is that the character of
Something similar happened with Franklin Roosevelt who was under even greater pressure from socialists, communists, populists and Huey Long. He felt he had to stay ahead of them.
Consider that his man on the case - Harry Hopkins - got more people
employed in four months than Obama plans to do by 20011. Or that the New Deal's Works Progress Administration built or repaired 103 golf courses, 1,000 airports, 2,500 hospitals, 2,500 sports stadiums, 3,900 schools, 8,192 parks, 12,800 playgrounds, 124,031 bridges, 125,110 public buildings, and 651,087 of highways and roads. We can't even imagine that today.
But it wasn't just the political pressures that made things happened. The mind, soul, experience and character of the capital were vastly different then they are today. Changes that have occurred make it much harder to do anything worthwhile no matter who is the president or who is demanding change.
Of course, you'd never guess it from the media, political rhetoric or academic analysis. But then we live in a time of illusory continuity. Peter Dale Scott put it well in describing
"The institutions of the city were preserved. . . the Senate continued to meet. Tribunes and consuls were elected. Historians wrote about decadence, and moralists vowed to revive the old family virtues. A class accustomed to participate in civic institutions continued to do just that and no more, for generations. People found it preferable to ignore the fact that real power had migrated out of these institutions, into an imperial machine, the armies and the courts of army commanders. The self-respect of the senatorial classes depended on this denial."
I once asked the journalist Stephen Goode how he would describe our era. Without hesitation, he said it was a time of epigons. An epigon is one who is a poor imitation of those who have preceded. Being around epigons is like being trapped at a bad craft fair where everything you see seems to have been made before, only better. Or in
A culture that has lost its way and forgotten so much is not the same as a flawed society bumbling through history trying to make itself better. A civil rights veteran once compared his era with that of the end of the 20th century by saying that in the 1960s there had been hope that someday the Congress, the courts, and the White House would see the right. Now, he said, we no longer have that hope. And the writer Dorothy Allison spoke of a betrayed optimism that many shared: "I had the idea that if you took
You don't hear that sort of thing anymore.
Part of the blame clearly belongs to the people and politics involved, But beyond that has been a disintegration of skills, values, attitudes, experience, policies, procedures and ability to play well with others. To understand what has happened to
Abuse of history
Good news is frequently given an historical profundity it doesn't deserve and bad news is treated as an isolated and atypical event. A classic example can be found in sex stories and other scandals, each handled as though it was the first time anyone in DC had taken a bribe or misapplied their urges.
The indifference to history also buries those who get it right. People like FDIC chair Sheila Blair who argued the government wasn't doing enough to prevent foreclosures. Or Brooksley Born, whom Katrina Vaden Heuvel described in the Nation:
"More than a decade ago, a woman you're likely never to have heard of, Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission -- a federal agency that regulates options and futures trading -- was the oracle whose warnings about the dangerous boom in derivatives trading just might have averted the calamitous bust now engulfing the US and global markets. Instead she was met with scorn, condescension and outright anger by former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his deputy
"In 1997, Brooksley Born warned in congressional testimony that unregulated trading in derivatives could "threaten our regulated markets or, indeed, our economy without any federal agency knowing about it." Born called for greater transparency -- disclosure of trades and reserves as a buffer against losses.
"Instead of heeding this oracle's warnings, Greenspan, Rubin & Summers rushed to silence her. . . Greenspan deployed condescension and told Born she didn't know what she doing and she'd cause a financial crisis. . .
"In early 1998, according to the Times story, one of the guys, Larry Summers, called Born to 'chastise her for taking steps he said would lead to a financial crisis. But Born kept at it, unwilling to let arrogant men undermine her good judgment. But it got tougher out there. In June 1998, Greenspan, Rubin and the then head of the SEC, Arthur Levitt, Jr., called on Congress 'to prevent Ms. Born from acting until more senior regulators developed their own recommendations.' . . . Months later, the huge hedge fund Long Term Capital Management nearly collapsed -- confirming some of Born's warnings. (Bets on derivatives were a key reason.)
"'Despite that event,' the Times reports, ' Congress (apparently as a result of Greenspan & Summer's urging, influence-peddling and pressure) 'froze' Born's commission's regulatory authority. The next year, Born left . . ."
This is a classic
In
Spin
The twisting of history is one part of a larger problem in the capital: a huge increase in the number of people dedicated to altering facts in one direction or another. There have always been public relations hustlers, rampant hyperbolists and verbal disaster recovery experts, but these days what was once periodic patois is now the main vocabulary.
Driving this tendency has been the willingness of the media to bury the who, what, where, when, and how of stories in a swamp of projections, assurances, promises, speculations, assertions and other verbal fantasies. Once the press gives spin as much status as it has, facts don't stand a chance. There is just too much other stuff for MSNBC and Fox to fight over, matter that has the added blessed nature of not requiring the slightest amount of research.
Once you decide that the top news is how various people react to what Character X is doing about Issue Y, you have turned over your news business to the biggest blowhards and liars in town.
There are all sorts of ancillary problems with the broad acceptance of propaganda as a reasonable substitute for reality. Investigative reporting becomes less important, style sweeps away substance and organizations dedicated to finding actual facts - such as the Government Accountability Office or Congressional Budget Office - become far less newsworthy.
A small but striking example occurred in the wake of the Obama stimulus package and bank bailout, both heavily weighted towards the wealthiest and most powerful segments of society. The mainstream media generally did a poor job of analyzing the true effects of these programs, but immediately came to life when Obama and Joe Biden decided to visit a hamburger joint. The end of he Washington Post story was telling:
"The lunch date lasted 34 minutes and by the time Obama and Biden stepped back into their motorcade, after posing for cellphone pictures with the restaurant's staff, dozens of people had gathered outside the restaurant to cheer. The outing was broadcast on national television. And as a public relations move, it appeared to be a success: Bonnie Cosby, 51, a technology consultant who picked up burgers on her way home from work, opined: 'It shows that he's in touch with the people, that he's not up in the ivory tower. He's a real person -- with a burger.'"
This is how we've been trained to think these days - not about how our president is handling foreclosures but whether he is in touch with us enough to eat a burger.
The media
The media's reliance on those trying to twist its message is more than matched by its almost obscene infatuation with political power and its daily manifestations. This has grown dramatically over the past half century.
When I returned to my native
By the 1950s, the typical journalist still had far more in common with the typical American than with politicians and similar icons, and this was reflected in how they covered the news.
At the end of the sixties, that began to change. The Washington Post replaced its "For and About Women" section with something called "Style." Worthy as the demise of the women's section was, the replacement had its own problems. For one thing, it fostered the notion that power was not only powerful but stylish. Worse, the press moved from half illiterate hacks in cheap suits to joining the upscale power structure of the city - becoming the first socio-economic group in history to raise its status simply by writing about itself.
As it did so, the media changed sides in the struggle between citizens and those who ruled them. It could never again be expected to speak for the former.
Later, not only did a high school diploma no longer suffice, one even needed graduate school, because journalism - at best a trade or a craft - had decided to become a profession, removing itself still further from its natural constituency.
As reporters evolved from being race horses in the stables of some egomaniacal and often eccentric publisher, to being corporate bureaucrats with deadlines, the
And its bosses helped this shift by shutting down beats that covered specific agencies or closing their
Another change I stumbled upon a few years ago while reading the NY Times one morning. Three stories and an editorial were based on investigative work not of its reporters but of non-profit groups that the Fund for Constitutional Government, on whose board I sat, had helped to fund. In other words, non-profits were doing the paper's most celebrated work: investigative reporting. From a corporate point of view, it made some sense: if the stories were wrong the non-profits and not the Times would take the blame and, besides, investigative stories can run up large tabs. A number of non-profits are currently working on how to expand this role in the face of the decline of print journalism, but it is one more sign of how journalism in
A broader problem is that a thoroughly embedded media treats as irrelevant, eccentric or bizarre anything that isn't on the establishment's table. This even includes matters in which a majority of the public differs from the insiders, such as handling marijuana and single payer healthcare. If today's media had been covering the 1960s and 1970s we might hardly have known there was a civil rights, anti-war or environmental movement.
Paranoia
Just one month before 9/11, I moved into a house six blocks from the US Capitol. When I had first covered the Capitol, a reporter could wander almost anywhere on the grounds except for the floor of the House and the Senate. Capitol cops were often the sons of major contributors to some senator or representative, earning a little extra while they went to American or
After 9/11 such memories faded. The Capitol turned into an armed camp. The
I would later tell people that I knew exactly where the war on terror ended:
It was an important lesson that made me realize the War on Terror was not about protecting me, but about protecting those extremely frightened men and women who ran our government, our major corporations and other large institutions. It was not about me, but about easing the fear of some Republican congressman from
I came to think of
The war on terror, it turned out, was in no small part about the terror those in power felt about those who were angry at them. It is extremely difficult to run a democracy out of a capital so overflowing with paranoia and the measures taken to relieve it.
Loss of reality
I had long believed that part of what good journalism was about was the care and feeding of reality. But sometime around the middle of the 1980s I suddenly noticed that the truth was no longer setting people free; it was only making them drowsy. This realization first came in the midst of a meeting held to discuss a worthy investigative journalism project. We had considered every aspect of the proposal save one and now, unbidden, a heretical question wiggled into my mind, never to leave: did the truth being sought really matter anymore?
At first it was only a sense of unease, a recognition that saying something true no longer commanded the respect it once had, an awareness that journalism was being driven away from the real and towards imaginings, mythologies, and "perceptions," that news itself was disappearing from the evening news and from newspapers, its place taken by inflated and cliched descriptions, commentaries, and analyses of the news for which there was no longer any room.
We were, I had belatedly noticed, embarked upon an age that denied the existence of objective truth and, by extension, the value of any facts that might point to it. This was now an age, as philosophy professor Rick Roderick put it, when everything once directly lived was being turned into a representation of itself --
Culture of impunity
In a culture of impunity, such as today's
In a culture of impunity, what replaces constitution, precedent, values, tradition, fairness, consensus, debate and all that sort of arcane stuff? Mainly greed. We find ourselves without heroism, without debate over right and wrong, with little but an endless narcissistic struggle by the powerful to get more money, more power, and more press than the next person. In the chase, anything goes and the only standard is whether you win, lose, or get caught. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now.
Concentration of power
As typical pasture in the American west, Federal Washington could support about 120 cows and their calves. The tendency to concentrate our view of politics and of our collective selves upon this tiny enclave has accelerated in recent decades in part because of a dramatic shift in power away from fifty "
Thus Congress has lost power relative to the White House not merely for various political reasons, but because 535 legislators are simply too many for the media to handle. TV, in particular, treats politics much as it does wide screen movies; it snips off the right and left sides until the frame fits comfortably within the more equilateral shape of its eye. The edges of our experience are lost and we find ourselves staring at a comfortable center -- which in the case of politics, means we find ourselves endlessly watching the President while much of the rest of American democracy passes unnoticed.
This preoccupation with the presidency not only exaggerates the importance of the position, it distorts the constitutional division of political power, denigrates the significance of state and local government and creates pressures for presidential action when such action may be neither wise nor even lawful. We can not, even out of seemingly harmless celebrity worship, imbue our president with supra-constitutional virtues or powers without simultaneously damaging the Constitution and the democratic system it was established to protect.
Besides, our presidential fetish badly skews our view of our country and the changes occurring within it -- not only elsewhere in government but beyond politics entirely. It trivializes our own collective and individual roles in creating social and political change. And, conversely, it can create the illusion of great change when far less is really happening.
Bribery
Today, every politician in
Most assume that to bribe someone you have to commit a crime. Not so. Dictionary definitions of 'bribe' include both criminal and merely distasteful acts.
For centuries ordinary people knew exactly what a bribe was. The Oxford English Dictionary found it described in 1528 as meaning to "to influence corruptly, by a consideration." Another 16th century definition describes bribery as "a reward given to pervert the judgment or corrupt the conduct" of someone.
In more modern times, the Meat Inspection Act of 1917 prohibits giving "money or other thing of value, with intent to influence" to a government official. Simple and wise.
But that was before the lawyers and the politicians got around to rewriting the meaning of bribery. And so we came to a time during the
The media has gone along with the scam, virtually dropping the word from its vocabulary in favor of phrases like "inappropriate gift," "the appearance of a conflict of interest," or "campaign contribution."
Yet, according to various dictionaries, campaign contributions fall comfortably within the definition of bribes. And hardly anyone in
Politics of the particulars
Although the media presents
Thus
One of the best descriptions of how
"First, plans would have been made for the use of the best planes to search the ocean. Then, when this extravagance was attacked publicly, cheaper planes would have been used. By the time that this device had received condemnation for inefficiency, the rescue would have been changed from a practical, efficient endeavor to a public debate about general principles.
"Everyone would have agreed that people in distress must be rescued. They would have insisted, however, that the problem was intimately tied up with balancing the national budget, improving the character of people lost at sea, stopping the foolhardy from adventuring and at the same time encouraging the great spirit of adventure and initiatives and so on ad infinitum. They would have ended perhaps by creating a commission to study the matter statistically, take a census of those lost at sea, examine the practices in other countries. What was saved in airplane fuel would be spent on research so that the problem could be permanently solved."
The town's most common skill, its trade of choice, is finding what is wrong with something. For the bureaucrat, this eliminates the need for action. For the politician, it lessens risk. For the lobbyist, it means points with the client. For the public interest group, democracy and justice are at stake. And for the lawyer and reporter, it is just instinctual. All day long,
In an interview with Time's Ann Blackman, HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros described the
"We'll spend hours talking through a strategy of meeting all the objections to try and move our homeless initiative through the Office of Management Budget and through congressional committees. We'll spend hours talking about how to please this or that person. Meanwhile, it's dusk. And people are starting to bed down for the night -- for one more night in the park outside the window. And we could go on for days talking and never get one step closer to the people who are using cardboard for beds in the nation's capital."
There is no law or corrupt practice that makes it thus but rather something deeper: a primal urge to maintain the equilibrium of the capital. The imperative of the parochial rises to the top. And it keeps getting worse.
Lobbyists
No one knows for sure how many lobbyists there are in town. In 1981, Robert Reich, then a Harvard professor, estimated the
Estimates run from 15,000 to 35,000 major lobbyists. To get some idea of what this means, if each of these lobbyists met just once with each member of congress would result somewhere between 8 and 18 million lobbying contacts a year.
A radical change in lobbying occurred in the 1970s. Business executives who had previously regarded lobbying as something not quite respectable became worried by the success of Ralph Nader. They formed the Business Roundtable, a group limited to the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and devoted to using the immense assets of these corporations -- including their customers and employees -- to affect political decisions in
By 2005, not only had the total number vastly increased, but a report by Public Citizen found, wrote the Washington Post, that since 1998, "43 percent of the 198 members of Congress who left government to join private life have registered to lobby."
And lobbying is fed by the news. The Center for Public Integrity recently reported that more than 770 companies and interest groups had hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists to influence federal policy on climate change in the past year. "That's an increase of more than 300 percent in the number of lobbyists on climate change in just five years, and means that
Add to this the disastrous influences that the huge banking and healthcare industries are currently having on our country, and one gains a sense of just how damaging the lobbying pandemic has become.
Numbers
Number-crunchers form another important
The effect of numbers on the city has been profound. At times it seems that there are no governments anymore, only budget offices. The idea of a budget bureau at the federal level only goes back to Warren Harding. As late as 1975, Austin Kiplinger could write that the president's budget officials were outnumbered by those of the various departments and thus "have to be especially sharp" and make up in clout what they lack in numbers. Today, few feel sorry for the White House budget squad, which has not only replaced many of the functions of departmental financial officials but those of the departments themselves.
As the numerologists rose in power, programs increasingly became transformed into line items. Numbers began serving as adjectives, ideas were reduced to figures and policy became a matter of where one placed the decimal point. Thus, what should be a debate about programs became one about arithmetic. It is an emphasis that can produce bizarre results, such as the attempt once cited by William Greider of various federal agencies to develop a cost-benefit factor for human life. The FAA figured it at $650,00 for the purpose of airplane crashes; the Labor Department thought a dead construction worker was worth about $3.5 million, while OMB disagreed, putting the value of a hard hat at only $1 million.
Every day in
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure, nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery."
Lawyers
The number of lawyers in DC has increased many fold since the 1970s. Today, the city has 276 lawyers for every 10,000 residents, while second place
As Jim Barlow, a columnist for the Houston Chronicle once noted, "I subscribe to the locust theory. The locust is a fairly benign form of grasshopper until we get too many of them. Then they swarm, eating their weight every day and devouring the countryside."
This is what has happened to the capital's government and its culture. Part of it is in the law itself and part in the legal perspective that invades all aspects of the city's life, decisions and policy. Lives become more regulated, decisions more circumspect, and policies stunningly cautious.
Besides, as de Tocqueville put it, lawyers are a "counterpoise" to democratic government: "They constantly endeavor to turn it away from its real direction by means that are foreign to its nature."
Take the technology of torts, with its tyranny of precedents and its infatuation with retribution over resolution, which has, in the words of the country & western song, walked across our heart like it was
If today's lawyer-leaders had come to the fore forty years ago, the 60s would have been just a lawsuit, not a cultural and political revolution. And few would have understood what Martin Luther King meant when he said, "Something must happen so as to touch the hearts and souls of men that they will come together, not because the law says it, but because it is natural and right."
You can not have a capital with courage, compassion, imagination and vigor when such such qualities must first be reviewed by the attorneys.
Autistic politics
While the capital is filled with extremely bright people, over the past half century the nature of this intelligence has changed dramatically. When I started, politicians - like reporters - were on average far less educated than today. What they possessed, sometimes to a remarkable degree, was social intelligence. The ability to weave knowledge, action, wisdom and people together typified the successful politician.
This is no longer true, in part because of the rising socio-economic status of politicians and part because of a deep change in politics caused in no small part by the arrival of television.
The beginning of TV-era politics is generally traced to the Kennedy-Nixon debates. It would be a couple of decades before we felt the full power of television to change our politics. By the end of the 1980s, however, it seemed that television was more important than anything.
Politicians no longer talked, conversed or argued with people; now they communicated.
Contemporary communications is quite different from that of discussion or argument. It is more like a shuttle bus endlessly running around a terminal of ideas. The bus plays no favorites; it stops at every concept and every notion, it shares every concern and feels every pain, but when you have made the full trip you are right back where you started.
If you challenge the contemporary communicator, you are likely to find the argument transformed from whatever you thought you were talking about to something quite different -- generally more abstract and grandiose. For example if you are opposed to the communicator's proposed policy on trade you may be accused of being against "change" or "fearful of new ideas" and so forth.
Philip Lader, creator and maitre d' of the New Year's Renaissance gatherings attended by the
"The gist of Renaissance has been to recognize the incredible transforming power of ideas and relationships. And I would hope that this administration might be characterized by the power of ideas. But also the power of relationships. Of recognizing the integrity of people dealing with each other."
There is an hyperbolic quality to this language that shatters normal sense of meaning. Simple competence is dubbed "a world-class operation," common efficiency is called "total quality management," a conversation becomes "incredibly transforming," and a gathering of hyper-ambitious and single-minded professionals is called a "Renaissance" weekend.
Key to this language is its disconnection from what it is meant to connect: two or more people. Intelligent as the speaker might be, there is no longer much consciousness of the other person at all or what they might be thinking.
This has striking similarities to high functioning autism or Asperger's Syndrome. Key to the Asperger style is the constant repetition of thought patterns and the imperviousness of the practitioners' thinking to outside fact or argument. The technical name for this is perseveration which has been defined as "the persistent repetition of a response after cessation of the causative stimuli; for example, the repetition of a correct answer to one question as the answer to succeeding questions," an almost perfect description of what regularly occurs on your average Sunday talk show. A less technical but even more generally apt definition is "continuation of something usually to an exceptional degree or beyond a desired point."
How did it happen that we have become cursed with a perseverating elite that endlessly repeats the same thoughts to whatever is said to it, and which insists on pursuing ideas well past any possible usefulness? One theory is that the SAT has played a role, helping to choose an establishment that, while seemingly diverse, is actually disproportionately comprised of those of above average intelligence but who think life consists mainly of coming up with the right answers.
Silently, without argument or recognition, the logic of our nation has drastically changed from experience to propaganda, from the empirical to the virtual, and from debate and discussion to addictive perseveration. Our capital's politics, once characterized by its social intelligence, is now trapped in the endless reiteration of high functioning autism.
Technocratic authoritarianism
One of the dangers with autistic politics is its bias towards the comfort of technocratic solutions. Our assessment addiction in education policy is a excellent example. It requires none of the traditional skills of a good teacher to come up with a multiple choice test that claims to judge correctly both the student and the instructor. With it you can wipe out concerns about social intelligence, judgment, cooperation or applying one's knowledge in a real community rather than on a paper form.
The shift was well described by novelist Jack Butler: "People understood reality as machinery rather than God's own dream of existence, intelligence as information rather than judgment.'"
In Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West the Canadian historian John Ralston Saul argues: "When the 18th-century philosophers killed God, they thought they were engaged in housekeeping-- the evils of corrupt religion would be swept away, the decent aspects of Christian morality would be dusted off and neatly repackaged inside reason." Instead says Saul, came "a theology of pure power -- power born of structure, not of dynasty or arms. The new holy trinity is organization, technology, and information."
Reviewing Saul's work for the Utne Reader, Jeramiah Creedon wrote:
"The new priest is the technocrat, someone who interprets events not morally but 'within the logic of the system.' Saul's point is that reason alone has no inherent virtue; it is simply an intellectual tool. In fact, when reason is allowed to unfold in an ethical vacuum, untempered by common sense, the results are apt to be terrible. The classic example is the 'perfectly rational' Holocaust, planned by the Nazis with 'the clean efficiency of a Harvard case study.' . . . Reason has also created a recurring human type well suited to perpetuating it: the leader for whom calculation is everything."
Obsession with the center
If you ask important
Even the KKK, so often cited as an example of the sort of threat the contemporary right poses, was powerful primarily because it was at the center, holding political and judicial and law enforcement office as well as hiding beneath its robes. In some towns, lynching parties were even announced in the local paper. And in the 1920s, both the
As Jim Hightower has pointed out, there's nothing to be found in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.
Collapse of liberalism
In lining up strongly behind two centrist candidates - Clinton and Obama - liberals surrendered their values for victory and their ideas for icons. With some notable exceptions the liberal has pretty much faded from the
This is a major shift and
Regulation of banks and stock brokerage firms cheating their customers
Protection of your bank account
Social Security
A minimum wage
Legal alcohol
Regulation of the stock exchanges
Right of labor to bargain with employers
Soil Conservation Service and other early environmental programs
National parks and monuments
Rural electrification
College education for innumerable veterans
Housing loans for innumerable veterans
FHA housing loans
The bulk of hospital beds in the country
Unemployment insurance
Child Labor Act
Small Business Administration
National Endowment for the Arts
Medicare
Peace Corps
Allen Ferguson, President of AFE Inc, in a 1985 talk the National Economist Club outlined the effects of such policies. He noted that the real gross national product rose 546% from 1933 to 1980. Real per capita disposable income rose 233% during the same period. In 1929, one percent of non-farm workers took vacations. By 1970, the figure had risen to 80%. The average work week dropped from around 48 hours in 1929 to around 35 hours in 1980. By 1950, 34 million workers were covered by unemployment insurance; by 1980 the figure was almost 93 million. Social security, during the same period expanded from covering 46 million to 128 million people. And a Congressional Research Service study done in 1982 showed that without the various liberal transfer programs, 24% of the country would have been in poverty rather than the 9% that was the case.
It is a shame verging on a sin that
The club
How one comes to matter in Washington politics is guided by few precise rules, although in comparison to fifty years ago the views of lobbyists and fundraisers are far more significant than the opinion, say, of the mayor of Chicago or the governor of Pennsylvania. This is a big difference; somewhere behind the old bosses in their smoke-filled rooms were live constituents; behind the political cash lords of today there is mostly just more money and the few who control it. Thus coming to matter has much less to do with traditional politics, especially local politics, than it once did.
Today, other things count: the patronage of those who already matter, a blessing bestowed casually by one right person to another right person over lunch at the Metropolitan Club, a columnist's praise, a well-received speech before a well-placed organization, the assessment of a lobbyist as sure-eyed as a fight manager checking out new fists at the local gym. There are still machines in American politics; they just dress and talk better. There is another rule. The public plays no part. The public is the audience; the audience does not write or cast the play.
Official Washington -- including government, media and the lobbies -- functions in many ways like America's largest and most prestigious club, a sort of indoor, east coast Bohemian Grove in which members engage in endless rites of mutual affirmation combined with an intense but genteel competition that determines the city's tennis ladder of political and social power. What appears to the stranger as a major struggle is often only an intramural game between members of the same club, lending an aura of dynamism to what is in truth deeply stable.
Furthermore. . .
Federal Washington has become a culture in which much seems to happen but little gets accomplished. It is a culture in which neither the battles nor the words about them are necessarily real, in which the interests of the federal enclave inevitably proceed those of the country, and in which speaking of something is considered the moral equivalent of actually doing it.
It is a culture that can admit neither to itself nor to the larger world the degree to which its various systems are out of control. Nor can it admit that when it defines corruption only by its most precise legal limits it exempts itself from any broader decency.
It is a culture that has been remarkably successful at isolating itself from the reality it is attempting to govern. The abstract, soulless security of the capital protects it from the pain it causes, the suffering it neglects and the concerns it can quantify but not ameliorate. Here statistics substitute for tears, data for anger, and mechanically modulated voices recounting promises never to be fulfilled serve as a placebo for real hope and joy.
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