Books over the Transom and other strange doings

Slowly but surely there are works that are emerging arguing again for a renewal of a public sector. The public sector has been eviscerated by the adoption of so-called free market proposals and the privatization of services from security to prisons to our public school system. One of the charges against the Obama Administration by Mitt Romney is that it lacks any CEOs on its economic team.

In a 2009 publication by the Harvard Business Review, Paul Krugman addresses this point in a small essay entitled "A Country is not a Company". The title is more promising than the text but Krugman explains what economists know and why successful business leaders are incapable of understanding the complexities of a national economy. He uses the example of international trade, a subject on which he is an expert, to demonstrate why countries attracting massive international investment inevitably run up large deficits. The country that serves to prove his point was Mexico, which ran trade surpluses when investment was low, and had the crippling Peso crisis in the 1990s when foreign investment was high. Hsi basic point is that the complexity of a national economy is a quantum leap from the operations of even the largest American corporation. As a side note, he warns about CEOs getting involved in politics because they do not know the intricacies of policy debates and that the very virtues that made them successful such as intuition and risk-taking are counter to the needs of the poltical system.

In Diane Ravitch's book she conducts an autopsy on Mike Bloomberg's reform plan for the New York City's public school system. He hired someone who was a success in business but who had no experience in the field of education. The goal was to elevate the test-scores among the high school students without taking into consideration the demographics of the student body. Consequently, Bloomberg dissolved large high schools and created scores of charter schools, which were self-selecting and neglected the poorest students. Even so, the test scores took a one year bounce and then suddenly fell below the scores of normal high schools. She also does an analysis of how the San Diego school system, which was highly rated, opted for reform and hired another success in business to work with the large foundations to reshape the already successful school system. The end result was a failing school system. The quote my wife likes, since she is undergoing many of the same testing impulses at a Charter School in Washington,D.C. is "We should be data informed and not data driven." The long and short of it is that education encompasses more than math and reading tests and that countries who excel in both teach a complete education.

$14 trillion on private weath vanished in the United States in 2008 and another $12 trillion was added to the national deficit, which did not exist prior to the presidency of George W. Bush. Today, Americans live less longer than Bosnians and slightly longer than Albanians. The disparity of wealth in the United States is slightly more than the develping country of China. We are now 12th in basic innovations in science and technology. Yet we are number 1 in the number of people incarcerated.

Writers are now beginning to talk out loud that something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For the last thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest. According to some,this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. The uncritical admiration of unfettered markets and disdain for the public sector have led to a situation where we know what things cost but no longer have any idea what they are worth.

In December 2009, Tony Judt wrote an essay in the New York Review of Books where he argued for a return to social democracy. The article brought such a response, particularly younger people, that he has enlarged his original essay into a very perceptive and timely book Ill Fares The Land (Penguin, 2010). He reviews how the world dealt with the Great Depression and adopted a social market system in both Europe and the United States. He analyzes the broad consensus that existed until the late 1970s in the United States at least for a regulated economy and a robust public sector complimented by a social welfare system. He basically puts blame for the deterioration of this consensus on the Baby Boomers both the New Left and the New Right. The book is particularly cogent in its analysis of the gutting of the United Kingdom by Margaret Thatcher and even later Tony Blair. In the United States, I felt he was particularly smart to observe how the rise of the New Right depended for its force and its eventual credibility on its critique of the New Left. This is particularly true today when you realize that most conservative arguments refer to the prehistoric history of the 1960s.

Judt calls for a dialogue on our national purpose and idea of the common good. Where he goes beyond liberalism is his embrace of a social democratic view on how progressive taxation can bring a social security to the public and how larger social goals and projects can be accomplished. Judt loses me in his minute discussions of smaller social democratic governments in Europe. But he initiates a dialogue well worth having.

Yesterday President Obama signed into law the reform of the student loan program. In essence, he withdrew the subsidies from the private banks and restored administration of the program to the Department of Education. One of the key elements of the program is to cap the repayment of the loans to 10% of one's income when students are starting out in life. The expansion of the program is aimed at supporting students in community colleges and public universities. For example, a student I know who can not afford college despite getting accepted at a state university could finance four years at $20,000 or less at a subsidized interest rate. While the rest of us were watching our retirements disappear, the younger generation was accumulating educational debt in the neighborhood of $50,000 without any prospects for employment. If the baby boomers were forced to prostpone retirement, another generation was starting life with an impossible debt burden.

I naively thought that after the health care bill passed that things would get less contentious. Instead, we are back at it again. President Obama announced subsidies for nuclear energy and the opening of coastal waters for oil exploration. What was perceived as a clever act of triangulation, accepting Republican ideas, for the chance of passing his energy bill was met with another "Hell No" from John Boehner who blasted the President for not going far enough.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that when I had money I invested in oil and gas wells and keep abreast of the oil debate. According to people I know in the industry, if you opened up all the territories the oil companies wanted to drill in, you would net the equivalent of one year of America's oil consumption. That's it. In addition, oil is traded on the world market unlike natural gas. There would be no appreciable cut in oil prices with the expansion of oil production in the United States. It's not even clear whether the oil would be consumed here since we prefer the quality of oil produced in Angola and the Gulf of Guinea. Our Alaskan oil is shipped the Japan. During the last campaign when Sarah Palin urged,"Drill, Baby, Drill", no one ever challenged the assumptions of the arguments for increased oil exploration. President Obama knows this so it's incredible to see that his compromise has met with such hostility from the Republicans. That don't know any better but still won't budge.

The last of the Hutaree militia was captured. The leader not only was going to fight the anti-Christ but was a Ron Paul fanatic who started to adopt the whole "sovereign citizen" idea from the white supremacists. His wife said she was radicalized because President Obama was going to spend millions to re-settle Hamas into the United States, a rumor circulated on the internet without any relationship to reality. Since they opposed the government, it was only natural that they asked for public defenders.

Watching the teabaggers at Spotlight, Nevada in that windblown, dry landscape, it dawned on me that they were like the native Americans who participated in the Ghost Dance. In the late 19th century after losing their territory, the native Americans had visions that if they had a Ghost Dance the bisons would return and the white people would vanish. It all came to a tragic end with the capture and assassination of Crazy Horse. You get some of that vibe here with the Don't Tread on me flags waving in the breeze and the RVs lined up like horses.

To get a grip on all this, I'm going to read Nell Irving Painter's The History of White People (Norton, 2010). Since I'm of the freckle race, I have no horse in this. In fact, people of Celtic origins were not considered white until the 19th century, even though people like my family were grandfathered in because they arrived in the United States in colonial times. But we made it into whiteness slightly before the Italians, Jews and other "Mediterranean types". What began as a simple question "Why are white people called caucausian?" is a 500-page scholarly tome on whiteness. Stephen Colbert asked Dr. Painter whether he was white. She said she didn't really know. His response was "Of course I am I have all the Jimmy Buffet records." She conceded his point. Under race for the Census, I just entered "cool" but many of my Iranian-American friends had a problem. Their parents entered "white" because they wanted to "belong" while they wanted to list "Iranian-American". Hopefully, the book will give us some answers.

A Washington Post poll the other day revealed an interesting breakdown on how the Americans viewed both parties on about 12 issues. Despite other polls indicating that generic Republicans have a 3-4 pt lead on generic Democrats for the mid-terms, I found the Post poll interesting about "Who do you trust?" Democrats had about a 5% lead on virtually every issue, except fighting terrorism. Republicans still have a lead of about 7% on being the best to fight terrorism. However, on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Democrats have the lead by a significant margin.

Republican donors are rebelling about the Voyeur sex club scandal. The donor who went to the club is a young donor who is very active in conservative causes and "in the ministry of his church". After firing the woman who heads the Young Eagles program, they decided to close the program for rich Generation Xers until further notice. Focus on Your Family's spokesperson Tony Perkins called for a boycott of the RNC. Republican money is being spread among Senator DeMint's own Senate campaign committee, the teabaggers, the Club of Growth and a myriad other conservative fronts. While Michael Steele managed to raise $102 million for the first quarter, he also spent $115 million putting the Republicans in a hole for their anticipated run for power in 2010. Sarah Palin's targeting of Democrats who voted for the healthcare bill has been a fund-raising boon for Democrats.

Earlier today I spoke to Bob Tyrrell, the publisher of the American Spectator, and told him the pressure is now on him to produce a book that makes conservatives look thoughtful and serious because I said I can't see anyone from where I sit. So next week his book comes out.