FLOTSAM & JETSAM

OF PORCUPINES & SEX

2009-07-08T00:49:00.000-04:00

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.

FROM VICTIM TO PERP

2009-07-01T09:58:00.001-04:00

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.

SHOP TALK

2009-06-30T15:04:00.001-04:00

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.

INDENTURED LIBERALS & INDEPENDENT PROGRESSIVES

2009-06-29T12:26:00.001-04:00

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.

BAD ADVICE & THE CRASH

2009-06-23T10:09:00.001-04:00

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.

END OF AN AFFAIR

2009-06-17T15:12:00.000-04:00

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.

SHOP TALK

2009-06-02T12:02:00.001-04:00

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

FIREFIGHTERS ARE NOT LAW CLERKS

2009-06-01T10:09:00.002-04:00

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.

MULTICULTURALISM ON THE CHEAP

2009-05-27T14:17:00.002-04:00

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 grad Barack Obama has already proved, to retain one's roots.

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 woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

When I read that, I asked myself just which one of the wise Latina women in my extended family I should listen to instead of myself and quickly realized that was a dangerous choice I had deftly avoided for a number of decades. Then I thought of Clarence Thomas, and the richness of his experience and how little good it had done for him. And finally I imagined Sotomayer relying on her own diagnosis of an illness, since her doctor had not share the richness of her pain.

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.

ARGUMENT WITHOUT HONOR

2009-05-26T08:58:00.003-04:00

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.

WHY WASHINGTON DOESN'T WORK

2009-05-18T10:04:00.001-04:00

Note: The Review will soon be moving its headquarters from Washington to the shores of Casco Bay, Maine. Here are some closing thoughts about the city your editor has covered for the past half century, including matter excerpted from his books and articles.

Sam Smith

The years I have spent in Washington since covering my first story in 1957 can be roughly divided into two parts: a time when the capital and

America

were getting better and a time when they were getting worse. In that order.

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 Washington a minute? I want to get off. I have to run down to People's [drug store] and restock my inventory of Rolaids before reading one more article about how the city is being reborn, revived and revitalized. This city - the Paris of prevarication, the London of dissemblance, the Florence of deceit - has outdone itself: It is telling itself and the world that it is getting better. . .

Washington's . . . autoerotic fascination with power for its own sake threatens to prove that masturbation does cause insanity. . . [It] is the city of real estate dealers rather than merchants, the city where you damn well better not leave home without It, clone of Gotham, sire of scandal so tawdry that it has discredited political corruption, the city in which a day's work can consist of a memorandum revised, a two-hour quiche Lorraine and martini lunch and four phone calls to say you're all tied up.

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.

Washington contributed at both the institutional and rebellious level. It was a time when the capital was on a par with Berkeley and Madison for progressive politics. It was a time, thanks to its members' civil rights activity, that our city council probably had the longest arrest record of any legislature in the country. It was a time when the city became a haven for those who faced a more hostile reception elsewhere in the land. They didn't call it Chocolate City for nothing.

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 Washington in the 1960s and 1970s was not so much defined by capital spinsters and politicians but by a variegated popular revolt that the spinsters and politicians could not control. And so, under pressure, they did the right thing.

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 Rome as it moved from republic to military empire:

"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 Washington.

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

America

and shook it really hard it would do the right thing." Even Jackie Robinson, well before a strong civil rights movement, recalled that "Never once did I face the immovable."

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 Washington, we must look beyond the political players and their games towards factors such as these:

Abuse of history

Washington only considers history when it finds it useful and then, typically, rewrites it. The grossly exaggerated comparisons of Obama with Roosevelt are an example.

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 Lawrence Summers. . .

"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 Washington story. Greenspan, Rubin and Summers are still calling the shots for an allegedly "transformational" president while hardly anyone remembers Brooksley Born.

In Washington, history is just one more metaphor to manipulate at will.

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 Washington in the 1950s, over half the reporters in the country had only a high school education. Richard Harwood once caught the social status of the press well describing his own experience a decade earlier: "We were perceived as a lower form of life, amoral, half-literate hacks in cheap suits. Thus I was assigned to a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Nashville in the late 1940s and, with other reporters, was given lunch at a card table set up in a hallway to protect the dining room from contamination."

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 Washington media lost its aggressiveness, skill, verve and soul.

And its bosses helped this shift by shutting down beats that covered specific agencies or closing their Washington offices entirely. This may not seem like much but if you don't have reporters closely covering the FTC or HUD, or keeping an eye on what a state's congressional delegation is up to, you're going to miss a lot of news.

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 Washington has changed.

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 Georgetown university. And the Capitol grounds were a de facto public park. Unlike the White House, the Capitol still had the strong whiff of democracy about it and you felt good about your country just being there.

After 9/11 such memories faded. The Capitol turned into an armed camp. The Capitol Visitors Center, under construction, was modified to serve as a bunker for members of Congress in case of an attack and the Capitol police force soared to three officers per member of Congress with the greatest number of police per acre of any spot in

America

. In the end the visitor's center/bunker would cost over $600 million, just slightly less than the city's new baseball stadium. Perhaps the most telling change was when the Capitol police, as a security measure, moved all tourist bus traffic two blocks further away. In essence, the police declared the lives of residents of 3rd & 4th Streets less important than those officials working at or near the Capitol.

I would later tell people that I knew exactly where the war on terror ended: 2nd Street. Living four blocks further to the east, there would never be the slightest sign that my safety was of any concern to the official city.

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 Idaho who was scared shitless.

I came to think of Washington as being divided into two parts: the free city and the occupied city, the former being those places where you could enter a building without having to prove you weren't a terrorist.

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 -- Washington news no less than anything else.

Culture of impunity

In a culture of impunity, such as today's Washington, rules serve the internal logic of the system rather than whatever values typically guide a society, such as those of its constitution, church or tradition. A culture of impunity varies from ordinary political corruption in that the latter represents deviance from the culture while the former becomes the culture. Such a culture does not announce itself.

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 "united states" towards an increasingly centralized and powerful federal government. But it has also been encouraged by a conglomerated media that requires news topics as ubiquitous as its own expanding corporate structures yet which still can be distilled into a single face or story.

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 Washington takes bribes, from the president on down. Only please call them campaign contributions.

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 Clinton administration when the Supreme Court actually ruled that a law prohibiting the giving of gifts to a public official "for or because of an official act" didn't mean anything unless you knew exactly what the official act was. In other words, bribery was only illegal if the briber was dumb enough to give you a receipt.

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 Washington talks about it.

Politics of the particulars

Although the media presents Washington as a city grappling with the major issues of our time, much of the town's workday is absorbed by highly specific concerns. The president is worried about the spin to give a statement or appearance. The lobbyist is obsessed with a very particular amendment to a very particular bill. The size of the capital's bureaucracy is necessitated in no small part by the number and specificity of regulations it must administer. And woe to the member of Congress who lets larger concerns surpass the parochial needs of the district.

Thus Washington is awash in the politics of particulars. Go to a congressional hearing concerning something you consider a good idea and you are likely to be startled by the number of people and interests this benign concept will allegedly injure.

One of the best descriptions of how Washington really operates can be found in Thurman Arnold's Folklore of Capitalism. Arnold imagines applying the principles of a contemporary debate to the attempted rescue of Amelia Earhart:

"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, Washington hums with people trying to stop other people from doing something, and with considerable frequency they are successful. At times Washington seems a series of endless loop videos in which policies are debated, lobbied and almost acted upon before the tape repeats itself once more. This is the city that first heard a president call for national health insurance in the 1940s

In an interview with Time's Ann Blackman, HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros described the Washington he had found:

"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 Washington regulatory "community" to consist of 92,500 people including lawyers, lobbyists and their employees, trade journalists, corporate representatives, public affairs specialists and consultants. The count is complicated by the fact that many lobbyists escape registration requirements. Said Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity, "No one in Washington ever admits they lobby."

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 Washington. William Greider reported that in 1970 only a handful of Fortune 500 companies had public affairs offices in Washington; by 1980, 80% did.

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 Washington can now boast more than four climate lobbyists for every member of Congress." The center estimated that lobbying expenditures on climate change last year topped $90 million.

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 Washington subculture, led by the uncritically accepted shamans of economics. The latter's success with ex cathedra calculations has encouraged much of Washington to speak so confidently about numbers that one almost forgets how many of them were once only English majors.

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 Washington, many of the best and the brightest occupy themselves computing such figures, defending them before Congress, citing them before a trade association or recalling them on C-SPAN. Adding and subtracting are among Washington's favorite activities, often providing a digital shield against discussing what the figures actually represent. Few speak of numbers with the clarity of Charles Dickens in David Copperfield:

"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 New York gets along with only 20, and Wisconsin 7.
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 Texas. No politics, no ideology, no culture has been immune. All of American life has been hauled into court. Thus we find in our path not only the endless droppings of corporate attorneys, but civil rights advocates who insist that the law will lead us to love each other, colleges that publish what amounts to a lawyer's guide to correct sex, and public interest activists trying to run a revolution out of the courthouse.

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 Clintons for many years, liked this sort of language. Said Lader on PBS:

"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."

Washington has increasingly moved away from common sense and judgment and towards a technocratic authoritarianism in which data and systems supplant wisdom and sensible action

Obsession with the center

If you ask important Washington people in politics, think tanks or the media where they stand politically, many will say "in the center." A lot of these folks like the center because it makes them sound reasonable and moderate. It also allows them to call other people extremists or gadflies or wishful thinkers for disagreeing with the conventional wisdom of the moment. Some members of the American elite have made whole careers of being measured and cautious. They like to write somber columns asking pompous questions like "Can the Center Hold?" What they really mean is: can they hold on to their power? But even if you do find the center, it's not necessarily the best place to be. My navigation instructor at Coast Guard Officer Candidate School explained it well: "If you take a navigational fix and it places you on one side of a rock and then you take another fix and it places you on the other side of the rock -- don't split the difference." Unfortunately, it's a rule not often followed in Washington politics.

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 Colorado governor and mayor of Denver were members of the Klan, the latter well enough regarded to have had Stapleton airport named after him.

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 Washington scene except as a socio-economic demographic. At the top of the liberal agenda are issues like abortion and gay marriage that, while worthy in themselves, do not speak to the larger constituency liberals used to attract. Most strikingly absent from liberal rhetoric and action are key economic issues of the sort that drove the Roosevelt and Johnson administrations. Liberals are strikingly quiet about the escalation of the Afghan war and its expansion into Pakistan, single payer (save for the unions), foreclosures and unreasonable bank bailouts.

This is a major shift and Washington is much the worse for it. Because its definition has been rewritten, it is easy to forget what liberalism was once about. Here are just a few of the things

America

would be without had it not been for liberals in the White House a long time ago:

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
Tennessee Valley Authority
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 Washington's liberals have so deserted their own heritage.

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.

WHERE'S THE NEWS GONE?

2009-05-11T15:15:00.001-04:00

Sam Smith

Let's put aside the issue of what's happening to the printed news media for a moment to deal with a more important question: where has the news gone?

Years ago, before the arrival of the Internet, I noticed a phenomenon around the middle of each June: the pile of mail arriving in our office suddenly declined.

The cause was fairly obvious: a drop off in news releases as public relations adjusted its efforts to the thermological nature of our culture. Which is to say, the warmer the weather, the less interested we are in what somebody else is trying to sell.

Then, of course, there's Thanksgiving and Christmas when many sorts of news disappear entirely. A foreigner arriving on such a day and watching TV could logically assume that we were a society with naught but violence and tragedy as the only visible hard news are accidents, murders and fires.

To a journalist, however, such occasions are reminders of how artificial and manipulated much news is. Over the past few months, I have begun to get that same holiday feeling about the news. Ever since Obama was inaugurated, hard news seems to have faded and we find ourselves in deep discussion over his daily activities, his wife's bare arms, other inanities and an amazing assortment of vagaries about what he is planning to do, appoint, go to, or talk about.

It is becoming ever harder to realize that we have recently added a new country to our Muslim war hit list, that job losses are increasing, that the budget is more out of balance than ever, that we will soon have as many troops in Afghanistan as we did in Vietnam in 1965, that banks are getting record subsidies while ordinary folk facing foreclosure or job loss are getting minimal aid, and that "health reform" is turning into a TARP program for insurance companies.

Since the media treated Obama as the Second Coming from the beginning, I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised about echoes of Christmas coverage, but all holidays have to come to end sometime. It would seem to be a good time for the media to go back to work.

While the media gave Bush a full pass on post 9/11 horrors like the Patriot Act, Gitmo and Iraq, the indifference to real news in the Obama administration extends far beyond matters of falsely purported national security. The lack of interest in Arne Duncan's planned interference in public school systems, the billions for first class high speed rail with little for coach class, rail freight or bus riders, and the highly dangerous medical records act have been left to a few eccentric journals like the Review to even mention. If the print media wants us to cry over its current problems, at least give us some real reporting to be sad at the thought of losing.

Instead, we have a media that falls without fail for various manipulations contrived by the White House, including covering each stage of an Obama decision as though it was new news, i.e.

"Obama is talking about. . . "
"Obama is consulting with. . ."
"Obama is reaching out to various groups. . . "
"Obama is planning to. . . "
"Obama is expected to announce on Monday that. . . "

And, finally, yet another repetitive front page story beginning, "Obama has announced. . . "

Not bad. A half dozen stories that lead you to an announcement that you can't quite figure out what it means anyway.

Which, of course, is intentional. Which is why we look forward to 3.5 million jobs created or "saved" by Obama, as the media treats the preservation of the status quo as news and a great achievement.

Or take the promised two trillion dollars saved by the health insurance industry over a ten year period. This in a media that doesn't even care who won the last American Idol.

As a general rule, political predictions of greater than two years should be banned entirely by the media. That might free up a little space to help people understand how we ended up in a war in Pakistan without any debate or congressional vote or when the subsidies of the Wall Street welfare fathers is going to end. After all, these were the guys who told us - with unquestioning support of the mainstream media - that free markets would take care of it all.

But as long as the media sees its role as Obama's Ryan Seacrest, it won't happen. It will just remain on a perpetual holiday.

RAMPANT SELF PROMOTION

2009-04-30T14:12:00.001-04:00

Mike Palecek interviewed your editor for his site, the New American Dream. Click here and then scroll down to New American Dream Interview to find it. Here's an except:

NAD: Why have you done all this?

SAM SMITH: So what else was I meant to do?

NAD: Why are you so interested?

SAM SMITH: My college roommates used to make fun of me because I would run out the door whenever I heard a nearby fire engine. I guess it must be genetic. . .

NAD: Was there a "moment" you can recall that made you want to do something about it?

SAM SMITH: I don't know if there was a moment. The better question would be: was there ever not a moment? From junior high on I was more of a fan of journalists like Ed Murrow and Elmer Davis than I was of sports figures.

NAD: What's it like to do what you do?

SAM SMITH: I love it. I feel like every morning I get to go fishing. . . only for news rather than for trout.

NAD: Is there a God?

SAM SMITH: I'm a Seventh Day Agnostic.

I don't think it matters because if there is a god I can't imagine him being worth worshipping if he holds it against people for not knowing whether he exists or not.

That would be a pretty rotten attitude — sort of like favoring the likes of Sarah Palin and Rick Warren. Who needs a god like that?

On the other hand, if it helps people to believe in God or things on key chains, that's fine.

It only becomes a problem when they want to punish others for failing to live up to their misinterpretation of some sacred book and start wars and things like that.

I'm an existentialist and believe our existence is defined by what we do and say. You can't blame it on God.

CAN I SELL YOU A NEW CAR TODAY?

2009-04-28T15:59:00.002-04:00

Sam Smith

I woke up this morning to the startling news that I will likely become a part owner of the Chrysler Corporation, thanks to the curious fact that National Writers Union, to which I belong, is Local 1981 of the UAW, apparently slated to become the majority shareholder of the company.

Another sign of the strange and wondrous times in which we live.

Especially so for a guy who grew up riding in a 1936, 1941 and 1946 Plymouth, a 1945 surplus Army Dodge personnel carrier (in which I learned to drive at 14 - complete with double clutching), a 1947 Chrysler and a 1951 DeSoto finally abandoned when one of its wheels fell off on some highway. I carried on the family tradition with my own 1985 Plymouth minivan (a sister car is now in the Museum of American History) and its 1993 successor.

I have no idea of whether this is a good deal or not and I doubt, despite the aforementioned extensive company experience, they'll consult with me on it, but I'm delighted to find the concept of union ownership finally considered worth discussing and that the UAW has moved so swiftly from a social status somewhat beneath Bernie Madoff to representation in the board room.

Much of the public and media treatment of auto workers in the recent crisis has been disgusting. These are the folks who helped build an America in which 21st century liberals could sit in front of their 52" flat screen TV complaining about workers' health benefits and never raise a finger for single payer.

All you have to do is look at the economic improvement in the life of ordinary Americans in the fifty years before 1980, in which unions played no small part, compared to the forty years since to recognize that the viral anti-union rhetoric in the media and elsewhere is just more of the rightwing economics that have led us to our current miserable state.

Which is not to say that union leaders haven't botched their role badly. Like other forms of power they have regularly shortchanged and abused those whom they were supposed to represent.

Even more important, perhaps, they have shown little imagination as times have changed.

For example, while there has been some effort to create a complimentary organization for non-unionized workers, this has been pretty weak, which is one reason non union workers lack the power of members, says, of the AARP or NRA. In the end the solidarity should be between workers, not just amongst the unionized.

Another problem has been a long antipathy towards union ownership participation. Because of labor's history, it has been assumed that management and workers would forever live in two separate worlds. This, however, is not true in many cooperatives (a concept as little mentioned by the media as worker ownership) or in many business in Europe and elsewhere. And how could the original dreams of the union movement ever be realized if workers could never reach the board table?

One doesn't has to agree with the specifics of the Chrysler deal to recognize its importance and the importance of that seldom heard phrase that bears great repetition: worker ownership.

FINDING FUN FLU FACTS

2009-04-27T17:40:00.002-04:00

Sam Smith

Ten days ago your editor came down with the first serious case of the flu or a cold or an allergy or god knows what since the Internet hit the big times. I did what I always do now when I'm trying to find something out: I hit the Big G. But unlike buying a new car, finding out local recycling laws, or checking the films at the E Street Theater, the Internet totally failed me.

True, it wasn't all the Internet's fault. The media has a strange approach to illness - obsessed with its possible fatalities but largely indifferent to less important matters such as symptoms and best cures. To the extent that modern medicine has discovered the Internet, it is still remarkably skewed towards preachy little statements that don't help the patient much. Especially when he's coughing.

As best as I can figure, this current unpleasantness had its roots in my granddaughter's group nursery and was lovingly transmitted to pops and omah about ten days ago. This would put it well in advance of the swine flu epidemic and would rank it amongst the most normal of respiratory mishaps. Certainly my doctor and my wife's thought so. We were part of the flu and allergy background noise of the season.

But once the swine flu crisis descended, things changed. On those surprisingly rare occasions when the media even bothered to mention the symptoms, it became ever harder to distinguish them from my own. CNN even claimed I had every symptom of swine flu. Which gave me one more reason to watch MSNBC.

There is something to be learned here. When one is ill, one has little taste for beautiful graphics or pompous and puerile prescriptions or suggestions of a worthy but, at the moment, unattainable life style. One wants cures, brands of cures, and useful warning signs that things are getting worse. One basic question, for example, went totally unanswered as far as I could find: when do you call your doctor?

All this could be accomplished on a simple spread sheet that helped one distinguish between the types of misery one might be enduring, what things might help it, when to get truly worried, and what to do then. The origins, history or geography of the illness is of little concern. There is, after all, only case that really matters. Yours.

As it was, nine days in I had to rely on an NPR correspondent. After all who in the world has a greater interest in not sounding awful? She explained to me something I had missed thanks to my rare contact with these problems and to the fact that I could find it nowhere on the Net. Water is not only important because of dehydration, but it actually soothes those tiny objects in the bottom of your throat that make you sound like a vertical Mt Vesuvius erupting every few minutes - proving once again that if you really want to know about something, go to someone for whom the answer truly matters.

THINGS I STILL READ IN PRINT

2009-04-23T17:35:00.001-04:00

Sam Smith

Since I belong to the class that has been destroying the print media - the print version of the Review even destroyed itself in 2004 (once again ahead of its time) - I thought it would be interesting to check out which print media still survived in our house.

After all, if a publication still arrives in the mail or on the doorstep at the home of such a confirmed cyber obsessive there may be some wider meaning - even hope - to it all.

So here's what I found:

The Washington Post
The Hill Rag
House & Design
Utne Reader
Vanity Fair
New Yorker
Down East

Why do I still subscribe to the Post when I can read it online? Because it's more pleasant over coffee and cereal (or egg beater omelet). While this is, for me, a comforting tradition, the same can not be said of younger readers. Pew found that while 48% of those in the Silent Generation (born in the late 1930s) read a printed paper, only 13% of those in Generation Y (born after 1976) did so and this sorry figure had even dropped seven points just since 2006.

The Hill Rag is a free neighborhood newspaper and while I'm not crazy about it, I do check out the news and columns that interest me and it tends to hang around the house for some time. Further, I can't think of living anywhere and not reading the neighborhood paper.

House & Design is one of those publications that appears mysteriously in the homes of long married men who know that it's best not to bring the topic up or may end up costing you some money.

Utne Reader I like because they've run my articles over the years. How I might react if I hadn't, I can't tell but, like Yes Magazine, it definitely serves a subculture not well attended to by the Internet.

Vanity Fair is the literary equivalent of dumpster diving for intellectuals. You shouldn't really admit you subscribe to it, but it has a great combination of beautiful photographs and trashy articles that the Internet has not been able to match. Besides it would be too expensive to keep a laptop by the toilet for bathroom reading.

The New Yorker is bedtime browsing, specializing in material that's too lengthy to scroll through. Besides who wants to take their laptop to bed with them?

Down East is an attractive monthly about Maine where we will soon be moving. As with Vanity Fair there is a quality to its published photographs that cannot be met on the Internet as well as being the sort of thing that you happily pick up when you leave your computer work and drop onto the sofa.

So what's the deeper meaning of this? Probably this: that print publications have to find ways in which they are instinctively different from the Internet. The top three papers in the U.S. are USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the NY Times. They have a distinct advantage over other papers because they are (a) national and (b) different. USA Today was the first paper to break the tradition of the daily press with its layout and use of color. The Wall Street Journal serves the greedster class and the NY Times is for those raised to believe that it contains all the truth one needs to know.

One possibility would be to give these national papers some competition. The most likely contenders might be the NY Post or NY Daily News, as a national tabloid could have considerable appeal.

Why would anyone buy such a paper? For the same reason I subscribe to Vanity Fair: trash and photos. And the tabloid format is much better suited for riding on a bus or waiting in a doctor's office.

The crisis facing newspapers is not entirely the fault of the Internet. Newspapers are strongly tradition bound institutions. For example, when television came along they did much the same thing they are doing now. They surrendered.

TV's big advantage over the print media was its images. But each of these images was only on the screen for seconds. What if newspapers had reacted by taking a more Life Magazine approach to photography - creating images and image stories over which the reader would linger?

Today, there are other things they could be doing such as much shorter stories, more really local news, more names in each issue, more story telling instead of just news reporting, and more creative use of comic strips (again something the Internet doesn't do well).

As for the neighborhood press, I suspect will outlast many of the larger publications because it does precisely what the bigger press could be doing: connect the reader to their place in the world.

The specialty publications such as House & Design, Utne Reader, and Down East may also do well because they represent things that are important enough to readers they like to hold them in their hand. While one can linger over the Internet longer than one can watch an image on TV, the time spent there is, on average, exceedingly brief - less than five minutes a day for each of the publications mentioned above, according to Alexa.

Finally, with Vanity Fair and New Yorker, you have publications that are intrinsically so different in feel and substance than what people usually go for on the Internet, that they can probably continue to create a life of their own.

So while there's no doubt the top of our coffee table has changed over the past few years, don't throw out that printing press quite yet.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS AND ASSOCIATED PROBLEMS

2009-04-13T23:44:00.000-04:00

Sam Smith

Watching Tom Curley on the Charlie Rose Show, I began to feel really sorry for him. The horrible things that were happening to his company, the threat to his business model, the vicious dogs yapping at his legs. He was a sad, dreary and bitter man, the sort of guy who might have a hard time knowing it was a new morning if his alarm didn't tell him.

Tom Curley is CEO of the Associated Press and the terrible things he was confronting included Google, news aggregators, blogs, and online journals like, well, like mine.

I kept trying to connect his misery to reality but I couldn't get out of my mind how many people come to our site each week because they've asked some question and Google has given them one of our links as a possible answer. Or how many times reporters and bloggers have sent us stories with the request or hint that we give them a virtual boost.

I got into this internet business 14 years ago when there were only 20,000 websites worldwide. Now there are more than 150 million. No one used the term aggregator back then. That was a couple of years before the Drudge Report went on the web and it was before the Washington Post had recovered from its first Internet failure.

One of the things I liked about the web was how it encouraged both competition and cooperation, not unlike the way those who do business on the water or in small communities work. They understand that part of progress involves helping others, which Americans generally accepted until the corporate greedsters took things over in the 1980s.

When Matt Drudge went online in 1997, I became fascinated by his use of links to other stories. I had initially seen the web just as a place to put all the stuff we didn't have room for in our print version, but Drudge encouraged another approach. After we started running news clips and links, our readership doubled in each of the next four years.

Part of Drudge's cleverness was that he had created a place where others wanted to be featured. What drives his audience is not his personal conservative views, but an understanding that his site is one of the best places to go for breaking news. Journalists understood this, hence the number of stories based on advance notice of a hot piece to which the reporters wanted to drive readers and impress their bosses. In at least one case, it seems one or more reporters had another objective: to get their publication to stop suppressing a story. Which is how the Monica Lewinsky story, which Newsweek was withholding, finally broke. The AP's Curley may not understand this, but plenty of good journalists have.

Yet I also realized that some publications would not understand the Internet and would not want to be linked. Our rule was simple: we would never link to or mention them again. In 14 years and more than 30 million article views, we have had exactly five such complaints. And when the AP began making threatening noises some months ago, although not specifically against us, we sent them into oblivion as well, despite the fact that their legal position thumbs its nose at the laws of fair use.

The fact is we don't need them all that much. As the song goes, "Got along without you before I met you, gonna get along without you now." Here are a few good reasons:

- The AP isn't all that good a news source for a journal with a section called Undernews. It doesn't break many interesting stories or shed new light on them. It is more like a daily Wikipedia of what's happening. Quite useful but far from indispensable.

- Many AP stories are based on press releases or testimony or public speeches that are easily found elsewhere. One of our new hobbies has become to find alternative sources for AP stories. It's not that hard at all.

- You can not copyright facts or history. If Karl Rove tells the AP that Joe Biden is "a liar," the only way it can claim copyright over those words are if Rove sold the rights to his comments to AP, which would be a big story in itself. If 35 people die when a bridge collapses, that fact does not belong to AP even if it reports it first.

- It is therefore relatively easy to simply present facts and quotes in new language without the slightest copyright infringement. All you have to do is to be able to type fast.

- The Review started as an alternative journal in 1964 with no conventional material, and certainly none from AP. A few years later we are joined by over 400 underground papers in the

U.S.

We still didn't need the AP; we just shared with each other. And in the process we changed America, including helping foster the civil rights, anti-war, environmental, women's and gay movements. Not even the Internet can make such a claim, and certainly not AP.

The fact is that the archaic media is just not as important as it thinks it is. And where it should be important, such as covering our imperial wars objectively, it has allowed itself to become an embedded mouthpiece of the government.

While it is true that we are small enough that the AP doesn't need us either, the same can't be said of Google as Jeff Jarvis, writing of the recent Newspaper Association of America meeting, put it:

"Yesterday, you delivered a foot-stomping little hissy fit over Google and aggregators. How dare they link to you and not pay you? . . . Beware what you wish for. You’d lose a third of your traffic overnight. If other aggregators and bloggers and Facebook all decided to follow suit, you’d lose half your traffic. On most of your sites, only 20 percent of the audience in a day ever sees your homepage and its careful packaging; 4 of 5 readers instead come in through search and links. In the link economy - instead of the outmoded content economy in which you operate - Google and aggregators and bloggers are bringing value to you; they should be charging you for the value they bring. "

Shane Richmond in London's Telegraph phrased it well: "Should plumbers complain if they can't make enough money from the business they get from the Yellow Pages?"

This from Sarah Lacey of Business Week: "Old Media's indignation is akin to a parent who tries to punish a kid by taking away the Glenn Miller records. Let's be honest: The traditional media is threatening to cut off access to an asset that's declining in value, and in many cases, no longer brings in profits. Think about that. What exactly is the "or else" here? Or else, we won't take your free traffic, and we'll just watch our subscriber rolls dwindle and ad revenue shrink all alone? . . .

"It's not just that Old Media is wrong, it's that they've played this sad hand so badly. They spent years nakedly trying to get more and more traffic from search, portals, and aggregators, and now they suddenly strike a victim pose once they realized their business models are broken beyond repair. . .

"There's always been a lot of pride associated with the Old Media world. There had to be -- we didn't make much money, we worked long hours, we had to ask uncomfortable questions and report things people didn't want reported. And then there's that endless stream of deadlines. But this week is the first time I can think of that I'm embarrassed for my profession. Once you're reduced to legal threats and whining, you're one step away from admitting total defeat. Just ask the music industry. What's next, suing our own readers for clicking on Google links?"

Danny Sullivan wrote of a complaint by the Guardian which is also on the warpath against Google:

"Gosh, it was about a year ago I sat at a panel at the Guardian, designed for its reporters, and talked about ways they could (and they wanted) to generate traffic from search engines. Doing keyword research, looking for trends, all that. And Google was by far -- by far -- the biggest referral of traffic the Guardian got. If I recall, it sent something like 3 million visitors to the Guardian per day.

"Seriously, the Tribune and the New York Times saddled themselves with debt, and that problem is somehow Google's fault? The Guardian's had a decade to figure out how to earn off the internet, and it complains to the

government that it can't succeed?"

That AP and the Guardian don't understand this is just sign of the degree to which business is run these days by those who don't play well with others.

They don't understand that how much of success - business, political or social - is based on symbiosis and viral activity. Consider the Internet, the Obama campaign, or a thriving downtown district with a mix of business, entertainment and service all dependent on others in the same 'hood.

Instead these media run to their lawyers as an alternative to creativity and new ideas.

This seldom works because lawyers are not natural lodes of creativity and new ideas. They can put you behind a wall but that's seldom a good way to find new customers.

Arianna Huffiington summed up the situation well:

"Take online video. Not that long ago, content providers were committed to the idea of requiring viewers to come to their site to view their content -- and railed against anyone who dared show even a short clip.

"But content hoarding -- the walled garden -- didn't work. And instead of sticking their finger in the dike, trying to hold back the flow of innovation, smart companies began providing embeddable players that allowed their best stuff to be posted all over the web, accompanied by links and ads that helped generate additional traffic and revenue.

"Or go to any college, as I often do, and ask a group of students how many of them, during the campaign, saw Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin. It's usually 100 percent. Then ask how many saw it on Saturday Night Live. It's usually no more than one or two. Yes, SNL could have said tune in to NBC Saturday Night at 11:30 or don't see it at all. But Lorne Michaels and Jeff Zucker obviously don't want to go the way of Rick Wagoner and his Detroit buddies."

Or consider the fact that I didn't see the aforementioned Tom Curley video clip thanks to AP or because I watch Charlie Rose, but thanks to Huffington Post, whose boss was the other guest on the show. Huffington Post ran the clip even though it clearly disagreed with it. On the Internet even your foes can help you.

Speaking of Huffington Post and the AP, it is perhaps instructive to see what's been happening to their page views according to Alexa, with HP first and AP below it:

There is another problem with the blame-it-on-the web approach, which is that the stats don't back it up. For example, Forbes reported last year that "in 2007, Internet advertising accounted for 7% of the industry's total revenue, up from 5.4% in 2006, according to the Newspaper Association of America." And writing in the Neiman Journalism Lab, Martin Langeveld finds that, contrary to the popular impression, "whether you look at page views or time spent reading, only around 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online."

Further, the problem blamed on the Internet actually started well before the internet began to flower. The NY Times' circulation, for example, peaked in 1993 and has been falling ever since. Google didn't even start until 1996.

In 1989, the same year that the World Wide Web began, I was invited to a community meeting to discuss the Washington Post, called by its publisher Don Graham. I couldn't make it, so instead wrote up a few comments in the Review such including:

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What are we doing as we sit glazing our fingers with your ink? At one level we believe we are educating ourselves. But at another, and very important level, we are developing an impression of the day and of our city that will affect our mood, our conversation and our actions for the hours to come.

And how does the Post serve us at this critical juncture? What sort of day and city does it prepare us for? Basically it says to the reader: you are about to go out in a city which has a wealth of problems that you can't solve, pleasures which you're not important enough to enjoy, and people who, when they are not just being dull, are deceitful, avaricious or mean. . .

The Post seems at times almost maniacally determined to drain the life out of the city. What remains is a bureaucratic memo on the last 24 hours from the perspective of that small minority of people who wield power in this town.

So if I had been able to come to your meeting I would have accused you of being a wet blanket on my mornings and, by consequence, on the rest of the day. To my mind, this is as serious a charge as one can make against a daily newspaper.

I think this is so not because Post writers and editors are inherently dull, indifferent, or lack humor or emotion. Many, I have found, consider themselves more prisoners than collaborators. I think the problem stems from the fashion in which the Post attempts to rule, benignly and with noblesse oblige, from its monopoly position. Its methods, as I understand them, are not strikingly different from those of McDonald's, that is to say they depend in no small part on quality control. This control, aimed at preventing bad things from happening, has the inevitable result of preventing a lot of good things from happening as well. You end up with a product not unlike Muzak, in which both the low and high pitches are removed leaving the listener with the bland middle range.

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As it turns out, not only is the Post in financial trouble but Muzak has filed for bankruptcy.

Seventeen years later I tried again to help out the Post:

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- Newspapers early surrendered the image battle to TV when, in fact, TV only shows images for a few seconds at which point they are gone forever. Newspapers should go back to the approach to photos that made Life Magazine so appealing: images that made you stop and look either because of the quality of the photo or because of the story that a series of photos told. When, for example, was the last time you let a photographer edit your page design?

- Dump the Pulitzer porn such as your recent series on black men. That dreary combination of abstractions, stats and not all that interesting stories makes for poor journalism, especially over breakfast. Besides, you can't make up for years of ignoring the problems of black men with an occasional series even if it does win a prize.

- Put news on your front page. I define news as something that has happened, something that is happening or something that is going to happen. News is not what someone said about what is happening nor what someone perceived was going to happen nor what the editors thought the impact of something happening would be on its readership.

- The one exception to filling the front page with news would be a story or two that are just interesting, which is to say ones about which readers will ask their friends, "Did you see that story about. . ?"

- Use the "holy shit" principle of news editing. If your reaction to a story is "holy shit" and the story is true, many of your readers are going to feel the same way.

- Run more and shorter stories. You can get the edge over both the Internet and TV through quantity rather than just style of news. And the more names the better.

- Run more local stories, more stories affecting different ethnic groups, and more stories about sports people play rather than just watch.

- Go back to pyramid style reporting or at least get to the point within the first paragraph or two.
- Stop burying stories that affect ordinary readers in the business and real estate sections and put them in the front of the paper where they belong.

- Run more stories that affect ordinary readers. Handle your news from the viewpoint of your readers rather than from that of your advertisers, sources, or journalistic staff - few of whom live in some the toughest yet newsworthy parts of town.

- Have a labor section as well as a business section. After all, you have more employees than employers in your circulation area.

- Slash the number of stupid, spinning, or sophistic quotations from official sources used in your paper.

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In the end, I suspect, it was the pretensions of what was once a trade but turned into a power-partying profession that has done a lot of the damage to the conventional media.

Richard Harwood once remarked of the journalism in which he began his career: "We were perceived as a lower form of life, amoral, half-literate hacks in cheap suits. Thus I was assigned to a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Nashville in the late 1940s and, with other reporters, was given lunch at a card table set up in a hallway to protect the dining room from contamination."

Moving from this dubious trade, a majority of whose practitioners hadn't gone to college, to a profession graced by graduate schools and thence to a status that was part actor and part apparatchik of a rising corporate uber-culture, journalists became ever more prominent and self-referential even as they were losing touch with both their purported constituency and their purported purpose. They became the first group in human history to dramatically improve their socio-economic status simply by writing about themselves, self-casting themselves among the very elite from whom they had once been expected to protect their audience.

So it was not surprising that this crowd met the Internet with contempt. In my 2001 book, Why Bother?, I gave a few early examples:

- Cokie and Steve Roberts wrote a column, headed 'Internet Could Become A Threat To Representative Government,' warning against the direct democracy of the Internet and saying it could threaten the "very existence" of Congress.

- A commentator on Court TV argued that acceptance of government regulation of the Net was the equivalent of growing up.

- Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes called for the removal of undesirable information from the Net. Asked on what grounds, Stahl replied, "That it's wrong, that it's inaccurate, it's irresponsible, that it is spreading fear and suspicion of the government; 10,000 reasons."

- A writer in the Washington Post warned that without gatekeepers of information -- e.g. the Washington Post -- "our media could become even more infested with half-truths and falsehoods."

- On Crossfire, Geraldine Ferraro breathlessly warned that "we've got to get this Internet under control."

And it hasn't changed all that much. The Atlantic reported recently:

"In a poll of prominent members of the national news media, nearly two-thirds say the Internet is hurting journalism more than it is helping. The poll, conducted by The Atlantic and National Journal, asked 43 media insiders whether, on balance, journalism has been helped more or hurt more by the rise of news consumption online. Sixty-five percent said journalism has been hurt more, while 34 percent said it has been helped more."

In short, the archaic media has never liked the Internet, never learned what it was about or how to use it, and now wants to blame it for all their troubles. That's probably not a great business model.

AMERICA'S CULTURAL BEAR MARKET

2009-04-09T16:36:00.002-04:00

Sam Smith

Cultures rise and fall like the stock market, only it takes longer and no one has come up with a really good index to tell you what's happening. My guess is that American culture has been in a bear market since sometime around 1980, with the fiscal bear market only catching up to the larger reality in the last year or so.

These days you can clearly sense the cultural collapse just by watching our inability to deal with the fiscal one. To be sure, our leaders in politics, academia and the media are determined and decisive but then so are a lot of inmates in mental institutions. What's lacking is logic, pragmatism, imagination, and common sense. Instead, they toss out trillions like confetti and call it policy.

And it's been going on a lot longer the current crisis. For example, one of the reasons we got into this mess and can't get out is because we've turned so much of life over to lawyers and MBAs. Practical business people (as opposed to marketers parading as such) seem non-existent in Washington, wise economists are ignored and the simple lessons of history aren't even considered.

Further, our leaders seem tone deaf. There is little consciousness that to get the economy moving, people at every level have to feel it's moving. Things have to happen and they have to be visible. Like new buildings, new businesses, new jobs.

There's a lot of talk about FDR but Roosevelt did it differently. He didn't use a banker or an MBA to get things rolling; he actually used a social worker, Harry Hopkins, who created more new jobs in four months than Obama promises to create (or "save") by 2011.

The 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.

Nothing like that is even contemplated this time around.

Obama, however, is not the cause of the problem; he is merely another product of it. He is just the head guy in a society that has lost the ability to get things done or fixed.

I once wrote a book called The Great American Political Repair Manual. While the title was still under discussion I got a call from my editor who said a couple of her colleagues had problems with it. One thought that because of the word "repair" it might be put in the automobile section of the bookstores. The other said that "repair" sounded too much like work. I replied, "Oh yeah, I forgot. You folks in Manhattan don't repair anything. You just call the super."

The problem today - 12 years later - is that there is no super to call to repair America.

There are two major alternative prognoses for such a time. One is that the stock market analogy is correct and we will indeed rise from our fall. The other is that it's actually much worse: that we are in a state of cultural dysevolution and America will never again be what it once was.

The arguments for the first prognosis include not only the history of past fiscal crises but the similarity between the time in which we live and those eras that historians call "great awakenings," times of obsession with religion over reality that were followed by things like the American Revolution, the abolition movement, and the progressive politics of the last century.

There seems to be a yin and yang to this: our politicians fail us and so we turn to God, forgetting the part about rendering unto Caesar that which is his business. After awhile, say like right now, it becomes apparent that God isn't going to keep your job for you or pay your cable bill. So there's a drift back to politics.

For example, the past few American decades have been run in part on the premise that gay marriage and abortion are more important than pensions, healthcare or jobs - and that so-called family values, as defined by a bevy of self-appointed priests and pols, are more important that home values.

The fiscal crisis and other reminders of reality have already done a good job of challenging all that. The gay marriage dispute has taken a major turnabout, thanks to some judges and the Vermont legislature. The Reverends Rick Warren and Reverend Jeremiah Wright have both proved more of a liability to Barack Obama than a blessing. The percent of youth in Canada, where it's easier to be honest about such things, claiming no faith at all has risen from 12% in 1984 to 32% today. And a new Rasmussen Poll finds that those Americans under 30 favor capitalism over socialism by only 37% to 33%.

Our president and supposed agent for change reflects none of such changes, but, as in the stock market, it's often the small cap companies that lead the way. As noted here during the campaign, Obama could just be a reverse Carter: instead of paving the way for the rightwing revolution that almost destroyed us, he could be the transition to something much better.

That's the cheery prognosis. On the other hand, what has happened may be permanent just as with the ancient Greeks or the Mayans. Bear in mind that humans are the only species that, with malice aforethought, ignore, disable or destroy the advantages of biological evolution. Thus we have moved from Gutenberg presses to text messages, from Bach to American Idol, and from weapons capable of killing only one at time to those that can explode the whole world. We have moved from survival of the fittest to survival of the Twitterist, and from dependence on DNA to dependence on MBAs.

There is no index, or even scientific theory, to plot the costs of such a course, but if the current crises of economics, ecology and culture are reasonable indicators, it makes biological determinism look pretty good and certainly an improvement over the advice of Tim Geithner, Tom Friedman, Glenn Beck or the Washington Post.

In fact, almost every elite institution - politics, academia, think tanks, the media - has failed us. These institutions have destroyed our national environment, constitution, integrity, reputation and communities.

To reverse what is happening, we must create strong alternative ideas and hardy alternative institutions and communities, a counter culture that rejects the myths of Washington and Wall Street just as, in the 1960s, a generation put the establishment on the defensive or in the closet.

This won't happen easily. The establishment has become far more skillful at defending its turf - using everything from fake town meetings to greater illegal spying. But there's another even more discouraging problem: the acceptance of helplessness by so many of those one might, in other times, have been expected to lead the rebellion against the catatonic confederacy of those in control.

A particularly painful example is the support of the Af-Pak war by those who still boast of their liberalism. This is a war - after Obama adds his most recent announced troops - that will bring us to the same status as we were with Vietnam in mid 1965 when a visible anti-war movement was already underway. Why such silence now? Are liberals on their way to extinction, too?

In any case, we need to act, but independent of those responsible for the mess, those exculpating them, those offering remedies that are mere manipulated shadows of the failure, and those engaged in misleading or misguided organizing on their behalf even if with purportedly noble intent.

There is no salvation to be found in the Democratic Party, in Obama or in more ranting about how bad Rush Limbaugh is. We need a loud and clear agenda - with things like single payer, no more imperial wars, public campaign financing and an economic policy that helps real people and not just bankers and hedge fund hustlers. We need to be at odds with both the criminally egregious and their ineffective or unintentional enablers.

The collapse of American culture was an inside job. Its cure is to be found on the outside, in a counter culture that is clear and worthy in its goals, eclectic in its alliances, and which builds community, recovers integrity and helps us to sing again. If we can't save our culture, we can at least create a new one.

CAN WE BAIL OUT OF NARCISSISM?

2009-03-31T15:57:00.001-04:00

Sam Smith

The problems we face and the problems we face getting out of the problems we face have more than a little to do with the culture of narcissism that has enveloped our politics, corporate life and entertainment over the past three decades.

We have been taught to regard personal success as more significant than cooperation, community, joint achievement, common advancement, or shared values and systems (such as democracy and fairly regulated commercialism). Better, in short, than qualities that benefit large numbers of citizens rather than just a few. Having accepted the very values that helped push us over the edge, we are now in a poor position to recover from the mess they have created. Add to that all the isolating factors in our society from television to population growth to Ipods, and it makes finding a common way back to social, political and economic sanity extraordinarily difficult.

A good place to start would be to jettison our heavy adulation of leaders in the arts, business, sports and politics for their appearance and attitude rather than for actual achievement. We need to free ourselves of hyper-manipulated dependence on hyper-exalted individuals.

For example, in politics we find ourselves increasingly huddled in the glow of favored individuals rather than united in a cause or joined by values. It doesn't really matter if it is Sarah Palin or Barack Obama. It's the same phenomenon: politicians about whom we know far too little upon whom we are taught to project far too many hopes and dreams.

Most Obama supporters, for example, had extraordinarily little idea where he stood on a large variety of subjects and now will only learn randomly and by chance over time. Neither was there much evidence of experience, but in today's culture, a sufficiently attractive if unfamiliar man can apparently leap from being an unknown state senator to the White House in four short years. What this says is less about Obama and more about how we deal with issues like war, the environment or the economy. We just put the right personal brand on them and hope for the best.

We only ask that the politician in question acts enough like a leader. We are thus behaving not as citizens but as directors of a reality show version of West Wing.

For this to occur, you basically need two things: an easily obsessed audience and a character actor willing to exploit that obsession. It is small wonder that the ambitious notice this and play to it.

Obama, mind you, is only the most prominent example of this phenomenon. The reason he was able to win was because we had long come to accept a similar principle in film, business and the news media. Ideas, issues, principles, record and known skill have faded in importance. Whom we trust with these things has become what matters.

This is an open invitation for control of our lives by narcissists.

As a culture it is not something we talk about. We have drifted into this approach with help from TV fantasies, bad books claiming to explain good management, parents who teach their children that they are the world's best, and an approach to leadership modeled on car dealers from back in the day when they were still able to sell cars. Thus it is not surprising that Bill Clinton's stepfather was a gun-brandishing alcoholic who lost his Buick franchise through mismanagement and his own pilfering. He physically abused his family, including the young Bill. According to FBI and local police officials, his Uncle Raymond -- to whom young Bill turned for wisdom and support -- was a colorful car dealer, slot machine owner and gambling operator, who thrived on the fault line of criminality.

An abused kid raised by hustlers. Not a bad formula for narcissism. But it can also come from being constantly told how wonderful you are, say like a black Harvard law school student or handsome black state senator when there aren't that many. Or it can be taught in business school as good management or exceptional leadership. Or you can learn it from the movies. Or watching who makes the most money in baseball or on Wall Street.

We are, in short, a culture that cultivates, teaches, celebrates narcissism and its results. And this may prove to be one of the hardest obstacles in our recovery from our recent past.

OBAMA'S KNOW NOTHING POLITICS: THE MEDIA IS THE MASSAGE

2009-03-27T16:49:00.001-04:00

Sam Smith

The word frequently heard in Washington for which there is the greatest gap between verbal use and actual practice is "transparency." Sadly, Barack Obama is widening the void.

This was apparent during the campaign if one simply looked a bit below the rhetorical massage. I found nearly three dozens things Obama had done or said that should have raised eyebrows in liberal circles, but at a time when melanin reigned supreme, to even mention such matters was viewed as disloyal.

Now we are paying the price as Obama's agenda remains in the shadows even as pieces of it fall silently into place - often without the media noticing and as the president continues to treat reality as though it were just one more campaign issue to spin.

If there was one safety valve during the past eight years it was that the Bush regime was not embarrassed in the slightest by the evil they did and so we didn't have to look too long under too many benches to find illegal wiretaps or discover water boarding. Their perverted pride served as a strange form of transparency.

Now it's different. Important policy is being hidden away in stimulus packages; the soporific semiotics flow like one of those bedside sound machines; and the media and liberal think tanks are almost belligerently indifferent to what is going on.

Several of them - including Move On, a group that would support self immolation if the right Democrat asked them to - are even out with ads promoting support for the president's budget. Not the country's budget, not - as the Constitution would have it - Congress' budget, but Obama's. In fact, any budget is a huge conglomeration of the good and the bad and there is no way one can make a rational decision based on 30 seconds of propaganda.

One of the first indications of the administration hiding behind the curtains was Obama's medical records bill, buried amongst the massive stimuli of the recent weeks. Whatever one thinks about having the federal government decide how medical records are kept and what is in them, an even greater concern is the enormous threat to patient privacy.

Yet this measure flew through Congress like a resolution honoring some buddy of a long time representative, with no one asking what would happen if an alcoholic, drug addict, a HIV positive citizen or a mentally troubled patient had their records passed on electronically to someone pretending to be a doctor on their case, but actually with the FBI, an insurance company or their employer. At the very least there should have been hearings, coverage and debate in the media and enough time to discover what was really going on. Yet one gets the sense that Obama and the Democrats didn't want this.

There is the much larger issue of who the bank bailout beneficiaries really are and where the money is really going. And the stunning lack of debate over a growing major war in Afghanistan. By the time we were this far into Vietnam, it was already a substantial controversy. On a smaller scale, shouldn't a democracy discuss the matter before giving four times as much to improve rail service for first class passengers as it does for ordinary riders?

All this has involved the exact opposite of transparency, led by a president who seems to prefer spending his days finding new communications systems over which to spread his platitudes.

One case that particularly struck home because its dangerous invisibility was the attempt to include a formal study of a national draft into a measure increasing funding for the Peace Corps and Americorps. At the last moment - perhaps because some conservative groups had noticed and complained - the provision was dropped from the bill but remains alive in new legislation pending in the House.

This is not a minor matter. It is huge. The reinstitution of mandatory national service could tear this country apart just like the last draft did. And while this may explain the sneaky approach Obama and the Democrats have taken, it certainly doesn't justify it. And why, as the great issue of the 1960s rears its head again, are the liberals so quiet?

The history of this is instructive. In 2006, Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, wrote a book called "The Plan: Big Ideas for America" It that called for three months of compulsory civil service for all young Americans. In it he said:

"It's time for a real Patriot Act that brings out the patriot in all of us. We propose universal civilian service for every young American. Under this plan, All Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five will be asked to serve their country by going through three months of basic training, civil defense preparation and community service. . .

"Here's how it would work. Young people will know that between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, the nation will enlist them for three months of civilian service. They'll be asked to report for three months of basic civil defense training in their state or community, where they will learn what to do in the event of biochemical, nuclear or conventional attack; how to assist others in an evacuation; how to respond when a levee breaks or we're hit by a natural disaster. These young people will be available to address their communities' most pressing needs."

During the last campaign we noted that Obama "favors a national service plan that appears to be in sync with one being promoted by a new coalition that would make national service mandatory by 2020, and with a bill for such mandatory national service introduced by Rep. Charles Rangel.

"We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded," Barack Obama said last July 2 in Colorado Springs, CO."

On another occasion Obama spoke of the need for "universal voluntary public service," although Michael Kinsley noted that service can be either universal or voluntary but not both.

At one point the Obama/Biden campaign website announced that Obama and Biden will expand Americorps and the Peace Corps with "a goal that all middle and high school students do 50 hours of community service a year. . . " When questions began to be raised, the words disappeared from the site.

The recent House bill, now approved by the Senate, contained up to the last minute of a provision for a commission that would consider "a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people" and a possible requirement for "all individuals in the United States" to perform such service.

As the DC Examiner notes, "The section could be restored during the Senate-House conference committee meeting. A new, separate bill containing that language has since been introduced in the House."

The Examiner also argued:

"Lurking behind the feel-good rhetoric spouted by the measure's advocates is a bill that on closer inspection reveals multiple provisions that together create a strong odor of creepy authoritarianism. The House passed the measure overwhelmingly, while only 14 senators had the sense and courage to vote against it on a key procedural motion. Every legislator who either voted for this bill or didn't vote at all has some serious explaining to do. . .

"The bill . . . summons up unsettling memories of World War II-era paramilitary groups by saying the new program should "combine the best practices of civilian service with the best aspects of military service," while establishing 'campuses' that serve as 'operational headquarters,' complete with 'superintendents and 'uniforms' for all participants. It allows for the elimination of all age restrictions in order to involve Americans at all stages of life. And it calls for creation of 'a permanent cadre' in a 'National Community Civilian Corps.'"

"But that's not all. The bill also calls for 'youth engagement zones' in which 'service learning' is 'a mandatory part of the curriculum in all of the secondary schools served by the local educational agency.' This updated form of voluntary community service is also to be 'integrated into the science, technology, engineering and mathematics curricula' at all levels of schooling. Sounds like a government curriculum for government approved 'service learning,' which is nothing less than indoctrination."

The bill also changes the name of the existing Civilian Community Corps to "National Civilian Community Corps." Why the pointed addition of the word "national?"

We don't have to debate what sort of service corps we need to agree that there should be an open discussion about the issue and that the White House and Congress shouldn't be deliberately concealing what they are trying to achieve. This is a malicious deception of the public.

Democracy only works with open debate and open agendas. Letting media manipulators and lawyers cleverly conceal one's purpose - whether on television or in legislation - as a deep affront to this country.

HAS WASHINGTON GONE MAD?

2009-03-23T14:57:00.000-04:00

Sam Smith

Has Washington gone mad? Certainly there are other factors affecting political matters, but if you are feeling that those in charge - regardless of party - are strangely disconnected from reality, you may be on to something.

When Washington is engaged in something absurd - like starting or escalating a bad war - its establishment coalesces around a set of presumptions of questionable logic and then approves - with the media's strong support - huge sums to test them.

One cause of this dysfunctional behavior is the great power vested in the capital. Among the advantages of such power is that you can blow a large number of bucks and bodies on a problem before you finally have to face the fact that what you're doing isn't working.

For example, soon after September 11, our leaders and much of our media drew the conclusion that our salvation lay in world dominance - in empire.

Within just days we moved from tragic reality to delusional myth. Empires don't have their major military and economic icons damaged or destroyed by a handful of young men with box cutters. Empires don't turn suddenly phobic at everything foreign, everything sharp, every place crowded. Empires don't jettison their Constitution and turn on their own people out of blind fear. Empires don't get hopelessly bogged down invading two small countries - one which had a military budget less than two percent of ours, the other with a gross domestic product smaller than the cost of the bombs we were dropping on it.

Something similar happened in Vietnam. The journalist Bernard Fall early in the conflict noted that the French, after their failed battle at Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep making the same mistakes over and over.

The same was true of the hugely expensive war on drugs, which has been going on for over three decades and only now is it becoming somewhat acceptable to say so.

Now we are launched on a bailout of our financial system that no one can explain, no one knows where the money is going, and no one knows who is really going to benefit. An inordinate amount seems to be going to the wealthiest corners of the country while Congress and the White House remain stunningly indifferent to the more modest yet more critical needs of ordinary Americans. It all doesn't make sense but few seem interested in having it do so.

If you start to apply logic, it just doesn't work. It's not unlike those struggles one occasionally has trying to introduce the real into a fitful dream. The fantasy grabs back control all too easily.

Driving the fantasy are comforting words like stimulus and a trillion here, a trillion there. After all, how can you spend a trillion and not have it work? Unless it doesn't.

The irony is that Washington loves to define others as mad - the Palestinian insurgent, the skeptic concerning some badly resolved mystery such as the JFK death, an Illinois governor engaged in what seems now to be a somewhat modest scam, or - most recently - those fearful and crazy "populists" who have the nerve to be furious over what's going on.

By Washington's standards, insanity is the disease of the weak. Just look at the difference in the way the Governor Blago and the Bernie Madoff scandals have been handled: Blago is crazy but Madoff is just an evil genius.

The key issue is power. By the capital's rules, the powerful may be wrong, they may be corrupt, they may even be naive, but they may not be insane, because that would cut too close to the bone, threatening the widely accepted Washington thesis that power proves wisdom.

One way to help figure out what's going on is to count the bodies. Healthy people don't leave a trail of victims as they go through life. On the other hand, the disordered, no matter how convincing their claim to normalcy or how noble their purported purpose, produce a wake that tells a different story. The body count of the fiscal crisis is not comforting.

At the moment, much of Washington seems to be run by two groups: the crazy and those afraid to challenge the crazy. The latter group sadly includes our president, who owes his election in part to those who created the fiscal mess and relies on advisors who contributed to it. Saner economic voices are found on the Internet but not at the White House.

For those outside the capital and not responsible for the current crisis, knowing that a significant portion of what's happening isn't going to help or will help the wrong people, isn't based on logic and isn't being pursued in a rational fashion, may not be of much comfort. But it may save some time and angst searching for logical solutions in barren fields and guide our efforts elsewhere. Such as to an approach more like those of those fearful and crazy populists - the ones who started the fight for the graduated income tax, election of the Senate by direct vote, civil service reform, pensions and the eight hour workday. Now there's insanity we can believe in.

RECOVERING THE DECENT

2009-03-20T15:43:00.001-04:00

Sam Smith

Reading all the articles these days about the fate of capitalism and socialism brings to mind that Virginia good old boy, Jimmy Jenkins. Jimmy went to college on the GI Bill and bought his first house with a VA loan. When a hurricane struck he got federal disaster aid. When he got sick he was treated at a veteran's hospital. When he was laid off he received unemployment insurance and then got a SBA loan to start his own business. His bank funds were protected under federal deposit insurance laws. Now he's retired and on social security and Medicare. The other day he got into his car, drove the federal interstate to the railroad station, took Amtrak to Washington and visited Capitol Hill to ask his congressman to get the government off his back.

The typical columnist isn't much more consistent. I imagine that even George Will rides the Metro subway from time to time, but I've never heard him complain about it.

Artificial dichotomies are the curse of American culture. And having more education doesn't seem to help. In fact, that's where many of our leaders learned to slice life in two, thanks to the curious notion in our universities that theory is more important than reality.

In fact, we have all lived in mixed economies our whole lives. And that's a good thing, Find me one Marxist who really wants the government running his favorite bar. Or a free market advocate who has never voluntarily driven on a freeway.

Our difficulty in facing this simple fact, and the lack of assistance from professors and the media, is one of the reasons we have such a hard time at moments like this. The times are screaming for practical solutions but we can't cast aside our ideological assumptions long enough to let them occur. It's like going to an evangelist to cure one's cancer.

One of the best descriptions of a complex economy can be found in anthropologist James Acheson's book, The Lobster Gangs of Maine:

"The relevant social unit for most fisherman is not the fishing industry as a whole; it is the men fishing for the same species with the same gear in the same area. They share skills and a common knowledge of the means to exploit and market a certain product . . . Although they are direct competitors, lobstermen are the most useful people in one another's lives . . The men in each gang are involved in an elaborate dance-like interaction in which cooperation must be balanced with competition, secrecy with openness, and sharing with self-interest."

Step this relationship up a few notches and you have the guiding principle of a town that works. . . or a state. . . or a nation. The secret of any well functioning community is a similarly elaborate dance-like interaction.

Or consider a band that functioned in the tradition of free market principles that have so badly damaged our country. One musician decides to take more than his share of the glory, won't end his solo and won't back up others when they finally get their turn. How popular would such a group be? One musician's free market principles has destroyed everyone's economy.

Similarly, the personal selfishness and greed that have characterized America's cultural values over the past three decades have not only brought down some of the practitioners - from Bernie Madoff to AIG, they have ruined the show for everyone.

It is hard to overstate the damage not just in dollars but in the cost to our collective soul.

The way out of this disaster will not be found in justice for those criminally involved, necessary as that is. Retribution can compensate but it can't create.

What we need to do is to rediscover the decent, practice it and honor it. We need to teach the mass media to respect integrity as much as it does power, cooperation as much as it does competition, and community as much as it does profit.

Fortunately, we need go no further than our own national past to uncover things like how immigrants advanced personally while not forgetting those around them. Or no further than down the street to the business that wins the community's praise yet still does well. Or no further than the alternative economies in our already midst such as cooperatives and condos.

At its best, America was built on a complex blend of ambition with cooperation, respect, integrity and community. It wasn't built on a free market indifferent to such values or on state control indifferent to human aspirations. We need to rediscover the role of the decency in everything we do, including business, for only then will we really start to recover.

TWO ERAS OF DEMOCRATS

2009-03-17T14:38:00.001-04:00

Sam Smith

Egregious as the bonuses being given the AIG crowd are, they are a miniscule part of the bailout and while they need to be dealt with, we shouldn't obsess over them.

Politicians and the media love to get us in a furor over minor segments of a much larger problem, in part because they can understand bits and pieces while the real crisis leaves them and others befuddled.

Far more serious problems with the bailout include the inordinate amount dedicated to ineffective tax cuts, questions concerning the larger bank bailout, the elitist bias of some of the measures (epitomized by four times as much for high speed business class rail riders than for ordinary coach riders and little at all for bus riders), the low level of aid to high job producing small business, and - perhaps worst of all - the small number of new jobs anticipated - even by the Obama administration.

In fact, Obama's job projections are about the same as has occurred under the average Democratic administration since the 1940s. While this is approximately twice as many as Republican presidents have been able to produce, it falls far short of what is needed during the worst economic disaster since the great depression.

Why so few jobs?

It doesn't seem so much a political matter as a cultural one, a massive shift in our ability to solve problems as American life has become more institutionalized, technocratic and layered with bureaucracy.

Franklin Roosevelt managed to fight the depression with a White House staff smaller than that Mrs. Clinton's when she was First Lady. He fought World War II with less staff than Al Gore when he was vice president.

During the Clinton years, on the other hand, Lars-Erick Nelson wrote in the New York Daily News, "On Friday, I telephoned the Pentagon press office and told the colonel who answered the phone that I needed information on duplication in the armed forces. He replied: "You want the other press office."

A decade and a half later, it's just gotten worse. A National Park Service official explained to me how his agency was reacting to the stimulus. One problem: if you start a new project you have to go through a lengthy environment review, so you put many of these aside for the time being and concentrate on things like repairing park watch towers - things that are already there that no one has to approve.

In late summer of 1933, when it appeared that the National Recovery Administration would not be able to provide adequate employment, FDR aide Harry Hopkins began laying the groundwork for a jobs program. Hopkins -- who had pledged to himself to put four million people to work within four weeks -- fell somewhat short. In the first four weeks only 2.8 million workers were put on the government payroll. Hopkins didn't reach the four million goal until January.

In other words, Harry Hopkins got the same number of people employed in four weeks as Obama has promised within two years.

It was a different time in other ways. For example, Democrats didn't apologize for the federal government as June Hopkins explained in Presidential Studies Quarterly:

"One hot summer day in 1935, federal relief administrator Harry Hopkins presented his plan for alleviating the effects of the Great Depression to a group of shirt-sleeved Iowa farmers, not noted for their liberal ideals. As Hopkins began to describe how government-sponsored jobs on public projects would provide both wages for the unemployed and a stimulus for foundering businesses, a voice shouted out the question that was on everyone's mind: 'Who's going to pay for all that?' . . .

"'You are,' Hopkins shouted, 'and who better? Who can better afford to pay for it. Look at this great university. Look at these fields, these forests and rivers. This is America, the richest country in the world. We can afford to pay for anything we want. And we want a decent life for all the people in this country. And we are going to pay for it."

With the capitulation to the vocabulary and values of the right under Clinton, the Democrats have lost their capacity for progressive policy and action. Today, Obama is far more interested in what the GOP thinks than in what imaginative progressives in Congress and elsewhere might be advocating. A post-partisan depression has settled in. Worse, the solutions that come out of this approach tend to ones that no one really wants.

To use the archaic language of the party's earlier days, we need jobs and business - not stunningly non-specific stimuli and fiscal packages, but things people can see and feel, leading them to invest in America again as well.

Because the New Deal understood this, not only did it create employment it built or repaired 200 swimming pools and 103 golf courses, 3,700 playgrounds, 40,000 schools, 12 million feet of sewer pipe, 1,000 airports, 2,500 hospitals, 2,500 sports stadiums, 3,900 schools, 8,192 parks, 15,000 playgrounds, 124,031 bridges and 125,110 public buildings, and thousands of miles of highways and roads. Add to that the programs for youth and for artists and writers and the result was something it is hard for us to even imagine today.

And it wasn't just the New Deal. Among its opponents was Governor Huey Long of Louisiana who thought Roosevelt too conservative. Long, in one four year term, reports Wikipedia, increased the mileage of paved highways in Louisiana: "By 1936, Long had [doubled] the state's road system. He built 111 bridges, and started construction on the first bridge over the lower Mississippi. He built the new Louisiana State Capitol, at the time the tallest building in the South. All of these construction projects provided thousands of much-needed jobs during the Great Depression. . .

"Long's free textbooks, school-building program, and free busing improved and expanded the public education system, and his night schools taught 100,000 adults to read. He greatly expanded funding for LSU, lowered tuition, established scholarships for poor students, and founded the LSU School of Medicine in New Orleans. He also doubled funding for the public Charity Hospital System, built a new Charity Hospital building for New Orleans, and reformed and increased funding for the state's mental institutions. His administration funded the piping of natural gas to New Orleans and other cities and built the seven-mile Lake Pontchartrain seawall and New Orleans airport. Long slashed personal property taxes and reduced utility rates. His repeal of the poll tax in 1935 increased voter registration by 76 percent in one year."

FDR got his pressure from the left; Obama gets his from the right thanks to the unwillingness of progressives to push him. FDR could take action without a gang of media manipulators telling him to be careful. There wasn't an inordinate pyramid of bureaucracy chipping away at every decision before it went into action. Liberals had more passion than status and really cared about those at the bottom of the American heap.

Are we trapped forever in this contemporary paradigm? Or can we face what has happened to us and start to change it? Can liberals once again represent the ordinary American or can such Americans only expect a few nods in their direction? Can we condemn a whole class of citizens because of what we fear some rightwing Republicans will say if we do something real to help them?

This is a time when status, style and semantics won't save us. Reality has entered the house of America without knocking. It can't be spun away. And time is running out.

ABORTION & RECIPROCAL LIBERTY

2009-03-13T15:02:00.001-04:00

Sam Smith

An interesting and troubling debate lurks just behind the headlines as the possibility increases that the Freedom of Choice act, which legislates what the Supreme Court established as a right, will becomes law.

The problem is that the act would probably require hospitals that receive federal funds to perform abortions, including Catholic ones. If that happens, Catholic bishops are already talking about closing down the faith's 624 hospitals, 13% of the nation's total. These hospitals employ over 600,000 people and provide services to one out of every six hospitalized Americans.

Reported the St. Louis Post Dispatch, "Bishop Thomas Paprocki, a Chicago auxiliary bishop, took up the issue of what to do with Catholic hospitals if FOCA became law. 'It would not be sufficient to withdraw our sponsorship or to sell them to someone who would perform abortions," he said. "That would be a morally unacceptable cooperation in evil.'" Other bishops, such as Robert Lynch in Florida would have the hospitals stay open but engage in civil disobedience: "We will not comply, but we will not close."

In any case, it could easily become an extremely heated issue, largely because so many Americans have come to think that what they believe to be right should be required of all their fellow citizens. They want, in effect, to define everyone else's freedom. The abortion issue is a classic example.

There is, however, an alternative to such rigidity in our politics and the abortion issue also offers an opportunity to use it.

Although the right to an abortion is frequently compared to the civil rights of minorities, there is an important difference. One can not practice discrimination against blacks, latinos or gays without actually causing harm to other Americans. On the other hand, one can oppose or have an abortion without doing harm to others, even if some activists have made it seem otherwise or have actually done harm to those who disagreed with them. In other words, as abortion supporters say, it is a matter of choice.

Admittedly, there is the fetus as human argument, but this again differs from the civil rights example as all sides of the latter now accept the premise that the minority in question is human. Most Americans don't accept this premise in the case of a fetus and not even anti-abortionists logically follow their faith to the point of publicly arguing that a pregnant woman should be allowed to drive down a HOV-2 lane.

Leaving aside the question of why anyone would go to a Catholic hospital for an abortion in the first place, if we are to have a free and decent country we have to pay a lot more attention to respecting the views of those with whom we strongly disagree. Catholicism is the most popular religion in the United States - one out of five Americans consider themselves Catholics - and there are four times as many Catholics as there are Baptists, who seem to have at least four times as much luck getting their way in our political system.

But if abortion should be a woman's choice, why should Catholic hospitals be exempt from granting that choice? Because you don't have a right to impose your personal choice on others.

Does this mean that Catholic hospitals can also refuse to serve or hire gays? No, because in this case the choice directly restricts another person's choice.

It is true that in towns with only one hospital, and that one run by the Catholics, a similar argument could be made and, in fact, the law might have to reflect that. A compromise might be to have a secular abortion clinic next to the hospital entitled to use its other facilities.

Similarly, the funding question is one that needs to be examined and debated. My inclination would be to cut funding by a certain portion to cover the costs of providing abortions elsewhere. The beauty of this is that both sides retain their honor and nobody is hurt.

But the point is that these are the sort of issues that should be discussed - not as polar positions but in a common search as two cultures seek a satisfactory compromise.

This is what diversity is really about. It is not about forcing your values on someone else. It is about sharing space with those of different values in a way that no one is hurt.

This is not a new concept in American life, although it seems to have faded from view. Absent these days, for example, is the concept of reciprocal liberty. As Thomas Paine said, "Where the rights of men are equal, every man must finally see the necessity of protecting the rights of others as the most effectual security for his own."

Describing David Hackett Fischer's discussion in 'Albion's Seed' of the difference in the view of freedom within the American colonies, Leonard J. Wilson writes, "Their contrasting concepts of liberty are among the most visible today. The Puritan concept of liberty, 'ordered liberty' in Fischer's terminology, focused on the 'freedom' to conform to the policies of the Puritan Church and local government. The Virginia concept of liberty, 'hegemonic liberty', was hierarchical in nature, ranging from the great freedom of those in positions of power and wealth down to the total lack of freedom accorded to slaves. The Quaker concept of liberty, 'reciprocal liberty', focused on the aspects of freedom that were held equally by all people as opposed to the unequal and asymmetric freedoms of the Puritans and Virginians. Finally, the Scotch-Irish concept of liberty, 'natural liberty', focused on the natural rights of the individual and his freedom from government coercion."

The good thing about the Quaker notion of reciprocal liberty is that you don't have to approve of the other person's behavior to accept his or her right to engage in it.

America, at its best, knows that you don't have to like someone or their beliefs to extend to them the same freedom to be right or wrong. As Walter Kelly said, we have to defend the basic American right of everyone to make damn fools of themselves.

For diversity to work, no one gets to approve its membership. It exists because that's the way the world is.

The distinction is whether diversity is merely different or if it hurts someone. If it hurts someone - as with ethnic discrimination or the physical mistreatment of women - then society rightfully gets to call a halt to it.

But an abortion is not a public or social act. It is a personal matter chosen for personal reasons. So is opposition to abortion. A decent America would neither prevent abortions nor punish those in medicine who decline to provide them.

And if we understood and practiced such a principle of reciprocal liberty we might feel much better about our land and about each other.

WHAT'S THE MARKET TELLING US?

2009-03-10T13:01:00.001-04:00

Sam Smith

The only people having a good time with the stock market these days are the political spinners. At issue currently is whether this is an Obama market.

One way you can make it look that way is to only look at the 2009 figures. This is what MSNBC has done a couple of times. But the fact is that the market peaked in mid October 2007.

In effect, it's a kind of pay back for Bush, though, since his first bear market and economic troubles actually began in the spring of Clinton's last year - included a stunning collapse of the over the counter market - but was universally blamed on him by a pro-Clinton media.

Now, once again, it's the guy who entered late who is being blamed. On the other hand, the drop in the Dow since Inauguration Day has been 20% and since election day it's been 29%, a pretty astounding way to begin a new era of hope. The last time anything close to this happened was the 18% drop after Gerald Ford took office following the departure of the disgraced Richard Nixon.

Fact and folklore on the markets as economic indicators and predictors is substantial. I remember reading once that if both Time and Newsweek featured the bear market on their cover the same week, the downtown was about over.

One useful way to look at it is that the markets are a form of gambling and gambling is about what's going to happen in the future: will it be a face card or higher unemployment? Because there are so many players involved, the markets inevitably become an expression of optimism or pessimism - not that of the public at large but of a segment with substantial influence over the economy. If your uncle doesn't hire anyone and doesn't play the markets, what he thinks about the economy will have less effect on both than, say, someone with 70 employees and cash in the market. In this way the markets are both less democratic and more indicative than, say, a Gallup poll. The thing that will turn the economy around will not be a popular referendum but a broad acceptance by a small segment of the population that it's worth investing, hiring and expanding again.

Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist at North Carolina State University, has described it this way:

http://www.ncsu.edu/project/calscommblogs/economic/archives/2008/05/the_stock_marke.html

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The stock market will always look at what is expected. That is, they factor in facts and statistics that they think are going to occur. And so, for example, when the news came out recently about the unemployment rate going up and faster inflation, the stock market already expected that. So in street lingo - Wall Street street lingo - they had already priced those changes into stocks. So it wasn't a surprise.

The second thing is that the stock market is always looking ahead. The unemployment rate goes up. It's already happened. We know that. So the stock market is really not looking at the unemployment rate. They're trying to look ahead. Where is the economy going to be three months from now, six months from now? And, indeed, . . . when we had the bad news about jobs and inflation, there was actually some good news that came out about corporate earnings. So this actually caused the stock market to think, hey, maybe the bottom's been reached on the economy and we're going to be much better off down the road. So keep these two things in mind about the stock market. One is that the stock market reacts to the unexpected, not to what is expected. And secondly, the stock market is always looking forward.

[][][]

As I write this, the Dow is up four percent not thanks to a political policy but to a statement by the CEO of one of America's worst run businesses, Citigroup. Things are going better there. How many hours it will last is uncertain, but what you can say Is that nothing emanating from the Obama White House has had as much immediate effect even when backed by hundreds of billions of tax dollars.

A fair summary would be that Bush caused the recession and Obama can't figure out how to get us out, and the markets know it.

His solutions have tended to be ethereal rather pragmatic; they have emphasized creating financial rather than human bailouts; they have not been decentralized enough that the public can see them; they have failed to significantly help that major job producer - small business; they have been top down rather than bottom up; they have been too indifferent to those hurting most; and they have not sufficiently emphasized job creation and new economic development.

You can't bailout the biggest and worst banks and expect to have the executives of smaller and more careful ones not to share their bitterness with colleagues over lunch at the Chamber of Commerce. You can't expect small business to hire new workers when they can't see any progress in their towns. And you can't turn around an economy without turning around the psychology, spirit and visual evidence for those who have to lead the move.

Perhaps it will change as some of Obama's cures begin to work. Or perhaps it will change because all over America it will seem that it can't get any worse so things can begin again. Watch the markets because chances are - and only chances - they will be one of the first harbingers. But for the time being, it is not fair to call it an Obama market because he doesn't seem to be able to affect it much at all.