SPRING IS BUSTIN' OUT ALL OVER!

I have not posted in the last week because of the death of my sister after a long illness,with all the travels and concerns attendant on that.  Death of a loved one is a somber time, with very few redeeming graces except for knowledge of the cessation of suffering for the one who has died and the chance to visit with family. But amid the interminable waits in crowded airport lounges and packed into cramped airplane seats, one does have opportunities to catch up on reading and perhaps to glimpse in the process a little of the larger flow of events.
   - item - the January 30th edition of Time Magazine contains a great article titled "Command and Control", by David Rothkopf, on the "great upheaval" throughout the world as corporate capitalism struggles with democracy for global control.  He describes a world in which even the 2000th largest global corporation is at the center of more economic activity than many small countries, and corporate values are increasingly at odds with democratic values.  It's very worthwhile reading, and he's singing my song.  He has a book coming out, titled Power, Inc.: The Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government; I'm looking forward to reading it.
   - item - a column in the Washington Post, by David Ignatius, titled "Where insurgents and elites meet", describes the current atmosphere and goings on at the Davos Conference, the annual get-together of world power brokers of all stripes where they mull over world problems and seek common approaches. Ignatius reports that they're having forums on topics like "Is Capitalism Failing" and "Global Risks 2012: The Seeds of Dystopia" and are nervously aware that rage against elites is a global phenomenon these days.  Ignatius comments that, for example, Chinese leaders are quite sensitive to the fact that a billion poor Chinese with TV's are looking disapprovingly at the goings on of wealthy Chinese.  Ignatius perceptively notes that even as the Davos attendees seek solutions to world issues, their very getting together maintains an elite network that further isolates the haves from the have-nots.
   - item - a news feed from the New York Times reports that the head of the IMF has diplomatically chided, without explicitly naming it, Germany for a lack of commitment to European union and suggested the IMF might hold back its contributions to the European stability fund unless Europe recognises that continually cutting the budget of governments is not the solution to the financial crisis.  Meanwhile the prime minister of Greece charges that the banks have become the enemy of democracy. And in Brussels, "Leaders are expected to bow to mounting evidence that austerity alone risks stoking recession and plunging fragile economies into a downward spiral."
   - item - a foreign policy discussion group to which I belong has an annual briefing book issued by the Foreign Policy Association that contains briefings by experts on eight topics of current foreign policy interest.  A current briefing in it on the unrest in the middle east notes several times that the common thread for the uprisings across the middle east and around the world is the economic disparity between the very wealthy elites and the rest of the population.  A picture included in the briefing shows a middle eastern wall with graffiti scrawled on it, "Thank you Facebook."

Putting, albeit very blearily, all those items together reveals an increasingly strong case for the paradigm shift I've written about, in which the calculus of economics must once more, as it did in traditional times, include the social impacts and ethics of economic transactions, not just the "rational" market considerations.  Spring is in the air!

Brain Reform and The Recession

     It's sometimes said that the Studebaker Corporation failed as an auto maker because it never got over its success as the leading manufacturer of buggies and wagons.  It failed to keep up with the times and succumbed to cultural lag.
     I've always been interested in the phenomenon anthropologists call "cultural lag", for it regularly points to a major source of our societal problems.  Social lag describes a situation where the pace of change leaves behind our social institutions, patterns of behavior and even our understanding of what the problems are, causing what we do to no longer relate to what the situation really calls for.  Some social lag is inevitable, and we struggle to catch up every day. But when it becomes excessive, institutions and societies, and buggy manufacturers, crumble.  It, by the way, is the driving force behind the paradigm change that I'm always going on about.  For societies, like rubber bands, can only be bent out of shape so far by the effects of cultural lag before they snap into a new arrangement.  And that is accompanied by paradigm shift.
     Fareed Zakaria, one of the more insightful of the political columnists, gave a glimpse of the effects of lag on current congressional politics in an opinion article on January 19 in the Washington Post. First, he noted the change going on in the talk of Republican opponents to Mitt Romney.  He is portrayed as a "vulture capitalist" (Republican language, not Zakaria's) who profits from cutting jobs, hollowing out companies and paying low taxes.  They deride him instead of celebrating him as a rational market success story of driving out inefficiencies, generating productivity, and creating "a lean, mean capitalist machine."
     Zakaria points out that the traditional success story no longer works because over the past decade, job gains have been matched by job losses and the kind of investments that improve productivity and create jobs have declined 15% as a share of GDP. But, Zakaria points out, the economy is experiencing a broad-based recovery focusing on manufacturing and exports, fueling job growth and labor productivity; all this is being partially fueled by government policy under the Obama Administration encouraging investment in infrastructure, training and R&D.  Meanwhile, traditional Republicans simply talk cutting taxes and eliminating regulations and getting government out of the way.  Then Zakaria notes that the most successful economy in the current global recession is that of Germany, based in large part on the actions of the German government.  The Germans may not understand how to reform Greece, but they surely understand how to run their own country.
     Here is where Zakaria offers his glimpse into the workings of cultural lag.  He notes that Germany provides government incentives to train workers and keep them employed, while the U.S. system emphasizes employer flexibility, freedom to hire and fire and lowering wages. That may have worked 50 years ago in small towns across America, but no longer fits a country with global concerns.   In a world filled with cheap labor, rich countries like Germany and the U.S. are better off with highly skilled workers making premium products, and with a focus on long-term growth and social stability.  Government policy plays a vital role in creating such a national culture.  The bottom line is government investment in and regulation of such an environment.  Yet traditional Republicans are still focused on how to run a buggy-making plant.  Thus can cultural lag bankrupt a party.

A Cheap Trip South

Sometimes losing your pre-conceptions can be a pleasant shock.  As a foodie, I have always loved both salmon and Mexican food, but not together.  In my imagination, salmon were the product of cold, stormy northern seas off places like Scotland and Canada, while Mexico was a place to stroll in a plaza or loll in the sun sipping margaritas or sangria. Putting the two together just did not compute.  But last night was, as they say, a dark and stormy night (or at least cold and windy) and my spirit longed for a trip to southern climes.  The foodie in me hastily served as my travel agent by riveting the unlike concepts of salmon and Mexico together and researching the fusion on the internet.  There were several recipes, but no one recipe worked for me. So I started scrounging through my pantry and came up with the recipe below.  It was an epiphany. Try it.  It may serve you too for one of those dark and stormy nights of the foodie soul.

SALMON VERACRUZ (Easy Healthy Version)

Ingredients (For up to 3 salmon portions)
2 TBS extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium-sized onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 14 oz. can diced organic no-salt tomatoes
1 can Rotel tomatoes (diced tomatoes with diced jalapeno peppers)
2 TBS chopped fresh thyme leaves or 2 tsp. dried thyme
1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest or juice ½ lemon
½  cup sliced bottled green olives w/pimientos
2 TBS capers, drained
2 or 3 salmon steaks (7 to 8 ounces each), about 1 inch thick
 
1. Prepare the sauce: Place oil in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring, until just beginning to brown, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook 1 minute more. Raise the heat to medium-high and add the tomatoes, thyme, lemon zest or juice, olives, capers,. Simmer briskly, stirring, for about 5 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer for 15 minutes to begin the blending process.  
2. Pre-heat the oven to 380 degrees. Place the salmon steaks into a baking dish just large enough to hold them with room for the sauce.  Spoon the sauce over the fish. Bake the fish for 25 minutes.  Enjoy.  This is good with a side serving of corn pudding.

The Peloponnesian Blues, Revisited

The Third Peloponnesian War continues, though this time it’s an economic war, and the enemy against which Athens struggles is not Sparta, but the Franco-German alliance (isn’t it quaint that the 21^st century begins with a de-facto alliance between Germany and France? I guess that’s progress.)  And right now the Greeks are struggling just to stay on their knees.  Wait, you say, Germany and France are partners with Greece, and their friends.  Well they are performing a great masquerade either as enemies or as two of the three stooges performing first aid on the third.

The January 11^th Washington Post reports that in the year since Germany and France united to strong-arm Greece about finance, the Greek unemployment rate has leaped 5.5% to 18.8%; homelessness, crime, suicide and drug use rates have risen; consumer spending has plunged; and the Greek doctors’ union has characterized the extreme shortage of medical supplies as a humanitarian crisis.  It’s worth noting that a 20% unemployment rate is the historical red line for when governments start to fall and democracies crumble.  The Post more modestly describes the situation as “both a dizzying economic plummet and a social crisis.”  The two stooges meanwhile continue their first aid by pressuring the Greeks for more budget cuts, more tax increases and for forcing bond holders to restructure the Greek national debt.  So Greece is singing the Peloponnesian Blues, only louder, as more Greeks are talking withdrawal from the Euro, and the Blues are spreading across southern Europe.

We may be witnessing here a last great death convulsion of the rational market paradigm, for the rational market economists have no workable solution, but probably not.  They will continue to bleed the patient until he is either cured or dead, for rational market economics offers no other alternatives.  Bleeding as a cure, by the way, was how the doctors of George Washington managed to make him die because of a case of pleurisy.  Paradigm changes, though, are slow in coming, so the bleeding goes on.

Meanwhile, the really rational among us are saying, “Wait a minute, bleeding an economy to death, and its people and culture along with it, in order to cure it, makes no sense.  There has to be a better way.”  Which brings us back to the United States.

The bleeders have been busily at work for the past year here in the U.S. also.  They started by rejecting Keynesian economics out of hand as a cure for recession, reasoning that it wouldn’t work (though it had in the 1930’s and hadn’t been tried yet now.)  The only solution was to cut taxes by cutting government programs, all in the name of reducing the deficit.  Programs to increase jobs, thereby raising consumer spending, were declared impractical.  Then when no improvement in the patient occurred, they called for deeper cuts, and so the Greek disease continues.  The possibility that the patient needs a transfusion rather than a bleeding is beyond their comprehension.

It goes back to a comment I made in a post about George Will, that he was counting only costs, not values, and that doing so was like measuring the value of World War II only by the cost of munitions. For democracy does cost.  Not every dollar will be spent for your personal benefit, some will be wasted by sheer human foolishness and cupidity, and some spent for your benefit will be challenged by others. But the value of democracy goes far beyond the dollars spent on it.  What a healthy democracy does is to make up through public programs for the flaws in the private economy.  And there are many.  Without those market interventions via the public sector capitalism becomes the enemy and oppressor, not the ally of democracy.  And democracies rise up against oppressors.

In economic terms the bleeders are seeing money only as a store of value, and have lost sight of it as a medium of exchange.  They need to raise their eyes to the sight of the country that is their home as it could and should become, with a healthy, employed citizenry sharing together the fruits of democracy, work together with others to determine ways to get there, and to calculate the monetary costs of achieving that vision.  Creating jobs, curing the sick, attacking global climate change, ensuring a healthy food supply, all may require more, not less, funding.  But those things, not minimizing taxes and maximizing loopholes, are the true tasks of America.   All the private wealth in the world will not be enough if in the process one's country is lost.

Out-Coolidging Coolidge

     When my youngest sister and I were teenagers (I was the younger), she had an unfortunate addiction to chewing gum combined with a habit of swallowing the wad she had. This left her searching desperately for a new stick at any cost.  As a nascent capitalist I recognized low-risk, high-return market opportunities and always had about me a pack of five sticks of her favorite gum, purchased for a nickel, from which I was reluctantly willing to part with one stick, also for a nickel.  By the time I had reached supposed mature moral discretion at about age 22 I had realized the moral quagmire into which my profiteering upon the weaknesses of others had been dragging me.  Perhaps that is why I have ever since looked askance at a life of unbridled concentration only on profit.  I know my own weaknesses, too.
     At any rate, that may be why, when encountering recently the famous quotation from our 30th President, Calvin Coolidge, that "the business of America is business", I decided to look a little into the life and times of the Great Man.  After all, why is a President saying the business of America is business rather than preserving the blessings of Liberty, as defined in the Constitution, or even being "a light upon a hill", as defined by Ronald Reagan. 
     Coolidge had first come to national prominence as governor of Massachusetts.  He was, it seems, a man agressively dedicated to continuance of the status quo.  To quote the official White House biography, "As President, Coolidge demonstrated his determination to preserve the old moral and economic precepts amid the material prosperity which many Americans were enjoying. He refused to use Federal economic power to check the growing boom or to ameliorate the depressed condition of agriculture and certain industries. His first message to Congress in December 1923 called for isolation in foreign policy, and for tax cuts, economy, and limited aid to farmers." 
     In pursuit of that goal, he twice vetoed farm aid, though in the roaring 20's farmers were the canary in the coal mine  signalling the Great Depression that was to come.  He also refused to fund a proposal to provide public electrical power with a dam on the Tennessee River, a project which of course later became the Depression ameliorating TVA project for which Roosevelt was justly acclaimed.  Walter Lipmann, the great political columnist of the time described Coolidge's style as, "active inactivity."  Of course, if you are actively inactive, you are really choosing, as Coolidge did, to make decisions that preserve the status quo and minimize change.  Real neutrality is not an option.
     If you are beginning to find Coolidge strangely familiar (former Massachusetts governor?, tax cuts and no public works?, total concentration on the role of business?;  hmm, who could that be? I'm sure I know him somewhere.), then beyond Mitt Romney, the obvious match for all attributes, including the Massachusetts bit, you might want to cast your eye over the entire right wing of the Republican party.  For they all share a common focus, and while most are of good intent, that focus leads them in directions they later might regret.
     Let us pause a moment and distinguish between Visions and Memories.  A vision involves a view of how things ought to be in the future; a memory involves a view of how things were, or seemed to be, in the past.  I say that about memory cautiously, for I am always sensitive to the different memories that persons, say an African-American and a traditional southern caucasian, might have of the same America.  To preserve the status quo or to "Re-Create America" thus is loyalty to a memory that others might not share, not a vision .  For visions are of "Alabaster Cities undimmed by human tears", and are meant to be sought by all.
     Unfortunately, the focus of the Republican right wing is on,  first, re-creating a past that would not be desirable for significant parts of America today and, second, would not ever be attainable and, third, focusing only on a few selective aspects of that prior time.  But you can't go home again. I admire their loyalty to the dream world of their childhood, but it can provide no real basis for steering America in the 21st Century.
     "Where there is no Vision, the people perish"; those are the Biblical words quoted by Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking to America from another troubled time.       "That vision thing" has been assiduously avoided by the right wing since the era of George H. W. Bush, and before that, Calvin Coolidge. But Business as Usual while dreaming of rocking on the front porch of tree-shaded houses that no longer exist will not enable America to cope with the issues of the new century.  It is time for the right wing to lift their eyes and see visions of  a new America fit for the 21st century and to proclaim their view so that all of us can work together toward the future we will all share.

Dysfunction in Government, Part II

At the close of my prior post on the current "dysfunction" of American government, I noted that while I disagreed with Grover Norquist about the cause and meaning of dysfuction in government, that currently dysfunction exists is obvious.  Since I reject the notion that the problem is a structural problem with the Constitution, a major other possibility is a change over time in the nature of the "inhabitants" of government, i.e., the politicians.  The Washington Post article to which I referred pointed to the changes in socio-economic status of members of Congress as a possible culprit.  The Post notes that in the past 40 years, the percentage of congress persons who are not millionaires has dropped sharply, and that the life-background of the average congress person now differs sharply from that of much of the "average" Americans.  The Post blames a lot of the change on campaign financing excesses,which make it impossible for anyone but a self-funded millionaire or someone heavily beholding to special interests to afford to run for office.  That, the Post concludes, may now make politicians unable to appreciate and act on the real problems which they were sent to Washington to solve.
It is tempting to follow the Post's thinking, but doing so gets only part way to the heart of the problem.  Through much of American history, congressional demographics have not reflected the "average" America.    The average blue collar worker does not now, and for the most part never has either wanted to or been able to afford to run for Congress.  Yet many politicians have performed nobly on behalf of those with which they had little in common, Anyone has only to read a good account of 19th century America to know that Congress has always been in the grip of special interests, but that did not prevent passage of legislation for the common good. Though campaign financing is a real problem in its own right, the dysfunctionality problem runs deeper.  But the Post writers are right when they reflect on how a congress person because of their background may be unable to appreciate the needs of constituents.
Part of the problem is the increasing isolation of socio-economic classes reflected in the Post article.  An interesting essay about a year ago in The American Scholar, entitled "The Invisible Lower Middle Class", noted that the typical graduate of an elite private college could not hold a social conversation with their plumber.  We are surrounded by things that isolate us from the difficulties of the world, but in doing so they also isolate us from people "not like us."  So  barriers which make it hard to appreciate and act on the problems of the "not like us" are an increasing challenge with which all of us must deal.  Both the college grad and the plumber must work at it.
That understanding gets us to the deeper problem. The "ability to appreciate and willingness to act on the problems of others" is a definition of empathy, and the lack of it  is a societal problem at the heart of governmental dysfunction.  A recent book, The Empathy Gap by J. D. Trout, reported that  in Europe about 60%  of people, asked why some other person was struggling with a problem like unemployment or homelessness, would say it was the unfortunate life situation the person was dealing with; in the U.S. over 70% would blame some characteristic of the other person himself, such as stupidity or laziness.  The lack of empathy is the dark side of our societal mythos of individualism.  It makes us cringe at Bill Clinton's "I feel your pain."  It makes some of us sneer at "it takes a village to raise a child."  It makes us unable to understand the problems of the farmer or the plumber or the small businessman.  And it makes us unable to overcome governmental dysfunction by developing a common vision of what needs to be done for all of us.