Sustainable Markets

A 2010 book by Robert Reich, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, does a nice job of describing the direct causes of the “Great Recession” in terms of income inequality’s effect on reducing demand.  Reich, the former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration provides a neat analysis, and I agree with most of it.  He’s “singing my song” in describing how we have forgotten the lessons of Henry Ford, that a prosperous business must have prosperous customers and the best start for that is to pay your own employees well.  Demand for your goods implies an ability to pay for them, and paying everyone else minimum wages while you invest your profits, thereby yourself reducing demand, does not do the job.  Markets thereby operate at reduced efficiency, and a vicious cycle of unprofitability leading to further belt-tightening begins.  The market itself becomes unsustainable.  He goes on to warn of the political revolution of resentment that is building in this country because of the careless ways in which the one percent are treating the lives of others.  But an analysis like his, an economic one that speaks mostly in terms of supply and demand curves, does not cover some of the fundamentals of life “outside the market.”

Suppose you are driving on the Washington D.C. beltway with a sick kid, trying to get him to the hospital.  Just a poor minimum wage worker, like thousands of others, you feel you don’t have the money to move over into the express lane, available only by paying a substantial toll, so you’re just trying to get by the miserable traffic jam that’s always there in the regular lanes, hoping your kid won’t get much sicker in the meanwhile.  A lane over, a Mafia Godfather, fresh from bumping off one of his counterparts, is celebrating by heading for the casino to throw around the big money he just got from a drug deal; impatient with the jam, he shifts over to the express lane and proceeds smoothly on his way; cost is not even a thought.  Though it’s a somewhat silly caricature of beltway traffic, the ethical issues are obvious, but they don’t count.  The beltway market, for that’s what is, does not deal with ethics, only with supply and demand and who has the money to purchase its goods.  The market does not make any choices either between present or future generations.  Or does it?  The fact that future generations cannot “vote” by purchasing or abstaining from purchasing means automatically that the market does not directly consider their needs.  There are no discounts for sick infants.  Nor can the market consider its own future.  It is only a mechanism for exchange of goods; if it is to be run into the ground by its own success or by its failure to adapt to change, that is beyond its choice.  It is an interesting contradiction that General Accounting Principles require individual businesses to act as though they are continuing entities but laissez faire capitalism, in which the invisible hand of the market heals all wounds, contains no bandages for the market’s own injuries.

That failure to consider its own need for survival, its sustainability, has begun to dawn on some observant CEOs.  An interesting article in the Atlantic Monthly reports that some CEOs have recognized that society itself furnishes a “license to trade”, a legitimization of business practices, that is revocable, and that license is getting frayed by the current excesses of the market.  To appreciate that, think of two extremes:  first, the social and legal prohibitions on sale of body parts.  In pure laissez faire capitalism, if you want to sell your kidney for food to feed your children, feel free to do so; there’s a market for it.  But it is prohibited.  Second, the corner lemonade stands run by neighborhood children in the summertime.  The stands probably violate all sorts of zoning, child labor and health laws.  But if some grumpy neighbor were to object, almost certainly the laws would simply be modified to accommodate the stands; society approves of them.   Society “licenses” certain things and bars others, for reasons outside the market. The CEOs are banding their companies together in different non-market ways, such as mutual assistance in disasters, like pioneer “family” to make life happier and easier and more ethical for all.   They recognize that if the market itself becomes unethical, society will intrude to enforce its rules through increased regulation.

But the CEOs’ concerns speak to only the market’s ethical wounds.  Future generations still have no “vote”, and the market still resists change more than it accommodates to it.  The basic market model envisions businesses seeking immediate profits in a stable environment.  The goal of the market is the production of products beneficial to society.  That was the culture in which Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was embedded. But the 21^st century is presenting climate change, globalization and rapid technology change as givens in a new environment which current markets cannot effectively manage.  With immediate profits as the accepted goal, only new technologies, such as cell phones, where there is no entrenchment are able to rapidly “arrive.”  Governmental basic research and development, green technology, businesses oriented to taking long term advantage by battling climate change and long term projects like infrastructure upgrade, which require cooperative action between markets and government, must battle for their existence with the entrenched industries and their lobbyists. 

A fundamental problem is that focus on immediate profit, which promotes avoidance of dealing with externalities.  Producing products for the benefit of society, a given for Adam Smith, is no longer necessarily the goal.   The libertarian doctrine that corporations must focus entirely on maximizing profit to shareholders, popular since the 1980s, combined with the focus on executive bonuses based on short term results, results in eliminating the brakes on excesses, emphasizes financial manipulation over production and minimizes the corporation’s contribution to sustaining the society in which it is embedded.

Just as we have begun focusing on sustainable agriculture, we must begin focusing on a sustainable business environment.  Our market model is broken.  Changing accounting rules to discourage focus on bonuses based on short term profits, as advocated by some economists, is a start.  But business models must also give more credit for dealing with “externalities.”  In other countries, businesses join with government in cooperative long-term projects to develop new industries, but that is not popular here because of a bias against long-term budget commitments and outdated fears of “socialism”; organized “industrial planning” by government needs promotion.  More Business tax credits are needed which would profit businesses long term by encouraging research and long-term development. That lemonade stand could increase its business long term by investing in a shade against the sun to increase the enjoyment of its customers.  It is only fair that America invest in infrastructure and green technology for the long-term benefit of its citizens; our competitors, China, Germany and the rest, are doing it already.

Thanksgiving Gumbo

I just finished off a batch of turkey gumbo I made the other day; it was great! Turkey dark meat, particularly if it’s smoked, goes wonderfully with andouille sausage.   In New Orleans, turkey gumbo is a traditional way of using the leftover turkey from Thanksgiving, but I just couldn’t wait.  It takes about half a day to prepare, but it’s a labor of love.  Well prepared turkey with the fixings, as they say in the South, followed by pumpkin pie is one of my favorite meals.  Not all would agree with that choice.  Calvin Trillin, who wrote beautiful essays, not about food, but about eating, felt that turkey at Thanksgiving was an insult to Columbus, who would have much preferred spaghetti carbonara.  That’s what Trillin served at Thanksgiving at his house.  But then, he was from Kansas City, so gumbo was not the kind of leftover he could look forward to.

Ben Franklin would have had deeper problems.  He believed the turkey, not the eagle, should be honored as the national emblem of the U.S.  He regarded eagles as carrion birds found everywhere while turkeys were truly native to America.  And a wild turkey, the only kind Franklin knew, is one smart bird.  Of course, it’s hard to eat the bird you’re honoring, and turkeys are delicious. It might be even harder these days declaring your national emblem to be a turkey.  But the turkey on a platter, not a flagstaff, goes back a long way in America, to that first Pilgrim Thanksgiving.  At that point, the Pilgrims might have been hungry enough to gnaw on the flagstaff, too, but the Indians rescued them with lots of fixings as well.

That, though, was part of an elaborate scam being run by the Indians, according to an article in Smithsonian magazine.  It seems that those “ignorant savages” were in fact quite sophisticated about Europeans.  They had been familiar for years with French and Spanish traders and trappers up and down the coast. They were at the time having tense relations with a larger tribe further north, and wanted the Pilgrims with their muskets to be an ally against their enemies. That friendly ambassador, Squanto, had actually travelled to Europe.  Taken there as a captive slave by the Spanish, who weren’t big on being friends, he had escaped to France, later returning to America as a cabin boy.  While in France, he had learned from peasants the trick he showed the Pilgrims about planting beans and corn in hillocks with a fish for fertilizer.  So that First Thanksgiving was, from the Indian point of view, sort of like taking a potential client to an expense account restaurant – generous and friendly, but with some further discussions in mind.

That doesn’t take away from the wonder of the Thanksgiving myth.  C.S. Lewis observed that when a myth is realized in real life, that just makes it better, accentuating the mythic truths. Think of Santa Claus, based on the story of Nicholas of Cusa, who left money anonymously to families so poor they were thinking of selling their daughters, or Robert the Bruce, who had failed five times but was encouraged to continue on to victory over the English by seeing a spider fail five times to spin a web, but succeed on the sixth try, or of Johnny Appleseed, who in real life was a land speculator determined to make properties more attractive for later sale by planting orchards but who in the process covered the countryside with blossoming apple trees.  Motivation isn’t everything.  The Indians at that first Thanksgiving may have had ulterior motives, but together with the Pilgrims, they created a myth of kindness and acceptance of newcomers that has blessed the history of America.  We often forget, as in the current immigration debate, but it’s there to remind us that we too were once “strangers in a strange land.”

Over the years, I’ve concluded that an important part of the art of becoming a decent human being is how we select the myths we honor and those we ignore.  Myths that build speak to our hopes and help us grow; those that are mean and destructive call out our fears and demean us.  The myth of the lone lawman destroying a nest of bad guys once was useful to impart courage and a sense of active justice on a dangerous frontier; nowadays, it leads to gun shows, and to solitary gunmen killing with no reason.  The conservative myth of Obama not being qualified because of being born in Kenya or the liberal myth that George W. Bush made some decisions because he had a “post-alcoholic syndrome” simply make their believers smaller people.  But the myth of that first Thanksgiving is a great one, bringing out the best in us.

Happy Thanksgiving!  Have some more turkey.

Citizenship Fraud

An old boss of mine used to comment that a primary task of auditors was to find bruises and turn them into cancers.  He could have substituted “the press corps” for “auditors” in that statement and been more correct.  I’ve been reluctant to join the vultures, mostly politicians or wearing press badges, picking at the carcass of Obamacare.com, but sometimes the urge to speak truth just can’t be set aside.  President Obama himself is being accused by some who should know better of fraudulent misrepresentation of the legislation, which is completely aside from the real issues involved.   For political reporters, accusations of misrepresented legislation are much easier copy to write than analyses of inept implementation, but accusations should be left to the politicians.  And second, I’m tired of hearing apologies from the White House for the wrong things, which serve mightily to assist the press in their muddling. 

As a matter of personal history, I’ve been in on a number of mad scrambles to make computer systems work in accordance with legislative deadlines, so I know the territory.  That you’ve mostly never heard of them simply testifies to the fact they were accomplished on or before schedule; you only heard about the legislation, which is how things are supposed to work.  But the important fact was that whether or not the systems were ready on schedule would not have affected whether the legislation was good policy or not. A lot were decent policy, but one effort I coordinated, elimination of the Social Security minimum benefit during the Reagan Administration, I personally thought was lousy as policy; we got it ready on schedule anyway.  Again, that’s how things are supposed to work.

The Obamacare.com implementation has been inept, mostly because some mid level bureaucrats were not knowledgeable about how to set up complex implementations on tight time frames (using 47 contracting firms is ridiculous!) and other upper level bureaucrats were lax about monitoring or interpreting the impediments to upward flows of information in their organizations.  And the White House suffered the common second term propensity to think that, just because the upper level bureaucrats are “our guys”, everything is going to work out fine. But the real issues there also include an outdated and ineffective organizational structure that contributes to mismanagement and contracting policies that have veered so far in the direction of promoting competition that efficient operations are verging on impossible, and those issues have mostly gone untouched.  And both structural and contracting policy issues are the product of congressional emphases over several administrations on reducing the number of employees counted in the budget; government is reduced in name only by use of contractors as for-profit agents, actually raising costs, to perform tasks far more effectively managed as an internal operation.  So there’s enough blame to spread everywhere.  Apologies are due, but they should be coming from all directions.

Meanwhile though, just the White House keeps apologizing.  President Obama accepts blame for having said ObamaCare “would not force anyone to change their doctor” when that, in fact, is absolutely correct.  For it to be incorrect is to include in ObamaCare the vast array of insurance companies which have steadfastly fought against government regulation of their premium rates and it is to hold ObamaCare responsible for the high prices charged by, again unregulated, medical service, prescription and equipment providers.  It is correct only in the sense that poor people who have been captive to the insurance-in-name-only companies are now being charged rates they cannot afford for real coverage, by the insurance companies and not the government.  Many of these, though not all, are people struggling at or near the poverty level who feel unable to afford better coverage than the pitiful amount they have received up to now. 

What has happened is that the insurance companies have been forced to cancel super-cheap semi-fraudulent policies that did not even cover the cost of going to a hospital.  Irresponsible individuals not poor, who have been purchasing them expecting they’ll never be used or that they will in an emergency rely on public hospital emergency rooms at public expense, are facing the need to pay a higher premium, and rightly so; they have, whether willing to admit it or not, been perpetrating a genteel fraud on their fellow citizens.  The government itself is not forcing anyone to change their provider of choice.  They are bringing a spotlight to bear on the seediest part of the health insurance industry, and that is one of the better features of the legislation.   Upgrading standards of what constitutes adequate health coverage has been a goal from the beginning, and eliminating this practice is a vital part of that upgrade.  For that, thanks, not apologies, are in order.

A valid policy issue is how better to handle the issue of transitioning individuals to adequate coverage.  The fundamental problem is how to care for those who are ill strictly, as at present, on a for-profit basis.  Other nations with health systems rated far better than ours have achieved good health care by insisting it be on a not-for-profit basis.  As I’ve noted before, extending ObamaCare to a Medicare-like system with a flat premium rate for all would be a major step forward in that direction.

I call it a fraud on other citizens when you knowingly pass on to them costs for which you rightly are responsible and deny basic needs to others simply to increase your own prosperity.  The real need for apology  is by the wealthy, individuals and businesses, who expect the fellow citizens who work for them to live in or near poverty, while at the same time the employer prospers by paying wages below the poverty level and fights against the very health coverage they shed crocodile tears about, passing on its costs to others.  A case in point is the current situation where Wal-Mart fights tooth-and-nail against increasing the minimum wage up to the poverty level while at the same time providing baskets for public donations to help its employees in need.  Being a good citizen of either community or country should not include preying on the poverty of others.

Paying, Now or Later

 

One reason for moving cautiously in an antiques shop is the little sign that says “If you break it, you’ve bought it.”  Antiques are fragile and not cheap.  That sign is possibly not enforceable in a court, but it’s at least a solid reminder of moral responsibility and the costs thereof.  We’re also having similar reminders this week of much larger responsibilities: the super typhoon in the Philippines and the climate discussions in Warsaw both are demonstrating the hideous costs of continuing climate neglect. The typhoon reports so far have focused on the human toll – thousands dead and lives destroyed as villages and livelihoods are wiped out. Pitifully poor efforts are underway to bury the dead and rescue the suffering, but that is only the beginning.  The focus will eventually shift to recovering the Philippine economy, and that massive effort will be with us for years.  And the question will remain: was the typhoon simply an unpredictable freak of nature, or the consequence of our careless handling of the climate?  If the latter, who should pay, and how?

In Warsaw, a key issue being discussed at the Climate Conference is how the developed world will make good on a prior pledge to “mobilize” $100 billion by 2020 to help developing nations cope with the effects of climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.   Developing nations are beginning to realize and declare that $100 billion will not begin to cover the bills they will face from rising sea levels and climate disasters.  And governments of developed nations, the U.S. included, are saying there’s no more in their pockets to contribute.  And both may be right.  The chart above, from Scientific American, shows the projected increase in costs from severe weather in the U.S., on a county by county basis, between now and 2050 resulting from a combination of climate change effects and population growth.  The chart could be replicated on a nation by nation basis worldwide with even greater extremes.  As you can see, most areas will be spending two to six times as much on disaster relief as they have in the past.  Neglecting climate doesn’t come cheap.

There’s an auto-repair ad on TV that goes “Pay me now, or pay me later.”  It’s a reminder that deferring a fix that’s needed for something broken won’t make the cost go away; it may just make it worse.  And our climate is definitely showing signs of being broken.  The $100 billion fund was previously negotiated under the assumption that action would be taken to limit world temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, and the UN Environmental Program reported last week that limit on rising temperatures is not going to be met.  I haven’t seen any chart yet that shows the added costs per degree of temperature rise, but the numbers will be big. 

Do we start raising the money now, by way of such things as the fund being discussed in Warsaw, or would we be doing better by putting money into disaster prevention?  That chart shown above indicates enormous efforts either way.  Governments starved for funds by the austerity preached by corporate interests just looking for increased profits through tax breaks will not be able to afford the efforts required.  In Warsaw they’re discussing how to “leverage” government funding through incentives to businesses to get involved.  However Warsaw and beyond turn out, immediate major work on infrastructure is required, as well as preventive steps like a carbon tax. Let’s change that name to climate tax and use that as part of the funding mechanism. Infrastructure development has long lead times, and the time to start is now.  Typhoon Yolanda, as they’re calling it in the Philippines, was a lot like a tornado three hundred miles wide.  Imagine that barreling in on the east coast, like Sandy.  In another twenty years, the imagining may not be that hard.  Stepping back from coastal areas endangered by rising sea levels, as some have proposed, may not be even close to a solution.

I was, on the one hand, pleased at the news last week, that President Obama is establishing a climate change work group to plan a course of action.  On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of “plans to plan” in my time, often used only as a ploy to deflect criticism, and we no longer have time for such maneuvers.  What to do about climate change needs to be a number one issue leading up to the next election, and thereafter.  There's no longer time for Congress to be arguing about silly things when the house is starting to collapse about our ears. Deferring that fix is no longer an option.

Separating How's and Why's

I just got through rereading Matthew Arnold’s 1862 book-length essay,  Culture and Anarchy, this time fortunately in a well-edited and concise version provided by the Great Books Foundation.  It’s a wonderful gem for the ideas it contains and a tedious bore for the lengthy Victorian language in which they’re embedded.  Arnold is more generally known as a poet (he taught poetry at Oxford and his “Dover Beach” at least used to be required reading in any literature class).  But his late 19^th century democratizing reform of the English school system and his great essay properly put him on the reading list for social history courses; that was where I first encountered him. 

The culture he writes about is not the culture of paintings and music and how to dress properly for a ball, nor anthropology’s modern definition of culture as a communication system, but about the search for perfection, “seeing things as they are” and virtuous action.  He dubs the whole thing “sweetness and light” and says that is what we should be educating for, because that is what holds society together.  It is, for example, “seeing things as they are” which enables us to recognize the common traits and foibles we share with others opposed to us and completely unlike us and to work together with them.  And, like his contemporary John Stuart Mill, he believes that Liberty is meaningless unless it produces responsible action.  It is the interaction between the search for perfection and virtuous living that prevents society from descending into an “anything goes” anarchy on the one hand or an intolerable conformancy on the other.  And the greatest enemy of sweetness and light is what he calls our immersion in the “machinery” of living.  For that immersion distracts us from asking “why” and focuses us only on “how to.”  Nowadays we would call that “machinery” technology.

It all sounds very abstract and Victorian until you read the newspapers and journals and cartoons.  For example, in the Washington Post David Ignatius writes about how at NSA, intelligence specialists were so consumed with what they could do with advanced technology to collect “metadata” that they went about collecting everything, without regard to why or why not it was needed.  Meanwhile, in a Scientific American review, Craig Venter, of human genome fame, is quoted as saying he doesn’t worry about the misuse of technology, but about the possible lack of use of it.  And in a recent New Yorker cartoon, young people dressed as a wedding party are standing around in front of a priest; each of them is intently reading his/her iphone, and the bride is glancing up and saying “oh yeah, I do.”  We treat Liberty as meaning our right to carry assault rifles and to pollute our air and streams.  We don’t ask why all those rounds are needed in a city park, or why increased profit should come at the expense of dirty air.  We see “the way things are” only as meaning millions starve for the benefit of a few.

Venter is charging ahead in pursuit of “digital life”, with the goal of eventually transferring whole people to the Internet.  He thinks the whole of life is reducible to “DNA machines” and “protein robots.”  His immediate “why” is obvious: to secure a personal immortality with some fame and fortune along the way.  That’s fascinating, given that “machines” or “robots” are not generally interested in that sort of thing.  His internet should be dubbed “Venter’s Ark.”  No more worry about climate or arthritis if you are just a cloud of electrons floating about in the ether.  Of course, propagating the species after a major system crash becomes problematic, or what is foregone in the life of an electron cloud, as well as what is happening to the billions of people who are not transferred to the Internet.  Or what to do on a dreary day a million years from now.  Or why immortality is desirable in the first place.

The NSA intelligence analysts have the excuse of an overriding concern with preventing terrorism.  That bumps into a national concern with preserving privacy.  At the start of the Snowden escapade, my view of the conflicting priorities was that so long as responsible governance required use of metadata, responsible citizenship required making it available.  But the NSA scenes described by Ignatius don’t constitute responsible governance.  They depict analysts caught up in the pleasures of technical accomplishment, the “how’s”, to the point of forgetting to ask the “why’s.”  The “why” of preventing terrorism becomes an excuse for figuring out how to do an even more advanced analysis.  They’re like that wedding party with the iphones; they have no clue about why they are there in the first place, or the significance of the consequences.

I’m no Neo Luddite.  I spent a career introducing new technology, and am proud of it.  But having an answer to the “why” was always important.  I always tried to avoid solutions in search of a problem.  I’ve turned down more than one technical proposal on those grounds.  That reluctance to over employ technology just for the fun of it is what I see less and less of these days.  We’re caught on the carousel of innovation, flying faster and faster, each trying to grab a new golden ring, approaching the “anything goes” anarchy of which Arnold warned.  Meanwhile, our education systems are avoiding teaching the importance of “virtuous action” as too controversial in a multicultural society.  “Values” education is no longer a goal in our schools, and it should be.  It’s time to reclaim the tools we use to separate what’s really important from the trash. 

Reforming the New Mercantilism

Strategists these days are muttering that a “great rebalancing” is underway in economic relations between nations.  The piper has shown up to collect his wages for the enormous trade surpluses and deficits that major countries have developed over the past few decades.  We have been living through a resurgence of the Mercantilist economic theory popular in Europe during the 16^th to 18^th century age of exploration, when the world was neatly divided into advanced producers of finished goods and colonies which must accept what they are provided.  The object was, like dragons, to collect the biggest possible hoard of gold bullion.  But this is no longer a world of colonial powers forcing the purchase of high-priced tea on reluctant Bostonians.  Reliance mostly on exports to drive a national economy, the defining characteristic of Mercantile Theory, assumes you can hold wages low in your own country and keep import tariffs high in order to pull in from elsewhere the money to keep you running.  Your business profits require your own continuing national austerity in order to sell affordable products to others. 

China has learned that its reliance on exports must now take account of its own domestic consumption needs, as Chinese workers whose low wages have supported cheap exports demand more goods and more pay to buy them with at home. China’s trade surplus, at 10 percent of GDP in 2007, has quietly shrunk to 2.5 percent in 2013.  The U.S. has steadily begun seeking ways to reduce its trade surpluses, both by refusing European austerity to combat recession, and as a natural consequence of American workers with less cash to purchase the foreign imports now grown costlier, and as a secretive process to facilitate more exports of American products through new trade treaties both with Europe and with Asia.  The only country that hasn’t yet got the message seems to be Germany.

Germany has been puttering along the last few years fiercely defending its own austerity policies and demanding the same austerity from its EU partners.  Its focus remains on exports, and its prescription to countries like Greece or Spain is that they should just tighten their belts and export more olive oil.  The Washington Post reports that German trade surpluses amount to over 7 percent of GDP so far in 2013, and the 2012 German current account surplus was larger than that of China.  The Post reports that a new U.S. Treasury report criticizes Germany for the way its anemic growth in domestic consumption harms its EU partners.  While its exports are booming, Germany maintains its domestic pressures to curb demand, and that in turn damages the inter-related economies of other European countries.  Southern European countries maintain their 25 percent and up unemployment rates, and Ireland’s unemployment has grown from 5 percent to over 13 percent.  Merkel sets her jaw and calls any change absurd.  As Europe’s German-enforced austerity deflates the whole of their economy, every one eats less, including Germans, while German banks and corporations build bullion hoards as though bullion was edible.  It’s not.

Recognizing that about bullion was in a way Adam Smith’s greatest contribution in his Wealth of Nations. It ended the old Mercantilism by teaching that economics is not just a manual of procedures for accumulating bullion. It is, at its best, a description of how people satisfy each other’s material needs by cooperative activity.  Smith turned the focus to the economy as the collective activities of people, but that got lost through the easy manipulation of his market concept.  Banks and corporations acquire bullion (or derivatives or mortgages) in order to sit on them like dragons and to brag about it in their annual reports.  People produce and sell goods and services in order to be able to eat and to feed their families.  It is the increasing dominance of corporations in shaping our policies that has caused our shift of focus away from that back to the new Mercantilism.

Perhaps China can lead the way on this subject.  As a very ancient culture that has seen a lot, China seems to recognize that the fundamental goal of government is to satisfy the needs of people.  Its historical focus has always been inward on maintaining its own stability.  Driving up exports while the people pinch pennies does not accomplish that.  Corporations produce profits, but it is people who riot in the streets.  China has recognized that and is moving away from its single minded emphasis on exports.  Its own historical culture may make Germany a slow learner, but the U.S. should also know through its historical experience that “we the people” is what economic policy is about.  We have entered a period where major moves are afoot to create free trade treaties with both the EU and with Asian nations.  The early signs are that they are secretive and dominated mainly by corporate interests.  That may, if not held in check, result in agreements with built in deflators of U.S.  jobs and wages, in favor of accumulating the profits of international corporations.  We don’t want to import the German disease in the name of reform.  We need more early visibility and discussion of what is being negotiated and possibly more early congressional inspection of it.  It might be a good time to ask your congressional representatives what they know about the negotiations.  Trade policy is too important a topic to be left to corporate lobbyists.