Tag Archives: economics

Bill Moyers is Back!!!!

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On Sunday evening, I was delighted to catch the first episode of the new PBS series, Moyers & Company.  You can view it, and a lot more, on the new website, http://billmoyers.com/.

Moyers interviewed political scientists, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, authors of, Winner-Take-All Politics:  How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.

The conversation startled me, as Hacker and Pierson said they were startled during their research.  They found that the current income gap in this country – greater than in some third world countries like Egypt – was not an inevitable consequence of free market dynamics or trends like globalization.  It was politically engineered over the last 30 years.  Hacker and Pierson argue that the current American leadership more closely resembles a third world oligarchy than the democracy our parents knew.

“Who’s the culprit? “American politics did it– far more than we would have believed when we started this research,” Hacker explains. “What government has done and not done, and the politics that produced it, is really at the heart of the rise of an economy that has showered huge riches on the very, very, very well off.”

Bill considers their book the best he’s seen detailing “how politicians rewrote the rules to create a winner-take-all economy that favors the 1% over everyone else, putting our once and future middle class in peril.” – (from billmoyers.com)

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson on Moyers & Company

Winner Take All Politics is going into my already overcrowded book-queue, since it appears to be of critical importance.  The first step in correcting a problem is gaining an accurate understanding of its nature.  The fact that the assault on the middle class was created and not fated is good news, according to Hacker and Pierson.  Something done can be undone.  Along with Moyers, they agree that our current national sense of outrage is a positive sign.

Moyers’ work and website are important to bring up today.  On the website you can find an April, 2010 interview with two African American lawyers, discussing what Dr. King would have made of America today. Lawyer Bryan Stevenson said:

“I think in America, the opposite of poverty is justice. I think there are structures and systems that have created poverty, and have made that poverty so permanent, that until we think in a more just way about how to deal with poverty in this country, we’re never gonna make the progress that Dr. King envisioned.”  http://billmoyers.com/content/bryan-stevenson-and-michelle-alexander/

These are important things to consider, especially today.

Sabre Rattling Over Oil: Better Get Used to It

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The juxtaposition of headlines this morning was strange but telling.  On page one of the Sacramento Bee, under the heading of “Tourism,” was the story of Virgin Galactic, a travel company that expects to offer 2.5 hour rides into space, starting as soon as next Christmas, for a mere $200,000.

You might want try to lock in your price now, before it goes up.  Buried back on page seven was this headline:  “Risk of showdown with Iran escalates as oil prices climb.”  According to Andrew Bacevich, in a 2008 interview with Bill Moyers, we can expect a constant string of oil crises; the choices we make as a nation make them inevitable.  There’s a price to pay for cheap space travel, among other things.

Andrew Bacevich

Bill Moyers 2008 interview with Bacevich is published in, Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues, (2011).  In the preface, Moyers says, “Our finest warriors are often our most reluctant warmongers.”  Bacevich is a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran who retired as a colonel after 23 years in the military, to teach history and international relations at Boston University.  Bacevich’s son, Andrew, died in Iraq in 2007.  Bacevich is the author of several books, including the best selling, The Limits of Power:  The End of American Exceptionalism (2008).

In his interview with Moyers, Andrew Bacevich doesn’t pull any punches.  He says our foreign policy, including our wars:

“reflect the perceptions of our political elite about what we the people want.  And what we want, by and large, is to sustain the flow of very cheap consumer goods.  We want to be able to pump gas into our cars regardless of how big they happen to be…and we want to be able to do these things without having to think about whether or not the books balance at the end of the month…”

To our list of wants we can now add, “affordable” space travel, with its guaranteed 5.5 minutes of weightlessness.   As an ex-miltary officer, Bacevich points to the dark side of this, something you never hear in presidential debates, and don’t often see anymore on the front page of the paper.

“One of the ways we avoid confronting our refusal to balance the books is to rely increasingly on the projection of American military power around the world to maintain this dysfunctional system.”

The biggest elephant in the living room is our dependance on foreign oil.  Without oil, Bacevich notes, the middle east has “zero strategic significance.”  Every president since Richard Nixon has promised to address our dependance on foreign energy, and Jimmy Carter staked his political career on finding a solution.  Bacevich paraphrases Carter’s speech in 1979:

“If we don’t act now, we’re headed down a path along which not only will we become increasingly dependent upon foreign oil, but we will have opted for a false model of freedom.  A freedom of materialism, a freedom of self-indulgence, a freedom of collective recklessness.  The president was urging us to think about what we mean by freedom…Carter had a profound understanding of the dilemma facing the country in the post-Vietnam period.  And of course, he was completely derided and disregarded.” 

When Moyers asked him about the realities of al-Qaeda and radical Islam, Bacevich replied that yes, they are violent and dangerous, but are “akin to a criminal conspiracy…Rooting out and destroying the conspiracy is primarily the responsibility of organizations like the FBI, and of our intelligence community, backed up at times by Special Operations Forces.  That doesn’t require invading and occupying countries.”

At the end of the interview, Bacevich, who defines himself as a conservative, says he hopes we will come to understand the war in Iraq as a great mistake.  And rather repeat the mistake in Iran or anywhere else, hopes we will “look at ourselves in the mirror.  And…see what we have become.  And perhaps undertake an effort to make those changes that will enable us to preserve for future generations that which we value most about the American way of life.”

You can read the full text of the interview with Andrew Bacevich in Bill Moyers Journal, along with many other provocative talks with thinkers and artists across the spectrum of contemporary life.

Be Careful Out There: Shopping Rage

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The title of this post is taken from the sergeant who read the daily assignments on the ground-breaking, 80’s cop show, “Hill Street Blues.”  Every day he would warn his people, “Be careful out there!”

Sadly, the same caution may be needed this year by holiday shoppers, after an incident in southern California that police are calling, “competitive shopping rage.”  At 10:20 pm on Thanksgiving night, shoppers were lining up in the Porter Valley Walmart to purchase discounted Xboxes, when a woman began pepper spraying them “to gain a shopping advantage.”

Ten people were treated for pepper spray, and ten others for bumps and bruises suffered in the confusion.  The assailant got away, and it isn’t clear if she scored an Xbox.  The store is going through register receipts to see if she left a credit card trail.  The woman could face felony battery charges if apprehended.  We all should be thankful she didn’t bring a gun.

I really want to condemn something or someone for this insanity, but that would be false.  A better question would be, how am I complicit in the greed that has come to surround the birthday of the Prince of Peace?  And to reference my previous post on Andrew Weil, how happy is this kind of grasping likely to make someone on Christmas morning?

Another Thread in the Social Fabric Unravels

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My wife and I both come from (different) upstate New York factory towns.  My family moved to San Jose when I was nine.  Mary moved to California after high school, while her brothers stayed in Rochester and went to work for Kodak.  In the early ’70’s, that was a reasonable path to choose.  Kodak was a solid Dow Jones company and historically, one of the first to offer generous benefits to workers.

Over the last three decades, Mary and I have gone back for fun, for weddings, and funerals.  Rochester isn’t the same city.  Weeds grow in the parking lot of many silent factories.  Birds fly out of smokestacks once touted as the tallest in the country.

Kodak is a textbook example of a successful company blindsided by a “disruptive technology.”  But textbooks are the last thing on the minds of many of Kodak’s 38,000 retirees.  Late to the digital party, there is now talk of Kodak going bankrupt, and unfortunately, Kodak retiree health care is tied to the company’s fortunes.  http://www.npr.org/2011/10/12/141257737/the-picture-isnt-pretty-for-some-kodak-retirees

There are way too many stories like this in the news.  This one caught my attention because I know the town a little bit, and know people who are affected, people who played by the rules and now find themselves getting screwed.  A week from now, their story will be forgotten.

***

I found myself thinking again of the Occupy Wall Street protestors and some reactions from our “leaders” to their attempt to give people like the Kodak workers a voice.

According to Paul Krugman of the New York Times, Eric Cantor has called the protestors a “mob” and denounced them for “pitting Americans against Americans.”  Mitt Romney accused them of “waging class warfare.”  Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.”  Senator Rand Paul fears the protestors will start taking iPads from the rich, and according to the talking heads on CNBC, they are “aligned with Lenin.”  http://www.sacbee.com/2011/10/11/3973680/plutocrats-fearing-scrutiny-demonize.html

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Hard times bring out the best in some people and the worst in others.  These days I find myself paraphrasing the Serenity Prayer – asking for “the wisdom to know the difference.”

Occupied

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I sat up and took notice the other night when a local news announcer complained that the “Occupy Sacramento” protestors “could not even say what they want.” In other words, they won’t play by the rules – you know, the unwritten rule that says when a TV station sends a van to cover your event, you need to have your sound-byte ready. How else can they work it into a one minute segment and move on? How else can you be neatly pigeonholed?

Actually, there is at least one articulate answer to the question of what the protestors want, supplied by Naomi Klein, a Canadian author and activist, at the “Occupy Wall Street” rally in New York. http://www.thenation.com/article/163844/occupy-wall-street-most-important-thing-world-now. This link comes courtesy of Genevieve’s blog, Look Who’s Blogging Now, which you can find on my blogroll. I suggest you check it out if you are interested in this latest eruption of frustration with the status quo, since Genevieve is off to check out the “Occupy Minnesota” protests, and will likely have more to say.

Occupy Wall Street protestors

Perhaps one reason I took special notice of the protests that night, was because I’d been reading of another famous entity that didn’t seem to be playing by the rules; I mean the universe we live in. If – and this is a big if – a large group of European physicists are right, and neutrinos really move faster than light, then some of our core assumptions about the nature of matter are wrong. Here’s a good article by Jason Palmer, science and Technology reporter for the BBC news: http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/09/this_extraordinary_claim_requi.php

So this neutrino walks into a bar a moment after he’s ordered a beer…

Suddenly we’re faced with conclusions like these:

  • Twentieth century politics no longer works.
  • Twentieth century economics no longer works.
  • Twentieth century physics may need to be revised at its core.
  • As I have often discussed here, twentieth century publishing models are spluttering, and I’m sure you can think of other specialty areas where the past no longer functions as a reliable guide to the present.

Something similar happened a hundred years ago. In 1905, Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, and Einstein published his special theory of relativity. Nineteenth century notions of human nature and the world no longer fit. The start of World War I nine years later marked the greatest failure of business-as-usual in the history of the world (up until then).

So what happens now?

Einstein said, “The mind that creates a problem is not the mind that can solve it.” In other words, we have people who are sick of the status quo, but for the moment, avoid easy answers. Analogies to the Tea Party are obvious enough that even this week’s Saturday Night Live picked up the thread. As I recall, the media was frustrated with the Tea Party in the beginning for the same reasons – no central spokesperson, no succinct Powerpoint agenda. Once they sent people to Washington, the Tea Party got buttonholed pretty fast as a one-issue-movement. “Balance the budget without raising taxes and life will be good again.” Does anyone, even a member of congress, really believe that?

Here’s an observation by a local man:

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend? Despite reasonable differences, tea partyers and “occupiers” have far more in common with each other than with the politicos they elected to represent them. Conversely, Republicans and Democrats have more in common with each other than they do with the people who voted for them.” Bruce Maiman, “Wall Street Protestors, meet the tea partners,” editorial in The Sacramento Bee, Oct. 7, 2011, p. 13

The news media, even NPR, refused to acknowledge the occupiers for more than a week, but they didn’t go away. I hope they stay out in the open long enough for people and especially politicians to really get a glimpse of the underlying disappointment, fear, and outrage that animates so many who can no longer be soothed by simplistic answers.

What do they want? For now, “None of the above,” is a valid answer!

A View From Outside Our Borders

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I had not planned to comment further on politics or the economy, but recently, in my geek mode, I was cruising for iPhone apps and downloaded the one for The Economist. I was so impressed with the first editorial I read that I decided to pass it along, as a pertinent view from an expert outside our fray.

If you favor the view that austerity is the way to prosperity in the short term, you’re likely to be disappointed because this editorial echoes others I have read suggesting that we have recently been asking the wrong questions.

The article is from the August 6, issue, “America’s Economy:  Time for a Double Dip?”   http://www.economist.com/node/21525405.  You may have to register to see it:

If America does manage to avoid recession and slowly begins to pull out of this mire, it will be testimony to its underlying strengths. It still has huge advantages over other rich countries: a younger, less-taxed population, a more innovative economy and, for now at least, the dollar as the global reserve currency. If only it had the political leaders to match, its chance of avoiding recession would be far better than one in two.

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And now I return to my usual tricks, in particular, reading a gripping adult fantasy that I plan to review later this week.

Stories of the Fall

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I started this blog to write about stories, imagination, and spirituality.  Initially, when I spoke of stories, I meant fiction.  I now use the word in the wider sense suggested by James Hillman when he defined psychology as, “the study of the stories of the soul.”  I also use “stories” as Professor of Religion, David Loy, did in his book The World is Made of Stories, a meditation on the worldwide intuition that what we normally see is not “reality” but our stories about reality.

Right now, stories of money and its lack weigh on everyone’s mind. I have my own stories of recent events that I hesitated to share until yesterday, when I saw that Rush Limbaugh accused the president of, “engineering the decline of the American Republic.”  http://awareamerican.wordpress.com/2011/08/09/limbaugh-on-market-collapse-obama-engineering-the-decline-of-america/.  I decided that since it’s Amateur Hour, I might as well weigh in.  Here’s my story of why the United States and Europe find themselves in such a colossal mess:

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We are still in the early stages of globalization, but no one seems to remember that.  Limbaugh should blame Al Gore for inventing the internet, the steam engine of our current post-industrial revolution.  The changes are going to take as long, be at least as sweeping, and at least as traumatic as those of the first Industrial Revolution.  Here are a few key events:

1)  NAFTA:  The North American Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect on Jan. 1, 1994, marked the beginning of the end of blue collar work as a viable means of livelihood for large numbers of people in this country.

NAFTA protest

2) Offshoring White Collar Jobs:  This picked up in earnest in the late 90’s, as the internet made it feasible to hire large numbers of skilled foreign professionals for a fraction of the cost of their US counterparts.  I remember lots of phone conferences at the end of the day with engineers in Asia who would sometimes have solutions in our inbox in the morning.

The Y2K scare delayed the effects of sending thousands of tech jobs overseas, but once it was clear that the world was not going to end, the “dot com bust” ended the party for good.  Springsteen’s blue collar lyrics came true for professionals as well:  “Foreman says these jobs are going boys, and they ain’t coming back.”

3)  The Economy on Speed:  Thanks to Alan Greenspan, who held interest rates artificially low, and George Bush, who started two wars, the bust was delayed, but delayed only.  Quite a few people saw it coming:

  •  In 2004, a poster on a Motley Fool bulletin board said, “Soon our biggest industry will be selling each other beanie babies on eBay.”
  • Ca 2004, Warren Buffett called derivatives, “financial weapons of mass destruction.”
  • By 2006, people on all the financial websites were warning that a housing bust was no longer a matter of “if” but only of “when.”  The only thing no one fully realized then was how bad it would be.

Our problem now is not just that housing prices crashed in 2008, but that since the turn of the millennium, housing and consumer spending have been our major industries.

So what comes next?  Here are a few random suggestions and observations, not necessarily in order of importance.

1)  The President should demand to see Rush Limbaugh’s birth certificate.  Evidence suggests he is an alien – and I don’t mean the kind that comes from another part of planet earth:

2) On the Sunday before the debt ceiling resolution, I saw an interview with General Motors CEO, Dan Akerson, that made me hopeful.  Not only has GM paid back the government bailout, but they’ve done so with the introduction of fuel efficient cars.  Akerson articulated our need for independence from foreign oil that politicians since Jimmy Carter have talked about without effect.  Other American auto makers have echoed Akerson’s sentiment.  Now that greener energy is becoming profitable, there there is hope for eventual movement, growth and jobs in that sector.

3)  I’d like to see every Democrat in Washington read this article Julian Zelizer posted on CNN.com, “Where are the Democrat’s Ideas?”  http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/08/08/zelizer.democrats.ideas/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

4)  We all need to look at the situation in Britain as an example of what could happen here if politicians try to balance the budget with only draconian cuts.  It’s time for people who care about the country to name the Flat Earth Party for what it is – an assortment of morons who don’t understand that they live in the 21st century and not in 1776.

5) Vote against any candidate who claims to have “a plan to create jobs” – they are either deluded or lying.  In discussions I’ve heard, usually referencing Japan, the only government action that seems to work is stimulus money applied for the long term, they way you have to use a lot of matches to start a fire with wet wood.   Unfortunately, we’ve exhausted the means and will to do that.

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If you’ve actually read to the end of my rant, thank you.  It’s no more outlandish than claiming a single man could bring down our Republic all by himself.  To paraphrase Hillary Clinton’s book, it would take a village to do that – a large village, like Washington, DC.

How Much is Too Much?

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I have to thank Ceinwenn for this topic.  He or she (I can’t be sure, since the link takes me to a password protected forum) commented on my previous post, Three Requirements of a Book Review (?).  Ceinwenn felt I had given away too much plot info in my review of  David Baldacci’s First Family.  It’s entirely possible.  Several comments mentioned avoiding spoilers, something I have not considered as much as I will now.

In my own defense, I would cite the similarities of a synopsis, which you use as a design and advertising tool with your own fiction, and the plot exposition section of a book review.  In a synopsis, you must reveal what happens; you can’t leave an agent or editor guessing.  In a book review you must not.  Got it.  Thanks.

But that wasn’t what I really wanted to talk about here.  Ceinwenn’s comment spun me off thinking of several recent things I’ve said about blogging, and specifically my discovery that the public act of blogging is far more stimulating than the private act of writing in a journal.  The public nature of blogging makes it challenging in terms of deciding how much self-revelation is right.

My wife has commented on my tendency to get too academic and boring, which is an easy path for me to take.  On the other hand, I remember a psych teacher who was Mr. Sensitive-Self-Revelation, and it wasn’t a pretty sight!  A remember a very calm and poised young woman walking out of the class, shaking her head and making barfing noises.

You get what I’m saying.  As a blogger I want to be real and I enjoy the same quality in others, but I’ve used the delete key on posts that went to far.  I might write about an embarrassing moment, especially if there is humor involved, but I’m probably not going to post my most mortifying-ever experience.  You know the one – you’re driving along and it comes to mind and you slink down in your seat in case the nearby drivers can read your mind.

Some topics rouse caution immediately, notably politics and religion.  Mary and I have a couple of long-term friends that are long-term because we learned early on to stay off these topics.  Here on this blog I circle both politics and religion, but I keep more of a distance than I would personally like to.  Still, because I really dislike door to door religion or candidate salespeople, I don’t want to risk using this space to invade anyone’s right to decide for themselves.  Fortunately, tonight I get to quote someone brilliant on a political topic.

I’m traveling.  As a matter of fact, I’m attending a two day intensive teaching session let by a Tibetan Buddhist teacher of international renown (forbidden topic #1).  I got back to my room and flipped on the news just in time to see the President’s message that a compromise is in the works. (forbidden topic #2).  Whew!  No one with their head screwed on right could wish to see our country in default, and yet, the whole situation is icky!  Have you ever gone for a swim in a lake or river that was too full of alge?  You come out feeling slimy.

It’s far to easy to blame someone else, but none of us are innocent in this mess.  We elected these clowns, most of whom are doing what they think we want them to do in order to get re-elected.  It cuts a lot deeper than that, and once I get home, I may quote from an article I found that has a lot to say about this dance of the public and the politicians.

Meanwhile, here is the brilliant comment I promised, from Walt Kelly, creator of the wonderful comic strip, “Pogo.”  This particular panel was printed in 1971, on the occasion of the first Earth Day, but its message took on a life of its own that goes beyond any single issue.  If we could learn one thing from this latest crisis, this would be my vote.  We, as a nation, will not be destroyed from without, goes the common wisdom, often repeated over the last decade – but clearly we can do it to ourselves.