Why the Public Option is a Bad Idea

I've been thinking a lot about the current status of the health care bills in Congress, and I've come to a surprising conclusion: I don't think the so-called public option is a good idea.

Last night Sen. Charles Schumer went on the Rachel Maddow Show to say that he and Sen. Jay Rockefeller had proposed amendments to the Senate Finance Committee health care bill that would insert a public option into it, and that if the public option passed through the Finance Committee, it had a very good chance of being in the final bill that comes to a vote in Congress.

Polls have shown that most Americans support the public option, which the Obama Administration and many Democrats support as a way to "keep the insurance companies honest." Schumer, in his TV appearance last night, spoke of how the public plan would not need to spend billions on advertising and other things that private-sector companies must do to attract and keep customers, and make profits. Therefore, it should be able to provide lower-cost care and pressure private carriers to become more efficient and cheaper themselves.

And this is precisely the problem.

Private companies in all likelihood will have no hope of ever being able to compete with the government. The playing field will not be level. The government plan, if administered efficiently (and I'll grant you this is a big "if"), should ALWAYS be able to deliver cheaper, better care.

The best example of this dynamic: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These two government-sponsored enterprises, while technically not owned by the government, enjoyed huge advantages over banks and other fully private mortgage lenders. Investors, thinking Fannie and Freddie were backed by the full faith and credit of the US government (because Congress had established both companies in the interest of broadening homeownership), lent them money at lower interest rates than private competitors could garner in the market. This enabled Fannie and Freddie to build gigantic mortgage portfolios that ultimately contributed to massive systemic risk and prompted the US government to bail them out.

I don't think that a public health plan would contribute to that kind of systemic financial risk, but it would have a similar, unfair, advantage over private insurers in the market. Now I'm not saying insurance companies haven't been responsible for some truly heinous behavior. Nor am I saying that our health care system does not have serious, fundamental flaws that need to be reformed. What I am saying is that you cannot force private companies to compete in the market against a government plan that does not have the same profit motive.

We must either go all the way and establish a single-payer, Medicare-for-all-type system, or find a way to achieve reform while preserving free-market competition among private insurers. Perhaps prohibiting insurers from dropping sick people and boosting safeguards against Americans losing coverage when they change jobs, among other steps, could accomplish the latter task. But we can't expect private companies to compete effectively against the government. Sometimes compromises yield really bad outcomes.

The Know Nothings Are Back, and They're on Elephant Steroids

Our national political discourse has been hijacked by Sergeant Schultz.

If you're too young to remember the TV sitcom "Hogan's Heroes," a little background: On the show, Sgt. Hans Schultz was the hapless guard that Allied prisoners serially outwitted during their World War II internment in a German prison camp called Stalag 13. "I know NOTHING," Schultz would routinely exclaim when superiors blamed him for failing to halt the POWs' scheming.

Sadly, Schultz's motto — but, unfortunately, not his utter fecklessness — has been taken up with gusto by a small but extraordinarily vocal corps of paranoid, infantile jerks who have somehow managed to gain a measure of influence over public affairs.

They call themselves patriots, purportedly protecting the US constitution from all manner of injury at the hands of President Obama and other Democrats in positions of power. Invoking the mantle of the country's founders, they stage self-styled "tea parties" to protest what they deem to be a takeover of capitalism by the government. The conduct of some of these "teabaggers" has been breathtakingly hateful. Witness a few of the signs displayed at these All-American patriot gatherings:

Many also have rudely disrupted public meetings that members of Congress scheduled to discuss health-care reform with their constituents during the summer recess, by shouting insults, screeching epithets and making not-so-veiled threats of violence — the kind of behavior that even my 3-year-old daughter would dare not broach on her worst day.

All of this childishness is woven together with one very important common thread: the expression of beliefs that have zero basis in fact. Let's examine a few of the most commonly voiced teabagger and town-haller tenets and hold them up to the light of reality here on planet Earth.

• Teabagger Truth: President Obama is a socialist. Or, worse, a Communist. Planet Earth Truth: Obama over and over again states his belief in the power of free-market capitalism. But upon taking office, he was confronted by the most severe financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The banking system was on the brink of failure, as was the US auto industry. I happen to disagree with the bailout of Detroit, because Asian and European auto makers had already eclipsed the US big three and could easily have carried the industry and absorbed many displaced workers if GM ceased to exist. But the institutions at the very heart of global capital markets absolutely needed to be bailed out, even if their own misdeeds were perhaps the biggest factor contributing to the collapse. Without massive government aid, the economy would have plunged into the abyss. We got a hint of this possibility in the aftermath of Lehman Brothers being allowed to fail one year ago. More broadly speaking, public stimulus was a sorely needed shot of adrenaline for a private sector that had simply stopped functioning. Yes, too much of the stimulus either has yet to be spent or was shamelessly diverted by myopic, greedy legislators to pork projects that didn't do as much to stimulate the economy as investment in infrastructure and renewable energy production would have. But some federal economic stimulus was absolutely necessary. Most importantly, all of this extraordinary government intervention is expressly designed to be temporary — an emergency intervention that will cease once the financial system and the economy recover. Already several banks have paid back billions in TARP money, resulting in substantial investment gains for the federal government. The Federal Reserve is winding down several of its programs that were designed to shore up the financial system during the crisis. Citigroup is pushing a plan that would reduce the government's 34% ownership stake. And Obama has directly and emphatically said that he wants to shed the government's ownership of GM as soon as possible. Next!

• Teabagger Truth: President Obama wants to create "death panels" that would euthanize old people rather than provide them with critical care. Planet Earth Truth: There is nothing in any bill, outline of a bill or any public statement ever uttered by the president or anyone affiliated in any way with the White House that would establish, or states an intent to establish, "death panels." This is a heinous distortion of language in one of the Democratic reform bills that would have covered completely benign and quite compassionate end-of-life counseling for the terminally ill. Such counseling would include advice about living wills and durable powers of attorney, for instance. A far cry from slipping some hemlock tea to Great Aunt Tillie.

• Teabagger Truth: President Obama wants to replace private health insurance with a system in which the federal government employs all doctors and other health care providers. Planet Earth Truth: A canard. Obama supports (albeit half-heartedly, because of all the fake outrage about "a government takeover of health care") making a government-provided plan one of many health-insurance options for Americans to choose from. The idea is to give private-sector plans an incentive to become more efficient by letting them compete side-by-side with a federal plan. His plan also mandates that everyone have health insurance -- a policy that has insurers, drug companies and other health-care companies positively drooling because it will boost their revenues by billions annually when 47 million people suddenly have to sign up for a plan. So much for socialism.

• Teabagger Truth: President Obama's health care plan will use tax revenue to provide coverage for illegal immigrants. Planet Earth Truth: There is absolutely nothing in Obama's plan or any of the bills in Congress — and there never has been — that would permit tax dollars to be spent on covering illegal aliens. Following Addison Graves Wilson's toddler-esque "you lie!" tirade, Democrats went even further and added language expressly prohibiting any such expenditure. Still, this bogeyman continues to be raised regularly on the Fox News/Teabagger circuit.

• Teabagger Truth: President Obama's health care plan will create government panels that issue mandatory, un-appealable decisions about whether citizens can see doctors, have surgeries and receive all manner of other care. Planet Earth Truth: Just one of dozens of lies being spread about Democratic health reform plans. Factcheck.org has a great analysis of these that is worth checking out if you want the truth.

So how did so many people grow so far removed from reality?

A big part of the answer is that an alternative reality has been created for them — by elite millionaire entertainers posing as journalists, and by huge, organized Republican and corporate lobbies posing as little grassroots groups.

Let's look first at the entertainers. A cadre of red-faced, hyperventilating, even weeping commentators call the teabaggers to action by exploiting their basest fears and insecurities. Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other entertainers amplify the rankest lies, hatred and misniformation for the masses and, worse, lend them a patina of credibility because their acts happen to be carried by a network that has the word "news" in its name. This is not news. It is hysteria, carefully packaged to appeal to the disaffected, who tune in religiously and support the multi-million-dollar salaries and rich-and-famous lifestyles of the elite broadcasters who purport to "stand up for the little guy."

Then there are the astroturf movements. Groups like Freedom Works, essentially an organ of the Republican party, are the driving force behind the tea parties and town-hall tomfoolery. They not only are promoting the events, but stocking them with professional political operatives who are bused and flown in from around the country to create the impression of grass-roots activism. This exposes the lie that somehow millions of Americans are rising up in a massive, spontaneous movement fueled by disgust at the Obama administration.

Racial animosity is certainly part of the package here. No one can look at the photos above of teabaggers claiming that Obama plans "White Slavery" or holding up signs depicting the president as an ominous-looking assailant threatening to slit the throat of Uncle Sam and deny with a straight face that a significant measure of Obama hatred is in fact racism. This is not, as one family member of mine recently suggested, a case of "lose the argument and blame racism." In fact, there is no argument to win or lose. The core beliefs motivating the teabagger "movement" so obviously lack any basis in fact that there has to be something else going on here. For some, it is undoubtedly the inability to come to terms with the fact that a black man has decisively been elected our president.

But there is also a broader anxiety being exploited here. Anxiety over the massive social, economic and cultural changes that began in the post-World War II era but accelerated drastically over the past decade. The economy has grown more efficient, more globalized, more dependent upon technology, information and a highly educated — often foreign-born — workforce. At the same time it has become less dependent upon manufacturing, industry and unskilled, less-educated workers. Computers, the internet and other technology have so permeated our culture that many who lack technological savvy not only find themselves losing in the global economy but also feeling left out of popular culture. And all of these forces are triggering dramatic social change. Perhaps the most significant manifestation of this has been the drastic growth in income inequality and shrinkage of the middle class in the United States. The great irony here is that this is patently the outcome of the Reagan Revolution. The idea that government is always bad, and should get out of the way of the private sector, freed giant corporations and Wall Street to lobby for policies that allowed them to eviscerate the American middle class. Laws and rules that were put in place following the Great Depression to ensure it did not happen again, including the Glass-Steagall Act, were repealed. The unfettered capitalism that resulted gave us today's financial crisis and Great Recession.

And the folks who have drawn the short straws as a result of all of this change are often the very same people who, in some cases, see in Obama the "other" to blame for their degraded lot in life. They can't possibly be worse off and have dimmer prospects than their parents because supposedly 'conservative' politicians have spent decades dismantling sensible government regulation of the private sector and drastically increasing income inequality. It must be because this black, Jesus-hating, baby-killing Communist managed to get elected president — in a landslide — by the Sauvignon Blanc-sipping coastal elites, even though we all know he is a militant Muslim that has been plotting to destroy "the America I grew up in" since the very day he was born in Kenya.

Reason and truth matter not to these people. This is how we wind up with Samuel Wurzelbacher, a.k.a. "Joe the Plumber," rejecting the Obama fiscal policy that would cut his income taxes and somehow becoming a hero to others like him and a desperate, late-inning centerpiece of the hapless McCain 2008 campaign. It's how GOP governors including South Carolina's Mark Sanford, the holier-than-thou-Bible-thumper-turned-very-public-adulterer-and-duty-shirker, justify rejecting federal stimulus funds — In the Palmetto State's case, funds that would have provide desperately needed help to millions of unemployed and the nation's 39th-out-of-50-ranked public school system. And it is the ugly foundation beneath last week's outburst on the floor of the House of Representatives by Rep. Addison Graves Wilson, also of South Carolina (he's known as "Joe" to the good ol' boys flying the Confederate flag over the state capital building), during which he yelled "you lie!" at the president, who had just told the truth about his health care plan not covering illegal immigrants.

The saddest part of all this is that the virulent teabagger movement is quite small. Glenn Beck's audience on a good day is about 2.8 million people — less than one percent of the current US population of 305 million. And the teabaggers are clearly self-conscious about their size, as evidenced by the fake photo they circulated to create an aura of ample attendance despite official estimates that only about 70,000 people showed up for their recent march on Washington. But organized Republican and corporate interests, teamed with Fox News and other paid liar-entertainers, whip up such hysteria among this small group, and make so much money doing it, that the rest of the media goes along for the ride. When they're not wasting time on celebrity non-news and promoting the other products of their conglomerate-owners, supposedly respectable newspapers and broadcast outlets devote precious space and time to covering the outbursts of the Know Nothings. All this comes at the expense of serious coverage and debate of the real, considerable problems that confront us as a nation.

We've seen this movie before in the United States. Other periods of swift, deep socioeconomic change have triggered paranoia that expresses itself politically. Candidates of the Know Nothing Party, formed in the mid-19th Century by well-off Protestant New Yorkers who were alarmed about an influx of poor, Irish Catholic immigrants, actually won election to mayoralties in Philadelphia and San Francisco and the governor's mansion in California before the Lincoln-led Republicans muted their influence (the likes of Limbaugh would ravage a politician like Honest Abe as too effete, too eloquent and too tolerant, ensuring he'd never make it through a GOP primary for dog catcher in Osh Kosh today). Industrialization and continued waves of immigration in the late 19th century gave rise to populist Democrats like William Jennings Bryan, who preyed on the fears of southern and agrarian America that cities were growing to be the dominant force in the country. Demagogues like Father Coughlin exploited the sheer economic privation of the Great Depression to conjure opposition to the New Deal. And more recently, the success of the civil rights movement, feminism and the 1960s counterculture helped launch George Wallace's Dixiecrats and the "Silent Majority" of disaffected ethnic and suburban whites that Nixon rode to power. A similar dynamic influenced the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s.

Most of the time these political movements don't amount to much. It seems, however, that the teabaggers are exerting an outsized influence on public affairs today. Some argue that the best way to combat this is to simply ignore them, which will cause them to go away. I've tried that. I don't think it works in this case. The organized interests whipping up this faux hysteria will keep doing it until the rest of the non-wacko country — another Silent Majority, if you will — speaks truth to its mounting power.

Tom Ridge Confirms a Shameful Truth

At first I was far from shocked at the news that former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge says he was pressured by two Bush administration cabinet members to raise the government terror alert level on the eve of the 2004 presidential election. After all, it seemed pretty clear to me at the time that the color-coded system was being manipulated for political purposes. Whenever things started to look bleak for the White House and the Republican party, presto, we went from Yellow to Orange. Ridge, Cheney or Bush started talking about "chatter" and "specific threats" and everyone fell back into line (perhaps the know-nothings parroting Hannity and Beck's ridiculous talking points about Obama's supposed totalitarian tactics at the health care town hall meetings should consider the real and proven totalitarian tendencies of their own party, but I digress).

And, truth be told, I'd rather focus on the present and the future than get caught up in past battles. But the more I see the headlines today and really think about what happened, the angrier I get.

That's because no matter how many different angles I employ to analyze the situation, I can't help but come to the same conclusion: Bush, Cheney and the GOP not only badly mishandled 9/11 and its aftermath, but added insult to injury by shamelessly exploiting the horrific deaths of 3,000 people for their own grubby political gains.

First and foremost — and a fact that seems to constantly get lost in this debate — Bush knew what was coming and failed to stop it. Eight years ago, in August 2001, he began his day with a briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." The briefing went into detail about Al Qaeda wanting to hijack commercial aircraft to attack US targets. The CIA and FBI were standing on second base stealing the catcher's signs, telling the president to expect the fastball. But instead of taking a swing, Bush and Cheney struck out looking. That's a fact.

So how did they redeem themselves? Instead of focusing all of our military and diplomatic efforts on finishing the job of finding Osama bin Laden and crushing Al Qaeda where it was headquartered — in Afghanistan and Pakistan — Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq, which, despite being one of many reprehensible totalitarian regimes in the world at that time, had nothing to do with 9/11 and was not a state sponsor of Al Qaeda.

And instead of doing everything possible to protect the homeland from further attacks, the government under Bush and Cheney diverted millions in Homeland Security funds to protect tiny towns in Kentucky and other rural, Republican, Christian strongholds that should have been fortifying actual terrorist targets in godless, Democratic New York and other big cities. As a result, our ports, chemical plants and nuclear power plants lack the protection they need. My family and millions of others are at risk because of this. That makes me very, very angry. With real anger, not the faux froth that Republican operatives posing as ordinary citizens are using to quash reasoned communication and debate at health care town hall meetings.

Indeed, the examples I cite here are all facts, not fake, outrageous rhetoric that gets dreamed up at RNC headquarters and parroted to an anxious country by the reprehensible, hateful little maggots at Fox News for the purpose of stirring up anger and resentment for political purposes (and for rating$, let's not forget). Click the links in each of the above examples and read for yourself (or don't, if you'd rather just believe what you want to believe).

I'm not normally given to angry rants. But I was in New York City on 9/11. I knew people who perished in the World Trade Center. Other friends and business associates narrowly escaped. I watched one of the buildings collapse with my own eyes. I lived close enough to Ground Zero to see the smoke rising from the site and inhale the sickening smell of death for weeks following the attack. It took about a year before I could see a shabby-looking guy wearing a backpack on the subway without my pulse quickening and my stomach getting a bit queasy. And to this day, eight years later, I still commute to New York City. And I still wonder what's going on behind the scenes when, on some days, the cops at the PATH station or on the streets of the financial district are suddenly brandishing assault rifles, or national guardsmen turn up, when they weren't the day before.

It was bad enough for all these years to see and hear 9/11 constantly invoked as a political weapon by the very people who so badly mishandled the attacks and their aftermath. And I can only imagine how the families of 9/11 victims felt. But now I know for a fact that my president and his minions shamefully exploited our sorrow — and exacerbated our fear with their public warnings — with no basis other than their own grubby desire to remain in power.

How could they? And followers of Christ, these people? Where was their sense of basic human decency? Shame, shame, shame.

There Sarah Goes Again - Makin' Things Up

I promised not to let another three months go by without posting, and I am hereby keeping my word — even if I'm doing it with a bit of fudging. Truth is I've been far too busy to post regularly but I did just read something that could very well have been a post on Citizen. It's Timothy Egan's New York Times piece on the health-care-demagoguery hoo-ha. So I'll link to it here, paste the content below (with certain passages nearest and dearest to my heart in bold) and let him do the work for me. Thank you, Mr. Egan!

August 9, 2009, 11:24 PM

Palin’s Poison

In Egypt, 43 percent of people think Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks in America, a poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org found last year.

In the United States, six percent of Americans say the moon landing of 40 years ago was staged, according to Gallup.

And in Alaska, the former governor, a woman who was nearly a heartbeat away from the presidency, now tells followers that “Obama death panels” could decide if her parents and her baby, Trig, who has Down’s Syndrome, will live or die.

The United States, like most countries, has long had a lunatic fringe who channel in the flotsam of delusion, half-facts and conspiracy theories. But now, with the light-speed and reach of the Web, “entire virtual crank communities,” as the conservative writer David Frum called them, have sprung up. They are fed, in the case of Sarah Palin, by people who should know better.

For a democracy, which depends on an informed citizenry to balance a permanent lobbying class, this is poison. And it’s one reason why town hall forums on health care, which should be sharp debates about something that affects all of us, have turned into town mauls.

The lies and shouts have had the effect that all crank speech has on free speech — stifling any real exchange. In my state, Representative Brian Baird, a veteran of more than 300 town hall meetings during his 11 years as a Democratic congressman from southwest Washington, has decided not to hold any such forums this recess after receiving death threats.

But is it any wonder that some are moved to violent threats, given the level of misinformation being injected into the system? If you really believed that Obama was going to kill your baby and euthanize your parents, well — why not act in self defense?

Here’s what Palin said on her Facebook page Friday, in her first online comments since quitting as Alaska governor.

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’ whether they are worthy of health care.”

This is pure fantasy, fact-free almost in its entirety. The nonpartisan group FactCheck.org said there was no basis for such a claim in any of the health care bills under consideration in Congress. One House bill would pay for counseling for terminally ill patients — something anyone who has lost an elderly loved one of late, as I have, will find essential.

Palin was given some cover Sunday by the former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a master of slipping innuendo into his arguments. Defending the “death panel” post on ABC’s “This Week,” Gingrich said, “you’re asking us to trust the government.” By such reasoning, American foreign policy is not worth its word, the currency is worthless, and the moon landing was indeed a fake.

The last time Gingrich went so far was when he called Justice Sonia Sotomayor a racist. He retracted it then. We’ll see what he does now. As for Palin, she should follow her own advice to the media of a few weeks ago — lay off the kids and “quit makin’ things up.”

America Needs a Healthy GOP

I know. I've been away. For a long, long time. 

I won't try to explain, because that will bore you. Let's just say I've been busy and uninspired — the latter being in large part a consequence of the former. 

Well, I read something today that inspired me. 

I know, it comes from the New York Times. The same Times that so many of you regard as incurably biased in favor of the left. Let's leave that debate aside for a moment, so that I may share said inspirational passage. It comes from Gail Collins, a former editorial page editor and now a witty op-ed columnist. Collins' column today riffs on the travails of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who has been in the news lately for leaving the Palmetto State leaderless while he spent a week in Argentina breaking up with his mistress. Collins writes:

Until Wednesday’s unpleasantness, Sanford was chairman of the Republican Governors Association, otherwise known as the Association of Possible Presidential Contenders Plus Arnold. Over the past few years, he has tried to woo the party’s base with antics like bringing two piglets into the Capitol to protest political pork and refusing to accept $700 million in federal stimulus money aimed at preventing massive layoffs of public school teachers. For a state with an unemployment rate above 12 percent, that ranks 39th in public school performance, that last caper might not seem all that entertaining. But it did draw the attention and affection of right-wing commentators, who nudged Sanford right up the potential-contender ladder.

This, like much of the rest of Collins' column, made me chuckle. For a moment, it also injected my moderate-liberal veins with a rush of schadenfreude at the pitiful state of the Republican Party. It seems the only way for a Republican to gain nomination for high office is to appeal to an increasingly lunatic fringe commentariat, thereby ensuring doom with the general electorate. 

But then, it made me sad for America. 

For our constitutional republic to live up to our founders' promise, we need robust competition — not just in the market for goods and services, but also in the marketplace of policy ideas. And as the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt degenerates into the party of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, none of us is well served. A sick GOP emboldens the Democrats who control Washington to make policy that would not survive a stronger, more thoughtful opposition. The extreme left is likelier to make bad ideas into the law of the land. 

We've seen this movie before, and it ends only when the country winds up in such bad shape that we can no longer tolerate single-party rule and finally throw the bums out. The Reagan Revolution of the early 1980s and the repudiation of Bush-Cheney Republicanism in 2006 and 2008 are two recent examples. 

So what can we do to prevent a sure-to-disappoint sequel? Well, if you haven't read my other rants about civic responsibility, I'll repeat my broken-record mantra here: be at least partially engaged in a mature, serious debate about public affairs instead of wholly immersed in popular culture. That means ignoring the yellers and demagogues and actually reading something now and then. Or, if you simply can't give up that America's Got Talent and Real Housewives of New Jersey habit for a steady diet of Congressional Quarterly and C-SPAN, at least throw in a dose or two of CNN here and there. 

I'll do my part: I promise not to let another three months go by before I post here again. 

See you soon. 

The Truth About Those Awful People at AIG

Among the many very interesting comments uttered by President Obama in last night's prime-time news conference (remember those?) were two regarding the blind populist rage currently being directed toward Wall Street. 

The first came when he was asked about all the plumbers, teachers, doctors and cops out there who are ready to set lower Manhattan ablaze to exorcise our economic demons. Obama acknowledged his and the country's anger at those who are "enriching themselves on the taxpayer's dime." But, he cautioned, the country "can't afford to demonize every investor or entrepreneur who seeks to make a profit." So much for Obama the supposed Commie.

Then, when pressed hard by a CNN correspondent (so much for the liberal media conspiracy) about why he "waited two days" to express his outrage at the American International Group bonuses, the President, clearly a bit miffed, responded, "because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak."

Kudos, I say. Instead of mindlessly glomming on to the oversimplified political point of the moment — those greedy Wall Street bastards are ruining the country and should be drawn and quartered in front of Federal Hall — the president actually wanted to explore the facts in all their complexity. (As I've noted previously, Americans today seem to have a hard time grasping complex subjects). 

But it's too bad Obama, along with all the "regular folk" out there ready to pillory Wall Street scum, didn't have a chat about a week ago with Jake DeSantis. An 11-year veteran of AIG, DeSantis' resignation letter, published in today's New York Times, powerfully and poignantly captures what all the uninformed populist mouth-foaming neglects: most of the people who work on Wall Street are at least as decent, honest, hardworking and patriotic as people from other walks of life. This includes the vast majority of the hundreds of people who work in the demonized Financial Products division of AIG. 

A son of rust-belt schoolteachers, DeSantis studied hard, got into MIT on financial aid and did very well for himself as a Wall Street trader. He had nothing to do with the credit derivatives that helped bring AIG and the global financial system to its knees. He earned his money fair and square. If you do nothing else today that faintly resembles civic duty, you absolutely must read his letter. Here's the link again in case you missed it above. 

To be sure, there are plenty of other folks out there who have lost jobs and compensation despite doing nothing to damage the financial system or the global economy. I'm not suggesting that DeSantis and other AIG employees shouldn't expect that problems with their company — even problems they had nothing to do with — won't negatively affect their employment prospects or incomes. What isn't right is how he, others in AIG's Financial Products unit and indeed, all who are gainfully employed in finance, have been demonized as the cause of all our woes. 

Never mind those "regular folk" who took out mortgages and bought homes they knew they couldn't afford. Or the local mortgage brokers that inflated their commissions by signing "no documentation" loan applications for those borrowers. Never mind the members of Congress who gutted financial-services regulation in the 80s and 90s yet now have the audacity to fuel the witch hunt by pointing fingers at Wall Street. Never mind the Federal Reserve, which flooded the financial system with so much liquidity following the dot-com bubble and 9/11 that risk became a quaint notion. It's much easier to blame the Wall Street fat cats. 

This is wrong not because it hurts the feelings of those who work in finance. Rather, it's dangerous because it is directly linked to the policy that Congress, the White House and regulatory agencies will make in response to the crisis. To ensure that we have the right laws, rules and policies in place to prevent another meltdown, we need to first understand the problem we're trying to fix. Not as a 5-second sound bite in a Congressional hearing that gets wedged between Natalee Holloway and American Idol on the evening "news," but in all its nuance and complexity. 

The Merits of Rewarding Good Teachers

Few people have more influence over the future of the country than teachers. 

We all remember teachers who helped shape the people we became as adults. Often we don't realize just how good they were until later in life. I'm talking about the tough teachers, with high standards and strong work ethics. The ones who won't settle for anything but the best from us. 

Among the educators I remember is Miss Lathrop, who taught me how to diagram sentences in the sixth grade. And Mrs. Van Dyk, who, a few years later, instructed me in the unceremoniously dying art of arranging those sentences into cogent paragraphs, essays and stories. They — and the other skilled, passionate teachers under whom I was fortunate enough to study — fostered my intellectual curiosity and fed my nascent talents. They helped make possible the livelihood I've enjoyed as a journalist and an analyst. 

Sadly, we also forget far more teachers than we remember, and I certainly had my share of this group. They did only what they needed to collect a paycheck. That is to say, they showed up for class, assigned textbook reading and homework and, ultimately, administered exams. They viewed teaching as just a job and approached it as such, with no passion or creativity. 

It is, of course, no secret that too many of our schools today lack for teachers like Miss Lathrop and Mrs. Van Dyk. Instead, they are overrun with mediocrity or, worse, incompetence. 

That's why I'm so encouraged by President Obama's plan to improve our public education system by, among other things, more accurately measuring teacher performance and rewarding the best in the field with higher compensation. Other highlights of the proposal: foster the development of charter schools, beef up curriculum standards and weed out bad teachers. 

The National Education Association and other teachers' unions for years have resisted common-sense measures such as these that would greatly enhance both the quality of our culture and our economic competitiveness. Predictably, the unions greeted the Obama plan as it does any idea that would inject accountability for performance: with an unenthusiastic whimper. Take the following excerpt from the New York Times coverage of the plan's release:

Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.4-million-member American Federation of Teachers, said her union embraced “the goals and aspirations” outlined by Mr. Obama. “As with any public policy,” Ms. Weingarten said, “the devil is in the details, and it is important that teachers’ voices are heard as we implement the president’s vision.”

The unions can no longer blindly fight any reforms that would alter a status quo that for too long has been poorly serving our youth, and thus our nation. It may not win me many admirers to say this, but poor teachers should have no job security. If I don't perform well at my job, I could be in danger of joining the unemployment line. Because their work is so important to the greater good, teachers should be held to no lower a standard. Conversely, the most outstanding educators should be rewarded commensurately, so that the best and brightest of our college graduates may be drawn to teaching careers rather than selling out to the highest bidders on Wall Street or in corporate America. 

Americans can only hope that our elected representatives in Congress have the courage to transcend the tired political battles over public education and back the president's and other out-of-the-box approaches that might actually begin to solve the problem of our failing schools. Everyone deserves to remember at least one good teacher's positive influence. 

The Limbaugh-ification of American Discourse

As political pundits go, the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger is a serious, sober intellectual. Though a dyed-in-the-wool Reaganite, Henninger is most certainly not the hyperventilating, hatemongering, inferiority-exploiting sort that has dominated the extreme right for decades and, increasingly, defines the Republican mainstream. 

Yet even as he thoughtfully jabs the Rush Right in his column today, Henninger falls victim to a milder form of its toddler-like tactics — which, by the way, are exposed for all their childish ineffectiveness by Timothy Egan today in a brilliant New York Times op-ed. Both are worth a read.

Henninger's piece argues that Republicans must appeal to voters by ditching their calls to prayer that Obama will fail and instead reclaiming Ronald Reagan's confident, pro-private-sector rhetoric. To draw a contrast between his prescription and the vision for the nation being put forth by Democrats, Henninger quotes Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich and longtime Democratic strategist Bob Shrum, both suggesting that Obama is in the process of unwinding the 1980s Reagan Revolution. 

Henninger is right to criticize these statements. Reich and Shrum should acknowledge that the Reagan Revolution shouldn't be completely undone — that some portion of what Reagan and his disciples did for the country was both positive and essential. It was good for the country that Reagan called out the government for being too bloated and inefficient, and for often preventing private enterprise from achieving its full potential to foster economic growth. And it was equally important to do something about that by reducing taxes, rethinking our approach to regulation and trimming the size of government. 

I, of course, believe that Reagan's movement ultimately went too far, contributing to much of what ails us today. But you can read my posts on such topics as bank bailouts, the gutting of food safety regulations and how smart regulation keeps capitalism from eating itself for more on all that. 

Back to Henninger and Rush. Unfortunately, in putting forth the idea that Republicans should reclaim the Reagan pro-growth mantle, Henninger relies on some Limbaugh-esque fakery. He suggests, for example, that appealing to voters with this argument should be easy, because Democrats have become nothing less than capitalism-hating socialists:

Arguably at no time in their lives have more Americans been this sharply focused on the economy. They think and talk about nothing else. The Republicans have been handed on a tarnished silver platter the chance to offer the American people an alternative vision of how their economy works -- and grows.

They should take political ownership of the 75% of the U.S. economy that the Democrats have abandoned -- the private economy.

Over the past four decades and the decline of private-sector industrial unions, professional Democrats -- politicians, intellectuals like Robert & Robert, campaign professionals, unions and satellite groups -- have severed their emotional and intellectual connection with private production.

Today, frontline Democrats see the private sector as doing two things: It produces tax revenue for $3.9 trillion federal budgets, and it shafts workers. The private sector in the Democratic worldview is necessary but nasty. Their leadership gives the impression of not having the simplest understanding of how an employer's life unfolds day to day.

Not exactly. Henninger conveniently forgets for a moment that we are in the midst of the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression. Of course those who are charged with getting us out of this mess are using government as their primary tool. For more than a year, the private sector has proven itself incapable of accomplishing that goal. So government must step in and make what in normal times would be unthinkable incursions into private affairs. 

Henninger, tellingly, also fails to point out the inherent inaccuracy of what Reich and Shrum said about Obama rolling back Reagan's policies (or at least what their out-of-context quotes suggest they believe). Obama is definitely not restoring what existed before 1980. For example, he does not propose anything remotely like reinstating income tax rates to the pre-Reagan 60-70% range for the nation's top earners.

Here, the esteemed columnist is exposed as under the influence, likely despite all his best highbrow intentions, of the talk-radio bully. He has set up a straw man to be knocked down because doing so renders an otherwise iffy argument much easier to "prove."

Egan's tour-de-force undressing of Limbaugh today points out that Rush is really little more than a classic demagogue, so bereft of real ideas that he must constantly construct straw men to tear down. (He also does a fine job of exposing Rush's trouble with black people and women - it really is a fantastic read). Henninger is no demagogue, but the Rush-ification of our national political debate can be seen in even his resorting to this tactic.  

I spend considerable time discussing all of this because it is yet another example of how our discourse about public affairs has degraded into little more than infantile name-calling wedged between an endless stream of celebrity gossip and reality TV. As you know, that makes me sad. And it hurts our country. Please do your part to recognize and stop it. 

One way to do that, of course, is to create some real discourse of our own. What do you think? Please post your comments. 

Thanks. 

A Nation of Dimwits

This morning on my way into work I read an essay that simply and convincingly captures why I started this blog. It's short and to the point. If you care about America, I urge you to read it and think about it. Here's a link to the article itself, and below is the full text. Thank you. And I apologize in advance for my headline -- it should make sense once you read the essay. 

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
We’re Not ‘Cowards,’ We’re Just Loud

By STEPHEN L. CARTER
Published: February 24, 2009
New Haven

JUST weeks before taking the oath of office in 1861, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a crowd in Pittsburgh. The times were fraught. Since Lincoln’s election, several slave-holding states had left the Union. More were threatening to go. But Lincoln told the worried assemblage, “There is really no crisis except an artificial one!”

Actually, Lincoln said much more than that — hundreds upon hundreds of words, calculated to soothe the public’s fear of war. But had his speech been covered the way the news media cover political remarks today, it is likely that most people would have heard only that one line, and Lincoln, the nation’s greatest president, would have been pilloried as an out-of-touch bumpkin.

Writing teachers everywhere tell their students that context is everything. But if the response to Attorney General Eric Holder’s remarks last week to Justice Department employees is any guide, teachers everywhere are wrong. The speech was written for Black History Month. Now, a week later, what most people know about the talk is that the attorney general accused his fellow citizens of being, on the matter of race, “a nation of cowards.”

The speech itself was more than 2,300 words. The already infamous phrase occurred about 150 words in. Thus we are left with well over 2,000 unanalyzed words — that is, the context for the phrase. For too many critics, the context of Mr. Holder’s remarks (like the context of former Senator Phil Gramm’s accusation during the election campaign that we are a “nation of whiners”) is quite beside the point.

Perhaps, as some have suggested, Mr. Holder’s language was infelicitous; but presidents and popes now and then regret their choice of words, so attorneys general can hardly hope for immunity from persecution. More important is what the response to the speech says about the current state of political dialogue.

Indeed, the truly intriguing aspect is not what the attorney general had to say about race, but rather what he had to say about the way in which we discuss it. Our national conversation on race, said Mr. Holder, “is too often simplistic and left to those on the extremes who are not hesitant to use these issues to advance nothing more than their own narrow self-interest.”

There is, plainly, something to this. When we talk about race we do tend to talk in simplistic categories, spending more energy on labeling each other than on reasoning together. Consider the entirely predictable battle lines over The New York Post’s infamous stimulus bill cartoon last week, which featured a chimpanzee. One side says the newspaper was insensitive, the other that the protesters have a double standard and are fanning the flames for the sake of attention. Plenty of sound bites, but nothing that moves us forward.

This difficulty, however, is not limited to race. There are few issues of any importance that are not reduced, in public dialogue, to sloganeering and applause lines. Whether we argue over war or the economy, marriage or religion, abortion or guns, we reduce our ideas to just the right size for the adolescent tantrum of the bumper sticker.

Consider, for example, the Obama administration’s evolving tough line on terrorism. Many critics seem to think that reminding us that President Obama’s policies are similar to President George W. Bush’s is argument enough against them. But guilt by association with an unpopular past president does not tell us whether a particular tactic is right or wrong. Or consider the economic crisis, where one cable television network, on the very evening of the Lehman Brothers collapse last fall, had a program promising to analyze not what had gone wrong but who was at fault.

Democracy, at its best, rests on a foundation of mutual respect among co-equal citizens willing to take the time for serious debate. After all, even on the momentous issues that divide us, there is usually the possibility that the other side has a good argument. Yet if we paint our opponents as monsters, we owe them no obligation to pay attention to what they have to say.

Forty-five years ago, in his classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter warned against this tendency, and worried that it would recur in every era. There is, he suggested, something in the Western psyche that too often makes us retreat to a vision of politics in which there is no complexity. “Since what is at stake,” wrote Hofstadter, “is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.”

Complexity is the enemy of such fundamentalism, and, as our public dialogue grows more fundamentalist, complexity fades. If you read Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” — and everyone who loves democracy should read it, at least every two or three years — pay attention to the speech by the fire chief, Captain Beatty, explaining why they burned the books. The reason was not national security or political power. It was complexity. Books, says the fire chief, make ideas too difficult. The reader winds up lost, he says, “in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.” The people demanded the books be burned because they wanted no complicated ideas.

We may not be burning books, exactly, but we are burning argument and ideas, replacing them with applause lines. If we Americans can make our way past the fanfare over the most controversial words in Mr. Holder’s speech, perhaps we can learn from his reminder that democracy needs dialogue more than it needs bumper stickers.

Stephen L. Carter, a novelist and Yale law professor, is writing a book about what democracy needs now.

Peanuts Grow in The Jungle

We've been had. 

For nearly three decades, Americans have slowly been bamboozled into thinking that we don't need government. The state, proponents of this argument contend, is always wrong and the free market always right. 

Umm, no. 

I know it's difficult, but set aside for a moment the obvious and gargantuan failures of the unfettered market that have led us to the financial, economic and cultural crisis we now face. Instead, think for just a moment about the scores of Americans who have died and fallen ill because of the misadventures in capitalism perpetrated by the Peanut Corporation of America. 

As the New York Times masterfully demonstrated in a February 8 article, the PCA blatantly and repeatedly disregarded the most basic safety and hygiene guidelines, irresponsibly putting short-term expedience and profit over public health. And thanks to the purely laissez faire attitude that has held sway in our great-but-wounded nation for so long, PCA was not required to report to the government or the public that deadly salmonella was present in its plants, nor were there a sufficient number of state-level inspectors to detect the problem and ensure it was remediated. According to the Times, "inspection reports on the Peanut Corporation of America plant over the last three years show that state inspectors — Georgia has only 60 agents to monitor 16,000 food-handling businesses — missed major problems that workers say were chronic."

This is what happens when our elected leaders worship at the altar of the unfettered market and let even the most thoughtful, minimal government oversight wither away like late-autumn wildflowers. Upton Sinclair's Gilded Age novel The Jungle comes to mind. 

It's absolutely true that government intervention with the free market can have disastrous, often unintended, effects. I have written of these effects in the past on this blog. But left entirely to its own devices, the free market will by definition infringe upon the common good. Small, thoughtful, doses of government oversight — especially such basic public health protections as clean food regulations and inspections — are absolutely essential to preserve our capitalist, democratic republic.

"I Screwed Up"

"I screwed up."

With that simple, active, declarative statement, President Obama turned the page on too many years of childish irresponsibility in the White House. 

Obama uttered these words when asked why he nominated Tom Daschle to be Secretary of Health and Human Services despite his past troubles with the Internal Revenue Service. There was no Bushian frown and denial to think of even one small mistake made in office. No Clintonian parsing ("it depends on what the definition of is is"). And none of the passive voice that has so often characterized presidential non-mea culpas ("mistakes were made"). The President owned up to his mistake like a grown-up. 

The last two overgrown teenagers who inhabited the White House would never have let slip with such a phrase in public. Their refusal to own up to mistakes and shortcomings cast a shadow of immaturity over our entire culture, much to our detriment. 

Whether we approve or disapprove of his policies and the job he's doing so far (and I have to say that I am not at all thrilled with the current status of the fiscal stimulus plan, but that is a matter for another post), I hope we all can agree that it's very refreshing and gratifying to once again have a president who levels with the citizens he serves. Hopefully he will inspire a similar wave of personal responsibility in a culture that has for too long failed to acknowledge the consequences of individual actions. 

Obama Opens Lady Liberty's Raincoat

With his first act in office yesterday, President Obama struck a righteous blow against the perversion of our great country's founding principles.

A quick summary, from today's New York Times:

The new president effectively reversed a post-9/11 Bush administration policy making it easier for government agencies to deny requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act, and effectively repealed a Bush executive order that allowed former presidents or their heirs to claim executive privilege in an effort to keep records secret.

“Starting today,” Mr. Obama said, “every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known.”

All citizens, regardless of political persuasion, should be proud of this action. In a constitutional republic such as ours — where the people and the rule of law are sovereign, and not kings, generalissimos or fuhrers — we elect representatives to do our business. And we possess the solemn right to know about how that business is being conducted. 

To be sure, there are extremely rare instances when the public's right to know is outweighed by some other factor, most often the threat that disclosure would compromise national security. But the danger of such an exception is the temptation to invoke it unnecessarily. For our nation to thrive, all government information and records should be deemed public by default, and the burden put on our leaders to prove otherwise. Too often during the past eight years that guiding principle has been turned on its head. 

I've said it many times on this blog but it cannot be repeated enough: all elected and appointed government officials, from the president down to the lowliest municipal grunt, work for us. Our duty as citizens is to insist that they behave accordingly, and exercise our power to punish them when they don't. 

More Trouble for Charlie Rangel

The New York Times' David Kocieniewski continues to do a bang-up job of exposing Charlie Rangel as a scoundrel who is not worthy of representing the good people of Harlem. 

First, Kocieniewski reported that Rangel had exploited connections to a wealthy real-estate developer to secure a rent-stabilized home comprised of four separate apartments, one of which he used as a campaign office, in violation of state rules. Then Rangel claimed to have lost track of back taxes owed on a luxury Dominican villa because he couldn't speak Spanish. More recently he all but shook down the chairman of Nabors Industries for a $1 million contribution to the planned Rangel School of Public Service at the City University of New York, and conveniently changed his position on legislation that permitted Nabors to move its headquarters offshore and avoid paying US income taxes. 

Now, Kocieniewski reveals that Rangel lobbied recently bailed-out financial colossus American International Group for a huge donation to the Rangel School before supporting legislation that would save AIG millions a year in taxes. Oh yeah, and Rangel lied about AIG having any business before his House Ways and Means Committee when news of the AIG donation first broke in the Washington Post. 

Smells rotten, Charlie. Really rotten. Hear that? It's the sound of Democratic primary challengers getting their papers in order. It's a sweet sound.

Happy New Year from Citizen

Only 19 more days...

Citizen to the New York Times: You're Fired

Yesterday I did something I thought I'd never do. I cancelled my subscription to the New York Times.

I've been a regular, satisfied Times reader for about 15 of my 36 years. Some think the publication is biased. I'll leave that debate for another post, except to say that all news outlets have unavoidable biases of which all citizens must be mindful. I love the Times because it covers the world in a way few other publications are willing or able to: with outstanding journalists who can think and report as well as they write. From US politics to foreign affairs, sports, literature and the arts, the Times extracts previously unavailable information, presents it smartly and analyzes it in depth.

So why am I canceling my subscription?

One simple reason: I no longer care to read the printed newspaper. Between my desktop computers at work and home, a laptop and an iPhone, I can read everything that's in the folded-broadsheet version of the Times and then some — including some good blogs and other web-only content produced by Times journalists. And I can do that without paying for a subscription to the print edition. Given the choice between a bulky newspaper that must be carried around, stored and recycled (and which costs money to buy) and a free, ultra-portable and more comprehensive publication, it's pretty easy to make up one's mind.

But for me, this wasn't a purely rational, Adam Smith-style economic decision. Before switching careers about a year ago to work on Wall Street, I spent 13 immensely rewarding years as a print journalist. I started at a newspaper, a small daily in a rust-belt city outside of New York, before moving into financial journalism as a writer and editor, first for weekly trade newsletters and then a monthly glossy magazine. I didn't always like the work, particularly near the end, but I loved the craft of print journalism and the role it played in the world. I loved the thrill of getting a scoop, the buzz and the colorful characters in a newsroom. I loved seeing my byline in print and getting phone calls from readers (even the angry ones). I loved meeting new people and learning about new things every day. I loved helping people learn about the world and being a watchdog for citizens. I loved newspapers. Even when I no longer wrote for one, I read them religiously: the Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Financial Times.

Still, I couldn't ignore the power of the Rational Economic Man inside me. And a few months ago I took the first step toward a life without newspapers. First, the Journal print subscription went. Then the Times on weekdays. No more trekking down my front walk in the bleary predawn to fetch the papers before heading to the train station. No more stuffing them in my briefcase and struggling to read them while sandwiched between ornery commuters in packed rail cars. No more watching them fill my recycling bins and dreading the stacking, tying and hauling out to the curb every two weeks. On my morning train my iPhone delivered e-mail alerts with all the headlines from each day's Journal, and the New York Times iPhone application let me read everything I would have read in the print edition and more — all on a palm-sized device.

My reading experience had improved. My pocketbook had gotten bigger. My life had grown simpler. Nothing was stopping me from going all the way and cutting out the gargantuan Saturday and Sunday Times print editions.

So now I am newspaperless, and I think I am happy. My only concern is for the future of the news.

Putting out a first-rate newspaper is not cheap. Most importantly, the companies that own newspapers need to pay the salaries of skilled journalists who know how to extract information from reticent sources, recognize what's news and what isn't, put it into the proper context and packaging, and convey it with clear, powerful writing. If I don't pay for it, and you don't pay for it, and our kids don't pay for it, who will? And if no one does, will it cease to exist?

When I called to cancel my subscription the operator practically pleaded with me to stay on, offering all manner of discounts and trial periods. I just didn't want the actual paper showing up at my door anymore. But I'd pay to read it online, provided the price wasn't exorbitant. Unfortunately for the Times, it does not offer such an option.

Because its website is free, the Times is in a worse position than other publications, such as the Journal and the FT, which require online subscriptions. Most newspaper revenue comes from advertising, but subscriptions provide a nice cushion of about 10-15% of revenues. That cushion used to be stable. Now it is disappearing. And advertising is not necessarily as plentiful and profitable for publishers on the Web as it is in print. Advertisers can take advantage of technologies, developed by companies such as Google, that target ads to certain Web users by placing them on blogs and other niche destinations instead of on general news sites.

I don't know what the answer to this problem is. But I know that it's a problem. We need a healthy, aggressive press for our democracy to function properly. And for too long, trends in our society have made the news media sicker and softer. Perhaps non-profit groups like ProPublica, which operates a fantastic investigative reporting site, provide an example of what the future might look like. Until that new model develops, citizens have little choice but to seek the best available information, wherever it resides — on paper or online.