Archive for June 2009

Limits of central government

June 28, 2009

Standard theory views government as functional: a social need arises, and government, semi-automatically, springs up to fill that need. (see Murray Rothbard) Furthermore, and this is always true, whether or not the “need” is satisfactorily met by government action, the newly hired government employees will be the first (and sometimes the only ones) to benefit from the government expenditure.

We ought always to be clear on what part of government monies (taken of course by taxation from the people) goes to government employees and what part actually reaches the people, structures, programs in need of that funding. We ought to be told upfront what part of the dollar will go to administering the new programs.

The apparent needs for government actions are myriad. The problem is to decide which ones should become the government’s responsibility, and which ones not. And among them all what are those that may best be met by government expenditures? Roads and bridges, certainly. These may be the best examples of appropriate government actions. The expenditures probably do by and large represent the cost of the bridge itself, as well as that of the non-governmental bridge workers.

What are the needs of the people that are worst met by government expenditures? Probably all those falling under the headings of health, education, and human services. And in fact along with defense spending these three represent the largest part of the federal budget.

These programs employ government workers in the tens/hundreds of thousands, are consequently very expensive, and pretty much fail to satisfactorily meet the health, educational, and job needs of the people. And these programs continue to expand and grow.

Is there another solution? It may very well be that health, educational, and other such services are best met on the local level, where the givers (the teachers,  doctors, and social workers) and the recipients (the students, the patients, and the broken families) are all members of the same community, and have therefore perhaps the best chance of becoming more responsible to themselves and to ne another, less in need of central government services. Wasn’t this how it once was?

But this is not happening. Instead, as central government roles have increased so have the responsibilities of the individuals, the families, the local communities decreased. And as a result the movement of the government programs and government dollars into an area of need accomplishes little by itself. Learning to read, for example, becoming ready to take and hold a job, being a father to one’s child, not trying drugs and going to prison, all these goals remain out of reach.

Mortimer Adler on Multiculturalism

June 28, 2009

“The world, certainly, is multicultural, and so we should be taught about its cultural diversity. But this, it seems to me, is the time to ask whether society as a whole or its educational institutions should be multicultural in all respects, or only in some.

If only in some, I propose that the word transculturalism should be employed for those respects in which multiculturalism or cultural pluralism should not be safeguarded or promoted….

For example, Chicago is multicultural in its restaurants but not in its hardware stores. A ruler or tape measure, in centimeters or inches, does not differ from one ethnically special neighborhood to another; nor does the candlepower of a light bulb and the difference between direct and alternating electric current.

There …are differences in French, Italian, Japanese, and Thai cuisines. Clocks and calendars are the same in all sections of the city. They are the same everywhere in the world.”
(To read Mortimer Adler’s full account go HERE)

Adler is correct about this (and, in my opinion, about most things). For there is a fundamental and substantial sameness in the lives of men, including not only the measures we take of the sizes of things, but also the values we give them. It is this sameness that we ought to be promoting in all our contacts, not only with our neighbors of differing ethnic and national origins at home, but also abroad, throughout the world, in our encounters with people of other cultures and civilizations.

The answer to the multiculturalists is that sure, there are many cultures of equal worth, reflecting the myriad ways that men and women have dressed themselves up to meet the world and live their different lives.

But these differences are only skin deep. They do not extend into our hearts and minds, the two vital organs that most make us what we are and that under a microscope are indistinguishable among us.

Finally, the sharing of our thoughts and feelings, when we are free to do so, as in public in a liberal democracy, or as in private in a totalitarian society such as today in Iran or earlier about a kitchen table in the Soviet Union, far surpasses in significance the great differences of clothes, customs, language, and even beliefs, that the multiculturalists would use to draw us apart.

Khomeini/Khamenei, lest we forget

June 28, 2009

During the Iran-Iraq War, the Ayatollah Khomeini imported 500,000 small plastic keys from Taiwan. The trinkets were meant to be inspirational. After Iraq invaded in September 1980, it had quickly become clear that Iran’s forces were no match for Saddam Hussein’s professional, well-armed military. To compensate for their disadvantage, Khomeini sent Iranian children, some as young as twelve years old, to the front lines. There, they marched in formation across minefields toward the enemy, clearing a path with their bodies. Before every mission, one of the Taiwanese keys would be hung around each child’s neck. It was supposed to open the gates to paradise for them.
(from Matthias Küntzel, A CHILD OF THE REVOLUTION TAKES OVER,  Ahmadinejad’s Demons, TNR, 4/24/06)

Liberalism

June 27, 2009

It’s much, much older than we thought. It doesn’t date to our own FDR nearly 100 years ago, nor to Rousseau, Voltaire and the other liberal thinkers of the French Enlightenment in the 18th. century, nor to John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and his three Letters on Toleration, published between 1689 and 1692. In fact, it’s as old as… well, agriculture. See here the Prospect Magazine article by Paul Seabright.

“How old is political liberalism? Here is a surprising answer: it is not a few hundred years old, but 10,000 years old…..Its roots are to be found not in capitalism but in agriculture, in that remarkable 10,000-year-old revolution that led modern man, independently in many different parts of the world, to give up the hunting and gathering life and to found farms, villages and eventually cities. That change had a radical consequence: human beings had to learn to live and to trade with strangers for the first time. By an intriguing paradox, globalisation began when man became sedentary – for settled communities cannot hope to avoid all contact with outsiders by melting into the forest.

Men are born free and sheep are born carnivorous

June 26, 2009

The forcing of freedom on others may or may not have begun with the French Revolution. But it’s been going on ever since. George Bush made it the highlight of his presidency and never seemed to understand that it couldn’t be done.

Why, he would say to himself, doesn’t everyone want to be free? Well no, not everyone does want to be free. We just saw the truth of this again in Iran, when the people’s bonds were loosened a bit, but only to be tightened again, almost without their opposition, just a few days later.

Rousseau’s statement, that “Man is born free, but everywhere is found enslaved and in chains” is well known. Not so well known is this statement by the French writer and diplomat, Joseph de Maistre, who unlike Rousseau lived to experience the Revolution:

“It would be equally correct [Jean-Jacques] to say that sheep are born carnivorous and everywhere eat grass.”

In Iran, the old man and the people

June 25, 2009

James Coleman in a passage written for The Public Interest, some 32 years ago, well before the Shah’s overthrow and the ascendancy of the Ayatollah Khomeini, had this to say while discussing John Rawls’s and Robert Nozick’s widely different ideas on inequality:

Whereas for Rawls, a central authority is entitled to distribute the fruits of everyone’s labor, for Nozick, only the individual is entitled to the fruits of his own labor, and he has full rights to the use and disposal of them.

This idea contains the essence of what still most divides the world, and also our nation. Today in Tehran the protesters are sensing, perhaps for the first time for they are all young, the median age of Iranians being some 25 years, that the fruits of their labors ought to be theirs.

The central authority, an old man with beard and black turban, senses, indeed knows well that if he doesn’t do something he risks losing everything. So out into he streets he sends his hired thugs to beat down the protesters that they become docile and once again return to doing what they’re told to do.

So far he is successful. Today things are calm in Tehran and the fruits of the labors of the protesters are not within their grasp. The old man is again determining just how best he and his henchmen should distribute the fruits of everyone’s labor.

Did John Rawls not recognize that justice, let alone equality could never spring from a central authority? Did he not recognize that all fruits came from individual trees. As in our garden, so in our nation the very best we can do is to help individuals to flower and to produce.

If the old man looked about him he would see that his country was poor, and that no riches would ever arise from the central authority’s, his, oppression of the people. While equality of possessions among the citizens of Iran may never have been his goal, equality of behavior, in particular of obedience to him, was. And now he is confronted by the dismal fruits of his own labor.

Why were these ideas of James Coleman, written down in the Public Interest in the Fall of 1967, allowed to die?

June 23, 2009

Toward Open Schools

by JAMES S. COLEMAN

Since the publication, in July, 1966, of the Office of Education’s report to Congress and the President on “Equality of Educational Opportunity,” there has been much speculation and discussion concerning the policy implications of the report. The report itself, which focused principally on inequalities experienced by Negroes and other racial and ethnic minorities, contained only research results, not policy recommendations. Indeed, if recommendations bad been requested, they could hardly have been given – for the facts themselves point to no obvious solution.

In some part, the difficulties and complexity of any solution derive from the premise that our society is committed to overcoming, not merely inequalities in the distribution of educational resources (classrooms, teachers, libraries, etc.), but inequalities in the oppor-tunity for educational achievement. This is a task far more ambitious than has ever been attempted by any society: – not just to offer, in a passive way equal access to educational resources, but to provide an educational environment that will free a child’s potentialities for learning from the inequalities imposed upon him by the accident of birth into one or another home and social environment.

The difficulty that attends this task can be seen by confronting some of the results published in the report with one another. First, the inequality in results of elementary and secondary schooling for different ethnic groups, as measured by standardized tests, is very large for Negroes, Puerto Ricans, American Indians, and Mexican Americans. At the beginning of the twelfth grade, these groups were, on the average, three, four, or five grade levels behind whites in reading comprehension, and four, five, or six grade levels behind in mathematics achievement. Second, the evidence revealed that within broad geographic regions, and for each racial or ethnic group, the physical and economic resources going into a school had very little relation to the achievement coming out of it. This was perhaps the most surprising result to some persons: that variations in teacher salaries, library facilities, laboratories, school size, guidance facilities had little relation to student achievement – when the family backgrounds of the students were roughly equated. Such equating of background is necessary because, within each racial or ethnic group, the factor that showed the clearest relation to a child’s achievement was his home background — the educational and economic resources provided within his home.

This pair of results taken together — the serious differences in educational output and their lack of relation to differences in the input of conventional educational facilities – create the complexity of the problem. For if it were otherwise, we could give simple prescriptions: increase teachers’ salaries, lower classroom size, enlarge libraries, and so on. But the evidence does not allow such simple answers.

Heterogeneity and achievement

Another finding of the survey does give some indication of how different schools have different effects. The finding is that students do better when they are in schools where their fellow students come from backgrounds strong in educational motivation and resources. The results might be paraphrased by the statement that the educational resources provided by a child’s fellow students are more important for his achievement than are the resources provided by the school board. This effect appears to be particularly great for students who themselves come from educationally-deprived backgrounds. For example, it is about twice as great for Negroes as for whites.

Reconstructing the environment

I suggest that the matter may be better dealt with by inquiring more fully into the question of how a child’s achievement is affected by, the educational resources brought to school by other children. The evidence on this matter is not strong, but it is suggestive.

It is, for instance, a simple fact that the teacher cannot teach beyond the level of the most advanced students in the class, and cannot easily demand performance beyond that level, Thus, a comparison of Negro students (having similar family backgrounds) in lower class and largely segregated schools with those in middle class and often integrated schools shows that the former get higher grades than the latter, but their performance on standardized tests is lower. The student in a lower class school is being rewarded more highly for lower performance – not as much can be demanded of him.

It is also clear that going to school with other children whose vocabulary is larger than one’s own demands and creates a larger vocabulary. Sitting next to a child who is performing at a high level provides a challenge to better performance. The psychological environment may be less comfortable for a lower class child (and there is some evidence that it is), but be learns more.

In short, there is some indication that these middle class schools have their effects through providing a social environment that is more demanding and more stimulating. And once we consider this, we realize that integration is not the only means, nor even necessarily the most efficient means, for increasing lower-class achievement. There may be other and better ways of creating such an environment

For whatever the benefits of integration, it is also true that even in socially or racially integrated schools a child’s family background shows a very high relation to his performance. The findings of the Report are quite unambiguous on this score. Even if the school is integrated, the heterogeneity of backgrounds with which children enter school is largely preserved in the heterogeneity of their performance when they finish. As the Report indicates, integration provides benefits to the underprivileged. But it takes only a small step toward equality of educational opportunity.

Thus a more intense reconstruction of the child’s social environment than that provided by school integration is necessary to remove the handicap of a poor family background. It is such reconstruction that is important — whether it be provided through other children, through tutorial programs, through artificial environments created by computer consoles, or by some other means. The goal of increasing lower-class Negro achievement may be affected through a wide variety of means, which reconstruct a child’s social and intellectual environment in any of several ways.

But if we recognize that racial and class integration does not in itself provide a full enough reconstruction of the environment, what happens then to the goal of racial integration in the schools? If more efficient methods for increasing achievement are found, as is likely to be the case, does this imply abandonment of attempts to overcome de facto segregation?

To answer this question requires a full recognition that there are two separable goals involved in current discussions for reorganizing schools. The aim of racial integration of our schools should be recognized as distinct from the aim of providing equal opportunity for educational performance. To confound these two aims impedes the achievement of either. It is important to know, as the Office of Education survey shows, that integration aids equality of educational opportunity; that white children perform no less well in a school with a large minority of Negroes than in an all-white middle class school; that Negro students perform somewhat better in such a school than in a predominantly Negro lower class school. Conversely, of course, greater equality of performance facilitates integration, making “grouping” or “tracking” within schools unnecessary. But integration is important to both white and Negro children principally for other reasons. We are committed to becoming a truly multiracial society. Yet most white children grow up having no conception of Negroes as individuals, and thus develop wholly unnatural and am-bivalent reactions to Negroes as a group; most Negro children are in a similar circumstance. All educational policies must recognize the legitimacy and importance of the aim of racial integration. But we should not confound it with the aim of increasing equality of educational performance. Thus the proposals I shall make, though they stem from a single overall principle for reorganizing our schools, are directed to these two goals as separable goals.

From closed to open schools

The general principle underlying the proposals may be described as the transformation of schools from closed institutions to open ones – the creation of “open schools.”

The general idea is to conceive of the school very differently from the way we have done in the past — not as a building into which a child vanishes in the morning and from which lie emerges in the afternoon, but as a “home base” that carries out some teaching functions but which serves principally to coordinate his activities and to perform guidance and testing functions. The specific ways of “opening up” the schools are indicated below.

The essential aims of the elementary school, if the opportunity for further learning is not to be blocked, are the learning of only two things: reading and arithmetic. It is in teaching these basic skills that present schools most often fail for lower class children, and thus handicap them for further learning. Many new methods for teaching these subjects have been developed in recent years; and there is much interest of persons outside the schools in helping to solve the problem; yet the school is trapped by its own organizational weight — innovations cannot be lightly adopted by a massive educational system, and local arrangements that use community resources outside the school cannot easily be fitted into the school’s organization.

In an open school, the teaching of elementary-level reading and arithmetic would be opened up to entrepreneurs outside the school, under contract with the school system to teach only reading or only arithmetic, and paid on the basis of increased performance by the child on standardized tests. The methods used by such contractors may only be surmised; the successful ones would presumably involve massive restructuring of the verbal or mathematical environment. The methods might range from new phonetic systems for teaching reading or new methods for teaching numerical problem-solving to locally sponsored tutorial programs or the use of new technological aids such as talking typewriters and computer consoles. The payment-by–results would quickly eliminate the unsuccessful contractors, and the contractors would provide testing grounds for innovations that could subsequently be used by the school.

One important element that this would introduce into schools is the possibility of parental choice. Each parent would have the choice of sending his child to any of the reading or arithmetic programs outside the school, on released time, or leaving him wholly within the school to learn his reading and arithmetic there. The school would find it necessary to compete with the system’s external contractors to provide better education, and the parent could, for the first time in education, have the full privileges of consumer’s choice.

One simple control would be necessary to insure that this did not lead to re-segregation of the school along racial or class lines; no contractor could accept from any one school a higher proportion of whites than existed in that school, nor a higher proportion of students whose parents were above a certain educational level than existed in the school.

This means of opening up the school, through released time, private contractors, payment by results, and free choice for the consumer, could be easily extended to specific core subjects in high school. It should be a potentially profitable activity to the contractor, but with the profitability wholly contingent upon results, so that the incentives of these teachers and educational entrepreneurs are tied wholly to improving a child’s achievement beyond the level that would otherwise be expected of him.

The use of released time and private contracts would be diversified in later years of school, so that a potential contractor could apply for a contract in any of a wide range of subjects, some taught within the school, but others not. The many post-high school business and technical schools that now exist would be potential contractors, but always with the public school establishing the criteria for achievement, and testing the results.

It would still remain the case that the child would stay within the school for much of his time; and in those schools that stood up well to the competition, most children would choose to take all their work in the school. At the same time, some schools might lose most of their teaching functions — if they did not deserve to keep them.

A second major means of opening up the school is directed wholly at the problem of racial and class integration, just as the first is directed wholly at the problem of achievement. The school would be opened up through intensifying the interactions between students who have different home-base schools. To create integrated schools in large urban centers becomes almost impossible; but to bring about social integration through schools is not. Again, the point is to discard the idea of the school as a closed institution, and think of it as a base of operations. Thus, rather than having classes scheduled in the school throughout the year, some classes would be scheduled with children from other schools, sometimes in their own school, sometimes in the other — but deliberately designed to establish continuing relationships between children across racial and social class lines. Certain extra curricular activities can be organized on a cross-school basis, arranged to fit with the cross-school class schedules. Thus children from different home base schools would not be competing against each other, but would be members of the same team or club. An intensified program of interscholastic activities, including debates and academic competitions as well as sports events, could achieve the aims of social integration — possibly not as fully as in the best integrated schools, but also possibly even more so — and certainly more so than in many integrated schools.

This second means of opening up the school could in part be accomplished through outside organizations acting as contractors, in somewhat the same way as the reading and mathematics contractors described earlier. Community organizations could design specific cultural enrichment programs or community action programs involving students from several schools of different racial or class composition, with students engaging in such programs by their own or parent’s choice. Thus, resources that exist outside the school could come to play an increasing part in education, through contracts with the schools. Some such programs might be community improvement activities, in which white and Negro high school students learn simultaneously to work together and to aid the community. But the essential element in such programs is that they should not be carried out by the school, in which case they would quickly die after the first enthusiasm had gone, but be undertaken by outside groups under contract to the school, and with the free choice of parent or child.

A widening of horizons

The idea of opening up the school, of conceiving of the home school as a center of operations, while it can aid the two goals of performance and integration described above, is much more than an ad hoc device for accomplishing these goals. It allows the parent what he has never had within the public school system: a freedom of choice as a consumer, as well as the opportunity to help establish special purpose programs, clinics and centers to beat the school at its own game. It allows educational innovations the opportunity to prove themselves, insofar as they can attract and hold students. The contract centers provide the school with a source of innovation as well as a source of competition to measure its own efforts, neither of which it has had in the past. The inter-school scheduling and inter-scholastic academic events widen horizons of both teachers and children, and provide a means of diffusing both the techniques and content of education, a means which is not possible so long as a school is a closed institution.

A still further problem that has always confronted public education, and has become intense in New York recently, is the issue of parental control versus control by the educational bureaucracy. This issue is ordinarily seen as one of legitimacy: how far is it legitimate for parents to exert organized influence over school policies? But the issue need not be seen this way. The public educational system is a monopoly, and such issues of control always arise in monopolies, where consumers lack a free choice. As consumers, they have a legitimate interest in what that monopoly offers them, and can only exercise this interest through organized power. But such issues do not arise where the consumer can implement his interest through the exercise of free choice between competing offerings. Until now, this exercise of choice has only been available for those who could afford to buy education outside the public schools.

It is especially appropriate and necessary that such an opening up of schools occur in a period when the interest of all society has become focused on the schools. The time is past when society as a whole, parents as individuals, and interested groups outside the school were willing to leave the task of education wholly to the public education system, to watch children vanish into the school in the morning and emerge from it in the afternoon, without being able to affect what goes on behind the school doors.

The office of Education report on “Equality of Educational Opportunity,” popularly known as “the Coleman Report,” has received extraordinary publicity; its findings on the school experiences of Negro children have been intensively studied and widely debated. Mr. Coleman wrote a first summary of his findings in THE PUBLIC INTEREST, No. 4, Summer 1966. Here he returns to discuss some of the implications of the report and of its reception. – Eds. (more…)

“Costs are keeping patients from care.”

June 21, 2009

In today’s Boston Globe I read that “Costs are keeping patients from care.”

Think about it. I’m certain that you would never see headlines like the following: “costs are keeping drivers from cars,” or “costs are keeping buyers from houses.” So what’s the difference between buying medical care and, say, buying shelter or transportation, or clothes? Clothes do keep you warm in the winter. Cost shouldn’t be a factor in the one, but should be in the other?

It would seem that the reporters who report and write this way hold, perhaps not consciously, to the so-called Second Bill of Rights. Cass Sunstein in an otherwise excellent piece written for a collection of articles, “What We Do Now,” following what was for him and the other writers, the disastrous presidential election of 2004, had this to say:

Roosevelt argued in his State of the Union address of 1944 that security means not only physical security, but also includes economic, social, and moral security. …[Roosevelt] had accepted a ‘second bill of rights.’ Such things as right to a good job, a decent home, health care, and education…. Government has a final responsibility for the well-being of its citizenship.

Is the Globe reporter arguing that the people’s right to health care is being interfered with, is being blocked by the costs of such things as co-payments and deductibles? In any case, as she tells us, “state lawmakers have scheduled a hearing… [to consider] a proposal to allow residents with chronic illnesses to buy prescribed medications and medical devices without facing a co-payment or deductible.”

But the real issue behind all this is the skyrocketing cost of medical care. Food, clothing, and shelter costs are being kept more or less in line with ability to pay. Health Care costs are not. They now represent what, 15, 20% of the GNP? Co-payments and deductibles are just one, not unreasonable, attempt to meet some of these costs, to place some of the excessive cost burden on the person receiving the care.

What if the costs of transportation suddenly started to skyrocket? Would the Globe write about the costs keeping drivers from cars with the clear implication that driver subsidies were necessary? Perhaps, but that’s not what’s happening. Also, transportation is not yet included in the Second Bill of Rights.

As far back as 1994 a Cato Institute paper by Stan Liebowitz said, I think convincingly, that “the major culprit in the seemingly endless rise in health care costs is found to be the removal of the patient as a major participant in the financial and medical choices that are currently being made by others in the name of the patient.” The fact that transportation costs are still within reason may very well be attributed to the fact that the major participant in transportation choices is still the driver and owner.

The principal thrust of the Globe article is that the patient’s participation in “financial and medical choices” is keeping him from obtaining needed care. For his/her expenses are so high, in the form of co-payments, deductibles etc., that he/she decides not to pursue the visit, treatment, or drug purchase. Although the article doesn’t mention the fact that without this cost conscious behavior on the patient’s part health care costs would skyrocket even higher.

Health care is really all about the costs (as is most everything else —it’s just that these costs are rising much too rapidly). While we more and more seem to be able to pay for clean air and clean water, and by and large individuals do seem to be able to purchase in the way of food, clothing, transportation, and shelter what they need, more and more the costs of available medical treatments go well beyond the ability of most to pay for them.

Whereas cars still perform a simple function of getting us from here to there the myriad kinds of medical care become more complex, more and more difficult to enumerate, let alone pay for. And more important medicine promises things vital to our lives. And as a result it becomes harder and harder to separate, given what is promised and available, what we want from what we need, let alone from what we should have and in some mysterious manner deserve.

Health care really is a horse of a different color. Probably because without it people’s very lives are threatened. We can live simply and well in regard to most everything else. But health care promises to enable us to live well and longer. Furthermore, isn’t it the government that is supposed to protect its citizens? Well yes, but not perhaps if the costs of that protection cannot be met. At the moment we seem unable to meet these costs, and here’s the rub, we don’t know how to meet them.

Multiple payers as we have at present? This system is simply not working for everyone. A single payer system as in France or Canada? Apparently too costly. Too costly because of the medical treatments that are available, and that given the availability are not easily rationed, or given to some (the affluent) and not to others (the poor). All treatments given to all regardless of ability to pay would probably bankrupt the country.

Patients must to some important degree, just as now they decide what to buy in the way of cars, homes, and clothes, decide the care they can afford for themselves. Only those who could afford little of what we would define as essential care would be eligible for health care subsidies. Only in this way would the costs become manageable.

But as it is now our politicians would make health care comparable to that received by the members of Congress available to all. How would they pay for it? By tax revenues? Not possible. In regard to health care what people will demand as their “right” will always come at a greater cost than society can afford.

In Iran, would that it were history in the making.

June 19, 2009

What is it about Iran that I, and probably most Americans who read and follow the international news, find so fascinating about that country? Right now it’s the struggle, a death struggle for some, between the Iranian people and their Iranian oppressors. And the latter, for the moment anyway, hold all the clubs. David and Goliath.

But for me the fascination lies no less in the faces I see daily in the news. The Iranians are a handsome people, clearly intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, and as you look at the pictures coming out of Iran during the current struggle you just know that this people doesn’t want to be led, and that they won’t be led except, as in the present instance, by brute force. And you hope for them, and for the world, that those wielding the clubs will disappear.

Iranian-women-activists

However, brute force, embodied at this moment by that fierce and unenlightened little boy-man Ahmadinejad, in the service of the supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, is what the Iranian people, now and again, find themselves up against. And up until now there seems to be no way the people can continue their struggle other than by going into hiding, and if they don’t, no way to avoid being knocked down and bloodied by Ahmadinejad’s henchmen, the Basijis.

The Basijis are vigilantes, not too different from Hitler’s Sturmabteilung, the brown-shirted thugs in Hitler’s pay who were used by Hitler to quash his rivals. Not too different from Ahmadinejad and his ruling clique who send their henchmen, the Basijis, out during the night when they cannot be easily seen, to beat, loot, and sometimes even gun down the individuals protesting Ahmadinejad’s authoritarian hold on power.

vigilantes2

Helas, we cry. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Iran, the inheritor of a long and splendid history, an inheritance now totally rejected by its present rulers who would with clubs return the people to the darkest moments of their past. A freer if not free way of life was supposed to follow the Shah’s flight just 30 years ago. It didn’t happen, and doesn’t seem about to happen now.

Instead the 1979 revolutionaries are still in power. The country is still ruled by the Supreme Leader, the Ayotollah Khamenei, the successor to the Ayatollah Khomeini, along with the now barbaric remnant of the original Revolutionary Guards from which comes Ahmadinejad himself.

During the 30 years since the Shah’s overthrow the people of Iran have greatly evolved and now resemble in their modernity their peers in Western Europe and the United States. These people clearly want now to be part of the modern and developed world. But their narrow, fanatical, and authoritarian leaders, as if sensing there would be no place for them if they were to join the developed world, have remained much as they were when as followers of their leader, Khomeini, they overthrew the Shah.

At this very moment we are transfixed by the spectacle of Iran, by the street demonstrations carried out by the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who, much like us, want simply to live in greater freedom, be guaranteed by their rulers more opportunities and more choices. We await with dread the next fall of the club wielded by the Basiji thugs, in the employ of the country’s autocratic rulers, onto the heads and backs of the people.

Take refuge by listening to opera

June 10, 2009

President Obama has just appointed a “Compensation Czar” whose job it will be to determine the salaries and bonuses of some of the top executives in America, including Kenneth D. Lewis, the chief executive of Bank of America, Vikram S. Pandit, the head of Citigroup, and Fritz Henderson, the chief executive of General Motors, all three now in good part owned by the US government.

The President’s (actually, that of the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner,  who didn’t want the job) appointee is a well-known Washington lawyer, Kenneth R. Feinberg.

feinberg

And as we read in today’s NYTimes article:

“Mr. Feinberg became a nationally known figure after he was assigned by the Bush administration to help settle possible lawsuits by the families of victims of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. His job was to put a value [yes] on the lives of the victims [!] and offer government settlements to avoid lawsuits.

“Mr. Feinberg met with many of the families and spoke around the country about how intellectually challenging and emotionally difficult the assignment became.

“Feinberg often sought refuge by cloistering himself in a room in his home to listen to his extensive opera collection.”

It is comforting that the Czar listens to opera. At least for me anyway, for I too turn to opera in highly stressful situations. I’m with him in this. I wonder how the reporter learned about it. Did Mr. Feinberg himself make the listening habit known?

In any case the reporter did recognize just how nicely this tidbit of information fit into what otherwise risked to be a cold and unsettling fact, Geithner’s  (Obama’s) decision to have Feinberg, now in the role of a government bureaucrat, telling us (a few of us anyway), although not yet such things as what we could wear or where we could live, but awfully close, what we could earn.

For later and considerably more information on this same subject go to: Jim Kuhnhenn (6/11/09) and Nocera (6/13/09). The bottom line that Geithner and now Feinberg seem to be struggling with is that somehow executives shouldn’t be rewarded for taking imprudent risks resulting in significant losses to shareholders and the public at large.


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