Archive for August 2009

Teddy Kennedy: bowls of mocha chip, James Bond, and an afterlife reunion with his brothers

August 27, 2009

I cite below just a few paragraphs from Mark Leibovich’s  After Diagnosis, Determined to Make a ‘Good Ending.’ Other than the reunion in the next life the description could be of my own father who shared much, especially the ice cream and the crooning (maybe not the James Bond) with  Senator Kennedy.

And in fact my father and Teddy were friends in this life. Probably because, although at opposite ends of the political spectrum, they were both passionately  attached to making a better world for the little guy.

I knew Teddy when I played with him on the Harvard freshman football team in 1950, and again when he returned to Harvard following two years in the Army. At that time he was still pretty much the pretty boy.

Life hadn’t yet knocked him down. But when it had, and on more than one tragic occasion, especially at Chappaquiddick, when he himself was most at fault for what happened, he probably then reached the decision to dedicate his own work, and survival in the Senate, to making life better for those without any of his great life advantages. And he became the so-called liberal lion or icon.

“As recently as a few days ago, Mr. Kennedy was still digging into big bowls of mocha chip and butter crunch ice creams, all smushed together (as he liked it). He and his wife, Vicki, had been watching every James Bond movie and episode of “24” on DVD….

“He took phone calls from President Obama, house calls from his priest and — just a few weeks ago — crooned after-dinner duets of “You Are My Sunshine” (with his son Patrick) and “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” (with Vicki).

“Mr. Kennedy had told friends recently that he was looking forward to a “reunion” with his seven departed siblings, particularly his brothers, whose lives had been cut short.

“When he gets there, he can say ‘I did it, I carried the torch,’ ” Mr. Delahunt said. “ ‘I carried it all the way.’”

The real elephant or gorilla in the classroom, segregation

August 20, 2009

In February of 2006 David Berliner told the American Association of School Administrators Federal Relations luncheon that the 600 pound gorilla sitting in the nation’s classrooms and making it difficult (if not impossible) for schools to do their job was poverty.

Many, especially those on the political Left, believe this. These reformers would address the failure of many inner city public schools to educate by making available to the impoverished communities where these children live many more of the resources and advantages that suburban children generally enjoy naturally. In other words, these people say that if you would have poor children learn look first to eliminating the presence of poverty, that 600 pound gorilla in the classroom.

And there are others, those on the political Right, who see poverty, not as a reason, but as an excuse for not learning. These “no excuses” people (from the book, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, by Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom) affirm that proper classroom procedures and discipline, high expectations of students and teachers, accountability etc. can assure that learning will take place no matter the gorilla’s presence.

And of course there are those who would do both, eliminate the impoverished and disadvantaged living conditions that the children bring with them to school, and also make high demands of the students and teachers in the classroom.

Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute has called for this approach, what he describes as a “Broader, Bolder Approach,” insisting that schools alone are not enough, that they need lots of help, such as better and expanded health care including family counseling services, schools for parents etc. as well as longer school days with afterschool programs, summer sessions for the students, and more and better early childhood initiatives.

But there is another elephant or 800 pound gorilla in the classroom, and no one is talking about this one. This is segregation which is back and in force. Too often our inner city classrooms are segregated in regard to both race and class. Even the best “no excuses” schools, the KIPP schools and others, those schools that are raising test scores and almost eliminating thereby the test score gap between inner city and suburban schools, mostly have students of a single skin color, black, and a single class, poor.

Once again, as in 1954, when in Brown vs. the Board of Education the Supreme Court ruled that Plessy vs. Ferguson was unconstitutional, that separate was not equal, we’re confronted with separate and “equal” schools. And this time there seems to be no solution, either in the courts or in the legislatures.

At that earlier time the solution was busing across the city. OK, that was doable, but busing across city lines into the suburbs? No way is that going to happen. The whites have fled to the suburbs and there are mostly only impoverished minority populations remaining in the cities. And it’s just not possible to integrate city schools when nearly all city school kids are of the same color or class.

Richard Kahlenberg has proposed enlarging the city school districts to include the suburbs, as in Wake County, NC, or in the single city, Cambridge, MA, that which would again enable integration to take place by busing. But the logistics of this, busing to the suburbs for example, are probably insurmountable, let alone the entrenched opposition of the suburban parents to allowing poor inner city children into their own children’s schools and classrooms.

KIPP Schools, and schools like KIPP seem the best we can do for the actual situation in our inner cities. But let no one mistake it, this situation is again, at best, separate and unequal. And the KIPP solution is in any case only for a relatively small number of students.

While KIPP schools are proposing that by 2012 there could be as many as 24,000 poor, mostly black students in their schools how many others are there out there, not reached by the “no excuses” schools? Depending on what poverty definition you use there are anywhere from 10 to 20 million children living in poverty.

As long as the school populations in our cities are poor and minority there is little chance that these children will ever profit from the great benefit of attending school with others who are significantly different from them in regard to both race and class, and from whom they might discover that the race and class into which they were born need not be their destiny, as too often it is for too many of them at the present time.

The “qualities” of the learners, that’s what it’s all about.

August 13, 2009

The passage just below is taken from the Considerations on Representative Government by John Stuart Mill. I found it in Peter Berkowitz’s Introduction to his book, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism.

“If we ask ourselves on what causes and conditions good government in all its senses, from the humblest to the most exalted, depends, we find that the principal of them, the one which transcends all others, is the qualities of the human beings composing the society over which the government is exercised.”

We might make a few changes to Mill’s words and write our version as follows:

“If we ask ourselves on what causes and conditions education in all its forms, from the humblest vocational classroom to the most accelerated advanced placement English or Molecular Biology lesson, depends, we find that the principal cause or condition, the one which transcends all the others, are the qualities of the learners comprising the student body on whom the education would take effect.”

When we talk about improving our public schools, when we talk about school reform as we seem to do endlessly, we should always begin with the students, the particular students of the particular school community intended to be the object of our reforms. But we don’t do this.

Instead, and much too often, we talk about all sorts of other things, the teachers, teaching certificates, teacher preparation, professional development and such. We talk about the curriculum, the schedule, the length of the classes and the school day. We talk about the physical condition of the school itself, about the peeling paint, the poor lighting, and we talk about the families and the neighborhoods where the students live when they are not in school.

Education to take effect has to begin, not with any of these things, but with the object of all our efforts, with the learner, in particular with Mill’s  “qualities,” with the interests and talents of the learner. And since these are not evenly distributed among the learners the learners or students will differ widely, in respect to them, among themselves.

But the root cause of most of our school problems doesn’t stem from the differences among our students, but from the fact that our schools and classrooms are not structured to take into account these differences. The teacher is reaching only a few of her students, at best, at any one time —the different levels of understanding among the students confronting her means that she loses the attention of most them most of the time.

Dropping out of school is a healthy response of a good number of those who are no longer listening. Remaining in school, but not paying attention, is more common.

Read any one of tens of thousands of school mission statements to see just how far our vision for the schools is removed from the reality of the students. Here is a typical statement from New Rochelle, NY:

“The mission of the New Rochelle School System is to produce responsible, self-sufficient citizens who possess the self-esteem, initiative, skills, and wisdom to continue individual growth, pursue knowledge, develop aesthetic sensibilities, and value cultural diversity by providing intellectually challenging educational programs that celebrate change but affirm tradition and promote excellence through an active partnership with the community, a comprehensive and responsive curriculum, and a dedicated and knowledgeable staff.”

It should be clear that the school mission statement is rarely, if ever, what the school, any school is all about. Yet we go on making these statements, and the students, too many of them in too many schools go on simply not listening to us, not paying attention to what the school leaders would have us believe is the school’s mission.

And there’s only one solution, and that’s to begin with the “qualities” of the “human beings,” with the talents and interests of the students, with the learners themselves.

Do we really want to replace NCLB?

August 12, 2009

In last week’s Ed Week, in a  Commentary article, Replacing No child Left Behind, Richard Rothstein writes:

“We all want better math and reading assessments. But we should also invest in better tests of history, sciences, and the arts, and develop tools to evaluate student behavior, judge a school’s disciplinary climate, see whether students know how to cooperate, and measure whether schools are enhancing physical fitness and appropriate health choices and habits.”

Although his proposal at first blush does seem reasonable — test or measure, not just the acquisition of math and reading skills, but all the variety of intellectual, personal, and interpersonal skill and knowledge acquisition, that, as we would readily admit, ought to be fully and equally represented in the learning environment of the school.

Also, it does seem to have happened, as Rothstein and others have been making clear, almost since the day that NCLB was enacted, that math and reading, because they are the only ones tested, are pushing to the side, or entirely out of the picture, music and the arts, history, social studies and the sciences, not to mention the whole gamut of important individual and community goals.

If a few activities have withstood the math and reading testing push, such as sports, theater, maybe some vocational pursuits, it’s because these activities were not in need of tests to give them importance in the eyes of the learner.

But while Rothstein’s diagnosis of the situation we now have with NCLB is accurate his prescription for improvement is totally unrealistic. What he suggests won’t happen. For to come up with accurate, reliable, objective tests of the kinds of things he mentions is prohibitively expensive, not to mention insuperably difficult to do.

If we’ve chosen to most of all test math and reading it’s not only because these are important subject matters, and in the case of reading if not of math, essential. But it’s also because we can do so objectively, and to most people’s satisfaction.

It might be possible to come up with objective history and science tests, but most likely the history and science tested would be facts, information, and we’d be testing only the student’s memory of those facts, not his or her understanding of them.

But the arts? The student’s behavior (in class, in the school corridor, outside of school?), the school’s disciplinary climate, and all the rest,  — “whether students know how to cooperate, and measure whether schools are enhancing physical fitness and appropriate health choices and habits.” Not a chance.

In regard to most of these things that Rothstein lists teachers, and parents even more so, will judge the same children in widely differing ways. There may be children of whom we could find general agreement about how well they cooperate etc. but this sort of agreement would be rare.

Furthermore, in regard to most of the things that Rothstein would like us to measure we would have to rely primarily on the teacher’s opinion, and this, of course, would reflect the particular values and interests of the teacher as much as the progress of the student.

There now is a baby, and the baby is NCLB, or the objective measure of math and reading skills. And while these skills are not all there is, or all that should be, a living baby is what we have and we shouldn’t risk losing it while discarding the admittedly dirty bath water. To clean that water, without threatening the baby, would be the way to go.

Eric Zencey: G.D.P. R.I.P.

August 10, 2009

It’s true that the value we give to things doesn’t represent something that we might want to call their “real value.” The best we’re able to do is come up with an appraisal, or market value, what they might be sold for. What is the real value of this country’s production? Is it GDP, or the measure of what gets made in the United States, no matter who makes it, or where it goes after it’s made?

Eric Zencey, a professor of historical and political studies at Empire State College, in an op ed piece in today’s Times, G.D.P. R.I.P., says that GDP is more correctly just a measure of gross domestic transactions (than output, or production, or value), and that it fails miserably to represent our economic reality.

Certainly it’s true, as he says, that GDP doesn’t include a good part of our productive wealth, such as all sorts of volunteer work, such as the huge volume of unpaid domestic services including housework, child rearing, do-it-yourself home improvement etc.

Nor, and this is commonly overlooked, does the GDP at all reflect the huge economic benefit that we get directly from nature. This, nature’s bounty, is as much, or more the wellspring of our country’s growth and development as the successive revolutions in agriculture, industry, information, and communication.

My wife has been telling me for years that clothes left out to dry in the sun is an economic benefit that goes uncounted. Whenever she’s had the opportunity to do so, as now in Tampa, she has never failed to put our clothes out in the sun. What value should we attach to this? Similarly, Zencey asks, what is, or was the real value of the natural services provided by the Louisiana bayous? Was it $82 billion, the cost of Katrina?

Perhaps worst of all the GDP doesn’t distinguish between items that are costs and items that are benefits. Zencey says we need a new, more accurate measure of our wealth production, perhaps something best called net economic welfare [N.E.W.].

Finally, Zencey’s summing up, “In 1934, the economist Simon Kuznets, in his very first report of national income to Congress, warned that ‘the welfare of a nation can … scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.’… [we need] an indicator that will tell us if we are really and truly gaining ground in the perennial struggle to improve the material conditions of our lives.”

Does Peace Have a Chance and Fayyadism

August 8, 2009

Encountered a number of ideas in my online reading today, some of them new, and some of them good, all interesting. Did I grow in understanding? Maybe.

A piece in Slate by John Horgan asks, “Does Peace Have a Chance?” And the answer is yes, at least more of a chance that ever before. The experts who study this sort of thing, we’re told, have determined that wars result more from cultural and environmental factors, than from man’s, supposedly, aggressive nature.

If true, and I’d like to believe it, that’s good news. For we can more readily influence our culture and environment than we can our nature. That also I’d like to believe, although too many of the world’s deeply entrenched problems continue to defy our attempts to solve them.

In any case many fewer people, percentage wise, are dying in wars today than in any other epoch, going back to the hunter-gatherer societies of 10,000 and more years ago when, according to the anthropologists, 12 -14% of deaths resulted from armed conflict.

Also, according to Horgan, the conflicts today are different. They have little resemblance to the trench warfare of World War One, or the devastation of cities by aireal bombardment in World War Two. Instead they “consist of guerrilla wars, insurgencies, and terrorism,” the remnants of war as one might call them.

In an op ed piece in today’s Wall Street, mostly about the Arabs, some 360 million of them by the latest count, Fouad Ajami makes it clear that while possessing a varied, rich, and important history, while no longer waging major warfare among among themselves, and while sitting on nearly one half of the earth’s remaining black gold, the leaders of these countries are doing little or nothing to improve the well-being of their own people, condemning them by their own inaction and neglect to living thoroughly impoverished lives with few if any opportunities to improve their lot.

As a result, he says, “The Arabs have become spectators to their history.” Now, as the struggle rages between the Iranian theocracy and America for Persian Gulf hegemony, things might have been otherwise, the Arabs, given their oil wealth and their large numbers they might have been a principal player. But instead they are letting events pass them by as they watch from the sidelines.

Ajami cites the most recent Arab Human Development Report on the state of the contemporary Arab world, published just last month by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

In the first of of these reports, published in 2002, a group of writers, Arab themselves, “broke with the evasions and the apologetics to tell of the sordid condition of Arab society—the autocratic political culture, the economic stagnation, the cultural decay.”

All the Arab countries together “had a smaller manufacturing capacity than Finland with its five million people,… and the Arab-speaking world in its entirety “translated into Arabic a fifth of the foreign books that Greece with its 11 million people translates….” And the new 2009 report tells pretty much the same story.

So what might the developed countries do to shake things up a bit, to confront and begin to change and modernize the “autocratic Arab political culture, the economic stagnation, the cultural decay?” Ajami seems to admire George Bush’s attempts to change things on the ground, especially in Iraq. Bush did well, he thinks, to plant the seeds of democracy in an influential Arab land. He did well to help break Syria’s hold on Lebanon. Steps in the right direction.

Ajami is fearful that President Obama will not continue to push for greater freedoms for the Arabs. He is afraid that Obama will too readily accept the failure of the unelected Arab leaders of Egypt, Libya, Syria, and the countries of the Maghreb to provide for the material and political development of their peoples.

And in fact Obama’s Cairo speech, while impressive in respect to his understanding of Middle East and Arab realities, didn’t promise any specific carrot or stick diplomacy that might begin to dislodge these feudal rulers from their secure positions and somehow influence them to do more for their own people.

I come away from reading Ajami asking myself, was Bush on the right track, and is Obama making a mistake in his dealings with the Arabs? Bush was wrong in going to war with Iraq, wasn’t he? Given the great blunder of the war in Iraq was he right about anything at all?

Then, as if to help me with my own quandary regarding how we might better use our power and influence in the Middle East I came upon this op ed piece by Thomas Friedman, Green Shoots in Palestine, written also, as the Ajami piece in the Wall Street, in response to the UN Arab Human Development Report.

Friedman tells us that the Arab authors of the study had concluded that too many Arabs lacked, “human security — the kind of material and moral foundation that secures lives, livelihoods and an acceptable quality of life for the majority,” that which is “a prerequisite for human development, and its widespread absence in Arab countries has held back their progress.”

In his response and in this piece Friedman gives an answer to my question, what to do, que faire, and it’s not the nation destroying and rebuilding program of George Bush in Iraq. According to Friedman the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, is right now testing out what may very well be the most exciting new idea in Arab governance ever, “Fayyadism” as Friedman calls it.

Fayyadism is built on the simple but all-too-rare notion that an Arab leader’s legitimacy should be based not on slogans or rejectionism or personality cults or security services, but on delivering transparent, accountable administration and services.”

Just the other day I read much the same thing from one of our Generals in Afghanistan. The notion has been around a long time. Like Fayyad many others have known what was needed. However, the great tragedy is that those in power in the Middle East don’t know, or if they do don’t let on that they know, not Afghan President Hamid Karzai, nor Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, nor Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and certainly not Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad….

The sort of thing that George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld didn’t comprehend

August 7, 2009

(For if they did they would never have sent our young men to war with these people.) “Hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims left Karbala on Friday after celebrating the birth of Imam Mahdi, the Shiite saint who is believed to have gone into a state of hiding in the year 873 at the age of 5. Shiites believe he will re-emerge for the salvation of mankind.”

(from Attacks on Shiites Kill Scores in Iraq by Sam Dagher in today’s New York Times)

General Wald needs to come down to earth.

August 7, 2009

General Wald (U.S. Air Force four-star, retired) in today’s WSJ, There is a Military Option on Iran, defends air and naval strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. He says that otherwise, “we risk Iranian domination of the oil-rich Persian Gulf, threats to U.S.-allied Arab regimes, the emboldening of radicals in the region, the creation of an existential threat to Israel, the destabilization of Iraq, the shutdown of the Israel-Palestinian peace process, and a regional nuclear-arms race.”

His words make me think of Bob McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, who with similar false assumptions as starting points led us into the “bad” (for all those who died in vain, for our neglected social problems at home) wars of Vietnam and Iraq.

Wald’s beliefs are as baseless as those of McNamara and the others who in the sixties touted the domino theory of communist domination of the countries of IndoChina, and as baseless as those of Rumsfeld and others who in the nineties talked only of the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in the possession of Saddam Hussein. Have we learned nothing from these terrible mistakes of our own recent past?

Assuming that Iran does become a nuclear power, why would that mean that they would dominate the oil-rich Persian Gulf? At best being a nuclear power would make them a bit more secure faced with the other nuclear powers in the region, including Israel. It might even make them act more responsibly. Just as home owners who have something to protect are more responsible than those who don’t.

And a threat to our “allied Arab regimes” in the region? Who are these “allies?” Saudi Arabia? Egypt? the Gulf Kingdoms? Wouldn’t in fact we love to see these feudal states disappear, and be replaced by democratic and progressive regimes, more supportive of their own people? A nuclear Iran might help that to happen. There’s no reason to assume it would hurt.

“Emboldening of radicals in the region.” Does he really mean this? That the radicals of the region could be even more emboldened than they already are by our own blunders? Where has he been living? Probably in a plane or ship. In any case he seems to have lost touch with the land.

Is there any need to go on with this? ‘The creation of an existential threat to Israel, the destabilization of Iraq, the shutdown of the Israel-Palestinian peace process, and a regional nuclear-arms race.” Need I comment any further? It’s all laughable, or it should be, would be if we didn’t suspect that there were those who took this General seriously, those who might have the influence and power to have us follow up Vietnam and Iraq with Iran.

Why and what do I read?

August 5, 2009

Why and what does one read, assuming that one still does read, given the digital/video/image culture in which most of us live most if not all of the time? In my own case three responses come immediately to mind. I read for escape; I read thrillers. Then I read for information about what’s happening about me in the world; I read the news.

But most important, and I would like to think it so, I read for new knowledge. I read to learn, to expand my own intellectual horizons. And to that end I read articles and books by those, without number, who know more than I do about a subject, and by whom I’m able to expand my own consciousness, awareness, recognition, and appreciation of the world in which I live.

The thrillers I read are by such as Lee Child, Michael Connelly, and James Lee Burke. I just finished the latter’s Swan Peak almost without stopping, a 10-12 hour page-turner. For news, mostly I go to the NYTimes, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and less often Le Monde et le Figaro, whose front page articles, by the way, are surprisingly often similar to those of the Times and the Journal

For new knowledge, for expanding my awareness of the world, most days there’s some of both to be had in articles from the newspapers I mention above, but more substantially in any number of reviews and journals that I subscribe to  online, and in the one or more of the several books that I seem always to be reading (right now Dan Dennett’s, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea).

In today’s Times Bharati Chaturvedi writes about the urban recyclers — “the trash pickers, sorters, traders and reprocessors who extricate paper, cardboard and plastics from garbage heaps and prepare them for reuse.”

World wide, the writer tells us, there are some 15 million of these people who recycle waste much more cheaply and efficiently than government programs, and at the moment are hurting, as, along with housing values and the cost of oil and other commodities, the price of scrap metal, paper and plastic has fallen sharply.

“In Delhi,” Chaturvedi says, “some 80 percent of families in the informal recycling business surveyed by my organization said they had cut back on ‘luxury foods,’ which they defined as fruit, milk and meat. About 41 percent had stopped buying milk for their children. By this summer, most of these children, already malnourished, hadn’t had a glass of milk in nine months. Many of these children have also cut down on hours spent in school to work alongside their parents.”

The answer to the drop in prices and lowered incomes for the recyclers? Prime the pump. Not too different from our boosting auto sales with the highly popular cash for clunkers program. Governments need to subsidy the scrap industry. “Pay a small subsidy to waste dealers so they can purchase scrap from trash pickers at about 20 percent above the current price.”

The interesting question arising from this article, as well as our own cash for clunkers program, is how does one choose those pumps that should be primed with government cash contributions, ultimately paid for, of course, by our taxes?

I suppose that one can argue convincingly that the automobile industry, and in particular General Motors was too important to be allowed to fail, and hence needed priming. In any case that argument was made and that’s what was done.

Why couldn’t we at an earlier point in our history have primed or protected, say, mass transportation, and in particular the railroad industry, prevented it from succumbing as it mostly has to unfair competition from the building of the Interstate, specifically for trucks and cars, and not for trains and trolleys.

We didn’t protect and defend mass transportation and it failed us, or at least went into life support mode where it has been for 50 years or more. That, by the way, may have been one of our biggest mistakes regarding the development of our country’s economy, not to mention the look of our cities and towns.

If one had to make a list of industries that governments could not allow to fail which ones would be at the top? Well we’ve already come up with one answer — banks, car companies, hospitals, and public schools. No I take the last one back. Public schools have always been on life support. Subsidies have always been their principal, in fact, their only means of support.

Not on the list, so far anyway, are airplane companies, consumer goods stores and chains, restaurants, and landscaping businesses (although a crack-down on illegal immigrants may still devastate the latter).

In our country trash collecting, recycling, litter clean-up, all that sort of thing is already a government responsibility, and like the subsidized public schools will probably not, even now in the current down-turn of scrap prices, be affected.

The idea I take away from all this is that there has to be a line between what the government subsidizes and what it stays away from. Government subsidies have to be limited, limited first of all to the amount that people are willing to be taxed, limited therefore to the not unlimited revenues available. Governments, our government, do not always seem to have understood this.

What idea, ideas might one come away with from three articles, an op-ed piece by Stephen Carter in the Washington Post, Profits We Should Cheer, A Wall Street Journal editorial, The 100 Million Dollar Banker, and opinion pieces from that same newspaper, Blue Dogs or Corporate Shills by Thomas Frank, and How to Fix the Health-Care ‘Wedge’ by Arthur Laffer?

Stop bad-mouthing capitalism, and in particular profits. Stephen Carter reminds us that record profits mean record taxes paid. And that when profits are high, firms are able to reinvest, expand and hire. Furthermore, profits accrue to the benefit of those who own stocks — overwhelmingly, pension funds and mutual funds, high profits today signaling more retirement income tomorrow.

It’s ironic that in its editorial the Wall Street comes down on the side of correcting free market failures. And by a kind of regulation of the banks. In the case of Citigroup trader Thomas Hall’s 100 million dollar salary, that we’ve read so much about lately in the news and on the talk shows, according to the Journal this is fine as long as the individual (Thomas Hall) or company (Citigroup) taking the risk does not have a government guarantee against loss if things don’t work out as planned.

“Citi employees and those of other banks should be free to make what the market will pay them—as long as it’s really the market paying them.” The clear implication being that in the present case of Andrew Hall it is not the market that is paying him but the market operating with government guarantees.

And according to Thomas Frank what is it that motivates the Blue Dogs? Why, it’s profits. Frank makes little of their high mindedness, their reasonable centrism, their fiscal conservatism. Instead, he says, that the Blue Dogs are most of all champion fund raisers.

In fact, the individual Dogs do far better than garden-variety Democrats when it comes to bringing in contributions from those lobbying Congress, like the insurance and medical industries. The Blue Dog political action committee is the only Democratic PAC to rival the big Republican dogs, and in 2009 was bested only by Mitt Romney’s gang.

Finally, Arthur Laffer, of Supply Side Economics fame, and scorned by so many on the Left for his economic ideas, has an excellent piece on health care. “The bottom line,” in all this controversy he says, ‘is that when the government spends money on health care, the patient does not.” In fact costs are no longer the patient’s concern. Not good! For when the patient doesn’t care about costs, only those who want higher costs—like doctors and drug companies—will be listened to.

In other words if you want to control costs make the beneficiaries of health care/health insurance policies important players (the most important?) in the determination of how these costs should be met. One’s choices of treatments should always have a “what’s it going to cost me?” component. Otherwise patients will never refuse this or that medicine, treatment, or other procedure. Why would they when it’s of no cost to them?

To quote Laffer, “The health-care wedge is an economic term that reflects the difference between what health-care costs the specific provider and what the patient actually pays. When health care is subsidized, no one should be surprised that people demand more of it and that the costs to produce it increase. Mr. Obama’s health-care plan does nothing to address the gap between the price paid and the price received. Instead, it’s like a negative tax: Costs rise and people demand more than they need.

“To pay for the subsidy that the administration and Congress propose, revenues have to come from somewhere. The Obama team has come to the conclusion that we should tax small businesses, large employers and the rich. That won’t work because the health-care recipients will lose their jobs as businesses can no longer afford their employees and the wealthy flee.”

Finally, just a comment. I read in Le Monde that, “deux sous-marins nucléaires russes patrouillent au large des côtes américaines.” And also in Le Monde I read from a reader, P. Damien (or Damien P.) in response to the news item about the Russian subs:

“Pas de soucis. L’immense URSS a jadis consacré 40% de son PIB à son armée, ruinant son économie et faisant le malheur de son peuple. Au pire moment, les USA deux fois plus peuplés et bien plus riches ont plafonné à 6,8%, depuis revenues à 3,8%. La Russie est au même niveau, très affaiblie. Pas de soucis. Espérons seulement que ces sous marins ne coulent pas.” (He is referring to the Kursk disaster of 2000, when the sub with all its men aboard sank in the Barents Sea.)

“Pas de soucis,” that should have been for a long time our mantra regarding the Soviet Union. And it should be our attitude now toward Iran, and even North Korea, as neither of these countries represent a realistic threat to anyone, other than themselves. We give them undeserved importance, and they take it and with it blow themselves up large and come on the world as our number one enemy. And don’t they love that!


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