The Grand Fiasco

Election Day and Night in Northern and Western Brooklyn

2008-11-04T21:34:00.000-08:00

I awoke this morning at 6:30 and rolled out to the polls, a three-minute walk to an elementary school where a few thousand people are registered to vote. It seemed they had all decided to vote at the same time: an 800-foot line snaked out the doors, down the block, around the corner, and halfway down the next block. I had to go, and came back at 8:30 pm, half an hour before polls closed. Nobody was waiting. The election workers were pooped. I asked how many people had voted, and a middle-aged woman with slightly bloodshot eyes who had been sorting papers paused and said "a lot." They had been there since 5:30, at least officially; for reasons beyond your reporter's comprehension, poll workers are employed for 16-hour days, rather than having two shifts. This makes it hard to hire enough poll workers. A 40ish African-American man, who took my name and directed me to a voting booth, wore a tag that read "Republican Inspector." I joked that there must not have been enough Republicans available. He gave a look of exhaustion as well, and shrugged a resigned "eh" in that way some people react to suggestions on how to save a trivial amount of time or money.
(The rank-and-file poll workers, called Inspectors, are required to be hired as 'Democracts' or 'Republicans', and there must be one member of each party at each table. This is generally a farce in New York City.)
From where I write, there are three bars within earshot. Loud and happy shouts are emanating from two of them. One, the large old-fashioned bar favored by an ever-rotating crowd of motorcyclists, football fans, and people of hearty appetite - and rather unusually for a bar, a fairly representative demographic sample of Brooklyn among its customer base - has a Soul Food and Election special tonight. A few hundred people appeared to be inside it, rapt as the nights events unfolded on flatscreens. A man in a Major League Baseball shirt offered me a drink, then asked if I would hold the door open as long as I was standing there.
At the end of Obama's acceptance speech, after the televisions briefly showed an older national African-American leader, who once ran for President and so knows a unique feeling tonight, with a tear in his eye, a rather drunk individual exclaimed, "Don't cry, Reggie!" at the TV. I let him know he had the wrong Jackson.
The other bar, favored by young singles of various descriptions and fans of live indie music (read: hipsters), has a fairly mellow scene tonight, but it's also packed, from the ersatz library to the legit Bocce court. I overheard one guy talking to his date, after walking out of the bar - in response I suppose to Obama's comment that we're not just red states and blue states, or to some other arcanum of the candidate's words - saying, almost apologetically, that he guessed it was because he wanted to unite the country at this point.
I dare say he does.
The networks and the papers called Ohio for Barack Obama, and things started to get giddy. As the eleventh hour arrived and California's polls closed - the earliest respectable hour at which to call an election, if one has national viewership, I suppose - they dropped the other shoe and declared a winner.
This is truly a night of the unlikely becoming fact: North Carolina is close, and Indiana is closer. There are young men and women on their fire escapes in Brooklyn singing "America the Beautiful." There are people in the street, white 20-somethings from the Boston suburbs and teenage girls born in Trinidad, middle-aged African-American men from North Carolina and Jewish transplants from the Upper West Side, all of them New Yorkers, all of them Americans, all of them immensely happy and proud.

The Way It Looks From Here

2008-11-04T19:44:00.000-08:00

It would appear, with Ohio and Pennsylvania well on their way to pledging their electoral votes for the gentleman from Illinois, and the venerable New York Times having awarded that same Senator 192 votes solidly as of this writing, that Senator Obama will be the next President of the United States of America.

If Economists Ran the World, Part II

2008-08-17T06:49:00.001-07:00

So what might complicate this seemingly rosy picture of how markets work?

1) Not all information is completely public, which can cause markets to fail or fail to develop. The amount people get paid for their work depends on the specific circumstances of who they know, and what jobs they know about; you can steer an ice-cream-making job or an order for some ice cream to a nephew that you like but who's bad at making ice cream. That would benefit the nephew and the one doing the favor, but it would eventually hurt consumers by reducing the overall quality of ice cream available or raising the price. Products might also be artificially cheap or expensive based on non-public information - a seller of a used car probably knows if it's a lemon, but figuring that out can be expensive for a buyer. A market might spring up to test used cars, but that still raises the price above what it would be if buyers could punish sellers for selling them lemons. But you only buy a car, if at all, once every few years, so there aren't as many ways to punish a lemon-car seller as say, someone who sells you some rancid lemon ice cream.

2) Most people work for someone else, and someone else owns the company. Instead of being small ice-cream shop owners, most Americans work in cubicles, factories, and large institutions. They are paid for their work directly, not for their products, and the amount they get paid might vary a lot based on their negotiating power within the organization - something that, as any cubicle-dweller knows, might or might not reflect their contribution to the organization. That's because owners and managers are different people, and in the U.S., managers make decisions about who gets paid what, while owners tend not to have a direct voice in the company. So top management is probably overpaid (though economists disagree a lot about this point, so if you don't hate your boss, don't start on my account.) Same goes for government; the managers are elected or selected, but the owners (that's us) have to do a lot of work to have any say in the final decisions about what gets made or done. Citizens or stockholders would have to be very well organized to counter the concentrated authority of a CEO or a President.

3) Monopolies exist. Not all people or companies are competing with each other. Sometimes it's hard to break in to a new market, for all kinds of reasons. There are 'natural' monopolies that arise when someone has something that nobody else has - the only hot springs with curative properties, or the only person who can throw a 105 mph fastball. Some monopolies are the result of a competition that can have only one winner, like the old AT&T (or "Ma Bell"), which, to simplify, got its wires up first and soon had the only wires and the only phone service between cities - starting a competing phone service would have been impossible. Others are artificial - like the monopoly that a crooked ice cream shop creates by breaking the windows of the ones across the street. In a similar category, food always costs too much at an airport, because you can't leave the security zone to eat and there's only one of each store. And Some are artificially created by the public for a specific reason, such as to created to produce a market for ideas; the patent holders on cancer-curing drugs or copyright holders on a book are the only ones that we allow to make and sell those things, even though someone could copy the information and make the meds or the book. A monopoly holder can limit the amount of things she makes, which raises the prices; she also has less need for quality control. A monopoly ice cream maker would make too little ice cream of too few flavors, and sell it for too much. In reality there are few ice cream monopolies, and lots of technology monopolies. So if I had to guess, I'd say that you like your ice cream person, but hate your ISP.

4) Unions exist, and are a combination of the previous two points - monopoly and large companies. In a monopoly industry large profits exist, so workers and owners can fight all day about the price of labor, but as long as they are just negotiating within the company's net revenues it's arbitrary how much the company and the workers each make. At some point, certainly, the owners will pack up and go to another - but that never happens, since neither the workers nor the owners want it to. They just stare until the other side blinks. It couldn't matter less to the price and quality of the good who wins. The goods will stay mediocre and overpriced either way.

5) Some things can't be bought and sold at all because nobody owns them; the atmosphere, which we all need to breathe, is an example. You can bottle some of it, but that would be silly unless you were selling it to someone without any air. Of course, they might not want to breathe the air around them if it's polluted, which it might be because of the tragedy of the commons - that's what happens when nobody owns something, so everybody uses it at an unsustainable rate. Sustainability has become a buzzword, but it basically means only using as much of a resource, such as air, as you could use indefinitely without effecting its future quality, or quantity. I have to worry about this if with my basil plant; you don't want to eat all of the leaves or the plant will die, but it's okay to eat some of them every week. And I probably won't eat all of it at once, unless I suddenly absolutely must eat basil now and don't care about the future (that's called 'having a steep discount rate.') But if you find basil growing wild, you'd be a fool not to harvest it all, since someone else could, but you'd be a villain if you take it all, since nobody else will be ever be able to. But unless someone owns or regulates the basil harvest, you'll have every reason to take an unsustainable amount - everything you can carry. That's the Tragedy of the Commons, so named for shepherds overgrazing Boston Commons in ye olden days, or so I'm told. Things like wild plants that nobody owns or are very hard to buy and sell are usually called public goods.

True public goods are things that are non-excludable (you can't prevent them from being enjoyed) and which are non-congestable, that is, are still good no matter how many people use them. Protection from pirates is a case in point: everyone in town stands to benefit from building a fort, and the protection is just as good no matter how many people live in town. Unless someone can make everybody pay for the fort, there won't be as much protection as people in the town actually want.

There are also semi-public goods, which are very important, because it's hard to charge for using them but they can be used up if too many people use them - like clean air or healthy oceans, we all need it and nobody owns it, but they can certainly be ruined or made less useful over time by overuse.

And another type of semi-public goods exist, which are very very interesting, and this blog is sort of an example of them. You can charge for their use pretty easily - I could print this on blue unphotocopyable paper and charge you to read it - but no matter how many people read it, it stays just as good. In fact, it might get even better. So tell your friends, and then you can talk about it.

In all three cases, you would expect that something will go wrong if everybody just follows their own interests - unlike with ice cream, where everything goes right. The fort isn't as strong as everyone wants it to be (or everyone builds their own forts that aren't as strong as if they just built one together for the whole town); the basil gets eaten up and never grows back; and there just isn't ever enough music or information to satisfy everyone.

So what do we do about it?

Part 1: If Economists Ruled the World . . .

2008-08-17T05:40:00.001-07:00

. . . there would be much disagreement. (Note: I'm posting this as prelude to a larger discussion of public policy. If you already think you know how simple markets work, skip to part 2.)

One thing they might agree about is that most people are better at serving their own needs than anyone else - but that they don't always know them in advance, and can't always talk accurately about what those needs are. That's why polls show different results than prices; prices rise and fall according to the actual amount of each thing or each hour of someone's time that everyone, everywhere is buying. But you can't always figure these things out in advance - it is hard enough to even do something simple, like estimate exactly much ice cream will be bought in Wisconsin this August, based entirely on how much ice cream people say they will buy. Imagine trying to figure out how much food, of every type, will have to be produced to feed everyone in the United States in 2010. It's not impossible, if you know what was consumed in 2006, 2007, and 2008. You can just draw a graph for each thing, and project those numbers forward. That even accounts for population growth, in a very simple way. But let's say you had to start from scratch. And do it for the whole world.

The task would quickly exhaust your resources, even assuming you had a computer good enough to deal with any information you've got. It's a big information problem. You've got to figure out:

1) how much work everyone wants to do (and many natural resources to use, and how)
2) how much of everything everyone wants to buy, and
3) how much everything is worth compared to everything else.

Markets figure these things out very well, so often that we take them entirely for granted most of the time. Ice cream costs a certain amount every day, and you can almost always get a tub of it if you have a couple of dollars bucks. Same coffee and juice and paper clips and headphones and magazines and a million other things. Why?
Since everyone needs to make a living, there will always be someone willing to make things if someone wants to buy them, and there will always be someone willing to do things for other people, if the other people are willing to pay them for their time.
Now When I say that someone 'wants' to buy something I'm being a little bit slippery, since what I really mean is that they are willing to pay for it as much as it costs to make it. What does it cost to make something? Let's look back at ice cream.
So you buy an ice cream maker, and you set up shop making and selling ice cream by the tub. How much will you make? The more ice cream you make, the harder it will be for you, since you get tired at the end of the day. So you're going to charge more for each tub if you make a lot than if you make a little. (Heck, you'd make it for free if it was just one batch - it's fun to make one batch of ice cream.) You'll also charge the same amount per tub, because if you simply charge more late in the day as you get tired, someone could buy up your earlier ice cream and sell it to the late customers, and then you would be losing out on some money you could have made by simply charging a little more for all of it. Now, the more you have to charge for it, the less of it you'll be able to sell, there has to be a point at which making more ice cream will be more of a pain than it's worth to you. And when you reach that point - I'm guessing after 8 hours every day in the ice cream shop - that's how much you're going to make. And if there are lots of people competing with you - that is, making ice cream nearby (I'll come back to the 'nearby' part) - then you're all going to make as much as you feel like making. How much will you feel like making? Based on how much you can sell it for, minus what it costs you to get the ingredients, you'll work until you feel like the next tub of ice cream you make will take more effort than it's worth. If more people want to buy ice cream, the price will increase because the ones who want it most will pay more now, and you might think it's worth staying later at your ice-cream shop to make more if it. Then there will be more ice cream, and the price will go back down to where it was, and more people will think it's worthwhile to buy it. Or someone else will start making ice cream, and there will be more of it and the price will fall. The price will always return to a certain point based on how much it costs to make it; as the total amount of ice cream being made goes up, the price will have to go up a little because each time a new person starts making ice cream, there are fewer and fewer people sitting around who might be willing to make ice cream. But based the expectation that they can sell ice cream, a certain number of people will enter the ice cream business, and they will make as much as it's worth it to make, and sell it. A price will emerge as a certain amount of ice cream is exchanged. No one is willing to make more of it at that price, or buy more of it at that price. Instead they will make other things and buy other things - bread, or bicycles, and one another's services as homework helpers or nail polishers. Without anyone being able to prevent others from buying or selling, the amount of each thing that's made will depend wholly on the amount of it that people want for themselves. Usually - though not always - that's just fine.

That's why, if economists ruled the world, they would probably agree that they can't do any better than the markets that already exist for most of the things we buy and sell - like bread and bicycles, manicures and tutoring - that many, many people would make or do if the price is right, and that come in small amounts that almost everyone can buy some of, if they want it, and whose quality level is easy to know.

And that doesn't prevent someone else from enjoying what they already have bought. On to part two. . .

Information

2008-06-06T19:06:00.001-07:00

A quick one:

A unified electronic system of managing personal medical information is long overdue. This information should be:
1) Controlled by and fully accessible to patients
2) Securely and electronically accessible to their approved care providers;
3) Available expeditiously to first-responders and emergency rooms, but any cases where they are used without patient or guardian permission must be made known to patients, and the specific information must be released by patients/can be limited by patients

Talk amongst yourselves.

As it is written, so shall it be done

2008-02-05T18:02:00.000-08:00

In the campaign season it is written; on election day it is sealed: who shall win and who shall lose; who shall party and who shall mope; who will be done in by debate and who by gaffe; who by smirking and who by grasping; who by their opponents' charms and who by their own hubris.

But this election is different. There shall be no rejoicing in Mudville. The moping will lack its urgency, and the parties will lack their sense of release. That's not because this was a primary and the national election is months in the future. It's because no matter what happens as the polls close tonight, we won't have learned much. The Democrats won't have a presumptive nominee, and the Republicans will still have one. McCain will have moved closer to winning the proverbial G.O.P. pennant, and his opponents might even drop out. Obama will have done well -surprisingly well in some places, as expected in others. Hillary Clinton will have won some big states, but mostly not by large margins. These two candidates will still have the same levels of support from the party's higher-ups that they enjoyed before tonight, and most importantly neither will have enough sworn delegates -as nearly everyone reading this blog already knows - to cinch the nomination.

And so, on this storied night of nights, what can we expect from the voters? Certainly, they will have spoken - not, marvelously and dangerously, with one voice, but with many.

Oh, Iowa

2008-01-02T10:58:00.000-08:00

Without engaging too much in the dubious politics of prediction, it's fair to say that the outcome of the Iowa caucus this evening is likely to be quite mixed. Obama's )mostly) coherent vision, extremely positive media attention, and (not least) personal niceness have played well in Iowa - he now leads the Democractic pack and could win big with independents. But Edwards' (restrained) populism is likely to show strongly among service workers (whose union supported him to the tune of $800,000) and manufacturing employees. And while Clinton's emphasis on hard work and modest proposals (and support from the government employee's union) haven't kept her in the top spot, anything could happen on election day.
Across the proverbial aisle, Huckabee's Evangelical credentials, noncommittal opinions, and feel-good underdog image have propelled him past the infighting Republicans. But just about anything could still happen in the primaryesque Republican Caucus, where Romney hangs on to a heaping portion of likely voters.
A few things seem likely: this year Iowa matters more than usual, and is more undecided than usual, and these things are probably related.
And one thing is certain: no candidate will criticize Iowa or New Hampshire for their disproportionate prominence in the political process, either before or after the election. And so far, no state has been capable of inching earlier than the Iowa Caucus or the New Hampshire Primary, in the first and second weeks of January respectively.
It bears repeating what many others have noted about Iowa and New Hampshire. These two states represent a valuable and quintessentially American variety of people and places - small towns, large farms, manufacturing cities, and rural homesteads - but they don't come close to representing the way most Americans live today. With slower-than-average economic growth and almost no minority population, Iowans and New Hampshirites are far removed from the everyday issues facing rapidly changing American cities and suburbs. The fates of several key U.S. service industries - information technology, education, health care, finance - and the status of their employees, mean little to manufacturing and agricultural workers in Iowa and New Hampshire. These voters are likely to interpret key issues like immigration, trade, and public investment in ways directly contrary to their urban counterparts. Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire have their share of problems - notably access to services and faltering local economies - but they do not sufficiently reflect the range of issues facing Americans in all walks of life across this large and unlikely nation.
Most of all, Iowa and New Hampshire are used by media and candidates alike as shorthand for America's supposedly shared past, a past of town hall meetings in little white chapels, Norman Rockwell scenes, and Jimmy Stewart patriotism. Democrat or Republican, they often seem to forget why Mr. Smith went to Washington in the first place, why the 50s gave way so dramatically to the 60s, or why America's political founders were so darn cynical about politics.
American voters who don't live in small towns (less than 20% of us do, though many more would like to) should scarcely be surprised when the candidates fail to discuss the issues that matter to them: the candidates have already been whittled down by a narrow and unrepresentative group of voters by the time they reach the broader public.
More Americans should get to participate meaningfully in selecting the major-party candidates for President. Jonathan Soros ' proposal for a lengthy national primary - in which anyone in any state can vote as soon as they've made up their mind - seems like a strong improvement over the current system. It would preserve personal contact with candidates while opening the real contest to any motivated voter.
If a small number of voters are to be entrusted with such a decision, they should be more representative, or at least more accurate - Iowa and New Hampshire are huge battlegrounds for campaign cash, but they don't always reflect the most likely national winner. Missouri is much more likely to pick the winner, at least on the second Tuesday of November. That state was won by the national winner in all but one Presidential contest in the 20th century. What's most surprising to me isn't that the campaigns don't call for a change to the primary process - how could they? - but that the parties don't seem motivated to alter the schedule. After all, the Democratic or Republican party could gain a distinct advantage by having selected a nationally more appealing candidate than the other party. But the national parties have preserved the Iowa-first schedule, even through the threat of stripping other states of their delegates. I just don't know what they stand to gain.
If the DNC or the RNC can really enforce such discipline, one of them could act between now and 2012 to enact a Soros-style national primary. The other would probably follow suit, imagining the ample and constant press coverage as running tallies are released every day. I find this solution appealing, since it makes use of the media's preoccupation with polls to actually increase, rather than decrease, voter interest and therefore the accuracy of primary contests - just as the YouTube debates married user-defined content with mass media, in a potent form that can truly be called reality television.
The YouTube debates' legacy will last: retail politics can finally take the form of a national debate. I look forward to the coming season.

Replace OTB with non-profit banks

2007-10-31T09:03:00.000-07:00

Here's a bizaare story - Off-Track Betting, a set of 60 "betting parlors" operated by the City of New York, has actually been losing money. The program was designed to compete with organized crime for the big bookmaking bucks (sort of like New Hampshire's state-owned liquour megastores). But OTB pays most of its profits to New York State . . . and to the horse- and dog-racing industry.
So New Yorkers, mostly those pretty far down on the financial ladder, are actually subsidizing dog racing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/nyregion/19otb.html?ref=nyregion

And Connecticut faced a similar issue in the past:http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE0DD103EF934A15757C0A961958260

The OTB storefronts - rather nasty places, located mainly in the poorest neighborhoods and on the margins of the business districts - should be replaced with public or non-profit storefronts that provide, among other training, fiscal education and free advice about money for the city's poor and underemployed. The roughly 1500 OTB workers (all City employees) could be retrained as either educators or bank tellers. Or maybe the City could team up with community groups to run microlending enterprises, building rather than draining the capital base of the City's poorest people. As non-profit banks take the place of OTB, the neighborhoods around them could see a modest decline in criminal activity, as local businesses are eased off their reliance on less above-board forms of financing.

Health Care: Incentives and Results

2007-10-10T08:30:00.001-07:00

Most Americans now recognize that the problems of financing, producing, and distributing health care have built into a great big thicket of misplaced incentives, and that the public has failed to correct these distortions. We have mostly failed to recognize that in addition to creating personal crises for the millions of uninsured Americans, the way we now pay for healthcare creates huge public burdens, too: for healthcare providers, for local governments, and for taxpayers, all of whom ultimately foot parts of the increasingly large bill.
That's why creating a healthcare system that covers everyone in the United States is the first goal, but setting up a system with proper incentives is just as important to its usefulness over the next few decades.

We are accustomed to hearing the common wisdom that those with insurance in America have the best care in the world, despite its hassles, so that no solution that sacrifices existing care is politically feasible. Those are two separate ideas, and there is a large body of literature rebutting the first claim. But the second claim also ignores the vast distinctions among existing health coverage. We all know that there are good plans and bad plans, and that there are excellent health providers who can be counted on to watch out for their patients, and not-so-excellent ones who have to be managed and sometimes even vetoed by their patients. But we rarely make the link between the two kinds of doctors and the two kinds of plans. I think this link is crucial.

I propose that financial incentives of doctors and hospitals are a larger part of why and how patients get treated than the financial incentives on the individual patient, and that aligning those incentives with an eye toward the best treatment will be crucial to the success of any national health program.

As I see it, there are three elements to paying for health care: how much a patient is charged for each type of care; how much a doctor, hospital, or other provider is paid for the work and for their expenses; and how the difference between those two numbers is financed.

I worry mostly about incentives at the practice level, where the most important diagnostic work of medicine is done. This is also where financial incentives are most often opposed to the patient's health. There is now, as there was in 1993, much room for improvement in the general practitioner's office.

People without insurance don't visit doctors regularly, and miss the early diagnoses which save money, pain, and sometimes lives. Moreover, they and their kids miss the consistent treatment for simple problems that prevents them becoming large ones: asthma becomes an emergency, allergies become infections, and Lyme disease becomes paralysis.

The uninsured poor are overwhelmingly affected, but the insured poor and middle class are often also deprived of good care. Their doctors, operating under HMOs and insurance plans, are given incentives to provide lots of visits and specific kinds of prescription medication, and very seldom specialist referrals - even when they don't know exactly what's wrong, which is frequent because they're paid per patient and spend less time with each patient than did doctors of previous generations did. And of course, the patients can only afford doctors within their network - so competition between practitioners is reduced.

I draw two conclusions from these observations.

First, the social costs of not going to the doctor are higher than the cost of a subsidized visit.
The potential savings is so large that many municipalities (who often end up paying for some part of their resident's emergency care) sponsor free primary care for children, and even for their parents. New York has started paying parents to take their kids to the doctor. That's how it should be nationwide - the cost to a parent of dropping off the other kid a childcare, and the cost of not working for an hour or two, does not have to prevent care from getting to kids.

Second, managed care has produced corner-cutting and irresponsibility, rather than competition, among primary physicians, in addition to the obvious conflict between insurance companies and patients over serious treatment.

To remedy these problems, it might make sense to pay doctors partially or entirely by the hour, to start slowing things down at the diagnostic stage. In my own experience, the doctors willing to take some time with each patient make the best diagnoses, and I think they should be rewarded for doing so. This would also draw more students into general practice, by equalizing it with more lucrative specialties.

That begins to address how providers are paid, and a good universal-care system would provide this primary care with a low or less-than-zero out-of-pocket cost. If everyone could afford a doctor as good as the one I relied on as a kid (but who left practice a few years ago instead of joining a health plan, to my sinuses' infinite chagrin), there would be many fewer emergency cases. Fewer people would need expensive specialist treatment, and a large social surplus would be the result.

Paying for this is another question.

The test of our health system should be whether everyone gets the care they need. The chief areas in which our systems fails have been in getting preventive care to everyone, to establish reasonable out-of-pocket prices for all treatments, and the best available treatment when they actually need it, the system will be pretty darn successful.

Most of the solutions that have been proposed so far are marginal - and marginal improvement is a good thing if sustained - but I am skeptical as to whether they can counteract the incentives problems and conflicts of interest that riddle the industry. I hope to cover these solutions in greater depth next week.

With Good Reason

2007-10-09T21:59:00.000-07:00

The Reason Foundation, a fairly hard-line right-wing publisher, has recently begun to push for a form of road pricing in which rush-hour travelers would pay for the ability to drive on the most congested roads. Sounds progressive, until the Foundation reveals what it wants to do with all that cash: build more highways. That's an idea debunked about forty years ago, and it doesn't deserve to be kicked around much anymore - even though China and India are repeating our mid-century mistakes and creating fiscally unsustainable infrastructure: superhighways, without any other mode of transportation to balance them out.

Turns out the Reason Foundation is funded by a few key sources: Shell and ExxonMobil, the Big 3 automakers, the big pharmaceutical companies, and the folks who build prisons. Follow the links on Koch Industries for a tale of the modern face of corruption in America.

I was telling a friend earlier today that I used to just be annoyed by the effect of cash and favors in politics. I thought it distorted priorities a little, but that its effects could be measured in marginal terms: maybe the country's allocation of resources was off by five, ten percent. It was a natural conclusion, and was, as I like to think of myself, cynically optimistic. But I have come to take a less sanguine view. The influence of corporate money has gone deep into the realms of research - not just agricultural and chemical, but social as well. It seems that even as the public sector has retreated from the liberal arts and sciences, the for-profit sector has discovered the joys of social science
.
Two things have happened. First, as governments cut internal research on policy topics, the slack is being picked up by both for-profit and not-for-profit groups. This practice is done most visibly, of course, by contractors hired by government - but more deeply by publishers and think tanks funded by corporate foundations and bearing pro-corporate agendas. These researchers have been in turn harnessed by the Bush administration and its appointees to lend credibility to their policy initiatives - even when the peer-reviewed literature would lend no such support. The media must get more vigilant about calling out all politicians on their research claims. They will have do it the old-fashioned way, by doing their own investigative work on the ground.

At the same time, Congress and the states have gradually removed funding for the arts, phased out or lobotomized civics courses in public schools, and replaced critical education with technical education in the public universities. The public discourse and sometimes the public record is left to be shaped by extremely concentrated interest groups - big extraction-industry corporations, government contractors, and large media conglomerates. All these groups have increasing personnel movement between them, and between them and the Federal government. This is old news by now - but we mustn't get bored of it.

Federal Intimidation of Immigrants

2007-10-08T18:46:00.001-07:00

From Texas and New York, two remarkable stories about the attacks on citizens' and immigrants' rights by the Federal government. Once again, the bizarre excesses of the right-wing agenda have resulted in hypocrisy. It seems that the same self-styled conservatives who extolled states' rights when they were out of power now find themselves squaring off against state and local governments.

On the Texas border, towns are standing up to Federal officials trying to build its $1.3 billion Berlin-wall-style 'security barrier' through them. Homeland Security shows little intention of backing down. In case you couldn't guess, I'm rooting for the towns. From the Houston Chronicle:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5183227.html

In the New York suburbs, Federal agents coerced local officers into a vast sting operation, purportedly against unspecified 'gang members,' but were in fact targeted at entire communities of immigrants. Federal agents entered dozens of homes, brandishing weapons at local cops, and arresting people after refusing to check if they were actually deportable.
A Federal lawsuit brought by Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund contends that “the unstated goal of these raids is to gain access to constitutionally protected areas in hope of seizing as many undocumented persons as possible” (NYT). That was when the INS broke the law - but I think the purpose of the raids might have been even more chilling - to intimidate Spanish-speaking citizens to prevent them from even trying to become Americans. I will remind skeptical/optimistic readers that the raids were conducted at 4 in the morning, and included the detention of 4-year-olds at gunpoint. Those pre-schoolers sure are dangerous. Moreover, these raids are part of a national policy by the ICE to arrest illegal immigrants - and, of equal political importance to the Bush administration, to intimidate legal ones.

The Times reports on the lawsuit and the raids themselves, while Newsday covers the national trend:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/nyregion/21raids.html?ref=nyregion
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/nyregion/03raid.html
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--immigrationraids1006oct06,0,7968008.story

The Federal government's deeply disturbing war against immigrants, their children, and Spanish-speaking citizens, should be a wake-up call to all Americans who take the law seriously. It is also a warning about the ambitions of the increasingly unpopular but still shockingly powerful men who control the nation's law enforcement.

The Departure of the Public

2007-10-03T07:55:00.000-07:00

This blog is about a few things, but here's one: In 2008 and 2009, Congress will have an opportunity to alter the economic, social, and political landscapes of the United States for as much as a decade. The decisions made in the next two years will set the country's basic political alignments, probably until the time when the 2008 presidential winner's successor takes office.

If nine years sounds like a long time. . . that's because it's a long time for us. It's a long time for the economy and the planet. But it's not such a long time for public debate or for serious investigation, and it's a very short time for the deep work of shaping ourselves through our actions.

The grand fiasco is the departure of the public from public life. In key areas, a division has emerged between the public's willingness to act collectively, and its potential gains from doing so. I fault the public - the voters, the non-voters, their organizations, the elected officials and the bureaus - because I am not a structuralist. I think people can understand things rationally, even if they participate in them actively.

This is mostly an economic argument, not a political one: I will spend most of the time arguing for why and how Americans should support certain policies, and only a little time complaining about why and how we have failed to get them passed before. I don't think that public debate has captured most of the important issues, or I would scarely be adding my own impetuous voice. But I won't cover the media much, or the political parties' comings and goings. I will try not to make fun of people. I will certainly make fun of ideas that deserve to be mocked.

In the next post, I'll detail some of the things that the public will have to address at a national level in the coming years. They are not in themselves disasters or emergencies - though some, like health insurance and environmental inequality, have given rise to emergenices. But they are vast, and will be difficult to fix. They are the results of administrative mistakes layered on political cowardice, mismanagement through inertia, and what I can only see as an epidemic of buck-passing.

They are also the fruits of our quintessentially American method of usually going with the least powerful idea. They are, in short, our fiascos.

Invitation to a Fiasco

2007-09-04T20:19:00.000-07:00

If the history of the modern world were written as play, it would be a great farce, and a tragic one. This blog will tell snippets of that story, as the fiasco unfolds in the world and in my own meandering (as you'll see), melodramatic (as you've already seen), and somewhat jaundiced thoughts. If done well it will challenge the border between relevance and irrelevance. If done well you will write to me to tell me how much you disagree with me.