Category: politics

O say can God bless America the beautiful

It was Little League day at AT&T Park yesterday, and when we got to the Giants game against the A’s it was already the fourth inning. (We’d spent the morning at Maker Faire.) So we missed the ritual singing of the national anthem at the beginning of the game.

I was therefore surprised when, at the beginning of the seventh inning stretch, fans were asked to stand and remove their hats for “God Bless America.” (My infrequent visits to the ballpark led me to expect only “Take Me Out To the Ballgame.”) The whole stadium dutifully complied as Kate Smith’s recorded voice echoed from the loudspeakers.

The whole stadium except for me, that is. I was disturbed that citizens would treat that song, patriotic though it is, with the same respect that is due the national anthem — which, for the record, is “The Star-Spangled Banner,” not “God Bless America.” For one thing, it diminishes the importance of the national anthem. But more importantly, it trains people to regard anything concerning national identity with unthinking veneration. A little patriotic pride is a fine thing, but the clearest lesson of history is that an excess of nationalism is poison.

Besides, neither of these is the best choice for a song that obliges its listeners to stand at respectful attention. “God Bless America” is merely a plea to God, with nothing in it about America per se other than that the singer lives there, gladly. “The Star-Spangled Banner” commemorates a battle and a flag, not a nation or its people or its ideals, and it’s notoriously difficult to sing to boot. But “America the Beautiful” is full of praise for our wonderful country, and it’s so easy to sing even a Muppet can do it.

Star-spangled scanner

O say can you see
By the flick’ring blue light
What the news channels hailed
From a TSA screening?

Whose broad thighs and bright scars
As he boarded the flight
Were so easily watched?
Even though it’s demeaning

In his bowels, some methane
Could have brought down the plane
If he’d saved that fart
Just to set it aflame

O say, isn’t it better
To submit and behave
Than be the land of the free
And the home of the brave?

Greatest hits: Ground Zero mosque

A relative circulated to my extended family an e-mail chain letter linking to an anti-Ground-Zero-mosque YouTube video, so I wrote this reply:

A mosque at Ground Zero is a great idea, whether you’re an anti-Muslim bigot or not.

If you’re not a bigot, then nothing could be a more powerful affirmation of America’s acceptance of all races and creeds than to turn the other cheek and honor the peaceful adherents of that noble religion, millions of whom were victims of 9/11 in more profound, longer-lasting ways than almost anyone else.

If you are a bigot, what could be better than a great big juicy target, right at the scene of the crime, for all the Judeo-Christian zealots bent on Biblical-style justice?

Personally, I’m offended that they keep letting Catholic churches get built. That was the religion of Timothy McVeigh!

You can’t spell leisure without (some of the letters in) socialism

The future, as seen from the 1920’s through the 1960’s, was one in which automation of ever-increasing ubiquity and reliability would liberate humans from every manner of drudgery: cooking, cleaning, driving, working. Thus liberated, the “permanent problem” of humanity, as celebrated economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, would be “to occupy the leisure” time that would be the inevitable result of consistent technological and economic progress.

Well, here we are in the future, and in spite of a conspicuous dearth of hovercars and Mars colonies, things are indeed fantastically more automated than they used to be. Those of us old enough to remember changing typewriter ribbons, getting up from the couch to turn the channel knob, and painstakingly placing the tone arm in the shiny stripe between songs would never go back. Cars aren’t driverless — yet — but some of them do unlock when their owners approach, and some of them tell you when you’re about to back into the car behind you. Robots vacuum your floors. Satellites tell you how to get from point A to point B. And don’t forget the Internet, which allows you to shop, work, communicate, renew your driver’s license, look up airline schedules, and be informed and entertained without ever leaving the house, licking a stamp, picking up the phone, or indeed engaging any muscles north of your elbows.

And yet, I don’t know about you, but figuring out what to do with our copious leisure time doesn’t appear to be the problem of anyone I know.

Here in the era of Google and PDF files I am much more productive than I ever could have been in the bad old days of filing cabinets and mimeograph machines, and the same is true for pretty much everyone else, everywhere in the developed world. And after various innovations or outright revolutions in manufacturing, construction, supply chain management, materials science, agriculture, finance, chemical engineering, electronics, and plenty more, the cost of meeting our basic material needs is much less than it used to be.

So at first glance it seems like there should be lots more slack in our economic system, and that we ought to be able to distribute that slack to the benefit of everyone.

But when robots displace thirty percent of a factory’s labor force, the increase in productivity does not result in a life of leisure for the workers that were sent home. They’re just plumb out of work. When simpler delivery systems for news and for classified advertising come along, employees in the crumbling newspaper industry don’t kick back, job-well-done, satisfied at achieving their own obsolescence.

The investment blogger Brad Burnham recently pointed out that “Craigslist collapsed a multibillion dollar classified advertising business into a fabulously profitable hundred-million-dollar business” — an example of a phenomenon common enough to have a cool new name: the “zero-billion-dollar business.” Herein lies the problem that seems to have escaped the mid-century futurists: when dramatic efficiencies arrive in an industry, lowering its overhead, that industry doesn’t suddenly become more profitable, pocketing the difference between the new lower costs and the same old price for its goods and services, able to retire its laid-off laborers with cushy pensions. No: the industry passes the savings along to you, the consumer, according to the inexorable pressures of capitalism. Any company that didn’t would find itself undercut by its competitors. As a result, the entire industry deflates, occasionally to the vanishing point: witness the fate of horse-drawn buggies, ice vendors, and more recently, consumer-grade photographic film.

Disruptions like these are great for the majority (else they wouldn’t happen) but disastrous for those who become idled by them. In the past, the people affected would slowly filter into new positions elsewhere, but as is often observed, we’re living through a period of accelerating innovation and upheaval. It’s possible that entire job categories are disappearing faster than the remaining ones are able to absorb the jobless, and if we haven’t quite reached that tipping point yet, chances are good that we will soon. Technology and the enhanced productivity it brings means society is learning to get along — thrive, in fact — with far fewer people working, period.

Which begs the question: is this kind of progress ultimately good for humanity? Yes, it lowers the cost of our material needs, increases abundance, and lengthens and improves our lives, but only for those who remain employed and can afford the fruits of progress.

Take this trend to a plausible extreme. When driverless cars are perfected, there will be no more need for bus, truck, and taxi drivers. A coffeemaking robot in my office portends the demise of the barista. Voice recognition keeps getting better and keeps putting phone operators out to pasture. The postal service appears to be at the beginning of what promises to be a lengthy contraction.

It’s not hard to imagine a future in which only a small fraction of the eligible workforce is actually needed to do any work. Is the resulting wealth destined to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands? What will the rest of us do?

In our march towards a shiny future of leisure we have overlooked one important ingredient, probably because it’s been taboo even to mention it. In a 2,500-word article about the world to come, written soon after the 1964 World’s Fair (which depicted that future temptingly and convincingly), and not coincidentally at the height of the Cold War, Time magazine glosses over the missing ingredient almost completely, giving it just three words at the beginning of this remarkable sentence (emphasis mine):

With Government benefits, even nonworking families will have, by one estimate, an annual income of $30,000 — $40,000 (in 1966 dollars).

(That’s about a quarter million today.)

That’s right: at the same time that Americans were getting worked up about the Red Menace, ironically they also embraced (without quite thinking it through) a vision of the future that depended fundamentally on socialism — the redistribution of wealth, by government, from those whom society needs and rewards to those whom it doesn’t but who stubbornly continue to exist.

Unfortunately, even as we’re headed towards a workerless society that will depend more and more on government assistance, we are abandoning our traditional values about civic responsibility and the common good. We are becoming a nation of selfish graspers who by and large would rather demonize the unemployed than provide for them (even if we could afford to, which isn’t at all clear). Too many Americans are opposed in principle to any form of welfare, even though it’s right there in the Preamble of the Constitution, even though they rely on social programs themselves, knowingly or not.

These folks cling to two soundbites from the 1980’s — “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” and “Greed… is good” — in lieu of any reasoned philosophy. An entire generation’s worth of politicians and civic and religious leaders have built their careers around these empty ideas, all but precluding rational debate on the subject, a debate we desperately need to have. We are barreling towards that efficient, workerless future, that’s for certain. But when the merest suggestion of government assistance prompts mobs to equate President Obama with Hitler or Satan, what hope is there that that future will even be livable?

It ain’t acquittal less’n ah SAY it’s acquittal

Dear President Obama,

Much as I consider you an enormous improvement over your predecessor, there is no way in the world I can support your administration’s claim that you have “post-acquittal detention power,” a baldly tyrannical claim that is one of the very things against which our Founding Fathers rebelled in creating the United States of America.

OK, I lied. There is one way, and only one, that I will support this claim: if you will exercise that power to detain the top members of your predecessor’s administration, for inventing that perversely anti-American doctrine in the first place.

What’s in a number, part 2

Gay-rights activists everywhere are abuzz with political strategy in the wake of last week’s decision by the California Supreme Court to uphold the ballot measure, Proposition 8, in the face of a challenge to its constitutionality.

I admit I’m a little confused. Proposition 8 was clearly flawed, but why do gay-rights activists in particular care so much about a mildly hysterical attempt to keep drugs out of K-12 classrooms, toughen teacher credentialing standards, and reduce class sizes? Besides, even though it was a long time ago, I seem to recall that measure failing at the ballot box, so what is there to uphold, and why all the furore now?

Ohhh… it’s the Proposition 8 of 2008 that everyone’s buzzing about, outlawing gay marriage; not the Proposition 8 of 1998. Well that explains everything…

…except why California has two Proposition 8’s. I arrived in this state in time to vote on propositions 152 through 154 (and to choose Bill Clinton as my party’s candidate). I still remember the controversy over Prop 187 a couple of years later. Even today people still refer to 1978’s Prop 13 as shorthand for the state’s constant budgetary woes. For decades, California’s ballot initiatives were numbered sequentially, which meant that important propositions, which were occasionally burdened with awkward titles (“Permanent class size reduction funding for districts establishing parent-teacher councils; requires testing for teacher credentialing; pupil suspension for drug possession”), had a unique, handy-dandy built-in nickname.

Until 1998. In the primary election that June, voters weighed in on propositions 219 through 227. Then, unaccountably, the numbering system reverted to 1 for the November ballot, started at 1 again in 2000, counted sequentially for a while, then rolled over to 1 once more in 2008 after reaching only 90 in 2006.

I know California’s education system is badly broken (thanks, most agree, to Prop 13 — the 1978 one), but really, I think most voters can count at least a little higher than 227.

(Previously in inexplicable innumeracy.)

Boy was I wrong

I sure am glad I didn’t get my way during the presidential primaries. John Edwards would surely have been a step up from the Bush administration, but as one negative news item after another makes clear, he wouldn’t have been the leap forward that Obama already has been. And considering that these stories started breaking while the election was still in progress, we might now have President McCain, or perhaps by now even President Palin.

Bullet: dodged.

Rental mentality

American capitalism is broken, and in the race to fix it there is a lot of prognosticating about what will work, what won’t, and what things will look like after this crisis passes. One of the best things I’ve read in the latter category is Richard Florida’s article, “How the Crash Will Reshape America,” in the March 2009 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

It’s a very long, in-depth analysis and rewards a full, careful reading; but since I suspect you’re not going to do that, let me sum up. Most of the article argues that industrial centers like Detroit are doomed in the long run, and that population-dense areas with diverse economies, like New York, will thrive, based on a notion of the “velocity of ideas” that such places generate, which may sound a little vague but rings true for me.

The article holds up Pittsburgh as a model for successfully managing the transition from a large industrial economy to a smaller idea-based one, and it wraps up with some prescriptions for managing this crisis to a comparatively soft landing. The most compelling suggestion the author makes is for “the removal of homeownership from its long-privileged place at the center of the U.S. economy.” Its benefits aside, homeownership creates economic ills of various kinds: for example, it anchors people to a region that may be in economic decline, producing a “creeping rigidity in the labor market,” when those people ought to be mobile and able to go where the work is. Further, government incentives encouraging homeownership distort demand, producing, for example, speculative bubbles of the kind we’ve just seen pop.

Richard Florida would rather see government policies favoring property rental, and calls the current tidal wave of foreclosures an opportunity: banks could be required to rent a foreclosed home to the erstwhile owners at the prevailing market rate (typically much less than a mortgage payment). This would achieve the goal of keeping families from ending up on the street, in a less artificial way than prohibiting foreclosures would. Just as importantly, it provides a basis for valuing some of those “toxic assets” you’ve heard so much about.

Digression: a big part of the problem in the financial world right now is that years of bad lending decisions have led banks to accumulate a lot of worthless assets on their books — worthless in the literal market sense that no one, no one wants to buy them at any price. In the absence of at least a potential buyer, it is literally impossible to compute a value for an asset, and in the absence of some way to place a value on those assets, banks will sooner or later be forced to “write them down” — to admit they’re worthless and that the bank as a whole is worth a lot less than before. If the bank’s assets shrink enough, its liabilities may overwhelm it, at which point it becomes insolvent.

This is one reason why compelling banks to turn foreclosed homes into rental properties is so attractive: in many cases it guarantees a stream of rental income from the property, meaning that the property now has a non-zero value even in a glutted real-estate market where the house itself can’t be sold.

I am a somewhat reluctant homeowner. Having grown up in New York City, renting was always the norm, and I never felt the urge to own my own home. But after a few sour landlord-tenant episodes, and after we made some money in the dot-com boom, and after our first son was born, Andrea got the homeowning bug and I went along — mainly because, even though renting had always been the norm, there was always lip service paid to the unalloyed good of property ownership.

I cottoned at once to Florida’s repudiation of this idea, but if we’re going to transform ourselves from a nation of hopeful homeowners to one of eager renters, there are some things about rental that we’ll have to make less painful. Here’s a short list of rental pain points that I’d want addressed if I were going to take that step myself:

  • Rent control (though unfortunately, when economists agree, the thing they agree about the most is that rent control is bad)
  • Ample notice of lease non-renewal or significant changes in lease terms
  • Authority to hire approved vendors for basic maintenance

Since I would expect to move more often as a renter, I’d also want a more robust and economical network of storage and moving services than exists today; but in a successful transition to the rental-oriented new-urban utopia of tomorrow that should follow naturally. I can’t wait.

The Arbitration Fairness Act

Here’s some unexpected good news: the Arbitration Fairness Act has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives.

As I wrote last September, the mandatory binding arbitration clauses that are ubiquitous in the service contracts we sign are “as un-American a practice as I can imagine” because they deny you your day in court should you have a grievance. It’s a measure of how well the monied interests have us brainwashed that most of us think this is a good thing — there are too many frivolous lawsuits and too many lawyers getting rich, driving up the prices of everything, right? Wrong. That’s just what they want you to think.

So most of us think mandatory binding arbitration clauses are no big deal, if we ever think about them at all, and hardly any of us do, even though we agree to them almost every time we enter a professional relationship with someone: a doctor, a landlord, an employer. Which is why it’s such a surprise to see opposition to this practice getting a little traction in Congress — in these days of global megacrisis piled atop global megacrisis, the phrase “mandatory binding arbitration” isn’t exactly spilling from everyone’s lips.

So extra kudos to the sponsor of the bill, U.S. Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia’s fourth congressional district, for doing what’s right even when all the oxygen has been sucked out of the room. Let’s show him some love in the form of a token contribution to his campaign fund.