ThoughtPossible.com :: In the wake of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and 19 other people, six of whom have already, tragically, died from their injuries, the national political establishment (media, pressure groups and elected officials) has turned its attention to the perils of extremist and vitriolic rhetoric. We are being asked to consider whether the use of metaphorical violence (putting Rep. Giffords in the crosshairs, which both Sarah Palin and her 2010 opponent did) leads to actual violence, and while direct responsibility is not being alleged, the ethical obligation to honor our democracy with civil discourse must be considered.

There is no question that specific individuals and specific organizations have very consistently ratcheted up the vitriol and hostility in our political rhetoric, for personal and partisan gain. Former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) yesterday repeated his criticism of the last year of his party’s near religious commitment to extremist rhetorical distortions and misleading statements about Pres. Obama and the nature of the reform legislation he and the Democrats in Congress have passed.

He urged “even the staunchest Republicans” to have the integrity and the civility to say “We are all Democrats today, for Gabby”. And while civility has been the watchword, and we have heard outraged disdain for the shooter and for anyone who believes this kind of action is legitimate, in concept or in action, political strategists have already begun seeking to defend individual politicians and specific conservative groups against the rhetorical “attack” that their rhetoric has been too violent and extreme.

So let’s say it clearly and resoundingly, and let’s all say it defiantly, together: THERE IS NO CIRCUMSTANCE IN WHICH VITRIOLIC DISTORTIONS OR HATE-SPEECH ARE JUSTIFIABLE; THERE IS NO CIRCUMSTANCE IN WHICH THREATS OF VIOLENCE, METAPHORICAL OR LITERAL ARE EXCUSABLE.

People who have ideas and a will to serve have no time and no use for such disgusting distortions, and people of conscience know this. However heated political debate may become, metaphor ceases to be useful when it becomes outright distortion. Some politicians have chosen to view extremist distortions as politically expedient, even openly calling for armed rebellion, to capitalize on populist anger and anti-establishment feeling. But that political expediency comes with a cost.

One election may be easier to win if such ideas spread at the right pace over the right landscape, but the landscape will then become a distorted form of what we once hoped were its best aspirations, possibly in dangerous ways. False claims can turn out to hurt those who make them, when the fact that they were false finally gets through to the people whose votes decide the shape and direction of government.

To honor the principled, and always civil service of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and the tragic sacrifice of her community outreach director Gabe Zimmerman, federal district Judge John Roll, 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green and the other victims of this disgusting atrocity, let’s commit ourselves to marginalizing any public figure who uses lies, distortions, hate-speech, or the language of incitement, to defame his or her opponents and to manipulate the American people. Their actions are a stain on our democracy and a perversion or our country’s great spirit.

Let’s commit to being principled and coherent in our devotion to building a more perfect civil order, a system of debate and idea-sharing aimed at constructing pragmatic responses to real-world problems. Let’s commit to being better than any ideology, better than any tribalist camp, better than any Balkanizing defamation, better than the sordid temptations of internecine conflict that threaten to undermine the meaning and the quality of public service to an open democracy.

• CBS News: “Schieffer: Rhetoric and Its Consequences”
  (Says Violence Stirred by Inflammatory Political Discourse Endangers Our Way of Life)
• Huffington Post: “Our Leaders Must Renounce the Ideology of Political Violence”
  (The time has come for political leaders of both parties, whether liberal or conservative, to renounce the ideology of political violence. Ideas have consequences. The idea that “the guys with the guns make the rules” has inevitable consequences that can no longer be tolerated)
• CBS News: “Dem: Tone Down the Political Rhetoric”
  (Says Hoyer: Political Environment Getting Worrying, Attack on Giffords Is an Attack on Democracy)
• CafeSentido: “Former Republican Rep. Inglis says ‘We’re all Democrats today’”
  (Inglis: “I hope what even the staunchest Republican could say is, ‘We’re all Democrats today for Gabby,’ and let’s just come together as a nation and figure out a way to get out of these problems”)
• The Examiner: “AZ shooter is a nutjob, but violent rhetoric still matters”
  (“[I]t would be naive to assume that nutjobs are immune to the influence of violent rhetoric.  On the contrary, they are likely the most gullible, malleable, and primed to be incited to violent action.”)
• ThoughtPossible: “McCain Calls Obama ‘Decent Family Man’, Demands Civility” (2008)
  (“[McCain] called on his supporters to be “respectful”, said that’s what this campaign was supposed to be about, a respectful debate of the issues by two qualified individuals.”)
• CafeSentido: “Is Glenn Beck Deliberately Inciting Violent Acts Against Progressives?”
  (“Glenn Beck has a moral obligation to answer the question: what does he aim to achieve with this campaign of libel and incitement? Is he aiming to inspire desperate people to desperate action? Is he aiming to make ordinary people into desperate radicals?”)

OpenSalon :: The Apple tablet should be an intensely user-friendly device that achieves a paradigm shift in the way we deal with information. That sounds big, but Apple is well-equipped to do this, even by just making a few key upgrades to what it has already made possible with its laptops and touch-sensitive handhelds.

I want the Apple tablet to:

1. store, manage and work with my files (graphic, text and media) more easily;
2. store, manage and play all of my music, with fewer clicks;
3. store and manage a library of content-rich e-publications, including newspaper and magazine subscriptions, automatically downloaded, at no extra cost, if I choose;
4. access and manage all of my online communications platforms;
5. instantly post content to an array of online networking platforms, simply by selecting and clicking;
6. find out the latest information on crisis situations and contribute ideas, research or cash, as quickly as possible, to reputable organizations (iTunes can help with this, or maybe a kind of iTunes-Safari mash-up);
7. manipulate digital files as if they were three-dimensional objects, by the way I interact with the touch-screen;
8. have a camera and allow me to voice conference (across platforms);
9. perform basic wireless internet functions, like GPS, with no need for subscription to any service;
10. be 100% free of any obligation to subscribe to any particular wireless service;
11. have an option to use a desktop environment like the traditional Mac OS X or the more streamlined iPhone homescreen;
12. introduce online back-up (for re-download) for all content purchased through iTunes — at Apple’s iTunes store, in my account;
13. allow me to arrange simultaneously visible workspaces into two columns, three columns or four corners, that fill the screen and allow me to multitask (or multi-chat) effectively;
14. include a tool/widget that allows me to measure not only the tablet’s energy consumption and carbon-efficiency, but to compare options in other activities/services for being greener while saving money, too;
15. be no bigger than the dimensions of a standard “marble” school notebook, and no heavier;
16. have at least 250 GB of hard-drive storage standard;
17. cost no more than twice what the Amazon Kindle costs (they are not direct competitors, but this is a good price measure)…

I can think of a hundred other things I want the Apple tablet to do, and it will probably do most of them, but these above are the key features of a user-friendly, multi-touch, full-computing tablet, revolutionary enough to give the tablet that special qualification of paradigm-shift communications and IT device that really gives the end-user greater flexibility and greater control of information.

• Join our discussion on the Hot Spring Network

This article began as a response to a very heated comment left by one user of the Open Salon network who seemed to be a physician, based on some of his phrasing. The usefulness of the exchange is meaningful, because the commenter expressed the concerns of someone very afraid of some of the key elements of the proposed healthcare reform framework. (As a margin note: the AMA —the doctors’ biggest national association— favors the proposed reforms and says they will help both doctors and patients.)

In response to the doctor’s commentary, I felt it necessary to note that the level of anger I detected in his tone was “over the top”. Some of the wording was outright hostile to other commenters, to the president, and to the very idea of reforms to the private insurance industry. He said he is a conservative, and his anger appeared to be rooted in the frustration that people like himself are too often assumed to be enemies of Medicare who want people to suffer needlessly.

I sought to address his misgivings, and also to consider with some degree of respect the fact that the current situation with regard to reimbursement for care often has doctors hobbled and on the run, just trying to find a way to get paid for their services, understanding that this can affect their patients as well. I also found it necessary to specifically address the misperception that the “public option” (PO, he called it) would be structured in such a way as to coerce individuals and businesses out of private insurance — it would not.

I learned after writing the response, that the commenter was in fact a patient, not a doctor, but I include here my original response, in which the self-described conservative Obama skeptic is treated as potentially a physician with concerns about the proposed reforms:

Staring out, it’s important to note that the public option is not what private insurers or those doctors and hospitals who fear it will undercut their income levels have made it out to be. The legislation is clear, and the president has been clear: the exchange itself is oriented not toward everyone, but toward those who can’t buy insurance any other way or for whom current plans are too insecure (likely to be cut off or to offer inadequate care).

The public option, specifically, would be available not to everyone with the need for cheap insurance, but only to those that no private plan and no government plan (like SCHIP or Medicaid) will cover. There is no risk of the PO stealing people out of employer-based insurance. As will be repeated at various points in this analysis: private insurers can offer competitive plans in order to expand their markets, the exchange is for them.

The real risk to insurers’ bottom lines would come if they failed to participate fully in the exchange, which would make it harder for them to capitalize on that opportunity to expand their market by winning new customers with lower-cost, higher-benefit plans.

The purpose of all these new ways of offering lower-cost higher-benefits insurance plans, if you are a doctor, is to change insurance company behavior, to make sure they actually pay you more of what they owe you. Efforts to empower those who can’t afford the current system mean empowerment of patients, and so of doctors.

The doctor commented that he was not in favor of scrapping Medicare or opposed to a public option because he thought people shouldn’t have insurance; his objection was waste and fraud. He opposes Obama’s strategy for dealing with it, it seems, for ideological reasons, and because he believes the government is responsible for the waste. I responded:

Medicare itself is not a giant waste of government money. It’s necessary, because in the time before it existed, seniors would routinely be left without treatment, dying with untreated brain aneurisms, untreated arterial sclerosis, untreated dementia, untreated cancer, literally languishing in low-rent end of life facilities or at home, dying in agony.

Cost was the issue then as well. Medicare has over the last 40 years done wonders for that population, and has allowed us to be a little prouder as a nation about the way we treat our seniors. It has prolonged lives and raised quality of life for millions and has allowed seniors to remain active longer.

It’s not a question of “I take care of myself” versus “I waste taxpayer money”; it’s a question of who will pay for everyone else’s older relatives. The fact is, decent as most people are, most people won’t pay for all the expensive care other people’s older relatives need. They can barely afford their own care, let alone that of their own relatives. That includes employers, who in the last 20 years have begun abandoning their contractual obligation to pay pensions and lifetime health costs.

Medicare is not something you buy into and “earn”, it’s something you get because you’re a human being and we’ve decided that people should be treated humanely when they’re old and infirm. Despite being a doctor who looks out for number one and “doesn’t need it” —the commenter himself suggested this was the case—, you’ll get it, because you’re a human being, a citizen, and worthy for that reason if for no other.

The problem of waste is to do mostly with cost distortions, subsidies to private insurers and fraud. In order to cut the cost of Medicare, one party —that likes to be “fiscally conservative” on programs that do good work but spend wildly on war and unaffordable tax giveaways— has consistently sought to cut the number of administrators and regulators that can make sure Medicare is not defrauded.

The result is hospitals and other medical institutions often file requests that either mistakenly or deliberately wind up being fraudulent in subtle but meaningful ways, for example billing for two items when only one actually was provided — a test and a treatment when only the test was given and the patient is out getting the treatment elsewhere or used supplemental insurance to pay for the treatment.

That has become routine in the Medicare billing system, because there’s no easy way to oversee it. Electronic medical records will help with this, because it makes it possible to easily cross-check, and an EMR-enabled billing system can catch such “errors” before they are sent on for reimbursement, stopping fraud at the source.

Another major area of waste are huge subsidies that are given to insurers, essentially to bribe them to provide affordable supplementary insurance to the elderly. Numerous economists have said for years that those subsidies are a huge waste of money, hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money, that actually produce nothing, because the insurers should respond to the market incentive to offer new plans anyway.

(Here the problem of whether there is a healthcare market, or an ‘anti-market’ enters in. It will be explained below.)

Whatever your ideas about Obama or Democratic political philosophy, the fact is, Obama has pushed this Democratic Congress to come up with the most market-based healthcare reform solution ever to approach passage. The public option does not infringe on this reality, but actually reinforces it; healthcare exchanges, mandates barring denial of coverage and denial of treatment, and the public option, are all oriented toward making the market more dynamic.

If we look at the healthcare market, we have high-end and low-end customers, people in between, and at all levels, special cases. At the high end are the wealthy, and the well-employed, whose benefits packages are out of this world and cover everything. There are even some who cannot be dropped for pre-existing or chronic conditions. These are the lucky few.

In all, only about 35% of the population is actually covered exclusively by private insurance. Across the entire spectrum, we have Medicare doing its part to cover the elderly. The benefit of this is universal; everyone in the system benefits from the fact that Medicare patients will not have their Medicare coverage dropped. The whole system would collapse if those tens of millions of people had to fend for themselves, because out-of-control costs mean they simply can’t have earned enough money in their lifetime to pay for the care they need.

At the low end of the income ladder, we have people who are too poor to find insurance of any kind other than Medicaid, which covers the poor. SCHIP covers poor children. There are people in the military who would not be poor enough for Medicaid but could never afford private insurance, and they have insurance through the government. After their service, they may have VA coverage, through the Dept. of Veterans’ Affairs.

This leaves all the people who have to fend for themselves, possibly one-third of the population. Most people cannot buy private insurance on the open market. Because insurers refuse to offer anything within their budget. Literally. Refuse is the correct term here. Insurers say their business model simply won’t permit their involvement in that segment of the market. There are at least 52 million, probably more, after a year of layoffs, who have ZERO coverage of any kind.

Remember, private insurers cover only about 35% of the population, and they don’t want to cover any more, because they see the rest of the population as too poor or too “risky”, in terms of need for health services, to be profitable to the business model they favor. Insurance companies are too well-used to deriving huge profits, very quickly, after payments into their system have just come in; they defend those “profits” by denying care and dropping sick patients.

They can say they desire a market where everyone can pay an arm and a leg for coverage that gives them nothing in return and drops them as soon as they need care, but that market will never materialize, because people are smart enough not to keep throwing their money down the drain when in the end they will not get the care they need.

This, frankly, is why many people support a single, national system for handling reimbursement, a.k.a. “single payer”. What people fail to understand, due to inflamed ideological rhetoric and emotional reactions to keywords, is that most single-payer systems, like France, for instance, actually have a very competitive, very vibrant healthcare marketplace, where major research, major drug innovation, major scientific breakthroughs are all possible, with corresponding megaprofits.

In those systems, doctors are also part of an open market, and do very well for themselves, are significantly wealthier than the average citizen. Single payer is not anti-market, it’s anti-rigged-for-insurance-market, and it comes about, in every case, because insurers have refused to continue meeting their obligations and the cost to society, in human or economic terms, is simply too great. Period.

(The doctor who had commented on the healthcare issue, expressing extreme skepticism about whether the current proposals could achieve the goals set forth, had also suggested it was a lie that Obama wanted to enact a market-based reform, instead of secretly plotting a single-payer takeover. That also needed some explaining.)

The reason Obama is not going that road with his framework proposal and has demanded a market-based solution, is that the goal is too pressing to do something that requires such a massive overhaul of the system, and he has to compete with the insurance lobby, which would spend relentlessly to stop such a change.

In order to stop the healthcare cost crisis from bankrupting the government, thousands of businesses, millions of families, and the entire American economy itself, costs need to be reined in, and that can only happen once the system securely insures everyone.

Looking at the income ladder mentioned above where the wealthy and the well-employed have total coverage with relative security. Others have good coverage with less security. Then Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, the Defense Dept. and VA cover many millions more (47% of the population among them), we are left with about 17% of the population (52 million people) who cannot get insurance of any kind.

The proposed reforms would bring some of those people into private insurance, through the low-cost exchanges, and would expand the reach of Medicaid for some more of them, up to about 133% of the official “poverty” index. This would still leave anywhere from 1% to 5% of the population with no insurance. For those people, a “public option” —meaning simply a plan that is legislated, non-profit and self-sufficient, but which is guaranteed to be low-cost and will not drop anyone—, would be needed to handle reimbursements, so their care is not defrayed through increased costs to everyone else.

It is not an NHS, and it is not a takeover. It’s just an option for that last segment of the population for whom no other option is made available by the private sector. Insurers would be free to offer competitive plans and to keep the public option from even penetrating too deeply into that remaining 1% to 5% for whom no solution can be found through market-oriented reform.

As a doctor, you would benefit from having this vastly expanded marketplace from which patients (clients, if you have your own practice or manage a hospital) might emerge, actually able to pay their bills, stabilizing your revenue flows and guaranteeing a more steady clientele. What about that makes you so angry?

As it stands, private insurers are only willing to cover about 35% of the population, but as they force people out, by denial of care or massive cost increases, that population is shrinking by the day. You say most do not need government help with medical care, but in fact, as things stand, unless these reforms go through and insurers are driven, by reformed market conditions and new regulations, to provide better low-cost no-dumping plans, most do need that help.

Absent that help, costs are defrayed by massive price increases that are paid through the private sector, by everyone else who does have insurance. These inflated costs also create waste that could be eliminated from Medicare as costs become more competitive throughout the system.

And Medicare is not corrupt; people who seek unfairly high compensation from Medicare are corrupt. If this upsets you, start a movement among your peers for more ethical billing, better adversarial action against stingy private insurers, and in opposition to parasitism by private insurers who seek to extract money for nothing via Medicare.

The reforms under consideration are in fact market-oriented. They aim to use pragmatic solutions to achieve the best fix possible for a broken system, in a way that would strengthen the logic of market dynamics in the healthcare system.

Right now, private insurance in the US constitutes an anti-market (driving up costs and eroding product quality — not the care, but the access to care, the reimbursements); the reforms aim to return our system to market dynamics, which lower costs and increase quality. If you are a doctor, or a patient, or a hospital, or a taxpayer, or an employer, you will benefit from this.

One of my closest friends in the world is a committed Republican, as is my father, whose father was a Republican elected to various offices in our state. The friend —whom we’ll call “Dutch”— often chides me for our differences of opinion, and we often have energetic philosophical debates in which we try to detail the workings of the universe according to our own personal abstractions or tastes.

These exchanges are rarely wasted time, though neither of us is likely to change our views. I am a registered independent who holds progressive views and believes we need a re-democratization of our society, on many planes, and a greening of our economic policy. My assessment of our political spectrum is that the Democratic party is a very centrist center-left party, and the Republican party a confirmed right, not very centrist party, given their current published platforms and legislative agenda.

We rarely discuss the casting of actual votes, though I think it’s fair to say Dutch votes Republican and I vote Democratic, both of us voting more for ideas than for ideology or partisanship. I recently discovered that he owns Barack Obama’s book Dreams from My Father, and is presently leafing through it to get a look at the man of the moment, and I have read Francis Fukuyama and Robert Kagan, to get a philosphical perspective I might not find by my own tendencies.

I would love for Dutch to read something from Richard Rorty or Cornel West, and I think he would enjoy it, and our debates would be still more energetic, or interminable, depending. But there is only so much time and everyone devotes more time to his or her own tastes, naturally. So part of what is key to our translating our close friendship into a viable political conversation is that we each look to inform the other and learn from the other, trusting that we will accept the right of the other to interpret the evidence according to sound judgment.

Whether that is true or not, in any given case, is usually the driver of whatever friction we find, and the fact that we have shared so many other experiences growing up and confiding in each other, over the years, helps us to següe into related subjects, on which we find our common ground.

As for family, politics is a difficult subject. My father and I differ in high contrast not just on our political ideas, but on the underlying constellation of assumptions that builds into the structure of our endeavor to know or to project knowledge about the political sphere. I won’t go into specifics, but suffice it to say, we have found common ground on some of the disappointments of the last 8 years, and have clashed intensely over others.

I think we both believe we live in a just society, where human freedom is privileged and protected, but where there are real threats to both justice and freedom, and a need to implement the right policies to protect and serve the rights of the people. We just find ourselves often looking at one another’s preferred strategy for doing so as ill-conceived or undesirable. We get over that, and the family bond is far more positive and resilient than the moments of conflict we get into on these points.

My grandfather was a mayor and an assemblyman in the state of New Jersey, and I know little of the details of his political life, though we were close in my childhood. I know that he was charismatic and cared deeply about people, on a human level, and I accompanied him many times when he would go out into the community and help people deal with personal difficulties, whether as mayor or after having retired from politics.

My feeling is that as a conservative Republican politician, he was proud of his principles and believed firmly in the greatness of the United States as a force for good in the world (this, of course, is not a description exclusive to Republicans). I think he did a lot to ensure that these traits were instilled in his children and in turn in his grandchildren, but that he knew each person must shape those principles around a core of character and information, that personal choice is vital in this.

I feel fortunate in many ways that he showed me that intellect was the root of an effective defense of principle, and he was more concerned with people’s ability to be reasonable and to deal with others than with imposing a single ideology at any cost. In this, I think he was a “good Republican”, meaning: he understood that the revolutionary principles of the party of Lincoln were not so much an ideology as a quest for a reasonable and just world, a belief in the imminent possibility of such an experiment.

To be candid, he also harbored views I could not consider part of my vision of generalized fairness. Morally, he was fair, but in political details, I think we would have clashed regularly. I suspect that in many ways, as is natural in any human group, a later generation takes the ideas of those that came before and builds on them, applying the best principles in new ways to a new reality, invested with new information. I have tried to build on what I understood as the need to learn about the truth of things, defend the interests of fairness and liberty, and effect change where it is needed.

As time has passed, I have been happy to learn that in private settings, my grandfather found new room for a more inclusive view, and affirmed my belief that he put people before dogma and was able to locate the basic humanity in those he sought to understand, or who inspired his affection in a way that went beyond anything political. I think I inherited from this legacy a vision of hope about the meaning of the human element in our society and the possibility of a cooperative democracy, in which citizens share in the work of leadership and get beyond the temptation to attack those they do not know.

• Originally published 16 October 2008, at ThoughtPossible, in the OpenSalon network

ThoughtPossible.com :: Today comes the news that the Taliban have taken more territory in Pakistan’s Buner district, just 100 km from the capital Islamabad. The shockingly weak government of Pres. Zardari has already ceded the Swat Valley to the Taliban, allowing harsh shari’a law to be imposed. The local government has been forced out of Buner, and the area is becoming a stronghold. If the Taliban reach Islamabad, they may be able to seize control of the one of the world’s 9 known arsenals of nuclear weapons.

The Bush administration’s obsessive adventure in Iraq led directly to the Taliban’s ability to destabilize huge swaths of northwestern Pakistan, moving ever closer toward the northern border regions closer to Islamabad. The Iraq war diverted hundreds of billions of dollars in military activity and supplies from potential deployment in Afghanistan to the campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein, based on false pretexts.

Meanwhile, billions of dollars in aid were given to Pres. Musharraf, a military dictator opposed by secular society for his actions against constitutional democracy and opposed by conservative muslims for his non-religious government and allegiance to Western powers. Musharraf waffled between fighting militants and combatting fractious tribalism in the northwestern frontier region and buying off those who threatened his reign.

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Ultimately, it is suspected Musharraf not only made deals with Taliban-linked figures, but also funneled hundreds of millions in payoffs to warlords and tribal leaders, potentially to the Taliban themselves, in an effort to buy their support. Essentially, instead of fighting the Taliban head-on, the Bush administration funded a campaign of bribery and appeasement that only empowered the militants and gave them increasing power in Pakistani territory.

That the Bush administration mysteriously gave $150 million to the Taliban themselves in the summer of 2001 has been glossed over by most press accounts of the struggle against Afghan extremism. The money was supposed to help facilitate a gas pipeline project that would transit natural gas from Central Asia through Afghanistan to port cities in Pakistan, where it could then be sent on to other parts of the world.

That appeasement money did not win enough favor with the Taliban for them to cooperate in the capture of Osama Bin Laden in September 2001. Even when faced with the potential annihilation of their regime and much of their nation’s infrastructure, the Taliban were unfazed by Bush administration threats of invasion. So why did the policy toward Pakistan continue the logic of mass funding of bribery and appeasement?

We may never be able to answer that, except to say that massive irresponsibility and disregard for catastrophic risk was instrumental in the Bush administration’s decision-making process, on any number of issues. Iraq invasion would be “a cakewalk”, never a quagmire. It would cost less than $50 billion. Katrina could never destroy a city, and if it did, just put the refugees in concentration camps on the side of the highways, no need to spend real money.

Pakistan could easily be controlled by a friendly military dictator. That was the logic.  What could possibly go wrong? The Taliban, emboldened by American inaction against them, by the dictator’s preference for bribing them, would build an arsenal, train an army, take over the message of the most susceptible fundamentalist congregations, recruit a new generation of Pakistan-based clerics and radicals, stage an insurgency against the 5th most populous nation-state in the world.

Of course they would. They were given the means, the leeway. They were even offered treaties of appeasement over and over, and at every turn they violated their agreement not to continue fighting. Nevertheless, for 5 years, after the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration’s policy was bribery and appeasement. The deliberate funding of a government whose intelligence services are known to be linked to the militants we consider our enemy.

That policy clearly put the Taliban in a position to mount the most credible insurgency against the Pakistani government, and to take aim at its nuclear arsenal. Now, with a government that handed over a massive piece of territory to a foreign guerrilla militia with far fewer resources, the Taliban are just 62 miles from the capital, and as far as we know, until Pres. Obama, with his message of firm opposition to Taliban expansion, took office, there was no plan in the works to prevent nuclear weapons falling into the hands of medieval terrorists.

We have hashed out the details of how finance became a shell game and our major banks lost track of what was real money and what was speculative. And now, we have the consequent malaise, rippling out and flooding underfoot. People are infused with a sense of urgency and intoxicated by the beguiling qualities of the concept of their own martyrdom.

It’s harder to pay the bills, but since I’m a victim of the greed of fat cats, I’m entitled to be pushy and hostile. Maybe so, or at least it appears so much a given truth that we find ourselves believing it is so. A lot of people seem more tolerant of hostility among strangers these days, because they find it “understandable”.

Paul Krugman wrote this fall of an impending return to “Depression economics”, driven in part by the downward spiral of consumers unwilling to spend as a result of mounting instability in their own financial standing. But there is a psychology that goes along with this that is (in large part martyrdom-based) the bad-faith economy.

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Bad faith is very tempting in hard times: we throw up our hands, feel hurt, express disbelief at the selfishness not only of the powerful but of those hurt by their misdeeds. But bad faith cannot build anything and cannot be the foundation of a prosperous civil society: it is an agent of entropy, and it attacks, as a matter of principle, each of the strengths that would allow us to accomplish anything (such as trust, imagination, perseverence, follow-through, a sense of community, purpose, hope or self-confidence).

Bad faith is an economic paradigm, or an anti-economic paradigm, best for throwing whole systems out of balance and into something more like a cynical array of useless, destructive, spirit-crushing cock fights, where the loser is told they’re getting the best deal possible. Recovery is somehow inconceivable if we give in to the bad faith paradigm.

As Edward Carr writes in The Economist, “financial instability feeds on itself”. Part of the reason for this is that everyone wants to bury their own debt in the remote past and no one is more astute in making the bad news look good than financiers engaging in “creative accounting”. But that’s where the house of cards shows itself, and teeters…

Once the lie gets too big and reaches into too many people’s pockets, the game is up and we all get slammed. The debt is not buried, it is dispersed and that angers millions of people. As it should. Namely because they don’t enjoy such opportunities fromt hose same financial institutions when they feel a need.

Somehow, though, someone has to break the cycle, stop acceding to the relentless contagion of malaise and avarice, and bet on good faith. It’s just that: there needs to be a system that privileges and rewards good faith and somehow eliminates the threat from pirates, money-hoarders and cheats. The good instinct we find in a moment of clarity or in affection for those around us should guide our social-level actions, lest we fall into a kind of limited solidarity that promotes tribalism, division and bad faith.

The election of Barack Obama showed that tens of millions of people were calling for such a better approach, for a way forward in which the humanity of individual people is also the interest of the collective human energies of society. To “not miss the forest for the trees”, we need to see clearly how bad faith inches its way into our midst, how it undermines our best intentions, how it works against us, when powerful institutions decide it should be the rule.

ThoughtPossible.com :: The much forgotten fact about the current economic malaise is that never before the last 2 decades had so many people of so many income scales had such liberal access to credit. This is not the cause of the crisis, as so many financial grandees happily profess, but a salient fact that must be examined. It has been a great thing for financial markets, for the US economy and for people across the world, and was widely considered to be a sign of deep maturity in the markets and in the banking system.

The problem stems from an all-too-pervasive and endless test of human nature: the lenders wanted mega-profits from everyone, not just a little on top, no matter how much or how little additional wealth their wealth could reasonably generate. Despite getting substantially richer as credit and lending proliferated, it seems there was a (perhaps subconscious) insistence among the top bankers that they should see their lot improved by vast amounts for every last consumer diving into credit or investments. This means: the ideology of bank management devolved into a notion of automatic income, a dangerous and untenable approach.

This is not an indictment of every individual in the financial industry, and we should remember there are some good people there. But it does speak volumes about the flaws in the system that with the democratization of credit, those at the top still wanted all wealth gains to be concentrated near the top of the pyramid they felt entitled to erect.

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A lack of imagination and an unwillingness to really get to know the intimate ramifications of global macro-economic conditions, meant the people running the show “chickened out” and gave into an ill-conceived nostalgia for the ancien regime of aristocratic overseers deciding what a market is all about, who gets to play, and taking a toll for all involvement. That elite group is then entitled to its fee for everything that occurs, and the logic of this is to be able to project far into the future repeated mega-profits, however improbable or unfair.

Entitlement is the word to watch here, because it will shed light in many dark corners of the development of this crisis. We often hear financial pundits talkk about “the invisible hand” or “what the market will bear”, vaguely metaphorical references to theories about how markets set prices, to justify exorbitant claims about profit-focused schemes that are quite simply unsustainable.

Yes, housing prices go up, because people can keep paying more, but balloon economies also burst because there is no longer anyone who can “bear” the absurd and irrational pressures exerted on all who dwell within a given market by the side-effects of ill-conceived, unimaginative, self-serving, profit-taking speculation and price manipulation. For instance, many are forced out of their homes by an inability to keep up with property tax payments on properties that have doubled or tripled in value in just a few years, because incomes tend not to surge by so much, even in the best of times.

Some people believe that being “in finance” means one is entitled to live well, to have luxuries others might think too embarrassing to openly engage in, to get paid huge amounts for doing work that is not necessarily orders of magnitude more heroic, meritorious or taxing than what less well-paid workers make. For instance: policeman, emergency surgeon, nuclear physicist, economist, president of the United States.

A rational amount of populism does not call for flattening of incomes across the board, which we know is destructive, unworkable and supremely undemocratic, but it does recognize that the entitlement emotion to which many of the most influential are given should not dictate policy, for government, markets or the firms themselves.

Trying to find boom-time petroleum-speculation sorts of profits from lending to the tens of millions of working-class families whose home-buying pushed economic growth and bank solvency for over a decade, because otherwise it would not be “worth it” to make the loans, that betrayal of purpose, was the thing that set this crisis in motion, if we are willing to look to the metaphysical plane to comprehend the bad choices evidenced in human behavior.

Financial “exotics” and derivatives whose speculative profits were too far out to be explained as a function of the actual worth of anything being traded were a masquerade, a two-faced experiment with global financial sleight of hand, whether those who invented them understood this or not. Re-sell the same thing (actual monetary value of an actual monetary “asset”) eight times and “produce” eight times the wealth… so long, that is, as no one stoops to pointing out that the thing being sold is worth only 1/8 the total amount spent, and someone, somewhere, is going to call in what’s owed, unable to finance by any reasonable math the “interest” accrued to that financial transaction, through absolutely no fault of the other party in the transaction.

Is that a very innovative sort of pyramid scheme? It’s certainly much more a house of cards than we expect our financial system to be. We expect such irrational claims will be singled out and combatted by attentive regulators. But they were not singled out, nor were they noticed, nor was anyone tasked with testing the viability of these schemes, because they were artfully hidden by being filed under the category of “spreading risk”, a very responsible financial strategy.

But there is a categorical distinction between “spreading risk” as widely and creatively as possible and extracting unwarranted income from unsustainable transactions hidden by bundling and reselling. Complicating the maintenance of a transaction in order to “spread risk” does not reduce the overall risk in such a way that profits related to that transaction should explode. In order to believe that it does, it is necessary to inject the entitled to massive gain sentiment into the process.

Whether you are liberal or conservative, populist or free-marketeer, a government accountant, a Wall Street executive, a victim of pension-hijacking or someone about to lose their home to foreclosure, an Obama supporter or a McCain donor, you have to accept that the attitude that those who work at banks should expect enormous wealth as a result, must change. People need to do their work because they believe in what they are doing, find fulfillment and can be trusted to perform out of principle and because they receive a fair salary, and not because they are driven by mystical ideas about impossible levels of automatic revenue.

“On Laze & Malaise in Mass Culture, Part”

[Part 1 :: Part 2 :: Part 3 :: Part 4]

Knowledge is wealth in its purest form, fully possessed by and inseparable from the individual. As noted in previous sections of this essay, the application of deliberately obtained knowledge to complex situations establishes the sovereignty of the individual. Variety is wealth insofar as it offers an array of options which may be combined in countless ways to confront the problems of living in the world. Variety in knowledge offers adaptability, and adaptability is the key to survival and prosperity at all levels. Ultimately, resilience, rooted in such flexibility, is the real meaning or value of wealth, of any kind.

Without variety, there would be only pure uniformity. All of existence would be one: one mass, with no constituent particles, with no variation of properties, no mobility and no place to go besides. Without the interaction among particles, among diverse forms, forces, materials and beings, nothing of the universe we know could exist. It is the collision, the mechanics, the action and reaction, the combination and differentiation among existent bodies that makes life, gravity, beauty, freedom and invention possible. Within the intelligent recourse to variety, there exists for humanity a maximum possibility for resilience in changing and adverse conditions. Inherent in this variety of choice is not only existence, but the possibility of freedom. Choice is not freedom as such, but together with intellect, offers us the possibility of really approaching it.

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In the spirit of this re-examination of what wealth is, we need to take into account the attributes that help to locate, formulate and communicate knowledge. Eloquence is wealth, as it represents an intelligent sorting and refinement of vastly diverse ideas and elements of the surrounding world, offering clarity, harmony, and again, the possibility of freedom, through the use of cultural knowledge and variety for the most inventive yet apt expression of human reality. Precise expression of complex ideas liberates the individual, and eloquence is more what it aims to be when it speaks the truth, its options expanded — so in the best case, it is a measure of the potential for liberation through ideas, in any given context.

The Declaration of Independence or Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech are eloquent not merely as expert wordsmithy, but because they transmit transcendent truths, and they comment on evidence of what most needs addressing: truth upon truth, distilled into fluid language, freeing the mind to believe in hard-won solutions. Barack Obama’s use of language falls into these transcendent categories: it is important to recognize that what his campaign has injected into American politics is not flowery rhetoric or ideological fluff, but a very real contact with the urge to get at, make sense of and share through the use of language, those timeless truths about the human condition that give democracy its purpose.

It could be said that all social ills are the direct result of insufficient communicative agreements between and among individual people and the constituents they represent, whatever the political structure within which those ills arise. It could be said that most political structures are the direct result of insufficient eloquence, having led to the use of force where it would otherwise not be suggested at all. In order to engage in dialogue, or in heated disagreement, we need to have an agreed semantic base, use shared measurements, make common assumptions about the world —we live on the Earth, it is round, it has a geological history, there were civilizations that pre-date our own, trees that shed their leaves in winter and those that don’t are categorically different—, so at least we know what concepts we agree or disagree over.

Culture, the vague and potent mix of ideas, traditions, changes, principles, language, will and expression, which defines all civil structures and to some degree all human communication, is an abstract category within which we conceptualize the intelligent diversity of a society. The more numerous the contributions, the more tolerant and open the means of administering and delivering cultural expressions of all sorts, the more knowledge there is available, the more possibility for new directions there is, the more resilient a system of human interaction within which those cultural expressions occur, will be. To benefit from such diverse inputs, from such productive oppositions, frictions and propositions, is to gain vital cultural and organizational resilience, to increase the wealth —as against decay— of a community, is to project its future potential as far as  possible, in as many directions as possible.

This may appear to be a redefinition of wealth, but it represents nothing more than honest thought about thought itself and its central and unimpeachable role in every individual human being’s life and navigation through life, and by extension the role that diverse and adaptable thought processes play in the life of a community, culture or nation. To address the faultlines where we find our political faith cracking, or to heal the wounds and cleanse the infections that seem to be inviting a long-term economic decay, we need to privilege the access to knowledge, but also to the ability to develop, disseminate, modify, adapt and expand it, for the overall wealth of a nation, a culture, a community, and the realm of individual freedom itself.

• Part 1: With or Without Ideas
• Part 2: Navigational Tools (Point of View)
• Part 3: Fate, Victimization & Sovereignty
• Part 4: Do we have an academic culture?
• Part 5: Culture & Resilience: a Redefinition of Wealth

[from Cave Painting, at Casavaria]

ThoughtPossible.com :: I have long felt, as so many Americans do, a profound emotional attachment to the ideals we always speak of when we talk about our founding revolution, our enlightened democracy, our progress toward a freer and more just world. And I have always aspired to see those ideals put on display, not just by an historic moment, but by the collective awareness of millions of impassioned American citizens. This moment in history is a sea change in our collective mindset, and a victory for all Americans.

We now see that what we preach as a nation of ideas really is possible in the reality of our democratic processes. We now see that hope is not a convenient illusion, but an engine for cooperative action and a bridge to the actual achievement of great things made improbable by a cynical environment. Obama’s victory demonstrates that the hope that “We Shall Overcome” is not just the province or the labor of an oppressed people, but the dream necessary for us all, if we are to have a chance to be what we seek as a nation.

His victory demonstrates that we are in fact working to overcome the sinister dangers we came through in the worst and weakest facets of our national character. It was amazing to see how many people, of all races and ages, were found to say yesterday, either for having cast their vote or for witnessing this historic event, that they had “never been so happy” as they were in playing a role in this. It may be difficult for those who supported the other party to see this, or to accept it so early on, but even they won a great victory against the darkness of impossibility last night.

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While the work of governing is serious and the task of the moment monumental, and there are countless risks embodied in pitfalls of the moment, the nature of Obama’s victory is a basic expansion of possibility and wellbeing for us all. It is not merely symbolic. What some might refer to as the symbolic value of his victory means we all now live in a more complete, more self-aware, more evolved society, and our democracy —the role each of us might play in its work— is stronger and more dynamic for it.

President-elect Obama may be facing the single most challenging array of crises since FDR took office during the Great Depression. On most policy fronts that need tending, he will inherit a disastrous situation, each of which requires genius strategies, a cooperative political environment, and funding that will have to come from somewhere. Obama won in part because his consistent, comprehensive message was not just about hope, it was about a framework within which such effective leadership might be possible.

We should all, no matter what our political persuasion, at this moment look with an open heart at the real matter of Barack Obama’s political philosophy, his policy goals, his approach to governing, look with an open mind at what it is he proposes and what he asks of us, as a united people, and wherever possible rise to the occasion of embodying that goal of an inclusive politics, a politics that draws good ideas from wherever they may come and replaces barriers and battlements with dialogue and reason.

This is our chance to be what we always say we hope to be. This is, as Obama said in his victory address last night, the beginning of a period of historic change across our nation and political system, not the culmination of it. But it is vital to recognize that this change is not about one ideology being imposed on those who believe in another —Sen. Obama was always clear this was not the nature of his vision—, but about a cooperative rising to meet the challenges of our times, with a renewed civic passion and a renewed willingness to work together toward a better world.

ThoughtPossible.com :: We have seen the old punchcard ballots ridiculed for their potential flaws in 2000, in Florida. We have seen the dangers of touchscreen voting machines almost everywhere they have been used, at one point or another. Indeed, the state of New Jersey is using them even after having commissioned a study that demonstrated comprehensively they could be easily manipulated to swing an election. And none of the solutions we’ve heard seem able to guarantee an errorless or tamper-free count.

Consensus seems to be building that the best choice we have are voter-marked paper ballots, which ideally can be read by machine, with little to no risk of erroneous readings. This leads us to the optical-scan ballot, the one where voters fill in little ovals or circles with black ink or pencil, like on standardized tests, and where electronic machines then scan the ballot to see where the marks are made, comparing that with the template it has been programmed to read.

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There are many potential flaws to this system, but on the whole, given all the criteria legislated to date, and the paramount standard of assessing “the intent of the voter” —how can it be necessary to actually legislate that standard?—, optical scan is the closest we can come to meeting all requirements, at this time. I propose here a hypothetical system for casting and counting such ballots with minimal risk of error or interference:

1. The ballots must be optical-scan paper ballots, preferably on paper or cardstock of optimum thickness for being selected and read, one by one, by a machine;
2. Provenance must be guaranteed, so the ideal situation is that only the voter ever touches the completed ballot, then inserting the ballot into a container which will only accept the ballot (as with dollar bills in vending machines) if it is inserted in the proper fashion, so it will be read accurately later;
3. Ideally, when inserted into the storage container, the ballot will be prescanned, and the container will be able to alert a voter to a possible smudge or under-darkened mark on the ballot, so corrective action can be taken before the ballot is officially submitted;
4. To guarantee provenance, the container into which the ballot is inserted cannot be opened by anyone except by court order, and no low-level election officials will have access to any means of opening the container;
5. To guarantee optimal readability, the space inside the container, within which the ballots will be stacked, must not be larger in format than the ballot itself (this provides for the highest possible likelihood that no ballots will enter the scanner at an angle, or in some way off-kilter, thus skewing the scan);
6. Once scanned, each individual ballot will be mechanically returned to a similar storage container, which cannot be opened without court order (such orders can be provided for as automatic under specific conditions laid out in state election laws), containing a precise number of “counted ballots” in a precisely sized space (as with the first container), optimized for mechanical recounts;
7. Containers holding counted ballots will be stored permanently in a state archive for marked ballots, where they will be available for any future recounts, mechanized or manual;
8. In case of manual recount, a court order would allow the sealed ballot containers to be opened and the ballots extracted by hand, or for them to be mechanically scanned again, then distributed to manual recount containers, from which point, they would need to be recounted and reinserted into sealed containers, with the entire process being overseen by a team of independent observers in any place where this occurs.

Variations to this process could work for certain areas of the country or for certain circumstances, so long as safeguards were in place to avoid any kind of ballot manipulation or disposal. All elimination of or discarding of marked ballots, whether categorized as “spoiled” or not, would be prohibited, and, due to the mechanical security of the count, it would be possible to legislate at least one automatic recount, even in the instance of the first count.

ThoughtPossible.com :: It is often lamented that the United States suffers from a culture that plays to the “lowest common denominator”, even as it gathers its collective urges to proclaim the loftiest of philosophical aspirations. So we are forced, as citizens, as intellectuals, as free spirits —as followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson or of Kerouac, Jerry Springer or Madonna, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.— to grapple with the argument that American culture is inherently “anti-intellectual”, and therefore unable to deal with overtly complex thought patterns, or convoluted, multiply parenthetical (or as Woody Allen might say it, polymorphously nested) sorts of syntax.

The first argument I would make against this is that we have produced too many resonant intellectuals to be a society that does not value, seek and promote intellectual behavior. We can go back to our founders: Franklin, Jefferson, Adams (let’s not forget Abigail), Madison, Hamilton: each of these were serious intellectual heavyweights, using a deep understanding of millennia of philosophy, science and politics, to approach the formation of a nation “of ideas”. In the environment, we have others like Thomas Paine, whose intellectual treatise (necessary to our revolution as other treatises have been to others throughout history) helped to motivate mass support for a revolution based on ideas.

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Paine’s “Common Sense” is arguably the most important “pamphlet” ever distributed anywhere, its achievement the distilling of heroically complex meditations about the nature of human beings, power and society, into a vernacular that not only made them accessible, but took the reader deeper into the personal relevance of those ideas. It is hard to overestimate the achievement of the work as writing, but what is truly astounding is the degree to which Paine’s contribution demonstrates that the United States of America was founded as a nation loyal to specific intellectual examinations of the world and its contents.

Frederick Douglass, a great American statesman, orator and author, was the first African American US ambassador, named by Abraham Lincoln as our first envoy to the independent nation of Haiti, 60 years after it declared independence from the French empire. Douglass was an ex-slave, and an intellectual. His case is known because of the work he did to make it known, by developing his intellectual abilities and by courageously touring the Union to make the case for abolition. The greatness of Frederick Douglass, his place of pride in our nation’s turbid history, is not down to his having escaped slavery, for others did that, but to his passionate intellectual pursuit of a yet-unrealized world of truth and justice.

Soundbite journalism, writing to the headline, making every turn of phrase another “hook” to stop the reader’s eye from wandering to something less tiring, is, I think, the main reason why such writing strategies appear necessary. A lack of complex, deeply relevant writing, is what pushes the best-soundbite headline to the forefront of our collective awareness. Not its inherent usefulness or interest. The potent soundbite headline is usually also the thesis statement of its attached text, meaning the argument is already made and understood and the reading seems, ultimately, either disappointing or unnecessary. So the mind becomes accustomed to wandering, incessantly.

The parenthetical expression —and I recognize the irony involved in taking so long to get to this point (part of me would like to think it was an artful wordplay, but it’s just the nature of this discussion)— is not about lateral movement, distraction, or fuzzy disinterested over-intellectualizing… it’s about going deeper. In Arabic folk tales, going back to ancient times, the oral tradition is “knit” into the fabric of a story, so that history and wisdom can be passed down through time, by way of wholecloth parenthetical renderings of a tale within a tale. One character tells a story, within which another character tells a story, and by the end, you must re-emerge, layer by layer, back to the surface, so that the entire story is cohesive, a closed circuit, comprehensible.

One can easily get lost —as with the complex familial relations spelled out by the long lists of three-part names at the beginning of many Russian novels, or the indulgent lyrical descriptions of landscape, manners and quotidian minutia, found in so many classical American or English novels— at any point in the descent into or re-emergence from the inner folktales, but they play a vital role in the memory-game that is oral tradition, the telling of a culture, the making and conveyance of ideas. Not just moral codes, but tested truths, aesthetic preferences, the cadence of language, are all captured by these techniques, and the story is made ever more relevant.

The 1,001 Arabian Nights is this kind of story. It is a single harmonious ship of narrative, within which we find stowed away a myriad —vastly more than 1,001— of vignettes, crucibles of faith and conflict, loves and narrow escapes, recounted for so many reasons that one quickly loses count. But we still value this collection of masterful stories today, because it works. The underlying wisdom here is that meaning is always layered: one meaning cloaks another, necessarily, or to put it another way, we often cannot see the forest for the trees. What focuses our attention also narrows our focus, in most cases, so the ability to first focus, then go deeper, allows us to also expand the ground our thought-processes can cover, without letting go of the original narrative.

If we shy away from phrases within phrases, from departures from the scene from within the scene, if we turn our backs to the Grand Canyon, at its very edge, we might be in danger of forgetting what gravity does to off-balance objects: to look at what we have before us, even in the midst of another tale, is not to lose touch with our preferred reality, but to know more clearly what surrounds and limits us. To do this is, frankly, to limit our freedom in a comprehensive way, and it is a caging in from which we cannot easily escape, perhaps not without the ability to imitate the liberating journey of telling the tales of the 1,001 nights, for that was the purpose of the surface-level narrative of the captive Sheherazade.

The meandering narrative, the open book, the chronicle of river systems of the everyday human, is our model of a free press, a decentralized, layered non-hierarchical web of meaning and fact, interrelated, referential, critical, and of necessity: parenthetical. We have retired our gaze from the most potent truth about our culture, when we propose that long, difficult reasoning is somehow contrary to our nature, when we forget that thousands of physicists among us have devoted their lives to the search for maddeningly, almost impossibly complex truths, at the level of elementary particles, that their minds are working to help our society as a whole keep pace with the complex aspirations we conjure up in our daily slog.

If we are afraid to go deeper within the body of any given thought or meditation, then we should put aside the undulating history of ideas, of instructive departures from simple clarity about those ideas, the violent clash of philosophies that plays out civilly in our judicial system, that is sometimes begrudgingly slow, but deliberate enough to give us back what we put into the system, our belief in common ideas, the patience to wade through the eddies and inconsquence of meantime arguments. If we are afraid to hash out our meditations in the school of layered and interlacing discussions of ideas, then we negate the fundamentally free-to-parenthesize nature of the American intellectual, and we give in to the temptation to negate our origins and believe again in the simplicity of a dangerous feudal clarity.

Order from simplicity is not the strength of the American system or the American mind; quite the contrary, we have fashioned our improbable experiment precisely to be resilient in the face of and even inviting to the expansive riches of infuriating complexity, of living in the gray area, keeping afloat in the mind-meld, working to craft individuality always from the omnibus of overarching concerns. We have sought nobility of spirit in the dignified complexity of those minds that have shaped our history, those heroic feats of imagining that have ushered in one after another bold new era of resonant upheaval. Without departing from our basic interest in the ideals of a free society.

We are, in short, parenthetical to our own narrative, which is to say, highly inclusive, overwrought with the prospect of being forbidden to be so, and in each individual, we are as such a universe of pretensions and hopes and relations, which for all our protesting to the contrary, desires the room complexity affords us for personal expansion. We should return to an awareness of the value of complexity in language, and use our trust in fact and truth-telling to reinvigorate the culture of reporting and comment, which has in recent years, been so corroded as to assert its right to infinite over-simplification, regardless of all that would deprive us of living.

ThoughtPossible.com :: There are reports coming out of Virginia suggesting that an unidentified person or group has been distributing fliers targeting minorities and registered Democrats, instructing them incorrectly that Election Day will be Wednesday, November 5. ELECTION DAY IS TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, for everyone who has not voted early or by absentee ballot.

The revelation suggests a potential conspiracy to suppress turnout among voters considered likely to cast their votes for the Democratic candidate, thus manipulating the electoral process and seeking to sway the count in Virginia to the Republican candidate. No specific individual or group has been accused, but voting rights activists and Democrats have called for an investigation into the fliers.

The NAACP has filed a lawsuit in Virginia, accusing the governor of not adequately preparing for the election process, and not having enough voting machines for predominantly African American precincts, whereas predominantly white precincts are receiving machines at a better voter to machine ratio.

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Democracy Now! reports:

Voter rights groups have filed a federal lawsuit in Pennsylvania seeking emergency paper ballots. The lawsuit was filed after Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State ordered counties to provide emergency paper ballots only if every electronic voting machine breaks down at a voting site. We speak to John Bonifaz of Voter Action.

The integrity of our electoral process is not guaranteed. After serious questions about whether hundreds of thousands of voters may have been denied the right to vote in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, with studies showing the real danger of an unverifiable electronic voting process, 6 states —New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, South Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana— will use machines that provide no paper record.

The Chicago Tribune, conservative monument of American journalism, which has never endorsed a Democratic candidate for president, since 1847, has endorsed Barack Obama, the US senator from Illinois, for president. Perhaps the most poignant phrase for many voters would be “He is ready.” The fact that this was the major sticking point for many suggests the rest of his appeal is an easy sell.

The conservative daily endorsed Abraham Lincoln in his day, and praised Sen. Obama effusively, noting that:

On Dec. 6, 2006, this page encouraged Obama to join the presidential campaign. We wrote that he would celebrate our common values instead of exaggerate our differences. We said he would raise the tone of the campaign. We said his intellectual depth would sharpen the policy debate. In the ensuing 22 months he has done just that.

As for voters who are concerned that Sen. Obama is somehow too new to government or lacks experience in Washington:

We can provide some assurance. We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago. We have watched him, worked with him, argued with him as he rose from an effective state senator to an inspiring U.S. senator to the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.

We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions. He is ready.

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The paper’s endorsement editorial also drew parallels between this election cycle and other moments in its history when it did not endorse the Republican candidate for president. It explained the history of the paper’s allegiance to the Republican cause, rooted in its support, along with (at the time of the paper’s founding, then US House representative) Abraham Lincoln, for the abolitionist movement.

It supported independent candidates who ran against the corrupt Republican administrations of Pres. Grant and Pres. Taft, and the Chicago paper’s editors blame the present-day Republican party for having “lost its way”, saying that in 2006, and likely in 2008, its difficulties are the price it is paying for having strayed from its principles.

The Tribune also criticized Sen. John McCain for having “put his campaign before his country” for choosing Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, passing over many highly prepared Republican women, privileging her ideology over her readiness, and doing so to win political points with a hard-right base.

While criticizing Obama for some tax policies that conservatives oppose as too much aimed at socio-economic policy, and not at the prosperity of American businesses, the paper judges that “Obama would govern as much more of a pragmatic centrist than many people expect”. Specifically, the editors testify that:

We know first-hand that Obama seeks out and listens carefully and respectfully to people who disagree with him. He builds consensus. He was most effective in the Illinois legislature when he worked with Republicans on welfare, ethics and criminal justice reform.

The paper noted that Obama’s policy proposals are “deeply grounded in the best aspirations of this country, and we need to return to those aspirations”, adding that “He has had the character and the will to achieve great things despite the obstacles that he faced as an unprivileged black man in the U.S.”

In perhaps the most resounding endorsement for Obama to date, the Chicago Tribune’s editors observe that “It may have seemed audacious for Obama to start his campaign in Springfield, invoking Lincoln. We think, given the opportunity to hold this nation’s most powerful office, he will prove it wasn’t so audacious after all.”

Obama has now received 61 newspaper endorsements, to Sen. McCain’s 18, with 22 coming in just the last couple of days. A raft of newspaper endorsements are expected in coming days, as we enter the final two weeks before election day. Sen. Obama has also enjoyed the endorsement of conservative radio talk show hosts, like Philadelphia’s Michael Smerconish and intellectuals like (former) National Review columnist (and son of its founder) Christopher Buckley.

That Obama continues to receive praise from conservative circles for a history of effective bipartisan leadership, for openness to ideas from across the political spectrum and for his reputation for pragmatic centrism, would seem to impede the hard-line argument that his policies would be “socialist” or somehow work against America’s market economy. [from Thought Possible, at Open.Salon.com]

Sen. John McCain brought back to life the question of whether or not the “No Child Left Behind” law was a good or a bad idea. He claims it was a good start, but foolishly glossed over the fact that the bill’s punitive “accountability” measures target the poor directly. Schools that most need funding are deprived of it, by the No Child Left Behind law, guaranteeing failure in schools that would otherwise be forced to struggle continually with scarce funding.

Pres. Bush’s most severe critics have accused him and the Republican Congress that helped him implement his education reforms of deliberately trying to create an educational “underclass”, in order to keep l0wer-end wages as low as possible and justify their 1o-year refusal to raise the minimum wage. This is speculation, of course, but the fact that stripping struggling schools of much-needed funds harms schools in low-income areas is clearly true, and is borne out by the facts.

There have also been accusations that such policies are similar to what happened in Texas, when then Governor Bush “privatized” the public education system, paying private contractors to manage public schools within a for-profit structure. This has not happened in most public schools, and states and municipalities retain most decision-making with regard to the schools, but that private education consulting or management firms have championed NCLB is clear.

The heart of the matter is that NCLB is fundamentally ill-conceived and unfair, especially if we consider that its expressed purpose is to reform American public schools so that all Americans enjoy the opportunity for the best possible education. Part of the problem is local funding, rooted in the state and municipal property tax system, which already imposes on most public schools a vast wealth divide that NCLB does not even pretend to deal with.

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Outside of Philadelphia, there are schools in wealthy townships that have not only radio but TV stations, faculty who have earned their PhD, and more than one football or track field. Just 10 miles away, on the margins of Philadelphia itself, it is possible to find schools where students may never own a bound text-book and work only from photocopies or from shared texts. Teachers are forced to pay for materials, and the “test-score” issue looms as a constant threat of funds being revoked.

When the Philadelphia school system found itself in need of an additional $50 million in funding to meet its needs, the administration of then Gov. Tom Ridge (later Homeland Security chief for George W. Bush) revoked $70 million in funding the schools already had, as a punitive measure for “failing schools”.

The funding gap was catastrophic for school quality and coincided with a steep increase in violence in the most troubled schools. But Ridge’s move was politically cunning, in that he then proposed he would offer the schools $70 million in “new” funding, if they took certain steps to “improve” conditions, according to a series of standards that may have been more ideologically driven than pragmatically informed.

Ridge contracted a private school management consulting firm to study the possibility of working with Philadelphia. After two years and millions spent, Edison Schools became the official management contractor for Philadelphia’s now “privatized” public schools. A report from 2002 notes the odd results:

Days before classes were to begin in September, trucks arrived to take away most of the textbooks, computers, lab supplies and musical instruments the company had provided — Edison had to sell them off for cash. Many students were left with decades-old books and no equipment.

A few weeks later, some of the company’s executives moved into offices inside the schools so Edison could avoid paying the $8,750 monthly rent on its Philadelphia headquarters. They stayed only a few days, until the school board ordered them out.

As a final humiliation, Chris Whittle, the company’s charismatic chief executive and founder, recently told a meeting of school principals that he’d thought up an ingenious solution to the company’s financial woes: Take advantage of the free supply of child labor, and force each student to work an hour a day, presumably without pay, in the school offices.

“We could have less adult staff,” Mr. Whittle reportedly said at a summit for employees and principals in Colorado Springs. “I think it’s an important concept for education and economics.” In a school with 600 students, he said, this unpaid work would be the equivalent of “75 adults” on salary.

What, ultimately, is the point of such an experiment? How is any reputable business expected to earn a serious profit by taking money predetermined to the dollar to be spent on specific public services costs? They can only profit if they withdraw money from that budget, for their own profits. In an environment where funding was already inadequate, and where new laws to “reform” the education system aim to reduce funding, this is not a morally or mathematically viable option.

One of the problems with NCLB is that the legislation was supported by conservative ideologues who view the federal Department of Education as socialist and a threat to democracy. They quite explicitly aim to eliminate any federal funding for education, and often misrepresent the role of federal funding, claiming it aims to indoctrinate the youth of the nation.

In fact, the federal role in education policy is intended to serve as a defense against unfair disparities in quality of public education. Partly informed by civil rights law and by judicial precedent on the question of school availability being a question of equality under the law, the federal education budget has always been intended to help raise the quality if education services available to communities across the nation.

No Child Left Behind turned that formula on its head, and in fact imposed a blanket system of “standardization”, which undermines local control, severely restricts the quality and scope of information available to American students, and imposes on the entire system a logic of cheating. Schools aims to “teach to the test” in order to raise scores, and even wealthy states like New Jersey are abandoning vital subject matter like social studies in order to focus on test-oriented teaching. [from Thought Possible, at Open.Salon.com]

Barack Obama appears to have kept his cool, delivered his message and kept his focus firmly on issues and the work of governing. John McCain fired a number of gimic-enabled shots at Obama, but failed to deliver a coherent message, other than his allegation that Obama wants to raise taxes and he would cut them for everyone, a factually untrue claim about his tax proposal.

The third and last of the presidential debates between Obama and McCain illustrated more clearly than the other two that Sen. McCain has rooted his strategy and his policy proposals in the philosophy of his party, even where that philosophy has been the underpinning of failed economic policies, over the last 8 years.

McCain enjoyed a bold moment when he fired at Obama that “I am not Pres. Bush”, saying that if he wanted to run against Bush, he should have run in 2004. But the point-score slipped away because Obama’s retort was more powerful: he noted that McCain’s tax policy and economic philosophy were nearly indistinguishible from Bush’s.

McCain falsely accused Obama of “class warfare” and suggested that “spreading the wealth” would be negative for economic recovery. The charge against Obama didn’t stick, and McCain failed to explain how his opposition to “spreading the wealth” fits with his suggestion of using $300 billion to renegotiate home loans in danger of being foreclosed by uncooperative banks.

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McCain has had the problem of wanting to have his cake and eat it, too, shifting gears a little too often to win favor among undecided and independent voters. He has tried to court moderates by not voicing the personal attacks that have alienated them, but has permitted his campaign to continue the attacks, and tonight he jumped in.

Criticized for the intensely negative attacks, even threats against Obama at rallies hosted by Gov. Palin, Sen. McCain’s running mate, McCain seemed to downplay the seriousness of the cases where Obama was threatened and said he’s “proud” of the people who attend his rallies. Clearly, he did not mean to suggest he was proud of those he called “fringe people”, but he failed utterly to explain that he disapproved.

Meanwhile, Sen. Obama was spoon-fed an opportunity to attack McCain’s VP choice on any number of fronts, at his choosing, and he took the high road, consistent with his admonition that voters were turned off by the back and forth of the campaigns and wanted substantive strategies for dealing with looming economic, energy, environmental and security crises.

Pressed by McCain for his campaign’s huge spending advantage, with McCain accusing Obama of spending “more on negative advertising” than any campaign in history, the Illinois senator quipped coolly: “I think the American people are less interested in our hurt feelings than in the issues they care about so deeply”, and noted that analysis had shown Sen. McCain’s advertising had reached 100% negative.

While Sen. McCain appeared more confident and more prepared than in the previous two debates, his focus on attacking Sen. Obama robbed him of the time he needed to better explain his positions to undecided voters. This may have been a strategic blunder, exacerbated by the unrealistic claims he made, such as alleging that ACORN was trying “to destroy the fabric of democracy”.

Sen. McCain also falsely alleged Sen. Obama was in favor of denying emergency medical care to newborn infants, while the issue hinged on a legislative vote, with Obama’s position supported by pro-choice Republicans, mainstream Democrats and by Illinois doctors, because existing law and the Hippocratic Oath already require doctors to provide medical care. As such, the bill was not really an attempt to help the infant in question, but a veiled attack on the Roe v. Wade decision.

McCain then alleged there is a “pro-abortion movement”. This language comes not from the Republican party’s mainstream “federalist” position on state’s rights to decide such policy issues, but from the radical groups that have in the past used violence against family planning clinics and obstetricians who worked in or around abortion procedures.

The dishonest phrase “pro-abortion” has seeped into electoral politics because it is considered to be a way to stain Democrats and to help Republicans court conservative voters. Its use is problematic because it suggests a lack of precision in matters of social policy and awareness of the political landscape. This is McCain’s biggest problem and his way of attacking Obama seemed to feed into the perception that he is not attuned to the political moment.

What’s more, he seemed to mock Sen. Obama’s suggestion that there’s an issue about “health and life of the mother” in late-term abortion, after Sen. Obama said he could not support the ban on that procedure because it had no provision for protecting the health of the mother, as he had requested. This could be a misunderstanding of the issue on McCain’s part, but it seems a terrible miscalculation to have so dismissed the mother’s health concern, which is part of the mainstream position on late-term abortion and not contrary to being pro-life generally.

A close examination of the night’s key moments demonstrates that McCain did well in terms of a debate on traditional conservative issues, and did get some key points across, but the event was not a debate on conservative issues, and Obama was able to achieve the night’s highest objective: to give the impression that he is cool under pressure, calm in the midst of the storm, ready to lead in a time of crisis, even as McCain was on the offensive against him.

Even in this muted performance, Obama spoke with presidential grace, as a man already on the job: “I don’t mind being attacked for the next three weeks; what the American people can’t afford is four more years of failed economic policies”. Sen. McCain will need to pull his message together, and find a way to demonstrate problem-solving ability, which is to date his most serious deficit. [from Thought Possible, at Open.Salon.com]

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA/Dow) today had its single biggest day of gains in history, climbing 936 points. It could be a good sign, that on Friday the market “established a bottom”, but it’s important to remember: the nature of volatility is not that it is ripe for gain or ripe for loss, but that it is volatility, and one’s will and judgment are not always as relevant as one would like.

The Dow had its largest numerical point-gain, but also its 4th largest percentage gain, at over 11%. The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ also increased by more than 11%, ostensibly as a reaction to news that governments around the world had made a concerted effort to buy shares in troubled banks, possibly to help even healthy banks gain access to capital, by letting governments take a share, in exchange for some say in how they are run, and the right to sell at a later date.

The program would be “voluntary”, meaning no one is proposing a mass nationalization of banking assets, so there is no need to worry —if you’re in the financial industry— that the fundamental principles of a financial marketplace will be relegated to history by a wave of government decrees. But there is more than easy capital at play: there is the atmosphere of volatility, which favors certain investment mindsets.

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In a time of unprecedented declines, there must be, logically, a few good bargains to be had, and nobody wants to lose out on those bargains. So the same rationale of fear and uncertainty that pushed people to sell and “get out” of the plummeting market last week —in turn driving the steep declines ever further— now may have motivated a return to buying, out of concern that great opportunities could be lost.

Morgan Stanley is reported to have gained 85% on its share value today alone. This may have to do with the deep uncertainty concerning the company’s future, its steep declines in recent weeks, and news last week that a deal to shore up its financial reserves may have fallen through. Today, it looked like the firm was in better condition, and the buy was a bargain-basement deal.

Morgan Stanley may be more stable than it was last week, during the worst losses in the Dow’s history (2,400 points, or 22% in one week), but the astonishing sudden increase in stock value is due to volatility, not to a lightning fast economic recovery or restoration of order to the banking system.

The DJIA is sometimes erroneously referred to as “the stock market”, as if there were no NYSE or any other exchanges or indices, and its daily point-total is counted as one of the most reliable measures of the performance of the New York Stock Exchange. But it is just one facet of what is now a global marketplace, and it has become one of the many tools for gauging what is happening in what is now a global banking crisis.

It is, in some ways, more important to acknowledge that this is a banking crisis, than to use terms like “economic” or “financial”, because banking underpins a lot of economic activity, but a banking crisis can be contained if banking reforms or interventions are well-planned and well-executed. And because the word “financial” often gives the impression of having to do with stock brokers, the art of the deal and “high finance” investment banking, but this crisis has come to permeate the banking sector broadly.

According to CNN:

On Monday, Neel Kashkari, assistant Treasury Secretary and interim head of the $700 billion bailout program – outlined some of the steps the government will take in the weeks and months ahead. The program includes buying soured mortgage assets from banks and buying stock in a number of financial institutions. (Full story)

Meanwhile, House Democrats are meeting Monday to put together a second economic stimulus package that could be worth $150 billion, although House Republicans are reportedly skeptical, CNN reports.

World leaders met over the weekend to come up with solutions. After an emergency meeting Sunday, 15 European nations agreed to help their troubled banks by adding capital and guaranteeing inter-bank lending. (Full story)

To put the problem of gain versus loss in the environment of a banking meltdown into perspective, the bleeding was not limited to “one or two bad actors” as karmic retribution for their ill-advised or unethical deeds, but spread like contagion to all corners of the global banking system, which had become overly dependent on the easy flow of new capital, through credit and investment insurance, some of which was flimsy or even non-existent (like the esoteric “credit default swaps”).

Now, we are looking headlong into a global government-backed buyout of “toxic assets”, financial instruments or even banking entities whose value relies heavily on unsustainable debt. That means there will be a wholesale revolution in the functioning of financial markets, and the goal will be to decrease volatility.

So, for now, the market is ripe for volatility, fraught with uncertainty, and prone to huge, historic swings, on the downside and on the upside. It will be necessary, from whatever point of view one takes, to remember that gains and losses on the stock market are both spurs and symptoms: they can represent underlying ills or dynamism, but also make things happen, like spur the collapse of otherwise viable firms or “lubricate” credit sources, for businesses, for investment and for consumers.

That, ultimately, is the goal, and it will be the coordinated respose to the crisis, not the volatile activity of the markets, that decides if credit becomes available more broadly. [from Thought Possible, at Open.Salon.com]

American schools have been many things over the centuries: the world’s first true universal public education system, a decentralized municipal forum for sincere ambition and hopeful good efforts, indoctrination channels, oases of political correctness, the envy of the world in science and math, edge-leaders in social progress, the root-structure of the most vibrant university culture in the world, and now, largely insufficient, as competing with the world’s best.

The reason for this decline, is that the focus in education policy has moved away from the original guiding principle: that a democratic society must have in all of its citizens, a reserve of reason and common sense, a perspective about society’s shared values, and an ability to help guide the innovation that with time helps to steer a nation toward a better, more just future.

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As education policy has come to focus more on “accountability”, reducing costs and test scores, there is ever less room for the goal of promoting the ability to reason, independently, to base one’s judgments on a general knowledge and learning about the world, to discern between competing philosophies and among them to locate the best way forward. We have sacrificed that laudable goal for the idea that students can be programmed to “test well”.

Losing sight of the goal of independent reasoning as the desired outcome of education means that a now more standardized system of public education is tainted by the assumption that testing is not about reasoning, but about concrete preparation for testing. Instead of elevating teachers, funding and elevating the profession, so that those who most contribute to a brighter civic future, we have downplayed the import of the teacher and elevated the role of blind tests.

Standardized testing has a role to play, but it is blind because it ignores, necessarily, the human element. Its role is to do that. But if we make it the centerpiece of our education policy, then we strip from our educational system the very thing most valuable about it: the goal of making for each student an optimal future, in which she can shape her own destiny.

There has to be a person-to-person experience, in which the content of an educational process is humanized, impassioned, made to come alive, in which one mind engages with another, and the student learns not just about the question-and-answer process, but also about what makes that intangible quality that is the intellect, what empowers the individual to apply what is learned and to interpret the abstract terrain of thought and consequence.

Our educational system cannot be about programming students for testing. Aside from the fact that this is nothing more than building a system designed to cheat itself —the tests are supposed to examine cognitive ability, not test-taking preparation—, it undermines the most necessary aspect of a successful educational system: that of cultivating intellectual curiosity and the willingness to test the world’s claims against one’s own judgment and comprehension.

This may be one of the most fundmental areas in which we need to reform our common culture: we are not educating test-takers, we are educating human beings. And a free citizen, capable of accessing all the benefits of a free society, must have at the core of his self-awareness, an intellect that knows it can be applied, that it can assess, relearn, inquire, challenge and distinguish between ideas, the less good and the better. [from Thought Possible, at Open.Salon.com]