What I am kicking around

As a nerd, I get stuck thinking about policy ideas and feel the need to share them with the world. The few loyal readers of this blog who remain, most of them blood relations, will have to suffice.

I have a few friends who made it almost all the way through college and were then either delayed or impeded entirely by prohibitive costs. They entered the workforce without the qualification of having a B.A. and essentially having less qualifications as someone with an associates degree. That means that you can make it through 3 years of college and have less proof of your knowledge/skills then someone who spent less time and money on school.

My idea is this. Each year of undergraduate work (defined in credits, not time) should count as an added level of qualification. Employers could start thinking about which jobs require a full BA and which one could do with less. (In this job market, they can simply demand a BA, but we will set that aside for the moment). Then, once they hired someone, any tuition reimbursement they gave to help their employees towards getting their degree would be a 100% tax write off. Rather than trying to subsidize loans for people to get Art History degrees, the private market would direct investment into training people in fields for which there is a demand. Plus, employees would be acquiring theoretical knowledge and practical, real world experience simultaneously. More to the point, they would be making money while they did it, rather than driving themselves into decades worth of debt.

We are to a point in which being middle class requires having a post-secondary degree and post-secondary degrees are bankrupting the middle class. Education, in some cases, has almost become a path of downward social mobility, simply with a lesser decline than not getting a degree. We can only eat away at our middle class so long before our society collapses. If we cannot find a cost-effective way to educate our people, we will perish. Period.

Confessions of a Black Gentrifier–interesting piece

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/40564/confessions-of-a-black-dc-gentrifier/

Why I hate Nate Silver

A week or two ago, the New York Times Magazine ran a piece by Nate Silver handicapping the odds of Obama winning re-election. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Mr. Silver, he is a political statistician wunderkind who spends all his time calculating the odds of various electoral results. (e.g., If GDP growth is x % and the Republicans nominate a fringe candidate, Obama has a x % chance at re-election). He has gained a great deal of renown for the accuracy of his predictions. There is only one problem: I hate him. Here is why.

There is a class of pundits and political consultants out there who have come to treat the democratic process as a science. Their views are based not on which principles are sound and which are not, but rather they are built upon the premise that elections are a horse race. If you want to win, you need to follow a formula of what to say and how to say it. It usually involves making measured, substanceless statements and avoiding challenging the American electorate to think critically in any way.

What upsets me about all this is that it means that are political process is guided by people who are essentially apolitical. They do not view elections as dynamic conversations among the American people. They are not opportunities for informed and engaged citizens to vet ideas and candidates. Rather, they are choreographed charades in which various archetypes/stereotypes (Nascar dads, soccer moms, anyone with black skin) predictably follow the same patterns time and time again. Suddenly, it is like I am no longer a sentient being. It is no longer accepted that at any point before I walk into the voting booth I may decide, for whatever reason, to switch over to a type of candidate that I as a college-educated, white, 18-35 year old male am not “supposed” to support.

I am almost (almost) certainly not going to vote for Rick Perry, but don’t tell me that. Furthermore, if Perry wants to be President, he should be trying to change my mind. You never know, I might just act irratically to piss off a self-satisfied statistician.

The fundamental issue is that there is an irreconcilable difference between politics and any hard “science.” Hard science is about establishing a set of assumptions or “givens” and then tweaking a select group of variables in order to find a consistent, immutable pattern. Politics, when it is done right, is about establishing a set of assumptions and then tearing apart as many of them as possible. A political pundit assumes that turnout among African Americans will be at a standard historical level and that they will almost unanimously support the Democratic candidate. A good politician will look at historical levels of African American turnout and then ask how it could be doubled. A great politician will ask the same question, but won’t take their support for granted and will take the time (for once) to answer the question “What have you done for us lately?”

The bottom line is that American voters should feel insulted that they are viewed as being such predictable agents. The result is predictable. Broad swaths of the American electorate will have their vote taken for granted and, consequently, politicians will stop working for it. Many will respond in kind and stop participating. The remaining participants will be hardened partisans whose intellectual schemas are hardwired to reject information that does not fit neatly with their preconceptions. Regardless of external factors, their ideology will drive them to vote as they always have. With each passing cycle, predicting electoral results becomes easier and easier and these apolitical luminaries seem even more “prescient.”

The end product could be fatal: an incompetent government that recycles the same ideas over and over, not because they are proven to actually solve problems, but because they are “common sense” to people on either fringe. We become a nation that responds statically to the challenges of a global geo-political reality that couldn’t be any more dynamic. Deficits go up. Soft power shrinks. The American dream becomes the American myth.

Perhaps Silver is not the disease, but rather just a symptom. Either way, it is time to start ignoring him and his kind. In the end, their hubris and folly is the same as any social scientist. It is the supposition that anything social will ever be truly scientific. I am a sentient being and I am gravely concerned about the future of the country I love. I don’t want the political class to size me up, type cast me, and then try to rile me up with canned and tired culture war drivel. I want to hear about new ideas, liberal and progressive, that have been tested and are proven to work. My vote on November 6, 2012 will go to the candidate who works for it.

…Unless, of course, I am feeling spiteful. If that’s the case, I will just vote the opposite of how Nate Silver says I will.

Better know a geo-political power house

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/world/middleeast/qatar-presses-decisive-shift-in-arab-politics.html?pagewanted=1&hp

Interesting overview of the role Qatar is playing in the Middle East. It’s a tiny, but important island nation in the Persian Gulf. Read it. You’ll be able to tell your friends you know something about Qatar. For extra credit, here is the wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar

The morning after…

For those who missed it, which was easy to do, yesterday was a rather momentous day. Americans all across the country went to the polls to decide on a variety of local issues. Here is a brief summary:

• Maine voters overturned a law the Republican-controlled legislature had passed that would have banned Election Day voter registration and required voters to register two business days before. Such laws are generally thought to disproportionately affect disenfranchised populations.
• Ohio voters overturned a law passed by their legislature–a key accomplishment of the new Republican governor–that would have restricted collective bargaining rights.
• Mississippi elected a new Republican governor. It is the first time in modern history that the state has had two consecutive Republican governors. HOWEVER, at the same time, Mississippi voters rejected a measure that would have defined “personhood” as starting at fertilization, a surprise victory for pro-choice advocates in a deeply red state. The measure had been supported by the gubernatorial candidates of both parties.
• Democrats retained control of the Iowa state senate, barring Republicans’ efforts to overturn the Marriage Equality ruling of their state Supreme Court.
• Last but by no means least, voters in Arizona recalled Steve Pearce, the State Senate President and primary author of the controversial immigration law, and replaced him with a moderate Republican who campaigned heavily against the law’s impact on Arizona’s image.

What strikes me is that all of these developments have a progressive streak to them, but many of them took place in states where Obama’s approval rating is muted or poor, if not atrocious. The Right continues to spin the tale that Obama lost the support of the American people by going too far to the left, but it seems like that is a bit off.

Obama’s problem, so far as I can tell, is that he has been insufficiently populist. He got elected with the support of a base that felt an almost spiritual connection to him. His style of governance, conversely, has been based on trying to build an intellectual consensus. He put together an administration filled with conservative and liberal luminaries who were unified by one thing: ivy league bona fides. At a time when Americans are extremely angry and feel betrayed by their government, he has tried repeatedly over the past 3 years to present ideas forged by a small cadre of confidants as the “logical” choice. This is preposterous, as any political psychologist/rank and file activist will tell you that moral and emotional appeals trump logic any day of the week.

This disconnect with the psyche of the American people would be okay if Obama had any knack for political give and take. We could sit back and say “Alright, he’s not out connecting with the American people, but at least we know he is working the halls of Congress protecting the interests of the working class.” Instead, in performances that would make LBJ turn in his grave, he has blindly made concessions to Congressional Republicans (never coordinating with the efforts of Congressional Democrats see: the cap and trade debacle*), in the hopes that all of a sudden it is going to start generating good will.

In short, I think if Obama runs solely on his record he loses. His argument at the moment is that he initially surrounded himself with the wrong people. (Apparently it is surprising to him that hiring a mix of the Clinton and Bush cabinets would prevent him from being “transformational”). Now, he says they are, pardon me for saying it, fired up and ready to go. This is a feeble argument.

Tip O’Neill said that all politics is local and I think that is key here. You start by having people look around them and take in what they already know: the middle class is under attack. Recruit democratic candidates who are unabashed populists. Then, frame the presidential debate in terms of a relative choice about who is more likely to fight on behalf of the working class. If the Republicans nominate Romney, take a look at the picture from his time at Bane Capital where he and his colleages have money stuffed in their shirts and tell me the script doesn’t write itself.

So that’s my suggestion. Normally you want your candidates for lower office riding the coattails of the President, but I don’t see that happenning this time around. Build your message from the ground up. 

*During the cap and trade debate, Obama ignored the group of Senators Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham who were working on a consensus bill. They were going to use expanding offshore drilling as a bargaining chip until Obama gave it away for free).

 

 

Quote of the Day

“We say to you that you have made too limited in its application the definition of a businessman. The man who is employed for wages is as much a businessman as his employer. The attorney in a country town is as much a businessman as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis. The merchant at the crossroads store is as much a businessman as the merchant of New York. The farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day, begins in the spring and toils all summer, and by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of this country creates wealth, is as much a businessman as the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price of grain. The miners who go 1,000 feet into the earth or climb 2,000 feet upon the cliffs and bring forth from their hiding places the precious metals to be poured in the channels of trade are as much businessmen as the few financial magnates who in a backroom corner the money of the world.

We come to speak for this broader class of businessmen. Ah. my friends, we say not one word against those who live upon the Atlantic Coast; but those hardy pioneers who braved all the dangers of the wilderness, who have made the desert to blossom as the rose—those pioneers away out there, rearing their children near to nature’s heart, where they can mingle their voices with the voices of the birds—out there where they have erected schoolhouses for the education of their children and churches where they praise their Creator, and the cemeteries where sleep the ashes of their dead—are as deserving of the consideration of this party as any people in this country.

It is for these that we speak. We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest. We are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned. We have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded. We have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came.”

- “Cross of Gold” speech, July 18, 1896

William Jennings Bryan

Stand strong

In five and a half hours, the Occupy Movement will receive its first major test. Mayor Bloomberg will attempt to evict the Occupy Wall Street protesters from the park in which they are currently camped. He claims he is doing so in the interest of sanitation, as the park needs to be cleaned. However, the same form letter that was issued to the protesters in NYC has been given to protesters in other cities, such as Austin. In the case of Austin, after the “cleaning” occurred, the protesters were not allowed back into their occupied space.

The protesters in NYC have begun their own clean up efforts. In all likelihood, if they are evicted, the city’s crews will come and do a poorer job. Those workers are working for a pay check; the protesters are working for an ideal. If there are concerns about the cleanliness of the square, I am sure the protesters would be more than happy to work out an amicable arrangement with the City to ensure that all standards are met.

It is true that the space they are occupying is privately owned and maintained. Then again, so were the whites-only diners in which Civil Rights activists held their sit ins. The struggle for justice shall not be limited to any particular space, for we have been granted no safe haven. We are in this fight, because–in some cases literally–we have no where else to go. We will meet them on the bridges. We will meet them in their parks and their plazas. If they want peace, they can return to us our rights of self-determination and we will give them peace. Until then, so long as we know no haven, neither shall they.

Be strong, Occupy Wall Street. You have brothers and sisters around the World standing with you in solidarity. The time has come to fight. Don’t give them an inch.

Howdy, neighbor

I’ve been thinking more today about the notion of public space and some of the challenges that go along with it. From what little I have picked up from listening in, there seems to be an awareness among some of the organizers that the protests need to be a welcoming space. Essentially, if this movement is about “the 99%,” then roughly the same crowd should feel at liberty enter the space.

The crowd seemed a little thin, when I was there on Monday evening, and the reasons were obviously sensory. First, as you walk through certain portions of the plaza, the smell is rather egregious. Now, I think that part of this is due to the fact that some homeless have begun to gather in the area, attracted by the free food and lack of move-it-along police presence. If that is the case, then more power to you. The protestors are living out their values and they are to be commended for it. I only worry that there may be some recreational homelessness going on, as well. If you are resolved to sleep out there indefinitely, I tip my cap. If, however, your buddy is willing to let you use his shower at some point during the day, it would be neighborly to take him up on it.

The more pressing and offensive assault was auditory. At one end of the square was a drum circle that had become blob-like, acquiring an electric and an acoustic guitar(s), along with a singer who was spirited, but not particularly in tune. The result was an amorphous jam session in which the singer would periodically belt lines from popular songs (everything from MJ to Lauryn Hill to Third Eye Blind) when their melodies aligned (somewhat) with what the blob was producing. For many, this epitomizes how a revolution should be–replete with free expression. After a while, though, the reality of that free expression is rather maddening.

But there is a larger force repelling people that is the fault of the public-at-large, rather than the protesters. Many people I talk to who are sympathetic to the spirit of the movement do not want to go down to the protests out of an aversion to “that crowd.” For those who understand Baltimore parlance, they assume it is simply the “Red Emma’s” people. (Non-Baltimoreans: Red Emma’s is an independent, “radical” bookstore/coffeeshop. There is probably an equivalent in your town, too, although I’m drawing a blank for the Twin Cities).

To put it in plain-speak, there is a sense that these are the people who would be protesting whether there was something to protest or not. Those who do not see themselves as part of that “scene,” I sense, worry that they will go down to protest corporate control of the political process and wind up either feeling unwelcome or getting caught in the middle of a demonstration against capitalism itself. In some cases, there may be evidence to support those fears, but more often than not I think it’s pretty knee-jerk. Besides, those aren’t bad people; they just aren’t part of your circle. Here’s an issue you agree on, so what’s the harm in going down to protest for a Saturday afternoon? (My critique sounds trivial and rings of junior high, but so does the behavior).

These protests should be about furthering a collective interest and not a particular identity. Coming together is an art and it’s a lost art. So, if you are unable to bathe, because you don’t have the facilities, then let us help you find support. But if you are able to bathe but choose not to because it’s not “protest chic,” maybe you should consider the fact that you’re not helping the movement by causing spectators to gag. Also, “jamming” should be done in moderation. Always. Under all circumstances. The goal here is not simply for you to be you, but also for your neighbor to be your neighbor and, ultimately, for us to be us. Remember, Woodstock was just a concert and its cultural legacy should not be confused with that of the Civil Rights Movement.

At some point, American politics became more about identity than ideology. We started caring more about being “red states” and “blue states” than knowing what that actually meant. It took a catastrophic event to remind us of our shared plight and our intertwined fate. Now, we all find ourselves out of our seats, faced with the task of rallying to a common struggle to topple an entrenched interest.

There has been so much hot air and spilled ink about how Occupy Wall Street compares to the Tea Party. Maybe Occupy Wall Street is the Tea Party, and they us. Maybe we are all lashing out in response to a shared wound with a common indignance, but have become so segmented that even our catharsis has to be boutique.

The day we all force ourselves to sit in the same square on the same day is the day the change comes.

Quote of the Day

“They hate him who reproves in the gate and they abhor him who speaks the truth. Therefore, because you trampled the poor and you exact taxes from them, you have built houses, but you shall not dwell in them; you have planted vineyards but you shall not drink their wine.” Amos 5:10-11

What’s the point?

It seems like a central criticism, or at least point of confusion, is that people are unclear on what the “goal” or “point” of the Occupy Wall Street. To some, it appears to just be an incoherent group of hacky sack-wielding ne’er-do-wells spouting off a lot of liberal angst. Admittedly, walking around the painted signs laid out on McKinney Square, you see references to just about every liberal cause in the book: environmentalism, peace, hemp, stream-lined permitting for drum circles, you name it. Still, I don’t think this is reason enough to dismiss the movement. In fact, it may even be its strength.

First of all, I am not convinced that the Tea Party started out being that much more articulate. Certainly, it evolved (with the help of the aw-shucks Mr. Smith likes of Dick Armey) into a political movement with a platform. There again, though, it’s fairly simple to unite around a single platform when it fits on a business card (“anarchy wouldn’t be that bad”). It seems silly, though, to assume that the same level of sophistication (if you can call a guy holding a sign with Obama’s face superimposed on a picture of a medicine man “sophisticated”) would be attained so quickly by such a disparate group of protesters.

Then again, maybe we’re coming at this the wrong way. Maybe it’s a medium and not a message. It’s clear that traditional media has its mind made up about the issues it is willing to discuss, and 90% of social media is dedicated to “Dancing With the Stars” commentary. The views espoused on the signs I see at the protest are varied, but they are united by the fact that you’re probably not going to hear about them any where else. It seems like everybody agrees that the American electorate’s biggest problem is this whole “Bowling Alone” syndrome. Granted, Occupy Wall Street is still bringing together somewhat (or extremely) like-minded individuals, but it’s also giving people an opportunity to get out of the house and get exposed to arguments that get no press. Even if that simply reassures people they are not alone in their beliefs, there’s a value to it.

Most importantly, people are out in public spaces interacting as citizens, rather than consumers. (I have nothing against being a consumer, but it should not be the entirety of one’s humanity). No one said this has to yield a particular result and it doesn’t have to manifest itself in the same way everywhere. It will by all means be a waste if this does not yield some concrete political change. For now, though, there is something worthwhile in breaking bread. After all, communion is the greatest catalyst for revolution.