Archive for July, 2010
The US Government: Just Another Fortune 500 Company
Yes, once again we Americans are faced with another “teachable moment” as Shirley Sherrod’s good name is dragged through the mud and then given a public cleansing. The lessons are many. Don’t jump to conclusions without proper research. Consider the source of the information you’re acting on. Perhaps even, be careful about confessing in public about past prejudices because your comments might be taken out of context.
Perhaps the saddest lesson is the one no one is discussing. The behavior of the United States government in the Sherrod fiasco is not unusual. All over this country, Fortune 500 companies layoff people at an alarming rate. Why do they do it? Are most of these people negligent in their jobs? No. These companies are looking at their share holders. Share holders love nothing more than a good layoff. It means fewer mouths to feed, and an improved bottom line. The fact that these companies haven’t had an innovative idea in the past ten years is beside the point. Waiting for quality company performance takes too long. Layoffs are the shorter path to profits.
If we look at the major players in the Sherrod incident, we see “corporations” acting quickly to please their share holders. Let’s start with the news media. The story was sexy. There was no way they were going to research it before running with it. Even the glaring name Breitbart, flashing a danger signal in red lights did not stop them. Only CNN had the decency to talk to Sherrod herself and get the story out correctly. Everyone else saw that profit motive, ratings, big money, and went to town on it.
The NAACP, mistakenly believing they had regained relevance with the Tea Party condemnation felt they had to scramble fast to satisfy its share holders: the media and the newly enraged conservative white population who were offended by the Tea Party assault. No time to go into their vaults and look at the speech in its entirety, a speech that had been delivered to their organization. Of everyone in the mix, they should have been the first to come to Ms. Sherrod’s defense but profit line, measured in the currency of reputation, had to be preserved.
Then we get to our bought and sold United States government where nothing happens without consideration for the shareholders: the voters, the lobbyists, the special interests. With the beer summit, ACORN, Van Jones and the New Black Panther Party easily visible in their rear view mirror, the White House had to make sure that this “racist black woman” got swept under the rug as quickly as possible. My wife asked me the other day, where was the human resources department (HR) in this decision to preemptively ask for Ms. Sherrod’s resignation? It doesn’t matter. You see in 2010, the HR department of the average big corporation stands by helplessly hoping the company doesn’t get sued. The companies execute their “resource actions” with soulless, clinical precision, with little if any concern for the impact on employees lives. The bottom line must be preserved! And that my friends is what the United States government did this week. With no concern for Ms. Sherrod’s reputation, much harder to regain than a job, they acted fast to fend off possible trouble with their share holders. Ms. Sherrod learned this week what so many employees across the country have learned. She is an expendable cog in the gears of a huge machine that exists largely for its own preservation and nothing more.
The latest conservative talking point is that our government is anti-big-business. Pure unadulterated bull crap. The United States government is big business.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
NAACP: What Took You So Long?
Last night the NAACP passed a resolution condemning racist factions within the Tea Party Movement. The question is not why, but why it took so long. From the outset, the TPM focused on uncertainty and fear for America’s future, particularly in the areas of taxation and right to bear arms. This in and of itself would have been no problem. Rhetoric on these issues can get heated without any reference to race or the use of racial caricatures in posters. Unfortunately a small minority of Tea Party protesters have used this understandable unrest as an excuse to further their racist agenda.
The posters displayed at the rallies spoke volumes. The one that stands out for me was a poster placing an “African lion” next to a “Lyin’ African”, a reference to President Obama. Any responsible political movement would publicly repudiate these displays. The Tea Party and its sponsors (e.g. Dick Armey) have not. Any protest movement would screen which posters are being used in protests. The Tea Party has maintained a come-one, come-all attitude with no concern that an otherwise legitimate message might get poisoned by bigotry.
Although the final text of the NAACP resolution has not yet been released, it is supposed to be very specific in its criticism of the Tea Party’s lack of repudiation for racist expression. It is not a condemnation of the Tea Party as a whole.
Ironically, with the exception of the occasional bonehead birther supporting politician (David Vitter, I’m talking to you), the heavy racial overtones of the Tea Party have simmered down somewhat recently. Politicians like Nikki Haley accept the embrace of the Tea Party but do not cross the line into racially charged rhetoric. So why has the NAACP chosen now to speak out?
There is a concept in the black community known as “CP time” which stands for “colored people time”. It is a reference to the stereotype that we cannot get anywhere on time, that we are late to everything. Hence, the only conclusion to be drawn is that we must operate on our own special timetable.
I’m sorry Ben Jealous and the rest of the NAACP membership, when it comes to protesting Tea Party racism, you folks are seriously on CP time!
Respectfully,
Rutherford
GOP: Ignore Frum at Your Own Peril
I have stated more than once in the comment threads of this blog that David Frum is one of the few sane voices left in the conservative movement. In fact, Joan Walsh of the liberal Salon.com, was quoted as saying, “FrumForum is the clubhouse for conservatives no longer willing to humor the crackpot fringe.” The reaction I get from my conservative readers is that Frum is a joke, a traitor, etc. etc. Conservative disappointment with Frum is not lost on the man himself. A year ago he wrote an examination of how he arrived at his views and as usual it made sense. Damn, it almost made we want to become a conservative.
Frum’s predilection toward criticizing his fellow conservatives can be broken into two categories:
Financial irresponsibility and bought politicians:
I moved to Washington, D.C., in 1996. And there I began to notice something disturbing. While the congressional victory of 1994 had ceased to produce much in the way of important conservative legislation, it sure was producing a lot of wealth for individual conservatives. They were moving from the staff offices of Congress to lobbying firms and professional associations. Washington (to quote something I’d write later) began to feel like a giant Tupperware party, where people you had thought of as friends suddenly seemed always to be trying to sell you something. Acquaintances of mine began accepting all-expense-paid trips to the South Pacific from Jack Abramoff.
….
George Bush narrowly won the presidency in 2000, and I was recruited to join the administration as a speech-writer. My initial brief was domestic policy and economics, and it soon become impossible to avoid noticing that the administration’s economic policies were not working very well.
Even as it fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the administration dramatically increased domestic spending (including the first permanent new entitlement program since 1974, the hugely costly prescription drug benefit for senior citizens). Taxes were cut in 2001 and 2003. Big deficits ballooned and a great consumption boom exploded. The stock market and the housing market soared — but median wages stagnated.
…
Conservative economic policies, which had saved the United States and the other advanced democracies from stagnation in the 1980s, suddenly seemed bereft of answers for the economic challenges of the 21st century.
This worried me. What worried me even more was how little it seemed to worry so many of my friends and colleagues from the conservative world and the Bush administration. A quarter century before, Ronald Reagan’s budget director David Stockman had famously said that it was the job of conservatives to attack weak claims, not weak claimants. We would creatively use the power of freedom to improve conditions for everyone. What had happened to that idealistic drive?
Even my conservative readers who hold Frum in disdain express disappointment about the Republican’s fiscal record between 2001 and 2007. So while they are annoyed at the messenger, they can’t deny the truth of the message. Fiscal conservatism during the 2000′s was a joke. Yet they hold fast to the belief that a GOP win this coming November will somehow change things. It will somehow put our economy on the right course. If past is prologue, as the saying goes, this is a pipe dream. But did conservatives simply lose their way financially in isolation? No, there were other factors, social factors that gave conservatives a pre-historic stench. The fact that Frum addresses this, the second category of his critique is really what pisses conservatives off.
Futile social reactionism and failure to change with the times:
So much of our energy was being absorbed instead by cultural battles left behind from the unfinished business of the 1960s and 1970s. Here, too often, we were on the wrong side of history: Back in the 1960s and 1970s, we’d been fighting to protect the common-sense instincts of ordinary people from elite interference. Now, in the Terri Schiavo euthanasia case, with stem cell research, on gay rights issues, it was we who had become the interfering elite, against a society that was reaching its own new equilibrium.
Of course, that’s not how conservatives saw it. We saw a country divided in two, red states and blue, NASCAR vs. NPR, real America against the phonies in the cities. A movement that had begun as an intellectual one now scornfully pooh-poohed the need for people in government to know anything much at all. But expertise does matter, and the neglect of expertise leads to mismanagement and failure — as we saw in Iraq, in Katrina and in the disregard of warning signals from the financial market. It was under a supposedly pro-market administration that the United States suffered the worst market failure of the post-war era, and that should have sobered us. Instead, we rallied to Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber.
Disregarding evidence and expertise, we shrugged off warnings of environmental problems. One consequence: In 1988, the elder George Bush beat Michael Dukakis among voters with four-year degrees by 25 points. In 2008, Barack Obama won the BA and BSc vote, the first Democrat to do so since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Conservatives stopped taking governance seriously — and so Americans ceased to trust conservatives in government.
…
… on environmental issues, we have to follow the evidence where it leads — and on social issues we have to take our society as it is. If the world changes, we have to change with it. The refusal of so many of my fellow conservatives in the United States to adapt their thinking to facts and realities does not demonstrate their adherence to principle. It demonstrates a frivolous indifference to the responsibilities of political leadership.
The argument in which I’ve been engaged … is an argument (as I see it) over what conservatism should be: Is it a philosophy of government? Or is it an expression of cultural alienation? Is it politics or is it protest?
With horrible irony, I see my fellow conservatives in the United States opting out of politics at exactly the moment when they are most needed. The Obama administration is careening toward a more expensive and interventionist government, toward reckless spending and destructive taxation. This is where I came into politics 30 years ago, and I will stand again on the same side I stood then. But now as then, my side will only be successful to the extent it is knowledgeable, to the extent it is public-spirited, to the extent that it is based on evidence and research, to the extent that it advocates the greater good rather than the narrow interests and values of one class or one geographic section.
I don’t think of myself as having gone squishy. I think of myself as having grown sober. And my conservative critics? On them, I think the most apt verdict was delivered by Niccolo Macchiavelli, 500 years ago: “This is the tragedy of man. Circumstances change, and he does not.” [Bold emphasis added by me.]
Frum is dead on here. Intellect has been replaced by emotion. Regional, ethnic and racial self-interest has replaced a sense of service to the country as a whole. Ignorance has been embraced to the point that we stand by helplessly and can only laugh as a comedian uses a politician’s exact words to mock her. Well not everyone laughed. Those embracing the ignorance were offended. Suddenly the “little guy”, the ordinary guy, the real American is synonymous with the ill-informed ignoramus.
To put Frum’s argument another way, while our country is in the worst financial straits it has been in since the 1930′s, we are arguing about evolution vs creationism, whether gays should marry and Washington DC’s resemblance to 18th century British monarchy. To paraphrase Frum and broaden his statement a little, our government has ceased to take governance seriously and as a result many Americans no longer trust their government.
Frum is unfair to conservatives in only one way. We get what we tolerate. We eat up the foolishness spewed by Sarah Palin and Louie Gohmert as entertainment. It seems in this media age, that is all some of us want from government, to be entertained. If we demand serious governance by throwing out the Gohmerts and Bachmanns and relegating Palin to the gossip column then things might change. Frum doesn’t lay enough of the blame on the voter. But to get back to Frum’s point, since the GOP knows that the voting public is not sufficiently discriminating, then it falls upon them to clean up their act on their own. Republicans should openly hold the nonsense of Michele Bachmann up to public scorn. The more outrageous claims of Limbaugh should be explicitly repudiated by GOP politicians who wish to be taken seriously.
If conservatives don’t change their act soon, one of two things will happen. They will either lose in November, or perhaps even worse, they will win with nothing to bring to the table but social divisiveness and financial hypocrisy. David Frum has been trying to save Republicans from themselves. It is a shame they refuse to listen.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
A Tale of Two Bigots
In the immediate aftermath of the death of Senator Robert Byrd, the accusation was launched that liberals, including me, would not give Byrd’s life the scrutiny of, let’s say a Strom Thurmond. The notion was that a Democrat with a history of bigotry would get a sanitized obituary whereas a Republican would not. This lead me to do a very brief investigation into each man’s life story. With time at a premium, I had to rely on the most basic source of information about both men, namely Wikipedia. I understand this does not qualify for academic rigor but it is the best I can do for the time being.
It is simply impossible to know what really lies within a man’s heart and mind. We can only judge men by their words and their actions, mostly their actions. Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd present troubling studies in complexity. There were times in their lives when they said the most vile things imaginable. There were times in their lives that demonstrated moderation.
Both Thurmond and Byrd started out as strident segregationists. Thurmond did a better job of hiding this philosophy behind the cloak of “state’s rights”. In other words, the government cannot tell a state how to conduct its business and if a state wanted to keep blacks separate from whites, then by golly they had the right to do that. To his dying day, Thurmond was unapologetic about his politics using the state’s rights claim as his reasoning. However early quotes from these men show an obvious disdain for blacks:
In his 1948 campaign for President, Thurmond said, “I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”
Similarly in 1944, while a leader of his local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, Byrd wrote, “I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side … Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”
In 1957, Thurmond filibustered the Civil Rights Act of that year for more than 24 hours. In 1964, Byrd filibustered for 14 hours against that year’s Civil Rights legislation.
However, both men had some redeeming episodes in their lives. Strom Thurmond won praise from the NAACP and the ACLU in the 1940′s as Governor of South Carolina when he actively pursued justice for the lynching of a black man. Late in his career he supported the Voting Rights Act and making Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday. Robert Byrd, unlike Thurmond, stayed with the Democratic party as it became more progressive and civil rights oriented, even though he remained a conservative Democrat through the 1960′s. In 2004, the NAACP awarded Byrd with a 100% approval rating based on legislation for which he advocated.
With their political lives a mixed bag, we could look to their personal lives for more insight. Again, all we get is complexity. Strom Thurmond never renounced his segregationist views. He never apologized for any of his political platforms. He remained sure that he was right in defending state’s rights in keeping with the social norms of the day. In contrast, Byrd apologized, especially for his involvement with the KKK. In 2005 he said, “I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times … and I don’t mind apologizing over and over again. I can’t erase what happened.” Yet Byrd opposed the nominations of both Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, the former for his integrationist views and the latter for his arrogance. However in 1982, Byrd came to a racial epiphany of sorts when his teenage grandson died and it dawned on him that black people love their children as much as whites do. A bit troubling that it took Byrd until 1982 to fully figure that out.
Upon Thurmond’s death, we learned that he didn’t dislike all black people. He particularly liked a black maid with whom he had a “secret love child” in 1925. To his credit, he financially supported his daughter for the rest of his life. To his discredit, he never publicly acknowledged her. His daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams claimed that the secret was kept by mutual agreement and the financial assistance given to her was not hush money. What gives more insight into the man’s heart, the fact that he supported his daughter or the fact that he hid her?
I think anyone can objectively say that Robert Byrd made the better show of seeking redemption than did his colleague Strom Thurmond. How much of this show was for political expediency in a changing social climate, we can never know. It could be argued that Thurmond had more integrity, not changing his views with the popular winds of the day. Compounding the difficulty of analyzing these two men is the fact that all politicians are liars. So it is hard to discern how much the desire to get reelected shaped these men’s professed views.
When we try to arrive at a bottom line for Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd, one Republican, one Democrat, it is best to think about what we might tell our own children. The lesson for our children, as I see it, is that bigotry is a terrible stain that years of good deeds and apologies cannot completely erase. Our only window into these men’s souls were their words and actions and we know for certain that at one time each of them evidenced an illogical hatred for those different from them. Whenever we are tempted to discriminate against another for purely superficial reasons, we should stop and think about whether we want our obituaries to bear the stains of those of Thurmond and Byrd.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
Political Ideology as Mental Illness
A couple of months ago one of my most loyal readers and political opponents introduced into the comments section of this blog the ideas of one Lyle H. Rossiter Jr., M.D.. Dr. Rossiter, a psychiatrist, published a book in 2005 entitled, “THE LIBERAL MIND: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness” in which he went to great lengths to “prove” that liberals are clinically, mentally ill.
Being very stingy with my time and money, I was not going to invest either fully in this book. Fortunately, Dr. Rossiter gave me a wealth of excerpts on his website from which to draw conclusions. Even with that said, I could only bear to read a small portion without regurgitating the turkey sandwich I had for lunch. Dr. Rossiter gets off on the wrong foot by misappropriating a term from his own profession. He claims, humans are by nature, bipolar. Now, anyone who has watched a week’s worth of Dr. Phil knows that bipolar disorder is synonymous with manic-depression, a condition characterized by alternating states of heightened euphoria and desperately dangerous depression. Dr. Rossiter tosses this definition to the wind and replaces it with the notion that humans are at once autonomous and socially cooperative. The fact that a psychiatrist writing about mental illness would come out of the chute misusing his specialty’s own jargon is a harbinger of things to come. In fact, Dr. Rossiter begins the book by defining things. Well of course. How else can he pull an argument out of his butt unless he first sets up all the parameters that justify his argument.
From the Table of Contents, one gets the impression that Rossiter is going to talk in human developmental terms and be pretty strict about keeping his “diagnosis” of the problem with liberalism clinical. But Rossiter just engages in the same heightened rhetoric of your average card-carrying conservative. An example:
I’ve bold-faced the more incredible parts of this drivel. Notice the references to redistribution and collectivism. Oh yes, liberals are socialists. Notice the accusations of no moral core. We are rude, scapegoating, anti-family, baby killing non-citizens. And to top it off, we actually think poverty and prejudice might play a role in social inequities. How insane of us! If we accept as fact all of Rossiter’s characterizations, perhaps liberals are crazy? A rude, scapegoating baby killer sounds pretty pathological to me. Unfortunately, at least in the excerpts I read, Rossiter simply engages in name calling with no facts to back him up, much less any real clinical analysis from a psychiatric perspective.
With this quote, we get to the core of Dr. Rossiter’s theme, as best I can find one. The only reason we have criminals is lousy parents. The only reason we have poor children is lousy parents. In a culture committed to “ordered liberty” all of society’s ills are cured. Rossiter’s view of “ordered liberty” is pretty much the “people must be forced to be free” idea except he is very careful to draw the line on how much order to enforce. Order can only be enforced to the extent that it does not piss off the “haves”. In Rossiter’s world, order exists to preserve success, not to give everyone an opportunity for success. Anyone lacking this special balance of autonomy and mutuality just got the bad luck of the draw in the child rearing department. Tough tittie. And don’t dare complain about it you immoral whiner. And in particular, don’t expect help from the perfectly balanced. They are not your parents. Your parents sucked and you are screwed.
Rossiter spends more than 400 pages advancing his theory of liberal insanity. Well two can play at that game and psychology professor Jonathan Haidt does a far fairer job of it. Haidt advances the theory that we all are born with five pre-programmed categories of moral values and these values are influenced throughout our lives. These values have political ideological correspondents. Of the five, Caring and Fairness are important to both conservatives and liberals, liberals slightly more so. However the other three values are much more important to conservatives. They are Loyalty, Respect and Purity. Liberals are open and therefore comfortable with change. Conservatives are closed and more comfortable with tradition and the status quo. These are deep-seated values found within these groups. The inability of the two groups to communicate with each other can be tied to these very different value systems. Another way to summarize the difference, says Haidt, is:
And so there we have a perfect assessment of Rossiter’s perspective and why he nauseates me. The prioritization of order over the welfare of those less fortunate is simply incompatible with my wiring. And Haidt says we are wired with our particular mix of the five moral values. He presented his views in 2008 at the annual TED idea exchange gathering.
But notice where Haidt concludes his argument. Unlike Rossiter who condemns liberals to a diagnosis of pathology, Haidt suggests that we need both forms of mental wiring (not illness) for a successful society. He claims, I think correctly, that conservatives and liberals form the Yin and Yang and are in fact symbiotic even though we so often think of them as at cross purposes.
The only value I see from Lyle Rossiter’s argument once you strip away the insults is that political ideology is not completely a choice made by weighing the pros and cons of the different positions. Our political preferences stem from deep-seated views of the world and morality. Optimal solutions can only be arrived at when we work together to strike a balance between social activism and respect for tradition. The answer is not for one side to label the other mentally ill. Sadly, Rossiter had the potential to write a significant work on how our nature effects our politics and he wasted it on overblown partisan rhetoric.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
Update: I took the questionnaire that Haidt mentions in his video. These were my results. (The first bar in each cluster is me, the second bar is liberals and the third bar is conservatives.)
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July 28, 2010 at 11:19 pm Rutherford 378 comments