Culture War Dumbness

David "Schoolboy" Brooks outdoes himself today with a particularly desparate, silly piece blaming fears of immigration on college elites. Don't ask about the logic, which would be like looking for the Sermon on the Mount in a long dribble of uncooked batter. The basic idea is that working people don't have any real economic problems after 30 years of Republican rule that has seen zero real income growth for about 80% of the population - they just don't like the liberal cosmopolitanism of college-educated elites. The essay is an aggravating five-minute escape from any known reality here on Earth One, where Schoolboy's culture-warrior pals have been helping destroy the economic base of their beloved "regular folks" while telling them their real enemies are liberals who send money to save Darfur. Gaaah!

Schoolboy's New York Times pals wrote a good editorial on Monday that he obviously didn't read. The editorial reported that accoreding to a study by Frank Levy and Peter Temin, two MIT economists, the top 1 percent of Americans (average income, $1.1 million) took almost a quarter of the nations income, "their largest share since 1929." There's a connection between the Republican's happy inequality boom and the anger of Brooks' "nationalists," which someday may finally focus on the real cause - conservative economic policies that reward the destruction of jobs.

A better account of growing inequality appeared in the same paper on Sunday. "The orthodoxy surrounding income inequality is being undermined by research that looks at institutional issues: changes in the way the corporate world measures the performance of workers, the decline of unions, and government wage and tax policy." Doh!

And for a sad tale of the king of Clintonian economics, Larry Summers, now suprised by inequality, see a short Sunday Magazine piece. "I'm finding my way," Summers says about the effects of his own policies. Far better is an interview with the producer of "Entourage," Doug Ellin, with his jaundiced desire to exploit the dumbness of Beemer lust and related more expensive desires. He doesn't make the Schoolboy mistake of confusing the desire to be rich with a noble vision for a red-state America.

Squeeze Them While They're Young

Today's Sunday New York Times has a good front-page piece on the role private loan companies are playing in creating the current crisis in student indebtedness. Meet Lucia De Poi, for example, a first-generation college student who went to Tufts and now pays $900 a month in student loans, some to private companies at 13% interest.
College was supposed to be the gateway to the middle-class. It's increasingly the gateway to a treadmill of debt. There goes your savings for the down payment on the house college was supposed to help you buy. While we were sleeping, the middle-class forget to maintain the pipeline for its next generation of members. Doh!

Dumbness and the Fight Against It

Today's New York Times has a nice illustration of the battle for what's left of the middle-class mind. There's Paul Krugman fighting dumbness by showing how the media has turned politics into a beauty contest that prevents people from voting on the basis of issues. "listening to what candidates say about substantive issues offers a much better way to judge potential presidents than superficial character judgments. Mr. Bush's tax lies [in the 2000 campaign], not his surface amiability, were the true guide to how he would govern."

In the other corner, representing dumbness, is David "Schoolboy" Brooks, with another of his grandiloquent philosophical frameworks leading to Reaganite cliches. Painting himself as a "Hamilitonian" in an epic battle with "mainstream liberals" and populists, he concludes, "Government is really bad at rigging or softening competition. It can do some good when it helps people compete." This distinction rests on a Schoolboy contrast between job retraining, job protections, and jobs programs (where gov is bad), and portable pensions and health insurance and skill-based immigration and encouragement of marriage (where gov is good). In fact all Schoolboy does is slam programs for workers and praise programs for the middle-classes. Blue-collar is bad, white-collar is good. Programs that make blue-collar people like white-collar people are good. Schoolboy wants a world in which gated commuters are subsidized and nobody else is - a paradise of bobos, paid for by everybody else.

If we don't start catching on to this classic middle-class dumbness, were not going anywhere except down.

Which reminds me: in March I blogged about Pakistani lawyers in revolt; this past week the U.S. press has realized that the protests have spread widely enough to be threatening to the Musharraf regime.

Green Truckers in LA

One of the dumbest ideas of the past 25 years is that blue-collars folks are, well, dumb - by comparison to white-collar managers and middle-class folks in general. The implication has been that college folks were the future and the working-class was the past. The latter couldn't keep up with modernity and took up regressive positions. They were the backbone of the Reaganite anti-feminist backlash against women in the workplace - remember the stereotype of the wolf-whistling construction worker - and didn't care about the environment.

Today's Los Angeles Times has a good piece about independent port truckers coming out in support of environmental regulations. They explain why they didn't come out before, and it ain't what you've been told.

Article Begins Here:

Port drivers steer toward clean-truck program
'On this issue, we stand with the authorities,' one worker says of the push to curb pollution.
By Louis Sahagun and Ronald D. White

June 6, 2007

About 300 drivers of the dirtiest and oldest trucks serving the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex gathered in Wilmington on Tuesday to support a program that would impose stricter pollution standards on harbor vehicles.

Port authorities and environmentalists were encouraged by the strong show of support for the program, part of a plan designed to cut air pollution 80% within five years by allowing only newer, low-emission diesel trucks to work the ports.

"It's a surprising turnout," said Rafael Pizarro of Coalition for Clean Air, an advocacy group. "You don't see this many truck drivers agree on anything outside of a strike."

Many of the mostly immigrant, Spanish-speaking independent drivers who filled an auditorium at Banning's Landing stepped up to a lectern and personally urged a joint panel of Long Beach and Los Angeles port commissioners to approve the program.

The proposed clean-truck program is part of the Clean Air Action Plan, which was approved in November. The program would scrap and replace the oldest trucks, and retrofit the others, with the assistance of a port-sponsored grant subsidy.

Among the speakers was Edgar Sanchez, 48, of Long Beach who said he could not afford to clean up his rig without a subsidy. Sanchez, who is among the area's 16,000 mostly low-income drivers who service the ports, said he was emboldened to speak his mind on the issue by the widespread support the program has received from environmentalists, religious workers, business coalitions and political leaders.

"Before we didn't have the courage or the confidence to tell people how we feel out of fear we'd be fired or labeled as troublemakers," Sanchez said.

"Not anymore. We see the smoke pouring out of our trucks and we breathe it all day, every day," he said. "But we also work long hours at minimum rates. We can be fired at any moment, like slaves without a voice."

Sanchez added, "Now we have the guts and the anger to say that on this issue, we stand with the authorities."

Maria Agamenon of Long Beach, 45, spoke on behalf of her husband, Raul, a port driver of 23 years who earns roughly $7 an hour, and their three children, two of whom have asthma.

"It's sad to see how my husband is mistreated; I cry with him," she said. "He can't breathe at night. Sometimes he shares the respirator we bought for the children."



The San Pedro Bay ports spew more soot and smog than half a million cars, a refinery and a power plant combined, port authorities said. Port trucks produce 30% to 40% of that pollution, which has been linked to higher risks of cancer, bronchitis and other respiratory ailments.

Jose Rayo, 43, who has worked the port for two decades, blamed much of the area's pollution on inefficiency, which forces drivers to spend hours waiting — with engines idling — to transfer loads. Rayo, a Los Angeles resident, was among a small number of critics of the program who worried that it would "sweep away the small businessman."

"The plan opens the doors for the big trucking outfits to monopolize the port business, but who's to say they will pay fair wages?" Rayo said. "If it doesn't work out, we'll have to fight it with lawsuits."

A week ago, the California Trucking Assn., which claims 2,300 members and about 250,000 trucks across the state, said that the ports lacked the authority "to completely change our industry" as the program could.

"The California Trucking Assn. does support the objective of cleaner air and would like to see reductions in pollutions and the greening of our side of the supply, but there are two problems with this plan," said Patty Senecal, vice president of sales and marketing for Transport Express of Rancho Dominguez, who spoke on behalf of the association. "We question the legality and the constitutionality of it."

The association questioned the program's constitutionality, saying that it would illegally supercede interstate commerce laws. The group also said it was unfair to single out port trucks. Studies have shown that the average age of a California cargo truck is 12.2 years, or just seven months younger than a port truck.

But German Merino, 53, said that his 1996 Freightliner Condo, which has several hundred thousand miles on it, was a heavy polluter. "I smell the oil burning and the diesel all day, and I work 14 to 16 hours a day," the Bellflower resident said. "For 23 years I have been part of this awful system. It has to change."

louis.sahagun@latimes.com
ron.white@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-truckers6jun06,1,2593982.story

See another example of working folks getting screwed - this time, in construction.

Dumbest of Death Trips

About six months after the invasion of Iraq, around November of 2003, I had dinner with my father, who lives in Los Angeles and was in Santa Barbara for the day. He's voted Republican ever since I could remember, so I was surprised when all of the sudden he said, "I hate Bush." "Why, dad," I asked? And mentally finished the sentence - you voted for him in 2000, and he cut your taxes. Dad replied, "because he kills people for no reason."

That pretty much sums up the situation. We're still stuck in the DMPWE (Dumbest Most Pointless War Ever, though "ever" should really be "recently."). The death on all sides is disgusting, and I am sorry to have to remind us that we are going to pay and pay and pay for the dumb guys' unbelievable, heartless, brainless errors.

The only bright spot is that the press is running some good obituaries, and the LA Times had several today, including this particularly wrenching one, about the death of a perfect son, Felix Gonzalez-Iraheta from Sun Valley, CA. I call this a bright spot only because it has forced big newspapers to talk about regular folks for a change, meaning we can read about the invisible ones, the non-rich and non-famous who keep going and keep everything going at the same time. When we forget who works - quite different from who runs things - we have collectively lost our souls.

R.I.P Sgt. Gonzalez-Iraheta, and Steven Packer, and Christopher Moore, and the other 37 of you that DOD announced as dead in the DMPWE. We will honor you by getting our souls back.

Wake Up - We're Brown

There's all this focus on immi- gration, and then there's the population that's already here. The National Bureau of Education Statistics issued a good report on the racial and ethnic composition of the country's schools. Two highlights, based in part on Sam Dillon's good piece in the New York Times yesterday:

• the "minority" share of the school population has gone from 22% to 42% since 1972. In the West, whites fell from 73% to 46%. Latino enrollments went from 6% in 1972 to 20% in 2005. Black enrollments stayed about the same (14.8% to 15.6%). Rock the continent!
• Students study more now than they did then, and more kids of every race take Advanced Placement courses. For example, "in 1980, 7 % of 19th graders reported spending 10 hours a week or more on homework, but by 2002 that number had risen to 37%, more than a fivefold increase."

Anyone ready to freak out about the browning of America might stop for one second to wonder if there's link between more minority students and more studying and achievement. It's not linear, but it's fun to think about. Asian American students have an eligibility rate for the University of California that is three times higher than that of whites. A study by Dick Flacks at UC Santa Barbara showed that students of color spend many more hours a week studying and working for fee and rent money than do their white counterparts. There's more where those facts came from.

But there's a big gap between the people who vote (overwhelmingly white) and the people who have kids in public school (much less white). Stereotypes die hard, and mere facts aren't going to keep voters from voting to cut their own taxes with the excuse that those ghetto kids can't or won't learn anyway so why fix their falling-down schools?

That's too bad, because as this blog loves to point out, there's never been a middle class in the history of the world that didn't depend on good public services. Meaning roads, hospitals, schools and the rest of the new deal. So we can either vote to tax and spend and lift everybody up, or let racial suspicion continue the current decline. Plan A or Plan D - there are no other plans.

Don't be dumb.

College Admissions Blues

The New York Times ran a decent article a couple of weeks ago about how hard it is to get into college these days. The hook was the crunch at the sub-Ivies, that is, at the safety schools of yesteryear that are now over the heads of a lot of good students who at one time may have felt entitled to Princeton or Yale. Lehigh now gets ten times as may applicants as it has spaces for. Its acceptance rate has dropped from 47% to 31% in just six years. "The admission rate at Pomona, in Claremont, Calif., was about 15 percent this spring; it was 38 percent 20 years ago. Bowdoin's rate was 18.5 percent this year and 32 percent eight years ago." This crunch is taking place all over the country.

What's going on? At least two things. The American middle-class is getting torn into pieces, with income rising steady and quickly only at the very top. There is a growing divergence between the fate of someone who goes to UT-Austin with the goal of a career in marketing and someone who goes to Duke with the goal of Harvard Business School and a major corporate career. Hence more students fight for Duke and Harvard, and more are at least trying to hang onto Lehigh and the University of Rochester. A good public BA isn't the gateway to a secure and prosperous middle class life in the way that it was at least for white folks a generation ago.

Secondly, the country hasn't been expanding the number of places in high-level universities. The elite private universities have had approximately the same sized first-year classes for decades, a period in which the country's population went from 200 million to 300 million people. Public universities did expand, but didn't expand at the top or in the middle as much as they stuffed lots of new college entrants into the bottom of the pyramid, especially the community college system. By the late 1990s, community colleges had 44% of all college enrollments. States did not spend enough after 1980 to make the new seats great seats at great schools. The "senior" public campuses - Michigan-Ann Arbor, Cal-Berkeley, Virginia-Charlottesville, etc. got much harder to get into. My school, the University of California system, was supposed to make all ten campuses as good as the original flagship campus, Berkeley. All the campuses were supposed to offer elite-quality education to state's masses of qualified students, meaning top quality for all. The newer campuses have succeeded to some extent, but never with enough money and by scrimping in all sorts of ways. Class size is massively larger at UC than it is at, say, Pomona College, and that's just one difference in the student experience. So more students are slotted lower in the quality ladder, and access to the top carries even more of a premium in an increasingly stratified society. Hence the rat race at the top.

The middle classes will not rise and expand as they have in the past until they start demanding a major reinvestment in higher ed. And they will have to do it for middle classes that are more diverse racially than at any time in US history. Middle classes of America, wake up!

PS. Universities are supposed to offer objective, unbuyable research. For a good look at how independent financial analysis is attacked by corporations, see Joe Nocera's good column a couple of weeks ago.

In Memorium

Memorial Day: in memory of the lost ones, the dead ones, the ones made dead for no reason, the ones made dead by the dumbness of the living, made dead by the dumbness of the living leaders, by the dumbness of the brain-dead ones who tolerate the leaders. In memory of the ones our dumbness kills and has killed all over the green earth. May we stop digging the green earth for the bodies of the ones our dumbness killed. May we stop killing them. May we stop being so dumb before so much more time passes, and we get to the next memorial day, and the many more acres of open graves that must be dug because we are so compulsively dumb.

Dull but Important

Hilary Clinton offered a piece of a health care plan this week. The LA Times reporter didn't actually know enough to avoid saying a dumb thing - that Clinton is distrusted by the industry because she believes in big government. Actually, her 1993-94 fiasco of a health care plan was a giant circuitboard love letter to the managed care industry, offering them millions of tiny jacks to pull money out of every single wallet in the United States. So don't expect anything good from her now.

But she does say a few true things:

• Premiums have almost doubled since 2000
• the nation spends 16% of its gross domestic product on health care
• 30% of the cost increase is related to the doubling of obesity among adults during the last two decades (crap I didn't know that one - we are in serious trouble)
• and administrative costs are the highest in the world

Remember that last one. The most privatized health care system in the rich world has the highest administrative costs.

Health care needs a little public sector efficiency.

Wedge In Those Pay Gaps Everywhere!

Not content to grow inequality only between executives and employees, white- and blue-collar workers, and legal-financial elites and the ordinary middle-class, business leaders are driving a wedge between the CEO and numbers 2 and 3 in their own executive offices. Since there is nothing economically efficient about these incessant and widening gaps, they have to be explained through the pure self-interest of the very top people, coupled with a bizarre neo-capitalist culture in which creating inequality is a sign of one' s viritility and special destiny. See the article for the data and charts. See the image here for the symbolic meaning.

We are circling back to the beginning.

Dumbness about Immigration

This morning's New York Times has a front-page story about how worried business supposedly is that immigration reform will cause them labor shortages. Neo-classical economic theory says that the way to cure a shortage of something is to pay more for it. So why aren't the conventional econ-heads at the Times and in corporate America saying well we should pay more for farm labor and drywallers and dishwashers and then more people will want those jobs?

The simple answer is because our leaders put our economy on the low road 30 years ago - the low-wage road where it has come to depend on rock-bottom wages to keep prices down to keep the crap raises of most Americans flowing into the stores. Things still aren't cheap enough for our crap wages: the US has had a negative savings rate since 2005, meaning we're floating our trips to Wal-Mart with credit cards, just like the country as a whole.

We could also have a virtuous cycle - remember John Maynard Keynes and Henry Ford? We could pay more wages, giving people more money to spend, causing more demand, allowing manufacturers and growers to actually raise their prices when they needed to. Supposedly that's all now impossible in the global economy. But that in turn is because we assume it's impossible.

The LA Times had a small piece on a conference about the trouble undocumented students face when they try to continue their studies. This goes under the rubric "middle classes of the world unite" - help a foreign-born kid finish school.

We should do two things at once: 1) demand living wages in all industries, with real accounting to show that in a rich country this is indeed possible; 2) offer full public services to people who work steadily and/or grow up in the U.S. If we do (1), meaning more vulnerable econ levels will be less vulnerable, it will be easier to get the public to do (2). And much economic theory says that the value created by better-educated workers will more than pay for the cost of educating them.

Average In Michigan

Look at the nice house. See the nice couple. Everything looks very normal. But normal isn't what it used to be.

The New York Times had a good piece on what it means to be normal in America these days, as opposed to being, say, married to one of the founders of LBO pioneers (sorry, we're supposed to say "private equity" firm) KKR and serving as the president of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

Average means

• earning $66,000 a year with two incomes.
• spending 1/7th of your income on interest on your consumer debt (up from 1/9th in 1980).
• owing collectively $880 billion to credit card companies, up from $8 billion in 1968 (in today's dollars).
  
• owing collectively $17.1 billion in 2006 — up from $12.8 billion in 2003,
• saving less than zero since 2005.
  

Meanwhile, back in New York, Henry Kravis's firm spent $29 billion last month buying First Data, one of the country's largest credit-card processing companies. They offered 26.4% more than the market value of the firm. But what the hell - debt in Michigan is only going to grow. Kravis is worth at least $1.4 billion personally, and that's going to grow as well.

From the Democratic Party's left: Robert Reich on sharply increasing the income tax on incomes above a million a year; John R. MacArthur saying "tariff" isn't a dirty word.

Krugman Torn On Trade

Paul Krugman has become one of the few semi-egalitarian voices on economic affairs in the major media (his New York Times colleague Bob Herbert is another, along with various business journalists at that paper like the great Louis Uchitelle). But Krugman has long been a fairly orthodox free trader in the Robert Reich mold. He's worried about the social consequences of lost manufacturing jobs and global wage competition, and yet he abhors traditional government remedies. The latter always get called "protectionism," which all enlightened people naturally hate. If you support some kind of tariff or trade restriction, you must belong to a union.

Krugman's piece on Monday shows how completely Democrats have accepted Republican free trade policy even when it paralyzes their brains. There is a "dark side" to globalization, he writes, but we can't go back to "old-fashioned protectionism." NAFTA hasn't worked for Mexico, but we can't just get rid of it. After a bit of this handwringing, he flips it around a little. We do need "labor standards," but actually these don't work.

Floundering, he settles for a nice shot at the Bush Administration, which is his speciality:

The Bush administration, by the way, opposed labor standards, not because it wanted to keep imports cheap, but because it was afraid that America would end up being forced to improve its own labor policies. So the inclusion of these standards in the deal represents a real victory for workers.

That was fun. But what what do the Democrats do when they stop attacking Bush policy as the work of selfish, inefficient crooks? In Krugman's case - nothing. He winds up changing the subject. Let's move on from trade, he says: helping workers should start with universal healthcare.

True enough. But Democrats are going to have to cough up most of the Reaganite salt-water they've swallowed over the past 25 years before they will do anything of the kind. If they could talk themselves into managing market forces - i.e. HMOs - enough to provide universal healthcare, maybe they could figure out how to keep trade from sitting on average wages for the next 25 years just like it has done for the last.

Pound a Dem on the back and see what comes up.

Moneybags

How am I supposed to feel about Chrysler being sold by Daimler to a private equity firm named after the three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell and led by Dubya's former Treasury Secretary? A few thoughts:

• Why can't American business make money in its flagship industry of the 20th century, automobiles? Chrysler first went broke in 1979, during the Carter Administration, and has been up and down my whole adult lifetime.
• Does innovation have anything to do with profits? Chrysler has been more creative than the other Big 3 and it hasn't helped.
• Daimler is getting $7.4 billion minus some costs for a car company it bought for $36 billion in 1998. Holy cow! How much money do you have to lose before you say "sorry, we're idiots! And not just us, but all those other executives, equity kings, and M&A lawyers who think just like us!"
• Writing in today's Wall Street Journal, Gregory Zuckerman et al. have probably gotten at the real story - Cerberus the 3-headed dog wants Chrysler's auto loan business. America may not make anything anymore, but we are good at charging points.
  
• Will the business press ever stop saying "synergies and efficiencies" about mergers and acquisitions and say "monopoly power" or at least "market dominance"? The euphemisms make everybody dumb.
• Will the 3-headed dog chew Chrysler employee health benefits to the bone? Several reports say Daimler didn't want to hack the company's liabilities there. Can America afford health care for the non-rich?
• Meanwhile, Bob Herbert reports in the NYT that half of all US workers have no paid sick leave, 80% of the bottom quarter by income have none, and 86% of food service workers have none. Herbert concludes that worklife for most US workers is stuck in the nineteenth century.

He's right. And so it goes.

M. Sarkozy: Govern from the Left, or Fail

There are two pieces to the prosperity puzzle for any country in the contemporary world. The first is a flexible capacity for production, one that can adapt to changing conditions. The second is a social system that apportions resources correctly, both to minimize suffering and to keep the population secure, content, creative, and, of course, flexible.

The past 25 years has seen a never-ending focus on the first part of the puzzle and the eclipse of the second. Politicians in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Chile, Poland, Ireland, and elsewhere have focused obsessively on deregulating businesses, cutting their taxes supposedly to free up investment capital, weakening labor protections, encouraging layoffs and other formers of worker recycling. This focus has been an enormous boon to the Right in each of these countries, which has collectively found in economic flexibility a recipe for short-term business gains and political success, since the policies that serve business self-interest also serve the Right's wealthy supporters.

The other half of the puzzle - proper social systems - has been allowed to decay. The quality of social services has mostly declined in the West, even as their cost has risen. Economic insecurity is on the rise everywhere, with the Right successfully making a virtue of the necessity that follows their political victories. For thirty-five years, the bottom 80-90% of the populations of these countries - the vast economic majority - has seen their living standards stagnate or decline. The fall of the Soviet Union, which should have discredited economic dictatorship and the police state, instead discredited socialism and, more generally, social democracy and the accompanying concepts of broad-based social development. The theory of social systems has been defensive and reactive - great work has been done on the concrete effects of welfare reform and dramatic increases in incarceration rates, but little of it points to a new vision of society.

France has been a partial exception to all this, but a weak one. For special historical reasons, it has done a better job than most of celebrating high-quality public services in areas like health care and public transit, and France's are among the best in the world. Its public secondary school system, battered by racial conflict and policy confusion, remains superb.

And yet even France has been unable to explain the causal connection between a strong society and a strong economy. A terrible misunderstanding - the idea that justice diminishes efficiency - has meant that even the left believes right-wing economics to be more efficient than its own. Sarkozy would occasionally concede that the French must be “protected,” but this didn't matter because he remained, from first to last, the candidate of economic vitality and competitive winners. Until the left can make the same kind of claim, founded both in better economics and better social justice, the Sarkozys of Western countries will almost always win. The excepts to this rule - Mitterrand, Clinton, and Blair - were so compromised by conceding the Right's vision of economics that their legacies will at best be dim.

The false yet pervasive axiom is that business gives life and public services drain it away. Sarkozy's victory in the recent presidential elections will have the ironic effect of showing its limitations. The reason is simple. France is not large or dominant enough economically for it to muscle its way through the inefficiencies of conservative economics as the US has done. American conservatives from Reagan on could indulge in their completely one-sided notion of development - all business, no society - only under special circumstances. The country was already wealthy, had a huge internal market, dominates the global economic system, and had military and financial power clout to win every bargain into which it enters. American financial and political leaders could conceal declining wages, benefits, and quality of life for the economic majority with massive foreign borrowing to fund domestic deficits, similar foreign subsidies to keep interest rates low, and cheap money policies that allowed rising stock and housing prices to create temporary wealth effects for the middle classes that, in the long haul, have done poorly. The Right was also helped by its incessant attacks on both people of color (as degenerate and lazy) and on blue-collar workers (as inflexible and obsolete), for these destroyed the political standing of much of the economic majority, leaving a clear field for conservatives.

None of these options are available to France. It is a medium-sized country with a second-tier economy that has no chance of competing with the US, China, or India through deregulation. No politically imaginable amount of flexibilization will make it like the US, to say nothing of countries where manufacturing workers earn 50 euros a month or less and have no health and safety protections. Nor can it imitate the U.S. immigrant labor strategy, whereby wage levels have been steadily reduced in important sectors such as hospitality, agriculture, and construction through the use of low-wage and often undocumented workers. France cannot even compete in status-quo quality industries - It lags well behind Germany in export revenues and general reputation - though that makes sense given its highly educated workforce and excellent technological capabilities. If Sarkozy lives by the neoliberal sword he will die by it - or more accurately, France will die, while his wealthy backers do as well as their counterparts in the US, England, Mexico, and Russia.

Sarkozy's only chance for success is to dump the Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism that he has ridden to victory. There are three critical strategies here. The first is to increase funding to the economically strategic public sectors that have lagged in France. This begins with education and research, and it includes languages and cultural disciplines as well as technological ones. This strategy will require a higher-quality version of the second piece of the puzzle - emphasizing public sector activities that add value in addition to maintaining those that sustain decent life.

A second key concerns the economic side. Now that he has won by hammering the inefficient state, Sarkozy will need to hammer the inefficient business world - its rigid hierarchies, its authoritarian executives, its culture of ritual and mistrust. If Nixon went to China, can Sarkozy go to the CAC-40 CEOs and say big business, reform thyself?

A third key is racial. The campaign was disgracefully silent on racism in France, on the warehousing of immigrants and their racialized French-born children, on their far worse public services, their limited life chances, the constant exclusion and hypervisibility, the general insult to republican ideals incarnated in their everyday experience. White French folks are likely to follow their American cousins in destroying the public services they associate with brown and black folks. IF French republicanism still matters today, it will matter by offering the first Western model of cross-racial negotiation and equal development. At the moment, this seems unlikely, and Sarkozy has gone out of his way to be part of the problem. If France fixes this, it will fix its society, and rebalance its society and economy. If France cannot include its own people of color, it will continue to deteriorate economically.

The French are among the most brilliant people on earth. Let's hope that they can help their new president be half as brilliant as they are.

Duelling Dumbness

The Wall Street Journal today has an example of an increasingly common kind of piece: middle-class people who wanted to ride real-estate to riches are getting caught in the housing downdraft and trying to bail out. Many of the buyers are suing developers to get out, some on grounds of trivial non-performance (a door to a common area that turns out not to be lockable), others on grounds that they, the honest middle-income folks, didn't make enough money to make the home purchase they did and should have been turned down. "You gave me what I asked you for, but you shouldn't have. Why did you? See you in court!" It's hard to know who to root for in this one, since all parties were working every angle to cash in big. One builder spokesperson summed up the other side by saying "These are not situations where a woman bought a unit and she's now a widow and can't pay," he said. "These are people who don't want to close because they can't flip and make $100,000."

The LA Times had a piece about child care that will no doubt disappear immediately. But it shows how state funding for child care would actually help the economy by freeing up parents to work longer, take better jobs, or something similar. I bring this up because every day the news has been showing the depressing shift in middle-class thinking from public services as their platform of life-and-work satisfaction and affluence to depending on price inflation in things they own. In the 1990s they looked to stocks, in the 2000s it has been real estate. Either way the middle-class now associates their own affluence with buying something cheap that they can then sell dear. They don't associate their well-being with social development or the general welfare.

The whole scheme works for a while but not for long. It works for some but not for all. Any chance we'll figure this out in time?

Sunday Sermons on the Decline and Fall

Our familiar Sunday themes:

-Fr. Frank Rich has an even better than usual piece on our Poodle Press in today's New York Times.

-News Flash: private sector failed to Rebuild LA. Sorrowful views 15 years later (1, 2, 3).

-Catch up on Paul Krugman's demonstration that the U.S. income and wealth spreads have returned to the 1920s or the 1890s, depending on your measure. Contrast it with Human Helium Balloon Tom Friedman's happy Einstein parable of salvation through science education. Why does anyone take Friedman's corporate global future seriously when he is in blanket denial of the corporate global present? A central symptom of that present -- the grotesque and bizarre maldistribution of money -- is noted by Krugman: the top 25 hedge-fund managers made $14 billion in 2006, which would have covered the cost of health insurance for the U.S. 8 million children who current lack it. Remember: soaking the rich does work, financially.

-A federal Court of Appeals immunized banks that helped Enron defraud investors by hiding loses and pumping the stock.

-Public investment stops: watch infrastructure fall. Today the LA Times reported that California's genius Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is strangling planning for a bullet train network, which eventually would have brought this huge state with terrible traffic into the second half of the twentieth century. Today, a gasoline truck completely destroyed a connector to the Bay Bridge that links Oakland to San Francisco. Whoops. A few more people will be taking the train.

-News Flash: racism undermines support for public services! Economists have figured out the obvious, but better late than never.

Rich Man Middle Man

The dailies are starting to cover the crazy incomes of hedge fund chiefs. Here's a sample from the Los Angeles Times. At the bottom is this list:

1. James Simons, Renaissance Technologies, $1.7 billion

2. Ken Griffin, Citadel Investment, $1.4 billion

3. Edward Lampert, ESL Investments, $1.3 billion

4. George Soros, Soros Fund Management, $950 million

5. Steven Cohen, SAC Capital, $900 million

6. Bruce Kovner, Caxton Associates, $715 million

7. Paul Tudor Jones, Tudor Investment, $690 million

8. Tim Barakett, Atticus Capital, $675 million

9. David Tepper, Appaloosa Management, $670 million

10. Carl Icahn, Icahn Partners, $600 million.

The assets of the rest of us are starting to flounder. Housing sales were down over eight percent last month compared to the month before. This will soon mean the end of the price inflation that owners used to boost their often-stagnant incomes and that kept many renters locked out of the market. It will be interesting if folks finally start to ask why the new wealth isn't shared like the old used to be.

Afraid for France

Today's first-round presidential elections in France are making me nervous. What if Sarkozy comes out way in front? What if the second-round consists of a choice between Sarkozy the wannabe Thatcherite and le Pen, the National Front right-wing racist? What if French voters turn out to be as dumb as we are?

Some reasons why they might be:

1. Sarkozy is widely portrayed in the press as a New Man, a bold, vigorous, decisive leader able to break France's attachment to its statist past. France could vote in effect to get rid of its best features - great public services like transportation and health care, and make its crappy features, like its university system and its rigid, top-down corporate world, even worse.

2. France's poor, though a much smaller piece of the pie than in the U.S., are often portrayed as violent, illiterate, Islamic fanatics who refuse to assimilate into France. Shades of Thatcher and Reagan, Sarkozy parades his contempt for the "scum" of the projects in place of meaningful accomplishments in reducing crime and increasing school achievement and employment. But these strong-man gestures please a lot of people in all countries.

3. France's business class is as irresponsible as that of the US and the UK, and incessantly demands lower taxes and easier firings rather than solutions to real social problems like racism, unqualified school grads, social polarization, and - the one we never talk about - clueless business elites who really have no idea how to make their companies excel internationally, and so fall back on milking their own public sectors.The slogan should be "Sarko le mediocre." This is a guy who never had a new idea in his life, who plays the race card and the deregulation card like the Anglo-Saxon right began doing thirty years ago. He would be the worst of both worlds, delivering cronyist neoliberalism in economics (France's biggest companies getting more favors, not getting more productive, and doing less and less for the country), and racialized dismantling of society, exploiting France's diminishing confidence in the value of its great public services and residual egalitarianism.

Is France on a death trip of its own?

Sunday symptoms:

1. our own utterly decadent leaders, anatomized by Fr. Frank
2. free market health care strikes again in America's death-trip zone, The South
3. migrate to live under globalization
4. finally a non-stupid piece on France in the New York Times
5. American financial culture's made-up rules: are we smart enough to follow the story?
6. shareholder votes on executive pay? One small step for reform.
   

Blingdexes Boom, Unlike You

This is under the heading of "proof of what you already knew." Robert Frank's Wealth Report in Friday's Wall Street Journal cites several indexes of the luxury consumer sector to show that indexes that track high-end goods have gone up much faster during the Bush years than those that track consumption for the rest of us. Frank writes, "Most of the luxury index have posted an average increase of at least 13% between 2001 and 2006. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, by comparison, has increased an average of 4.7% annually during the same period." And of course GDP has increased less than that. In addition, "same-store sales for upscale stores like Saks and Barneys are increasing at more than twice the rate of the overall retail sector, analysts say."

Another example: Merrill Lynch's new MI LIfeStyle Index (which includes BMW, Porsche, Bulgari, Coach, Burberry, Tiffany, Sotheby's, etc.) "increased 23% in 2005 and 12.5% in 2006 - above the 14% and 7% posted for the Morgan Stanley's MSCI World Consumer Discretionary Index" which tracks global consumer stocks.

And of course the inevitable stats behind this are not long in coming: "The number of millionaire households in the U.S. has more than doubled since 1995," and "the total wealth held by the nation's richest 1% has increased more than 50% since 1998, to $16.7 trillion in 2004."

No wonder we had to cut national higher education funding by over 15% in real dollars in the 2000s, and had to privatize the formerly federal student loan agency Sallie Mae, whose CEO after 1997, Albert L. Lord, made $235 million between 1999 and 2004, and stands to make another $135 on this new deal. (See a good piece by Joseph Nocera, and and another by Julie Bosman on loan companies phony but mandatory "counselling" to students on campus.) Why send two kids to Harvard, or fifteen to Cal State Channel Islands, when you can buy a Bugati instead, make the kids take on debt, and then pay off your Bugati with the interest you make from their securitized debt? This is what makes this the greatest country in the world!

Goodbye Means Hello

I haven't read Vonnegut in years but I will miss him anyway. I'll miss what he represented - originality and stylistic loopiness that opened up new windows into how people think and feel. I loved how he believed that we could imagine other worlds, and then went ahead and imagined them.

There's some good quotations in this clip from David L. Ulin's obit in the Los Angeles Times of April 13th. But there's also a tendency to cut Vonnegut down to size.

Here's Ulin:

"Slaughterhouse-Five," Vonnegut's masterpiece, is the story of a World War II veteran named Billy Pilgrim who comes unstuck in time. The book is centered around the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces near the end of World War II, which Vonnegut survived as a prisoner of war. It's no understatement to suggest that this was the defining experience of the author's life, not because it made him bitter but because it opened up his point of view.

Close to 100,000 people died in Dresden, almost all of them civilians: shopkeepers, nursemaids, teachers, children. It was a horror so incomprehensible that the only reasonable response was to see it as absurd. For Vonnegut, this was the linchpin in what became a humanistic outlook on the world. It allowed him, in some fundamental way, to develop his own odd bittersweet sense of humor, since he had witnessed such indiscriminate devastation and despair.

What set Vonnegut apart is that, even as he commented on this, he understood there was nothing to be done about it; when he acknowledged, in response to a question from an acquaintance, that he was writing an antiwar book, he was asked why he wasn't writing an anti-glacier book instead. "What he meant, of course," Vonnegut wrote, "was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too."

He was also smart enough to recognize his complicity, the idea that as a writer or observer, he was not above the fray. "One way or another," Vonnegut acknowledged ruefully in 1976, "I got two or three dollars for every person killed [in Dresden]. Some business I'm in."

This willingness to tell the truth would sometimes blur, as Vonnegut grew older, into cynicism. He could be a misanthrope; in his 1991 essay collection "Fates Worse Than Death," he described humanity as "an unstoppable glacier made of hot meat, which ate up everything in sight and then made love, and then doubled in size again," and later he would go so far as to say that we, as a species, had been a mistake.

Indeed, much of his later work was marked by a pessimism about the fate of the world and, indeed, the human race. "The good Earth — we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy," he wrote in his last book, "A Man Without a Country," published in 2005.

Still, even the existence of that final effort spoke to an opposing, and more optimistic, point of view.

Actually, no. Vonnegut never thought there was nothing to be done about things like war. He was depressed and "pessimistic" because there were lots of things to do to stop war, global warming, etc. - we just weren't doing them. That's depressing.

He's gone and not suffering anymore. And he's not pessimistic anymore. And not gone - there are those amazing books. RIP Kurt. We will keep working on your other worlds.

Executive Pay Frenzy at the New York Times

As readers here know, Sunday in America is Class Anxiety Day. The New York Times prepared a special Easter Class Anxiety edition with excellent graphics available on line for a week or so. The anxiety almost spills over into anger and even a little whiff of class war. It is pretty outrageous, what you can do by studying 200 "large public companies" and the pay of the top three folks. Look at the graph to the left. I don't think I have the heart to write about this long enough to get to the bottom of this insane, stratospheric spike they've given themselves - oops, I made it. The big spike is actually the top 10% of executives, showing the nutty spikes within spikes of the inequality that has become our defining national feature. My gut reaction is that these guys at the top don't care about anything - the country, the economy, the people, the environment, nothing outside of crushing everybody else in whatever game they think they're playing. Maybe they'd pay attention if somebody tried to raise the 15% capital gains tax rate back to the 38% or whatever the hell the top bracket is in this country of clueless leaders. But global warming, civil wars, blown up in the market, starvation and drinking water for a billion people that makes you crap your guts out: these guys can't do a goddam thing except make it worse, so you wonder why we're paying them anything. It almost makes you wish the Second Coming would come right now. Happy Easter everyone. I need another chocolate bunny.

Restless Scarf Day

Today I had lunch with my brother upstairs in a good hole-in-the wall mom-n-pop restaurant in the Galerie Vero Dodat, just off the Palais Royal which was looking mighty good in early spring as we walked through. We talked about about all sorts of things, particularly the upcoming presidential elections here in France, which as Americans we feels we've already lived through. Sarkozy the candidate of security, patriotism, immigration controls, and the deregulation of business; Royale, getting called inexperienced and indecisive and going down in the poles. Sarko is the culture of force brought to France, and of cronyism already here, and of Blairite privatization which means giving businesses slices of government activity thus driving up costs, allowing business to declare government inefficient and taking even more of the action. Maybe Sarkozy can bring HMOs to French healthcare so the French can pay three times what they do now, making them "efficient" like us. Naturally, Brad says, much of the middle class supports Sarkozy.

But what the hell. Things feel less urgent in Paris, which has survived centuries of lying and stealing leaders. The Palais Royal was the original fusion of government and retail, built for Richlieu in the 1630s and combining over time royal apartments and every variety of snobbery and trade. After lunch we walked down rue de Rivoli, the heart of middle-brow commerce, and then I continued on across the amazing Seine on an early spring day that combined an unsteady, chilly north wind with lots of unbroken sun. I passed la Conciergerie with its famous round towers, the heart of the old monarchy and of royal imprisonment and then past le palais de justice, the heart of the law, and on to Notre Dame de Paris. As ye olde Catholic atheist, I visit cathedrals every chance I get, including ones I've visited dozens of times before, like this one, a destination of one of my traditional Paris walks. If you asked me "what is European civilization's single greatest achievement," I would immediately reply, "Notre Dame."

I looked at it today and thought of what Avery says about the ruins at Jumieges. It used to be powerful and evil. Now its power is gone, and it is peaceful. And beautiful, beautiful, beautiful The beauty does mean something. It always gives me hope. The structure, the ornament, the entire world of humanity represented in the figures - all speak of the authority of god, which leads to fixed, rigid, absolute hierarchies on the facade. I like watching the unstoppable mobs of tourists in the parvis in front. They are amazed by it, and excited, at least temporarily harmless and at peace themselves, taking pictures and pointing and deciphering and perhaps they wonder what I always wonder - how did those European barbarians, those superstitious fanatics, those ignorant pretechnological killers, make something as beautiful, as overwhelming as this? How did they do something this right?

They knew many things that we have forgotten. They had labor and craft, and art was central to the ways they honored the universe. They were doing much better at that than we are.

I stared at the central portal as I always do. There are the saints standing on the backs of the servants who twist their necks to look up at them. There are the rows of heads ascending and descending. There are the fake kings looking down, the substitute statues after their forebears were pulled to the ground during the revolution. The destruction of the kings was the beginning of the ruin, and the romanticism, and Hugo's novel that brought people back to the building to look up at it. The end of the kings was the start of the peace.

The revolution left the central portal intact. There is Christ on his throne. Below him an angel conducts the weighing of souls. The saved are directed to heaven. The damned are directed below.

The saved and the damned - this dichotomy is the central mistake of Christianity. This is not Jesus, the great anti-imperial thinker of community-based higher things. This is Christ, whose status as himself divine supposedly ratified church power and what better way to show his power than by damning souls to hell? Really, what worse way? The reflex of damnation - it's nearly been the end of us all.

After weighing the weighing of souls yet again, I walked around to the back, past the pink and the green flowering trees, and the smiling grandfathers having their picture taken, and the boys happily strangling each other on the pavilion. From the heart of the church I walked to the Jardin des Plantes, the heart of old French science, fully repaired, spreading out flat and wide and endlessly in the distance, with the Galerie de zoologie majestic and undisturbable in the distance, wide and high and forming its own horizon. Manet-like tableau sur l'herbe occurred at regular intervals - a teenage girl helping an 8-year-old with her homework under the pink petals, a 4 year old girl in a red coat amiably kicking her way across the crushed granite earth, clumps of shouting schoolkids, businessmen blinking in the sun as they talked on the their phones. I went out the front and walked by the great Mosque, the old heart of Islamic France. I couldn't go home without stopping in at the 5 a Sec on Saint Marcel to see if my regular laundress was there, and thankfully she was. Something else to look forward to.

My scarf took off in the wind about 50 times during the walk. Happy to come back, but equally happy to go.

Robbing Thy Pension

Today's New York Times has a good investigate article about budgetary deception and the siphoning of the teacher's pension fund in the state of New Jersey. "I'm from Jersey" jokes aside, New Jersey is a wealthy state, in per capita income not far behind Connecticut and Massachusetts, ahead of New York, and way ahead of California. So it's particularly ominous that the state has been robbing its teachers to pay its contractors, or its pension consultants at JP Morgan - or somebody, who really knows. This is not a conspiracy against middle-class social services - it's just part of the overall disdain and carelessness regarding public sector resources that create a phony sense of their inefficiency and, more literally, gradually destroy their solvency so after lots of sighing, lamentation, and handwringing our "responsible" public officials - usually Democrats - can clean up the mess by cutting payouts, taking new employees out of the pension altogether, and increasing everyone's insecurity. Actually this downsizing of public pensions and benefits is the specific goal of business roundtable-like organizations like the Rich Citizens Public Budget Complaint Committee, known more formally as the CBC, which constantly argues that public employees don't deserve good pensions because their wages aren't as grossly substandard as they used to be. Well too bad, it's your fault for choosing public service when you could have been an IP lawyer . . .

Middle Classes of the World, Unite!

It would be nice to see the middle classes in the US protest when they get screwed. The war in Iraq has as of this minute cost about $410 billion. See the counter at the National Priorities Project, which points out that this amount is the equivalent of almost 20 million scholarships to college for four years. The human but also the social and monetary waste is literally crazy. Happy Fourth Anniversary of the start of the Iraq invasion. This is the war that no level of protest OR of human rights violations, mayhem, or strategic failure has affected. How do we make it stop?

Those middle-class protesters in the picture are lawyers and their supporters in Pakistan. The shot was taken March 14th, when lawyers took to the street to protest after Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, fired his chief justice. Salman Masood reported to the New York Times that "Hundreds of lawyers gathered outside the Supreme Court to give Chief Justice Chaudhry a hero’s welcome. Wearing black arm and head bands, lawyers and activists chanted slogans — 'Go, Musharraf, go!' and 'A regime of bullet and baton will not do' — in the face of a heavy contingent of police officers. The Chief Justice had been suspended on the basis of secret charges.

The suspended Chief Justice, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, had clashed with Musharraf in the past, particularly on the issue of "forced disappearances," unlawful detentions of people by the government's security forces. Chaudhry was liked to have presided over a challenge to the legality of Musharraf's occupation of the presidency. More recently, Masood writes, "Chief Justice Chaudhry had considerably embarrassed the government by overturning the much-publicized privatization of a steel mill, which tainted Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz for approving the underpriced sale of a major national asset."

Governmental lawlessness, the routine disappearing of dissidents, crony-driven privatization, the crushing of an independent judiciary - they all violate the basic tenets of the "open society" that capitalist markets are supposed to guarantee. Elites who want capitalism should help their restive middle-classes to defeat this kind of tyranny. If they don't, middle-class movements will more widely equate capitalism with tyranny, just as many of their working-class predecessors did.

Smarter Than Their Parents

The LA Times has a story covering the UC Regents meeting yesterday, where they voted 13-6 for a 7% increase in undergraduate fees next year, raising the average annual tuition for a UC undergrad to about $7350. The frame successfully created by the Office of the President (UCOP) was that it would be worse for you if you lived in Texas or Virigina, where fees are higher, so look on the bright side. This doesn't change the fact that the state is steadily replacing public with private funding, and that the university's social and personal impacts will change as a result. We'll talk a little about this in lecture today.

Another ominous note is that the Regents approved a proposal led by the law schools at Berkeley and UCLA to remove the cap on tuition increases there, meaning that they will soon rise from their current level of around $25k to $35k or more. The damage to public-interest law is obvious, since now even graduates of public universities can't afford to take the five-figure jobs that those non-profit entities can afford to pay.

The damage to the concept of public higher education is subtler but just as deep: as students and parents pay more for eduation out of their own pockets, they are naturally less interested in paying more for education in taxes. A few of the protesting students mentioned that the "high-tuition, high-financial aid" model wasn't working for them, but most people haven't figured out that only public funding can support higher ed that combines high-qualty with high-volume. That includes the middle-class folks who in many cases are middle-class only because they took a few steps up the social ladder because of very cheap but very good college instruction. To repeat a lecture question: will the California middle-classes give away the conditions of their own existence?

Republican Columnist Sees A Lot of Pissed-Off Indians in His Future

Ben Stein watched TV in a hotel, fell asleep, and dreamt class war. Well almost. This is America, the classless society. But the New York Times's Ben Stein got upset nonetheless.

I recognize the experience: he doesn't watch much TV (at the moment I'm restricted to DVDs of last season's Battleship Galactica), he gets his news from places like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and then he's by himself in a Houston hotel and clicks on the TV:

I watched a show called “The Big Idea With Donny Deutsch.” It was about lavish parties. Now, you remember how we were having those tax cuts for the very rich so they could invest more and make America grow? Remember that?

Well, surprise! Some of that money is going to lavish Sweet 16 parties and $10 million bat mitzvahs, with Tom Petty and Kenny G and private jets flying the guests around. Five-hundred-thousand-dollar parties in New York and Malibu are no longer at all unusual. Even million-dollar parties for the rich are not out of the ordinary, according to the party planners on the show.

I started to feel hysterical. Is this what America is all about? We’re in a war and we cut taxes to stimulate the economy — and it probably did — and we are having million-dollar parties at home while our soldiers are paid starvation wages to offer up their lives in Iraq? We’re in a war and the government cannot afford to pay for adequate training for our soldiers, but the society at home is routinely having million-dollar weddings and bar mitzvahs?

Can anyone say “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”?

We are creating a debt that is about $3 trillion greater than it was when Bill Clinton left office, and one sequel is $10 million birthday parties? Is this what supply-side is all about? To obligate future generations so our generation can have $10 million parties for teenagers?

Yes it is, Ben, what's the matter with you! Our children will be much much richer than we are so who cares? In America, freedom means freedom to spend your money any way you want. So if you spend on a party in one day what it would take ten people making the average American wage of $1 million per year a whole year to earn, so be it. After all, the same free market that creates $10 million kid parties has brought the average annual wage in America to $1 million. So if ten people work a total of 3000 days for a one-day party, what's the problem?

Think of the alternative, like the socialist economies of Western Europe. If America had public services that burdened business - universal health care, good social security, subsidized mass transit, high-quality yet low cost universities, whatever - we would have a median wage somewhere in the socialist neighborhood of, say, $44,300 a year. That would mean, rounding off, that the same $10 million kid party would take 200 people working for one year to pay the catering and decorating and private jet bill, or one person working 200 years. This would violate the American spirit of fair play. Luckily, American wealth-creation has put $10 million parties within reach of the average worker, and the home equity in our $18 million average houses is more than enough to borrow against.

Just think how upset Stein would be if he woke up in Paris!

A Dishonorable Schoolboy

I start most Sunday mornings by reading a Sunday sermon, usually Frank Rich’s New York Times column on the Bush Administration and its sins. Father Frank’s sermons resemble one another, which makes them very reassuring. The Bush people did last week more or less what they did the week before, which gives the world a certain horrible orderliness.

Father Frank was stressing the tangled web of alliances wrought by American stupidity, and my eyes wandered into the next column where everything is always perfectly simple - the column written by David “Schoolboy” Brooks. Schoolboy was expounding on some half-learned lessons from evolutionary biology (actually he’s doing evolutionary psychology, but whatever): the “content of our genes” make us do bad things, this has always been true, it will always be true. Hence the Schoolboy title, “Human Nature Redux,” and the capitalized clichés from Steven Pinker and Thomas Sowell (lumped together with Adam Smith and Edmund Burke), half-baked together in a Schoolboy Pie.

I was reading along waiting for the pie’s razorblade to appear, but where was it. “Today, there really is no antinomian counterculture - even the artists and rock stars are bourgeois strivers. Today, communes and utopian schemes are out of favor.” What the hell is he going on about, I asked myself. I always approach Schoolboy knowing that he is actually the most ambitious of NYT columnists, since he does The Culture and is always saying We Moderns or We Americans or We Humans are Really Conservative. In other words, Conservatism has nothing to do with Bush, Rove, Iraq, or shortsighted, obnoxious, selfish financial elites. These for Schoolboy, never forgetting his intro philosophy class at the University of Chicago, are fallen faded images of Platonic Conservatism, which is infinitely great, and universally True.

Back to that paragraph about Today: “People are mostly skeptical of social engineering efforts and jaundiced about revolutionaries who promise to herald a new dawn.” Hmm, I think, Schoolboy has written that exact sentence in about 150 columns already. But then the razor-blade appears: “Iraq has revealed what human being do without a strong order-imposing state.” Ah ha! Schoolboy Sez: I didn’t chop down the cherry tree, an Iraqi did!

Of course the Iraqi debacle is the Right’s solo show, much more so than was Vietnam, and they have lied big time to make it happen. Now they are doing the most desperate, high-intensity, bullet-sweating blame-shifting in recent history. It wasn’t our clinically delusional stupidity and wholly wrong philosophy of life. It was the Iraqi People. Since Schoolboy is the Right’s pop philosopher, he deepens the stakes: It’s the weak, lazy, quarrelsome, violent Iraqi people, as tied to unpoliced human nature itself. The Schoolboy’s Solution is more force from above, not less. And since the Iraqis are living in a Hobbesian state of nature, that means more American force.

Calling Brooks “Schoolboy” makes him far more innocent than he actually is. He’s a product of the Right’s think tank networks, which produce knowledge that justifies preconceived conclusions: funders endow these think tanks knowing that all research will confirm conservative doctrine, or at most update it. It’s this same process of fixing the facts around the policy that delivered Iraq on a silver platter. Schoolboy has been operating like this since he graduated from college. So today he writes a column that is a justification for the failure in Iraq, but makes it sound like a scholarly mediation on human nature.

Why does this crap work as well as it does? Well as my friend Andi says, “People Is Dumb.” I would add that Americans is dumb about social causality. Schoolboy can be a great cultural philosopher because thirty years of Schoolboy-type pseudo-scholarship has cut our cultural IQ in half. He’s so much more pleasantly brainless than Father Frank.

Fr. Frank has a causality tale to tell, but first you have to read 14 paragraphs of fairly intense prose. Here’s the good father main point: “What makes [Mr. Bush’s] spin brazen even by his standards is that Iran is in fact steadily extending its influence in Iraq - thanks to its alliance with the very Iraqi politicians that Mr. Bush himself has endorsed.” What! That’s quite a neck-snapping Space Mountain hairpin turn, Fr. Frank! Fr. F. spends the next paragraphs explaining himself by discussing the only slightly hidden anti-U.S. political ties of Bush pal Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, Iraqi president Nuri al-Malaki, and the former US-installed Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari. Are we actually Schoolboy dumb enough to be unable to take this in? Delivering us therefore to “Iraqi Redux,” aka war with Iran?

My Sunday thanks is as follows; thank you, Fr. Frank, for trying to save us from being Schoolboy dumb.

PS. For another exercise in Recovered Causality, see today’s Louis Uchitelle’s NYT Week in Review piece, “Nafta Should Have Stopped Illegal Immigration, Right?” Turns out that free market economics didn’t revive the Mexican economy but hurt it. Turns out that the free market didn’t reduce illegal immigration to the U.S. but increased it. Woah, Fr. Louis, too fast, you’re hurt my neck!

Losing Our Way

Last weekend I was in Durham, NC and this weekend in Nashville Tennessee. Both times I’ve gone to these heartlands for the universities - to give a lecture in a conference at Duke and to see friends that teach at Vanderbilt while Avery speaks at a conference. Things in America don’t look any more normal from here.

My pal Jan opened the Duke conference by saying that the American university has lost its way. True, and the same could be said of the country as a whole. But it could also of my friends as a group. They are some of the best educated and most brilliant people around, and yet its hard not to feel like they’re going through the motions. They have all this knowledge but what is it for? They know these things but what good does it do? They say all these things but who is listening to them?

All around us people who know nothing have tremendous effects, supporting leaders who as my Republican dad pointed out in 2003 “kill people for no reason.” Now every week the dying gets worse in Iraq, in Gaza, in other places we meddle and lend our support. And at home we are pretty sure there is nothing we can do.

My Nashville hotel window faces south. It snowed last night but that has melted away. In every direction I see cranes and half- buildings. They will join the hodge-podge of old brick buildings - 3 and 4 stories mostly - and new condo and office stuff whose color you can’t remember five seconds after you stop looking. Buildings are scattered here and there, and there’s a church’s gothic tower, and the white dome of a quad building on Vanderbilt’s campus. But the idea of coordinating anything wouldn’t arise - it would take concentration, it would take planning, it would take thinking.

A few people are still doing that. They are mostly inside corporations. My friend Dana’s husband Tom tells me as we drive towards downtown that they are going to build a new tower that’s just eight stories shorter than the Sears Tower in Chicago, making it the second tallest building in the U.S. Well why not add 9 stories and go for number 1, I laugh? The buildings they have now are what, 35 stories at most? That’s going to look pretty desperate. We pooled all our money and built the second tallest building in America, where it stands out like the Washington Monument in a lagoon.

We drive by an abandoned 1 story brick strip that could offer street life and shops - the kind of things Americans fly 8000 miles to Paris to get. It could even be connected to another block just like it, and to a couple of others, and with 5 blocks of shops pretty soon you’d have a town. They have some stuff like that down by the river, 2 or 3 blocks of restaurants and bars. Nobody will pay to paint the little buildings, but they’ll build a tower 5 times taller than anything else now in town. We walk across a bridge by the Country Music Hall of Fame. It crosses the Cumberland river, and there’s the new stadium for the Tennessee Titans. Tom tells me it’s built on 10 Indian burial mounds. They saved two in the foreground. I take a picture. Then I take a picture of them, with the Nashville skyline behind, minus its Sears Tower to come.

I liked the Country Music Hall of Fame OK, but it needed a lot more about the culture and the business the music came from. There was a lady in there who opened all the doors on the gold and platinum album displays to hear the song inside, and she tapped her feet and said some of the words to every one. She was the only one of us that wasn’t kind of wandering aimlessly. Where have we come from? What have we done?

Personally, I don’t know what this country’s trying to do other than make money, enormous money, money that buys the immunity of a private island. One half of our elites go around destroying stuff . The other goes around making more money than any group in the history of the world. People who are trying to do something other besides making money seem as lost as the country’s foreign policy. We don’t think anyone’s waiting to hear from us. We go about our business, and work at staying happy.