Democrats Need to Go on The Offensive

Despite the travesty of the Republican led government shutdown the GOP is still controlling the debate in Washington.As George Packer writes in the New Yorker"These days, Republicans may be losing politically and resorting to increasingly anti-majoritarian means—gerrymandering, filibuster abuse, voter suppression, activist Supreme Court decisions, legislative terrorism—to nullify election results. But on economic-policy matters they are setting the terms. Senator Ted Cruz can be justly described as a demagogic fool, but lately he’s been on the offensive far more than the White House has. The deficit is in fairly precipitous decline, but job growth is anemic, and millions of Americans remain chronically unemployed. Democrats control the White House and the Senate, and last year they won a larger share of the national vote in the House than Republicans did. And yet the dominant argument in Washington is over spending cuts, not over ways to increase economic growth and address acute problems like inequality, poor schools, and infrastructure decay."As Larry Summers has stated recently in the Financial Times" budget deficits are now a second-order problem relative to more pressing issues facing the US economy. Projections that there is a major deficit problem are highly uncertain. And policies that indirectly address deficit issues by focusing on growth are sounder economically and more plausible politically than the long-term budget deals with which much of the policy community is obsessed. The latest Congressional Budget Office projection is that the federal deficit will fall to 2 per cent of GDP by 2015 and that a decade from now the debt-to-GDP ratio will be below its current level of 75 per cent. While the CBO projects that under current law the debt-to-GDP ratio will rise over the longer term, the rise is not large relative to the scale of the US economy. It would be offset by an increase in revenues or a decrease in spending of 0.8 per cent of GDP for the next 25 years and 1.7 per cent of GDP for the next 75 years."So why the disconnect between the political conversation that should be dominated by facts and not by Republican talking points?   A lack of White House leadership seems the best explanation.  As Maureen Dowd puts it well in yesterday's New York Times, this is a President who is too fond of being above the fray,"Obama’s default position is didactic disdain. He underuses the fear and charm cards. When he first saw the White House movie theater, he was surprised there were so many seats beyond what the first family would need. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, probably would have built a balcony and auctioned off seats, if he could have.As Valerie Jarrett told David Remnick in “The Bridge,” Obama’s “uncanny” abilities need to be properly engaged, or he disengages. “He’s been bored to death his whole life,” she said. “He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”The worst part about the situation is that the White House will not allow other talented people do anything either.  Perhaps they are too caught up in the health care exchange failure but this cannot be the entire explanation. The President so controls the message that they will not allow other potential spokespeople, notably his Secretary of Labor to take center stage in the way that Robert Reich was allowed to do in the Clinton administration. The Democrats in Congress too seem in a cowering position as if they just want the Republicans to return to the old centrist party they once were and feel they might get rewarded for good behavior if they play on their turf.  If Obama is really serious about preserving jobs and growing the economy he should repeat over and over again that the deficit is not the issue, the problem is growth. He should be out front on this debate instead of gaming the next potential shutdown in January when Republicans will demand cuts in social programs and refuse to allow tax increases on billionaires. You cannot win when you don't engage. 

Is Obama Squandering his Legacy?

In July Obama visited  Knox College in Galesburg Illinois and told the audience that he cared about “one thing and one thing only, and that’s how to use every minute of the 1,276 days remaining in my term to make this country work for working Americans again,” but now Obama is so boxed in with regard to Syria that it is highly unlikely that many of those days will now be devoted to delivering on that major goal.  This will be unfortunate as the slow crisis that has been building since the implosion of the economy under reckless mismanagement by the former president, his friends on Wall Street and enablers in Congress, is now stealing the futures of the young. The portion of people aged 20-24  who have jobs has fallen from 72.2 percent in 2000 to just 61.5 percent, while adjusted for inflation, their median earnings has fallen by nearly 30 percent since 1973 and women, the median by 17 percent.  Meanwhile the average net worth of the wealthiest seven percent of households climbed by 28 percent. The effects on the next generation will be even more severe. In 2011 nearly one third of all children lived in a household where no parent had full-time year round employment while half of all children in urban centers experience unstable family employment.  As a recent ETS report points out “only Romania has a higher child poverty rate than the US." This is shameful for a nation that claims to be a world superpower. There is no use to pretending either that these numbers don't translate into significant gaps in achievement between rich and poor particularly in cities where continued segregation compounds the problem. As the recession continues income and educational equality will make the lives of poor families even worse as 26 states provide less funding per student to local school districts in the new school year than a year ago.

Syria is a huge distraction from the battle to focus people’s attention on unemployment and underemployment.  A Syrian operation will likely cost several billion dollars just a few of those dollars could be spent to raise the minimum wage. How can you justify paying workers who support families wages that cannot support those families so that they have to apply for food stamps ? These are not handouts. The minimum wage in 1963 when Martin Luther King marched for jobs and justice was held constant for inflation it  would now be $9.40 an hour in today’s dollars, not $7.25. Rather than wasting his political capital on rounding up Congress to authorize a dubious strike with a dubious legal basis he should be raising the minimum wage to reignite his flagging presidency. Doubtless MLK, Obama's hero, as he declared so passionately on the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial this month, would have supported the fast food workers. As their strikes move to more cities he could allow his inner MLK to sign an executive order to raise the minimum wage and rescue at least some of the workers caught in today's  economic vice. On Syria he should follow Jane Harman’s advice and get Russia on our side, “If Russia would align with us on stopping all the butchery, that would be an important change, and Russia’s not there. For Russia to be on the wrong side of the use of chemical weapons is stunning, and we’re just not calling them out adequately. Our recent track record with Russia has not shown many results, but I think pulling the international community together to shame Russia is something we should be doing. We should use the leverage we have. The G20 is happening [September 5-6] in Russia. I would look at the G20 and at the United Nations General Assembly as two places where the international community comes together. It should be G19 against G1 going into Russia.”

For Obama to squander his last year and a half in this way will not help his legacy and set back the hopes of a generation.

Why The Rush to "Retaliate"?

We have had two wars in the past two decades and they both started through murky if not dishonest reasoning. We now hear the drum beat again to start prompting allied action in Syria. Why the rush?  As Hans Blix notes in an interview with the Huff Post,

"As far as they are all concerned, a criminal act has been committed so now they must engage in what they call "retaliation." I don't see what they are retaliating about. The weapons weren't used against them. It should be the rebels who want retaliation. If the aim is to stop the breach of international law and to keep the lid on others with chemical weapons, military action without first waiting for the UN inspector report is not the way to go about it. This is about world police, not world law."

You may recall the Bush administration went out of its way to discredit Blix and he returns the favor nicely by exposing the flaws in this latest crop of world leaders' reasoning .  The British public at least seem to have learned the right lessons from recent history with respect to middle eastern conflict and they have  no desire to repeat the same moronic behavior. As Cassidy notes in in his  New Yorker blog, widespread  opposition to Syrian action is cooling Cameron's  desire to play Blair's role in agreeing to follow the Americans, 

"Britons are against military action by a majority of about two-to-one, and the skepticism extends to many supporters of the Conservative-Liberal coalition. In recent days, the voters have been besieging their M.P.s with phone calls and messages, and their protests have had an effect. “Grateful for all the emails I’m receiving from constituents about Syria,” the Conservative M.P. Zac Goldsmith wrote in a tweet on Wednesday. “Unlike so many cut-and-paste jobs, they are authentic & heart-felt.”

Maybe giving the UN a chance to vote on any action might be a good start. If you want to play world policeman and want a world of laws you cannot ignore the one body entrusted with the right to authorize military action under these circumstances. 

New Book Out! Planet in Peril: Young People to the Rescue

I am very pleased to announce the publication of my new book, Planet in Peril: Young People to the Rescue you can find it on Amazon Kindle among many other venues.Why did I write this book? First because the news headlines concerning the future can make young people especially if not the rest of us feel gloomy and even despondent about the future.

Young people in particular find it harder to separate off their own futures from the general gloom. While a gifted environmental science or social science teacher can give them a perspective on topics like global warming and the many calamities to come, too often the discussion is framed far too abstractly. I wrote this book because students need and want to comprehend their own role and place in this unfolding drama. Without understanding their own sense of agency students can all too often feel depressed and tune
out. But how do students gain this sense of agency? In my view it is through understanding people like themselves acting in the world and working to realize their own goals and following their own core values. My second reason for writing is that for a while now I have been frustrated by the gap between the rhetoric applied to various school reform initiatives and the reality. The rhetoric of why we must change our traditional teacher and text book centered classrooms and embrace more global realities has been in place at least since the cold war ended in the 1980s if not before. Yet despite the introduction of computers that can link any classroom to anywhere around the world, we have been relatively slow in using technology to exploring our global identities, preferring the safety and security of our still quite insular textbooks and the traditional approaches to the curriculum that they so often favor. The latest effort of our still quite insular textbooks and the traditional approaches to the curriculum that they so often favor.  A third and final reason for writing this book is my deep conviction that if we are truly to survive as a species we will need to be able to exhibit a new ethic of cooperation and collaboration that can surmount race and nationality. Young people I have met instinctively understand this and yet in their classrooms they are not shown enough people who may not look like them or sound like them who also want to make a difference on behalf of our common humanity. As the world gets smaller and we all get connected on Facebook and other social networks, we need to do more to show our young people the ways they can make a difference by using their voices to affect positive change in the world.

You can find the book at the following E-Reader Sites--

On Amazon


On Nook

Sugata Mitra: We Are Just at the Beginning of Exploring the Web's Potential for Education

I have been following Sugata Mitra' work since I discovered his Hole in the Wall experiment in which he left a working computer in a hole in the wall of a remote Indian village and observed how the children taught themselves how to use the machine. This was ground breaking work that Mitra classifies under the academic sounding title 'self organized learning.'  The work provoked some mild interest and a spell binding TED talk that earned him a $1 million dollar prize in 2013 but not much else(as Mitra notes in a Guardian article) seems to have changed in the educational landscape. Mitra seems frustrated by the problem but has not stopped experimenting. His most recent innovation is the Granny Cloud--that has involved a group of volunteer teachers from the UK and a few other countries  who have been connecting to poor schools in India and South America for more than five years, "using a combination of the internet and admiration to provide a meaningful education for children."The grannies, or e-mediators as they are officially known, are not teachers, and the sessions they conduct with the children in India are not lessons. Instead, they read stories to the children and talk about things relevant to them and to the U.K. They encourage, praise and became a "virtual granny" to these Indian children. The granny idea emerged when after he saw students learning grow using the computer alone he brought in a " 22-year-old woman with no knowledge of the subject to tutor the kids, using “the method of the grandmother.” Instead of traditional instructing, she simply gave encouragement. The kids’ test comprehension scores jumped. There are around 300 "grannies" involved in the scheme and is growing all the time." What a good idea.  As Mitra states

"We don't need to improve schools. We need to reinvent them for our times, our requirements and our future. We don't need efficient clerks to fuel an administrative machine that is no longer needed. Machines will do that for us. We need people who can think divergently, across outdated "disciplines", connecting ideas across the entire mass of humanity. We need people who can think like children."

Mitra's major point is that we need to reinvent schooling based on the notion that the kind of superficial learning that school encourages can be mastered in a few minutes by children using the web

"The curriculum lists things that children must learn. There is no list stating why these things are important. A child being taught the history of Vikings in England says to me: "We could have found out all that in five minutes if we ever needed to."

What the Internet has really allowed in classrooms is what do we do with the knowledge once we find it ---how does it apply to real world problems. How can we devise new solutions. What does it mean for example that we are entering a period of planetary unsustainabilty?   We as teachers have been given a gift--we still seem to be struggling to know how to use it.

Google Takes Up A New Socially Useful Way of Harnessing their Profits and the Web

We live in an exciting age where good ideas can come from everywhere and anywhere not just from the ivy towers. The web can be used not just to gather the ideas but to enable them to go quickly to scale if they are designed correctly.  Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook etc etc maybe one of the first of a long line of innovations to transform the world. In later years we might be referring to these developments as those who transformed us into a socially and globally networked species, perhaps the most important transformations, led by such creations as Kickstarter will launch a new wave of socially useful ways to tap into that massive connectivity.  As web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee,  has stated “The Web’s contribution to economic progress has been much celebrated, but I believe that we are only scratching the surface of its potential to solve social and political problems."Berners-Lee was among those who persuaded Google to set up a competition in which four organisations will be awarded   £2 million ($3 million) in the UK that are using technology for social good in areas like education, economic development, health, environment and community service. The challenge is being piloted in Britain ahead of a "global rollout" “Google believes technology can help solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges, and is eager to back innovators who are using technology to make an impact,” a spokesman said. Doubtless it is good for Google's PR image to be associated with something  so socially useful as  Tech Crunch states

"The Global Impact Challenge is an extension of the Global Impact Awards, $23 million award that Google gave out in December among seven non-profits using technology to solve world problems like clean water (charity:water) and endangered species (Consortium for the Barcode of Life).

A Google spokesperson says that the difference between that round of awards and this newest Global Impact Challenge is that the latter features a competitive element, with the prize open to any non-profit in the UK that chooses to apply. On the other hand, with the earlier grants, “there was no entry criteria, rather, [the] grants [were] awarded to exceptional orgs doing amazing things with tech.”

Now if Apple can be persuaded to follow Google's example and just a fraction of its profits that it parks off shore in shady accounts  then we might begin to see some impact. Go vote on the latest set of innovative ideas by clicking here!

Dictators Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics

Since the dawn of history there have been no shortages of leaders who are prepared to do anything to stay in power. By “anything” we can include starving, torturing, stealing from and even slaughtering their own people, anything includes anything. We may want to believe that we live in an enlightened freedom loving world but for the peoples of Cambodia, Equatorial Guinea, North Korea, Mynama, Cambodia. Sudan and a host of others the future is as bleak as it ever was. These scoundrels are often assisted in their task of pillaging their country’s resources by a system of international aid and a belief that the “enemy of my enemy” is my friend that keeps these ruthless tyrants well supplied with US armaments designed to fight terrorism. Although de Mesquita and Smith’s thesis in The Dictators Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics is broader than a critique of the way the US and the international system it supports maintains these thugs. Its theme is that once the dictator. mob boss or even CEO is in power they have to follow some well entrenched rules or risk losing power. The preeminent among these is take care of those who brought you to the table first above all things or risk being deposed. Julius Ceaser forgot this basic rule when in his efforts to reduce the tax bite he got rid of tax farmers and destroyed the livings of many of his core supporters. There are many other interesting ancetdotes like this, from Carly Fiorina’s troubles as CEO of Hewlett Packard to “Big" Paul Castellano failed efforts to survive their enemies that give flavor to a highly readable book.  One of the features that make it such an easy read is the combination of  academic insights and "ripped from the headlines" inside stories of how corrupt dictators manage the game.

The takeaway is that good governance matters and there is a way to change our approach to the giving of aid so that we do not abet their egomanical desire to stay in power and force them rather to address the needs of their own people. But for any real efforts in this direction to begin we should give up our naive notions that foreign aid does anything more for the suffering people who are unfortunately locked inside the dictators’ prison walls. Despite the billions that have been given to countries’ where dictators rule there has been neglible impact for the simple reason the authors claim that autocrats believe money spent on “people-like infants and little children who are years away from contributing to the economy is money wasted. Resources should instead be focused on those who help the ruler stay in power now, not those who might be valuable in the distant future.” The difference in belief is shown by useful contrasts between where there is a commitment to democracy and where there is a flagrant disregard of it. Take Equataorial Guinea for example, with a per capita income of $37,000 a year can only provide 44 percent of its people with clean water. By contrast Honduras with a per capita income of only $4,100 can provide 95 percent of of its people enjoy potable water.

The authors conclude, “The availability and technology of clean water doesn’t favor democratic socieities; democratic regimes favor ensuring that drinking water is clean.” While many dictators do provide their people with a reasonable if basic education system and adequate health care that is because they need workers to be productive and pay taxes. Transportation systems may be more of an option since on the face of it new roads would increase productivity, the threat that a system of roads poses to a fortress like dictatorship can outweigh the benefits. Take Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko who once told the President of Rwanda that the reason why he never built one road despite staying in power for thirty years was he did not want them driving down his roads to get him. In fact so worried was he about the danger of roads that he made his life work destroying as many roads as possible. When he came to power in 1965 there were 90,000 miles of roads in Zaire, when he was finally deposed in 1997, 32 years later there were only 6,000 miles. Enough roads to take goods to market but not enough to make an armed uprising easy. Autocracy and corruption feed of each other much like symbiotic bacteria. According to Brookings Insitute’s Daniel Kaufman more than a trillion dollars is spent annually on bribes worldwide and much of that pocketed by government officials who live under dictators or the dictators themselves. Among the many features of the book that calls out for action is the discussion concerning the abuse of foreign aid.

If you want to get a lasting picture of how corrupt and ruthless these dictators are  you can take a look at what happened in Sri Lanka which suffered a massive earthquake followed by a tsunami that hit that country in December 2004  killing over 230,000 people across 14 nations. Assistance totalled over $14 billion contributed by people throughout the world. Oxfam sent 25 four wheel drive trucks to the region which the Sri Lankan government promptly impounded "insisting that Oxfam pay a 300 percent import duty. For over a month (the first critical month after the tsunami) the trucks sat idle and people went without food and shelter. Eventually Oxfam paid over a $1 million to have the trucks released."

Those who protest and fight against the obvious corruption find themselves in extreme danger. The dictators’ lifeblood is providing a source of riches to their most loyal supporters. Since the plunder is to be had not from their own citizens who they have for the most part bled dry they must gain the funds from the outside. The anti-corruption movement represents a large threat to their rule. Kaufman notes that the fate of some courgeous individuals who have joined the few anti-corruption commisions is that they are “either embattled or dead.” The leader can make no mistakes when dealing with dissent he must not give any signal to his core supporters that he can be toppled by being perceived as weak. Dictators constantly fear they will be deposed by an even more ruthless tyrant. But donors, most notably the World Bank, the IMF continue to cosy up to the dictators “like people so desperate to eat at a restuarant that they continued to ignore the health department warnings that the kitchen was overrun by rats.” The donors cannot pretend they are having the wool pulled over their eyes. When the IMF gave Kenya a $252.8 billion loan following the new president’s hollow promise to clean up corruption, the finance minister was whistling “pennies from heaven” and the new anti corruption minister had to flee to Britain carrying with him the tapes of how corrupt the new administration was. His information was ignored as whistleblowers routinely were in the circles where secrecy and non accountability is king. Nor can we have any illusions about the benefits bestowed by agencies like USAID which is more about advancing American foreign policy interests than about relieving poverty. If we ever wondered why we can never really make a dent in poverty we have to look not only at the World Bank and its fellow travellers as they turn a blind eye as the dictators siphon off cash and the western consultants and companies take their share, but to agencies like USAID.  They often provide a way for dictators to discharge themselves of their responsibility to feed the hungry and provide medical assistance due to weather emergencies etc so that they can better concentrate on their business of maintaining power. For example, half of Cambodia’s budget is made up of foreign aid. “Rather than supplementing government programs. these donor funds are largely directed toward the bank accounts of government officials.” Cambodia ranks among the world’s most corrupt countries. The USAID report notes that fact “a significant portion of funds earmarked for schools, teachers and textbooks and for clinics, health care workers and medications are diverted.” The NGOs are similarly taken advantage of and all these outside bodies the authors contend are “facilitating the government’s opportunity to steal more money..helping to further entrench a bad government in power to plague the people for many more years to come.”


What can be done? This is the subject of the last chapter and one that might be usefully read by all foreign policy students and future world bank bureacrats and aid executives. The danger is of course to become cynical and just put the entire miserable if not tragic history of aid down to the inevitable weakness built inside the human soul towards corrupt behavior. The anitidote is transparency and accountability, just like corporations that go off the rails when CEOs get drunk with power countries can do the same. In the case of companies it is frequently when the board and the shareholders lose track and a small proportion of them get wined and dined to go along. As the authors state we live in an age of networking. Much of the world although certainly not all of it is on Facebook or LinkedIn we can express our outrages at corportate excess--unjustified bonuses and the like in a more personal fashion using highly powerful social shaming techniques. For dictators who have armies the challenge is greater but by no means different. One of the reasons the Arab spring started in Tunisia is that the dictator there was concerned about a fall off in tourism. Tunisia had a relatively free press and the ability to assemble but tourism was a big ticket item and tourists wanted access to the internet and a feeling of less oppression. “Free assembly on line ..was translated into mass assembly in the streets.”

The authors see tourism as a key tool for helping to democratize countries--places like Kenya, Fiji and Palestine either are or want to become big tourist destinations. Aid does not just have to advance security interests it can be used more effectively as a tool for foreign policy--the aid needs to be contingent on criteria being met and “if the performance does not come up to agreed upon standards the money reverts to the donor.” We need to find more incentives for leaders to step down and the authors have no qualms in granting them immunity and keeping a portion of their ill gotten gains. The world is moving rapidly for the dictators --they cannot keep the lid on the ability to organize through cell phones and the internet forever. The Arab spring spells one hopeful sign that the era of dictators, one which thrived on isolation, ignorance and fear maybe coming to an end but it will take the concerted efforts of people who can pay attention and stand up for the injustices and outrages. It could all begin anywhere with someone carrying a simple device like a smart phone. Will we take the call?