Yesterday I was critical of Governor Abbott for the cheap theatrics of a ‘day of prayer proclamation’; today, reading from a prepared text, he sounded like a different person.
He sounded like what a governor is supposed to sound like, thanking some, telling residents where they could get aid, talking about gas availability, and issuing warnings for another threatened area. He sounded like he was in charge and on top of events, as much as anyone can be.
But getting through this and preparing for the next one is going to take some doing. People are going to need help, and the closest source of labor is Mexico. So will officials stick to the party line (no illegals, restrictions on legal residents and even citizens), or will they pull their collective heads out and do what needs to be done?
Officials in cities like Boston and Chicago understand that the snows will come, and they may well be catastrophic. They maintain a fleet of snowplows and salt/sand dumps to combat the ice.
But along the coast, no such preparation exists. Not nearly enough emergency vehicles, no supply dumps. Not nearly enough boats and high-water trucks. Why?
Development of wetlands and swamps is encouraged; why? Development makes storms and flooding worse. Developers took the profits, left homeowners with the risks. I’m astonished and appalled that so many didn’t have flood insurance. Why?
I’m equally astonished and appalled that voters elect officials with so little forethought. Climate change is here. This is the third ‘hundred year flood’ in the area in less than ten years. The floods and storms will keep rolling in and eventually the ocean will simply engulf the entire Gulf coast. The ice sheets and glaciers are melting, the ocean is rising. Scientists have been saying this for years, but our leaders claim it’s a hoax. They’re instant experts by virtue of winning an election, and people believe them. Why?
The rest of the developed world accepts it and they’re working together. But not us. Trump pulled us out of the climate accords. This time, I know why; money. He’s for drilling, even in national parks and monuments. He understands that he’s in a position to get a chunk of the money for himself, and he couldn’t care less about anyone else. But it doesn’t make sense; we already have enough fossil energy reserves to see us through the transition period to full green power. We don’t need more.
We do need a lot of other things. We need a national water distribution system, where as much floodwater as possible is collected and pumped to the dry west and great plains. We need to recharge aquifers. We need more trees to extract carbon dioxide from the air, and harvested water could be used to develop forests where there are none. We can push back against desertification.
But we won’t, not until we elect real leaders. Leaders who will fight for REAL needs, not a stupid wall. Who will enact programs to benefit citizens, not billionaires.
And we need voters who will insist that elected officials do just that.
Archive for the ‘Government’ Category
Harvey, and the Aftermath
September 1, 2017On Alliances
March 19, 2017I was just thinking about Trumpsky’s comments. About how other countries should pay the US for defending them. About how much we pay for defense, and his rationale for spending more.
He’s a fool. You probably knew that, but maybe someone will explain.
The US, to the best of my knowledge, never spent a dime to benefit other nations.
Ponder that carefully.
The money was for our benefit primarily. If it also helped them, great.
Consider Germany; we spent quite a bit keeping folks like me there in the mid to late 20th Century, in my case on various hilltops waiting for the Soviets to roll across the border. So why did we do it?
Think how many men and women we had in the armed forces, how many machines we bought, and how much this nation spent fighting WWII. Just off the top of my head, I think we had around 7m people in the armed forces.
But not now. We don’t maintain a huge standing army, and that results in an enormous savings. I’ve seen it called the ‘peace dividend’.
Why?
Because we have allies. They have men and women in uniform, machines, ammunition, you name it. They maintain armies which allows us to keep ours relatively small.
Sure, we might want them to spend more, but even that has limits. If they expand their armed forces too much, the temptation is there to use them. Sort of what a number of American presidents have done, send troops to fight in wars against nations that had not attacked or even threatened the US.
What we’ve bought with our alliances (including NATO, whose nations are closest to our immediate threat, Russia) is peace and savings. Also security.
Someone should explain that to the guy who works more on his golf game than on governing.
Good Ideas Gone Wrong
November 4, 2015Any idea can be carried too far. When that happens, good ideas become bad ideas. As examples, consider the Veterans Administration and the American public school system. Neither institution does what it’s expected to do. How did they go wrong? And are there lessons in why they’ve failed?
In both cases, the failure is caused by believing that government programs can be operated like a business. Eliminating waste in business makes the business more competitive. If carried too far, market influence will force a correction. But schools and the VA aren’t businesses and they aren’t subjected to market forces. Instead, they’re controlled by politics. Politicians invariably cut too much, because claiming they’ve eliminated ‘waste’ appeals to voters.
But what happens when you cut too much? You make the programs ineffective at doing what they’re supposed to do.
In both of these systems, the operating budget controls everything that’s done. The focus should be on the outcome, on what the institutions do, but invariably it’s on the budget. As a result, underfunded institutions don’t do what they’re supposed to do, educate students in the case of the public school system and provide for the needs of veterans through the VA.
Both institutions must select between two choices: provide a quality product to the few, thereby rejecting others, or provide substandard services to the many. We’re seeing that now. Our public education system does not educate students, the VA does not provide adequate, timely care for veterans. Uneducated students can’t successfully operate their own businesses. They lack the qualifications needed to work for others, and there are few good middle-class jobs anyway. This leads directly to high rates of criminal activity and huge prison populations. As for the VA, veterans die while waiting for care.
Testing in schools highlights the system failure, but does nothing to solve the problem. And Mr. Trump plans to ‘reorganize’ the VA if he’s elected. It’s funding, not organization, that’s the real problem.
We can do better. We must, if we expect the American nation to endure.
Private Education, and Why Our System Is Failing
May 12, 2015A recent discussion with two online friends caused me to reflect on education.
I’m a product of a small public high school (in Leesville, Louisiana) and a small university (University of Texas-El Paso). Most Americans share a similar background. The system worked for us, back then, but it doesn’t work nearly so well now.
And none of the proposed fixes have made a bit of difference.
Students are stressed; teachers are stressed; some, lacking any other solution, cheat. Even school boards cheat (EPISD, for one, the district I once worked for; the cheating happened several years after I retired, and it was done at the district-administration level; teachers had no input into what happened).
My friends, who have a libertarian philosophy, feel that the solution to our education mess is the free-market approach. I don’t agree. Such a system has several major flaws.
The first one is simple: there’s no law against opening your own school. Go ahead, invest the money, hire the teachers, apply for certification, and invite people to bring their children. Collect a fee for services and just like that, you’re off and running.
Until you go broke. And you are very likely to do so during your first year.
There are such schools, and many have been around for a century. Excellent schools; the nation’s wealthiest citizens send their children to such.
And that’s the problem; such schools are only for the wealthy. They cost roughly what a university education costs. Ordinary Americans can’t afford them.
The private/charter schools, instead of offering their product in a free-market system where competition would result in excellence, neatly bypass competition by collecting not from customers but from government. In so doing, they siphon off needed money from public schools.
So why can’t public schools compete?
Actually, they do. Note that I graduated from a public school, as did my sons and grandsons.
But public schools must do things private schools don’t.
They provide transportation to those that need it. Simple solution to busing, instead of huge schools that draw students from wide areas, keep schools small and locate them where students can walk to school or be brought by parents. The larger schools are thought to be more efficient, but when you add in costs of transportation, plus the reduced education outcomes, I question whether large schools really are more efficient.
The other thing that differentiates public schools from private schools is government control. Schools are no longer about education; they’re about social engineering, about inclusion, about lawsuits. Some of these are positive, and it may be that all of these trends are positive in the long run; but they’re expensive. And that’s the failure of the American school system in a nutshell.
Testing only proves what many already knew: we’re not producing the level of education among graduates that we once did.
Schools are about funding; the rule is, live within the budget. It’s the ‘business’ approach.
But kids don’t fit into the column of figures. Some require more services, whether adaptive services such as ramps for physically handicapped, to smaller classes (more teachers; expensive) or resource-intensive classes for the educationally handicapped.
If there’s an advantage to the private-industry school, that is where it’s to be found. As a private company, such schools can avoid much of the governmental/judicial mandates that, however well intentioned, don’t come with funding.
In a rational system, trained professionals would assess the funding needs and come up with a budget. This would be presented to the school board or other authority, much as departments of the government do . Instead, it’s much more the top-down approach: here’s the money and this is what you must do, and you’re forbidden to make changes by dropping programs or dropping expensive students because you don’t have enough money.
There’s another hidden corollary to this: unproductive and misbehaving students.
The budget is based on a cost-per-student basis, and if student enrollment increases the budget is increased. But if students are habitually truant, schools lose money. This means that if students violate rules, they aren’t expelled; they’re sent to an alternative school, set up to deal with such. If students cannot or will not benefit from attendance at a public school, they’re still kept there, because doing so brings in money.
Private schools don’t operate that way. Those schools I mentioned in the beginning, the ones that wealthy people send their kids to? They had a different solution. If you misbehave, for example bring a weapon to school, you’re expelled. If you refuse to do the work, you’re dismissed. If you are so disruptive that other students can’t learn, you’re expelled. Parents quickly become involved, because having paid considerable amounts of money to those private schools, they don’t want their children expelled.
One final comment about those private, for-profit charter schools: if they don’t produce, they go bankrupt. Good economics, bad sociology. What happens to the students who were enrolled? If you’re a factory making widgets, you can send the ones that don’t pass inspection back and have them fixed. Kids aren’t widgets; they have a narrow time-frame where education either takes place or it doesn’t. Subsequent efforts at adult remedial education can help, but it can’t fix what went wrong during those formative years.
I don’t know that there’s a solution. We elect officials, and as soon as they take office they become magically expert in everything. The urge to stick a finger in and stir things up is overwhelming. So they do.
And the system gets stirred up, but somehow it’s not better. Short of a total redesign, I don’t see improvement taking place.
Of Riots, and Causes
April 29, 2015The president has condemned the rioters, as have most politicians.
I’m not happy with them either. They did indeed burn businesses, loot them, put their neighbors out of work. All those and more beside.
I read a few statistics about that neighborhood in Baltimore. I hope you’ll take the time to look up things for yourself. I certainly don’t know everything about it. I don’t know anything at all about the police who arrested the young man or what they did to him. I’ll only say it’s suspicious, and that officials are looking into the matter. Six officers have been suspended. Some will probably be charged, although it hasn’t happened yet. An investigation is ongoing, although it seems to be moving far slower than a similar investigation would take that involved a civilian.
So what’s the neighborhood like, other than that it’s filled with minorities who are likely overwhelmingly black?
Less than half of the residents have jobs. Why?
One in four young men have been arrested by the police in the past. Why?
There are gangs in the neighborhood, criminal gangs. We know that because the police know it and implied that they’d received intelligence that major gangs were allied and were going to ‘take out cops’. The gangs quickly responded and said that no, there was no such alliance and they weren’t going after the cops. Duh.
I wonder how these folks live? You can be sure their income is less than the official poverty income. So how do they buy food, buy clothing, pay for electricity and gas service, things like that?
And of all those politicians, from President Obama all the way down to the mayor and city council, how many have had an opportunity to do something about the impoverished, black neighborhoods of Baltimore?
And decided that no, it wasn’t worth fighting the entrenched interests who insist on no taxes. No taxes to improve people’s lives. No taxes to build good schools, hire good teachers, hire enough policemen to suppress the gangs and the drug trade that supports them. No taxes for urban redevelopment.
It’s a vicious slope. The residents don’t have enough money to do anything, including pay the necessary taxes. State and federal politicians aren’t willing to spend the money on a blighted neighborhood filled with blacks.
And then, when a trigger point is reached, the riots erupt. Arson. Looting. Violence and vandalism. Police cars torched. Rocks thrown, sometimes shots fired.
Most major cities have neighborhoods just like the one in Baltimore. And, before Baltimore, Ferguson.
It will happen again. Los Angeles? New York? Kansas City? Atlanta? Birmingham, New Orleans, Dallas, Houston…
I expect a long, hot, summer of unrest.
And all the politicians, including the wannabe’s, will wring their hands and condemn the rioters.
Revolution, by Constitutional Means
January 2, 2015It’s time.
Consider the following: John Boehner was elected easily by one small district in Ohio. Yet during the last Congress he effectively disenfranchised a majority of voters in the entire nation. How could he do that?
As Speaker of the House, he represents the Republican Party. That party held control of the House of Representatives despite receiving fewer votes nationally than did the Democrats. How? Through gerrymandering of districts, redrawing lines so that a particular party would be able easily to hold a majority of votes. Result? By employing something called the ‘Hastert Rule’, Boehner brought to the floor for votes ONLY those bills that a majority of Republicans favored. I think he set this aside twice during that two-year period.
Democrats, despite having received more votes, never got to put forward bills they favored, never got to respond to voters who’d sent them to Congress. Disenfranchisement.
Not to claim that Mr. Boehner is particularly corrupt; he’s no more corrupt than others in a system which has itself become corrupt.
Leaders in both Houses of Congress permit ‘amending’ of bills after they’ve passed through committees. As a result, big banks can have their employees write major portions of a bill to regulate their own behavior, send them (along with a campaign contribution) to a Representative who’s holding his hand out, and see the rules they’ve written be added to a must-pass bill. Whereupon it will become law, even though the original bill had to do with funding of the government to avoid shutdown.
The framers of the Republic made a mistake; they never saw the rise of party dominance nor the day when politics became a profession instead of a duty one did part-time. As a result, a small fraction of people from a relatively-tiny district sends someone to Congress who will control the destiny of the nation.
The district/state that elects and reelects those professional politicians doesn’t pay their salaries, we the taxpayers do. Despite the relative few thousand who send them to Congress, they pass laws affecting all of us. We face taxation or exemption from taxation without representation.
It’s time for a national referendum for all members of Congress, Senator or Representative.
This is the change I propose:
At the bottom of the ballot would appear a list. “Shall Senator Foghorn be permitted to represent the nation in the Senate?” _______ (Yes)
Note that the default position is “No”. Unless a majority of voters check that yes box, Foghorn will be required to resign at the end of the calendar year. Even though he might want to run for office again, even though he might have an enormous war chest to finance his campaigns, if he can’t convince more than half of the nation’s voters, he’s a former Senator. Ditto Representatives.
I suggest that the same be applied to Supreme Court Justices as well. Let the bar be set at the same level, 50%. To maintain some vestige of continuity, perhaps only half the justices would face a referendum in any election year.
Rationale: The current system is not serving us well.
So how do we force Congress to listen? Take up our trusty muskets and march on Concord Bridge?
No. There’s a better way.
The oligarchs own our politics, they pay those Senators and Representatives. Let THEM force change. Start with a nationwide strike. No one goes to work, no one goes shopping. If no change, repeat the following month. Then perhaps repeat once a week if necessary.
Just say no. We won’t take it any more.
Use the initiative to send a Constitutional Amendment laying out the above to Congress and require, on pain of dismissal, that they press to make it part of the Constitution. Then publicize this widely, so that politicians will be forced to act.
A second part of the systemic revolution has to do with how Congress does business. It’s currently corrupt, systemically corrupt. Those who wield power in Congress, the major party leaders, allow the corruption, even wallow in it, because they profit from it. So change the system of unlimited ‘amendments’ that have nothing to do with the bill under consideration. Force all votes, especially votes having to do with taxes or exemption from taxes to be public by roll call, so that anonymous yeas and nays be eliminated.
This is the best way to reform our nation.
Radical? No. I’ve long admired Lincoln, and I think he would approve.
Let government of the people, for the people, by the people, be returned TO the people.
Economics, Consumerism, and Individual Responsibility
August 6, 2014I posted this today on Facebook; it represents my musings about trends I see in the American economy, but it also reflects on world economics.
Something worth considering:
We’ve built a middle class consumer economy in this country based on Henry Ford’s model; pay the workers enough that they can afford to buy the products. I’ll note that Ford didn’t go broke doing that; he got pretty rich, if I recall. And soon other industries leveraged that prosperity by paying steelworkers and miners and construction people better, albeit with a lot of union arm-twisting thrown in.
But then unions became overly powerful and many became corrupt. Membership declined; it’s a great cycle when looked at in this way. Much of the reasoning behind unions went away as government began doing what only unions had done before. To make it seem as if they were still needed, unions demanded ever higher amounts of money, so a cycle of inflation boomed; people got more wages, but they also paid more because everything else went up.
And government pushed quality of life issues; reducing pollution, cleaning up mine and industrial waste residue, things like that; these cost manufacturers instead of increasing profits. So they went offshore.
Gradually we’re taming this; other nations are also being faced with the necessity of controlling pollution of water, earth, air; safety of workers is also a rising issue. The great consumer market in the US, the one China leveraged to raise herself from backwardness to leadership, is faltering.
Competition has become something that companies avoid in the drive for ever greater profits. Those profits are concentrated at the very top. This really is a ‘zero sum’ game; what goes to the oligarchs isn’t available to those who once fueled the great consumer market. Not even the insane advertising industry can prop it up for long. Simply put, there’s just not enough money at the bottom or in the middle.
We once turned our economy ‘outward’ when recessions hit; we employed people making exports and brought in money from other nations. But now they’re largely in the same boat we are. All those developed nations are attempting to export goods and bring money home to aid their economies. Europe calls it ‘austerity’, but it’s the same problem; profit isn’t to be found in manufacturing, in making goods for people to buy, it’s increasingly gained by manipulating money. The stock market is part of that, banking is a large part of it, real estate and speculating in general is a part of it.
And the fallout is distrust in major employers, as well as in the oligarchs controlling our political system. People are fed up in general, disgusted with political scheming and manipulation, they dislike what the president is doing and detest Congress.
One immediate improvement is to begin teaching children that self employment is preferable to employment by a corporation. Once, an employee had a living wage, benefits, and job security if he/she worked for a large corporation; and if the corporation was multinational, that provided security against economic downturns.
No more. All those things have largely vanished. You can spend half your working life becoming skilled at making widgets, only to find yourself turned our with no prospects because a worker in some foreign nation can afford to work for half what you can work for without starving or becoming homeless.
If you become a plumber or an independent mechanic or dentist, you’ll never be unemployed; you might not get rich, but you also need not suddenly find yourself homeless.
It’s time we stopped aiming our children at a future of neo-slavery under the corporate whip; it’s time to emphasize individual initiative, individual responsibility, the necessity of taking care of our individual selves rather than expecting someone else to do it for us.
Corporations specifically won’t. Unions won’t, or can’t. Government won’t, because they’re the lackeys of the oligarchs who run the corporate world.
For those in the middle, there probably isn’t a universal solution. What’s left of your working life is more bleak than rosy.
But maybe it’s not too late to let the future learn from what’s happened in the late 20th–early 21st Centuries.
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