American Dream

Harold Simmons leaves a bad taste in your mouth. One of America’s richest men, Simmons was born in poverty in rural Texas and has subsequently amassed billions through an arcane holding company that shields him from responsibility for the trail of toxic sites he has strewn across America. One of those sites is an abandoned NL Industries property on New Jersey’s Raritan River. Simmons bought the former National Lead in 1986, acquiring both the company’s assets and its considerable liabilities. It would appear that if you exploit the assets and stonewall the liabilities, you can make a lot of money out of toxic metals.

Last evening I gave a program in environmental justice for the New Jersey Council of the Humanities, which opened with the documentary, “Rescuing the River: The Raritan.” New Jersey is trying to clean up the Raritan, whose waters historically sustained some of the nation’s largest industries. Parts of the river now sustain nothing at all, primarily because of the toxic wastes those industries have left behind. It is a crime repeated along countless rivers across America. The Raritan’s biggest culprit is NL industries.

Perhaps coincidentally, Simmons is a huge philanthropist in Dallas and the largest individual contributor to SuperPACs in the country. As of March, he had give $18 million. Although Rick Perry was his first choice, he has subsequently contributed to every Republican candidate.

But there's hope: Simmons’ foundation, which is run by his daughters, supports immigration rights, campaign and prison reform, gun control and reproductive rights.

Is More Better?

After determining that China has been “dumping” its heavily subsidized solar panels on the U.S. market, the Commerce Department recently imposed duties of 31 percent on imported Chinese panels. This set off the predictable debate about free trade and protectionism, trade wars and global capitalism, the economics of alternative energy and Chinese currency manipulations.

It’s way too complicated for me, but a debate on NPR yesterday pitted US panel manufacturers against panel distributors and an environmentalist from the Rocky Mountain Institute. The manufacturers pushed for the tariff because of what they claim is China’s drive to create an international monopoly. By unfairly subsidizing its manufacturers, they argued, China has undermined the U.S. domestic industry – and ensured the transfer of thousands of jobs overseas.

The others raised concerns about the impact of substantially higher panel prices on the still-fledgling efforts to shift America from fossil fuels to alternative energy, and they forecast continue dependence on “foreign oil” and increased contributions to global warming.

Despite the variety of their views, they were united on the need to produce more of what all accepted as an unmitigated good: sustainable energy. In the last depression Americans were promised a chicken in every pot; in this one it is a solar panel on every roof.

But one reason we are in this mess is because of our insistence that more is better, that we can have our cake and eat it too. In a finite world, maybe we can’t – and maybe it’s time to talk, not just about alternative sources of energy, but about alternative ways to live.

Viva Las Vegas

An old friend and I were driving around our childhood neighborhood last weekend, when we passed a decrepit and long-abandoned shack along the road. I recognized it instantly. “Hey,” I said. “Remember Wally’s Ski Shop?”

“Sure do,” he said. “Wally won the lottery . . . The next day he closed up shop and took off.”

The lottery has replaced the American Dream as the way to wealth. In Pennsylvania, where it’s celebrating its 40^th anniversary, billboards urge the public to “play every day.” But the multi-billion-dollar market may be reaching its saturation point, and states are finding it ever harder to sell ever more tickets. So governments must constantly come up with new games and gimmicks to fill their coffers.

The main difference between state lotteries and the TV car salesman who jumps out of the trunk waving a giant cardboard price tag is that the money the states so generously give away comes out of the pockets of their own people – and in particular of those who are least able to afford it and most addicted to trying.

Of all the hidden taxes we pay, the lottery is the most regressive. And in their frantic search for revenues that don’t seem like taxes, the governments have become as addicted as the players.

Maybe it’s time to have an honest conversation about the need to provide essential public services and a fair formula for distributing the cost of doing so. But that would be a tax, which is, of course, unthinkable. The states have a better idea.

Casinos.

Stumble of the Week

The Eponymous Mr. Pitts.  The office of Joseph R. Pitt (R PA) is desperately trying to tamp down the laughter after the veteran Congressman sent a letter to a constituent declaring: “With the global war against terrorism, it is now incumbent on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Yasir Arafat to clamp down on Palestinian extremists that have perpetuated violence and to restart a peace process that has collapsed.”

There was no immediate response from Arafat, who died in 2004, or Sharon, who has been comatose since 2006.

Pitts, a former member of the International Relations Committee, is seeking his 9^th term (despite his public pledge to limit himself to five). One of the House’s most right-wing members, he was tapped as a freshman to chair the Values Action Team, which is the liaison between “traditional values oriented Members and similarly-minded citizen groups.”

Despite his ideology of small government, Joe has dined without interruption at the public trough since 1972, first as a member of the state legislature and then, since 1996, as a Congressman. As a result, he will receive two hefty pensions (including the largest legislative pension in Pennsylvania), numerous perks, and the best health insurance that our money can buy.

I’m not saying “I told you so,” but I did run against Joe Pitts in 1996.

Roger Clemens Trial Update.  Injections also seem needed in the jury box, as Judge Reggie Walton dismissed the second juror in a week for sleeping during the trial.

All Our Trials

America has long been known as a litigious society, its people just itching to haul somebody into court. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as settling matters at trial seems preferable to dueling with pistols or “necktie parties” in the woods. The courts have declared the right to sue inherent in the first amendment, and the fairest judge I ever knew told me never to sign that right away. But we don’t need show trials to publicize repellent behavior, and two current proceedings strike me as complete wastes of taxpayers’ money – because smarminess, however destructive, is not crime. The prosecutions of John Edwards, the politician, and Roger Clemens, the pitcher, have cost millions of dollars, and the testimony at each seems more appropriate to daytime television than a court of law.

Since taking steroids was not a crime when Clemens played baseball, he is being tried for perjury; and Edwards’ verdict will turn on whether the money Bunny Mellon and Fred Baron funneled to him violated the campaign finance law or was simply to cover up his creepy behavior. We’ll never know, since Ms. Mellon is 101 and Mr. Baron is dead. In any event, that seems a distinction without a difference.

Meanwhile, a trial of huge significance began yesterday at The Hague, where Ratko Mladic, the “Butcher of Bosnia,” is charged with war crimes and genocide. The United States led the effort to bring prosecute those crimes after World War II, although the Bush administration subsequently refused to recognize the court’s jurisdiction.

It seems almost criminal that we waste millions on Edwards and Clemons when real and appalling crimes are being prosecuted at The Hague.

Let Them Read Books

This is an observation, not a statistical analysis, but I have noticed a phenomenon lately on which the pundits have yet to remark – and that is the number of homeless people on New York City’s streets who read books. Many are young, some have their dogs with them, and most stare so intently at the page that, other than the pleas written on cardboard with magic markers, you might think they were students on class break. What people make of this probably depends on their politics.

For some, it must be more evidence that English majors can’t even flip hamburgers. Or that the new hippy generation is too lazy to work. Or that the schools really have failed, not because kids can’t read but because that’s all they can do.

Others may think of their own children’s struggles to get work in this economy. Or find the sight of able-bodied, literate young people begging in the streets a social rather than a personal problem.

Maybe these kids go back to their parents’ apartments after their stints on the sidewalk. But maybe they are part of the city’s homeless population, which has reached it highest levels since the Great Depression.

In fact, almost every statistic about the homeless in New York is an “all-time record”: Over 40,000 people are homeless each day, including 10,000 families and 17,000 children. Over 100,000 different people use the city’s shelters each year, and city authorities have no idea how many others sleep in the streets, the subways and the parks.

Play the Game

I am reading Adam Hochschild’s riveting story of World War I, To End All Wars. Born into a family that made a huge fortune in mining in the late 19^th century, Hochschild became a civil rights and anti-war activist early in life and co-founded Mother Jones magazine in the mid-1970s. As such, he is in a prime position to write about the war’s loyalists and dissenters, groups with wonderfully arcane British twists – such as the fact that Sir John French, the first commander of British forces, and Charlotte Despard, anti-war activist, future communist and IRA sympathizer, were brother and sister. Hochschild writes insightfully about the British penchant to see war as a game, to equate fighting with competition, and to honor sportsmanship on both the playing field and the battlefield. In particular, he notes the impact of Sir Henry Newbolt’s “Vitaï Lampada” (“The Torch of Life”) – a poem I still sometimes hear declaimed by grown men in school ties – which compares war to cricket and urges its young heroes on both fields to “Play up! Play up! And play the game!”

This was a creed that made the British general staff exceptionally unsuited to the devastation of industrial warfare, the ugly reality of the trenches and the mind-boggling casualties – military and civilian – of World War I.

In an unrelated matter, I lost at squash yesterday, and I’m still pissed.

Unrelated? Well, maybe it’s better to think of a game as war, rather than of war as a game.

Joe, Bob and Me

“We have all these huge issues, and we’re bogged down in whether Joe can marry Bob.” Gay marriage has gone from an abomination to a diversion.

The charge is not new. Democrats have long accused Republicans of exploiting “social issues” to play to their evangelical base – and so giving the party’s real powers the cover to dismantle the welfare state. Indeed, I have done that myself. Republicans, by contrast, now assail Democrats for playing the gay card to deflect attention from the economy.

But gay marriage is not a tangential matter. It is a defining issue of today’s politics. It is part of the ongoing struggle for America’s soul.

As a country we are at our best when we expand the rights of people. Those efforts have never come without fierce opposition – from the mid-19^th century when a tiny group of abolitionists were dismissed as fanatics to the mockery of suffragettes to the murder of civil rights activists. And marriage has long been a focal point. When I was a child, it was a mortal sin for a Catholic to enter a Protestant church, let alone get married in one, and it was not until 1967 that a unanimous Supreme Court declared Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage unconstitutional.

When I ran for Congress in 1996, my position on gay marriage was “evolving.” I knew the right answer. I was just too chicken to give it. It’s a lot easier to stand up now, but it is not too late.

Stumble of the Week

Buddhism. Perhaps jealous of the recent notoriety gained by Catholic priests and Muslim jihadists, Buddhist monks in South Korea’s largest order were videoed drinking, smoking and gambling huge sums of money at a seaside resort just days before the Buddha’s birthday. J.P. Morgan Chase. How can a company whose founders include J.P. Morgan and the Rockefellers be so bad at investing? Fittingly, for an organization that displays Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr’s dueling pistols at its headquarters, the bank lost $2 billion the now old-fashioned way: credit derivatives.

Joe Biden stumbled last week when his public support for gay marriage forced President Obama’s evolving hand. All has been forgiven at the Oval Office, and the expansion of human rights has received a shot in the arm. Here’s hoping that next week Biden stumbles over TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline.

Human Rights fared less well in North Carolina, where an overwhelming majority of voters – in a state that already has a Defense of Marriage Act – passed a constitutional amendment just to be super sure. “We are not anti-gay,” said the movement’s leader, “we are pro-marriage.” Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, who have had seven wives between them, are elated.

Switzerland lost one of the most famous citizens it never knew it had when Michelle Bachmann renounced her dual citizenship, saying, “I have always pledged allegiance to our one nation under God, the United States of America.”

Stereotypes. Pam Shaw, whose stage name is “The Sexational Pam,” says she is now ready to give up her virginity to the right man. Ms. Shaw is 70 years old.

The Samaritan

United Flight 414 had just begun to taxi down the runway when the woman in seat 28B threw up. I was in 28C. We were on our way to Newark Airport, five-and-a-half hours across the country. She spoke no English. I do not speak Chinese. This, I thought, is going to be a long trip.

I had a lot of work, and when I had arranged it in the space an economy seat offers, I got up to use the head. When I returned, a man was standing at my seat. He was the woman’s husband, and he sat behind her in 29B. He didn’t speak English either, but he made clear to me that we were to trade places. I looked forlornly at the two large men in 29A and 29C, and as I gathered my stuff, I made it clear how put out I was. People should recognize the sacrifice I was making.

In the Gospel of Luke, a lawyer asks Jesus, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Part of the answer is to love “your neighbor as yourself.” The lawyer naturally presses, “And who is my neighbor?”

The answer turns out to be the Samaritan, who went out of his way to help the man lying half-dead in the road. He did not act begrudgingly, but cared generously for the stranger – whereas my body language had emphasized the extent of my self-sacrifice. My one-percent roots were showing –  I have a right to my privileged place but occasionally make a noble gesture to the less fortunate.

Whipping up the Base

Who says the two parties are polarized? After writing the script for Obamacare when he was governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney is now taking credit for the auto industry bailout. This surprised me, as a couple of days ago a friend of mine – a thoughtful and entrepreneurial businessman – said, “Mitt will have a lot of explaining to do about his position on the bailout.”

Here’s his latest explanation: "I pushed the idea of a managed bankruptcy, and finally when that was done, and help was given, the companies got back on their feet. . . . So, I'll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry has come back."

If the outcome had been different, Plan B was ready: "If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday,” he wrote in 2008, “you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.”

Guess which of those statements he made to workers at an Ohio auto-parts manufacturing plant.

No wonder his former Republican opponents are burying their endorsements at the end of speeches and the bottom of emails.

Near the conclusion of his self-important exit announcement, Newt Gingrich said, “I’m asked sometimes, is Mitt Romney conservative enough? Compared to Barack Obama? This is a choice between Mitt Romney and the most radical, leftist president in history.”

And on Monday, Rick Santorum’s website posted his endorsement email without fanfare, in the middle of the night, and in the fourth-to-last paragraph.

Seekers

I spent the last few days at a remote ranch not far above California’s huge Central Valley, one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. Being there made me think about people’s relationship to the land, a subject that was fed by weekend conversations with old friends and reading Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture, “It All Turns on Affection,” and Isabel Wilkerson’s book, The Warmth of Other Suns. Berry is the poet of the simple rural life in which people are connected to the land. He is heir to both Jefferson and Thoreau, and the student of Wallace Stegner, who taught him that Americans can be divided into “boomers,” who “pillage and run,” and “stickers,” who have “such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.” Wilkerson traces the Great Migration of 1915-1970, when six million people left the Jim Crow South for the urban north – and in so doing, transformed both the landscape and the history of America.

Berry long ago came home to the Kentucky hills – where his family has farmed since before the Civil War – to live the values he espouses. It’s a story I want to embrace – but Wilkerson reminds me that this is the same rural South from which millions of Black sharecroppers fled an unimaginable system of oppression that bound them to the land.

The migrants’ story is unique; their message is  universal. As Berry writes, “land and people have suffered together, as invariably they must.” To me, those courageous enough to leave were neither boomers nor stickers. They were, like so many of us, seekers.

Stumble of the Week

It’s hard not to be tired of tawdriness after a week of such uplifting events as:

• A British Parliamentary panel’s finding that Rupert Murdoch is “not fit” to run a large news company, which is quite a condemnation since Murdoch runs the largest such company in the history of the world. This is the same Murdoch who was Prime Minister David Cameron’s first official overnight guest. That’s the same Cameron who hired Andy Coulson as his communications director while Coulson was still on Murdoch’s payroll. And that Coulson is under arrest.

• The testimony at the trial of John Edwards, a man some once considered fit to be president.

• The abrupt resignation of Ric Grenell, Mitt Romney’s foreign policy expert, because of the outcry against his homosexuality by “pro-family community.”

• The National Football League, which suspended four players for offering “bounties” for maiming opposing quarterbacks and whose former star, Junior Seau, became the second ex-player in two weeks to commit suicide.

So it is nice to note that one of the most heartwarming stories also came out of the NFL, when Tampa Bay Buccaneers rookie coach, Greg Schiano, signed his former Rutgers player, Eric LeGrand, a defensive lineman who was paralyzed from the neck in his junior year. It was a gesture, to be sure, as LeGrand is in a wheelchair – although he has made more progress than his doctors ever thought possible. But Schiano’s act reminds us that it isn’t only in fiction that a coach can love his players.

Murdoch

Here’s a man-bites-dog news flash, Rupert Murdoch is “not a fit person” to run a big international media company.

Who knew?

The discovery was made by a tri-partisan panel of Conservative, Labor and Liberal members of the British Parliament and issued yesterday in a 121-page report.

For those who have not followed the scandal that brought down Britain’s largest newspaper and threatens Conservative David Cameron’s Parliamentary leadership, it began with the discovery of telephone hacking at the now-defunct News of the World, and has since led to several arrests, the resignation of top editors and allegations of bribing Scotland Yard.

A majority of the Parliamentary panel accused Murdoch of “willful blindness” to the activities of his employees and therefore unfit to run the company. (Interestingly, the panel’s Conservatives, who supported the rest of the report, broke ranks on the fitness issue, which goes to the heart of the shameful relationship between the Murdoch empire and the Conservative Party.)

The report’s conclusion misses the point. Murdoch is not unfit to run a media business because he was oblivious his underlings’ activities. He was oblivious to their activities because he is unfit to run a media business.

The distinction is critical. Over his long – and financially successful – career, Rupert Murdoch has trashed every ethical principle on which the credibility of the media depends. He has used his properties to further his political agenda. He has cheapened the definition of news. He has valued titillation over information. He has traded his support for politicians for their support of his business ventures.

There are many reasons the newspaper business is in trouble these days, from the economy to the Internet. But none of them has done more damage than Rupert Murdoch.

Strangers’ Gate, Children’s Glade

Strangers’ Gate, one of 20 named entrances into New York’s Central Park, stands near the park’s northwest corner under the shadow of the Great Hill. No one seems to know how the gate got its name, which is chiseled into the entry wall, so I like to think it is there to welcome strangers to this quiet oasis in the midst of a city that can wear you out. If you climb the 77 stone steps to the top of the Great Hill, you come at once on a small stone that marks the Peter Jay Sharp Children’s Glade. This is an urban playground unlike any I have ever seen. It has no swings or slides, no sandboxes or ball fields. It has only some large rocks set about an open lawn, trunk-sized logs on which to climb or sit (and one in which to hide), trees and flowers now coming into bloom, and paths that give the place a sense of unthreatening mystery and quiet adventure.

  Is a playground for the imagination, a place of quiet contemplation that beckons children with its simple beauty. It seems a novel concept in a world of computers, organized sports and flat-screened TVs. But it is what educators such as Richard Louv in Last Child in the Woods and David Orr in Earth in Mind have been trying to tell us we are losing as we become strangers to the world of nature from which we spring.

Ghen Guangcheng

It’s a story that makes you want to stand up and cheer. A blind civil-rights dissident escapes from heavily guarded house arrest in a remote Chinese village and somehow makes it 370 miles to Beijing, where he seeks refuge at the American embassy. Or so we think. The techno savvy Chinese government has banned all references to Ghen Guangcheng – including any Internet references to ”Shawshank Redemption,” whose recent showing on state-run TV Ghen’s sympathasizers view as an underground tribute to his escape.

Our government is being almost as tight-lipped, refusing to disclose Ghen’s whereabouts or other details – although it’s clear we know where he is and are enabling him to be there. This is hardly the first time that our professed commitment to human rights has come in conflict with our desire to improve relations with a strategically important nation.

Witness our tap dances with Saudi Arabia and Russia – and historically with Pinochet’s Chile, apartheid South Africa, the now-toppled Arab regimes. The issue is posed as one between “realpolitik” and idealism, but it’s amazing how often the realists end up on the wrong side of history.

In the past we have talked of finding leaders we can “work with.” But might we not be better off in the long run – and more at peace with ourselves – if we looked harder for dissidents we can support – those with staying power, personal humility, true courage and a dedication to peace?

Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Dalai Lama are rare in history, but because they embody the aspirations of their people, they endure.

Stumble of the Week

Political consensus allegedly took another hit last week, as two moderate Democratic Congressmen lost to more liberal opponents in Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primaries. Reporters attributed the defeat of incumbents Jason Altmire and Tim Holden to their votes against the Obama health care plan and their opposition to global warming legislation – yet more evidence, they said, of the polarization of America’s two major parties. This raises an interesting question: why is it polarizing for Democratic candidates to support (1) the health care law that is the signature legislative achievement of their party’s president and (2) climate legislation, when the scientific debate on the issue has long been settled and the imperative to act is recognized by virtually everyone this side of Rick Santorum? To be considered a moderate, must you vote for the policies of the other party? When King Solomon threatened to cut the disputed baby in half, did he seriously believe that half a baby for each mother was a reasonable outcome?

In a recent documentary on New Jersey’s Raritan River, then-Governor Christy Whitman said, as she signed a Brownfields bill into law: “The fact that you have people on either side of the spectrum who are not 100% happy tells you that you probably struck a pretty good bargain right in the middle.”

But is the measure of moderation our willingness to sacrifice our beliefs to a more politically palatable consensus? What happened to the idea of standing up for them?

The public discourse in this country has turned ugly, I think, not because of the strength of our own beliefs so much as our refusal to respect those who disagree.

Grant's Tomb

When I taught middle-school history, one question on my Christmas quiz was “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” Almost everybody got it right. Ulysses S. Grant’s Tomb sits on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River a few blocks from where I write. Tomorrow is the 190^th anniversary of his birth.

Grant is one of three men to have been both commander of all U.S. armed forces and president of the United States. While we remember George Washington and Dwight D. Eisenhower as beacons of personal rectitude and public benevolence, Grant has fared far worse – recalled for heavy drinking, the scandalous behavior of his appointees, and the ruthlessness with which he pursued the Civil War. Robert E. Lee, Grant's adversary, has become a more sympathetic figure in history.

But Lee was as hard on his troops as Grant. After the disaster of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, Lee told Pickett to reform his division for a second suicidal attack. “General Lee,” replied Pickett “I have no division."

We revere our Revolution and talk of World War II as “the good war” – despite the 60+ million people who died. The Civil War is more problematic because it pitted “brother against brother” on American soil.

It also ended slavery in this country; and as president Grant enforced civil rights laws and backed African Americans’ constitutional rights.

All that changed after Grant’s presidency, when Klan violence brought racist retrenchment and the Jim Crow caste system – buttressed by a nostalgic view of the South right out of “Gone With the Wind” and “The Birth of a Nation.”

That revisionism made its way into generations of American history textbooks, and after that, Grant’s reputation never had a chance.

Oh, Fence, D-Fence

A report released yesterday by the Pew Research Center, which found that net migration from Mexico has dropped to zero – and may even have reversed itself – has roiled international relations and national politics. Speaking in his native Spanish, Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon called on President Obama to hurry up and finish the border fence. “We have enough problems without having to deal with hordes of gringos flooding across the Rio Grande,” he said. “It’s already hard to get our people to go up there” now that the Minuteman Project calls itself "a citizens' Neighborhood Watch on our border."

“This is just one more example of a failed Obama presidency,” said Mitt Romney. “This administration can't even provide jobs for illegal immigrants who will work for practically nothing.”

Asked if he now favored discontinuing the fence, whose cost is estimated at up to $10 million a mile, Romney responded: “I support the efforts of Gov. Jan Brewer, Sheriff Arpaio and others to secure our border.

“But,” he chuckled, “Ann and I have lost good yard boys in three states.”

The campaign quickly clarified that Romney meant to say “maintenance staff” and noted “the Romneys paid all appropriate taxes.”

Convinced he had finally found a winning issue, Newt Gingrich traveled to Arizona, where he accused Obama of maintaining the fence to keep Democratic voters from leaving.

“Mr. Obama,” he said. “Tear down this fence.”

Today the Supreme Court hears testimony on Arizona’s immigration law (SB 1070) aimed at protecting us from “the invasion of illegal aliens we face today.”

Back to Brock

In earlier posts, I wrote about Woody Brock’s book American Gridlock – his characterization of the current political debate as a “dialogue of the deaf,” his thoughts on the deficit, and his solution to the entitlements problem. In my ongoing discussion of the book, which I urge you to read, I will look for stories that demonstrate one of the issues Brock raises: (1) the public economic crisis that threatens to make this a “lost decade;” (2) the entitlements crisis; (3) preventing perfect financial storms; (4) China and bargaining theory; and (5) distributive justice.

This morning’s news is dominated by the catastrophe hovering over Europe. This is hardly a new story, as we have been reading for months about the potential collapse of Greece, the recession in Spain, the Irish debt, Italy’s financial crisis, etc. While the doctrine of austerity may seem a rational intellectual solution to these problems in national treasury offices and newspaper editorial pages, it doesn’t work so well when people are injected into the equation.

Brock’s distinction between sound public investment in a nation’s infrastructure as opposed to deficit spending for short-term stimulation offers a way forward. A sound investment creates things we need – new bridges, better education systems, public transportation – and guarantees a return. It’s not easy to implement – “shovel ready,” for example, is not the right criterion – but it is the only way to get beyond the current impasse. It will put people to work building things we desperately need that will pay for themselves over time. And it will require people to work together, which is the antidote to the hardening economic and ethnic divisions that are Europe’s biggest threat.