“Why Should Dreaming Be a Privilege?”

While Ted Cruz makes headlines trying to bring down the government, I turn to people who are building things. This week in Louisville, Kentucky, nine entrepreneurs, some of them very young, presented their ideas to a group of investors. Both entrepreneurs and investors are part of a growing movement called “impact investing”, in which profitability is one criterion in a business that also addresses social and environmental issues – the so-called “triple bottom line”. The focus of the three-day event, presented by Village Capital, is the intersection of energy and agriculture, and its goal is to encourage entrepreneurs who address major societal problems.

The ideas have been imaginative, grounded and exciting for me: an insect-monitoring device that reduces pesticide use; a precision irrigation system; a plan to repurpose “gray water” for urban hydroponic growers; platforms to determine shellfish size before harvesting, streamline solar panel installations and lower costs for electricity consumers in East Africa; a battery that will double the energy and life of current batteries at half the cost.

My two favorites are a patent-pending technology to measure crop-water use over an entire field and a plan to turn old electric car batteries into low-cost power packs for schools in rural India, where electricity is both expensive and unreliable. “Why,” asked company founder Shiv Rajendran, “should dreaming be a privilege?”

I believe in a positive government, but I am certain that America’s future has more to do with nine idealists in Louisville than Ted Cruz’s claptrap on Capitol Hill.

Big Money

I long believed that the two-party system was the backbone of America’s political stability because it pushed each party to seek coalitions rather than ideological purity. In times of national trauma, those coalitions fractured, as before the Civil War, or one party assembled an unbeatable coalition, as in the Great Depression. We are now in a time when the Republican demand for purity threatens the government, and the two-party system seems unable to cope with it. One reason is money. Legislators are beholden to those who have it, and the Supreme Court ended decades of efforts to regulate it with its abysmal 5-4 decision in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission. “It’s a bad decision,” a friend who knows it well told me. “It denies the legislative process the ability to treat corporations and labor unions differently from individuals. It’s a raw case of the court’s exercise of political power.” But the court is not going to reverse itself, and there isn’t much stomach for reform among legislators who depend on the current system.

What can be done to break the closed loop of money and politics? One step is to make politics local again: Encourage unaffiliated candidates to run, reform ballot-access laws, curb gerrymandering. These are small things, but they might lead people to challenge the monopoly of the two-party system – which may be the only way to rescue our electoral process from the grasp of big money. We’d better hurry. The Koch Brothers are already working that territory hard.

The Hollow Men

We are the hollow me We are the stuffed me Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! T. S. Eliot

• Yesterday the Republican majority in the House of Representatives voted to cut $40 billion from food stamps and to kick 3.8 million people out of the program. This, in a nation with 46.5 million people in poverty.
• That same majority is bent on shutting down the government at a time when the long-sputtering economy is finally gathering steam.
• It is goading its wretched leadership to default on the national debt when over 11 million people remain unemployed and we are seeking negotiations with Syria and Iran.
• It has voted 41 times to defund Obamacare, treating it as a partisan bill, rather than the law of the land, passed by both houses of Congress, signed by the president, upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that will ultimately insure 48 million people currently without insurance.
• It is eating its own young. The nation’s ten poorest states – Mississippi, Arkansas, West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, New Mexico, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oklahoma – have 44 Republicans in Congress and only 10 Democrats. In Mississippi, the country's poorest state, 40% of all children receive food stamps.
• It is destroying the safety net, which is the glue that holds communities together.
• It is unraveling the social contract, which is the foundation of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution that these “patriots” claim to revere.
• It is the meanest collection of bullies and hypocrites that have ever claimed to represent America.

Sayonara, Larry Summers

A friend who worked with Larry Summers once told me that he is not as smart as he thinks he is. To which I replied, how could he be? Thankfully, he was smart enough last Sunday to remove himself from consideration for chair of the Federal Reserve, a move that delighted the stock market, liberal senators and me. Summers has an impressive pedigree (both parents teach economics at Penn and two uncles, Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow, have Nobel Prizes in economics) and resume (World Bank Chief Economist, Treasury Secretary, Director of the National Economic Council, President of Harvard). Yet his career has been like the Peter Principle (in which people “rise to their level of incompetence”) on steroids. He has been wrong on almost every major issue he has touched. He advocated massive deregulation of the banking industry and vigorously opposed any oversight of derivatives. These policies, combined with the Bush doctrine of massive tax cuts for the rich and off-the-books military invasions, produced the worst financial disaster since 1929. Less well known is Summers’ hostility toward environmental regulations, especially for greenhouse gases, because of their perceived adverse impact on growth. Summers boasts that his policies pushed America into the 21^st century, but in a nation where 95% of all recent income gains have gone to 1% of the population, where income disparities are greater than they have been since the Gilded Age, and where global climate change is still scorned, he has actually helped usher us back into the 19^th.

Warning Shot

Two months have passed since George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin by pleading the Second Amendment. For how else can you interpret the jury’s refusal to convict a man who – in violation of explicit police instructions – pursued an unarmed man in a quiet neighborhood and shot him dead, except as the swagger that comes with carrying a gun? It’s less than a year since Adam Lanza killed 20 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a massacre that led to modest regulations in many states. But fear not, the NRA has risen to the challenge, and its efforts to snuff out any remnants of a national conscience are escalating across the country. Last week in Colorado, voters recalled two state senators who had voted in favor of Colorado’s rational gun laws. Similar efforts are under way in all 50 states. It’s easy to castigate the NRA and leave it at that, but the image of gun-toting yahoos doesn’t really describe what happened in Colorado. Democrats and Independents outnumbered Republicans at the polls, and gun-control advocates, led by Michael Bloomberg, outspent the NRA by 5-1. Colorado’s legislative branches, governor and U.S. Senators are all Democrats. The NRA didn’t just galvanize voters around a single issue; it appealed to a broader sense of alienation among people who feel disempowered. That feeling is not limited to two senatorial districts in Colorado, and those recall elections should awaken us all to the need to start listening, not just to ourselves, but to each other.

A Love Story

We don’t know why we’re here. We don’t know where we’re going. And we don’t control what will happen to us along the way, much as we like to think we do. When John Vigiano, a retired New York City firefighter, woke up 12 years ago this morning, he had no idea that his only two sons would be dead before noon. John Jr., 36, was a firefighter and his brother Joe, 34, was a police detective, and both men lost their lives at the World Trade Center. Their father recorded his memories of that day in a four-minute video, animated by StoryCorps, which my daughter Annie sent me. Watching it, listening to the father’s voice, is how I imagine a religious experience – a four-minute moment of awe, without any false emotion. John and Joe each called their father as they were heading to work. The calls ended with the words, I love you. “We had the boys – John for 36 years and Joe for 34 years,” said Vigiano. “I wouldn’t have changed anything. There’s not many people that the last words they said to their son or daughter was ‘I love you’ and the last words they heard was ‘I love you.’ So, that makes me sleep at night.”

There is no mention of heaven or hell, of Christians or Muslims, of vengeance or the American flag. This is the ultimate resurrection story, the triumph of love over the tragedy of life.

Annie’s message with the link said simply, “I love you.”

Trusting Ty

“Hey, I’m Ty,” he said, as he launched himself from the top of the stairwell, a tiny misguided missile hurtling straight at me. I caught him (he wasn’t very large) – and that’s when I learned that the essence of teaching is trust. I had started an after-school program in a Boston inner-city housing project, and Ty – and his less rambunctious twin brother Troy – had just arrived. It was September 1975, and Boston schools were enflamed by the issue of busing to achieve school integration. That era is history now, but the question of how to educate America’s children is no less urgent. A friend sent me a piece on the new Common Core State Standards, the latest national effort to reform our schools. Both teachers and parents are understandably wary of another grand plan. (The opinion of students is rarely solicited. I mean, what do they know?) But after years of a mind-numbing focus on standardized test scores, not as evidence of learning but to make administrators look good, the new standards do two important things: they provide clear goals without dictating how teachers should teach and they encourage critical thinking rather than rote learning. That seems simple, but it requires something that is too often absent from our schools – a deep trust in teachers to teach and in students to learn.

I often wonder what has happened to Ty. Did he find teachers who sough to nurture his exuberance or a system that tried to crush it?

Millennial Thinking

“Jamie, assuming that you do another piece on the Syria bombing, you might want to consider the fact that this will be the first time in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives that the RAPTURE will be a significant if unstated force in favor of passage.” The Rapture is the evangelical belief that the elect will be swept up into the clouds to meet Jesus when he returns to dispense ultimate justice to the rest of us. It was brought to prominence in the New World by Increase and Cotton Mather, the father-and-son team of 17^th-century Puritan divines who were the driving force behind the Salem Witch Trials. When you have no doubt of your own righteousness, you have little fear of Judgment Day.

Remember, in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions that followed, how horrified we were by the epidemic of suicide bombings that killed thousands of innocent people? Who could do such a thing, we asked? Only zealots, we were told, young men (mostly) who had been drugged or blackmailed or, above all, promised a paradise filled with dark-eyed virgins just for them. Such fanaticism, we were assured, is the foundation of radical Islam. This is not a clash of civilizations. We are engaged in a war between civilization and barbarism.

For those who are convinced of their place in heaven, the fate of the earth becomes less important. We should beware of going to war for those who eagerly anticipate Armageddon.

It’s Only a Phrase

“There are 78,000 abandoned buildings in this city standing in various levels of decay,” the article begins. “Services have fallen into dysfunction, and debts are piling ever higher. Yet for all the misery, Detroit’s bankruptcy gives an American city a rare chance to reshape itself from top to bottom.” “From top to bottom.” It’s only a phrase, I know, but what if the reporter had written of rebuilding Detroit from bottom to top? Consider the difference in our images of what is happening in that distressed city. In one we picture planners, experts, outsiders, people with the answers imposing their solutions from above. In the other, we start with the struggling communities and impoverished people seeking to nurture whatever will help them survive. We need both approaches, to be sure. Detroit cannot heal all the wounds inflicted by 50 years of disintegration and misrule without a lot of help, but how you describe the problem determines, at least in part, how you define the solutions.

Half a world a way, in the remote villages of Dertu, Kenya, and Ruhiira, Uganda, Nina Munk reports on Jeffrey Sachs’ quest to eradicate poverty from Africa. Yet “with almost every intervention,” writes Joe Nocera, “she documents the chasm that exists between the villagers and those running the project.”

For whom are we building villages and rebuilding cities if not for the people who live in them?  Words matter. You do not build a community from top to bottom. You build from the ground up.

Sneak Attack

I once watched Tiger Woods stop his golf swing a nanosecond before hitting the ball because a spectator had clicked his camera. Woods swings at 128 miles-per-hour, so his back-wrenching reverse was mind-boggling to watch – much like Barack Obama’s back-wrenching reverse on Syria. First, contrary to all theories of the importance of surprise, Obama declares we will attack Syria. He’s a little fuzzy on why – take “a shot across Assad’s bow”? Salvage America’s “credibility”? Reinforce the “red line” against gas? Send a proxy message to Iran? But he’s clear the missiles are coming. Then he pulls the rug out from under everyone, particularly John Kerry, by announcing he will submit the question to Congress, which (a) is on vacation and (b) hasn’t passed any meaningful legislation in years. Yet, with this stroke of inadvertent brilliance, Obama restored the Constitution – which gives Congress the sole power “to declare war” – and placed Congress in a pickle. For how can they shut down the government if they are simultaneously going to declare war? I believe that internationalism and human rights should be foundations of American foreign policy, and there is horrific suffering in Syria. But I don’t see what sending missiles to enforce rules of civilized slaughter in a war in which the good guys may well be worse than the bad guys will accomplish, beyond escalating the carnage. Congress has not declared war since 1941, an interval filled with disastrous efforts to impose American values at the point of a gun.

A Fable

Once upon a time long ago, there was a republic known for its civic tolerance, diverse cultures and passion for innovation. The glue that held it together was the people’s belief in an open political system and a tradition of civic debate. But hard times hit, and the republic went into a recession. The old communal bonds weakened. Parties purged their ranks of dissenters. Moderates became an endangered species. Demands for ideological purity triumphed over pragmatic efforts to build the coalitions required to govern in a pluralistic society. Voters increasingly turned out in support of extremists, and eventually the commitment to maintain the republic itself was called into question. There was plenty of blame to go around, but one right-wing group was especially relentless in pursuit of its agenda. Under the banner of patriotism, its members manipulated national symbols to vilify foreigners, non-whites, gays, Jews. They actively sought to shut down the government and ultimately to bring down the republic. Few took them seriously at first. They seemed a laughable bunch of bombastic buffoons, ranting against a society that was leaving them behind, shouting down their political opponents. One day powerful interests asked the leader of the party to become the leader of the nation so that order could be restored. And that’s where the fable ends. Because the rest is history: Immediately after being named Germany’s chancellor, “Hitler rushed to his headquarters and told Goebbels with tears in his eyes, ‘Now we are on our way.’”

(Drawn from Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman)

A Disturbing List

24/7 Wall Street published a list of America’s ten fastest-growing jobs over the last decade. They are: (10) Skin Care Specialists; (9) Personal Care Aides; (8) Personal Financial Advisors; (7) Coaches and Scouts; (6) Human Resources Specialists; (5) Massage Therapists; (4) Interpreters and Translators; (3) Music Directors and Composers; (2) Petroleum Engineers; (1) Service Unit Operators, Oil, Gas and Mining. There are lots of ways to interpret this list – the authors point to an aging population and “non-conventional” fuel sources. But what jumped out at me was the absence of any jobs focused on building communities, or on building much of anything, really. Instead, I see a people absorbed with taking care of ourselves, both physically and financially, while becoming increasingly oblivious to – and dependent on – extractive energy policies that threaten the health of the earth, which is the ultimate source of our own well-being. I was heartened by the presence of composers as evidence that we still value the creative arts, until I read that one “factor driving job growth for this occupation is the expected greater need for original music scores or transcriptions used in commercials.” We need translators because globalization has exposed our weakness in other languages, a weakness we exacerbate by insisting that good Americans only speak English.

Reading this less-than-robust list, I kept thinking of the decline of Rome, destroyed by the self-indulgence of a people no longer involved in their own governance. And that music, I wondered? Could it be the sound of Nero fiddling?

Early Morning, Low Tide

The sea is so calm this morning. I sit on the rocks sipping my coffee, looking out the “western way,” which lies almost due south between Cranberry Island and the Manset shore, the silence broken only by the sound of a few birds and the occasional melancholy clang of a bell buoy. Later the water will be filled with boats, both working and pleasure, but now I can see only two small sails far in the distance, one carrying its passengers away, the other coming toward home. A handful of gulls skim soundlessly above the water’s surface, landing without effort on a rock or the waveless sea. Somewhere, out of sight, a boat’s motor breaks the silence. There is just enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and it is so clear that I look far out to a horizon, which the Episcopalian burial liturgy tells us is “nothing save the limit of our sight.” Or more fully, “Life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only an horizon, and an horizon is nothing, save the limit of our sight.” I imagine what lies beyond, but am mostly immersed in my surroundings here, so absorbed that my coffee has gone cold. I think, I don’t have the words to describe this, which suits me because they would limit what is limitless. My religion taught me early on to fear God. I sit in awe of this.

What Next?

“As I transition into the next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female.” With those words, issued through her lawyer on yesterday’s “Today” show, the former Bradley Manning began a 35-year sentence at Fort Leavenworth. Tactically speaking, I’m not sure I would have made that particular announcement as I was entering a federal penitentiary, but this is a person who apparently believes that we need to know everything. I write this, not to belittle Chelsea Manning, but to wrestle with a case that is at once heartrending and bizarre. I believe: (1) Manning launched an important discussion about our government’s actions and secrecy by disclosing a lot of information we have the right – and the need – to know; (2) the length of the sentence is unjust; and (3) Manning has every right to assert her own identity. None of this makes me especially comfortable with an army private, struggling with huge personal issues, deciding unilaterally what government secrets to release to the world. Clearly, our government operates in far too much secrecy. I’m not sure I trust Manning’s judgment on where to draw the line. In other news, Anthony Weiner went one up on former Australian legislator (and chair of the Parliamentary Ethics Committee) Peter Dowling, who had acknowledged texting his mistress a photo of his, um, wiener in a glass of merlot. Weiner admitted in Wednesday’s New York mayoral debate that he had texted while driving.

And All That Jaz

As we all know, Al Jazeera is not really a news organization; it is a terrorist group. At least that’s what former co-President Cheney insisted during the Iraq war, calling it “a platform for terrorists.” In 2003, a U.S. jet fired on Al Jazeera’s Baghdad studio, killing reporter Tareq Ayyoub. So you wonder what Cheney was thinking yesterday afternoon when Al Jazeera America launched its daily cable television news program from New York City. Despite the Bush administration’s demonization, Al Jazeera has long had an international reputation for balanced, innovative and on-the-spot reporting. It was the only news channel to have live coverage of the outbreak of war in Afghanistan. It is known for airing dissenting, and often controversial, views on its Middle Easter stations. And both Salon.com and Hilary Clinton called its coverage of the 2011 unrest in Egypt superior to that of the American press.

Al Jazeera’s aim for its new channel is to “air fact-based, unbiased and in-depth news.” Its competitors seem unfazed by a challenger offering 14 hours of serious news each day to an audience that is hooked on entertainment, celebrity sightings and reality TV. But the deeper question is whether a channel with an Arabic name and an imposed reputation for Islamic bias will have any appeal to an increasingly insular and nativist America. We live in a world bathed in American brands, from Coke to The Wall Street Journal, and in a country awash with Japanese cars and Chinese clothes – and yet remain disturbingly closed to “foreign” ideas.

Three

My granddaughter, Calliope, and I play a game in which she sneaks into my chair and says, “Come sit in your chair, Poppy,” and I wander over, saying how tired I am, and sit down on Callie. And then I jump into the air, shouting my surprise, and she laughs and laughs. Sometimes I introduce a variation . . . I’ll lure her off the chair and then slip in by another way and get to the chair first. Usually, though, we play the same game over and over, because much of her pleasure derives from anticipating the outcome she knows in advance – and while I may tire of the game, she never does, and if I try to end it, she sometimes gets into a fuss. Callie is three. As it happens, the 2010 Congressional class is the same age. That was the year Republicans, many of them astonishingly right-wing, recaptured control of the House, and they have been playing childish games ever since. For example, they have voted to repeal Obamacare 40 times, even though they know the outcome in advance. Under the banner of “No,” they reflexively oppose initiatives, even from their own leadership, that might facilitate better governance, and their real goal seems to be to shut down the government itself. Their age-appropriate behavior, however, is missing a critical component. Calliope is forever asking, “Why?” She is curious, constantly on the edge of wonder, wanting to explore and understand the world. This Congress never seems to ask why? They just vote no.

e pluribus unum

What accounts for the differences between the “March on Washington” fifty years ago this month, which produced significant changes in American life, and the current protests in Cairo, which have produced a bloodbath? It is tempting to point to the evolution of western democracy. And there is truth in that. But the 1960s – America’s equivalent of the “Arab Spring” – witnessed far more violence than we like to remember, including urban riots that brought tanks onto the streets of our cities and a bloody response to protesters at the 1968 Democratic convention that was later declared a “police riot.” I think two factors are critical to understanding the differences: the commitment to nonviolence and the appeal for inclusion. Faced with intimidation, beatings and murder, civil-rights protesters were trained to “stand their ground,” unarmed, in one of the most remarkable displays of mass courage in history, demonstrating the power of moral suasion to effect lasting change. And civil-rights leaders appealed, not to tribal differences, but to our common humanity. In his speech before the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King invoked the two most important documents in American history – the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address – to demand that we live up to the ideals we espouse: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” King’s dream was the American dream – for all people, in all our diversity, bound together as one community. This is “American exceptionalism” at its best.

Trail of Tears

On this day in 1842 the second Seminole War came to an end, followed by the last forced march of Native Americans from the southeastern United States along the “trail of tears” to what is now Oklahoma. The relocations, which began right after Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, involved the resettlement of tens of thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands to federal lands west of the Mississippi. The motive was simple: the expanding population of European-Americans wanted the land; and the Act, which overturned the nation’s earlier policy of respecting Native-American homelands, legitimized decades of removals across the continent. Wars of conquest and the subjugation of native peoples are not confined to 19^th-century America. They are how empires are born. But in America it is hard to square the historical reality with the principles on which the country was founded – we are, after all, both the land of the free and the home of the brave – and so we ignore the unpleasant parts of our past. Witness today’s self-proclaimed patriots, who trace their political lineage to the Boston Tea Party, when “Sons of Liberty” dressed as, yes, Indians, dumped English tea into Boston Harbor. They talk of “American exceptionalism,” the idea that America is a unique country with a special mission, a "city on a hill." And it is exceptional the way they hold high the torch of liberty in one hand, while papering over 100 years of genocide with the other.

McDynamo

I write in praise of a horse and of his owner. Michael Moran’s McDynamo was inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame on Friday, after a career that included winning the Breeder’s Cup Grand National five times and the Eclipse Award for Outstanding Steeplechase horse three times. He didn’t always look like a champion – he finished last in his first race and had such claustrophobia in a starting gate that he dumped his jockey, jumped the fence and ran wild for 20 minutes. That was McDynamo’s last race on the flat, and Michael asked Sanna Hendriks to train him as a steeplechaser. Most of horse racing is a shameful sport, in which the animals are routinely injected with performance drugs and painkillers, the races often fixed, and the horses run into the ground until, when they can no longer run at all, they are discarded as trash. They are, in short, treated the same way so many other professional athletes are treated, without the possibility of a big contract. Their role is to perform, and their bodies increasingly break down under the pressures of doing so.

But McDynamo loved to run and jump, and Michael and his wife, Anne, an Irish-born horse whisperer, treated him with something you don’t much see at the track: love. They admired his talent and honored his spirit; they never pushed him beyond his limits; and when his career was over, they brought him home to live out the rest of his life in peace.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Two of the oldest and best newspapers in America sold this week for a fraction of their recent value. Jeffrey Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, bought The Washington Post for $250 million the day after Red Sox owner John Henry bought The Boston Globe for $70 million. In 1993 The New York Times paid $1.1 billion for The Globe. That’s quite a drop. It’s also a trend, as scores of once-venerable papers have gone bankrupt, shut down or sold for a pittance. So the question is: where we will get our news? For even as they close far-flung bureaus and slash budgets, newspapers remain our primary source of independent reporting. The idea of non-partisan news reporting is relatively recent. Nineteenth-century papers were blatantly one-sided, usually little more than mouthpieces for political parties. Then two critical firewalls developed: one between editorial content and advertising; the other between news and opinion. The pressures against those walls were relentless – advertisers wanted only good coverage, politicians only editorial support – and they have collapsed in recent times, as publishers seek to appease advertisers, politicians and, yes, readers, by putting platitudes above professionalism. Now we have thousands of outlets where readers get only what they want, and ever fewer where trained journalists are trying to give us what we need. Whatever you may think of the opposing editorial positions of the Times and the Wall Street Journal, both news staffs are committed to piercing the political and corporate veils of bluster and secrecy in search of the true story. Without them, who will watch our “custodians?” Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?